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Q u o t e:


You have to admire how hard it is to position the voidwalker. The warlock as to set the vw on stay, have him taunt, then move to where the vw will tank. After a flame breath you now have to quickly position the voidwalker in the correct spot.

Now hes there for all the flame walls to hit him.

Its a gimmick, not a replacement for an actual tank.

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To make this even easier here's a pro-tip:

Pyrobuffet will not hit pets.

No one in my guild was really showing any interest in 10-man sarth+3, but 10 of us got together to try this out, and after an hour's attempts (only having done +2 in 10-man and +3 in 25-man) we were pretty much on the turning point of completing the task. Since it was Valentine's day not everyone could stay, we were just gonna test it out to see how it works and we almost got it.

people that QQ about warlock pet tanking Sarth:

the only thing you're skipping is the need for 2-3 external CD's to survive 2-3 breaths, until the DK's CD's are up again... the rest of the fight is the same.

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Q u o t e:
people that QQ about warlock pet tanking Sarth:

the only thing you're skipping is the need for 2-3 external CD's to survive 2-3 breaths, until the DK's CD's are up again... the rest of the fight is the same.

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Well, it really takes one of the most significant parts of the fight out of the game... the remote possibility of a tank death.

With a vw you dont even need to worry about it at all.

I'm not sure why someone said in an Add + Boss fight you usually kill the boss first. In my experience in almost every fight with adds + boss, you always kill the boss last. In fact most of the time if you try to kill the boss first it pisses him off or his adds and they wipe the group.

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Q u o t e:
The largest problem with a VW tank here is they are not crit immune. Really just replacing one spike with another, in the hopes the physical one is more manageable (seems like it is, though).

I will laugh and slightly die inside if Mr Blue, who's sole purpose beyond this is sacrifice fodder for PvP (he rarely even gets pulled out for this), gets nerfed because of this.

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Only the melee swing crits, so like a 4-5k hit becomes a 10k hit... big deal.

The POWER of the void walker tank comes from a lot of things:
(1) The warlock heals the pet for 25% per tick of health funnel. A pet with 100k health gets 25k health pet tick.
(2) The health funnel reduces incoming dmg by 12%
(3) Pets get avoidance talents that reduce total incoming spell dmg by 80% (not 70)
(4) The pet takes 15% less dmg total from demonic resilience.
(5) Armor and health modifiers from talents are ridiculous.

Even with just 10% total avoidance a void walker makes an all-around better tank for 10 and 25-man Sartharion than any other tank in game.

My guild was disinterested in the 10-man sartharion encounter because it just added days to our raid week. Once we heard about this we kinda grew more interested in it..

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Q u o t e:
Only the melee swing crits, so like a 4-5k hit becomes a 10k hit... big deal.

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7-8k hits to 14-16k crits. Nothing that can't be managed, but any real tank who can take the bursts will probably need less total healing.

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Q u o t e:


Only the melee swing crits, so like a 4-5k hit becomes a 10k hit... big deal.

The POWER of the void walker tank comes from a lot of things:
(1) The warlock heals the pet for 25% per tick of health funnel. A pet with 100k health gets 25k health pet tick.
(2) The health funnel reduces incoming dmg by 12%
(3) Pets get avoidance talents that reduce total incoming spell dmg by 80% (not 70)
(4) The pet takes 15% less dmg total from demonic resilience.
(5) Armor and health modifiers from talents are ridiculous.

Even with just 10% total avoidance a void walker makes an all-around better tank for 10 and 25-man Sartharion than any other tank in game.

My guild was disinterested in the 10-man sartharion encounter because it just added days to our raid week. Once we heard about this we kinda grew more interested in it..

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not disagreeing with ur point but ur statements listed are off somewhat.

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Q u o t e:
people that QQ about warlock pet tanking Sarth:

the only thing you're skipping is the need for 2-3 external CD's to survive 2-3 breaths, until the DK's CD's are up again... the rest of the fight is the same.

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There are a couple other tanking classes besides DKs, y'know? None of them do nearly as well in the CD department.

Anyway, more power to our blueberry comrades. If it lets people kill him who would have the raid DPS to kill Sarth+3 with a DK but only have a warrior or paladin able to tank him and can't quite get the job done, then it strikes me as good thing.

Amg I was first! It was very sad when I learned that they were considering using a VW over me as a main tank for Sarth.

Imo - Vw doesnt need the Aoe avoidance because it really isnt used as a raid pet. Either that or scale back the voidwalkers stam from its master.

So you stated that pets shouldnt be able to tank fights like Sarth. Care to give us a peak under the tent at what the devs are thinking? Not to be a downer, but you didnt really tell us anything we didnt already know.

Red - My alt is a lock so I was wondering what you have in store.

And also edit for the people who like to rail on people who misspell one word instead of responding to the topic. /sigh

haha had to happen

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Q u o t e:
I would not expect the Voidwalker to continue to be an excellent tank for challenging raid content.

The health boost was largely for PvP reasons and the damage avoidance was to make up for limitations in pet AI and master control, not to let you opt out of having to manage tons of incoming damage on your main tank. :)

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Not to be a troll, but could we get a little insight on this? This seems to be the only situation where something like this is even viable, and it's a very creative use of game mechanics. So, why the need for a change? I seem to recall a VW tanking a certain half-elf/half demon guy in the not too distant past.

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Q u o t e:
Not to be a troll, but could we get a little insight on this? This seems to be the only situation where something like this is even viable, and it's a very creative use of game mechanics. So, why the need for a change? I seem to recall a VW tanking a certain half-elf/half demon guy in the not too distant past.

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GC didn't necessarily say a VW nerf is coming. It likely could have meant that a VW simply would not be a viable tank in future content.

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Q u o t e:
I would not expect the Voidwalker to continue to be an excellent tank for challenging raid content.

The health boost was largely for PvP reasons and the damage avoidance was to make up for limitations in pet AI and master control, not to let you opt out of having to manage tons of incoming damage on your main tank. :)

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Now GC, is that going to mean the voidwalker is nerfed, or is that just meaning that the circumstances which allowed the voidwalker to be a good tank in this situation are unlikely to repeat themselves.

Because the voidwalker is quite frankly an unappealing pet unless you're specced for it regardless. In PvP it's our pet when we need to soak a bunch of damage, and in PvE it's our pet to tank with if and only if we are specced towards it tanking. A warlock without points in Demonology has no viable use for the voidwalker.

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Q u o t e:
Imo - Vw doesnt need the Aoe avoidance because it really isnt used as a raid pet. Either that or scale back the voidwalkers stam from its master.

So you stated that pets shouldnt be able to tank fights like Sarth. Care to give us a peak under the tent at what the devs are thinking? Not to be a downer, but you didnt really tell us anything we didnt already know.

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A lot of classes that had pets on them would just AoE down the pet. The avoidance change was so drastic so that a class would have to focus down a pet instead of just consecrating them to death. The void walker doesn't do any dmg all it has is high health/dmg mitigation. Its meant to be a pet that no DPS would ever consider killing. If it wasn't impossible to kill... why would anyone ever choose to use one? I run shaman/warlock 2s I would consider any nerfs to warlock pets to be a tremendous nerf for warlock pvp that is struggling already.

Blizz said before this expac was launched that they intended for pets to be able to off-tank on bosses. The person who tanks Sartharion IS the off tank on this fight. The most important tanking roles are the fire ads and the drake tanking. They involve the most skill to do and all a sarth tank does is hold onto the boss until the second ad is dead. The void walker barely does any threat.

This is not cheap to do either costs tons of gold for one overtuned 10 man fight.

All you have to do to fix this is make sarths breath a single target flame breath with a slight nerf so people dont have to think out of the box for this stupid fight.

I think people dont understand this has been done way before the pets hp hotfix voids has always scaled high.

I dont think this deserves a nerf by any means they just need to think of ways pets wont be a better tank than real tanking classes.

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Q u o t e:
I would not expect the Voidwalker to continue to be an excellent tank for challenging raid content.

The health boost was largely for PvP reasons and the damage avoidance was to make up for limitations in pet AI and master control, not to let you opt out of having to manage tons of incoming damage on your main tank. :)

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Please don't simply nerf pet hp and 80% avoidance to say 50% and call it done. Lock pets need that avoidance in pve when just being used as normal dps pets. Nerfing avoidance to 50% or so would eliminate the steps forward WOTLK has made towards getting lock pets back into raid pve (from a dps point of view).

a. the stam transfer from master you hotfixed in could just as easily be a large static boost to pet base hp instead with a smaller stamina transfer, still leaving lock pets with 15-25k hp in raids yet not 50-70k when the lock stacks all stamina gear.

b. leave avoidance alone. Modify certain boss abilities to not be only aoe. Sarth's breath for instance could also have a hefty single target component.

c. the voidwalker ISN'T a good tank in raids simply because of threat. It is only this fight where there is no dps on Sartherion during the hard parts that a VW is adequate, just enough threat to keep agro off healers.

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Q u o t e:
It likely could have meant that a VW simply would not be a viable tank in future content.

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That's the most logical interpretation, given that the VW tank doesn't suddenly make Sarth +3D trivial. It's far less likely to get 2-shot without cycling defensive cooldowns, but at the same time takes more damage overall (requiring more healing over the course of the fight).

The other aspects of the fight that make it challenging are unchanged:

- The raid still needs to dodge void zones and lava waves
- The fire elemental adds can still potentially 1-shot non-tanks
- Reckless DPS can still kill themselves on Twilight Torment
- Near-synchronous breaths from two drakes can still insta-gib your drake tank