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Blood Pact: Destruction 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 mentions in a quick announcer voice that green fire spells are sold separately. So, you just boosted to 90 on your warlock and...now what? This whole pet deal is bananas to you and maybe you've heard that destruction (often abbreviated as "destro") -- is a simple spec, so you figure you'll try that one out first. but where do you start? And how can you learn without embarrassing yourself? Let's start, shall we?
Blood Pact: Weak Aura strings for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill dares to share her stash of Weak Auras with the internet. Since I primarily take my own screenshots, we've seen my Weak Auras in action already. I've talked a little about how this addon and TellMeWhen can accomplish some of the same user interface goals. Now, we finally get around to the big request -- let's see some warlock Weak Aura strings. The usual caveat applies here: these are my Weak Auras and they work fine for me within my own setup of playing a warlock that is unique to me. I'm sure someone will find my Burning Embers graphic irrelevant, but I remind you, to each her own.
Blood Pact: Multitarget DPS and situational awareness
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses how to handle one, some, or many whelps. Before BlizzCon, I left off with the beginnings of how to put together your UI. While it would be easy to generate a post of macros and Weak Auras import strings, that wasn't my intent. User interfaces in WoW are varied and can be unique to the player, so I think it's a greater lesson to learn how you can design your UI to help you, rather than to help patchwork import settings together for you. So while the setup of unit frames may have seemed incredibly basic to some readers, knowing where some set frames are helps you take control of how your targets are presented to you. Much like healers considering a raid frames grid to be a central part of a healing UI, having damage targets at the ready is a central if often subconscious part of a DPS UI. Today is another basic topic, but it too has a subtle effect on how a proper UI setup can aid in DPS.
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.
Patch 5.4 PTR: More spell changes to facilitate warlock talent nerfs
Warlocks around the world have been weeping at the Patch 5.4 PTR intended nerf to Kil'jaeden's Cunning and Mannoroth's Fury. Blizzard Community Manager Lore had already posted an explanation for the tier 6 talent nerfs and some unseen PTR mechanics that were not in the patch notes to help aid warlocks in recovering DPS lost to movement. CM Lore is back tonight with another post of spell changes in the next build for warlocks in the continuing discussion of the Kil'jaeden's Cunning and Mannoroth's Fury talent nerfs. After the break, you may read about a minor note about Rain of Fire generating less embers (specifics currently unknown), so that the developers can further discourage use of the spell in single-target situations. Fel Flame is being reworked entirely: it will no longer extended DoTs and it has a 1.5 second cast time instead of being instant-cast. In return, Fel Flame will be castable while moving and has received a small damage buff. Haunt, in return, will go back to being interrupted by movement. Affliction is being further compensated for the loss of Malefic Grasp while moving by expectedly moving the damage done power back into Haunt and the three DoTs. Finally, Kil'jaeden's Cunning and Mannoroth's Fury are both on a 1 minute cooldown (down from 1.5 minutes) but also a lowered duration of 10 seconds (down from 15 seconds). Mannoroth's Fury applies to only the main AoEs but it provides a 100% damage increase to the specific AoE spells as well as the expanded area.
Blood Pact: Soloing the vanilla raids for pets and more
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill laments being knocked successfully up past the Suppression Room, only to pull the boss and be knocked back down and across the Suppression Room while the original knockback mobs die. UGH. Well, Naxxramas is big enough that I'll leave a whole article to it. The other raids from the original raiding scene of level 60 can fit into one since they're relatively easy to do. The roadblocks to finishing them are largely mechanical tricks, not damage output or survivability problems. There's no real difference between the specs in these earliest raids. I run as destruction mostly because it's fast-paced, but any spec and almost any talent setup can do these raids.
Blood Pact: Vault's end with multitarget magic
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill continues on with Mogu'shan Vaults while hunting pets in old raids. I thought maybe I'd goofed, that I'd mis-timed the first two-thirds of Mogu'shan Vaults and would need to interrupt to make a fun post about Black Temple and some new warlock lore. Sadly, the felfire questline got postponed for a little while. Oh well. In the meantime we can alternate between old raids and new as a warlock. First, let's finish up Mogu'shan Vaults with two complex-to-explain but simple-to-do fights.
Blood Pact: Share the love of dead mobs with MoP AoE
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill enjoys exploding things, whether by smashing mobs to gore splats as a Diablo III barbarian or by chaining together multiple Seed explosions. A bugged Nightfall won't stop me from enjoying the new Seed of Corruption. I am completely willing to channel Drain Soul on full-health trash just so I can get a 'burned Seed and 'burned Curse combo off on the next pack. Chaining Seeds together is too much fun to pass up. With this new beta build, Mannoroth's Fury received a little nerf, and I thought about all the new AoE abilities for warlocks. Every spec has multiple AoE options now, both small-scale and large-scale. Even better, no spec feels like a mindless spamming anymore. Even affliction's constant casting of Seed requires a little setup.
Blood Pact: Newbie tips for destruction warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. Today, Megan O'Neill is still breaking for beta, and in the meantime, brush-fires up on her flame-flinging techniques. Destruction has evolved a lot since the one-button Shadow Bolt days of The Burning Crusade. Now in Cataclysm, destro has a convoluted cast rotation, still retains shadow DoTs despite being the master of fire, and has a clunky buff mechanic to boot. While skilled warlocks can pull off amazing numbers with their fantastical weaving of spells, the clunkiness of the spec is still present for beginners.
Breakfast Topic: Design a unique healing spell
There has been quite a bit of talk on the forums about the various spells each of the healing classes have available to them and how those might be expanded in Cataclysm. One poster asked when we'll see healing variants of some various DPS spells like Cone of Healing or Rain of Healing (which was actually announced for Shaman). This led to a fun little conversation here at WoW.com between Dawn Moore, Chase Christian, Elizabeth Harper and myself. We came up with ideas like Holyfiend, a pet that healed people. You could either target it or set it to "aggressive" and it would heal people at random. Another idea was a talent turning a paladin's Consecration into an area healing effect that ticked when stood in (standing in stuff on the floor is good?). There was also the idea of creating a healing wand similar to the healing rod from Final Fantasy VI that did healing instead of damage on the target you attacked. What would be some interesting mechanics you'd like to see turned into a healing ability? Would you turn the moonkin's little treants into mini resto druids? How about something like Pestilence that spread your heal over time spells to the rest of your party?
Blood Pact: Meet the minions part 5, the infernal and doomguard
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "Don't tell anyone this but Niby is daft." ~ Impsy <Niby's Minion> This week, Blood Pact looks at the bad-boys of our demon companions. When you think through the various warlock minions it's common to consider their usefulness. This is especially true of non-warlocks and raid leaders. Everyone knows that imp for his ranged DPS, health bonus and constant grumbling, the felhunter for annoying casters, voidwalker for tanking, felguard for pure DPS and the succubus for, well, dying a lot in Black Temple. This week though we look at two minions that are best known for killing people and causing trouble in towns and villages: the infernal and the doomguard. Anyone who has been playing the game for some time probably remembers at least one occasion where a bored warlock has decided that they have nothing better to do than annoy low-level members of their own faction by setting one of these guys loose. If not then you've almost certainly heard stories. It's these stories that, even though this chaos is no longer possible, make others look at locks with much suspicion and locks sigh for the old days.
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!
[UPDATE] Demonology 101: the Doomguard
I have a confession to make. I don't know the Ritual of Doom. I guess I'm just not hardcore that way. I wish I did the quest chain, although after this post, I might actually make my way to the Blasted Lands and start it. I've actually died to the Ritual of Doom, so I know what fun I'm missing.Anyway, here we go. The Doomguard is the last demon we'll discuss on Demonology 101. Lazy Warlocks such as myself can luck out on a Doomguard with Curse of Doom, our favorite spell on Netherspite. It's a fairly low percentage to spawn one, and Curse of Doom needs to deliver the killing blow on the mob... which can be a long wait considering the curse only deals damage at the end of one minute.[UPDATE: Curse of Doom has been revised to spawn a Doomguard 100% of the time if it delivers the killing blow! Ritual of Doom also no longer kills a player but damages them, apparently with a Curse of Doom-size damage spell. Doomguards remain enslaved for 15 minutes and disappear thereafter, eliminating the need to enslave.]
Sunday Morning Funnies: Rouges in Azertoh
This week we have an NPC coup, a battle of the bands, two strikes, and of course, the much beloved mischief. In the Scout Report, #37, a new activist wanders onto the scene. From the Noob Comic comes Area Effect. Sometimes, a mage just can't help himself. Messy Cow has some adventures in Skinning, although she should have been healing. The best part? The "rouge" who was stealing corpses! Teh Gladiators battle their stealthed opponents, and the Murlocs heat up the scene. This week, the commentary beneath the comic is decidedly worth the read. Sockpuppet holds the "Azertoh Battle of the Bands." Yes, I said "Azertoh." Want to see a raid with the characters from Real Life? NoObz #9 brings you to a special mob-held meeting of sorts, where you get to meet the gray kangaroo (wolf). The old computer has finally broken him. A friend of Monkey Punchers is finally Losing It. In LFG this week, my favorite character breaks into a song and dance! Shakes and Fidget have made their Preparations, and with proper hilarity ensuing. This week on Dark Legacy Comics, the NPCs launch plans to take over the world, through Operation: Horace. From Action Trip comes Impressive Knowledge. Seriously, kids these days really know their stuff! Sure, they might lose a finger or a hand, but then they'll know which faction they're dealing with, right? Pass through the break to vote for your favorite from this week's selection.
All the World's a Stage: Class is in session
All the World's a Stage is skipping class (gasp!), and playing with roles every Sunday evening.Our spells are shiny and bright, well worth using in more than just combat situations! Last time we talked a bit about this idea, as well as how druids, hunters, and mages could use their spells to entertain their friends. Today we turn to the remaining classes: priests, paladins, rogues, shamans, warlocks and warriors. Each roleplayer would do well to sit down and examine his or her action bar to pick out those spells which can be used outside of combat, and think of whatever opportunities imaginable to make good use of them. Chances are, if you put your mind to it, you can come up with some really creative ideas.Buffing, for instance: You've got these beautiful abilities that can benefit anyone around you, no matter what class or level they are. If you're going to bless them with such a neat thing, why not say something about it while you do so? You can say, "<Deity Name> guide you, sir!" or, "you look pretty dumb -- have some extra intellect!" or whatever expression sounds right for your character.
