First I'm going to start with an introduction of myself.  Tenko was the first character created by me on Nov 23rd 2004.  I have played her non stop since then.  I have only 1 other character that made it to 70 and 2 others to 60 (both pre BC).  I will always play my lock until i decide to not play this game any longer.  I have raided, pvp'd and now Arena.  I've been on one of the top 5's teams on the BG6 for the last 2 seasons, continuing to do well this season.  My 3's teams have finished 10th, 14th, in season 1 and 2 runnig the same comp (resto shaman, warlock, mage) and were gladiators again in season 3.  This will be an attempt  to explain whats strong about the warlock class, whats wrong and dispel the myth we are the overpowered class.

Things to keep in mind as you read this.  I play wow only to do arenas so I will not discuss PVE aspects of the warlock class or in general with the exception of Warglaives and their impact on arena.  Also my perspective is about 5's and 3's arena, 2's is glorified duels based on what classes you are fighting not what your skill elvel is.  In adition i'm really only concerned about high level arena because that is where I want a fair chance at competing. I also will not comment on WotLK changes because they are still just proposed changes and until they are implemented its impossible to see how they will play into the game.

Season 2 warlocks began a surge in almost every bracket.  2's and 3's especially and more limited representation in 5's.  This smaller the format the better warlocks were doing, this made since as warlocks were and are the strongest 1v1 class in the game.  At this point Blizzard began nerfing the class most noteably mana drain, life return and spell damage talents to the class we have today.  

Right now i'm going ot throw in my rogue rant and it has merit in my argument about the locks nerfs.  Blizzard  nerfed locks before letting the evolution of arena take care of the problem itself. Evolutions happen in arena all the time, teams are formed and other teams are formed to counter them.  Even more so people slowly adapt to playing this new "super" combos developing strategies to beat them.   Season 3 i've dubbed "season of the rogue" because blizzard waited tell after the season was over to nerf this class.  I don't know if its because they learned from what they did with warlocks or they just didn't realize what the problem was. 

In any case I believe there were 2 main reasons warlocks got nerfed (whether it was premature or the if the severity was warented is up for debate).  The first and i think the most important was "a bellow average player could play a warlock at a level that others couldn't compete with."  This in itself could be enough reason to nerf a class.  It refers to the old line "warlock face rolled his keyboard and killed me" and while this statement is obvious hyperbole it actually wasn't so far from the truth.  The second reason "warlocks were over represented in the 2's and 3's bracket." This plays into the first reason as everyone rushed to reroll locks because they were the OP class at the time and were able to play them well because the class at a basic level was simplistic; "dot, run, fear."

Now there is much more to a lock (even an SL/SL lock) than dot, run, fear.  The bigger the field, 3v3 and 5v5 the harder it becomes.  In 5's you need to know where the healers are positioning themselves so you can do damage and CC while not getting caught in the open.  You need to have be able to decide when to CS/Intercept DPS or Heals.  Its easy to spam tongues on a focus but maintaining it on the healer that isn't you focus and another caster takes a little more skill.  Fearing targets when they are LoS of their dispellers.  Even harder looking for that moment when you can single target fear the priest then aoe fear the shaman while taking out his tremor totem with your pet rendering both healers down for 6-8 seconds.  Then not spaming tongues but getting damage up on target then making sure one has tongues and the other is refeared.  These things were done by the average warlock playing in season 2 but in 2's and 3's it wasn't as necessary, just spam dots and profit against teams that couldn't dispel.  Lets not forget mana drain (which i think needed the nerf it got).

Easy mode lock was taken away not just by blizzard but a concept i mentioned earlier, evolution of arena.  lock/druid in 2's was fast becoming replaced by druid/rogue and druid/warrior.  This of course is the most logical progression.  The druid is a strong healer so why not play with a class that can do as much damage and has a MS effect (better than mana drain in most cases).  In 3's rogues and warriors made comebacks some paired with locks others paired with 2 healers.  When one class gets out of control in arena teams will always look to counter it and a locks biggest nightmare is a rogue and warrior (not 1v1 but paired with a healer is tough to beat).  The problem i have with this is the evolution of arena would have taken care of the overpopulation of locks (some nerfs probably needed but not all of them) but coupled with the nerfs continued to hurt us in 5v5 arena.

I'm not saying that locks are this piss poor class that needs to be buffed.  We have some huge issues that I will address but overall we are a good class.  We are probably strong against casters but its hard to nerf this without furthing hurting us against melee.  Our 2 biggest weakness are our pets and our inability to escape melee.  Our pets are our greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time.  A felhunter can be used to lock down casters, keep yourself or teamates out of sheep, provide pushback against casters or a felguard who is just a beast for damage.  The problem with pets is our greatest strength -20% damage is based on them.  Felhunters have 6.6k hp unbuffed and have around 20% melee damage reduction.  Intercept + MS + Whirlwind + HS can equal a dead pet before your healer even blinked.  Even worse is when you take so much damage that just to keep you up a direct healer (paladin/shaman) can't spare a flash to keep your pet alive.  This times 2 and the "god like" warlock is nothing more than a 0 armor wearing pansy that can do anything but through up dots.  Felguards suffer the same problem but from casters, shatter combo + a little damage = dead pet and we suffer the same problems.

Melee escape is one spell on a 2 minute cooldown.  It does give us an okay amount of health and removes melee from our face for 3 seconds (really only 1.5 because of the global cooldown).  Against warriors best used to clear MS and give your healers a chance to get us up to full.  The biggest problem with it though is even if it is not trinketed a warrior can just intercept back and rogues have 2 options: shadowstep or sprint.  We can't give our healers a break from damage save every 2 minutes.  Enhancement shamans will frost shock  to slow you down and give them time to catch up.  Ret paladins probably suffer the most from deathcoil but they are almost always paired with other melee with movement imparing effects.  There is no way around the pounding from melee that you will take.  This is even more important now with the creation of the "cleave" comp featuring a variety of triple melee dps ready to rip warlocks and their pets apart.  Another huge problem with the melee issue is pushback....once 2-3 melee start pounding on you at high rate of speed the best you can hope for is 70% pushback for 1 spell and 50% pushback for fear....you have to deal with that + the chaining of interupts on you durring the pushback.

These 2 major problems are not something we can outplay or learn to get around.  They are part of the game and a reason warlocks are no longer a prevelant class.  Now it should be mentioned warlocks made a bit of a comeback w/ OP rogues in euro comp but that was shortly followed by cleave teams designed to rip through euro comps.  I'm not saying its impossible to play a class in high level arena but it gets more and more difficult with each passing season.  The community knows our weaknesses which they were already figuring out while we continued to get nerfed leaving us in the state we are in today.  

I'm perfeclty open to the fact that we need to be nerfed against casters just a little bit. Tongues probably needs some sort of a cooldown, maybe 3-6 seconds so it becomes something more skill based to apply, although given the amount of resists to shadow spells some talent that if it gets resisted cooldown is reset so we can still apply it.  I feel with the buffing of shaman totems and every other healing class having dispels that  fear is right where it needs to be.  Double CS from a feldom might be overpowered but it also leaves warlocks with only one pet so maybe its a reasonable tradeoff.  If you somehow gave us melee protection we could go with less stamina on our gear furthing helping out casters against us.  Currently i wear almost 3k more HP than the mage on my 5's team but i can't last nearly as long as he can while being focused.

Side notes, I'm okay with demonolgy being our PvP spec.  Yes there is some room for UA in 3's and 5's but its small.  4 dps teams have fallen by the wayside on our BG, i dunno if this is true of others BG's.  Everyone has their nitch in arena and i don't think this game will ever be so balanced that any class in any spec can compete in high level arenas. 

-Tenko (Korgath)