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Blood Pact: Taking care of your DoTs
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.
Addon Spotlight: Personal Cooldown Tracking
Last week's Addon Spotlight was apparently a little confusing for some readers, since it dealt with raid-wide cooldowns and addons to assist in managing those cooldowns. It was not meant as a column addressing your own personal cooldowns. We talked about addons for your entire raid to follow, such as healing cooldowns for healers, so that your entire raid don't blow them all at once. But fear not, this week we're going to look at personal cooldown tracking! This, in contrast to last week's column, looks at methods to monitor your own things, and not share them with other players. I touched briefly on this topic in an addon mailbag a while back, but my main recommendation is not behaving itself at all well at the moment, so I figure we ought to have a second look at this. Not-so-sexy cooldown This is the addon I recommended last time I discussed this, and up to recently was my addon of choice for personal cooldown monitoring. It's a pretty simple premise, really, it has a bar, as you use spells, their cooldowns move from one end of the bar to the other. They can either have a timer on them or not. Up to you.
Blood Pact: Useful addons for raiding warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill does actually have 100some addon folder things in her Addon Control Panel profile. Laugh all you want; her UI is spacious and pretty to play on. I've been asked several times from either new warlocks or old warlocks who came back to the game about what addons are out there to help a PvE warlock. Recently, it's been through Twitter, which isn't exactly the best place to explain how to get the most out of your UI. Gear is one important preparation for raiding, and I've set you up with most of those considerations. Knowing your class and spec is another, and I promise, I'll get to that. But a good buff to your spellcasting techniques is a well-done user interface, so let's talk about that.
Addon Spotlight Alternatives: Cooldown bar timers
Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. The Addon Spotlight Alternatives series continues with a look at cooldowns, timers, bars, and anything falling into the category of timing. Timing is a crucial factor in many of World of Warcraft's angles. You've got DPS rotations that can be made or broken based on the time between skill use. You've got tanks making split-second decisions on ability usage and timing -- what if you're only a few seconds away from a Shield Wall, but heroic Nefarian is about to use his thunder electro-whatever? Yeah, you have better been timing those cooldowns better, buddy. Cooldown and skill timing management are some of the game systems baked into the game to separate the better from the best, the true test for the most hardcore WoW players out there. People are still tackling Dragon Soul heroic content and succeeding because of good timing -- ask anyone about the gruesome slog that the Madness of Deathwing fight is on heroic. I did. I asked Rossi. He growled at me. We've established that timing is important, right? Good. Addons can greatly help you with the timing and cooldown tracking of your abilities because the game does a pretty poor job of it. That's not Blizzard's fault, either -- tracking your cooldowns in such an elaborate and specific way is not exactly what the game is designed to showcase to every player. This is all information we are willingly taking on in excess from what Blizzard is providing.
Addon Spotlight: Slackers, beware! RSC is on to you
Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same. Are you ready to pull? The ready check says you've got the green light, people look ready, and your current raid boss stands in front of you, cruising for a bruising every moment you wait before initiating the fight. Stop. Is everyone flasked? Did everyone eat the feast? Who pre-potted on a progression encounter? Has someone dropped a repair bot that was not noticed? Are you sure that you're ready to pull? There is little more annoying than raiders giving half their effort to the team effort, 10- or 25-man raiding. It's game time, people! Stop slacking! We've got bosses to kick in the loot bags and gear to grab. Maybe with a little help from RaidSlackCheck, you can whip your cadre of nerds into shape and get these fights down at a quicker pace.
Spiritual Guidance: How to become a better priest, starting with your UI
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen spawn camps poor, defenseless gnomes. Dawn also writes for LearnToRaid.com, produces the Circle of Healing Podcast, and plays white knight to those loveable gnomes. When I first started raiding a few years ago, I was an obnoxiously overconfident priest determined to prove to the world that I was the best discipline priest who ever lived. Fast forward two years, and I'm still trying to get comfortable with the reality check that resulted from meeting amazing priests like Kinaesthesia or Kras. I realized I wasn't competitive enough, dedicated enough, and that my growing ability to self-critique every tiny aspect of my play was holding back me back more than it was pushing me forward. How I wish I could be that overconfident idiot again. On the bright side, the whole thing has left me quite good at helping other priests identify what they need to do to get to the next stage of their development as players (without becoming overly paranoid from self-awareness). So when I recently met someone who was up against a massive wall in his development, I decided I ought to tap into that ability in a more formal way by writing an article about it. Bob (we're going to call him Bob) wrote me and described various problems he was having as a healer, explaining that raid damage was unmanageable and that he couldn't keep up. I thought for a while he might have been going OOM, but as we talked more and more, I realized certain things he said just didn't making sense. Eventually, I asked him for a picture of his UI and was immediately horrified by what he sent me. Thus today, we're going to talk about addons and setting up your first healing priest UI.
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest addons for a post-Cataclysm world
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. In the spirit of the Thanksgiving Pilgrim's Bounty holiday, the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen has been pondering that which he is thankful for: a broken (but new!) world, a constant supply of minds to flay, and his Joan Rivers-esque good looks. When I heard for sure that patch 4.0.3a would be hitting yesterday, I immediately thought to myself, "What kind of information about the post-Shattering world will shadow priests need to know?" The idea was to create a great big article all about those changes so that everyone would be prepared. But here's the thing -- all the major Cataclysm changes happened to shadow priests in patch 4.0.1. Patch 4.0.3a is almost all about changing the world around us (and also about nerfing warlocks). There are a few spriest-specific changes worth noting, but they're largely passive: Vampiric Embrace has been nerfed, as discussed a few weeks ago. We now only get 6 percent of the damage we deal back as self-healing, down from 12. Ouch. Our mastery has been reworked. Casting Mind Blast (with a Shadow Orb active) now procs a non-stackable, 15-second buff, Empowered Shadow. It increases the damage of shadow DoT spells by 10 percent (base), plus 1.25 percent per point of mastery. You should be experiencing close to 100 percent uptime with that buff. Our talent tree has been reset, mostly due to tinkering in the non-shadow trees. This is my preferred, crowd-control-free talent tree for your last few days at level 80. If you found yourself unsatisfied with the damage you were doing in 4.0.1, these few changes are probably going to leave you wanting. You'll need to find some other way to boost your damage or manage your spec, and there's really only one foolproof way of doing that (aside from practice, of course): addons.
Reader UI of the Week: Mvin's UI
Each week, WoW.com brings you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you're using, to readerui@wow.com. Greetings, Reader UI of the Week readers! It has been another awesome week for reader UI submissions, but keep those submissions coming. Mvin, this week's lucky spotlight, has sent in an awesome variety of screenshots to show us not only the evolution of his user interface, but also addon positioning as part of a helpful guide for those taking suggestions.
AddOn Spotlight: Priest, mage, warlock addons
Addon Spotlight focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. We'll look at everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same! This week, I cop to not knowing a thing about casters and give some recommendations from my awesome caster friends. Welcome back to the Addon Spotlight miniseries on class-specific addons. Last week, we took a look at a few specific addons for the paladin, death knight and the shaman. This week, we're forging ahead with three more classes: the warlock, the mage and the priest. If an addon is recommended that isn't particularly useful for your specialization, fear not! This type of Addon Spotlight will happen again in the future. Let us commence the celebration of these three fine caster classes and their addons.
Patch 3.3 compatible addons
With patch 3.3 just hours away, we thought it might be nice to do a quick list of major addons that have already been updated to give you something to do while waiting for the servers to come back up, then waiting in the login queue, and then waiting for Dalaran to load. You've got a good fifteen minutes worth of downtime just trying to get out of Dalaran. Oh, and don't forget to set your game client to load out of date addons to cover all of the ones that haven't updated yet.
