Rakshava’s Off-Tank Temptation Support SW Guide

Hello fellow Warlocks!
Due to an overwhelming amount of questions I seem to get regarding my Temptation feated Scourge Warlock, I decided it may be wise to create a guide to direct people to. This, obviously will be updated fairly regularly as and when I discover how to optimise my Warlock further, and likely will receive quite an overhaul when I have finished gathering all the boons.
Pictures have been annotated for those skim-readers (Yes, I am guilty of being one sometimes, I won’t judge )
This build is for PVE.
So, what does this build do? Well, The most obvious answer would be heal. But heal how? Through Lifesteal. The harder you hit, and the more Lifesteal you have, the better you can heal your party. A Temptation Warlock can vastly outstrip a Cleric in healing through sheer constant ticks of Lifesteal healing. The Cleric is left with nothing to heal with their burst healing. What else does this build do? It can reduce the damage your party takes by weakening mobs attacks, give every party member 5% Lifesteal, take a decent amount of damage and deal a decent amount of damage.

(Note: as someone who mained DC for a year+ since beta I advise DC’s to start running non-divine AS, Divine Glow and Nimbus feated Daunting Light paired with High Prophet gear if a SW like mine is in party)
Rolls
After careful consideration and some testing on the preview server, I decided Human would suit the support Warlock best, indeed it holds promise for all three paths. This is for two reasons.
Firstly: The 3% defence increase is something not to be ignored. As an off-tank build it is imperative to stack whatever defences you can without ruining the dps aspect of the build. This racial feature is perfect for that.
Secondly: The three extra heroic feat points are incredibly useful. Five points are needed to increase the damage from CON, and the other three can go into either one of the final heroic options.
So, choosing Human, we are next faced with rolling stats.
Now, CHA is our supposed Primary stat, however this increases crit chance and we are not aiming for crits. So we are left with CON and INT as our secondarys. CON increases not only our damage percentage but also our HP. Damage? HP? Yes please! So we put our +stats into CON and roll until we have 18 CON.
As we level we will want to put our points into CON and INT. INT lets us ignore a percentage of an enemy’s damage resistance. Final rolls at 60 will be 24 CON, 18 INT, 18 CHA.

Feats
Pretty standard stuff here, hopefully most will be self-explanatory or the annotations will help. Any questions of my choices will of course be answered as soon as possible. And I am also open to suggestion if anybody has a better idea on how to run feats for a Temptation SW.

Armor:
Note all armor I list here has been tested by me.
Nether Mage armor gives you:
The two set bonus gives you 450 deflection.
The four set bonus gives 6% of your encounters’ damage in a heal to your party if they are within 30 feet.
The stats are defensive with Power, Defence, Deflect and Lifesteal.
Honestly its a great tanky set but I feel the extra heal is unnecessary.
Draconic gear gives you:
The two set bonus gives you 150 action point gain.
The four set bonus gives you a Lifesteal aura that gives your allies 3% lifesteal (stack this with the 5% from feats = hard 8%
The stats are more offensive with Power, Crit, Arpen, Recovery, Defense and Lifesteal
I like this set for its stat balance more than anything else.
Class Mechanics
Warlock’s Curse: Places a Warlock’s Curse on your target, increasing the damage they receive from you by 20%. You may place your Warlock’s Curse on up to 3 different targets, but the damage bonus will be divided between them.
Soul Puppet: Several Warlock powers can summon a Soul Puppet to fight alongside you. You may only have a single Soul Puppet active at any time. Soul Puppets will follow you for 120 seconds or until they have attacked 5 times, at which point they will dissipate. If you attempt to summon a Soul Puppet when you already have one active your current Soul Puppet gains a 20% increase in damage for 20 seconds. This effect can stack up to 5 times.
Lesser Curse: Deals damage over time, and counts as a Curse for power interactions. Applied by numerous powers and feats.
Powers
I won’t go into huge detail about these (hopefully.. whenever I say that I go on a ramble!) but here are my favorites:
At-Wills:
Hand of Blight. I love this attack, you can use it at range or melee. In melee it is faster and adds a debuff to the enemy. Plus, big green glowy hand of death!
Dark Spiral Aura. This is like an extra encounter when fully charged to 3 spirals.
Hellish rebuke. A dot that never stops.. IF your enemy is foolish enough to keep hitting you with it applied. Also synergies with one of our feats if you pick it.
Dailies:
Flames of Phlegathos. Big drippy acidy skull vomiting all over an enemy, spreading damage to nearby foes. Yum.
Accursed souls. Sucks the souls out of foes, dealing damage and giving you life before ramming the souls back into their bodies dealing more damage. This is a BIG heal for when you are swarmed with a billion mobs.
Gates of Hell. Flashy, big damage, however it takes a while to fire.
Tyrannical Threat. A huge boost to dps, best used in large groups of mobs.
Encounters:
Dreadtheft. An 80ft death laser from hell you can blast for 6 seconds, whats not to love? Oh right, careful with your aim or you may end up with more mobs than you bargained for.
Vampiric Embrace. Our signature move. Tab an enemy with curse, use this skill and watch as you are healed AND get a big chunk of temp HP. Also heals others without the temp HP thanks to our capstone feat.
Fiery Bolt. Curse a mob in the middle of a group, then BOOM. A huge burst of damage to a number of mobs.
Harrowstorm. Spinning spiral of doom. Apply it on an enemy and everything around it gets DoTAoE’d. Hit curse on the mob you applied it on and they get knocked and proned.
Warlock’s Bargain. Sure, it takes 15% of your HP, not that you will ever notice, especially if you use curse/vamp embrace after. A powerful single target DoT.
Blades of Vanquished Enemies. I pair this with Harrowstorm to allow me constant Lifesteal heal ticks from even more DoTAoE’s. Slice and Dice!
Other mentionable Encounters:
Killing Flames. Fun for sniping kills in pvp
Curse bite. Chomp! Haven’t tested extensively but looks like a reasonable burst of dps. Update: seems a bit laggy to fire off after tagging mobs.
Wraith’s Shadow. Another dot and an immobalise if you press it again.
Pillar of Power. I have heard good things about this, more info will be added soon.
Passives:
Shadow Walk: Extra mobility, handy with lots of mobs that use cc
Dark One’s Blessing. A heal whenever you kill a cursed target (Rarely use anymore)
Warding Curse. Enemies hit you for less damage
Flames of Empowerment. For when you feel like some extra dps
Deadly Curse. Again, a little more dps
No Pity, No Mercy. A nice dps boost if you get your crit to a nice place.
Companions:
Obviously running dungeons you want an augment out. Any one of the stones/chicken/cat is fine but I went with the Cat for the extra 200 deflect at epic rank. If I could get one I would definitely go with an Ioun Dragon Stone.
Others: Well I like the Rust Monster for the damage debuff it can inflict on mobs. An Acolyte of Kelemvor and a Lizardfolk Shaman combined gives you extra incoming heals which I am assured works with Lifesteal. A Fire Archon is nice for the extra DPS. A Blacksmith will reflect damage done to you. A Pseudodragon helps with stamina management. A Blink Dog gives extra combat adv damage as does the Intellect Devourer. A Phase Spider reduces the damage you take from combat adv. And if you get your crit chance to a decent place you could go for an Erinyes and Dancing blade combo to rack up the crit severity.

Boons:

Dread Ring: Just a couple notes on this. I took regen because we already have ridiculous Lifesteal. And the last boon is pretty much a no-brainer.

Icewind Dale:

Sharandar: Mobility is key.

Tyranny of Dragons: Again, regen because we have a ton of lifesteal already. And crit severity will stack well with my Erinyes and Dancing blade/crit sev feat combo.

Some Q&A
Q: ‘What is your combination of powers for aoe and single target?’
A:
Single target set-up, like on FH final boss I use:
Warlock’s Bargain, Vampiric Embrace, Wraith’s Shadow. Purely because these are single target only. For the Daily I would use Flames of Phlegathos and hope it doesn’t spread too much.
For encounters like Dragons I use:
Warlock’s Bargain, Fiery Bolt, Dreadtheft. Phlegathos for Daily. These seem to offer the most in taking into account damage/cooldowns.
For easy dungeons:
Blades of Vanquished Enemies, Fiery Bolt, Harrowstorm. Phlegathos/Gates of Hell for Dailies.
For harder dungeons:
Blades of Vanquished Enemies, Vampiric Embrace, Harrowstorm. Phlegathos/Accursed Souls
Solo Questing:
Whatever seems fun at the time
Q: ‘Someone else had recommended Daughter’s Promises in the Fury tree. What do you think about that over Syphoning Curse?’
A: Okay, weapon damage, lets start there. I’m running (at time of this answer) the Fallen Dragon weapon with 686-838 weapon damage. So choosing between Daughter’s Promises and Syphon Curse either converts those numbers into an attack or a heal. Now, personally I think either way is fine but I’m running on a premise that I could be dealing 838 damage to a minion OR potentially saving someone’s life after a big mob attack or a swarm. Your choice
Q: How much of the lifesteal stat do you currently stack/recommend?
A: Currently stacking 3,493 Lifesteal. With the Aura of Cruelty on top thats rated at 20.7%. Recommended? Well this is working out great for me and my party, but some experimenting is required before I recommend a number. Update: anything around 20% seems fine.
Q: ‘Regarding the feat “Syphoning Curse” in the Damnation tree which “When a cursed target is killed, the slayer of that target is healed for …/2% of your weapon damage.”
To me, this seems like you would heal one person for around 16 points (800 x .02). Even it was better, its providing mediocre heals as you clear a dungeon or yourself solo, in which case you probably didn’t need it anyway. Am I reading this incorrectly?’
A: As somebody has mentioned this is actually 100%
Q: ‘Regarding the feat “Blood Pact of Cania” which “Increases the amount of bonus damage Constitution gives you by 5%” It was my understanding, from other classes, that these feats increased the bonus damage in a multiplicative and not additive way.’
A: If somebody could help confirm this either way I’m sure many of us would be grateful. Update: Stopped using this as it does indeed seem to be a waste of 5 points.
Q: Is it possible to run a tempation SW with Con/Cha instead Con/int. Since I alrdy went that way with tiefling and rly don’t wanna reroll based on that stat.
A: Sure you can. It isn’t what I would consider optimal but I’m sure you can easily make it work with a little adjustment of gear and enchants.
Sidenote: ‘As for armor chosen I think the thayan stuff is better than the nether mage, but that’s personal preference.’
Response: The Dread Legion (think this is what you refer to) armor certainly looks interesting enough and I will definitely be testing it out, however, its going to take a while to get the set and Nether Mage will help me get to it. Also, Draconic looks rather nice. Update: Draconic IS nice.
Sidenote: ‘i wonder how clerics feel about us temptation warlocks.’
Response: I mained three clerics over the space of beta to now. Part of me hates that clerics will now be.. obsolete as far as heals go. Clerics I have randomly partied with have actually been leaving halfway through a dungeon after seeing the heals board. However, I am embracing my new warlockdom with joy and I have already made a recommendation for clerics in my first post.

Resource http://mmominds.com/2014/10/20/rakshavas-off-tank-temptation-support-sw-guide/