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Blood Pact: A pewpewer's notes from tanking and healing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill muses about tanking, healing, and why she really does play a DPS. I have a confession: I was once a tank. Technically I could have been half a tank, because I think I healed just as often, but once upon a time I rolled a druid with the intent of getting a melee DPS perspective. One night in Wrath of the Lich King, my first guild had some trouble with kiting the adds on Gluth. So we upped the tank count to 3: the paladin tank moved to the back for holy tag with the undead while the former-bear warrior walked me through my feral spellbook as I sat in bear form on that pipe. I think it was the extra Mauls that hooked me. I became a bear tank with a branch-waving offspec. I have fond memories of alt or PUG raids where I had cooldown-busting health pools and hero-bear resurrections between Gormok's death and the arena entrance of Acidmaw and Dreadscale. But as my guild tore apart in the beginnings of Icecrown Citadel, I've been back to pewpewing from the back as a warlock. My bear is merely an alt. But my bear has made my warlock a little stronger.
Blood Pact: Staying slightly alive as a warlock
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill completely devours a real-life box of cookies while listing out all the ways a warlock can heal herself. Om nom nom. Dead DPS does zero DPS. We all know that saying. I introduce to you my Princess Bride collorary to the Dead DPS rule: Miracle Max: Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do. Inigo Montoya: What's that? Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change. The perfect description of what happens when a mob dies in an RPG aside, Miracle Max is right: mostly dead is slightly alive, and slightly alive means you can still do more damage. Naturally -- since we are magnificent, resilient bastards instead of glass cannons -- warlocks are quite excellent at staying slightly alive.
Blood Pact: How to use your warlock's party toys
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill steps back to cover some group functions of warlocks she feels she must explain every week to her raidmates anyway. It's in our fel nature to want to work alone, but warlocks actually have some great party utility. We lost some of that utility in Cataclysm with the advent of a specific guild perk, but now in Mists of Pandaria we've resurfaced in lore and game mechanics. It's time to relearn our old tricks and introduce a new party toy to group content play.
Blood Pact: Do a double take in your spellbook
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill decides that she actually might miss Searing Pain in Mists of Pandaria. All three specs of the warlock class have been reworked -- and yet there are still familiar things lying around. We can still Fear and Banish and Enslave Demon. We still have Unending Breath. We still sacrifice our health to get mana back or to dump threat. We still have pets and guardians to summon. But while everyone's still focused on the new things -- the resource changes or the new abilities -- some familiar things are different. Same name, even same icon as before, but they're actually a little different. Some are obvious and important, and some you won't notice or care about. All the same, I think you should know a few of the smaller changes to our class abilities.
Click the Lightwell -- no, really ...
I like to think I'm a decent rogue. My DPS is pretty good, I know my rotation like the back of my hand, and I've got orange weapons with which to stab things. More important than that (to me, anyway) is the fact that I use self-heals almost religiously, without thinking about it. I think a good portion of that comes from having been a healer originally and having an understanding about healing and just how difficult it is. I don't want to make it more difficult; I just want to happily stab things. In order to do that effectively, I need to not die. That said, I love Lightwell. It's a nice little spell that priests toss on the ground, and you click it to use it. Earlier versions of Lightwell were a little clunky and difficult to use, but today's version is pretty streamlined. I don't lose my target if I click the Lightwell, and I don't have to be on top of the thing to click it. It's a handy little heal to have, much like a Healthstone or even Recuperate. Since I'd rather be using DPS-boosting potions than healing potions, I'll take any little heals I can get. Oddly enough, not everyone does. And I can't quite figure out why.
Breakfast Topic: Skill mastery, or lack thereof
Yeah, I know most of you reading are pretty elite dudes. You have your hotkeys mapped, your DPS rotations memorized, your addons loaded, and you never miss a cooldown and never let a buff drop for more than a second. But for most people, I can't help but think that we all have that one ability that just sort of gets forgotten all the time. There's just so many buttons to press and configure and it's not exactly core to basic gameplay, so you shuffle it off to a corner in your brain or the UI and forget about it.
Arcane Brilliance: Good and Bad in patch 3.2
Welcome to another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly Mage column where you can find all the latest issues that are important to those of us who can alter the molecular structure of our enemies, conjure great missiles of entwined flame and ice, and create delicious pastries from the very air around us, but can't seem to negotiate the mysteries of wearing anything more substantial than a fancy bathrobe into battle. Mages: masters of the arcane, failures at dressing. Let me begin with a few nice things. These are things I like--things that do not, in principle, infuriate me. We'll get to things that do a bit later. I'll hide them after the jump, I suppose, so as not to annoy those of you who cannot stand to see even the most minor of complaints from any class but your own. For now, we'll be positive and cheery, and illustrate that--as it ever has been and ever will be--there are aspects of this game that I love, and aspects that I simultaneously do not. Such is life on the class-balance carousel. As a Mage with a pulpit from which to preach, I will never cease to celebrate the changes I agree with, and decry those which I consider to be affronts to Magekind. Preamble aside, let me tell you what I love right now: our mana gems no longer share a cooldown with Warlock healthstones. Yes, though it wasn't in the patch notes, this seems to be an undocumented change that has made it live, and one that Mages have been lobbying in favor of for a very, very long time. For far too long, we've been largely unable to take advantage of the one good thing Warlocks have to offer, for fear that we'd use one and then not be able to pop our own mana returning item when the need arose. No more! Dying? Need a few thousand health in a hurry and can't wait for the healer to notice you're on death's doorstep? Ice Block on cooldown? Use that healthstone with impunity, my fellow Mages! More good stuff after the break. Also bad stuff. If you dine on Mage tears, feel free to wring the second half of this column for whatever sustenance it might provide.
New Warlock glyphs found in Wrath Beta build 8820
As Inscription is slowly built into a viable trade skill, Blizzard sneaks more and more glyph data onto the Beta server, even if none of it is directly available thus far. This build, MMO Champion discovered a nice selection of Warlock glyphs, and I have to say that most of them look pretty sweet. Of course, it's hard to say for sure on how good some of them are until we know for sure if PvE damage rotations besides Shadow Bolt spam will be viable in Wrath's endgame, but I'll assume they will be, for the most part. Let's check them out after the break.
Arcane Brilliance: Why we Mage
Hi there! Yes, after a long hiatus, Arcane Brilliance is back. Snack tables all around! Anybody ninjas the biscuits, they get a Fireball in the face. Nah, just kidding. Even ninjas are welcome here. As long as they're mage-ninjas. I've been a Mage since day one with WoW, and until a few weeks ago I had never really questioned my class choice. I liked the idea of being a caster, a back row fireballer with robes and a pointy hat. When I came over from FFXI I asked my WoW-playing buddy (the aforementioned shammie) which class I should be. He asked what I was into, and I said something like "I want to be a huge caster-tastic wizard in a dress who sets things on fire with his mind. Is there a mage-type class?" He said. "Yes. It's called...Mage." And that was it. I rolled my undead Mage and began conjuring flaming death and croissants. I happily leveled my Mage to 70. And then...the bubbling, Healthstone-critting warlock happened. After the jump: Shameful self doubt, soul searching, and finally...sweet redemption! And more Mage-talk.
World of WarCrafts: Healthstone
Every Wednesday World of WarCrafts features a recipe or craft that teaches you how to make own real life version of in-game recipes and items. Today in World of WarCrafts I thought I would show you how to make a more "crafty" project. So this time I am going to make a Healthstone. How you may ask can a mere mortal conjure a Healthstone? Ah, young ones I am more than just a mortal. I am a mighty Warlock with special powers. Okay, maybe not but I can make a soap that looks a bit like a Healthstone. To make your Healthstone you will need to gather a few supplies.
Insider Trader: Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
If you're the type of player who finds cauldrons useful, then you probably already know about them – and if you have no idea what they're for, you probably have no use for them. But Insider Trader is the Martha Stewart of WoW Insider – we happen to think that any tool that helps other players take responsibility for their vitals is, as Martha would say, a Good Thing. So let's talk about the so-called pot o' pots.Cauldrons are the alchemical, resistance-pot equivalent of a warlock's soulwell. The alchemist creates a bubbling cauldron that other raid members can click on to receive a major resistance potion from one of the various schools of magic – there are cauldrons for each type of magic except for Holy. Cauldrons can turn out 25 potions over a five-minute duration, a decided improvement over creating, carrying and handing out that many individual pots (and quite a bit cheaper than making even less than half the number of normal major protection pots).Read more about cauldrons, as well as a handy tip about how to use multiple healthstones (yes, that's more than one at a time), after the jump.
Breakfast Topic: Consumable consumption
So I have a question: how exactly do you use your consumables?I noticed a few weeks ago now that I never really used my consumables when I was supposed to. On my Resto Shaman, I have Nature's Swiftness bound to Q (since my left hand is always on WASD) as a panic button-- need a heal instantly, hit it fast. But consumables like potions and healthstones just sat in my bag-- I almost never remembered to whip them out when the party was going down.So recently, I opened up the second hotbar on the right side, and put all my various pots and healthstones there. That way I'm just one click away from one if I need them. And that's worked pretty well-- now, even the tank sometimes forgets to use his healthstone, but I always have them available in a clinch.But they're still all the way on the side of the screen, and it seems like I could do it faster. How do you have your consumables set up? Do you forget to use them all the time, or do you have them bound to a certain key, ready to jump into action at a moment's notice?
Blood Pact: What is a Warlock?, part 1
Every week Elizabeth Harper contributes Blood Pact, where she tries to share the joy of the Warlock class with her fellow players, Warlock or not. When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I rolled the ubiquitous Night Elf Hunter. The pet angle appealed to me, and in all the games I'd played previously, I preferred to stay away from close combat and pelt my victims with spells or arrows from a safe distance. However, with so many classes available to me, I couldn't stick with just one -- my second character was a Mage. I spent my first weeks in Azeroth cheerfully hopping between these two characters, but I must admit that neither of the characters made it past level 20. Why? I found out that a friend of mine played on another realm, so I rerolled to join them -- this time as a Warlock.I didn't know what I was getting in to at the time, I only knew that Warlocks had pets like Hunters and cast spells like Mages. But I've got to tell you, despite the first-glance similarities between the classes, they're not at all alike -- which I learned while leveling mine to 60. (And before you ask -- I played this Warlock prior to the class changes that turned them into tiny gods. Yes, I was a Warlock back when Warlocks were the underdogs.) Perhaps you're not quite sure what to expect from Warlocks -- whether you play with them, are trying to kill them, or are thinking about rolling one yourself. If so, read on as I attempt to explain the essence of the Warlock class.
Insider Trader: Bags for the pros
Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.Need more bag space? It's a completely rhetorical question for most WoW players. Blizzard's tight rein on player bag space is a perfect example of what I only somewhat jokingly refer to as WoW's "relentless tuning." And nobody feels the pinch quite so strongly as professions addicts -- crafters whose bags are full of little bits of this and that for making, well, even more of this and that.Specialty bags to the rescue! Crafters have access to a whole host of beefier bags designed especially for holding crafting materials. These player-made bags do have some drawbacks. You can only carry one at a time on your person, and since they only hold profession-related items, they do cut down on the space you have for general inventory. You'll undoubtedly catch yourself snarling at the banker when tussling with the specifics of what items will and won't go into these bags -- but for all their prissy limitations, you'll come across some sweet surprises, too.No discussion of specialty bags would be complete without a mention of player-made ammo bags and soul shard bags for warlocks, too. We'll include details on those containers at the end of this article.
...and Mages and Warlocks too!
Recently, I wrote a post on Rogues having trade windows opened up on them without so much as a word. As I suspected, many other Rogues out there indeed have the same problem. Of course, many had their own ways of dealing with it like picking the box, but not hitting trade until there was a tip in the window. Another idea was just keeping all trades off in their options so that people couldn't open up trades with them in the first place. All of these are things that I've tried from time to time with varying levels of success. What I didn't expect, however, was the sheer amount of people who jumped in and brought up the similar plights that Mages and Warlocks face on a daily basis. As I've got a L59 Warlock and a L61 Mage, trust me when I say that I completetly understand and appreciate what you all go through with the requests you get. I'm not even able to portal others to Shattrath yet on my Mage, but anytime I'm playing her, I almost immediately get asked to open a portal there for someone anyway. Now, nobody has opened a trade window on me without asking and grunted out "food/water" as yet, but I've definitely gotten the tells demanding that I make food or water for them, as opposed to asking nicely.
