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Blood Pact: Affliction 101 at 90 in the end of Mists
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants Drain Life filler back despite knowing it won't happen. So you just boosted your warlock to 90 and... You decided that playing destro at 90 isn't for you, but you still want something easy to pick up. As of patch 5.4's changes to Soul Swap and the boost to DoTs after the KJC change, I'd argue affliction is easier to pull off than destro. Due to Soul Swap, everything is a single target to an "aff'lock." But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Blood Pact: Patch 5.4 has a few ups but mostly downs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill's raid sadly realized that the changes to KJC mean there will be no more air-bound soulwells. Well. It's been a hell of a week on the PTR for warlocks, hasn't it? A few of the original patch notes have been changed for the better again in response to player feedback on the forums. Don't get me wrong, Patch 5.4 is still largely a depressing bunch of nerfs for warlocks. But let's go over the changes and make sure we have everything straight. The usual disclaimer of "things can and may change" still applies to all of these patch notes.
Blood Pact: Inner demons in our talent selection
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks it's too difficult to convey moving while casting in a static screenshot, so, instead, have the Scholomance potion guy in front of a Demonic Gateway. We covered Karazhan's pets, mounts, and fun last week, so this week, we'll cover Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in the continuing quest to colle-- No. Sorry. If you really thought I was going to skip this past week's bombshell of warlock PTR patch notes for collecting pets from retro raids, I will scold you later for having no faith in me. Let's talk level 90 talent problems.
Blood Pact: The problems haunting affliction
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks that the Murphy's Law of Blood Pact is that the blues will always post when she's away from the internet for a few days. At least there's an IRL PvP tournament to save her sanity. Mists of Pandaria beta has been a bit of an interesting ride for affliction, I think. With demonology and destruction getting almost totally reworked, affliction supposedly remained mostly the same. The only thing that was supposed to change was no more Shadow Bolt. But we got a nerf across the class to our self-healing, Soul Shards were more integrated into the only spec that retained them, and our DoTs finally got some buffs in their damage while Haunt got nerfed in its debuff power. Haunt isn't meant to be 100%? That changes everything for us aff 'locks. But is this a good change?
Blood Pact: Affliction struggles to burn soulfully on beta
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill finds DoTs no longer crash her client, so she sets about corrupting every soul she can find. Unfortunately, she finds her Abyssal Bag empty, and with frustration wishes that shards could be as plentiful as before. The Soulburn system of Cataclysm was a big bust for affliction, offering plenty of utility but lacking in role-buffing damage abilities. The biggest issue was that Soulburn didn't feel like a real resource. Soulburn largely felt like a complicated set of "oh, crap!" buttons. In Mists of Pandaria, demonology and destruction are each departing from soul shards to gain new secondary resources. Soul shards will be affliction-only, so it's finally time to tailor shards to affliction purposes. Unfortunately, beta is where many things are broken or unfinished, including soul shards.
Blood Pact: Soul sticks and soul carrots
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. When she's not bribing the priest to life grip the mage through Hagara's Ice Wall, Megan O'Neill paints her damage done bar like Seurat -- that is, with lots of DoTs. Soul shards -- the special resource that has been iconic for warlocks since the beginnings of World of Warcraft. Once nonstackable in-game items that there were special bags for, soul shards now in Cataclysm are part of the unit frame as a secondary resource. Soul shards are particularly a great flavor match for affliction and will stay as affliction-only in Mists of Pandaria. The only problem is that the Soulburn mechanic doesn't jibe well with affliction. Sometimes the stick is too long for us to care about the crunchy, delicious carrot at the end. Sometimes the carrot isn't big enough for the properly balanced stick. Whatever the problem is, our soul carrots don't match our soul sticks.
Blood Pact: 2009 through the Eye of Kilrogg
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The avarice never ends! 'I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored and sell it to make glue.' Look, I don't wanna make waves, but this whole Christmas season is stupid, stupid, stupid!" ~ The Grinch Hmmm... a look back at changes for warlocks in 2009. Well there was... no, wait, that was 2008. Well what about... nah, that's planned for Cataclysm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Nothing particularly outstanding has happened in the warlock area this year; but so much has happened and, well things have changed. It's like waking up each morning and something is subtly different. Your blue toothbrush is now red... The sofa is now against this wall, not that one... each change is pretty unremarkable in it's own right but by the end of the year you are a stuntman living in LA married to a small, blond Portuguese skier who when she's not training does abstract painting, practices yoga and brews her own beer. As we surfaced, bleary-eyed into January our memories of sacrificing succubus and SL/SL were fading faster than those of December 31st. Those heady days of power that also led to FotM wannabes flooding our ranks. Skill and complexity had been leaking out of the class for a while and Naxx wasn't really providing any of us with much of a worthwhile proving ground. Affliction spell rotations were causing carpal-tunnel injuries on those who were determined to take the cold-turkey approach to dropping their addiction to Shadow Bolt spam. Fans of demonology were taking felguards like some sort of methadone for simplistic raiding, meanwhile retaining the use of their fingers.
Blood Pact: Spelling test
With a flash of flame and a gout of smoke, Blood Pact appears again! It demands that columnist Nick Whelan make a sacrifice! Either he must write on a relatively simple subject this week, or be doomed to perform poorly during his finals! Left with no other recourse, Whelan submits to the will of the column.Spells are the essence of playing a Warlock. Just about every part of playing the game, save role playing, has spell casting as a central feature for us. Fighting for control of Arathi Basin, dueling on matters of honor with some upstart Mage, questing and leveling, or any instance from assailing Defias scum in The Deadmines, to unlocking the secrets of Azeroth in Ulduar. Without spells the only things a Warlock could do would be run, jump, and weakly bonk our foes with our staffs. And there just aren't enough platforming sections in WoW to make that kind of thing fun.Depending on our spec and in-game vocation, different Warlocks focus on different spells. And the decision of which spells to focus on is based on numbers. Such as the time required to cast the spell, potential damage output the spell has, or the amount of time that the spell will allow us to reign destruction on our foes while they run around screaming in abject terror. Understanding the mechanical uses of spells is essential if we're to be effective Warlocks. But as I've said in the past: Rain of Fire isn't just an area of effect spell channeled over 10 seconds which causes 2-3k non-crit damage every 2 seconds to enemies within a 15 yard radius--it's fireballs falling out of the sky!
The Queue: Soul Shard parade
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.In yesterday's intro, I mentioned WoW Insider's April Fool's joke. Sillily (it's a word now), I didn't actually include a link to it, and there were people writing that they had no idea that we even did a joke and couldn't find it. Well, here it is! Now, let's begin, shall we?Sorano asked..."In the Argent Tournament, is it possible to champion other cities than the ones attached to your race and faction? Could my Tauren Warrior try and earn the favor of Gnomeregan to obtain a sweet Mechano Strider? I've always wanted one of those for my tauren warrior."
[Updated] Warlock soul-shard farming a thing of the past?
Yesterday, a couple new 3.1 changes for warlocks surfaced: Drain Soul: Each time Drain Soul deals damage to a target which can grant experience, it now has a chance to generate a Soul Shard. Soul Shard: This item now has a maximum count of 32 in inventory. Upon reading the first change, my initial thought was something along the lines of, "aw man, now I get to spend half the raid throwing soul shards away!" Then I read the second change, and my QQ was nipped in the bud. I need to read faster!This change is not yet on the test realms, so I have no first hand knowledge of how it will actually function. Fortunately, Ghostcrawler elaborated on what it will be like. Based on his commentary, it appears that this change is designed to keep warlocks from needing to meekly inform the raid leader that -- after so many wipes -- they need to head down to Dragonblight for some shard farming if they're to continue summoning pets and health stones. Given the obtuse nature of this infernal reagent, I'm surprised this change was so long in coming. Warlocks have been complaining about how difficult it is to manage soul shards since before I rolled my first 'lock. I'm looking forward to seeing this change up on the PTR, where I can get a better idea of just how awesome it's going to be.Updated: There's been a lot of talk about this being an unsatisfactory change to the soul shard situation. I think it's important to note that Ghostcrawler mentioned two changes would be coming for drain soul. One will be a very large change that will significantly alter gameplay, and the other is more of a minor tweak. A stopgap measure while the larger change is worked on. I think it's safe to say that the above changes announced for 3.1 fall into the latter category, and we can look forward to more significant alterations later on. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
[UPDATED] Warlock changes in patch 3.0.3
Patch 3.0.3 isn't a hefty patch by any means, but it did bring some pretty nice changes for Warlocks. Some were simple bug fixes but others were outright improvements. As we reported, the Dreadsteed spell will become trainable to all Warlocks at Level 61. Players no longer need to do the quest line, which opens up at Level 60. The character must have Journeyman riding skill and the Felsteed spell learned. Despite this welcome change, I implore all Warlocks to do the quest. It is one of the best and most flavor-rich quest lines in the game, and any Warlock worth her salt will have fun keeping up the Bell, the Wheel, and the Candle. The cost of materials are trivial in the new economy, so there really shouldn't be any excuse not to do the quest now. High level friends can and should (we're Warlocks, after all) be bribed to chaperone Level 60 Warlocks with the Dire Maul Achievement.[UPDATE: Thanks to our industrious readers, I needed to change my shorts (I'm sending you my dry cleaning bill, Augustus) when I read about this change... the coefficients to Corruption and Immolate were significantly buffed to 20%. That's just... wait, let me change my shorts again (blast you, Augustus!). Oh, and apparently Ritual of Doom is actually cool now. It no longer kills a party member, the Doom Guard lasts for 15 minutes and just disappears afterwards like a zit to Oxy afterwards. How polite. So wow, yeah. Bdew, you can split my dry cleaning bill with Augustus.]
So much for Chaos and other Warlock stories in build 9014
You might have heard that Chaos Bolt now deals Fire damage instead of the nebulous "Chaos" damage, which was actually an amalgamation of all schools of magic. On one hand, this is good news because getting Kicked or Counterspelled while casting it won't lock Warlocks out of every spell. On the other hand, this means Fire immunities will stop it cold. This makes the spell easier to implement or work with, and further enforces the use of Fire spells for Destruction. It's not even a Shadow and Fire version of Frostfire Bolt. It's just... a bolt Fire that looks like Alien larvae. Now, the coolest thing about Chaos Bolt was how it conceptually penetrated through immunities. Ghostcrawler explained that making immunities have vulnerabilities would only create a vicious cycle. Now, the spell only goes through absorption effects -- which is fine, really, but makes Chaos Bolt merely another direct damage Fire spell. Is it a great 51-point talent? I don't know. It deals pretty good damage, I'll give it that. But I'm not sure it's worth 51 points.Curse of Doom can now only produce Doomguards from targets that yield experience or honor, which was a necessary change considering it's now a 100% chance if CoD delivers the killing blow. It still can't be cast on players, though, which is a bummer. Haunt was retuned to heal for 100% of the damage it deals, which isn't so bad considering the 200% I raved about last time was bugged to hell, anyway. Oh, and Everlasting Affliction affects Haunt instead of Shadow Bolt, which is excellent because it relaxes Affliction's already complex rotation.
Mind Flay gets bigger crits, better beams
The class designers have filtered out a little more information regarding our Mind Flay upgrades, and it's very pleasant to hear. In addition to the higher coefficient on Mind Flay and gaining an ability to crit, Shadow Power will give Mind Flay 100% bonus damage crits, rather than the baseline 50%. This is very good news, because 50% crits just don't cut it anymore. Almost everybody has 100% bonus crit damage via talents, and not having the option to spec that way is quite a hurdle when you're trying to be competitive. Very good news indeed.In less game changing but still exciting news, Mind Flay and other beam-type spells (Drain Life, Drain Soul, etc) will be getting a graphical overhaul. Perhaps they'll be more like Penance's fancy missiles? Or maybe they'll just be more of a beam than "behold my blue/green/purple/yellow squiggly line of doom!" Either way, I'm happy to hear it. I'm a firm believer in 'shinier is better.'
Warlock glyphs in Beta build 8905
I'm having a lot of fun with the new Inscription profession. Not necessarily as an Inscriber, but as the recipient of these cool new customization features. As Daniel noted the last time, the Warlock glyphs look pretty sweet, and more glyphs for Warlocks appeared recently in the Wrath Beta. And just like the last time, a few of them really do look pretty spiffy, like this one for example...Glyph of Drain SoulYour Drain Soul ability occasionally creates an additional soul shard.We might as well call this the Soul Shard specialization glyph -- an extra shard for Drain Soul? Yes please! Even if you pack your bag full with 28 Soul Shards before heading into an instance or raid, Warlocks still find themselves in situations where they run out of it, specially for those who have Shadowburn thrown in. Timing Drain Soul just right so it doesn't gimp your DPS is a pain in itself, so an extra shard for the effort is pure win. Besides, procs like these are like an Azerothian mini-lottery. This is also perfect for those lazy Warlocks -- and there are a ton of those -- who only bring a handful of shards to an instance.
