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Blood Pact: Affliction 101 at 90 in the end of Mists
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants Drain Life filler back despite knowing it won't happen. So you just boosted your warlock to 90 and... You decided that playing destro at 90 isn't for you, but you still want something easy to pick up. As of patch 5.4's changes to Soul Swap and the boost to DoTs after the KJC change, I'd argue affliction is easier to pull off than destro. Due to Soul Swap, everything is a single target to an "aff'lock." But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Blood Pact: Framing a fighter jet's power
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying. I started part one as an introduction, to set everything up. While "yaw" (keybinds and macros) and "pitch" (procs and cooldowns display) are important parts of a UI, you can't start doing your damage dealing job without a health bar to take down. So this week, we're going to look at all kinds of health bars you can find on a warlock's UI. You can see all my unit frames in action here in the full version of the header image. Remember: I'm using the addons I use as examples, because it's easiest to draw from what I know. You can be an accomplished DPSer with minimal addons on a mostly default interface, if you so wish.
Blood Pact: Warlock stats and set bonuses in patch 5.4
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets cleansed of disease and starts on a new rivalry. *cough* *cough* *haaaaaack* Megan coughs violently into a clutch of raggy, mucused-up robes. It's all good. I'm going to survive. The healers haven't cleansed me since that last time I dropped the Gateway still inside the windstorm, so I'm stuck to my cookie cooldown. I really don't blame them for that. But, I gotta say it was worth a little cough to see all the melee drop dead like that. Don't worry, I'm not cursed or anyth-- What is that. No -- THAT. Who the ... You guys let a mage in here?! Well. *Megan steeples her fingers.* No matter. Warlocks are still better than those muffinmakers in patch 5.4.
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.
Blood Pact: Taking care of your DoTs
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill admits to problems with DoT clipping (*gasp*) and finds a way to fix it. Every warlock has at least one damage over time effect to take care of. Destruction has Immolate. Demonologists flip between Corruption and Doom (Metamorphosis), though I suppose you could count Shadowflame off Hand of Gul'dan as one. Affliction is the "DoT spec," starring Agony, Corruption, Unstable Affliction, with appearances of Haunt.
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: Leveling a warlock, 40 to 60
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "Closer! Come closer... and burn!" ~ Keli'dan the Breaker Once again Blood Pact turns its gaze towards those up-and-coming warlocks; those who are learning the craft, battling foes to hone their skills and sharpen their minds. I've said before that leveling a warlock is great fun and part of this is due to the diverse ways in which you can go about it. By the time you start getting a decent pile of talent points to spend you can shape your lock in many and varied forms. There's the unstoppable train of death that is the affliction lock, cursing and corrupting all around it as it passes smoothly through the world. The demonologist, pouring their power into their minion and pushing them into the fore while sitting back and calmly picking off their foes. And of course, the destruction warlock, blazing a trail of raw power in an explosive display of mental prowess over physical frailty. Let's see how these locks in training are getting on.
Patch 3.1 PTR build 9637 Priest changes
As mentioned earlier today, a new build is being rolled out on the PTR this evening. The class changes contained within aren't as extensive as we first expected, but what Priests do have is pretty incredible... and somewhat expected, since we heard about a few of them before! There are a couple that are total news to us too, though. The PvP Shadow Priest is going to be very pleased with this patch. Let's take a look, shall we?New Ability: Psychic Horror - You terrify the target, causing them to tremble in horror for 3 sec and drop all weapons for 10 sec. (Instant cast, 30 yard range, 1 minute cooldown.)Um, yes please. This is going to be pretty incredible in PvP, especially the arena. Something like Psychic Horror is definitely a defense that the Shadow Priest needs. It's currently a 41 point talent in the Shadow tree, most certainly out of reach of Discipline or Holy. It's only a one point investment for Shadow Priests, so I fully expect this ability to make its way into a lot of PvE builds as well, at least pre-raiding. I could see myself using this quite thoroughly in 5-mans to take some heat off of the tank with the Disarm effect.
Blood Pact: Raiding as Affliction
I'm stubborn. I am. Even though Blizzard have themselves admitted that Affliction's rotation just might be a little too complex, I insist on sticking with it. Partially because it's fun and partially because it really does give the highest returns once our gear gets up to par. My gear is slowly starting to improve, and one Valorous Plagueheart piece away from the 4-piece Life Tap spirit bonus which should help quite a bit. The new Ritual of Summoning -- which some of my guildies have dubbed the TV from Hell -- has impressed everyone and I feel somewhat useful again. Specially if people die during the run to Loatheb's room.Let's for a moment forget that Survival Hunters are in the equation. We do this for our sanity. For now, let's focus on getting our own performance up to par. The spec I use for raids is a 53/ 0/ 18 as opposed to the more popular 56/ 0/ 15, but I've found it gives tremendous returns with just a few talent points allocated in some talents. It's been difficult, but it's slowly becoming rewarding. I say slowly because it must be noted that some classes scale better and faster with gear and the raid. Let's take a quick look at the build right after the jump.
[EDITED] Patch 3.0.2 primer for Warlocks
First things first. Things will be changing this Tuesday for all of us. One sobering fact that we must all face is that from that day forward, we're going to be just a little bit squishier. Demonology, in particular, has taken some hits in survivability with the rework to Demonic Embrace (Stamina increase reduced to 10% from 15%, but Spirit penalty removed) and Soul Link (15% damage transfer, down from 20%). General homogenization of cloth items also means that we will no longer be getting more Stamina than other squishies in gear past Level 70. Stamina stacking from gear is about as good as it gets at Level 70, so enjoy it while it lasts. On a good note, Soul Link has been moved up to an 11-point talent, giving us some very interesting choices to make when considering going deep into Affliction or Destruction. In fact, out of all the 11-point talents, Soul Link is the only one that should give us any pause for thought. Considering that for about a month, we can only allocate up to 10 points in another tree if we choose to get a 51-point talent. Anyway, Patch 3.0.2. What's in store for Warlocks? An overview of the talent trees after the jump.
Skill Mastery: Haunt
When Blizzard started work on the Warlock class for Wrath of the Lich King, I imagine one of their goals was to make the underrated Affliction tree viable for raiding. Unstable Affliction was a great spell for PvP, but anyone specced deep enough for it wouldn't have Soul Link and thus were practically free kills in the Arena format. In raids, it was a wasted spell because most mobs and bosses don't dispel. It also had a cast time that ate into the Warlock's spell cycle. It was a great spell on paper, but lost a lot of luster in practice. Now along comes Haunt, the 51-point talent in the Affliction tree. It's a direct damage spell that applies a 12 second debuff that increases the damage of the Warlock's DoTs on the target by 20%. In addition, at the end of the debuff's duration or if it's dispelled, it heals the Warlock for 20% of the damage it dealt. It's a nice effect but the amount healed is rather negligible so I hope that aspect of the spell gets tweaked some more before it goes live.
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.
Demonology 101: the Felhunter
I thought I'd do a Blood Pact on a Warlock's demons and how they'll be changing somewhat in Wrath of the Lich King, but considering there are two other trees to worry about, I've got the next two weeks loaded. Instead, we'll take a short look at one demon each day and see how the new talents and inherent demon abilities change the way you'll be playing with your pet. For today, we'll take a look at my personal favorite, the Felhunter. I love the Felhunter because its cute, scaly, and eats my opponent's buffs and locks them out of magical schools. Out of all the demons -- with the exception of the Succubus -- Warlocks get the most benefit from micromanaging a Felhunter. This demon changes the most significantly in Wrath owing to a few things. The bad news first: currently in Beta, Felhunters no longer confer Paranoia, so in Wrath you'll actually get stun-locked by surprise instead of seeing it coming and not being able to do anything about it anyway. It also loses Tainted Blood, which won't be missed because a Felhunter with a Rogue or Warrior on it is going to die, -475 attack power notwithstanding.
Blood Pact: Affliction in Wrath Beta
I know, I know, we've been slacking off. Warlocks have been wanting for some love from around these here parts and rightfully so -- there are a lot of amazing things happening for Warlocks in the Wrath Beta. Some of our readers have called us on it, so here I am taking up the demonic slack because as much as I'm devoted to the Light, playing around with the dark side is fun, too. Anyway, so Beta. Warlocks have gotten a fair amount of changes but have yet to see a major second pass which means that a lot of what's already in can still change a lot, or even completely. Michael Gray covered basic changes in the patch notes some time back while Vims giggled over the new Level 80 ability Demonic Circle (I'll giggle about that some other time...). For today we're going to take a look at the new, juicy, and ridiculously bloated Affliction tree.
New Warlock glyphs found in Wrath Beta build 8820
As Inscription is slowly built into a viable trade skill, Blizzard sneaks more and more glyph data onto the Beta server, even if none of it is directly available thus far. This build, MMO Champion discovered a nice selection of Warlock glyphs, and I have to say that most of them look pretty sweet. Of course, it's hard to say for sure on how good some of them are until we know for sure if PvE damage rotations besides Shadow Bolt spam will be viable in Wrath's endgame, but I'll assume they will be, for the most part. Let's check them out after the break.
Lichborne: PvP, grinding, the Unholy tree, and you
Every weekend in Lichborne, Daniel Whitcomb will take you through the ever-changing (Beta) world of World of Warcraft's first hero class, the Death Knight. With a new Beta Build on the test servers, Death Knights have received a massive amount of talent changes. Many of them have been hinted at on the test servers for eons, and I've covered much of them in last week's Lichborne. The new disease changes are in, as is the changing of Chains of Ice's Snare component to an undispellable physical effect. You can check out the full list of changes here. Among the new changes is a very extensive revamp of the Unholy tree, which features quite a bit of talent consolidation and quite a few new and interesting mechanics and abilities. In fact, I'd have to say that the current build may very well mark the rise of the Unholy Tree, with the changes making it an amazing tree for grinding and PvP. As a disclaimer, there's still lot of bugs in this build. Many abilities don't seem to be working quite right, especially Blood Caked Blade (which only hits for 1-4 damage based on the number of diseases instead of 60% weapon damage per disease), Raise Dead, and Night of the Dead. Because of that, it's often hard to say how or if an ability would be better or worse if it actually worked. Therefore, I'll be discussing the abilities based on if they actually did work, backed with some feel for them from Death Knight play on the Beta Servers.
Arena Tournament: Tales from day one
Last night, the WoW Insider arena team stepped into battle for the first time on the arena tournament realms, and it was immediately apparent that things were going to be quite different from our experiences on the tournament test realms. For starters, there were way fewer people. I also noticed that, contrary to my expectations that everyone shelling out an extra $20 to play here would be a hardcore arena-goer, there were many people on just to have fun. General chat was full of people who didn't know where to go, how to allocate their talent points, and even people who hadn't formed teams yet!Still, despite the fact the vendor areas had a drastically reduced population, the queues were amazingly short, as Adam points out. Often, I was reading that my team had joined the queue at the same time I was clicking to enter the battle.
Build Shop: Warlock 43/0/18
Welcome back to another edition of Build Shop, talent fans! I've gotten a couple of emails about Warlock builds, so this week I'm going to take a look at one of the most infamous builds around -- Affliction. When people complain about Warlock DoTs, they've often just had a run in with an Affliction spec Warlock. Boasting up to 5 DoTs (Corruption / Seed of Corruption, Immolate, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction) and a bevy of channeled drain spells, one of these warlocks can make quick work of your health bar. In addition, Affliction warlocks also sport talents that make their DoTs harder to dispel or make you think twice about trying to dispel them.Amongst warlocks, it's a popular grinding build, able to handle multiple mobs at a time with very little downtime. Though it lacks the higher health pool and greater survivability associated with Demonology warlocks, or the pure nuking power of a Destruction warlock, Affliction is a build which performs well in many areas of the game. Let's take a look at an Affliction / Destruction build that incorporates threat reduction, DoT protection, and maximizes the damage done by DoTs.
