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.

I returned to a good warlocky place -- Black Temple -- for a background to show my auras against. It's prettier for me to show the auras and describe animations rather than litter the page with epicly long strings.

So I've split the strings into two pages: general and spec-specific.

General warlock spells

All three curse options have a bracketed version and they sit together in an aura group. I see a draining bracket bar as per the duration of the debuff if I have applied my particular Curse of Exhaustion (grey) or Curse of Enfeeblement (green) to the target. If Curse of the Elements or a similar magic taken debuff is not applied to the target by anyone at all, a pulsing red bracket appears. (The brackets typically enclose my DoT debuffs as shown by the addon Raven.)

Dark Soul -- Misery, Knowledge, or Instability -- is the purple U-like runic curve, that drains from left to right as the buff fades. Unending Resolve is the reddish runic band on either side of the bracket auras, and as of Thok and select PvP situations, I've included Devotion Aura as a condition so I know it's safe to cast without interruption.

The purple swirly in the middle shows me when I've hit the execution phase (20%) for a target's health. It was originally modeled after Drain Soul's purple swirling animation, but if you want to change it to a Soul Fire or Shadowburn-y likeness, go ahead. I like to know how long I'll have increased health, so the big purple shield drains as the buff for Shadow Bulwark fades.

Finally, I have a bouncing white aura that shows me when I have a holiday-related costume on that prevents me from spellcasting. You can use this macro to clear all the buffs I'm aware of that prevent spellcasting.

Gear and proc auras

I can't really bear to change my original Heroism aura (gold wavy parentheses) or intellect potion aura (orange parentheses) into poofier, non-central auras. The Heroism aura contains every possible way of popping the popular 30% haste raid cooldown, but I just change the pot aura to include the most recent expansion's intellect potion.

Windsong is a three-part enchant, so I grouped it together with similar aura shapes but different colors. Haste is green, mastery is purple, and critical strike is orange. (Yes, it goes in order of the warlock specs. Imagine that.) Windsong appears bright at first and fades over time to nothing.

Everything else is in one group for me, though many auras compose it. The arcs drain from left to right and the poofs fade over time.

I have my tailoring back enchant proc as a pale yellow arc, though engineers are welcome to input their glove tinkers. Opposite that is a white arc representing my weapon enchant, Jade Spirit. The green runic arc is the legendary meta gem.

For trinkets, I have a few auras. Wushoolay's (and later, Black Blood of Y'Shaarj) has a blue poof to mark the duration of the trinket proc while a white text aura sitting on top marks what stack the proc is at.

The green poof is what I call "T2 - Haste" -- really, it's usually whatever is in the second trinket slot, and as affliction, I've tended to prefer hasty trinkets in the past (there aren't any mastery trinkets in the current tier, so don't nip at me about it). In the same spot as the green poof is a white poof to indicate a lesser intellect proc trinket in my second trinket slot ("T2 - Intellect"). The yellow poof ("T1 - Intellect") is typically reserved for the better or only intellect proc trinket I have, which I equip in my first trinket slot usually.

The poof trinket auras work regardless of which slot you equip a trinket in. For example, when I run with PBI and KTT, I will see yellow and white poofs, even if I flip the order.

Affliction

Haunt looks like Dark Soul except it's green (and it sits just above or inside Dark Soul). I altered the background alpha for one of the standard auras so it's transparent for my soul shards. Soul Swap is that big draining purple asterisk around my character, and it's there just so I can get used to the much shorter regular Swap duration.

Demonology

I don't track my demonic fury with a bar; I still to plain (purple) text. The purple-pink raindrop arcs mean that Hand of Gul'dan has a charge ready and available to cast. Molten Core is a two-part aura where the orange runic arc tracks the duration, and the orange text indicates how many stacks I have.

Destruction

The big green arcs up near the center mean Fire and Brimstone is active. It's big and bright enough to alert me before I spend needless embers. Havoc's 3 charges are represented by 3 red arcs while Backdraft's charges are three green arcs on the bottom. The four big embers are exactly what you might think they are; the white text tracks the exact emberbits, so I know when I hit 3.5 embers. The little green ring around the text is my indicator that I don't have a Rain of Fire active.

Share time!

If you want to share some strings, perhaps in pastebin form, that's perfectly fine. If you want to make your own, Olivia Grace already has an intro on Weak Auras.

Blood Pact is a weekly column detailing DOTs, demons and all the dastardly deeds done by warlocks. We'll coach you in the fine art of staying alive, help pick the best target for Dark Intent, and steer you through tier 13 set bonuses.