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Blood Pact: What's going on with 'locks in patch 5.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks Rygarius rocks at patch-note writing, but we'd still like to summarize it further. There's a lot of changes besides the usual number tweaking to warlocks in patch 5.4. We'll wrap up the say before patch with a loot list, but here's a prose version of what the patch notes mean before we get into the shiny gear drops. Overall, there's probably a small nerf in damage since heavy movement fights will affect us once again. Our damage is shifting to our DoTs primarily with some support either from fillers on the move or a twist on our Dark Soul cooldown, depending on the level 90 talent we choose. Since the RPPM system has been tweaked a little to account for haste affecting not only proc bonus but proc chance, we also may see a shift from haste gearing to more solid mastery gearing, also since mastery for all three warlocks boosts damage done in our top damage spells. But check after the break for more specific changes.
Blood Pact: Fewer drastic changes, loot still developing
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill attempts many experiments both on live and PTR realms. I think I've copied my warlock over to the PTR for most of the copies allowed, but I finally got Unerring Vision of Lei Shen (UVLS) to get into my backpack a weekend ago, so an update to test out playstyles on the PTR is needed. Look at all those imps! I'm seeing more tweak-type changes being datamined than drastic changes like our tier 90 talents, and most gear names were revealed, so we might be getting down to the end of it.
Blood Pact: Find greater knowledge in elites' tricks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill finally landed a heroic-mode soulwell this Ji-Kun kill. Every time we hit Ji-Kun, I try to place a soulwell mid-air. There isn't any performance-breaking reason to do this other than pure amusement as raidmates try to "grab the cookie from my jar, young grasshopper." But it's possibly my favorite use of KJC so far. This isn't an trick that requires super skill. Mostly, it's whether or not you can time your cast, your latency, and the wind that grabs you off Gastropod Boulevard. But what I do like to do sometimes is watch elite players from the top guilds in the world do fights in a crazy or simply slightly different way. Usually this involves watching a lot of soloing videos: e.g, Spygnesy, who just uploaded a warlock solo of Ragnaros in Firelands. But when it comes to minor tips for huge meter wrecking, I love watching Sparkuggz of play.
Blood Pact: Kanrethad's defeat at mortal hands
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill celebrates one year at WoW Insider with a fel fire victory. I promise, I won't put unfortunate spoilers in the header this time. One of my favorite Blood Pacts to write was a narrative based around our spells and the hints of a fascinating possible subplot just for warlocks. Instead of writing a traditional, straightforward guide for the final boss in the quest for green fire -- Ackthal's already written a great one -- I want to celebrate my personal victory with the quest and another special occasion with this story post. See, this is my 53rd Blood Pact. I believe a certain moonkin now owes me a crown for the longest reign as WoW Insider's Defense Against With the Dark Arts professor. For the sake of space, I've obviously shortened the story down from my actual experience with the final fight. But many of the elements are there, from spell details to actual NPC roleplay (none of the NPCs' dialogue is mine). Jump behind the cut to catch the story.
Lichborne: Tier 15 set bonuses and other death knight changes for patch 5.2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights. In the post-Cataclysm era, death knights are no longer the new kids on the block. Let's show the other classes how a hero class gets things done. In the weeks since the patch 5.2 PTR has been up, death knight changes have held pretty steady. The announced unholy changes have stayed in place, and so far seem to be working out much as expected, making the spec a little easier to handle and overall promising to put unholy in a better place once patch 5.2 comes out. That said, there have been a few other tweaks added, as well as the revealing of the tier 15 raid gear set bonuses. Today, we'll dig into these changes and see how they're stacking up. Tier 15 death knight DPS bonuses Death Knight T15 DPS 2P Bonus Your attacks have a chance to raise the spirit of a fallen Zandalari as your Death Knight minion for 15 sec. Death Knight T15 DPS 4P Bonus Your Soul Reaper ability now deals additional Shadow Damage to targets below 45% instead of below 35%. Additionally, Killing Machine now also increases the critical strike chance of Soul Reaper. I'm going to be honest, I'm a little bit in love with the current 2 piece DPS bonus, if only for the flavor. A few columns back, I mentioned that one of my wildest dream updates for death knights would be a Wild Imps style ghoul summoning, and the 2 piece tier 15 bonus is sort of probably the closest we'll come to that. We'll need more solid parses to see if stacks up damage bonus wise, but in flavor, I'm pretty excited for it. The biggest issue here may be if the summoned pets end up dying prematurely to mobs before they can do their damage.
Blood Pact: When datamining is not what it seems
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill admires the new season 12 PvP gear for Mists and hopes she can save enough to get that purple set. I admit it: I looked at the latest MMO-Champion datamining and rolled my eyes at all the lower numbers on affliction spells. A sigh later and some words about why fix destruction when you can just nerf the other specs. That seems to be standard warlock balance operating procedure half the time, right? Wrong. Affliction mechanics actually changed a little bit, which required some number shuffling. I don't know if you saw that blue post about destruction embers, so we'll go over that and other small changes, too.
Blood Pact: Demonic Leaping to new heights of awesomeness
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is disappointed that moonkin are allowed to ride mounts, but not metamorphs. That's just not fair. I admit: I don't play demonology. As much as I'm a maestro at affliction, corruption gliding from my fingertips, I just fall apart when it comes to mastering the demonic arts like Illidan. So on the one hand, I don't really know where demonology is supposed to be heading in Mists of Pandaria, apart from Metamorphosis being just more awesome now. On the other hand, I don't have the old habits to rewrite over. I'm new blood, much like the revamp of warlocks in Mists will certainly attract people who don't play the class now. I'm perfect for testing how easy the spec is to pick up for newbies. I can tell you this: I was having fun on beta demonology. All you have to do is Demonic Leap with me beyond the break.
