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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: Buffs and debuffs for warlocks and logs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is almost free for summer. Almost. The last two weeks have been on simple topics like glancing at a raid parse on World of Logs (WoL) or looking at the various graphs WoL has. Before we dive into the actual combat log itself with the expression editor, I'm going to take a stop at what buffs and debuffs are going on in the fight. This information is still broad in scope and can apply to almost anyone, but it's still important foundation knowledge for warlocks and logs.
Trinket nerfs insufficient to repair PvP burst issues
We reported last week on the trinket nerfs implemented by Blizzard's team, in order to help fix the current issues in PvP burst. Blizzard Community Manager Daxxarri explained that Blizzard's team's data led them to believe that the on-use trinkets were a major contributor to the very high levels of burst currently being experienced by players. Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street recently tweeted the following: .@rick97950219 We are concerned that trinket nerfs were not sufficient in curbing mage and warrior burst. Discussing options. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) December 7, 2012 Given Ghostcrawler's tweet, it seems that warriors and mages are still putting out too much damage, in Blizzard's eyes at least. While it may be the case that specific actions are required to address these classes, any attempts to improve the situation in PvP are appreciated. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
Spiritual Guidance: Top healing trinkets for priests
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. There were five potential healer trinkets added in patch 4.3, some of which have their pluses and their minuses. If you're a holy or a disc priest and you're not quite sure what trinket you should be taking this tier, let me help you narrow it down. I'll give you a hint, though -- they're the trinkets that everyone else will try to kill you for. Watch your back! Windward Heart As far as healing throughput goes, this is currently the best trinket in the game. Many healers are reporting its doing up to 5% of their healing in a fight, and since the heal is a smart heal that will target the most injured member of your party, you know it's never going to overheal anyone. The internal cooldown is 20 seconds, meaning you'll see the proc going off constantly as long as you keep healing. There is some debate on whether holy or disc will benefit from this trinket more, since holy priests are typically healing more targets and thus more likely to get a critical heal, while disc priests are known to have more crit because of talents like Renewed Hope. First off, it doesn't really matter who benefits from the trinket more, because it's best in slot for both specs. Second, who it benefits more has to do with your raid role, not your spec. It's true that a holy priest is more than likely going to be acting as a raid healer, but disc priests will occasionally fill that role too, just like holy priests may occasionally tank heal. Because raid roles change from fight to fight, I would encourage you to not be that jerk who tries to make a case for it by waving his spec around.
Drama Mamas: Proper AH etiquette when a guildie helps craft
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. So. Dreamy. I perhaps should have warned you that if you are going to send letters that contain even the slightest hint of a Jane Austen reference, this kind of thing would happen. Well, now you know. Hi, I recently had an issue with a guildie that I would like to ask about. At the beginning of the expansion, it was a goal of mine to get one of the Darkmoon Card trinkets crafted. As we all know, it is no small task. A fellow guildie (and fellow officer) offered to help me with the task. So I immediately flicked the farm herb switch, and set out to make it happen. After a couple of weeks, more research into available trinkets, and nearly 60 stacks of herbs, I was one card away from the deck. I was able to purchase the last card for a good sum of gold and finally had my deck ready for the Darkmoon Faire. With all of the gear research I had done, I concluded that the trinket I had worked so hard for was going to be replaced very quickly. So I decided that I'd try to sell it, reasoning that there were other personal goals I had in the game that could benefit from a chunk of gold. After posting it on the AH and being away for a day, my guildie that crafted it for me shot me a fairly aggressive tell saying how he thought selling it was a low thing to do. He explained that he even used some of his own herbs to craft the cards and that the only reason he offered to begin with was to help a guildie get raid-ready. I took it off the AH so as not to cause problems and explained that I wasn't aware he had to use his own mats to help make it all. I found out later that he had been ripping me to others about selling it before he spoke with me. I posted an explanation in our forums of why I was going to sell it at all. apologized if I offended anyone, and stated that I would be using it after all.
Arcane Brilliance: Mage pre-raid trinket compendium
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking trinketry. I have a rubber pig keychain that has an on-use proc: When you squeeze him, poop comes out of his butt. It's difficult to measure the value of that, but I'm pretty sure it's worth a billion DPS. Quickly: Close your eyes, forget that you have already seen the title and intro to this week's column, and tell me the first thing that comes into your head when I say, "hardest pre-raid gear slot to fill." No, not bracers. What ... dang it. I mean ... come on, guys! It's trinkets! Trinkets. Didn't you read the title? It's right there. Though you have two slots free for trinkets, they have always been one of the most notoriously difficult to fill gear slots in the game. And no single gear choice is more subjective than choosing one trinket over another. Instead of choosing between 225 intellect and 255 intellect, you're often picking between a Vengeful Wisp and a Fallen Footman. That's a bit like asking which is better, shrimp tacos or integrity? I don't ... I don't know. Sometimes the only indication that one given trinket is better than another is the item level, and let's be honest, even that isn't often a very reliable indicator. The math can be obtuse and often a bit fuzzy, and even plugging trinkets into a damage-simulating program like Rawr can prove problematic. And then there's the matter of finding said trinkets. Through each of WoW's three expansions, the relative difficulty of finding two good trinkets has been a frustrating constant. In many cases, you'll find solid endgame-level upgrades for every other slot while still waiting, an increasingly hard-to-ignore urge to kill swelling steadily behind your brow, for Paletress to finally drop the stupid Abyssal Rune, even though this is your 75th consecutive run and you've seen her drop the stupid hunter trinket the last 16 times ... To compound the issue, there's the undeniable fact that no other single gear upgrade can improve your DPS as dramatically as switching from a crappy trinket to an awesome one. Those two slots are arguably the most important in the game.
Totem Talk: Ruby Sanctum loot for enhancement
Rich Maloy subsists solely on enhancement air. He experiences shortness of breath when offered spellpower gear and is easily confused by spirit and MP5. You can ask him anything about enhance at the Totem Recall roundtable or watch his WoW reality series, Big Crits. In case you missed it in all the news about the Cataclysm beta, Ruby Sanctum was released into the wild on Tuesday. With a new instance out everyone is asking, "What's in it for me?" But my question is, "What's in it for enhancement?" The short answer is ArP. For a stat that's going away in a few months, we're seeing a lot of it in Ruby Sanctum gear from both the 10- and 25-man versions of the raid. Armor penetration (ArP) is not the ideal stat for enhancement. Not ideal, but definitely usable. There are some definite winners among the RS loot -- on both 10 and 25. I've created a new enhance gear spreadsheet on Google Docs including the new loot. It's read-only, so either make a copy to your Google Docs file or save a copy to your desktop as an Excel file. I've also included some sample EP values for different levels of play, including EP values derived from the latest Elitist Jerks BiS gear, setup and rotation.
Totem Talk: Enhancement trinkets
Currently Stoneybaby is trying to come up with witty article titles and failing miserably due to a splitting headache, so "Enhancement X" will have to suffice for this week. And yes Rich Maloy lives and loves enhancement. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. He blogs about the life and times of enhance at Big Hit Box, pens the enhance side of Totem Talk, and leads the guild Big Crits (Week 4 now out!) as the enhancement shaman Stoneybaby. Since last week's weapons column went off with slightly less trolling than normal, I'm going to push my luck with another article about gearing. Today's topic: trinkets. Trinkets are not nearly as hard to acquire as weapons. Unless of course the RNG gods hate you and Death's Choice/Verdict drops only once in your guild in all of the god-forsaken months you spend in ToC and the first time it dropped you passed to a hunter who really needed the upgrade and you thought to yourself I'll be a good leader and let someone else win because it will drop again and I'll get it next time only it doesn't drop again ever and you're convinced the RNG gods do in fact hate you so you wrap yourself in your towel and rock yourself gently to sleep. Thinking back on that, maybe trinkets are a bit hard to acquire. Thankfully for us, one of enhancement's best-in-slot trinkets is very easy to come by.
Arcane Brilliance: What to do with your trinket slots, part 2
Welcome to another edition of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to say to all of the warlocks who sneak in here each week, skulking about in the shadows, wearing dark clothing and eyeliner and hating their dads, and then like to crow in the comments section about how I've inadvertently provided them with a warlock guide of some type because warlocks generally use the same gear as mages: Thanks for the pageviews! So last week we talked about trinkets. Specifically, the kinds of trinkets a new level 80 mage might want to keep his eyes peeled for. This week, we're going a step farther. Already pimped out in full tier 9 and sporting an Abyssal Rune/Talisman of Resurgence combo? Looking over the Lich King's loot table with a critical eye? In a guild that routinely tackles hard-modes? Let's look at some of the trinkets for which you should be on the hunt.
Trinkets: Hard to get, and Blizzard likes it that way
Any caster worth their salt can remember the frustration involved in trying to nab the elusive Illustration of the Dragon Soul trinket from Sartharion in the Obsidian Sanctum. We tried everything we could to get it, from creating our own melee-heavy raid groups, to participating only in "3D zerg" runs hoping that participants would be too over-geared to want it, to participating in Less Is More achievement runs just so there would be less competition for it. Towards the end of the Patch 3.2 days, people would run OS25 once a week just to try and get that one trinket. Most weeks, it wouldn't even drop. When it did, you'd have to beat a good twelve or thirteen people in a roll for it. The Illustration was so valuable (1) because it was a darn good trinket with gobs of spell power, and (2) it seemed impossible get it -- or any good trinket, for that matter. You can still head to Dalaran and buy trinkets with emblems, like the Talisman of Resurgence, but their use is painfully specialized and their value is often less than trinkets you can find in lower level heroics. It turns out that good trinkets are hard to find for a reason: Blizzard like it that way. Bornakk at the official World of Warcraft forums wrote today: "Trinkets are really the one item (weapons are to a lesser extent) that we use to try and capture that old slot machine feel from the classic Molten Core days. Yes, completely random loot with huge loot tables can be frustrating but we are pretty far from being completely random these days. Trinkets however are still somewhat random, they can be hard to acquire, and there is often a lot of competition for them."
Raid Rx: Maximizing the proc
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the idea of using spells based around procs or on-use trinkets. Now I don't know about you, but I sometimes tend to forget that I have these on-use abilities. Other times I never notice procs going off. But first, what is a proc anyway? A proc is short for procedure. They are events that happen when conditions are triggered. For example, Val'anyr will trigger a buff for the user when they heal players. This buff then grants the player to place shields on anyone they heal.
Raid Rx: 14 patch 3.2 trinkets to check out
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. It's been a while since I looked at trinkets. What options are there available since then? Yes, the linked article goes to the Priest column on trinkets. Not every healer's going to use them. But truth be told, there aren't that many new options for healers in the current game since Ulduar and Trial of the Crusader opened up. Let's look at everything available since Malygos. So what do we have to work with?
The Queue: Trinket-Palooza 2009
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert is your hostess today again (our condolences).I'm in an autumnal sort of mood, hence today's picture. Yes, I know that Barrens trees always look like that. We got a really interesting question about trinkets the last time around that really caught my attention, so a lot of today's Queue is going to be comprised of an Enjoyable Stroll Down Memory Lane and Into Holy ^$*# Look At That Trinket From AQ40 How Has That Not Been Nerfed Yet.Starlin asks...So, what's up with Brewfest this year? Anything new or updated?Fortunately or us, Kisirani posted on this same question yesterday. To summarize, there are no major changes to the holiday, but Coren Direbrew has been updated to level 80, the mount drop rates haven't changed (nor are they now required for the Brewfest meta-achievement), and no new pets or mounts have been added. You can reasonably expect a beefed-up holiday boss with a new loot table (most likely of ilevel 200 items, possibly 219 if they want to match the gear from heroic Trial of the Champion), but otherwise the same experience as last year. I'll have an OverAchiever for the good folks seeking Brewfest achievements up on the site soon.
Raid Rx: Really cool Coliseum healing loot
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. It's time to gear us up some healers! Let's take a look at all the phat loot the coliseum has to offer. The Crusader's Coliseum offers a wide variety of gear and equipment for both new and veteran healers. It's time for us to start equipping ourselves in order to be prepared when Icecrown Citadel hits. While we're not exactly going to be healing Arthas to death, it's a good idea to start working on our stuff now. We'll start with Trial of the Champion for the fresher 80s before we move to Trial of the Crusader where all the good stuff is.
Dual specs and loot priority
Like lots of other players, I found myself running the regular version of Trial of the Champion endlessly in pursuit of trinket drops when patch 3.2 hit, and it wasn't uncommon for groups to spend some time beforehand figuring out who was going to roll on what. With so many players now dual-specced into different roles and volunteering to come to 5-mans on an offspec just to get things moving, determining who had more priority on an item drop usable by multiple classes got a bit tetchy at times. I saw some ugly fights break out, and never more so than when a DPS player who respecced to heal for the sake of the group was told not to bid on the Abyssal Rune or Banner of Victory. Losing a roll on something you need to an off- or secondary-spec sucks, but being unable to roll on gear that benefits your main spec just because you respecced to get the group going is equally agonizing.
Breakfast Topic: Most frustrating non-drop
Unless you are a Ridiculously Lucky Bastard, odds are good that you've gone the length of your time in the game without managing to get a particular drop you really wanted. It's been a running joke in my guild that, try as I might, I can never get Pillar of Ferocity to drop from Anetheron. It didn't once drop in the near-year I ran Hyjal during Burning Crusade, and it sure isn't dropping during our occasional fun runs now. I don't even know why I want it as badly as I do. It wasn't a giant upgrade back in the day given how oddly it was itemized for Druid tanks in comparison to the Wildfury Greatstaff, and it's sure as heck not an upgrade now. But every so often I find myself staring at Atlasloot in celebrated Captain Ahabesque fashion, being driven to the brink of madness over an elusive white whale weapon that is among the last of that now-vanishing breed, the feral tanking staff. A Restoration Shaman pal spent each Hyjal alongside me waiting for a pair of Howling Wind Bracers that never came (let's face it, Hyjal hated us), and our Holy Paladin colleague went more than a year in Karazhan without ever seeing a Shard of the VIrtuous. With gear consolidation in Wrath and generally smaller loot lists all-around, you get the slightly more exciting problem of being more likely to see a drop but losing it to someone else, possibly multiple times (see: Illustration of the Dragon Soul, enormous popularity thereof). Spill, folks; what are your horror stories?
Wrath 101: Darkmoon Cards
Now that that Silas Darkmoon and his merry bunch are in town -- well, if you'd like to call outside of desolate Shattrath your town -- it's a good time to take a look at the four new Darkmoon Cards that have come out in Wrath of the Lich King. The method of acquiring the cards, unlike in the past, is no longer as random as it used to be. The new darkmoon cards can be created through the Inscription spell Darkmoon Card of the North, which is learned from Grand Master Inscription Trainers at skill level 400. It still isn't easy to get the right cards, of course, as each Darkmoon Card of the North can produce one of eight cards from four different decks. With a little patience and a lot of resources, it's possible to get the right cards or trade for them. Failing that, there's always the Auction House, which is still the most common way to complete a deck. You will also sometimes see entire decks for sale. Realm economies notwithstanding, the most expensive deck will be the infamous Nobles Deck. What is the this deck and what Darkmoon Card does it give? A look at all the new Darkmoon Cards in Wrath after the jump.
Spiritual Guidance: 17 trinkets for healing raiders
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. How do you feel about trinkets? This week Matticus will examine a wide variety of trinkets in the game obtainable in Northrend for healers! Trinkets are interesting items. They have different abilities and uses best suited for the situation at hand. Here is the majority of trinkets that I believe us healers would be interested in the most and my initial thoughts on them. I've even recommended a few of them for us Priests!
Phat Loot Phriday: Oracle Talisman of Ablution
We continue our spotlight on some leveling gear for you to hunt down as you make your way up to 80 with this rep trinket you should start working on right now.Name: Oracle Talisman of Ablution (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)Type: Epic TrinketDamage/Speed: N/AAbilities: Improves crit strike rating by 71. Restores mana, energy, rage, or runic power when you kill a target that grants honor or XP. That proc look familiar? It should -- it was on the Power-infused Mushroom that probably helped you out right around Zangarmarsh the last expansion. Pretty helpful for leveling -- it's helpful in PvP too, obviously, but the XP add makes this helpful for leveling as well. %Gallery-33600%
20 quests you shouldn't miss
Our friend Lassirra over at Hunter's Mark has a good post up featuring 20 quests you shouldn't miss in the game. If you're looking for something to do in-game between now and next week's expansion, it's probably a great time to go back and check out some of the best quest content in the game.Unfortunately, her number one quest has been gutted already, but there are a lot of good quests on the list for sure. And quite a few of them have some great rewards as well -- the Barov Peasant Caller is great, I'm still wearing the cloak from Bring me the Egg, and the Divination quests in SMV will let you pick up some nice consumables and gear as well, not to mention a good bit of cash. And some of them are just plain awesome -- Ivus the Forest Lord, I agree, is something people almost never do any more, but once you've done it, the reward of having a big treant kicking ass for you is just too fun.If you need more quests to do, you can check out our writeups on the top lore-based quests in the game, and don't miss the must-see quests at 70, either. Whether you're looking for a time-filler or want to know which quests to start on when the XP starts flowing again, odds are there are quite a few great quests you missed the first time through.
