I am listening to a BBC podcast regarding piracy (with special interview with Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay), so if my train of thought wanders, I am sincerely sorry.

SO, the rape... yes... No, not my druid. There is zero rape going on concerning my druid, sadly. My warlock though, oh man, there is RAPE involved. I touched, briefly, on my new spec on my warlock in my Illusions post. However, I do not think that the sentiment truly came across -- that is, I do not think that any of my readers truly understand just how strong this build/team is. So, I'm here to rectify that ignorance.

The 9/41/11 build that I am currently using has many strengths in 2s play. The first of which is obviously soul link. There are a number of good things from soul link: you share damage with your pet, thus reducing the amount of net damage you take, you get a 5% multiplier on your damage done, and the most powerful aspect of soul link is that your opponent is almost always going to choose to attack your teammate. "Why?" you ask -- because you just absorb too much damage to be a real target at first. Also, instant cast corruption is always amazing, but pairing it with shadowburn is the best combo in the game. Additionally, because everyone is busy not paying attention to you, you are free to spam shadow bolts with your 5% multiplier on soul link, and your 5% multiplier on Felguard, which ends up being better than shadow mastery. The last amazing aspect of the spec is Felguard.

Now, I have shared a laugh at the expense of the "nubguard" spec in the past, and maybe it was only because they did not have great damage gear at the time, or resilience had not been piled on, but for whatever reason, I could kill a nubguard-lock as a feral druid more times than not, soul link or not. Now, because warlocks have amassed resilience and just a ridiculous amount of spell damage, "nubguard" might require a renaming to "rapeguard" or "deathguard" as that is all he really does. Rapeguard has a few interesting aspects to his play. The first of which is the fact that he does surprisingly good damage even against plate-n-shield toting paladins. It turns out that while this is nice, it is not the best aspect of the Rapeguard. Intercept, on the other hand, is indeed the best aspect of the Rapeguard. Putting Intercept on auto-cast (which is stupid on paper but amazing in play) turns out to demoralize and destroy healer+dps teams (even druids because of cyclone/roots). If the Rapeguard is attacking one target, and the other hostile starts a cast, and the Rapeguard is in range and has LoS (usually the case for healers), he will automatically intercept to the caster, then run back to his target and continue the rape-fest. This turns out to be amazing for catching Flash of Light in clutch situations when my shadow priest is mid-mind-blast or other cast and cannot stop to silence the healer. The intercept stun gives just enough time to finish his cast, then silence the healer, which improves our damage output and control over the match by a large amount.

Okay, I can talk about his play, but let's put it into perspective. Let's say that you played mage+spriest, but your mage did not have counter-spell and was spec'd fire. Now, that is not a good team, honestly, it is not. The mage does not have enough options for getting away from a dps to cast a spell (which does considerable damage... it just cannot be cast). Okay, that sucks. However, let us now change the game such that the mage gets to bring any 65 warrior he wants, only the warrior cannot have MS, and must wield a fast two-hander, but on top of that, he shares damage with the warrior, and so long as the warrior is alive, the mage's damage is increased by 10%. This is essentially what my warlock is. We roll a 3s team in the 2s bracket. We do insane damage because my Rapeguard is chasing down whomever I like, he intercepts other hostiles when they start casting (especially useful against warlock+druid when the warlock starts to try and banish because Rapeguard intercepts banish, and I usually fear the warlock during the stun).

Rapeguard: "You just got raped."

The amazing thing is that this team seems to excel against all the cookie-cutter teams with gear at this point in time. This team absolutely destroys druid+warrior. This team beats rogue+lock most of the time because of the dot-rape coupled with sbolt bombs landing on the rogue. The closest match we had to losing outright was against a ret-pally+rogue because we just did not expect the pally to start swinging a s3 sword. The rogue died from dots with me and the pally at 50%, and paladins cannot kill a Rapeguard warlock with Hammer of Wrath, it just does not do enough damage. So, some light-weight drain-tanking and a win there, but still much closer than my cavalier recollection makes it seem. We beat up on sl/sl+pally pretty hard because we do not stop raping the pally when he bubbles. We beat spriest+rogue, though that was just a weaker version of sl/sl+rogue. The only losses we have sustained on this team are from disconnects, and one team who actually beat us (during the first 7 games we played it, but I do not remember what the makeup was, something like disc+rogue but we just played poorly and deserved to lose... I do not remember and I am not worried that it will happen again).

... Trust me, Rapeguard ...

We did EotS with these two last night because it was the daily. While my brother, the Shadow Priest, always leads in killing blows, I am always leading in damage done by at least 25% of my damage. We just make the win that much easier for our team. We sat mid, and pushed out whenever someone got ballsy enough to step up, which did not happen much after the first few 5v2 attempts failed. We capped 3, then we pushed to the fourth graveyard and farmed hks. It was amazing how well the two of us could hold back an entire team.

"RAPEGUARD!!!!!! AND THE RAPEGUARD COMES IN THE NIIIIIIIIGHT!!!!" -Strongbad