agony

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  • Blood Pact: Affliction 101 at 90 in the end of Mists

    by 
    Megan O'Neill
    Megan O'Neill
    02.24.2014

    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: Framing a fighter jet's power

    by 
    Megan O'Neill
    Megan O'Neill
    10.21.2013

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying. I started part one as an introduction, to set everything up. While "yaw" (keybinds and macros) and "pitch" (procs and cooldowns display) are important parts of a UI, you can't start doing your damage dealing job without a health bar to take down. So this week, we're going to look at all kinds of health bars you can find on a warlock's UI. You can see all my unit frames in action here in the full version of the header image. Remember: I'm using the addons I use as examples, because it's easiest to draw from what I know. You can be an accomplished DPSer with minimal addons on a mostly default interface, if you so wish.

  • Blood Pact: Warlock stats and set bonuses in patch 5.4

    by 
    Megan O'Neill
    Megan O'Neill
    09.30.2013

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets cleansed of disease and starts on a new rivalry. *cough* *cough* *haaaaaack* Megan coughs violently into a clutch of raggy, mucused-up robes. It's all good. I'm going to survive. The healers haven't cleansed me since that last time I dropped the Gateway still inside the windstorm, so I'm stuck to my cookie cooldown. I really don't blame them for that. But, I gotta say it was worth a little cough to see all the melee drop dead like that. Don't worry, I'm not cursed or anyth-- What is that. No -- THAT. Who the ... You guys let a mage in here?! Well. *Megan steeples her fingers.* No matter. Warlocks are still better than those muffinmakers in patch 5.4.

  • Blood Pact: Combat log kung fu for warlocks

    by 
    Megan O'Neill
    Megan O'Neill
    05.27.2013

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is finishing out the World of Logs posts while she hunts for BC-era battle pets. Have you ever tried to read the combat log? Maybe you're on the PTR testing a spell change or you want to know how often a new trinket procs, so you open the combat log chat window and start reading. You get twenty-something lines down before you realize something horrifying -- that's only one second of combat. Your jaw slowly falls to the floor and you reach up to pull your hair out as you contemplate reading a combat log for an entire raid fight -- that can sometimes last more than six hundred seconds and includes far more actors than just you and the training dummy. Luckily for us, when events are printed in a specified format without too much variety, computers can read and process --or parse -- these lines magnitudes faster than we humans can. World of Logs has graphs and charts to help us understand our performance, but it also includes what is basically Google for your combat log. Just like there are tips to speed up and pinpoint your browser searches, there are tricks you can use to query events better in the World of Logs expression editor.

  • Blood Pact: Taking care of your DoTs

    by 
    Megan O'Neill
    Megan O'Neill
    01.29.2013

    Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill admits to problems with DoT clipping (*gasp*) and finds a way to fix it. Every warlock has at least one damage over time effect to take care of. Destruction has Immolate. Demonologists flip between Corruption and Doom (Metamorphosis), though I suppose you could count Shadowflame off Hand of Gul'dan as one. Affliction is the "DoT spec," starring Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, with appearances of Haunt.

  • EVE Evolved: Heroes of EVE

    by 
    Brendan Drain
    Brendan Drain
    08.15.2010

    In last week's EVE Evolved, I looked at a few of EVE Online's most famous outlaws. In the game's open-ended sandbox, players are free to turn to a life of crime. Around every corner, you'll find another thief making off with someone's loot, or a pirate waiting for an unsuspecting victim to pass by. Worse still are the many scam artists and market manipulators you'll find in trade hubs like Jita, making a dishonest living at the expense of other players. But it's not all doom and gloom, and not all players are the dark, nefarious types EVE is famous for. For every low-life scammer trying to steal your hard-earned ISK, there are helpful individuals working to counteract scamming. For every war-mongering pirate preying on new players, there are hundreds of people willing to teach new players to defend themselves and stay safe. Despite all the talk of EVE's anti-social element, you'll also find a rich and diverse community, built around forums, chat channels and dozens of blogs. Programmers even spend their free time to provide the community with free tools to aid play. These are all people I would call heroes of EVE, either because they work to prevent the wrong-doings of outlaws, or because they selflessly enrich the EVE community. In this opinion piece, I look at a few of the people and groups I consider to be true heroes of EVE. Who are your heroes?

  • How do we start a guild?

    by 
    Amanda Dean
    Amanda Dean
    05.18.2009

    I'd like to take a moment to address another reader email. In this post I kind of skirt the direct issues of recruiting and establishing a guild bank. I offer my best advice on the absolute basics of starting a guild. Please ignore spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors in the reader's email, and direct all of your ire toward mine.heya,me and my friend want to start up our own to guild working towards raid progression. We have both done all pre 3.1 content on other characters on different servers and on moving to a new server have found it hard to find a guild that meets our needs/scheduale; thus we want to form our own guild. However neither of us has any experience in doing so, and would appreciate some tips on how best to start ie. how to recruit, how developed the guild bank needs to be etcthanksBefore you get started making your guild, I'd like to let you in on a little secret. Some of the most painful experiences in my life include boiling the skin off the back of my right hand with scalding water from a steam iron (you wouldn't notice the scar unless I pointed it out, but even 22 years later I use it to tell left from right), the massive hangover I had on 1/1/2000- three days after I got my tongue pierced (and working a double shift), and starting a guild with a handful of friends. My best advice is that unless there is a real need for a guild, don't do it. You and your friend may want to look for a guild that meets your needs, our readers have posted many that are looking for members.

  • Guilds that do it with style

    by 
    Michael Gray
    Michael Gray
    06.11.2008

    WoW enjoys a community created through informative blogs, forums, and most importantly -- Guilds. Guilds form the foundation of most players' experiences. Some Guilds, though, just seem to conduct themselves with a little more style. Nihilum's live stream efforts are a good example -- they're letting us into their little corner of gameplay, showing us how they do things. Nihilum's well-known for their success, and it's fascinating to get an insider's look at how they conduct their raids. The members of Agony issue their news with a bit of artistic flair. They turn their raid screenshots into comic book updates. While the plot might be hard to follow if you've not done the raids yourself, the pages are rather pretty to look at. Sometimes, though, Guilds break up. They can do it with a bit of a drama, or they can choose to do it with a little class. When Forte called it the end of the road, they left a final "goodbye" to fans and foes alike. They ended their story in a way that let everyone know what was going on, and with a final farewell to their fans. These three Guilds are just examples. We've all encountered Guilds who do something a little extra to make the game fun or enrich their community.

  • Low level hunter pets to level faster... someday

    by 
    David Bowers
    David Bowers
    09.14.2007

    So there you are, a proud hunter at level 70, and you suddenly realize that you absolutely must have a low-level pet, such as the famous translucent ghost saber? What do you do? Up till now the conventional answer was: "suffer." Low level pets only gain experience when you kill something around your level range, not theirs, so the only choice is to just bear with it for a very long time while you try to kill high-level monsters with a low-level pet, or else just give up and not do it.Well finally it looks like Blizzard has in mind something to do about it. Drysc tells us: We have plans to adjust how quickly a hunter's pet will level if there's a large gap between it and the hunter's level. However, it's still just a plan and not something we've implemented and thus are not ready to discuss it.Something's going to happen -- we just don't know what it is yet. But really, for hunters anything would be better than what it is now. It's always nice to remove needless tedium don't you think?