dark-apotheosis
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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: Dark Soul, glyphs, and more PTR fun
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. Last week, I had this whole thing planned to talk about the Thunderstruck scenario of damage with the olde Glyphe of Lyfe Tapp style Archimonde's Vengeance. But literally before the deadline, the PTR builds finally caught up with the PTR patch notes and Archimonde's Vengeance was completely replaced by the new Archimonde's Darkness. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I could spend at least 1000 words on a double cooldown; today, I can't even break 150. But before we get seriously into settled number-tweaking things like the datamined loot, let's talk about some other changes on the PTR.
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: Speccing for old world raids
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill harvests all the songbells ever in the search for more Imperial Silk, but slaughtering masses of Horde NPCs for reputation also works. Patch 5.1 introduced pets to the vanilla-era raids. Patch 4.3 introduced transmogrification, which brought old raids back. Before that, some players would solo or duo old raids just for the challenge giggles. Every new expansion has raised the level cap and opened another expansion to soloing. Whether you're soloing for a look, for improved familiarity with your spell toolbox, or for bragging rights, warlock is definitely a great class to jump into soloing old raids. At level 90, even before you're decked out in tier 14, most of the Wrath of the Lich King raids are fairly easy. But let's start with the basics -- speccing and playstyle.
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: Look Dreadful with PvP gear for warlocks
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill personally loves this tier of PvP gear since the horns look like her favorite Disney villain, who was also purple and had a tinge of green in her fire. Even the name -- Malevolent -- is so close! I have only 7268 Honorable Kills on my warlock. I scored a few during a cross-realm Sha of Anger raid hosted by a PvP realm, but I've only played casually in random battlegrounds in past tiers. My experience includes memories of an SL/SL demonoloy lock in Isle of Conquest during Wrath of the Lich King and dealing with the, shall we say, "vicious" turnover of the Season 9/10 gear transition. Everything's a bit fuzzy for PvP in between those memories. Recently, I'm sure my DoT dominance of battlegrounds was due more to my company of guildmates, my Dragonwrath, and my heroic Cunning of the Cruel than any skill I had, but I'm not entirely new to flinging my enemies around in fear. But this is the warlock column, not the Warlocks-Who-Only-Raid column. While I reach out to warlocks around the world for warlock-centric PvP advice, how about we peruse the gearing options for dipping our toes into level 90 PvP?
Blood Pact: Zone into Pandaria with 85-90 leveling tips
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill delights in getting off her night-shift work at 3am Eastern -- just in time for Pandaria leveling! There are things I'll do and things I won't do when it comes to playstyle and gear advice. I'm not going to tell you that there's a best spec for leveling. There are many ways to level and Mists of Pandaria is all about doing what you want to do, so following what I do may not be best for you. I'll have you know that I think leveling is far too easy still, so I tend to pick the inefficient or harder ways of doing things on purpose just to keep it interesting. I'm also not going to debate which faction first with people. The gear choices are as varied as the leveling choices, and are meant to be mixed and matched as your drop luck will do for you. I will, however, point out the reputations you'll want to at least reach for reasonable raiding preparations.
Blood Pact: Warlock tanks are void where prohibited
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill was a little disappointed by her warlock tanking experiment. So she promptly installed Diablo III on her new computer and rolled a witch doctor for all the fun zombie times. When we all first heard of the demonology attributes like Glyph of Demon Hunting and Metamorphosis: Nether Plating, we all thought the same evil thought: Warlock tanks are finally happening. We got all excited -- and then the CMs broke our cold, black hearts with news that demonology warlocks aren't meant to really tank. Those attributes, like Demonic Leap, were just for fun. The warlock tank isn't supposed to be an option, but I still wanted to try it out. When stars aligned for beta bugs, computer problems, and healer availability, I stepped into Stormstout Brewery with only Matt Low to help me test things out.
Blood Pact: "En Doomguarde!" shouts the warlock tank
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is really just looking for an excuse to take the big hits as a warlock tank. We have the Glyph of Demon Hunting, whichever side of the warlock tanking fence you're on. Maybe it's just for soloing old content. Maybe it's for tanking in a pinch while the real tank gets battle ressed. Maybe it'll just be the chunky flag-carrier glyph for PvP. Any way you slice it, there's going to be a beefier stance than Metamorphosis. Someone in your future pickup group will try to tank with it, guaranteed. Let's explore the possibilities of warlock tanking before we tell that pugger how silly they are.
