And the Award for Worst warlock pact goes to....

[Maelodic]

Arrrgh Curse you Maelodic! lol

I so wanted to just hate the abyss pact and now I'm actually contemplating turning it into something awesome! Maybe i should start hating on the celestial pact instead cuz it was a close second in my book. I appreciate your viewpoints in the theorycraft of this build and your grasp of warlocking concepts!

I'm the worst, I know =P

It's hard to come up with a use case for celestial when the best ability they get leveling is... soundburst. Which is twistable. I'm sure ameliorate feels good when it lands and all that but it's just not all that useful in most places.

So the icon of bitterwind gives 193 incite, and Nocturne ring gives insightful 86 incite. So that's a nice chunk of incite and 43 to intim total from both items isn't bad either. If I run US destiny I would take Commanding Presence 3 tiers for another 450% threat generation. Celestial mandate also is 2k hate ever 6 seconds and if i really wanted to i could drop GSC and you got my back from FI tree and pick up brutality in ES for 75 more threat generation. But I still need to take some time and sit and think about dps gear swaps for solo and farming, its on the agenda for sometime this week, maybe??

With dreadkeepers and ring of winter's chill you'd pretty much be set for damage unless you want to use a bunch of stuff out of soul eater for debuffing. You could technically run mostly defensive and melee threat gen stuff and as long as you have dreadkeepers, ring of winters chill, and the winter court necklace and winter crown for extra defenses and utility- all your other slots can just be total defensive stuff. You can't do anything to add damage beyond that other than upping DCs and there's no reason to try that for harder content when you're CON based

Should be a pretty easy time gearing, honestly.

[Tilomere]

It's hard to come up with a use case for celestial when the best ability they get leveling is... soundburst. Which is twistable.

The twistable sundburst doesn't take DC bonuses into account, so it is 30-40 DC below castable one and basically is useless. Celestial pact is amazing. Evocation pact/CC for single school focus, and lighting augmentation from draconic is an additional -10 reflex on mobs.

[Maelodic]

The twistable sundburst doesn't take DC bonuses into account, so it is 30-40 DC below castable one and basically is useless. Celestial pact is amazing. Evocation pact/CC for single school focus, and lighting augmentation from draconic is an additional -10 reflex on mobs.

TIL that twistable soundburst sucks.

I know you're super big on soundburst but I honestly have never liked it. I can see why that would be appealing. I don't feel like it's a huge deal especially since Warlock already has a ton of control options, where the other pacts add things that Warlock can't get otherwise.

[Tilomere]

I know you're super big on soundburst

I used to be until they nerfed the base helpless from 50% to 25%.

Investing and the spending 1 second to make the other 5 seconds of combat +50% was worthwhile on basically any build. Especially since it reduced incoming damage as well. Then SSG nerfed base helpless to just 25%.

Investing and then spending 1 second to make the other 5 seconds of combat +25% not so much. It has to flow with rest of build to be worthwhile now, but it does with warlock since dps is evo as well, and there is a gap running into range and then again after cone #3 (or after burst/blast) to toss a spell in.

Plus I moved on from leveling in reaper racials to legendary reaper iconics. Hard to land soundburst in R4 legendary on a level 20.

[LightBear]

Maybe I'll give the tanky version a go in one of my future racial lives.
Did it as a human with a high focus on SE and TS with cone shape attack and it was a dread.
The live before I did the same thing but as Carceri and it worked great in the raids, the route to 30 wasn't super smooth but doable.
Abyss, had the same experience as OP, did my TR as soon as I hit 30. Did not even bother to do a few reaper quests to get another point or two.

Would appreciate a more detailed laydown of feats and enhancements.

[Amastris]

Would appreciate a more detailed laydown of feats and enhancements.

I did a full build out in a different thread. you can see it here

Tankenstein

that was created before my complete playthrough in abyssal pact. it was more of a theorycraft back in May. But now that i got the character to 30 i saw some ways to improve on it as i was going through epics and made notes of those. I posted them in that thread, just today. as a note i designed the tankenstein build specifically for the Dryad and the Demigod feywild raid. I just hit level 30 2 days ago and the raid group that i am a part of will run that raid on friday so i should know how it performs on friday night.