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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: 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 5.2 spell changes and tier 15 for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thought the druid T15 was the warlock tier originally, and she thinks that the Season 13 warlock gear looks like a cross between Shannox and a Faceless mob. My apologies, fel-slingers and fiendish friends. I stepped through the Dark Portal to visit family and when I returned, my hard drive had dead clusters, almost as if someone came by and Frost Nova'd the lot of it. Maybe dropped a few Nether Tempests while he was at it. I blame the mages. I've already had my flu shot, so they must've realized they had to get at the latest Defender of the Dark Arts electronically. Silly mages -- I'm a warlock, so of course I backed up my stuff. But Patch 5.2 wasn't going to wait for my new hard drive, so let's look at the changes so far.
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: Stones, armor and artistry
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest, brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "You have come a long way to speak with me. But fear not, I know why Gakin has sent you, and he was wise to, for I can help you in your search." -- Takar the Seer Each week, the voidwalker hauls in the Blood Pact fan mail and dumps it at my desk. Those that don't end up lining the felhound's cage typically get used to fuel the furnaces in the succubus' torture den. Every so often, the imp picks one out and dances round the room reading it aloud, while dodging any spells and other projectiles I hurl in his direction. This week, he snatched up this one from Vincent Quillen. Hi Mr. Hobbs, I'm playing my first warlock currently, and it's my first character to make it past lvl 20 after trying six other classes. I'm currently at lvl 65, demonology. I've read all of your articles and they played a big part in feeding my love of the mighty lock. The reason I write is with an idea for an article. After unlocking fel armor, i began to wonder about the various uses of the two armors and if there were any finer points that I'm missing. Also, the spellstone and firestone. As a demo lock, I expect the 1% perk to be indifferent, and my pet feeds on both stats. Is one beter hands down or are there different times for each? Also, I've been scouring the internet for how to tell when it's a good time to pop Meta in a raid, but all i can find is people saying that it's "an artform." Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you in advance if you decide to write about these questions. Fan and loyal reader, Vincent Quillen After suitably punishing the little snot-ball (he's currently cleaning out Matt Rossi's jock-strap drawer), I decided to indulge the little guy for once. Hell, it saved me coming up with anything else to talk about.
Warlock changes in Beta build 8926
The nerf bat swung low and hard. Did it hit Warlocks? Well... yes and no. This is the stage in Beta where things are tuned downwards -- notoriously labeled the nerf patch -- and Warlocks are big, fat nerf targets. On the other hand, some spells got buffs and others were reworked. This is just Beta, so don't panic. Classes are buffed and nerfed throughout the testing process until everything is finely tuned.Without further ado: they nerfed Death's Embrace to grant 9% crit to all Shadow Spells when an opponent is at 20% or below health, down from 15% crit. Eradication can no longer be a permanent buff now as it now notes that, "This effect cannot occur more often than once every 30 sec". On the other hand, Death's Embrace and Eradication got cool new icons. Dark Pact, which I raved about when I talked about the Felhunter, has been nerfed back to its current form of granting 100% of the mana drained from pet (down from 200% in previous builds). Curse of Exhaustion was nerfed to a 30% movement speed reduction, down from 50%. It's now back to the live realm's value but without the benefit of Amplify Curse, which was reworked in Beta. Fel Armor's mana regeneration was removed and replaced with a health regeneration rate of 2% per 5 seconds. I'm not too sure how to feel about that, but since Warlocks treat health as mana, anyway, it's not such a substantial nerf but merely a mechanical change. More nerfs and a few pleasant surprises after the jump.
Warlock glyphs in Beta build 8905
I'm having a lot of fun with the new Inscription profession. Not necessarily as an Inscriber, but as the recipient of these cool new customization features. As Daniel noted the last time, the Warlock glyphs look pretty sweet, and more glyphs for Warlocks appeared recently in the Wrath Beta. And just like the last time, a few of them really do look pretty spiffy, like this one for example...Glyph of Drain SoulYour Drain Soul ability occasionally creates an additional soul shard.We might as well call this the Soul Shard specialization glyph -- an extra shard for Drain Soul? Yes please! Even if you pack your bag full with 28 Soul Shards before heading into an instance or raid, Warlocks still find themselves in situations where they run out of it, specially for those who have Shadowburn thrown in. Timing Drain Soul just right so it doesn't gimp your DPS is a pain in itself, so an extra shard for the effort is pure win. Besides, procs like these are like an Azerothian mini-lottery. This is also perfect for those lazy Warlocks -- and there are a ton of those -- who only bring a handful of shards to an instance.
Yes, Virginia, there will be premade characters, and other PTR Tidbits
In case you were wondering, there will be premade characters for the 2.4.3 PTR before all is said and done, according to Hortus. There's no word for sure on why they're needed, what gear they'll have, or when they'll come along, but they'll be here. You'll need an account that had Burning Crusade activated before these PTRs went live, and when the time comes, you'll be able to sandbox it up with a fresh new premade while you help test the patch. This phase, says Hortus, is also not intended for testing Season 4 gear, since it was already tested on a previous PTR. Besides, with 4 days left until Season 4 goes live, the 2.4.3 patch won't be on live servers until Season 4 is well underway. That said, it looks like most (but not all) of the Season 4 gear is still on the PTR right now, so if you want to go check it out, you can fly up to Area 52 on the PTR and check out Big Zokk Torquewrench's wares. Of course, you can also expect us to give you all the Season 4 news you need in the next few days here at WoW Insider as well, including gear guides. Also, Mages and Warlocks are reporting that their self-buff armor spells are now no longer dispellable on the PTR servers. That's a nice chunk of mana you won't have to waste recasting after a stray Purge in PvP. We'll be watching the PTRs for more undocumented changes, oddities, and happenings, so be sure to keep it here for the rest of the testing cycle for all the news and analysis you'll need when the patch goes live.
Hybrid Theory: Death Knight distress
Hybrid Theory returns after a month long hiatus. We could tell you a long and boring story about how Alex's computer suffered a horrible death during his relocation from Wisconsin to Michigan, but we won't. Just picture the battle scene from Braveheart, except replace the English with a PC. It was basically the same thing.Last week, we were graced with a boatload of Wrath news. With the Wrath news came Death Knight news. With the Death Knight news came laments of, "my class is dead, noo!" from the WoW community. Yes, it is probably quite intimidating to add another class to the tanking niche for the tank classes, especially considering we've seen the incredible Death Knight abilities and not those of anybody else, but I think all of our classes will be quite safe come Wrath.There are a few things that should be taken into consideration before we run in circles screaming of the apocalypse and mourn our forgotten not-Death-Knight-tanks. Head on past the jump to find out just what the heck I mean!
