The Crittacular Agrognome

Pets, Tooltips,

2010-07-12T15:19:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Tya on the MMO-Champion forums I was finally able to post a shot of Command Pet in action. This is basically what players have suggested since approximately vanilla beta: The stay command is replaced with a small targeting circle that gives go-to capability to pet commands. Pet's are still leashed, so send them too far or walk away and they still despawn.

A few other random points of note:

The core UI is finally beginning to show scaling for spells, updating your spells' damage and healing figures for your current gear and talents. This is a feature many people have used addons for since way back in vanilla, and is a positive addition to Blizzard's mostly positive program of rolling highly common addons into the core UI.
Soulburn fear that was mentioned in previews is gone.
The felhunter's buff is now maximum mana and mp5. This may sound odd initially, but it's really no change from live - it prevents the intellect boost from becoming spellpower and spirit is just MP5 now...
Channeled DOTs crit for 150% damage. So drain soul crits are crazy, but not as crazy as they could be. Non-channeled DOTs crit for 200% damage.
It seems that mana regen isn't balanced yet with the removal of the 5 second rule. Not only is the cost of a life tap trivial now (the cost still doesn't scale and with much higher health it vanishes into a fel armor tick) but you may not even need it while grinding. Some spells are costing significantly less mana than on live (corruption is barely a third of it's live cost), which is probably also a bug with the level rank scaling, so I doubt it'll be quite so crazy when things go live, but still, warlocks have never had regen while casting before, it's interesting to see what will happen to our mana flow.
Health stones restore 60% of the creator's base HP. For a gnome warlock, this is 4427 untalented at level 80, a slight buff.
CoW is now a physical vulnerability effect, like Savage Combat and Blood Frenzy instead of a minor armor debuff.

Lore Series 3: Notable Warlocks - Richard

2010-07-10T04:31:00.000-07:00

So you're a warlock. You know the spells, you know the talents, the rotations, the stats. But how much do you really know? How much do you really want to know? The World of Warcraft has a body of lore worthy of most major works of fantasy, potentially more than you'll ever want to know.

This week we're looking at a famous and popular warlock who is, strictly speaking, not a Warcraft character. He is a fan made creation in an Azeroth varyingly divergent from the Warcraft world we're more familiar with, but still based in the fundamental rules of the world. He's wildly popular, moreso than any of the canon warlock characters, but there's a dark, dark secret about Richard.

He's not actually a warlock. Read on, if you dare, for the startling, innocence ending truth.

Richard is a powerful magic user, there's simply no doubt. He's slain adult dragons with only a couple spells, and emerged unscathed from a solo battle against dozens of demons. He apparently has an imp, though the claim is in severe doubt. However, no evidence yet seen actually demonstrates him to be a warlock, or to have even dabbled in the demonic arts. Some striking evidence would strongly preclude the possibility, at least in recent history.

First off, let's look at his core powers. He makes extensive use of fire and frost magic, a key hallmark of a mage, not a warlock. Even in his theme song he sings of, "fire and cold," not "shadow and flame." He can animate and command the undead, which we will discuss in detail later. He can perform numerous magical parlor tricks of the likes mages revel in but warlocks disdain. He even makes significant use of nature magic, and has been seen communing with animals and nature, which we will also discuss later.

His very limited use of shadow magic is entirely associated with the undead. He has a small army of undead at his call, which are the subject of some interest to us. Threats against that force are threats against him, even if he is distant at the time. This would suggest that his soul is somehow invested in the undead - perhaps they guard a phylactery or in some way act as a phylactery. This could suggest Richard is a nascent lich, still tied to his original form but able to survive the destruction of that form. He has certainly survived dismemberment and decapitation, and even having his soul separated from his body for a time.

Richard is unusual among the undead. He is quite old, predating the Scourge considerably, let alone the Forsaken, and appears to originate in northern Kalimdor, farther separating him from the undead we're most familiar with. This make shim a likely Night Elf, not human or high elf as the Forsaken are. Possibly a Highborn, which does open the possibility that once, very long ago, he was associated with demonic magic in the opening of the portal through the Well of Eternity. It's also not known if he created his undead legion or if he and they were created together by some other party.

His necromantic practices don't particularly reinforce his claim as a warlock. There is some overlap, but not extensively much. In terms of magical mechanics, necromancer is to priest as warlock is to mage. The ability to reanimate and command flesh is not significantly different than the ability to heal it. One of the more notable examples is the Forsaken religious group, the Priests of the Forgotten Shadow, a twisted and necromantic reinterpretation of the Priests of the Holy Light.

Richard's powers being what they are, his warlock powers are lacking, if at all present. When faced with a large force of demons, he fought them with frost and fire magic. He made no use of the anti-demonic magics warlocks learn for self defense, indeed he seemed to specifically slip into his tendency for shaman-like magic. Most notable is that "his" imp, Chtib Elttil, was present in that room, among his assailants.

Let us be clear: Richard has no hold over this imp. It can actively disobey and even openly attack him, and disappeared for an extensive time during which Richard could neither detect it's location or summon it back to his side. Even the least skilled warlocks rarely have trouble with this. Even the fantastically incompetent Gnomish "masters" like Niby the Almighty and Wilfred Fizzlebang have successfully controlled their imps. Indeed many warlocks who performed the complicated ritual formerly used to summon Dreadsteeds before captive breeding was established keep a second imp locked in a jar just because they can. On the other hand, many very powerful mages have captured imps for study and failed to control them by force of magical will. While it requires demonic magic and cannot be managed simply by arcane force, it requires exceptionally little demonic magic. Yet even this is beyond Richard's demonic ability.

Lastly, and most damning of all, is Richard's extensive mastery of nature magic. He commands it offensively as readily as he does fire and frost. He also has a strong bond with nature, able to commune with spirits and animals at will. He has a fantastic bond with a fluffy bunny and even appears to have greater command over Cael'Anon's companion beast than the hunter himself.

While it's common for notable warlocks to also practice arcane and in some cases necromantic magic, there's one boundary which cannot be crossed. While even holy magic can be forcefully bent to one's will, as was done with the captive Naaru M'uru by the Blood Knights, nature magic has not been subject to such force in known history. All of the orc shamans who touched demonic magic found their contact with nature cut off. Their powers would not answer them and the spirits ignored their calls. It took many years for a glimmer of the spirit's voices to return after they abandoned the demonic arts. Yet Richard freely commands the elements, communes with animals and spirits, and does everything expected of a shaman except throw totems around.

His obvious evil means little. A common meatshield warrior is capable of great evil, evil mages are just as common as warlocks, and while nature will not answer the call of one who has touched demonic magic, it does not do so for moral reasons. Nature is without morals, and shamans can be every bit as evil as the worst warlock.

So what are we to conclude by the display of magical power Richard has shown us? He's a definite mage. He's a probable necromancer. He's a likely shaman, though his nature magic could mark him as a druid instead (more in keeping with his likely Night Elf past life), he has never demonstrated the ability to change his physical form as druids do. He is not, however, a warlock. His known origin suggest he may have been one of the Highborn millenia ago, who were primarily mages but dabbled in demonic magic, however his command over nature magic proves he abandoned that magic long ago, possibly he hasn't touched it since the Sundering, if at all.

Richard is a popular figure in the warlock community, and while we as a class certainly can't complain if our popular figures are dishonest to the world, do we truly deserve one who is dishonest about actually being a warlock? Though this does raise an interesting question... Warlocks and necromancers are the most socially unacceptable schools of magical training one can pursue. What is the truth if this is the lie used to cover it?

More Assorted Miscelleny

2010-07-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

The Real ID fiasco is over, the sharks (From the EFF to the California Attorney General to the lawyers already gathering plaintiffs for a class action) are dispersing after Mike Morhaime himself made a rare emergence from community obscurity. Just like Facebook did after experimenting with universal name access, Blizzard backpedaled so hard they robbed the earth of rotational momentum and days will now forever be 0.005 seconds longer, requiring a 1.825 second lapse every year to correct the clock. This lapse shall be known as the Leap Blizzard. The average American will ask, "Why is it a blizzard if it's now snowing?"

With that behind us, we can look on to better things. Like Cataclysm blue posts. Not much in general, but more pieces for the puzzle we're all trying to put together. The only thing we can say clearly is that all classes, as they exist in beta, bear very little resemblance to what they'll look like by the time Cataclysm goes live.

Soul Link is dead, long live Soul Link

Our thought at the moment is to put Soul Link in the second tier of talents where it is accessible to any PvP-focused warlock.

Previous statements saying that the current way warlocks were dependent on soul link in PVP was seen as a flaw were interpreted to mean soul link was going away entirely. I didn't report that bit because it was a stretch to interpret it that way, and I was right.

Shard Recovery

If we find that it's super frustrating as a lock in a long encounter (including a long Arena match), then we'll look at ways to get shards back in combat. However our prediction is as soon as we do that, locks will start blowing their shards on cooldown and then getting frustrated at a slow Aspect of the Viper-like mechanic to get them back.

I'm going to edit that a bit and say, "(primarily a long Arena match)." The PVE side of shards right now is in a decent place, except for the fact that destruction has a terrible demon soul effect. Being limited to three is a moderate inconvenience, in current content only one encounter strongly supports more than three rounds of two minute cooldowns.

I also strongly disagree with the characterization of Soul Harvest being Evocation. It's not Evocation, it's Preparation. It's a cooldown reset, not a resource restore. It's hard not to think of soul shards as a resource, but they're more of a unique variable cooldown - you can use them independent 2 minute or 30 second cooldowns, but are also encounter limited.

Pet Scaling

The plan is for your pets to scale 100% with your stats. In fact, group buffs don't even work on pets any longer so that they don't double dip from those buffs.

If you look at the warlock trees, there are tons of talents that buff Corruption and add range and crit damage and whatever. A couple of those per tree are okay but clearly we need to remove a lot of them and that means adding new talents, which unfortunately is slow.

I included both halves of this particular post. The first half is the only one I'll comment on a lot, though. Full pet scaling is compelling. Our pets, as well as hunter pets, would end up quite powerful. No buffs to pets sounds bad initially, but our pets would scale 100% from the buffs we receive, and would be stronger unbuffed than their current fully buffed forms. We double dip a lot of buffs already, especially demonology warlocks, but with this kind of pet scaling it really would get out of control.

As for the second half, it's nothing we didn't already know, really, and it still doesn't shed any light on what talents may or may not get the 4.0 chop.

A smokescreen no doubt, but a potentially awesome one

2010-07-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

I'll let you read it for yourself. This is very light on details, but extracting all the fluff is somewhat promising, but also packs a lot of uncertainty.

A good chunk of each talent tree is now tied up in a single point instead of distributed. You pick that first Destruction point and with it you gain your mastery bonuses, one of your defining talents (My assumptions are conflag, felguard, and either UA or haunt respectively). It also includes %damage boosts (wrapping up talents like Emberstorm and Shadow Mastery directly into the spec choice) and some key passive talents from the tree. The example given is Anger Management being built into that first Arms point. For warlocks, it's hard to say what might be included. Perhaps Fire and Brimstone, Demonic Knowledge, and Everlasting Affliction.
It sounds like that specialization also unlocks tree-defining core spells at level 10 rather than their normally trained level. Main thrust here is probably destruction warlocks getting incinerate instead of being a shadow spec until level 64 and then suddenly being fire.
The third mastery bonus is not part of your spec, but gained at level 75, after which mastery from gear will contribute to it.
There's about a third less talents, 41 instead of 76, but they're budgeted higher. Everything that's there is supposed to still be there somehow. We already knew some of it would be wrapped up in Mastery, and now some more will be piled into your initial specialization pick.
Your secondary trees are only available after spending your 31 point talent. For leveling, this is generally recommended for many (though not all!) classes anyway, and at level 85 it means fairly little, since almost no ideal specs ignore their bottom talent as it is.

Hit the break for my thoughts.

Like I said, there's a LOT of uncertainty built into the system, a lot will depend on actually laying hands on the system. As described, it's almost exclusively a leveling change. If you already have all your talent points, you've got your full spec as it is, it doesn't really make that much difference if you get it in 41 points or 76 if you get it.

On the surface, it does immediately look like a drastic reduction in options... but as anyone who follows serious theorycraft knows there's not many options as it is. Even somebody with no clue throwing together an awful spec will hit a lot of the same talents as the cookie cutter because a lot of those talents are just such obvious picks - 15% boost to everything you're doing for 5 points? Duh. 10% to two of your major spells on top of it? Win. Nobody passes on that stuff. There's less than 41 points worth of talents where you can look at think "Hm... it's not immediately obvious which is better" right now. More like 5-10 in most specs. And a lot of the choice is in the fact that our talent trees are very unfocused as they currently exist. I just have a hard time seeing it as losing options when the options you're losing were bad.

Like I said, this seems a profound change for the leveling warlock Level 10 should represent a substantial jump in player power, and you'll be a fairly functional hero at that level. That sounds pretty damn fun, and definitely means I'm shelving my current sub-60 alts for leveling in Cataclysm. It would be very easy to overdo this so there's too little feeling of progress after that sudden explosion at level 10, but there's still a lot of stuff in our spellbooks that isn't critical to making our specs functional out of the box.

Lastly... this is a smokescreen announcement. I'm sure it escaped nobody's notice that this huge announcement came at the height of the Real ID stuff, while multiple CMs have vanished and one unfortunate sod is probably in court petitioning to have his name legally changed as we speak.

I'm reserved, but I still think this is an awesome smokescreen.

Names are sacred for a reason

2010-07-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

I work in information technology. My official job is to deploy service and maintain networks in homes and businesses throughout the Tri-Cities. However, the bulk of what I do falls into two categories: Security and privacy. Rule number one in both? Names are sacred.

Many industries, most notably the healthcare industry with their highly restrictive HIPAA regulations (which I experienced first hand working electronic data disposal several years ago), have extensive restrictions, some internal and some legal, all with one intent: To prevent people from connecting names to information. Names are powerful, even many people who are already dealing in personal information quail when personal becomes identifiable.

Most people don't have exceptionally common names, despite what you may think - the combination of a first and last name is enough that simply knowing what state a person is in will narrow you down to single digits if not one person. Knowing my name (a common first name in my age group and a last name with over ten thousand individuals in the US), you can narrow it down to seven people in the US, only one of which (not me) has an internet presence that can be connected to his name. If I add that I live in Michigan, you can narrow it to two of those seven. Interestingly, the other one is a professor at the university I graduated from. As was pointed out on the official forums, even if you're filtering the half million John Smiths in North America, just limiting yourself to tech savvy college educated John Smith's brings you down to a manageable number. Knowing a state brings it down to a number that a dedicated person could search through individually in an afternoon. Knowing a city, even though large cities may still have a dozen John Smith's, is enough to get the job done within a day.

It's no secret that right now, Facebook is hemorrhaging users. The bleeding is slowing down thanks to enough backpedal to reverse the local flow of time, but earlier this year they lost millions of users in a matter of days. Why? Because they made information like real names public for all users, and took away the option to hide those names from the public. Those options came back fast, but a lot of damage was done.

Armed with nothing but a picture of a home, internet vigilantes have brought animal abusers to justice. Armed with a partial name and a city, they've caught child predators. Armed with a full name and nothing else, they have ruined lives.

Blizzard got a taste of the last bit for themselves in recent hours. Bashiok is best known as the Diablo III community manager. To prove how safe the Real ID system was, he posted his real name. Now, Todd Davis, the CEO of Life Lock liked to flash around his documents to prove how safe you are from identity theft, and for his efforts (even protected by his own protection plan), he's one of the most defrauded individuals in the US if not the world. A British journalist thought to publish his numbers because the numbers weren't enough to initiate a transaction. While they weren't enough, he still awoke the next day to find the bulk of his money had been donated to cancer research.

With that in mind, perhaps you'd be a bit hesitant about things. Well, Bashiok posted his real name, and the results are sickening, but as much as I hate to say I told you so I FUCKING CALLED IT. Lo and behold when I went back to the thread, somebody else had only taken two minutes to start finding extremely detailed information and the shit had already hit the fan within five.

Within minutes, not only were Bashiok's phone number and address found, but the names of his family, his license plate number. Pictures of his house and car were taken. Phone calls were made, visits paid. Pizzas were ordered, one poster on another forum claimed to have used Dominoes entirely too detailed custom pizza order form to have a 6 inch personal pizza with no toppings, no cheese, and no sauce delivered to his house.

An account of his was found on Facebook, which in turn lead to his relatives and friends, and addresses were obtained for several of them. Pictures of the house he grew up in were found in the afternoon. Within twenty minutes people had found his exact age, race, income, the projected and taxable values of his home, whether or not he owns, rents, or carries a mortgage. They found out he recieves mail at his mother's house but also has an apartment in his name. They found out he's been caught driving without proof of insurance or registration twice since 2004. Some clever social engineering or just generally incompetent DMV workers at this point could get copies of his driver's license, a trick members of Anonymous have pulled off in the past when tracking an online persona back to it's respective person..

It's been less than 24 hours since that post, and already his Facebook account is gone, his phone numbers changed, threads locked and other at the post cap. The main realid thread hit 11k posts when I started the first draft of this post, 18k when I sat down to finish, and 20k when I checked again while typing this sentence. On twitter he claimed the number found wasn't his, but there's enough people doing creepy and sick things to prove that it at least rings in the house where he lives, but even if it wasn't, that really makes matters worse because some other guy named for a cheap countertop laminate is getting harassed to hell and back. It's sick, a lot of it is illegal, and I hate to say it, but I have no sympathy.

It didn't stop at Bashiok, either. The most recent article on the subject over on GameRiot has all the same details of the out of touch marketing robots presumably responsible for this whole mess. I have even less sympathy for them and what will doubtless happen when the bulk of the trolls wake up this morning.

This is a Blizzard Employee acting in an official capacity, a capacity in which it may be reasonably expected to reveal one's real name. However, expecting customers to offer themselves up in the same manner in order to access one of the primary means of guild recruitment, event organization, and inter-guild communication is unconscionable.

And if you're not worried yet, the information found on Bashiok is enough to get a WoW password reset and potentially steal an account without an authenticator. His facebook could have potentially contained answers to his security questions. which is why you should always use bizarre questions and not commonplace things like the name or your cat or your grandmother's maiden name.

The ultimate measure, however, is always money. Well... Stick ATVI up on your tickers today. It went into the negatives yesterday immediately after the announcement, dropping over 40 cents a share before recovering by 10 cents near closing. People are trying to flood the New York Times with the story. That paper has always loved to fan the flames of identity theft paranoia, and with the Bashiok incident in hand they'll find a way to make it even worse than it looks. And it looks pretty bad.

Cataclysm Gemming

2010-07-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

Cataclysm items are flooding the internet. It's impossible for me to post everything, as much as I like to say HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE NUMBERS ON THIS ROBE I'll have to keep such posts to a minimum.

However, some items are notably profound. Comparing a level 79-81 dungeon to level 80 raid content is particularly compelling for the sake of the gear reset, but also compelling are the more mundane items we'll be using all the time. Today, those mundane items are gems. Stats get moved around a lot in Cataclysm, and gemming had to be almost completely redone as a result. Click for details.

So, with stats swiveled all over the place on different gem colors, how did things settle for us? Well, let's look where the stats landed first.
Red Stats: Strength, Intellect, Agility, Parry, Expertise
Yellow Stats: Resilience, Mastery, Haste, Crit, Dodge
Blue Stats: Stamina, Hit, Spirit, Spell Penetration

Rare gems (as with BC and Wrath there won't be any epic gems initially) have 50 of their given stat, or 75 in the case of stamina. Split gems have 25 of each, or 37 stamina.

Note blue sockets don't really give us a solid pick. Spell pen presumably still doesn't function in PVE, spirit no longer benefits us, stamina isn't a DPS stat and hit is highly situational, it may not always be a gain to gem. Oh shame mastery wasn't a blue stat.

Yellow's not easy, either. Mastery's there, and haste and crit are still there. The rating conversions suggest haste will still be better than crit, however destruction may strongly favor crit because of their critical damage mastery bonus, and mastery remains the great unknown that could fall just about anywhere.

Red is at least easy, 50 intellect (that is, 50 spellpower) is spectacular, and always a solid pick. 25/25 split with any of our secondary stats isn't bad, either.

An interesting fact, however, is that currently none of the new meta gems indicate activation requirements, which may mean it's not such a big deal we have no good blue stats, we can just bugger blue sockets and their bonuses. The Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamond gives 54 crit and 3% crit damage, and has no listed requirement. This could be a bug or just not implemented yet, or it may be a move away from meta requirements, which could be very good indeed if blue remains such a lackluster DPS gem. Particularly with that possibility on the board, tier 11 may default to stacking intellect and ignoring bonuses much like tier 7 did. Socket bonuses have never been a huge DPS gain, just that extra 15 dps you wouldn't have had otherwise, and while hopefully the first tier won't be as easy as Naxx was, don't expect Heroic LK or pre-nerf Muru in tier 11, it is still the first tier.

Last note, if you're a jewelcrafter, red gems are more in demand than ever. Not only are all three main DPS stats still on red, but the big stack-stat for healers is there now, too. When in doubt, everyone except tanks will be stacking red gems, and orange/purple half red gems will be the major option for hitting bonuses.

Cataclysm Loot Pt. 1: Blackrock Caverns

2010-07-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

Things are early in Cataclysm, yet, but as with BC, dungeon loot lists are filling out. I've mentioned multiple times the itemization curve in Cataclysm, but today I'll give you a direct taste of that curve.

Blackrock Caverns is one of the first dungeons you'll hit in Cataclysm. It's loot requires level 78 and the zone is aimed towards level 80-81 players. And it's loot is on par with normal Icecrown Citadel.

Itemlevel for BRC is 279. In Cataclysm, both blues and epics have 4 stats, and the retooled Wrath epics will have 4 stats (with spellpower and attack power being rolled into core stats, defense going away, and plate DPS already only having four stats). Epics have more itemization points, so higher stats, but if you're not a high end ICC raider, expect to start replacing your gear in this dungeon.

Corla's Baton (wand)
418.1 dps
51 Int
77 Stam
36 Mastery
30 Crit

Compare to the heroic Corpse-Impaling Spike, the closest existing match, in it's post-Cataclysm form:
460.4 dps
49 Int
83 Stam
38 Crit
30 haste

Not a clear upgrade - you lose 2 spellpower and some ratings. It has mastery, which makes it interesting if only because mastery is still the great unknown.

Beauty's Silken Ribbon
(waist)
120 int
181 stam
80 haste
80 crit

Compare to Heroic Crushing Coldwraith Belt:
120 int
193 stam
Red/Blue sockets, +7 spellpower bonus
74 crit
90 haste

Note, thanks to the sockets, even the normal Coldwraith belt would hold it's own against Beauty's Ribbon, but this is one of the first blues you'll see in Cataclysm, and only ICC loot compares.

There's also a set of robes, the Inquisition Robes:
162 Int
243 Stam
108 Hit
108 Mastery

Compared to the Heroic Sanctified Dark Coven Robe:
167 int
261 stam
R/Y, +7 spellpower
122 Crit
106 Haste

Again, sockets prop up the old robe, the stats alone barely keep up.

Next item is an offhand. Without gems to save the old epics, how will simple accessories stack up?
Beauty's Favorite Bone
90 int
136 Stam
53 Crit
65 Hit

Compared to the Shadow Silk Spindle:
102 Int
146 stam
68 crit
68 haste

Again, stats are tight. There aren't any caster weapons in BRC, unfortunately. Weapons really take the hit from itemlevels. DPS for melee and spellpower for casters shoot up fast with weapon level. ICC armor will survive the first couple Cataclysm dungeons, but not weapons. There's a pair of daggers in BRC with 226.9 dps, almost identical to normal ICC epics.

Runaway Haste

2010-07-04T16:42:00.000-07:00

We are going to be much more vigilant about haste getting out of control (from talents and gear) to where GCD issues get to be a problem. Simply making non-haste stats more attractive will help as well.

While technically a mage bluepost, this is relevant to our interests, as warlocks were hit with runaway haste, as well. Personally, I think the first step would have been to equalize the haste and crit ratings, or even make crit rating a slightly higher percentage conversion than haste. That lower conversion played a big part in haste being just so damn good in Wrath. However, the only warlock spec with significant haste issues was destruction, and destruction has a notable feature that might solve the problem. It's second mastery bonus is Critical Strike Damage. One of the easiest ways to increase the value of crit is to make crits bigger relative to hits, which is exactly what destruction's mastery promises to do.

Mini-Lore: Dwarf Warlocks

2010-07-04T16:36:00.000-07:00

Troll warlocks are fairly obvious. Their a voodoo worshiping race with a penchant for the dark arts, even their shamanism has a darker lore tint to it than the orc and tauren versions. Warlock was really a natural for them all along.

Dwarves, however, spawned a lot of WTF moments up there with Tauren paladins. However, things actually make a reasonable amount of sense in light of new Beta explorations. For example, take this image of the Ironforge throne. Magni Bronzebeard is out of commission, and now the dwarf capital is ruled by a council of three: Muradin Bronzebeard, representing the Dwarves of Ironforge and possibly the Frostborn as well, High Thane Falsted Wildhammer, representing the shamanistic Wildhammer dwarves, and somewhat unexpected, Princess Moira Thaurissan, representing the Dark Iron Dwarves. These are the three factions that the dwarves split into during the War of the Three Hammers after the death of the last Anvilmar king.

As you may remember from BRD, Moira was the Bronzebeard princess forced to marry Emperor Thaurissan of the Dark Iron dwarves. A special quest in BRD requires you to kill the emperor but spare the princess. That storyline has at long last been revisited. As the technical heir to the Dark Iron throne, it appears Moira has reunited at least part of the defeated Dark Iron clan with Ironforge.

What does this have to do with dwarf warlocks, you ask? Everything, I say. The Dark Iron dwarves are notable as the only dwarf clan to dabble in the dark arts. They have a number of warlocks in Blackrock Deeps and elsewhere. Doom'rel, one of the Seven who summoned Ragnaros at Blackrock Mountain, was a warlock, as is Balgaras, the leader of their forces in the Wetlands.

Existing Itemization Overhaul

2010-07-03T14:34:00.000-07:00

We know that existing items are being converted to the new itemization rules, but what can you personally expect?

Let's compare a few hallmark items. I'll be touching on a trinket, a weapon, and a couple random cloth pieces here, comparing their current stats to their Cataclysm stats.

First up is a weapon, the Frozen Bonespike (normal).
Current stats:
67 Stamina
67 Intellect
59 Spirit
59 Crit
741 Spellpower

Cataclysm stats:
126 Stamina (+59)
0 Intellect (Weapons seem to have spellpower only, rather than intellect only)
59 Spirit (unchanged)
59 Crit (unchanged)
928 Spellpower (+187, 67 of which can be presumed to have come from intellect)

Trinkets
Not going to go over trinkets in detail, only mention that Phylactery, DFO, Sundial, NMIC, and the other prominent caster trinkets didn't change. They still proc spellpower, likely to prevent wild up and down swings in mana pool sizes.

Cloth: Heroic Sanctified Dark Coven Robe
Current stats:
139 Stamina
139 Intellect
Red/Yellow sockets, +7 SP bonus
122 Crit
106 Haste
195 Spellpower

Cataclysm Stats:
261 Stamina (+122)
167 intellect (+28)
Red/Yellow sockets, +7 SP bonus
122 Crit
106 Haste
0 Spellpower (167 from intellect, a reduction of 28)

So, over your entire set, what can you expect?
Lots and lots of stamina - Expect almost doubled stamina the day you log into patch 4.0. The slack itemization of dropping every caster epic from 5 stats to 4 mostly went into stamina. Unlike the BC stamina inflation, you won't have to regear for this one, your health is skyrocketed right out of the box.
Similar spellpower - Weapons went up quite a bit, but armor generally went down. Looks like average at equal item level might be a wash, which has been a stated intention anyway. Your results will vary - if your weapon is notably higher or lower itemlevel than the bulk of your armor, you'll see more significant gain or loss.
Slightly larger mana pools - Weapons dropped intellect, but everything else gained a good chunk.
Identical ratings - Crit, haste, spirit, and hit didn't go anywhere on any items I looked at.

Most importantly, Expect all bets off the second you ding 81. Cataclysm blues are redonkulous. Yes, I said redonkulous, because ridiculous isn't a big enough word. Shadowmourne won't last to 85, let alone whatever piece of shit gear you're wearing. Remember the last two expansions, where people said "Whaa whaa my epics are replaced by greens in two levels" but in reality good high tier epics lasted until the new endgame? Well, now the whaaaambulance finally arrived for real. Itemlevels take off fast. Expect six digit health, mana pools big enough that 72k mana water you can get at 85 is just as annoying as the 19.2k stuff is now. If you like numbers and like feeling your character get truely powerful, Cataclysm looks like it might just be YOUR expansion.

Intellect:Spellpower

2010-07-03T14:16:00.000-07:00

Should have posted this with the ratings conversions yesterday but slipped my mind.

The intellect:Spellpower conversion in the current beta build is 1:1, however like all stats the very lowest points behave differently. Your first 20 intellect gives only 1 mana each, compared to 15 for every point past 20. For spellpower, your first 10 points give none, while each point past that gives 1. So if you have 1000 intellect, you'll have 990 spellpower.

Weapons still have spellpower on them. In fact, they seem to not have intellect. This is so weapons can still be a significantly higher DPS contribution without also having ridiculous amounts of intellect on them inflating mana pools. Blue posts have said procs (trinkets, a theoretical future version of Lightweave, etc) could well still be spellpower to prevent mana pools from jumping up and down constantly as well.

As for mana pools, be ready for them to get BIG. We've already seen that blues available within the first 2-3 levels as quest rewards outshine even 277 epics, and intellect numbers of 300+ on random crap gear is the norm. Just to give you an idea, the level 85 drinks resore 72,000 mana, compared to 19,200 from level 75 drinks. Some of the screenshots coming out of beta have quest geared level 82s standing around unbuffed with 40k mana pools.

Hybrid Superiority

2010-07-03T04:20:00.000-07:00

There's been a neverending stream of QQ about the superiority of hybrid classes since Molten Core was serious business and a guild actually let a priest go shadow and saw the damage the spec was capable in the days when casters barely scaled.

The argument has always been, "Nobody will ever bring a pure DPS class when a hybrid can do similar DPS and potentially tank or heal."

The argument is bullshit. For a lot of reasons. Click for just a fraction of them, but still a damn lot of reasons.

There are 25 slots in a raid. Typical layout is 2 tanks, 6 healers, 17 dps, but common fight styles call for an extra healer or tank, capping up at 3 tanks, 7 healers, and 15 dps. Extreme cases, never required but occasionally used for various reasons (like staving off the soft enrage on heroic Putricide) there's some benefit from a fourth tank, or an eighth healer, and while I've never seen both recommended on a single fight and never seen both used together, I'll allow a hypothetical 4 tank/8 healer composition for the argument.

Now, this is how the raid lays out:
2 permanent tanks

6 permanent healers
2 variable DPS/tank
2 variable DPS/healer
13 permanent DPS

This raid composition has a huge amount of flexibility. It has the standard 2/6/17 setup, but can go up to 4/8/13. However, no matter how you cut it, 13 people will ALWAYS be DPS.

Now, this raid makes use of 4 hybrids. The two primary tanks, six of the healers, and thirteen DPS slots will always be filling the same role for the entire duration of the raid. Even though the tanks and healers are hybrid classes and some of those 13 DPS are as well, none of them are actually acting like hybrids - they're pure specialists covering only a single role.

Thirteen permanent DPS slots (52% of the raid), and 21 fixed role slots total (84% of the raid). And that's allowing for an extreme case, a fully successful raid would be possible with only one of each variable slot, which would bring us up to 92% of the raid being specialists, and 60% of the raid being permanent DPS slots.

Think about that: 92% of your raid never changes spec, and you gain no hybrid utility from them. The fact that all your tanks and healers are hybrids means nothing if they never go DPS. Even if all your DPS are hybrids, that means nothing when 15 of them are always DPS.

Let me put it this way: If your car can turn into a boat, but we both live in the desert, is it any better than my car that always stays a car?

And that's looking over the course of an entire raid, assuming that it's not an option to sit people and bring in alternates. Let's look at a single fight, because one of the most common arguments put forth by paranoid pure players is that hybrids can serve their multiple roles during the same fight.

This isn't how the game works. A hybrid can change their role, but they're still locked into a single viable role while in combat. A shadow priest out of form may be able to pull a clinch heal in a heroic, but in a raid that heal will disappear into tank damage, and the GCD it takes to drop form and start healing is the GCD in which the tank is already dead.

All three healer classes, when in their DPS specs, share a common trait: Their healing is terrible. It won't keep a tank up, it isn't sustainable, and it isn't supported by their gear (Though a Cataclysm ele shaman or boomkin may at least be geared approximately for healing).

Spec is big. Go to your trainer, reset your talents, and go DPS the dummies specced 0/0/0. Your rotations don't work, your spells are mediocre at best, you're missing key features that make you a viable class. Healers are like that. Take away their healing talents, and you're left with a 0/0/0 warlock trying to DPS. Sure, you're pushing buttons and numbers are popping up, but those numbers aren't going to justify your raid position. Neither will a hybrid healer out-of-form trying to heal.

Likewise, tanks. A boomkin might be able to pop into bear and pull a clutch taunt, but if he's actually called on to take hits, he's going to go squish and there's going to be a small bear shaped stain on the floor. Because he's not a tank. He's a boomkin in bear form.

Unspecced tanks take more damage, receive less healing, and will be missing key abilities that make them a viable tank. In fact, without feral talents backing them, there's a very real chance that druid will still die to a single hit anyway and all that clutch taunt accomplished exactly shit. Even plate doesn't help. Ever seen a fury warrior get agro? They die faster than a rogue does, because at least the rogue might get a lucky dodge first.

Demo locks can see this first hand, with soul link and metamorphosis, you can actually take a hit better than a boomkin in bear form, you just have lower health. But health doesn't matter because... well, next time you charge in for immo aura, "accidentally" cast challenging howl. When the boss turns around and smacks you in the face for 115,000 of your 35,000 health, you'll see that even having some extra health as a boomkin in bear form doesn't make you any more of a tank.

Because you're not a tank, you're the dumbass who taunted.

Beta is Beta

2010-07-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

Warlock talent trees still have a long way to go.

The dev note says the next build or two, but blue is still covering their tail just in case that doesn't actually happen, which is generally a good indication it likely won't.

Cataclysm Rating Conversions

2010-07-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

One of the important things to know for gearing is what ratings convert to. The step up was BIG for Cataclysm. Here's the conversions:

Stat: 85 conversion (60, 70, 80)
1% melee hit: 192.056 (10, 15.769, 32.79)
1% spell hit: 153.645 (8, 12.615, 26.232)
1% crit: 268.878 (10, 22.077, 45.906)
1% haste: 192.056 (10, 15.769, 32.79)

Implications
First off, look down to the bottom: Haste>crit, as currently. It still has lower rating requirements, and presumably 1% haste will be better than 1% crit like it is now. However, keep in mind crit suppression has already been mentioned: Your crit rate on a tier 12 boss will be lower than on a tier 11 boss, and your hit needs will be higher.

Hit cap, presuming the 17% standard remains in tier 11 (it's been suggested to be higher in later tiers), is 2612 for the full 17%. The entry level blues we've seen have upwards of 300 in their combat ratings, so this is around 7-9 hit items to cap. That's actually not much different than tier 7 was, so we can put aside the "OMG HIT CAP WILL BE UNATTAINABLE NAO" fears. The itemlevel curve is VERY steep in what we've seen of Cataclysm gear. Early level 85 crafted one hand weapons have damage ranges only slightly below Shadowmourne.

Stat priorities as we know them now will be: Hit cap>Intellect*>Haste>Crit. Mastery remains the oddball, how good it is depends on it's conversion into our spec bonuses, but also on how much the "main armor type" mastery bonus is. Warlocks will always have their full armor type bonus, we can only wear cloth. Druids will only gain the bonus from leather, shamans only from mail, and so forth.

*-Per point, we don't really know where intellect will fall. However, it's still a primary stat and still on all of our gear, so it's going to be a major stat regardless.

Lastly, as we already know, stamina is again being inflated and it's itemization cost reduced. Health will rise more rapidly than other stats. Again, looking at the sort of stamina on entry level blues, six digit health on clothies is likely after a few tiers if not early. Damage and healing won't ramp up as quickly. In PVP this is most notable, as burst won't kill people, only hurt like a bitch. However, heals won't just pop people from 5% to full because you missed a kick, so damage will be a bit stickier.

The same model works in PVE, as well - you can expect less instant raid wide death than the current system (not to say there won't still be "Move or die" moments), but also slower healing from the damage you do take. The result isn't harder or easier, just different. Perhaps a bit more heroic, or perhaps closer to vanilla where DPS could pull agro and survive that first hit, unless it crit (or the dragon breathed and took out the entire even side).

Lore Series 2: Artifacts - The Book of Medivh

2010-07-02T03:59:00.000-07:00

So you're a warlock. You know the spells, you know the talents, the rotations, the stats. But how much do you really know? How much do you really want to know? The World of Warcraft has a body of lore worthy of most major works of fantasy, potentially more than you'll ever want to know.

Continuing where we left off last week, today we'll be looking at a powerful warlock artifact. No legendary weapon or ancient font of power, but a simple, modern book. The Book, in fact, that set in motion nearly all of the events of the Warcraft universe: The Book of Medivh.

Though Medivh himself is rarely noted as a warlock - he confined himself to the arcane arts for the most part - it is notable that Medivh committed one of the greatest acts of demonic magic ever to occur on Azeroth: The opening of the Dark Portal to Draenor. The orc invasion, which defined the political landscape of the Eastern Kingdoms as it is today, the rise of the Scourge and the Lich King, the modern Burning Legion invasions, Illidan's return to power, and the ultimate conquest of Draenor by the races of Azeroth - none of these things would have happened had the Dark Portal not been opened.

It's unclear if the Book of Medivh itself possesses any special power. It's not uncommon for spellbooks to be empowered by their creators, but it's not a prerequisite, and there is reason to believe the Book of Medivh is a simple mundane book in and of itself. What it does contain, however, is a wealth of demonic knowledge. It's complete contents are a mystery but the most prominent and best known item in the list is a collection of spells and rituals required to create a permanent, stable portal between worlds.

Medivh used the ritual only once. Possessed by the Dark Titan Sargeras, he created the Dark Portal and opened the way for the demon empowered orc hordes to invade Azeroth. The event has profound repercussions around Azeroth, most of what we know about recent history simply wouldn't have happened without this event. As such, it's one of the prime targets in the bizarre and confusing Temporal War between the Bronze and Infinite Dragonflights. If that attack by the Infinite Dragonflight were to succeed, major threads of the past, present, and future would unravel with unknowable results. If you really want a headache, that may have already happened and it might be your fault. Confused? There's a reason why mortals are warned against delving too deeply into the ways of dragons. They're unfathomable enough when they can't travel through time.

But, alas, I digress. Where was I? Ah, the Book of Medivh. Following Medivh's death, the Book was kept in New Stormwind's Royal Library. At the end of the Second War Khadgar used knowledge from the Book to attempt to undo what was done in the Blasted Lands and to close the Dark Portal. While the portal was damaged, the rift remained connecting the worlds. Nethergarde Keep was built to keep the Orcs from returning.

Even as the Alliance expedition forces passed through the Dark Portal to end the orc threat, Ner'zhul and his lieutenants stole the Book of Medivh. In addition (and as I mentioned, this is the reason many believe the Book itself houses no special power aside from pure knowledge), he required the Jeweled Scepter of Sergeras, the Eye of Dalaran, and the Skull of Gul'dan (another well known warlock artifact with a storied history).

Using the Book and the artifacts he collected, Ner'zhul opened numerous portals from Draenor seeking easier worlds for the horde to conquer. Opening such portals isn't a gentle process - the single portal opened in Azeroth blasted a crater well over a hundred yards wide altered the geology and climate of the southern end of the Eastern Kingdoms permanently. Opening many at once unleashed a spectacular magical cataclysm. Draenor was nearly destroyed - what exists of it now is but a fragment of a single continent, ripped from the surface of the world and plunged from this plane deep into the Twisting Nether.

Grom Hellscream and Killrog Deadeye (Not a warlock, but a name that should be well known to any warlock) and their clans led an exodus as the bulk of the orc hordes tried to escape the destruction. Obris remained, but was struck down for his insolence in questioning Ner'zhul. His dying act of vengeance was to hand the Book yet again to Khadgar, and the Skull of Gul'dan with it. The fate of the Sceptor and the Eye are both unknown. The Skull has another story to tell in the interim, but was among the artifacts recovered after Illidan's defeat in the Black Temple.

Khadgar, Turalyon, and the Alliance expedition forces chose to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to destroy the Dark Portal from the other side. Just before the portal was closed, a Wildhammer gryphon rider was dispatched with the Book and the Skull, hoping to lock the keys outside, so to speak. For many years the fate of those heroes was unknown, and likewise Khadgar had no way to know if the Book and Skull made it through to Azeroth.

Demon portals are durable things, though. While rendered inactive, the Dark Portal was not destroyed. It's not clear it ever can be. Illidan passed through it years later, though during his reordering of Outland he was able to close the majority of the portals opened by Ner'zhul, those portal still stand as a chilling threat and constant reminder of the fragility of Azeroth's conquest in Outland.

As for the Book, it's story still still isn't over. It's movements are unknown following the closing of the Dark Portal, however it finally came to rest in the Magical Nation of Dalaran in the possession of Archmage Antonidas. Now, despite (Or perhaps because of, *cough*) the density of powerful mages in Dalaran the city's military history doesn't inspire confidence. It was burned to the ground in the Second War, and no sooner did they rebuild it but the horde came through again and made off with the Eye of Dalaran.

So when Arthas and Kel'thuzad came knocking, what would history have the educated warlock expect of the glorious mages of the Kirin Tor? They got slaughtered. Again. And just to insult to injury, Kel'thuzad used the Book of Medivh right there in front of the Kirin Tor to summon Archimonde into Azeroth. Archimonde's first act was to burn Dalran to the ground. Again. Though, after the job the Scourge had already done to it, he was really just shifting the rubble around. As with Medivh, Kel'thuzad is rarely remembered as a warlock, but using Medivh's spellbook, he performed another of the greatest feats of demonic magic ever accomplished on Azeroth.

The Book of Medivh's ultimate fate is unknown. It's power, if it possessed any, may have finally been spent summoning Archimonde, or the book physically destroyed in the process or aftermath of that summoning. It may have been handed over to the Legion. It may still lie in the hands of some Scourge necromancer who survived the conquest of Icecrown. It was not among the artifacts recovered from Kel'thuzad upon his first defeat, or after his resurrection and final (presumably, as his phylactery was successfully recovered this time) death. It wasn't in the hands of any of the necromancers killed during the dismantling of the Scourge. It also wasn't in the possession of Archimonde upon his death, either originally or, as part of the Bronze Dragonflight's Temporal War, his simultaneous future-past re-defeat (normal verb tenses fail in ways it's fundamentally impossible for words to fail when talking about the Temporal War). Granted that it's possible he wasn't (or won't be) defeated in the future-past Temporal War version of the timeline, despite it already happening possibly twice, and it's possible that's your fault, too. I told you not to think about it too hard.

Warlock Races, Cataclysm Itemization, random miscellaney

2010-07-02T01:50:00.000-07:00

Troll and Dwarf Warlocks official
Trolls aren't much of a surprise, but dwarves are. Not sure what the lore there is or will be, but not sure there has to be any. After all, there's a good number of warlocks within the Dark Iron warlocks and the other dwarven races. "Bad guys do it," is pretty much the lore for Troll druids, and given troll NPCs penchant for shapeshifting nobody questioned that. Note this is in addition to both new races, as both worgen and goblins can be warlocks.

Steeper Itemization Curve

Since we're only raising the level cap to 85 in Cataclysm, one of the goals is to pack as much content and gameplay as possible into the new 78-85 zones and dungeons. We don't want the leveling experience from 80-85 to feel as if it's only half of the content we've provided in the last two expansions. So, with that comes more substantial scaling of items and character power with each level gained. A level-82 character should feel significantly more powerful than a level-80 character, for example. There are some epic and legendary items from Wrath of the Lich King raid content which may take a while to replace, but chances are most of your gear will be replaced by the time you start running level-85 normal 5-player dungeons.

The net effect here is less that you'll feel more powerful or your gear will be upgraded sooner and more that the steeper gear progression means much more pressure back to the normal>heroic>raid progression than Wrath's truncated progress. The dungeon/raid honor style point system still means that the vast majority of raiding will happen at the current top tier with less at the next down, so in the grand scheme of things this isn't a radical shift from Wrath. It might, however, keep all the world firsts from being over and done with within the first 72 hours.

Soul Burn/Demon Soul
Pretty much the conclusions level heads drew the last couple days, but empowered spells and demon soul are two sides of the same coin. Soul Burn empowered spells are very momentary and situational, with a focus on immediate effects and gameplay, but they're not terribly beneficial in a situation where you care about sustained damage output like your typical raid boss encounter.

Demon Soul, however, is a large passive damage increase (except for the imp version, which here's hoping gets changed somehow). It uses a shard, but has a 2 minute cooldown instead of 30 seconds. The 2 minute cooldown basically negates the PVE need for an in-combat shard recovery, as few fights allow, let alone give opportunity for more than three rounds of such cooldowns.

The previewed Unstable Affliction soulburn may not go live because of it's effect duplication with fel flame. Seems like an odd reason, since the empowered UA would be vastly more powerful, but this could just be the sugar coating on the "Holy shit that's a lot of damage" pill.

One last bit of soul burn blue text:

Ideally, we'd like to educate players on Soulburn effects through quests. Listing the spells it effects in the main tooltip is also an option, our only concern is it just becoming a short novel. When you cast Soulburn, it should change the tooltip of spells it effects. In a future build it will also “highlight” the icon of your spells which it affects.

Quests won't really work, I don't think. It's hard to go back and review them, and I promise you every major patch from Cataclysm onward will change at least one of them. It might be some nice (and sorely missing) flavor to discuss class mechanics in quests, but not an ideal method of player education. Not sure what I think about changing tooltips only while soulburn is active. It works, but it's inconvenient to review. I was thinking empowerable spells would have an extra line of yellow text at the bottom of their tooltip listing their empowered effect.

No, Deathcoil was not nerfed

2010-06-30T19:23:00.000-07:00

There's a bit of noise about Death Coil's 2.5 second cast time (castable while running like grenades) in beta. A lot of people flying off the handle. Here's what less than 30 seconds of research revealed to me:

That was a bug with deathcoil. It was like that for the first few weeks, but for just over a week now its been back to instant cast.

It took me longer to copy paste than to find. Seriously people, a bit of effort?

Cataclysm Talents

2010-06-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

Note, the warlock talent trees are scheduled for major changes soon, and so far very little has changed (including talents promised to be up for the chopping block), so the current calculator is very preliminary, but there's some fascinating things in there.

Hand of Gul'Dan - taking the place of demonic empowerment (empowerment is moved up two tiers to be in the same line as mana feed and master conjuror). Basically this is Flamestrike, only instead of a flame strike, it's a meteor with a residual ground-effect AOE.

Bane of Havoc - replacing Devastation in the destruction tree, this Bane (putting it in the exclusive category with Agony and Doom) that causes 15% of the damage you deal to also be dealt to the Bane target. This will be devastating on primary targets in AOE pulls, but will also cause some extra boss damage in add heavy fights. Remains to be seen if this can be put on a single target for an effective 15% damage buff or not.

Little else has changed yet except things we already knew, like Demonic Pact now functioning like Trueshot Aura. The warlock trees are up for a lot of work in the next couple builds, so stay tuned.

NDA LIFTED

2010-06-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

So, the Cataclysm nondisclosure agreement is lifted as of today. The mmo-champion database is now filling with beta data and tooltips are filtering out of betaland. Here's a few things to look at.

First off, what kind of gear are we looking at? Well, the entry level 85 blues being found are itemlevel 352. Here's an example of one such item, FIreweave Robe. It has 320 intellect, 480 stamina, 219 crit rating, and 219 haste. We don't know what kind of spellpower 320 intellect converts to, but even at just 1:1 (which feels reasonable for the itemlevel), that's cracking 320 spellpower.

Demon Soul
A bit different than first expected, you don't fuse physically with your demon. (Lore: Only your souls fuse). It's learned at level 85, and it's a 2 minute cooldown. Effects:
Imp: +60% crit with destruction spells for up to 30 seconds, reduced by 20% every crit for 3 charges.
Voidwalker: All threat generated by you goes to your pet for 15 seconds (Amazing for soloing!)
Succubus: +10% shadow bolt damage for 20 seconds (no charges)
Felhunter: +20% shadow dot damage for 20 seconds (no charges - affliction mainstay most likely)
Felguard: +15% spell haste and +10% shadow and fire damage for 20 seconds (no charges - demo mainstay and not too shabby at that).

Soul Harvest (!)
9 second channel that regenerates 15% (not much) health and all three soul shards. 30 second cooldown. Cannot cast in combat, so this isn't evocate for shards.

Fel Flame
Despite the suggestion that it won't be a rotational ability, instant damage plus DOT refresh with no cooldown sounds pretty rotational to me.

Warlock Ninja Bluepost

2010-06-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

In a thread mostly about level 85 heirlooms, Ghostcrawler slipped in a bit of a warlock tidbit. Soul Shard empowerment won't work for all spells.

Not unexpected, really. Warlocks have a pretty large spellbook, and a lot of spells just don't have any clear way to empower (or at least actually be used in that form). This is the first blue text to officially say so, and hope still existed. The early shard previews are still hopeful, though, a lot of our major DPS spells are in there and there looks like plenty of options and debate coming up once the system is actually in player hands.

Lore Series 1: Demon Lore - Felhunter

2010-06-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

The Caster Legendary "Delay"

2010-06-18T02:20:00.000-07:00

So our Blizzcon dropped first tier legendary for Cataclysm has been pushed back. The sky is falling, world is over, and there'll be nine more tank/melee legendaries in Grin Batol before we get ours.

Seriously, take it easy. The delay is most likely a good thing for final-tier progression in Cataclysm (granted this is on the order of three years away).

It's been a long time since there was a first-tier legendary. Thunderfury and Sulfuras were the last two (Though Thunderfury required a non-trivial tier 2 investment). How are they remembered? Thunderfury is remembered as a tank weapon, and with good reason - that proc was absolutely ridiculous to the point it's threat had to be neutered four tiers and sixty some itemlevels later because it was still outpacing far superior weapons. However, Thunderfury was more than that. It had its time in the sun as a glorious weapon for that lucky fury warrior who didn't have to wear a shield 24/7, and at one time it was the best thing a rogue could put in their offhand. It was a viable DPS weapon, but it's not remembered as such, because by the time AQ rolled around it was outclassed by epics.

Sulfuras, however, was a DPS weapon, pure and simple, and completely contained within tier 1. How did it stack up? Thanks to the extensive fire immunities in tier 1/2, Ashkandi already gave it a run for it's money, as did Kalimdor's Revenge in AQ40. Dark Edge of Insanity was already to the point that even on non-immune mobs the fire proc was hard to justify, and by the time Might of Menethil was on the scene, it was already over for Sulfuras, buried by itemlevels.

Sulfuras didn't have hard mode itemization to contend with, either. Remember, the top weapons right now are effectively tier 13, not tier 10 - tiers 8-10 all had a second level of loot. Ashkandi already made life uncomfortable for Sulfuras, but a heroic version, comparable to Dark Edge of Insanity, would have been death.

A tier 11 DPS legendary will face the same fate: Buried by itemlevels in a world where casters will likely be pushing five digit spellpower and itemlevels could well push 500. Even a tier 12 legendary may need an unfair advantage built in to survive in the final tier of Cataclysm thanks to hard mode itemization. Two such advantages would be an immense additional bonus specifically against Dragonkin (like the Warglaives demon killing power - though the Warglaives were a third tier legendary and had little to fear in Sunwell regardless) or, and as a demonologist this really tickles me in private places, another raid support legendary like Atiesh was, that will provide benefits not just to the wielder, but to the entire raid.

Long delayed Cataclysm Roundup

2010-06-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Cataclysm information has been very thin so far. Most of it has been about the decision to drop path of the titans (a shame, though it sounds like Archaeology will still do some cool stuff) and reforging (less of a shame, for reasons I'll explore in another post most likely).

Affliction Shadowbolt is Fine
This is a pet peeve of mine that people get so bent out of shape about affliction using shadowbolt. Spec trees within each class aren't discrete things. If they were, there wouldn't be a Warlock option at character creation, there'd be Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction options. Affliction and Demonology both relying heavily on destruction spells is neither unusual or uncommon in the game, self-contained trees are quite unusual for that matter, restricted to a couple of the hybrid DPS specs, druids with their spell limiting forms, mages, and almost (but not quite) destruction. There's even extreme examples, like Death Strike - an unholy ability that only sees DPS use by blood, and is improved by a talent so deep in blood that you can't have improved death strike and still call yourself an unholy DK by any argument.

The general improvement of talents could at least break affliction's ties to the 15 points in destruction, which isn't a bad thing. 200% crit talents are going away, which means they may be baseline or simply gone, but either way, that's 5 points out of destruction for affliction. With 5 more talent points, all it takes is 3 points out of affliction (a heavily bloated spec likely to see a few talents get the cut) to allow a 51/13/10+2 build - improved shadowbolt/bane (actual spell altering talents that aren't sure picks for the cut), Demonic Aegis (free spellpower, a hallmark of destruction, and very attractive but out of reach for affliction), and still full mastery in affliction.

Caster Legendary
While casters are still officially "next up," the Blizzcon mention of a first-tier caster legendary have been redacted. This is, I think, a good thing, provided we get a second tier legendary as suggested.

The reason I think it's good is simple: Look at Val'anyr. It's damn powerful, but compared to the current BIS epics, it's getting tighter. DPS is a lot easier to quantify than healing, too - throughput is everything for us, but not everything for healers. A tier 11 legendary runs the risk of becoming outdated by tier 15. I assume 15 will be the end of Cataclysm, since vanilla, BC, and Wrath all had four levels of raiding, though vanilla and BC both had one tier without a true tier set, Wrath had tier 9 with a pretty short loot list besides the tier sets.

Threat Talents go Bye-bye
I mentioned this is what I thought should have happened instead of the buff to warlock threat reduction a while back, but I'm fine with the buff - a buff to one class goes down a lot better than nerfs to the other nine. If necessary, they'll build a bit more into tanking mode threat boosts like they did for blessing of salvation, but they think (and I agree) that it won't be needed. Vengeance will be a nice threat boost for tanks, and returning to a first-tier situation, tanks generally outperform DPS anyway, so it'll probably be tier 13 or so before we see threat problems again, and without gross discrepancies in threat reduction between specs, they'll be universal threat problems, not warlock specific ones.

Haste reduces channeled duration... Wait, no it doesn't. Wait, now it does again.

2010-04-20T02:28:00.000-07:00

A couple blue posts were made about how the clipping change applies to channeled spells. For all the trying it took for GC to get it out, a simpler way of putting it would be that haste adds ticks in the same duration, just like it does with DOTs, however the duration will always end on the last tick, not a second after as it will with DOTs.

It's probably more accurate to say that the haste will lower the duration until you earn a whole additional tick, at which point the duration will go back up again (but with more damage / healing because of that extra tick). Getting more haste will never be a bad thing, but there will be break points where haste is more valuable than others. You should also never want to cancel the spell early.

This is definitely one of those cases where we'll have to see how it feels, but it is more intuitive when you're actually casting spells in the game than it might sound on paper.

The answer we were trying to give was that "channels won't just get shorter and shorter the more haste you get." But a more complete answer is that hasted channels will get shorter until you get a whole additional tick, at which point the duration will go back up again. We don't want to do partial ticks or things like that because they encourage you to just recast the spell.

Possible good news about boring mastery bonuses

2010-04-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

Or possibly bad news for cool ones like Shadow Orbs.

On the broader topic of whether more creative or more passive mastery benefits are more fun, we just need to get players in there in beta and trying them out. The risk of more passive bonuses (like the current Enhancement one) is that it's just a little dry. Since your spell damage tends to scale roughly (roughly) with your gear, it risks just feeling like more damage. On the other hand, bonuses like Shadow and Balance affect gameplay an awful lot and may end up being just one too many things to monitor. We wanted to split the difference for now and see what feels the best.

So, if it wasn't glaringly obvious to anyone who's followed a video game during its beta roll out, the mastery preview is an experiment. Warlocks, among others (enhancement, rogues, etc) ended up in the control group - we got boring simple bonuses that are easy to measure and blanace. Priests, among others, ended up in the test group - they got unusual complicated shit-procs-other-shit bonuses that will be a nightmare to balance, scale in strange ways, and might just end up being a failed experiment anyway.

If things go well, we might get our own shit-procs-shit bonuses before release. Or if the experiment goes badly, priests might see their shadow orbs turned into periodic crit bonus or something.

Crittacular Agrognome Supports our Gnomish King!

2010-04-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

For five years now, the Gnomeregan exiles have been ~~mooching off of~~ enjoying the kind charity of our Dwarf brothers. Now, we've finally ~~worn out our welcome~~ found a way to restore our glorious capital city.

How? Well, turns out the main issue all along was that Thermaplugg dropped ilevel 37 blues. The Crittacular Agrognome supports the acquisition of epic items, prestige mounts and cool vanity pets from all sources, so I fully support Operation Gnomeregan, as long as ~~there's something in it for me~~ it restores the glory of the Gnomish race.

Warlock Q&A sortakinda

2010-04-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

We do like the idea of allowing warlocks to re-skin their demons and have been talking about possible ways to implement this. I have no concrete information for you at this time beyond that.

Good news for those (all) of us who'd like to see some variation or selection in the pet department.

When it comes to naming demons, this has always been one of those sacred cows, where the hunter gets to name their pet because he loves his pet bear, but the warlock considers the demon to be something disposable -- a tool.

Not unexpected, and I really don't want to see the option anyway. I don't mind Blizzard basically admitting it's a sacred cow and staying just because, but there's still strong arguments. In a number of fantasy works and even traditional folklore, treating with a demon or spirit requires finding and invoking it's True Name. Using any other name would break the enslavement.

For Soul Shard bags, we will probably do something like remove all the shards, reduce the bag size (a little) and convert it to a normal bag. This would be a one-time conversion. We'll probably get rid of the recipes, as we wouldn't want other classes to go out and get shard bags just to get a free bag.

Again as I expected, but I don't see any reason to remove the patterns. They're not free by any means, the materials on them are generally higher than equivalent normal bags. Unless that is to say warlocks will be getting free 24 slot bags, thus saving me 3000g on a fourth Portable Hole. Ah, we can hope, can't we?

Shaman Q&A gives hint of Demonic Pact's future

2010-04-08T08:36:00.000-07:00

Q: Does the 10% spell power buff from Elemental scale with the shaman or the target’s spell power?
A: It will scale with the target the same as Demonic Pact and other buffs that bring the same benefit.

The question was given with little context and no elaboration, but this is roughly what I expected would happen several patches ago when Demonic Pact started far outpacing Totem of Wrath. The answer suggests that both spellpower buffs will become like Trueshot Aura and increase based on the recipient's spellpower, not the caster's.

That is pretty much the best viable option for the two buffs anyway. Scaling ToW to the shaman's spellpower will still leave it in the dust behind Demonic Pact since warlocks in general and demo locks especially have inflated spellpower.

Rotation speculation

2010-04-07T20:30:00.000-07:00

So it's a long way from cataclysm, but it's still fun to think what the new stuff will do for our rotations. A lot will depend on cooldowns, scale factors, and damage of the new spells, none of which is out yet, but it's not too early to get an idea for what Cataclysm might mean for the relative complexity of your spells.

Note: I'm not hammering down priorities entirely, since shifting talent support may move spells around even relative to their current places. Basically setting up 4 priorities: Maintain debuffs, refresh DOTs, short cooldowns (the likes of conflag and chaos bolt), and filler.

Affliction
>25%
Debuffs: Haunt
DOTs: Corruption (one time), UA (once), Bane of Agony

Fel Flame (refresh UA)
Shadowbolt
<25%
Debuffs: haunt, improved shadowbolt
Filler: Drain soul (pandemic will maintain BoA and UA)
Cooldowns: Demon Soul

Compared to right now, looks like pretty much status quo above 25% - fel flame will likely be the pick to refresh UA instead of recasting it, but it's the same level of complexity we have right now. Execute range, however, the rotation collapses pretty hard - drain soul will be refreshing ALL THREE of your DOTs, and with haste no longer reducing duration, there'll be pretty much no worry about them falling, ever.

Demonology
>35%
Debuffs: Demon Bolt
DOTs: Corruption, immolate (once), BoD
Fel Flame (refresh immolate) *this assumes Fel Flame hits harder than the immolate nuke, which it almost certainly will with immolate's split spellpower coefficient
Shadowbolt
<35%
Debuffs: Demon bolt, ISB
DOTs: Corruption, BoD
Fel Flame to keep immolate going
Soulfire
Cooldowns: Demon Soul, Metamorphosis>Immolation Aura, Demonic Empowerment

Here, actually looks like a net gain in complexity for a complex spec - how demon soul and metamorphosis would interact is interesting in itself. This is, of course, assuming demon bolt is "Haunt for Pets" and not a new primary nuke, which it yet could be.

Destruction
>25%
DOTs: immolate (once), BoD
Fel Flame to keep immolate up
Short cooldowns: Conflag, CB
Incinerate
<25%
DOTs: BoD
Fel Flame for immo
Short cooldowns: Conflag, CB, shadowburn (depending on how good the execute boost is)
Incinerate
Cooldowns: Demon Soul

Not a big change for destruction as things stand. Fel Flame basically replaces immolate refresh. Only real change looks like it might be a Shadowburn execute. Unless shadowburn is Jesus Almighty sub 25% it's not going to be an execute on par with soulfire or drain soul, but it's an execute nonetheless, and it will help destruction compete with the other specs.

Not bad... not bad

2010-04-07T14:24:00.000-07:00

If you haven't, go familiarize yourself with the Cataclysm preview. Familiar? Good, now for me to talk.

Lots of changes for warlocks wrapped up in here, and they're not bad. Nothing overtly bad for the class, lots of things people want in forms that will actually improve the class. Even a demonic fusion that isn't just the demonic sacrifice with a different name that so many people ask for.

Big news includes ALL warlock DOTs benefitting from haste and crit innately, which is immense in many ways. Haste no longer reduces duration, but instead adds ticks to the base duration, and "clipping" only refreshes the duration, it no longer clips DOTs. Note it will still be a DPS loss to clip more than the last tick of a DOT this way - you'll be increasing GCDs spent maintaining the DOT's uptime, the tick timer reset is only one concern with DOT clipping.

New spells, Mastery bonuses (I'm not thrilled on them, but they're not bad I suppose), and more after the break.

New Spells

Fel Flame - An instant cast split-school (shadow/fire) spell that refreshes immolate and unstable affliction. Particularly with the changes to DOT clipping, this spell will probably find a place in all three spec's rotations (affliction only above 25% though) as a DOT soft refresh.

Dark Intent - Basically Focus Magic that mages have, except it works off of periodic crits instead of direct crits. With all DOTs critting base, this will be a nice one to trade with another warlock, or failing that pass to a shadow priest or resto druid.

Demon Soul - 2 minute cooldown that temporarily fuses you and your demon for 20 seconds or a set number of charges. As I said in last night's post, the class has always been saddled with a lack of cooldowns, and this is just what we need. It'll have to be a BIG one, of course, as you presumably lose your pet for the duration, but it could well be a key tool going forward.

Burning Ember - New spell for imps, stacking DOT, replacing Fire Shield. Not bad for imps, but might make for some trouble with autocast macros. Hopefully pet autocast will take advantage of spell queuing in the future.

Whiplash - Replacing succy's pathetic threat reducer with a point black knockback like shaman's have. Pretty hot, even if just for sheer grief potential at the mill in AB.

Demon Bolt - Mentioned in the talent change, new spell for demonology. Basically sounds like Haunt, but it increases pet damage.

Changed Spells
Hellfire no longer does recoil damage - could be good for saving the spell's bleak fate, but also means no more cheating repair bills.

Voidwalker's threat abilities are improved and Torment sounds like it's being made a true snap-agro taunt. Could make voidwalkers... Something, I hesitate to say they'll be good.

DPS curses (agony and doom) are being unpaired from curses and being named Bane of Doom and Bane of Agony. They're in an exclusive category with each other, but not with debuff curses (elements, tongues, weakness, exhaustion). A solid increase in warlock utility in all situations.

Metamorphosis is no longer subject to demon CC (this could also bode as a nerf to warlocks if Tree of Life form gets the same treatment).

Shadowburn is now a sub 25% execute - if it's big enough it might be Destruction's execute at last. If it's really big it might be a supplement to affliction or demonology's, unless those specs are unchained from Ruin at long last.

Mastery Bonuses
The mastery bonuses aren't as fun or interesting as Deep Healing or the Holy one that adds a HOT to priest heals, but they're not bad ones.

Affliction gets spell damage, spell crit, and shadow DOT damage.
Demonology gets spell damage, spell haste, and demon damage - demon damage applying to both pet and yourself while in demon form.
Destruction gets spell damage, critical damage (a strong boost to crit scaling for the spec), and fire direct damage.

Destruction's improved crit scaling from this may help alleviate it's ailing haste scaling - though haste may not reach such absurd levels in Cataclysm that it is currently, and Backdraft may yet get a change that itself fixes destruction's haste scaling.

Talent Changes
Pandemic is now an auto-refresh for CoA and UA, greatly simplifying Affliction's execute rotation.

Fel Domination is gone, Soul Burn>summon taking over that job.
Impending Doom - certain spells reduce the cooldown on Meta and Bane of Doom (presumably reducing the time until it ticks? Otherwise reducing the cooldown seems pointless)

Soul Burn
None of the specifics I hoped to get, except that there will be NO way to recover misused shards.

There was the laundry list of empowerment speculation I knew was coming but wasn't high on my hope list because it's honestly not that informative. Some nice stuff, though - empowered health stone acts like Last Stand, empowered UA does 30% of it's damage up front (similar to Devouring Plague), empowered drain life gains a 60% haste.

What I DON'T want to see in today's blue posts...

2010-04-07T03:07:00.000-07:00

Considering the lengthy threads of sometimes bizarre hopes and dreams for the Cataclysm preview later toady, it's easy to get caught up in what you want to see to the point that you may lose sight of the fact that we won't see much this early in the expansion cycle.

Of course, I can't overlook the room there is to hurt the class (or any class) with big changes. It's always there - the DK blood tree shitstorm has already started, for example, and their class preview isn't even in the first round, and the information available for the talent tree change can't be anything except neutral at worst, and pretty solidly positive considering the implications that mixed DPS/tank trees would have under the mastery system.

Warlocks I think are in a riskier position in this respect, though, because some of the worst things that could be done to the class are things the community is begging for.

So, what am I not hoping to see?

1. Permanent Demon Form
This is by far the biggest thing I don't want to see, and the reasons are legion. Metamorphosis is the single most lore-steeped spell in the game. Blizzard was hesitant to implement it to begin with because it's tied to a pretty profound (and not fully resolved) story arc - one that touched several zones in Azeroth, dominated four raids worth of content in Burning Crusade, had it's fringes in Icecrown Citadel and still has elements left to the imagination in the Emerald Dream.

Not only lore, but this is our class's only major DPS cooldown - lack of cooldowns is a shortcoming our class has been saddled with for a very long time. We've only got two of them, and demonic empowerment is pretty damn weak. And no implementation of soul burn will make it a comparable cooldown without being grossly overpowered.

It's also not in any way analogous to druid forms or warrior stances. It doesn't alter our class, it doesn't change our role, and it doesn't turn us from a healer with some piss poor DPS spells into a DPS spec the way Shadow Form does. Any implementation of a permanent metamorphosis would come coupled with significant nerfs not just to Meta, but to the spec around it.

Secondary nerfs, loss of our only significant cooldown, diluted spec flavor and blurred class identity... There's nothing good about permanent demon form. If the people who want it ever get it, they won't be happy with what they get, because it won't be what they want.

2. New Minions
WHAAA? YOU DON'T WANT NEW PETS ABNOT? OMG!

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm all for a new pet, but I think it's an ill advised move unless a LOT is done in other areas. Right now, our pets are lacking in usability as it is. Adding a sixth when the five we have aren't in a good place is only going to reinforce the problem. Worse so if all three trees remain chained to their current minions of choice, there will be no niche for a newcomer to fill. A lot of this will depend on the talent tree changes, which I doubt we'll see more than a bullet list of rough examples of today, but it comes down to our current pets: Fix what we've got, not what we've not.

I include permanent doomguard in this, as well. I hope to see expanded roles for both doomguard and infernal, but I don't think this is their place. Like I said, though, we do have quite a shortage of cooldowns...

3. Shit Hunters have just because
Class identity is a frail thing - warlocks have been stuck between mages and hunters forever, and the comparison will never go away, nor is it always bad in and of itself. However, it's a dangerous comparison when it starts taking aspects that define the other classes and bringing them to the Warlock side.

I'm more open to pet talent trees than some of the other things people want. Buffs are buffs, and a lot of good could come from them despite the class distinction side of things. However, my main thrust here is permanent enslavement. We already do that, effectively, it's the point of our pets, adding a pick-your-own aspect to the process just comes back to point two: A sixth pet when the five we have aren't really in a great place.

4. Affliction filler just because
Pure stubbornness on my part here, but the arguments about shadowbolt not being in the affliction tree are plain and simple retarded. Using spells outside of your talent tree is the norm in most classes, even your primary attack. Affliction's not even the most grievous offender, just look where improved death strike is.

Thankfully this one also sounds like one that won't be happening anyway - Blizzard has already dropped hint that range and threat reduction talents would be homogenized. Ruin stands as a stickier one to unwind - simply giving affliction a crit bonus talent for shadowbolt would still leave ruin an option for immense crits.

5. Just another laundry list of soul burn speculation
The Blizzcon list was interesting, but still read like the product of an early brainstorming session, not a class preview. I want to know more about the new shard system as much as anyone, but I don't want a bland unsatisfying brianstorm list. I want to know in real terms how big they want shards to be - how much they'll alter spells or boost DPS, how many you'll really have access to in combat, how they'll actually be handled as a resource system, how much not using them or using them poorly will hurt you and what options you have to mitigate that hurt...

A laundry list of empowered spell effects is certainly one part of this, but the real functions of the system are still pretty vague, and a list of empowered effects won't do anything to shed light on them.

Cataclysm Class Preview Tomorrow!

2010-04-06T13:50:00.000-07:00

Warlocks, along with shamans and priests will be in the first round of class previews on April 7th. Included in this will be new spells from 81-85, mastery bonuses to all of our trees, and outlines of some of the talent changes.

I'll probably have a lot of posts on the subject once details are up. Of course, almost all the changes that we see tomorrow will change by the time Cataclysm goes live - beta invites aren't even out yet after all. But I'll still have a lot to say about them, and more as new updates are given and the nondisclosure act is broken and eventually lifted entirely, as well as the inevitable chain of mini patches after launch itself.

End to all your shard problems

2010-03-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

Seriously, I get a bit ticked off when people complain about shards. Even on extended wipe nights, it's entirely possible to maintain at or near a full bag of shards all night long.

How? It's an amazing secret called Drain Soul. As soon as a wipe is inevitable (somebody critical dies and can't be/won't be rezed) start draining, especially if you're going to "just go with it," you'll get plenty of time to refill. Drain soul averages over 1 shard per full channel, the glyph procs off of tick shards and not just death shards now, and the proc rate is a lot less terrible than it used to be.

If you can get 2 shards per wipe, assuming you're using 4 per attempt (pet, soulwell, soulstone, shatter), you can go twice as many attempts before running out. If you can average 3 per attempt, you'll almost be able to outlast the 40 attempt limit.

Other do's and don't's to help you out in the break.

DO come to raid with a full goddamn bag.
DO destroy your spell or firestone (both if you'll be changing specs at some point) and make new ones before filling your bag. 5 charges will last you through a typical 4-5 hour raid with 0 shards required in the field.
DO make a soulstone and summon your pet before filling up. It only saves one shard, but you're the one complaining, not me.
DON'T DPS trash if you're not at full bag. Trash DPS is srs bsns and you can get tons of shards even on small pulls. I can get around 10-15 just on the two Val'kyrs that respawn around the LK teleporter. Any of the three wings I can potentially get a full bag out of, excepting trash before Valithria which doesn't respawn. Valithria adds give shards.
DO know what does and doesn't give shards. Ninja off a drain soul on the last 1% of non-urgent adds on Valithria for free shards as you go. Not all boss adds give shards, and of course some, like blood beasts, are too DPS urgent to risk draining.

Now, here's a fun fact: I don't do ANY of the do's in this do/don't list. I come with 1 charge left on my soulstone, 7 shards in my bag and no pet summoned, and jump ass backwards into Heroic Sindragosa or Putricide wipe nights, and I have no shard problems, ever. If you drain on trash and during wipes, you can easily get enough shards to keep going for progression content.

Eating my words

2010-03-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

My logic a while back was sound, but I was off by a week per step on the ICC buff ramp up (failed to account for unlock week before hard modes officially started).

Anyway, Cataclysm testing will be starting at some point this month. As always there's sure to be a nondisclosure agreement, and as always you can be sure somebody will break it very quickly. I'll be collecting all the pertinent warlock leaks I can get my four fingered stubby hands around and collecting it here.

Of course, by saying I intend to collect NDA violations I also pretty much promise to violate the NDA myself, so I guess that means no beta invite for me. Oh well, Starcraft 2 is still fun.

Life Tap hotfix

2010-03-28T01:59:00.000-07:00

Warlock’s using a lower rank of Life Tap will receive a reduced benefit from their shadow spell power.

Pretty simple one, just adding the downranking penalty that most damage and healing spells have, I was kind of surprised this wasn't in out of the gate.

The thing to remember here, this doesn't penalize low level players. Downranking penalties only kick in on a spell rank 11 levels after you can first train it, at which point your spellpower is multiplied by (spell level+11)/caster level for that spell. A low level warlock will always have full scaling on his current top rank of life tap, but a level 80 warlock will only have full scaling on rank 8. Rank 7 will have an extra (68+11)/80=0.9875 spellpower multiplier, and down hill from there. Rank 1, which was getting full scaling before the hotfix, will have a 0.2125 spellpower multiplier.

Fel Armor hotfix

2010-03-25T01:11:00.000-07:00

About a week prior to 3.3.3, someone reported that fel armor was keeping talented improvements when swapping specs. I tested, and posted screenshots in the official forums showing that, at the time, it wasn't - within 2-3 seconds of swapping spec, fel armor and your weapon enchant updated to their new talented (or untalented) forms.

Tuesday and most of Wednesday, however, that was actually happening - fel armor would retain it's improved form when changing spec, but weapon stones would not. A hotfix went live at some point Wednesday to address the matter, however, changing specs now wipes out armor enchants.

Told ya' so

2010-03-23T17:32:00.001-07:00

Known Issues

Life Tap: The tooltip for this ability incorrectly states that the health lost is modified by spirit. Health loss is fixed and does not get increased by the Warlock's spirit.

Well I did.

3.3.3 Checklist

2010-03-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

3.3.3 is a bit patch for warlocks, but surprisingly very little changes. So, what do you want to do as a warlock in 3.3.3? Read on...

Affliction warlocks will want to reevaluate their spec. Dark pact now outscales life tap and no longer has it's range and LOS drawbacks.
Demo warlocks will not want to reevaluate their spec. Your immolate is fairly weak. It's DPCT is propped up by a long duration, but it's still a small part of your DPS. Buffing it with Aftermath or Glyph of Immolate are not viable options.
Destruction warlocks using Glyph of Imp will want to swap to Glyph of Immolate now.

Collectors will have their work up for them, though, plenty of new things up for easy access today.

Mount collectors who don't have PVP mounts will want to cash in their battleground tokens and Wintergrasp commendations - 50k honor for PVP mounts now, instead of 90 assorted emblems, making them significantly easier to farm if your faction hast he general disadvantage on your battlegroup.
Pet collectors will want to pick up Lil' Smokey and the Pet Bombling, formerly engineer only pets, but now available to everyone. Wait a few weeks on these... the materials justify a price of 50-150g at most, but they'll likely be moving for a lot today. Hit up the Wonderworks in Dalaran for another robot pet.
Been saving your Frozen Orbs? Time to cash them in on Runed or Crusader orbs. Granted the price of both is going to plummet, but if you haven't gotten your TOC or Ulduar crafted epics, their mats just got slashed, too, so for a dozen or so runed orbs, you could have a nice new belt, bracers, or robe.
While you're cashing in the Frozen Orbs, tailors will be able to pick up a new flying carpet pattern for 6 orbs (costing 4 additional to craft, as well as one of each blue cloth - not a bad price to pay if you're on your way to that Blue Dragonhawk).

Hunter tears bring up good point... unintentionally.

2010-03-21T00:14:00.000-07:00

Very little good seems to be coming from this thread, but there's one interesting post in the lot, which is mostly interesting because it applies to more than just hunters. Disappeared in an increasingly surreal back and forth between hunters and Ghostcrawler... which peaks around the time GC actually downloads simcraft and a DPS spreadsheet and starts kicking ass with actual numbers.

Anyway, argument at hand is about DPS neglecting survival talents. The claim is that we blame the game or healers for death and ignore the fight in favor of DPS.

The reality is a long shot off, and it also explains exactly why DPS specs almost universally ignore survival talents. It's not a mater of burdening healers, it's actually the exact opposite. I'll actually let GC explain it himself: "Now days someone is at 100%, will hit 100% in the next couple of GCDs, or will be dead."

Rant continues in the break, with cataclysm speculation and such.

Raid damage these days comes in two flavors: Avoidable and Unavoidable.

Unavoidable damage, like the damage auras all over the place in ICC and not uncommon throughout all of WotLK, is just that. The raid has to eat it, you can't avoid it, so it has to be healed (and by extension is healable).

Avoidable damage comes most notably in forms like empowered flame orbs, defile, and shadow crash with a couple dozen stacks off the Animus up, which will take out significant portions of the raid if not properly avoided, but also in forms like malady of the mind or malleable goo that will still indirectly cause wipes by secondary effects if not by damage alone.

In all cases avoidable damage simply must be avoided, not survived. No amount of survival talents lets you eat a full pungent blight, or let's you do more than about 200 dps after taking a malleable goo to the face. Most forms of avoidable damage can't be healed, or are at least sufficiently difficult to heal that not avoiding them simply isn't an attractive option. This also completely removes the value of survival talents - why reduce the damage by 5% when you shouldn't be taking it to begin with?

On the other hand, unavoidable damage is, by principle, healable. There are considerable discrepancies in survival talents available to various specs - even within warlock specs, affliction has no viable access to soul link. Destruction can trade less than 40 dps for it, demo has it out of the box, affliction loses 10 talent points for it, and many of those points have to come from powerful must-have or over-budgeted talents. Most classes don't have an easy 20% damage reduction like warlocks do, either, and for the entire raid to be healable through damage auras and unavoidable explosions, it's balanced around the lowest common denominator... which is roughly zero.

Now... Cataclysm. One of the stated goals of the mastery system is to move the bulk of damage boosters down into those green numbers at the bottom of the spec, so the entire talent consists of talents that actually alter the way spells work. The way it's been explained several times, talents like Bane would be the bottom end of complexity - simple damage boost by altering the spell, not by adding +5% to it. So a survival talent is still a DPS talent because it adds a few points down in the mastery numbers.

Ideally, every talent pick would be function vs. funciton, not damage vs. function, and specs would simply have room for stuff like range talents, threat reduction, damage reduction, and so forth.

This all sounds fine until you start looking at raids... For every Firefighter or Blood Prince fight out there slowly driving every healer in your raid to alcoholism there's a Brutallus or Blood Queen demanding the best out of your DPS. You also still have to consider discrepancies between classes.

While I'm tentatively interested by the goal of making tanking and healing closer to DPS in that you can "catch up" again after a mistake (rather than the current reality where a third of the raid is dead before the mistake is even apparent) I don't think it'll pan out that Blizzard will make survival talents attractive to DPS specs.

There is one case, though, where I can see them pulling it off. Let's say a 51 point tree has 45 DPS talent points available. There's 6 points for survival - nether protection and molten skin, for example. This is a touchy line to follow, people have been spoiled by tightly tuned DPS trees this expansion, but vanilla and BC speccing wasn't far off, there was very often at least 3-5 points of slack in a spec. That's not a bad thing, unless it goes far enough that talent trees feel like sparse mechanics just for maxing out your mastery bonus.

A lot of people are worried about a lot of things regarding Cataclysm, but I think I'm in a pretty small group to say this is my biggest worry: That they won't be able to "fix" healing and tanking the way they want to without either screwing DPS (or tuning encounters around sub-optimal DPS, which also isn't an attractive idea).

It'll be quite a while before people can decide if this happened or not, just like the other things I've mentioned worrying about for Cataclysm. It most likely won't be apparent until at least tier 12 heroics. Blizzard openly admits to badly undertuning Naxx and possibly over-nerfing Ulduar easy modes, but tier 11 will still be a first tier raid, regardless, Karazhan wasn't exactly a telling preview of tiers 5 and 6 itself, and it was better tuned than Naxx, though it was pretty overtuned at first.

Overtuned is generally a bit better than under - you'll never screw someone by nerfing a boss they've killed, even if you do annoy a few. Consider the relatively modest complaining about the nerf train that ran over Ulduar and dragged it for seven miles before the train exploded, but consider on the other hand the complaining that surely would have ensued if around December '08 Naxx was buffed to the point that two thirds of the guilds running around in Naxx gear could no longer clear the place. The ill advised Hodir hard mode buff generated almost as much QQ as the complete collection of Ulduar nerfs, and that buff truly impacted a small handful of guilds. Even the single guild that got it before the buff still had Firefighter between them and Algalon when the buff was reverted, so they weren't even in the world first running.

Get off my armor class!

2010-03-08T19:20:00.000-08:00

Some of the first meaningful details of the Mastery system were unveiled today. It's not much, and the concrete details offered don't apply to warlocks, but one notable bit that all clothies will appreciate is this:

You will also gain a small amount of Mastery by wearing gear of your intended armor type (such as plate for paladins)

This isn't likely to be the end of boomkins and ele shamans looking to cloth for gear, sheer abundance of caster cloth will always make it a fall back plan when elemental doesn't get an spirit-free pair of boots some tier, but hopefully mastery will be a strong enough stat that it'll be a meaningful contribution, particularly if combined with some reforged spirit, it may become a better item than an ideal cloth.

If this same armor class bonus scales with itemlevel, it might make for some interesting consideration in gear, but it's not likely to be an immense one unless they chose to make this armor class mastery bonus significant enough for hybrids to take spirit gear over better cloth items. Itemlevel could be about as good as intellect is currently - it helps but is generally safe to ignore, and it's on everything anyway. Thankfully, if this is the case, it only applies to armor slots, not jewelry, weapons, or trinkets. So, there'll be no mastery bonus for using a high level healer trinket instead of a good but lower level DPS one, trinkets will still stand on their own.

Some of the mastery bonuses shown thus far are quite interesting. All the trees previewed today and at Blizzcon have one simple % increase to damage or healing, basically the hole where all the plain jane talents are being dumped. Some trees only have increased crit, crit bonus, or haste, but some have quite interesting effects. One of Holy's mastery bonuses is a HoT tacked on to all direct heals.

Dark Pact range fix

2010-03-08T17:42:00.000-08:00

Dark pact no longer has meaningful range (or line of sight) restrictions on the PTR. This is another kick in the nuts for life tap affliction, but also a very important change if dark pact is going to be a consistent contender as a raid spec in cataclysm. The general theme of the next expanion means we can likely expect a lot more dragons, and that's the main type of boss where that 30 yard limit becomes a serious issue.

Life tap coefficient, future of Dark Pact

2010-03-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

Life tap is now working on the PTR, and the conversion is... strange.

Cost: 1490+1.5*spirit
Return: 1490+0.5*spellpower (untalented).

I'm assuming the cost is in error, as this will cause a much larger cost at lower gear levels when the return is much lower. However, our primary concern is the return. To that extent, note that the scaling coefficient IS indeed lower than 0.8, meaning dark pact will outscale talented life tap with sufficient gear.

As currently, the main consideration between DP affliction and LT affliction is which one returns more mana.

Dark pact: 1200+0.96*spellpower
Life tap: 1.2*(1490+0.5*spellpower)

Math after the break...

The break even point when LT=DP is solved thusly:
1200+.96sp=1.2*(1490+.5*sp)
1200+.96sp=1788+.6sp
.36sp=588
sp=1633.333 (repeating of course)

WOW. That's really low, I had that much unbuffed before fel armor back in Naxx. Of course, being a raid consideration, DP vs. LT is going to be based on raid buffed spellpower. Most level 80 warlocks these days have considerably more than 1633 straight off of armory, so life tap affliction looks pretty much obsolete with this change, the only meaningful downside now being loss of effective range on large bosses facing the raid, as dark pact range can potentially become very restrictive. That's not an exceptionally common situation, as so many bosses are tanked facing away from ranged and many very large bosses (dragons in general, as the tail is just as deadly as the head) are tanked parallel to the bulk of the raid.

Pets don't get Strength of Chin

2010-03-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

So starting this week, King Chin and the angry orc are in Icecrown Citadel buffing players. Pets don't get the buff, though.

Intentional? Unknown yet. Big deal? Not really. But goddamnit I'm burning a lot of mammoth treats here.

As the buff grows (it steps up in 5% increments topping at 30% health, healing, and mana), it'll become a real issue. At 5-10% it's trivial, but at 15-20% it starts meaning something, and at the full 30%, it's going to be about 6% off a demo lock. That does leave a good window for a possible fix. Assuming today's 5% rollout represents the start of a schedule, the other 25% will be spread over the next 15 weeks, putting 30% in the early to mid June range.

Cataclysm Itemization Pt. 2: Hit/Crit

2010-03-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

I left this out of the post the other day because it was already getting pretty damn long. This is something I expected from past statements about bosses scaling instead of just gear and hit/crit chances being added to mob tooltips, but this is the first time that it's actually been confirmed.

Ratings will be steeper in Cataclysm, and creatures in later tiers of content will be harder to hit or crit, similar to how level-83 mobs are harder to hit or crit than level-80 mobs.

So, just to theorize, let's say the tier 11 hit cap is still 17%. That might suggest a 19% hit cap for tier 12, 21% for teir 13, and so on. I'm actually going to guess tier 11 will end up having a lower hit cap than current content, and the old standard will be about mid-expansion, with Deathwing's raid having a higher hit cap (Let's just toss out 22%, check back in two years to see how far off I was).

This means having reserve hit gear is more important than ever - that extra ring in the bank isn't just covering for the one day the shadow priest doesn't show, but for the next tier's increased cap as well.

The crit bit is interesting too. Level 83/skull elites have a built in crit suppression that lowers your chance to crit against them. In theory it doesn't look like it'll have much effect on warlocks as-is, we're not crazy about crit but we've geared considerable amounts all expansion, so while we'll see a drop in crit rate every teir, I don't expect we'll be stacking crit specifically because of it, unless the suppression is bigger than the normal growth in crit rating. This change will mean a lot more for melee than casters due to the single roll miss system they use. Dual wielding classes in particular will be affected by this, as they already have to deal with very real (and surprisingly low) crit caps where their white damage no longer benefits from crit without cranking up hit.

Similar applies to avoidance, as well, meaning a smoother progression of gear from tiers. In theory, properly balanced, this new system could work for at least several more tiers than the existing system before stat bloat starts breaking the game and forcing brute force adjustments like Sunwell and Icecrown both saw. Imagine instead breaking Chill of the Throne into thirds and putting parts in Ulduar and ToC so it's a gradual change instead of suddenly Arthas says dodge less.

Cataclysm Itemization

2010-03-01T21:33:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you're aware, Blizzard wrote a bit of a dissertation on how stats will work in Cataclysm.

Spellpower is not *quite* gone - caster weapons will still have spellpower not derived from intellect. Presumably this will be a holdover from right now - caster weapons trade itemization from their physical DPS to elevated spellpower. Doing the same with intellect would have secondary effects, as intellect isn't just spellpower. Non weapon gear will only have intellect. Also, while it's not specifically stated for spellpower, attack power will remain on some procs. I suspect spellpower procs like most of our good trinkets will remain spellpower.

Mastery is still a big vague nothing - it'll be a while before we see any specifics.

Gem stat colors are being shifted around, perhaps there will finally be good blue stats. Hit is a likely blue stat as stated. I'd personally like to see either crit or hate moved to blue, or preferably mastery made a blue stat. Without spirit, our only blue DPS stat would be hit.

Finally, the specifics of reforging have been revealed. When you convert a stat with reforging, you only get half as much of the new stat back. So while it can make a bad item mediocre or a mediocre one ok, it lowers the overall itemization of the item, meaning ideally you'll still want unmodified gear. Some conversions aren't allowed, as well - you can't just strip all the stamina off your gear for more int. Not revealed is if reforging will be a level 80 option or limited to at or near 85. If the former, the best use the ability will ever see is to burn allt he remaining spirit off your gear the day 4.0 hits and stack up some haste or mastery.

Oh PTR, you're so funny

2010-02-26T23:26:00.000-08:00

On the PTR currently, life tap is converting 0 health into 0 mana. That's some damn good spellpower scaling there, even the base conversion isn't working.

This of course means that right now, all 3.3.3 sims must be taken with a huge grain of salt. Life tap assumptions right now are based completely on conjecture, there's no way to test in game to confirm assumptions.

On the bright side, this does seem to be the first PTR since the conflag redesign on which conflag actually worked correctly.

No spec change for Demo 3.3.3

2010-02-26T22:52:00.000-08:00

The immolate change is big for demo, no denying, and at first glance it does look like a good trade to drop improved demonic tactics for aftermath to increase immolate's periodic damage. IDT already serves a very small role in demonic pact uptime, and that role will be effectively ending in 3.3.3. The damage from IDT isn't that impressive...

However, a look at immolate as demo isn't heartening either. Demo is a very nuke-favored spec, it gets even less direct benefit from it's DOT effects than destro. Corruption's role is as a proc generator, and immolate's DPCT is propped up primarily by it's very long duration and locked in by 4pt10. Ënmity of Mal'ganis, among others, have already tested the change, and despite the huge buff to immolate, demo's immolate is just too weak for Aftermath to pay off, even against the small benefit of IDT, changing the spec for aftermath works out to a loss of over 100 dps in helter skelter mode, higher yet in patchwerk mode.

EJ's current round of tests agree, and have some other interesting notes. While Destruction's buff is also huge, it's still hampered by it's poor crit and haste scaling. It performs very strongly in T9 gear profiles, beating out affliction and demo, but falls behind even demo in T10 profiles. Right now, what destro needs doesn't look to be simple damage buffs - the things that will keep it up there in T10 gear will disproportionately buff it in lower gear. Cataclysm will require some very wide spread work to address haste and crit difficulties suffered by a number of specs, not just destro. The mastery system may be a strong route of this - for example, propping up a spec's crit scaling is often as simple as increasing it's crit bonus. Some of the mastery previews included crit bonus as a mastery spec effect.

Life tap change

2010-02-24T16:48:00.000-08:00

As of the latest PTR update, Life Tap is being returned to spellpower scaling. Note no changes are being made to glyph of life tap or our other spirit scaling options, just the size of life tap.

Short story, assuming life tap is being returned to it's old status (which was equal scaling pre-talents to dark pact), this basically marks the end of dark pact affliction. Life tap's higher base (1490 vs. 1200) and 1.2x multiplier from talents will keep it ahead of dark pact at all gear levels. The tired "less healer pressure" argument is as invalid as ever - affliction can life tap four times more than it's mana use, and still get immense overhealing just from corruption.

Even if it's not equal, if life tap's coefficient is greater or equal to 0.8, life tap affliction will remain ahead of dark pact affliction at all gear levels.

BLIZZERD EHATS WAROLKS

2010-02-24T00:06:00.000-08:00

Ever since the first fear nerf (which couldn't really be called a fear nerf, as it limited duration on all forms of CC in PVP), the favored cry of the bad has been "Blizzard hates Warlocks," sometimes accompanied by such favorites as, "They should just delete the class and give everyone a level 80 (class)," or, "The class serves no purpose anymore," or my personal favorite, "Things were so much better in [vanilla/BC/3.0]."

I've got a lot of opinions on this, but to sum them all up, warlocks right now are in a good place. Overall in Wrath of the Lich King, we've been in the best place we've been for PVE ever, though it's been a rough ride for PVPers.

BUT VANILLA WAS BETTER!

Ok, I'll bite, let's talk about how things used to be...

The bulk of vanilla locked warlocks under the debuff cap. 40 people got to compete for 8 debuff slots. After CoE, CoS, mark, and the sunder stack (the priority debuffs that didn't get pushed off), that doesn't leave much. Even after the debuff limit was increased to 16, they were precious things, dots never went full duration. Curse of Doom? Have fun. What this meant was that every spec we had was a shadowbolt spam spec. Hell, affliction (SM/Ruin at least) was the least DOT based spec we had - shadowbolt was higher DPCT than any of our DOTs, mostly because DOT scaling was terrible. Not that shadowbolt's was much better, by the way, frostbolt's damage with fireball's cast time and higher mana cost than either.

We were specifically designed to be an inferior caster for several reasons: We had DOTs, we had pets, and we weren't mages. Mages were intended to be the supreme caster, hands down. Our dots weren't feasible in raids, our pets weren't viable in raids, and the only threat reduction we had (in raids that were highly threat sensitive) was so deep down our worst DPS tree that by the time we got it, we didn't need it anymore.

We were in a good place though. We had three specs that could do comparable DPS. They were basically the same spec, one had strong shadowbolts, one had stronger shadowbotls but with longer cast times, and one had good shadowbolts with low threat. That was it, but at least we weren't, say, Paladins, who had one functional tree. Retribution was so broken Holy was better DPS. Protection was so broken Holy was a better tank. And holy couldn't even heal all that well next to a priest, let alone DPS or tank.

About the time that guilds discovered you didn't need multiple warlocks past Garr, the class started seeing a rapid decline in high end raiding. It didn't help that they eventually figured out you didn't have to banish to kill Garr easily. There was a long period when one warlock for Curse of Elements and one for Curse of Shadows was normal... Then somebody pointed out that the only class actually benefitting from CoS was the warlocks and you didn't even need that, just one for CoE.

Combined with the complete lack of sublte design in 40 man raiding, and things spiralled out of control. Some of the frontier guilds had a boomkin, cat druid, and warlock there only for the sake of buffing their array of mage, rogue, and fury DPS, who accounted for every other DPS slot. This worked because there was no distributed raid utility - all the buffs could be covered with only a few characters, which left the rest of your raid slots open for the classes designed to be best at what they do - holy priests, prot warriors, mages, rogues... Fury warriors got in due to runaway rage generation, which Blizzard eventually nerfed hard enough that they barely saw the light of day again until Wrath.

Toss in a shard system that would require warlocks in a raid with a "standard" 5 locks to bring 50+ shards and still run out half way through with no way to replace most of them, and it was hard to keep things fun raiding as a warlock. I developed an unhealthy love of Jagermeister and Mountain Dew during my BWL months. Raiding 7 days a week back then you could still validly call your guild casual, and it took everyone 3-4 hours of farming to pay for those raids. God forbid you were in content that actually called for flasks, a server could only spawn enough black lotus to cover maybe three guilds using flasks on the whole raid..

BUT THEN BC MADE IT BETTER

Yep, so much better we... still spammed a single spell. The same spell as in vanilla. Yeah, we out DPS'd mages, and shadowbolt's runaway scaling meant that it got bigger crits than it did for most of Wrath, but the only thing that kept us where we were was the fact that Blizzard was extremely lax about PVE balance during BC.

We spent that entire expansion with the Sword of Fucking Damocles dangling over our heads. Class supremacy as a design rule was still in effect, and every patch brought twin worries: That the destro tree would be reposessed for the fire spec it was meant to be or that mage caster supremacy would be enforced. It got talked about, the threat was real. The only thing standing between warlocks and three more tiers of CoE bot was a lack of timely developer response to severe mage scaling issues.

Just to rephrase, the reason warlock DPS was tops is that Blizzard allowed a balance situation to continue for four tiers of content. The exact same situation (only worse) than warlocks chaffed under for about two months in the early phases of the Icecrown Citadel rollout before Blizzard decided it was unacceptable and took steps to change it, and people acted like it was the end of the world and just time to reroll mage now. Mages had that for two goddamn years, no wonder they cry so much.

Throughout our darkest times in Wrath, warlocks have never been even half as far behind mage DPS as we were in vanilla. We weren't even as far behind them as they were behind us in Sunwell, and they didn't fare badly at all. For the first time ever, we're MEANT to be on par with mages, and when we're falling behind, Blizzard has reacted, as they did with 3.3.2, and are continuing to do in 3.3.3.

When the class was nerfed for PVP several times in the Ulduar timeframe, it always received buffs PVE side that worked out to net gains in DPS. These hurt scaling and led to problems down the road, but right now we're reaping the fruits of those problems, and in powerful, game changing forms. From Glyph of Quick Decay to the new Demonology nuke rotation,

BUT MY SHADOW BOLT CRIT FOR 11k IN SUNWELL AND BARELY THAT NOW!

And your DPS has close to trippled nonetheless. This is what having a spell rotation does. Warlock DPS is no longer stands or falls on a single spell's scaling. Even though that spell scales lower and is generally weaker than it once was, DPS rotations involving it do far more damage than the old spam specs.

BUT BUT BUT DEMONIC SACRIFICE!

Let's face it: Demonic Sacrifice was never anything except an apology for a design oversight that left us with a large chunk of our class being completely inviable in a raid setting. It carried a certain flavor, but was nothing more than a clunky substitute for a broken mechanic. It's taken a long time, but demonic sacrifice hasn't served any purpose for a long time, our pets finally, after four years, worked when we started raiding in Wrath. For a long time, neither pet class actually GOT to be a pet class.

I was pretty dumbfounded when several times after the removal of Demonic Sacrifice, I read posts on the lines of, "A pet class isn't what I signed on for." A pet class is exactly what you sign on for when you click the purple button. Reality forced the class to be a totem class for one expansion and a one button caster that had to cast a few spells every half hour for another, but the description and talent trees have always been that of a pet class.

So let's look us right now:

No more mage supremacy - we are no longer an inferior caster by design rule.
Three viable talent trees (two of which have viable variations). More raid-viable specs than we've ever had, and they're not all different ways to do the same thing like the last time we had more than one good spec.
Raid viable pets. The first time this has happened for us ever.
Developer action when DPS is being outscaled by (or outscaling) other classes.
Complexity. People have been saying "warlock is hard" since day one, yet our PVE history has been one of almost nothing but pressing one. Single. Button. My keyboard only dates back to Hyjal, but there's no 2 left on my 2 key, it completely wore off back before I even saw serious work on Supremus. From six tiers of shadowbolt spam, our simplest rotation now consists of four spells, and our most complex consists of nine(!). Even our top PVP spec of BC was SL/SL, a simple but brutally effective spec, no fun for anyone involved with either end of it.

BUT BUT BUT CATACLYSM!
Yep, Cataclysm. I'm confident. The class is a lot better now than it was in BC, and several things stand promising in Cataclysm.

Flexibility of spec. None of our specs have much wiggle room right now, talent trees bloated badly in Wrath, and not just for warlocks. Blizzard's biggest design promise (and biggest design challenge) is a revamp of all talent trees to get rid of this ongoing bloat.

An end to shards as we know them, and the introduction of a unique resource system in it's place. People like to call it a recycled DK mechanic, but the similarities between the proposed shard system and the DK rune system starts and ends with the fact that both are integrated into the UI. It shares that effect with the combo point system, and totem bars, too, but it's no more similar to them for it.

"Dumbing down" of stats? We as warlocks are losing two stats from consideration: Spirit and spellpower. In the place of spellpower, however, Intellect becomes a significant stat. It's one we've never taken into consideration when gearing before. In place of spirit comes Mastery, which if you want complexity, there's probably going to be the most complex and mathy stat the game's ever seen - it will do something completely different for every spec. So we're losing two stats, but gaining two others. And one of those two will offer more complexity than anything we've ever had to worry about when it comes to itemization. The character system is also extending with the Path of the Titans and Archaeology glyphs, adding more specialization factors to consider, and Reforging adding a freak curveball to itemization.

Developer attitudes promise to continue the current policies of viable talent trees, distributed raid support, and most importantly response to PVE balance in the timeframe of minor patch cycles rather than expansion cycles as it was in the past.

The worst worry we face in Cataclysm is a poor transition into tier 11 content. As a first tier raid I'm sure it'll be the pinnacle of raid difficulty, just like Molten Core, Karazhan, or Naxx were as they stymied guilds for weeks on end. Oh, wait... Few warlocks are likely to see content where it becomes an issue while it's still an issue if Blizzard continues as they have in Wrath.

BUT MY DPS ARE STILL BAD!

One last parting shot for Mr. Bold Text Guy: Never let the fact that your class's DPS is falling behind others be an excuse for your DPS. Eternal's Boomkin Andris put a number of DPS parses at the top of the Boomkin top lists over at WOL, he saw numbers pushing 8k in TOC. And Balance had some terrible scaling issues, worse than any warlock specs.

3.3.2 was less than a 5% buff for any warlock spec. Yet many, MANY people claimed to see 10-15% increases or more. Why? Because they were comfortable using the "warlocks are nerfed" excuse and ok with putting out poor DPS. When they finally got buffed they actually started playing up to par and getting numbers up to par. They could have been up to par before, they were happy coasting along being just good enough.

The whole point of getting an ideal spec, tweaking your gems, arguing about whether conflag or chaos bolt should be cast first or if it's worth stacking shadow embrace ahead of DOTs is that your DPS is never good enough, no matter how good you are.

People like to say serious min/max raiders have no lives. We real people have lives, we're happy being just good enough. Just think about the attitudes here. "Never good enough," vs. "Eh, it's done, what's the difference?"

There's some professional basement dwellers playing WoW while mommy and daddy pay the bills, sure, but I'm not one of them, and I don't personally know any of them. I have a career, even if it is a dead end IT job. I have a girlfriend, and live in daily fear of conversations involving the M word. I'm under thirty and own a house debt free in a troubled economy. I've built my career on the attitude that the job's never good enough. That's an attitude that's been associated with success for centuries. It's gotten me ever job I've ever held, it's kept my current job through layoffs, a merger, and a recession.

That job is why I can piss away half my evenings killing imaginary internet monsters, and the other half talking about it, and I bring the same attitude to my imaginary internet monster killing. It's gotten me into guilds beyond my gear's worth for my entire WoW career - guild were I earn my keep, not get carried to great gear. It's gotten me into one of Scarlet Crusade's top guilds. It could get me into better guilds if I tried, but I'm staying in Eternal until Kdorf kicks me out, and my cat Loki is just too cute for the guild to let him. That's another rant, entirely, though.

Immolate critting: It's that big

2010-02-22T18:02:00.000-08:00

I don't actually mean big in terms of DPS. It's actually kind of medium at that, but I'll cover that momentarily.

It's big because it's a significant design decision by Blizzard. Immolate, as it stands on the PTR, does not require a talent, glyph, set bonus, or any outside utility. It is capable of dealing critical hits in its BASE FORM. If that doesn't excite you yet, read on for the implications for other specs as well.

It's only the second periodic damage spell in the game capable of doing this, and the first was Conflag, which is a talent itself anyway. This has wide implications for warlocks as a whole - from level 1 when you go to your trainer and spend those first precious 10 copper for Immolate, you have a DOT capable of critting.

Of course, your crit rate is dick like everyone's at level 1, you'll probably hit level 5 before you even see it crit, but the point is less the DPS gained by level 1 warlocks and more what this change means for other spells. It means the "glyph/talent/bonus or gtfo" rule of periodic damage crits isn't set in stone. There's hope yet for Cataclysm killing off talents like Pandemic. Hell, Shadow Form's tooltip might fit on screen in the future.

What it means RIGHT NOW
Short term... This doesn't mean as much. It will solidify immolate as the life tap alternative glyph for destro, glyph of imp's days are numbered at best. Immolate is slightly over 7% of destro's DPS. With BIS crit rates, it'll be gaining around 30-40% damage (remember the nuke portion can already crit, only the relatively weak periodic damage is actually going up).

Demo gets a nifty boost from this as well, with it's high crit rate getting packed onto extra ticks. However, immolate is less than 6% of demo's DPS - demo is a heavily nuke favored spec, arguably moreso than destruction (corruption is there more for procs that benefit nukes than for periodic damage). While this is certainly a nice boon for demonology, leave your glyph of immolate at home, you're not getting away from glyph of life tap, even at next to no spirit from gear. Base plus raid buffs is enough to keep it in the number 3 spot.

Imp force-cast macros

2010-02-22T17:47:00.000-08:00

This is something I haven't touched on previously, but there's been a lot of talk about it for some time on Elitist Jerks, and it's spilled over to the class forums lately, so you've probably heard about it.

Supposedly, it's a DPS gain for destro to macro /cast firebolt onto all of your other spells, thusly:

/cast incinerate
/cast firebolt

/cast immolate
/cast firebolt

And et cetera. So, what's this all about? Is it really that good? Read on in the break.

Ok, first of all, notice no "Myths" tag. This one's true. It's talking 0.5% gains in DPS, but so is min/maxing between glyph of imp and immolate. Realistically, and I don't exaggerate, these macros can mean more DPS gains than switching out those crit gems I keep seeing you people using for more appropriate selections.

So, why do these spells work? To see exactly how your spells work differently than your pet's on autocast, go to a target dummy and just spam incinerate or shadowbolt. Hammer the button like it owes you money.

You'll notice that as you hit the incinerate key while it's already casting, it will highlight near the end of the cast, this means the spell is "queued" and will start casting server side immediately when your current spell finishes. This is a recent addition to the WoW core UI, in the past addons faked the effect, but the core UI would only let you start casting when the client and server agreed that the previous cast was done - which is delayed by ping time. No matter how amazing your connection, there's always latency.

Now, start your imp auto-casting firebolt and watch his button. His doesn't light up like yours does. Autocast works on similar rules to the "old" WoW core UI.

Now, hammer on his firebolt button like it's your incinerate button and watch what happens. The pet bar supports spell queuing the same way your spells do, autocast just doesn't do it.

So, tacking /cast firebolt onto every spell in destro's rotation means that every time you hammer your buttons to get casts queued, you're doing the same for your imp, removing the latency delay on every cast he makes. Thus he fires more firebolts, and triggers more empowered imp procs, meaning more DPS for you as well. Small gains, but like I said - most DPS discussion is about getting small gains, there's only a few big things you can do that account for 90% of your DPS. The last 10% comes from a lot of little things that do add up.

Now, that's all well and good, but why doesn't affliction and demonology benefit from this?

The way the UI handles this queuing, you can't chain cooldowns, only casts. So you can go from a shadowbolt to another shadowobolt, from an incinerate to a conflag, but not from a curse to a shadowbolt.

Only the imp has a spell that can take advantage of queuing. Cleave, lash of pain, and shadow bite are all instants with cooldowns. White damage also isn't effected by latency, but imps have no white damage, only firebolt.

If you're serious about maximizing your DPS, these macros are easy to set up and are just one thing you can do to help. They only take a few minutes, and they're specifically designed to make the process painless - they work on something you're already doing for your own casts. You might occasionally miss an imp firebolt if it comes mid incinerate cast, but you'll hit a lot of them with no additional effort required.

Glyph of imp's days are numbered - immolate's already taken it's throne back in many cases, but even strong imp spec will be giving up on glyph of imp in 3.3.3 with immolate periodic damage gaining crit. However, in the mean time, min/maxing between glyph of imp and glyph of immolate does mean using these macros. The latency effect built into imp autocast means that imps naturally underperform simcraft unless you're forcing firebolt to queue. Even where glyph of imp is better it's not by much in simcraft. If you go that route, you can't afford latency turning your carefully calculated gain into a loss.

Developers investigating Demonic Pact/Divine Spirit bug

2010-02-01T17:36:00.000-08:00

A bug that's been standing since patch 3.0 is now officially being looked into.

The bug's rare, but it does happen. It can prevent demonic pact from proccing over top of Prayer of Spirit, and in some cases even causes pet crits to reapply Prayer of Spirit instead of Demonic Pact. It can cause inconvenience or significant impairment for a raid if it's not caught quickly. Technical nerd jargon after the break.

There's two theories on exactly what causes the bug. One is that a typo in code exists causing their similar aura ID's to overlap. Prayer of Spirit is 48074, Demonic Pact is 48090.

If those two don't look similar to you, you don't think like a computer. In hexadecimal, those are BBCA and BBDA. The C and D are binary 1100 and 1101, meaning a one bit error could conceivably be responsible for the bug. When you hear people say computer's think in binary, they're only half right - base 16 is actually much more representative of how computers work, as opcodes process bits in blocks equal to multiples of 4, with 4 bits being one digit in hexadecimal.

The second theory is that Prayer of Spirit does three things in game data. It increases your spirit, but it also increases your spell damage and spell healing by 0. These are relics from when Discipline had a talent to add a spellpower bonus to Prayer of Spirit, they no longer actually do anything. Those two things are, however, the same two aura effects Demonic Pact applies, though it applies them in greater quantities than 0.

4pt10 Bugged

2010-01-31T09:00:00.000-08:00

Marking the fourth consecutive warlock set going live with at least one set bonus half functional, pets do not receive their half of the Devious Minds buff from 4 piece t10. Blizzard has confirmed that this happens sometimes. By sometimes, they surely mean all the time, I've yet to see it work. A hotfix is promised.

Affliction warlocks need to hard cast corruption to get the benefit of this buff on corruption... however, because of the more powerful effect, you can't recast corruption on a target with haunt, meaning that unless you wait for a Devious Minds proc to stack your NMIC and wild magic potions for the initial corruption, you're shit out of luck and will have to live with only 85% of your DPS benefitting from Devious Minds.

Strong Imp not so strong after all

2010-01-21T01:20:00.000-08:00

So, 18/53 got some noise early on in 3.3 as being the destruction spec of choice. Then all of a sudden it wasn't on the EJ compendium anymore. What happened? This happened:

Doesn't look put up such a good showing, does it? What happened? 18/53 joined 40/31 and 41/30 (though not so quickly) in the communal grave I call buried by scaling. Imp scaling is awful, buffing the imp in this way is only a temporary thing. The logic that 4 piece tier 10 would magically make so much more difference for 18/53 also didn't hold up for long - had anyone stopped to think about it, they would have seen the same fact without tests needing to bear it out.

18/53 outperformed 13/58 in the old ToC gear profiles, but not ICC ones. However, it's rise to attention wasn't even so warranted then. Why? It outperformed in the EJ 300 second 5 minute benchmark, but just like 3/13/55 before it, it didn't hold up in, say, a 360 second test (6 minutes). In my gear going into 3.3, 315 seconds was enough to put 13/58 back up on top.

Issue at hand is how simcraft handles life taps. It doesn't distribute them evenly for destruction, it life taps to maintain the buff, and then when it bottoms out, life taps for mana as needed. Now, this is where ISL comes in: It can sustain itself for a long time this way in TOC gear profiles, it'll end a 300 second benchmark around 40% mana. 3/13/55 and 18/53, though, hit this after less than three minutes, meaning their high DPS starts to wane after that point. 5 minutes is a short average for fight lengths, few fights in ICC resolve themselves that quickly, and fewer still are likely to in heroic. 13/58 also has substantial flexibility in stats. You can see where imp and immo glyphs line up with LT in the ICC BIS profile. Don't go running to the auction house just yet, if you're coming from a typical TOC gear setup, LT is still the best, nothing's changed there. However, things start to change when you drop under 400 spirit, which you're going to if you're gearing for personal DPS in ICC. Demonology has to do some unpleasant things to itself to keep spirit up for demonic pact purposes.

ZOMG NEW PET IN CATALYZM

2010-01-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

Q. With the new skins for druid forms, what is the chance that warlocks might see race/faction specific demon skins or maybe a new one?
A. When you look around, there are a lot of say imp or voidwalkers we could use. It's something we talk about quite a bit. As for new demons, I hear warlocks are going to be getting some new spells for the next expansion...

Ok, so this has spawned more than a few OMG threads... I want you to take exactly what was said in the context it was said:

As for new demons, I hear warlocks are going to be getting some new spells for the next expansion...

Literally nothing. Literally. In fact taken in the context of the question it implies more that we're NOT getting a new demon, just new spells. Taken on it's own, it says absolutely nothing. Here's waiting for beta to start and the nondiscolusre act to be broken.

Getting the Touchdown

2010-01-17T12:48:00.000-08:00

So the developer chat on twitter was the other day. There's a few relevant questions that caught my eye, but this was the biggest one:

Q. Why is it tanking or healing that makes an encounter hard or easy? There isn't much other than high dps to consider for damage dealers.
A. There are berserk timers that usually rest on the shoulders of the dps to beat. There are adds that need to be burned down, etc. Tanking and healing aren't that hard on Deathbringer IMO (for example). Managing the adds is the key.

Aside from the fact that healing can actually be pretty brutal on the fight and looks like it'll be terrible on heroic, the question itself overlooks an important fact about healing and tanking intensive fights: It's up to the DPS to bring the encounter to a conclusion before they become unmanageable. Heroic Anub'arak is a stressful fight for healers in phase 3, but the onus is entirely on the DPS to burn the boss's health before healers just run out of options. Vezax was another fight that stressed healers, but DPS was the limiting factor. Phase 3 of yogg-0 is the biggest strain your tanks are likely to see in current content, but it's a DPS check to beat that fourth beacon.

Any sports team consists of several positions with distinct roles. A game can stress different positions differently depending on who you're facing, but it still comes to one position to take the ball across the goal, and in raiding, that position is the DPS. Maybe it doesn't feel so stressful because the stress is always there - even when fight design removes it, we put it back there ourselves, taking the opportunity to push ourselves to the highest numbers we can get. Healing and tanking sees radial swings from fight to fight, but DPS always has a red bar to cut through.

We'll see what Valithria does to that design, though. More twitter clips in the break.

Q. You mentioned pet scaling being added for patch 3.3 but due to time constraints, was delayed. Will this be in the next patch?
A. We'll try to do what we can. Technically it's just more challenging than you might think. For Cataclysm, we have on our list that 100% of stats scale. If they don't then certain stats just won't be as valuable for pet classes. At the very least, we can do stuff like convert your X into damage for the pet so every stat is valuable. Getting everyone to scale with every stat better is a major goal for the class team for Cataclysm.

Not much to say, but it's the first real word since Blizzcon on this. I expected this all the way back during Blizzcon, the balance ramifications of pet crit and haste scaling would be immense. It just makes more sense for them to be left for the big overhaul that marks every expansion.

An interesting side note, a lot of people were excited for pet crit scaling because of empowered imp... It's actually not a net gain. 30% is a typical pet scale transfer - so let's say your imp gets 30% of your crit. Your crit goes up to 1%, and you get 0.3% more empowered imp procs, but 1% more of the procs you get would have crit anyway. Meaning you're actually getting less effective crit from empowered imp than you were before increasing your crit. Now haste... that's another one altogether, and there's some real potential for runaway scaling there.

Q. You added Armor->Strength talents to discourage Plate from wanting DPS leather. Are there any plans to stop non-clothies from wanting Cloth?
A. Yes, we do have some plans.

I've never been a HANDS OFF MY CLOTH person, I know the itemization craphole that elemental, balance, and sometimes even healers are handed. Cloth makes an abundant and diverse pool to pull spellpower gear from, and the difference in armor doesn't matter to any class that actually uses spellpower anyway. Some incentive to stay in your armor class has honestly been needed for quite a while, particularly now that the random heroic loot system makes it so difficult to get lower class armor.

If I could buff one thing...

2010-01-13T16:26:00.000-08:00

In all the talk about buffs accross all three trees, one particular buff comes to mind for me: Nemesis cooldown reduction increased to 11/22/33% (up from 10/20/30%). This is particularly with an eye at talents like Intensify Rage as it applies to Death Wish.

Doesn't sound like much does it? It won't even buy you one extra demonic empowerment in a raid. But what it will do is make metamorphosis a 2:00 cooldown, not a 2:06 one.

Why? Because a good deal of fights are built rather cleverly around the common 2 minute and 3 minute cooldowns, meaning that critical phases like nether portals on Jaraxxus and most recently slimes on Putress often line up very closely with a number of cooldowns. Metamorphosis is an odd man out, it literally doesn't line up with anything as cleanly as it could with just 6 seconds off the cooldown.

No impending nerf for affliction (that's basically a buff in itself!)

2010-01-13T00:57:00.000-08:00

I don't think either haste not crit qualify as an "exploit." That word implies you are somehow abusing mechanics so bad that you risk some kind of punitive reaction on our part. Usually if we don't like how a class is working we'll just fix the mechanics and not blame players for it.

In any case, haste provided a huge damage boost and was hard to fix. Crit provides a moderate damage boost and is hard to fix. So we probably won't be changing the way rolling crit works any time soon. You can use it without fear of ramifications from us.

This is referring to rolling crit on corruption and shadow word pain, particularly when involving Nevermelt Ice Crystal's 30% boost to either spell for the full duration of a fight. So, looks like no plans to change crit rolling any time soon... however, it was commented before 3.3 went live that haste rolling was difficult to fix and there was no plan to do so, and then it took them barely 24 hours to hotfix it.

It's a huge boost, and it's an unfair one in all honesty, but it's also one we get to keep, so hooray regardless.

The thing that'll keep Blizzard from spending man hours fixing it, right now? It's not making affliction or shadow overpowered, neither is exactly blowing away the meters even using NMIC. And, as unbelievable as NMIC is compared to equal and slightly higher ilevel trinkets, it's only marginally ahead of ICC trinkets, and it's actually surpassed by heroic ICC trinkets, so it's also not taking us to heights that would have been unattainable without the bug, it's just taking us there with one 5 man trinket, when most classes need at least nonheroic ToC/ICC to get there.

I'm sure it'll get fixed eventually, 4.0 pretty likely, but I also think that as long as rolling crit isn't being responsible for 20+k parses it'll basically fly below the radar. Consider that even with rolling crit, Blizzard feels affliction is lower than they want it, so fixing it will only necessitate more buffs anyway.

More buff specifics

2010-01-11T18:04:00.000-08:00

Hopefully this post doesn't get too buried in this thread since it's grown quite a bit since I last posted. Another change we'd like to make for Destruction warlocks concerns Conflagrate. We're looking into doubling the damage-over-time effect to 40% of Conflagrate's total damage, up from 20%.

Now we're talking about meaningful changes. This will actually bring conflag back to pre-nerf status as far as PVE is concerned, dealing 100% of immolate's DOT portion split 60/40 between the nuke and dot. This is a 25% increase to conflag's damage, which does make this pretty close to the 5% broad spectrum buffs put forth for affliction and demonology.

Overall, this change would approximately keep the status quo. Affliction and destruction would stack up similarly to each other, demo might close the gap slightly but will still be a bit behind. Really no change for lock vs. lock balance, which isn't the intent of the buffs anyway.

Warlock Buff Specifics (Maybe)

2010-01-09T09:59:00.000-08:00

Affliction: While some warlocks will no doubt disagree, we think the damage output of Affliction in PvP is pretty good. Therefore, we want a buff that will increase sustained damage after a ramp-up period. The specific change we have in mind is to allow Shadow Embrace to stack up to 3 times for a total of a 15% damage bonus. The current healing debuff would change to 10% per stack.

Demonology: We want to double the damage bonus of Demonic Pact granted the warlock. To avoid making this an all-around buff to raid damage, however, the damage bonus provided to other players would remain unchanged.

Destruction: We want to double the damage bonus provided by Empowered Imp.

As a further buff to both Demonology and Affliction, we’re testing out the effects of doubling the damage bonus of Improved Shadow Bolt in the Destruction tree.

So, there you have the preliminary offering. Consideration and details in the break.

So, looking at destruction first, the clarification is that the imp damage increase would be upped from 15% to 30% on the top rank. This buff is pretty damn small, amounting to about a 1.5% increase in damage (strong imp gets a whole 1.515%). Destruction is already behind affliction in DPS, and will be behind demonology if the full extent of the discussed buffs go forward, and is also offered less than a third the buff of the other specs.

Affliction's offering is a 5% increase to all periodic damage (most notably drain soul execute) and a possible additional 5% increase to shadowbolt. This is pretty much a 5% increase in overall damage, as only haunt misses out on the 5%. This will add about 2 seconds of ramp up time, though, eating a bit of the DPS back up.

Demonology getting demonic pact bumped from 5% to 10% (only the selfish half of the talent, spellpower portion remains the same) is not only big but another good boon to the spec's weak scaling. Tack on 5% to shadow bolt and you've got a fairly hefty buff to the spec.

So, demo got the best out of the bunch, to be honest. Affliction fared well. Destruction... Well, it had a good run, but if this is all it gets, it's going to have it's work cut out keeping up with demo, let alone other classes.

Possible Incomming Something

2010-01-07T18:10:00.000-08:00

So, the new list of balance concerns today reads basically like the list of complaints over the last month. You can read it two ways: Blizzard caves to QQ or Blizzard acknowledges player experience.

I chalk the growing list of Occulus nerfs to the former, but this new post to the latter, because many of those concerns were quite correct.

Details in the break

-- Warlock damage in PvE is a little low.
-- Protection warriors have too much utility and damage for PvP. (We don't want to hurt their tanking in PvE of course.)
-- We are considering adjusting (not replacing) the Elemental 4 piece Tier 10 set bonus.
-- We'll continue to refine and look at the Icecrown weapon procs.
-- Other stuff (yes, we've heard your concerns), but these are the big things we are focusing on at this time.

Warlock DPS lacking, prot OP in PVP, shaman tier bonus issue, and ICC weapon procs. Obviously most of this is outside of the general scope of this blog.

There's not many weapon procs that are relevant to our interests, but Nibelung has already seen a buff. The Val'kyrs it spawns are now automatically hit capped and their damage has been upped. The weapon is still inferior to a MH/OH combo of equal level, but it is a lot better than it was, possibly beating stat only staves, and it's borderline OP for AOE fights like heroic anub now.

Of more interest is the first item on the list. It's an overblown issue on the class forums, but it's still true, and what's more a lot of people saw it coming. The buffs to affliction and demo brought them up on par with destruction, which was already showing pretty stark scaling discrepancies with rogue, mage, and hunter DPS, among others. The "others" column only got longer with 3.3, as class changes and set bonuses were used as brute force buffs for several ailing hybrid specs like shadow and ret.

I will point out this is not the first time the exact same thing has been said. The last time was followed by no changes to affliction or demo and a nerf to destro.

End of Arena Season 7 Announced

2010-01-05T12:04:00.000-08:00

Blizzard announced today that they plan to end arena season 7 as early as January 19.

Now, I've barely given PVP a mention on this blog, but the end of an arena season has implications for PVE as well. A January 19 end to the current arena season (two weeks from today) would mean a January 26 start to the next. The start of the next arena season will also herald the arrival of Toravon the Ice Watcher in the new vacant wing north of Emalon's room in VoA.

This may also coincide with the opening of heroic Icecrown Citadel, as the start of season 7 and Koralon's arrival coincided with the opening of heroic ToC. That would mean 2 weeks per gate for the reset of ICC, however note that the 26th would then only be the first crack at the Lich King himself. ICC has only a single lockout with individual hard modes, not separate lockouts like ToC. So hard modes will technically be available the following week.

Killin' an Orc (Deathbringer Saurfang)

2009-12-31T22:29:00.000-08:00

So the last fight of the first wing of ICC. Next week we'll finally break through that door and move into the next area, with three new bosses and the first attempt limited boss of the zone.

Saurfang has some strategic similarities to Vaelastrasz - while there's no direct enrage timer, there's a very high pressure to end the encounter while the raid is still capable of functioning.

There's two basic strategies, one of which is heroic viable and one of which trivializes the fight on normal but will be completely impossible on heroic. I'll discuss both, but the primary focus will be on the "correct" strategy.

Spec
Affliction has one of it's bad points on this fight in dealing with blood beasts. Blood beasts die fairly quickly, shadowbolt with focus fire from other ranged will finish them fast enough, and you can maintain dots on Saurfang while you go. Never dot blood beasts and you'll be pretty much ok.

Demonology also has some benefit on the fight, in that you will very often proc decimation off blood beasts and you can turn several soulfires on Saurfang. Soul link is also a huge boon if you get marked.

Destruction's all around solid on the fight, but as with demonology, there's something to be said here about soul link. Strong imp spec will have it anyway, and it fits comfortably into suppression spec, or even the "every little bit counts" 14/57 soul link spec that was often used by guilds fighting for tribute to immortality. Of even more note than soul link, however, is shadowfury. A reliable 3 second stun that hits all 5 blood beasts is pretty big for kiting - combined with piercing howl it's enough to kill them before they even get far out of their starting positions.

Macros
/target blood beast

Short and sweet, you'll be doing this a lot, macro it and love it.

Blood Power
Saurfang has a red resource meter that functions similar to runic power in some ways. There's a number of ways he generates blood power:

He debuffs tanks, causing his hits on them to generate blood power and heal him for five times the damage done (This is mitigated by tank switching)
He casts blood boil on random targets, which ticks every three seconds for 24 seconds. Each tick generates blood power (This cannot be mitigated)
He casts blood nova on random targets, hitting them and everybody within 12 yards, every person hit generates blood power (This is mitigated by spreading out - in 25 man space becomes a real concern, doubling a few people up is preferrable to packing in tighter, so that only two people will be hit at most.
Blood beasts generate blood power every time they deal damage (this is mitigated with stuns, knockbacks, kiting, absorbs, and just killing them faster than they can reach ranged)
Lastly, every time he reaches 100 blood power, he marks a random target, causing his melee swings to hit them as well. Every hit on the marked player(s) generates blood power, meaning an exponential increase in blood generation as the fight goes on. This can be eased by absorbs (absorbed hits in all cases don't generate blood power), but the debuff persists through death and resurrection, immune effects, everything.

The Easy Way
If your guild is not seriously considering hard mode, or if you're having considerable difficulty with the fight on normal mode, simply allow marked players to die. They will heal Saurfang for 5%, but will also starve his blood generation. It's entirely possible to kill him with only a single mark this way, even with sloppy execution.

This will NOT work on heroic mode, however. The heal is 25%.

The Real Way (and specifics for the easy way)
Normally your guild will heal through marks.

The primary concern in the fight is blood beasts. They (2 on 10 man, 5 on 25) are summoned on a strict timer. Blood beasts take 95% reduced damage from AOE and 75% reduced damage from diseases. They can't be tanked without generating massive amounts of blood power, but they don't have terribly high health. Two ranged DPS can focus fire them down before they close distance.

Drop a portal somewhere (it really doesn't make too much difference where, but preferrably where you won't accidentally blood nova six people - I've actually had good results putting mine in melee range) to escape if a blood beast does close to melee range of you, portal and run away, let somebody else finish it off. If you're all focusing on them, they won't last long.

Dealing with Marks
Mark of the Fallen Champion is mostly a healer concern. If you get the first one, you're generally safe and can continue business as usual. However, depending on how many marks you have when the frenzy hits at 25%, the healing may become a concern. The more marks you get, the faster they'll come. If you're mitigating enough of the blood generation you shouldn't get more than 3, maybe 4, and it's possible to get only one or two.

This is something where communication with healers is important - if mark healing is becoming an issue and you're one of the marks, switch to fel armor. It will reduce the damage you're taking (mark hits are physical) and increase the healing you receive.

As a last resort, if you're hitting like 5-6 marks, a voidwalker. Unfortunately this is limited to specs with fel domination, so only demo can take full advantage, but absorbs are a serious help on blood power generation.

This is one of those fights where your guild will be glad for every absorb it has, most blood power sources won't generate power from a fully absorbed hit. Running a second disc priest isn't as counterproductive as it is on some fights, and if you have three Val'anyrs like my guild you'll have a key advantage over a guild with one or even none.

The Profit
The toughest fight in the first gate of ICC, hands down, and promising to be a brutal test of both healing and DPS prowess on heroic. You'll get your Storming the Citadel achievement here, and you can also get I've Gone and Made a Mess if you get less than 5 marks (3 in 10 man). It's not a difficult achievement if you're mitigating blood power, my guild has managed as few as 2 marks without letting anyone die. If you do let marks die, the achievement is basically a given.

His loot's a bit lackluster, but not outright terrible, from a caster standpoint. He's also the first source of the mid-grade tier tokens.

10 man
There's a lot here, but unfortunately there's good reasons not to take a lot of it. It IS still ICC gear, though, itemlevel 251 is nothing to piss on regardless. Sheer numbers can and do make up for unideal itemization.
Icecrown Spire Sandals - hit/crit boots. Not an entirely attractive stat combination but still nothing terribly notable.
Mag'hari Chieftain's Staff - Staves generally fall behind mainhand/offhand combos, and this is no exception. Unlike Nibelung, this one doesn't have an interesting proc effect that can prop it up in AOE situations.
Soulcleave Pendant - Haste/crit is the bog standard of DPS gear in ICC, like it or not, this is the bog standard neck. It's not too bad, one of the better picks from 10 man at least, and the main attraction on his 10 man loot list.
Thaumaturge's Crackling Cowl - haste/spirit, hallelujah! One of the good, well itemized picks in the zone. Shame it lands on a tier set slot, but this would be a decent enough pick for a 10 man raider to take as their 5th slot. Pants still look like the better one to drop, being a weaker set piece and having stronger offset options (even a 10 man raider would have access to 3 socket crafted pants).

25 man
The loot list on 25 man is pretty short. Not just from a caster standpoint, from any standpoint. This is mostly due to the first item on our list:
Conqueror's Mark of Sanctification - This is your all purpose tier token. Trade this plus any piece of itemlevel 251 Dark Coven's Regalia to upgrade it to the itemlevel 264 Sanctified Dark Coven's Regalia.

Greatcloak of the Turned Champion - haste/spirit again, and this time in ilevel 264 flavor. This is where a lot of stuff is at, it's just an all around excellent cloak. It's also pretty much the best warlock cloak out there right now, being beaten only by the Tribute to Insanity cloaks from ToC.

The... WTF IS THAT?
OH MY GOD HIS EYES ARE STILL BLINKING. WHAT THE BLEEDING FUCK? HIS EYES ARE STILL BLINKING!

Storyline foreshadowing or a graphical oversight in the implementation of death knight glowing eyes? Probably just the graphical limitation, but just the same HIS EYES ARE STILL BLINKING.

Simcraft Supplemental: Set Bonus Hackery

2009-12-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

So I've talked about gem sockets, gear choices, and shoe polishing with Simcraft. What about set bonuses? Set bonuses are one of the big failing of gearscore systems, but they're also hinge points that our entire gear decision revolves on. They're also tricky to test, because changing the set bonus also changes your stats.

Well, turns out that somebody already thought of that, and thought up a solution. It is possible, and in fact pretty easy, to test set bonuses in a vacuum on simcraft. I'll even do all the work for the lazy reader.

Procedure
I'll be using the gear profiles used in the Elitistjerks simcraft thread, testing a standard affliction and meta/ruin build, and I'll be using 0/13/58 for the destruction test, being about average of the three with very similar scaling factors.

After importing a profile, head to the Simulate tab. There's some general information at the top, then the action priority list (a series of lines starting with "actions+=/"), but then the gear list is what we want.

When simcraft imports a profile, it does so in this format:

head=guldans_hood_of_triumph,stats=282armor_94crit_151sp_116sta_116int_86spi,gems=chaotic_skyflare_12sp_10spi_9sp,enchant=30sp_20crit

This isn't the only format Simcraft understands - you can give it item ID numbers and let it do the legwork itself, for example. This is the easiest one to work for with our purposes in mind.

In this format, Simcraft identifies sets and adds bonuses based on item name alone, it trusts you on stats. If you want to break a set bonus, just rename your gear. head=guldans_hood_of_triumph becomes head=nobonus_hood_of_triumph, and it no longer counts for the set, but you still have all the identical stats.

This also works going the other way. You can trick simcraft into thinking you have set bonuses you don't. Change guldans_hood_of_triumph to dark_coven_hood, and now it counts for the tier 10 set, but still has the tier 9 stats.

So, doing this for all the selected profiles:

Destruction
Tier 9
4pt9: 9712
2pt9: 9582 Loss: 130
0pt9: 9271 Loss: 311

Tier 10
0pt10: 9271
2pt10: 9431 Gain: 160
4pt10: 9780 Gain: 349

Affliction
Tier 9

4pt9: 10020
2pt9: 9758 Loss: 262
0pt9: 9663 Loss: 95

Tier 10
0pt10: 9663
2pt10: 9878 Gain: 215
4pt10: 10168 Gain: 290

Demonology
Tier 9
4pt9: 9848
2pt9: 9726 Loss: 122
0pt9: 9545 Loss: 181

Tier 10
0pt10: 9545
2pt10: 9767 Gain: 222
4pt10: 10129 Gain: 362

Set Bonus DPS Values
Tier 9
Two Piece
Destruction: 311
Affliction: 95
Demonology: 122

Four Piece
Destruction: 130
Affliction: 262
Demonology: 181

Tier 10
Two Piece
Destruction: 160
Affliction: 215
Demonology: 222

Four Piece
Destruction: 349
Affliction: 290
Demonology: 362

So, when should you break your 4pt9 bonus?
Well, as you can see, the cumulative bonuses from tier 10 are better for all three specs. That 4 piece tier 10 bonus is absolutely amazing (the uptime is almost 40%, making it about a 4% dps increase).

2pt10, however, isn't quite so amazing. It's actually a loss for affliction of 47 dps that will have to be made up for in gear stats, but it is a gain for destruction and demonology, it's actually quite a strong bonus for demo.

By rough eyballing, dropping 4pt9 for 2pt10 is just a matter of having the set bonus and not losing stats - not an issue unless you're sitting on the ilevel 258 set. Affliction, however, will probably want to hold out for a trophy or two to make the difference.

However, once you have 4pt10, the bonus is amazing, and there's no question about itemlevels, it's better.

Killin' a Boat (Gunship Battle)

2009-12-25T23:09:00.000-08:00

Since I've been doing the fights in ICC in order, this one's up next. And here's the strategy:

Get a rocket pack.
AOE shit that comes over to your ship.
If needed jump accross and kill the mage.

The only way to wipe on the fight in normal difficulty is to screw up in epic fashion. Like talking to your NPC leader with half the raid back fighting that frost wyrm or nobody having their rocket packs.

The only thing warlocks should note: Your pet doesn't jump with you if you visit the enemy gunship. Keep your pet on stay.

Loot in the jump.

The Profit
10 Man
Muradin's Spyglass - one of the notable trinkets in Icecrown, this one is in the same family as the Eye of the Broodmother. 180 spellpower once stacked up and a massive amount of crit. Crit may be our weakest dps stat, but it's still not a bad stat, especially in numbers like this.

And... that's it for 10 man. The gunship armory doesn't have much to offer casters, but it's at least a good one. There's lots of plate and mail here, and an MP5 dagger that you don't want.

25 Man
25 man likes casters more than 10.
Amulet of the Silent Eulogy - the first bit of gear I picked up in Icecrown Citadel, as a matter of fact. A hit/haste neck in the tradition of the 4 tower leviathan model, one of the better picks of the zone.
Gunship Captain's Mittens and Corp'rethar Ceremonial Crown round out the cloth drops. The gloves are a nice pick, and really draw attention to the fact that tier 10 gear is short on the gem sockets compared to the zone drops. Unfortunately, that 4 piece tier 10 bonus is pretty much non negotiable, and pants look like the slot to drop, so both of these are going to be a bit harder to fit into a gear setup, it's still possible to fit one or the other if you opt for the tier pants.
Ring of Rapid Ascent also clocks in, crit/haste is the rule in ICC. This ring makes a good show of that, and has a gem slot - something that had been reserved for hard mode rings last tier.

Seed of Corruption buff Official(ly Awesome)

2009-12-19T16:10:00.000-08:00

First thank you for posting, constructively. Our intent is for Seed of Corruption to be more attractive to Affliction, and Rain of Fire more attractive to Destruction. Before the flames begin, please note the word "intent". We realize that is not always the case, depending on numerous variables.

This was already largely the way things fell, though affliction didn't use seed of corruption on small pulls because losing one target could be a big difference.

However, "intent," didn't quite work out. As the rest of that thread discusses, seed of corruption is a very powerful AOE, only held back by the fact that it didn't hit the primary target. Using heroic anub'arak as an example, this is a 25% damage increase - from 4 targets to 5 - and is enough to put seed ahead of rain of fire even for destruction. Hell, it's enough for affliction to pass meta/ruin AOE potential and compete with unholy death knights on their own terms. Good luck keeping up the seed spam in phase 3, though.

In other post-3.3 hotfix news, Ghostcrawler made good on his offer to add drain soul to Everlasting Affliction, the hotfix is now live. Tooltip updates will require a client patch, but the fix is working in-game. This should finally solve affliction's problems with corruption refreshing once and for all. If this isn't enough... Maybe next corruption will just refresh itself.

It's also confirmed by tests that, while the first affliction hotfix put an end to haste rolling, corruption still doesn't update crit on refresh, making Nevermelting Ice Crystal damn near best in slot for the 30% crit it can stack onto corruption. It does work out to a fairly weak trinket for destruction or demo due to fast falloff from the peak buff, unfortunately.

Blue weighs in on Conflag DOT and Empowered Imp

2009-12-17T00:31:00.000-08:00

According to the official word, the conflag DOT cannot consume empowered imp. My own testing was as much on the PTR and live, honestly, so nothing in this comes as news to me. The math given in the thread isn't that surprising, as the conflag DOT crits with the same rate as the conflag nuke, and with a sample size three times as large, there's less influence from unlucky chains, the conflag DOT is one of our two most critting abilities, regardless. Additionally, because of how DOTs inherit buffs from the caster at cast time and not tick time, there should be no interaction between the effects.

There may yet be an issue with empowered imp, but my suspicion is that if there is, it's tied closer to the disappearing soulstone issue, not conflag. As some people have probably encountered, soulstone buffs have a habit of magically vanishing right now.

Meanwhile, a few people have encountered glyph of conflag malfunctions - they have the glyph, but don't receive the benefit. Relogging sometimes fixes it, switching specs, but the silver bullet seems to be overwriting the glyph with something else and then replacing it. At least one person has noticed this happening on glyph of quick decay, as well, and I suspect the issue may extend to all glyphs, though many would be very easy to overlook.

Killin' a Lady Lich (Lady Deathwhisper)

2009-12-16T02:18:00.000-08:00

When you walk into Lady Deathwhisper's room, she immediately starts complaining. If you've ever shared a roof with a woman, this is a familiar event, and you know how to handle it. Just ignore her and keep clearing trash.

Like Kel'Thuzad, half of the fight is spent fighting adds while the lich herself watches. Unlike Kel'Thuzad, Deathwisper can at least be attacked during this part of the fight.

Specs
Nothing particularly noteworthy, however affliction has a rough time with the adds due to basic inability to target switch in a timely manner. Caster attention on adds isn't paramount, so this is only a minor issue, but it may be a consideration you should look at.

Of bigger concern, affliction and demonology both only get about half their execute mileage on this fight, since the first half of the damage done to her goes to her mana bar instead of her health.

Macros

/target deformed fanatic
/target reanimated fanatic

Depending on the exact way your guild choses to handle adds, you can either macro these together, or you may need to have them separate. If you have them together, the highest priority target goes last. As with all /target macros, it may be worth putting your opening spell on this, but you may find yourself readjusting range on switches anyway.

Mind Controls
The debuff is called Dominate Mind. A mod that tracks debuffs on the raid configured to specifically watch for this one is a good idea. Mind controlled people do massive damage and have to be CC'd. Fear's your main tool here, but banish works on a druid or meta lock. Affliction warlocks can use spell lock to shut down a controlled caster or healer. Ideally you want a CC that can be dispelled if it's still up after the mind control breaks.

Phase One
Like Kel'Thuzad, Deathwhisper watches the fight in phase one. But, you can attack her, she just converts mana to heal any damage you deal, so in essence you're burning through her mana bar in this phase. Caster DPS will primarily be on Deathwhisper while adds come from both sides and behind. Drain mana is not worth casting in this fight. The spell is fairly weak, and is limited by your mana pool. Health damage and mana damage are the same for this phase, and all specs can do health damage faster. Watch out for Death and Decay. It's big, bright, and green, so it's impossible to miss, and it doesn't blend in with any player abilities.

There's several types of adds on the fight, most of them are variations on Cult Fanatics and Cult Adherents. Ignore Adherents, as they become highly resistant to magic attacks. Fanatics, however, do the opposite.

Some of the Fanatics that spawn will either become Deformed Fanatics (Plague beasts) or Reanimated Fanatics (skeletons). Deformed Fanatics do increased damage and heal for the damage they deal, and focused DPS is needed to overcome their healing. When Deathwhisper yells, "I release you from the curse of flesh!" she is transforming a Cult Fanatic into a Deformed Fanatic. Adherents do not have a deformed form.

Reanimated Fanatics have a buff called Fanatics Determination, reducing physical damage by 99%. Again, it falls to casters to kill these off. When Deathwhisper yells, "Arise, and exalt in your true form!" she is raising a reanimated add, though it may not be a Fanatic, Adherents can be reanimated as well..

The last consideration in this phase is Curse of Torpor. This will put add a 15 second cooldown to every spell you cast. This isn't a problem during DOT refreshes, but it is a problem with nukes. Having macros, keybinds, or even just a separate bar on hand to swap to other nukes is a good idea. You should be getting decursed quickly, but don't risk eating a 15 second cooldown on your primary nuke, cycle through other spells while you have the debuff.

Phase 2
Once Deathwhisper's mana is depleted, she enters phase 2. "Enough! I see I must take matters into my own hands!" is your cue to break off and clean up adds.

Cultists stop spawning, but you do have to deal with any still alive. Watch out for Reanimated Adherents with the Adherent's Determination buff, they take 99% reduce magic damage and there's no point in wasting your time with them.

Threat can be an issue on this phase. Deathwhisper stacks Touch of Insignificance on her target that reduces their threat generation by 20% per stack. She is tauntable, and tanks will be switching during phase 2 to prevent this from getting out of hand. She also enters this phase with a blank threat list, residual damage left over from phase 1 can be touchy in the first few seconds. She is tauntable, however, and your job is to deal with cultists for the moment, so you should be in no danger as long as you switch off of her when her mana barrier breaks.

Death and Decay and mind controls still happen in phase 2, but the cultists are over once you kill off the spares. The new consideration is Vengeful Shades. These will follow random people. If one has you targeted, get the fuck away. If they reach you, they will explode and do a lot of damage and make people very angry at you. If you're using your portal, be very careful about where you put it that you're not screwing yourself and everybody within 15 yards by popping too close to the shade you're fleeing.

With her health depleted, too, Deathwhisper's out of cheats and dies.

The Profit
Nibelung is probably the most interesting bit of loot on Deathwhisper, or even in the zone. Proc based caster weapons are an extreme rarity. I may elaborate on this staff more in the future, but for now, I'll just say that the proc sucks... usually. On single target fights, you're better off with pure stat weapons. However, there is no internal cooldown, and during AOE every hit on every target has a chance to proc a Val'kyr to fight at your side. Casters with this staff have had several of them up at a time on AOE heavy fights like heroic Anub'arak, and it actually does start pulling it's weight. If nothing else, this one's worth picking up just as a toy.

Shoulders of Mercy Killing, hit/haste, and The Lady's Brittle Bracers, hit/crit round out the cloth drops from Deathwhisper. Mercy Killing is probably the more attractive option in terms of itemization, but the Brittle Bracers are more likely to find their way into your wardrobe because of tier pieces tying up the shoulder slot.

Ring of Maddening Whispers is a crit ring, but it's also spirit, which is a commodity in Icecrown. If you happen to be sitting on something like the ring from Onyxia's head, this is a solid upgrade.

Affliction Hotfix Incoming. Again. Again. Maybe.

2009-12-16T01:24:00.000-08:00

So after adding shadowbolt to Everlasting Affliction, talk is now put forth of adding Drain Soul with it to extend the existing solution through execute range as well. If it goes through, it's good news for affliction, though it isn't a foolproof solution.

At this point, that tooltip's getting a bit carried away, but they could easily get away with dropping drain life and haunt and replacing them with shadowbolt and drain soul at this point.

Undocumented Seed of Corruption buff

2009-12-15T20:38:00.000-08:00

It isn't listed in the patch notes, but seed of corruption's explosion now hits the primary target in addition to those around it.

Mind sear did not receive the same treatment, so it remains to be seen if this is working as intended or not.

Affliction Hotfix Incoming. Again

2009-12-14T15:06:00.000-08:00

So, the rolling haste hotfix was a double-kick, since it also refreshed corruption to it's hasted duration, not just tick timer. So a haste proc would easily cause corruption to fall off before haunt. People were using drain life to refresh it, but it was actually stronger dps to just re-cast corruption to begin with. You spend the GCD and reset corruption's haste either way.

However, there's now another hotfix hinted for December 14th or 15th, today or tomorrow. The simple addition was to add Shadowbolt to Everlasting Affliction. On one hand, this resolidifies the affliction rotation and removes wasted GCDs, but it also means the loss of even the slight haste rolling left in the spec. Corruption will be reset to your current stats almost immediately after a proc fades now.

This isn't killing affliction, keep in mind. The EJ numbers didn't take advantage of a superhasted rolling corruption. This nerf is bringing the spec more in line with those numbers, still above destruction.

Ashen Verdict Rings

2009-12-10T22:06:00.000-08:00

Stats are in on the Ashen Verdict rings from the Armory, and HO-LEE SHIT. Exalted version is 101 spellpower, 51 hit, 64 haste, and most importantly, a proc effect triggering 285 spellpower for 10 seconds, plus a yellow socket (Armory doesn't show the bonus, but I'm going to guess 5 spellpower).

Revered version is the same minus 1 hit and 2 haste, but without the gem slot. Honored version is the same as revered but without the proc. Most people are probably already familiar with the friendly version, which is the poor man in the group, since it's not the same as any of the others.

These look like damn amazing rings, at least from revered up. They shouldn't be too hard to come by - if you can stay at the head of progression you'll probably be hitting exalted around the time the Lich King's gate unlocks.

Well, THAT didn't take long

2009-12-10T18:58:00.000-08:00

Impending hotfixes, corruption now updates haste on autorefresh.

Note that no mention is made of crit. Depending on exactly how the change is implemented, it may still be possible to inflate the crit on an initial corruption and roll that throughout. While not quite as attractive, that 5 man ICC trinket can still pack close to 30% crit before it's proc starts to diminish.

This does kill the short lived gravy train of weapon swapping from black magic to a spellpower weapon, though.

Demonology Power Auras

2009-12-10T17:17:00.000-08:00

No big secret that demonology is a fairly bloated rotation. Lots of stuff going on - three DOTs, a cooldown tied to additional abilities, an execute phase, and you switch to incinerate periodically during the normal rotation.

Mods like DOTtimer, Necrosis, and ForteXorcist work flawlessly for affliction or destruction, but I've found they're somewhat lacking in demo. Power Auras, however, brings the answer. I still prefer my timer mods for tracking debuffs, but for buffs, Power Auras is definitely my favorite.

This is what I see in a raid (note I'm generally zoomed out considerably more than this, so the circles don't dominate the view as much). The inner ring is molten core with charges, middle is glyph of life tap with timer, and outside is decimation.

Import string after the break. Note if you're not a gnome (or raid zoomed in closer than I generally do), you may want to adjust the size and position of the rings somewhat.

Set=Page 1@
Aura[1]=Version:st3.0.0; gcd:bofalse; b:nu0.13725490196078; anim1:nu1; g:nu0; optunitn:bofalse; ignoremaj:botrue; stacksLower:nu0; target:bofalse; icon:stInterface\Icons\Ability_Warlock_MoltenCore; size:nu0.75; torsion:nu1; r:nu1; y:nu-30; x:nu0; customname:st; groupany:botrue; isAlive:botrue; timerduration:nu0; unitn:st; bufftype:nu1; stacks:nu0; focus:bofalse; raid:bofalse; texture:nu1; alpha:nu0.75; aurastext:stTesting; symetrie:nu0; soundfile:st; owntex:bofalse; isResting:bofalse; duration:nu0; mine:bofalse; multiids:st; inVehicle:bofalse; speed:nu1; sound:nu0; stacksOperator:st>=; realaura:nu1; threshold:nu50; exact:bofalse; InactiveDueToState:botrue; textaura:bofalse; party:bofalse; wowtex:bofalse; groupOrSelf:bofalse; customsound:st; combat:nu0; inParty:nu0; id:nu1; HideRequest:bofalse; aurastextfont:nu1; Active:bofalse; anim2:nu0; beginSpin:bofalse; customtex:bofalse; tooltipCheck:st; stance:nu10; isSecondary:bofalse; thresholdinvert:bofalse; spec2:botrue; inRaid:nu0; spec1:botrue; Showing:bofalse; UseOldAnimations:bofalse; buffname:stMolten Core; begin:nu0; off:bofalse; texmode:nu1; inverse:bofalse; ismounted:bofalse; targetfriend:bofalse; randomcolor:bofalse; finish:nu1; stacks.a:nu1; stacks.Showing:bofalse; stacks.HideLeadingZeros:bofalse; stacks.y:nu34; stacks.h:nu1; stacks.id:nu1; stacks.Transparent:bofalse; stacks.UpdatePing:bofalse; stacks.enabled:botrue; stacks.x:nu0; stacks.Texture:stDefault@
Aura[2]=Version:st3.0.0; gcd:bofalse; b:nu0; anim1:nu1; g:nu0.90980392156863; optunitn:bofalse; ignoremaj:botrue; stacksLower:nu0; target:bofalse; icon:stInterface\Icons\Spell_Fire_Fireball02; size:nu1.2200000286102; torsion:nu1; r:nu1; y:nu-30; x:nu0; customname:st; groupany:botrue; isAlive:botrue; timerduration:nu0; unitn:st; bufftype:nu1; stacks:nu0; focus:bofalse; raid:bofalse; texture:nu18; alpha:nu0.75; aurastext:st; symetrie:nu0; soundfile:st; owntex:bofalse; isResting:bofalse; duration:nu0; mine:bofalse; multiids:st; inVehicle:bofalse; speed:nu1; sound:nu0; stacksOperator:st>=; realaura:nu1; threshold:nu50; exact:bofalse; InactiveDueToState:botrue; textaura:bofalse; party:bofalse; wowtex:bofalse; groupOrSelf:bofalse; customsound:st; combat:nu0; inParty:nu0; id:nu2; HideRequest:bofalse; aurastextfont:nu1; Active:bofalse; anim2:nu0; beginSpin:bofalse; customtex:bofalse; tooltipCheck:st; stance:nu10; isSecondary:bofalse; thresholdinvert:bofalse; spec2:botrue; inRaid:nu0; spec1:botrue; Showing:bofalse; UseOldAnimations:bofalse; buffname:stDecimation; begin:nu0; off:bofalse; texmode:nu1; inverse:bofalse; ismounted:bofalse; targetfriend:bofalse; randomcolor:bofalse; finish:nu1@
Aura[3]=Version:st3.0.0; gcd:bofalse; b:nu1; anim1:nu1; g:nu1; optunitn:bofalse; ignoremaj:botrue; stacksLower:nu0; target:bofalse; icon:stInterface\Icons\Spell_Shadow_BurningSpirit; size:nu0.85999995470047; torsion:nu1; r:nu1; y:nu-30; x:nu0; customname:st; groupany:botrue; isAlive:botrue; timerduration:nu0; unitn:st; bufftype:nu1; stacks:nu0; focus:bofalse; raid:bofalse; texture:nu16; alpha:nu0.75; aurastext:st; symetrie:nu0; soundfile:st; owntex:bofalse; isResting:bofalse; duration:nu0; mine:bofalse; multiids:st; inVehicle:bofalse; speed:nu1; sound:nu0; stacksOperator:st>=; realaura:nu1; threshold:nu50; exact:bofalse; InactiveDueToState:botrue; textaura:bofalse; party:bofalse; wowtex:bofalse; groupOrSelf:bofalse; customsound:st; combat:nu0; inParty:nu0; id:nu3; HideRequest:bofalse; aurastextfont:nu1; Active:bofalse; anim2:nu0; beginSpin:bofalse; customtex:bofalse; tooltipCheck:st; stance:nu10; isSecondary:bofalse; thresholdinvert:bofalse; spec2:botrue; inRaid:nu0; spec1:botrue; Showing:bofalse; UseOldAnimations:bofalse; buffname:stLife Tap; begin:nu0; off:bofalse; texmode:nu1; inverse:bofalse; ismounted:bofalse; targetfriend:bofalse; randomcolor:bofalse; finish:nu1; timer.a:nu1; timer.dual:bofalse; timer.HideRequest:botrue; timer.id:nu3; timer.cents:botrue; timer.HideLeadingZeros:bofalse; timer.enabled:botrue; timer.Showing:bofalse; timer.y:nu53; timer.h:nu1; timer.ShowOnAuraHide:bofalse; timer.Transparent:bofalse; timer.UpdatePing:bofalse; timer.InvertAuraBelow:nu0; timer.x:nu-7; timer.Texture:stDefault@

Killin' a... Bone... angel... demon... thing. With wings (Lord Marrowgar)

2009-12-10T02:19:00.000-08:00

Whelp, after abusing the ever loving Jesus out of random heroics, exploding the first wing of Icecrown Citadel, blowing most of my hard earned gold on 24 slot bags, and getting my first reputation ring from the Ashen Verdict, the main conclusion I've come to is that the normal mode Icecrown bosses are much like the normal mode ToC bosses, and the post-nerf Ulduar easy modes.

But, still, it's a long way before the Lich King's door is open and heroic modes are available, so I'll have something to talk about for a while, starting with Marrowgar. You see Marrowgar the minute you set foot inside, but the path there is longer than you'd think. Traps spawn patrolling giant skeletons with 5 million health, though the bulk of trash itself is not terribly difficult.

The boss himself is also not terribly difficult, but it helps to be aware of the specifics.
Specs
There's no particular spec favorites on the fight, nobody can abuse mechanics to their advantage, but affliction does have one important drawback - the fight includes a periodic threat reset, and the boss is not tauntable. This is manageable, but it does mean you can't do much during part of the fight.

Macros
/target Bone Spike

Simple as that. Marrowgar will impale people on these spikes which must be killed.

The Fight
Most of the fight is tank-and-spank. Kill Marrowgar, switch and target spikes when they come up. Watch the timer for Bone Spike Graveyard, this is the ability that spawns the spikes.

He has two abilities to note: Cold Flame and Bone Storm. Cold Flame sends a line of blue fire towards a target. Just step out of the way and let it pass - it can get quite difficult to find space to stand when he sends out multiple cold flames during bone storm.

Bone Storm is a bit tricky. The boss's hitbox is immense, so keep in mind his whirlwind is also immense. During bone storm, he'll pick a target and race towards them. Move out of the way perpendicularly to his path and get as far away from him as space allows. There is an achievement for perfect dodging on this ability, and it is on the meta. This ability is going to be the Drake killer.

And that's it. Just keep it up, don't be bad, and the loot is yours.

The Profit
The first boss in the zone isn't bad at all for the caster loot, either. There's a bit of everything in this one:

Bone Sentinel's Amulet is probably one of the more notables, a haste/spirit neck. Spirit's a tough stat to come by in icecrown DPS gear, savor it.

Crushing Coldwraith Belt is more typical - haste/crit belt with two gem sockets. A strong upgrade from most existing belts.

Frozen Bonespike is the first caster weapon of the zone. Spirit/crit, so not completely idealized, but still, spirit is a commodity in this gear. 741 spellpower's nothing to sneeze at, either.

Loop of the Endless Labyrinth Hit/crit ring. You'll notice a great many rings and necks have gem sockets in Icecrown. That was something reserved for heroic loot in TOC - They really did pull the stops out on this stuff.

For those interested in 10 man, he's not quite as much of a goldmine, but still has some stuff.

Cord of the Patronizing Practitioner, a haste/spirit belt with two gem slots. A solid upgrade from many existing belts.

Cord of the Patronizing Practitioner hit/haste on the first weapon from 10 man ICC. 657 spellpower's not a bad weapon, either, this is an upgrade from many existing weapons. Even 10 man ToGC weapons with gem slots top out at 644 spellpower.

3.3 Shopping List

2009-12-08T10:56:00.000-08:00

So it's really here, patch 3.3 launches today. Downloaders are going, servers are... still down until further notice.

So, as with every patch, there's some immediate runaround to acquire the new stuff. While we're bored and waiting for the servers to be back up and Icecrown to be broken for the first day or two, let's look at just what those new things are.

Glyph of Quick Decay - If you plan to go affliction, you'll need this. It's even an arguable pick for meta/ruin, though not necessarily a must have.
Runed Signet of the Kirin Tor - Hope you already have a Kirin Tor ring, because if you do, you can get an immediate upgrade for it. This ring is an upgrade from all but a very few rings you may have, so it's almost a certain pickup. Cost: 1000g plus your Inscribed Signet of the Kirin Tor
Battered Hilt - a trash drop in the Icecrown 5 mans, and the beginning of Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind.
Ashen Band of Destruction - You'll need friendly with the Ashen Verdict for this, most likely this won't be happening the first week due to Icecrown gating, but it's still a good idea to remember that one. This is the first upgrading reputation ring of Wrath of the Lich King, but it joins a long tradition dating back to the Brood of Nozdormu. It's known versions are itemlevel 251, 259, and 264. The exalted version is presumed to be 277.
Emblems of Frost - queue for a random heroic and get two from your first heroic of the day. At raid time, grab some friends and go hit the raid weekly quest for another 5.
Portable Hole - for those willing to drop 3000g each, here's a 24 slot bag. Non-unique, so you can fill your bank with them if you just absolutely must spend in excess of 20,000g in two minutes.
Pets! Breanni in Dalaran will have new stock available for pet collectors at 50g each, including a calico cat.
Dread Pirate Ring - A 5% experience boost heirloom ring, stacking again with the shoulders and chests. This time it's not that easy to come by - you have to win the Kalu'ak fishing contest.

Quel'Delar: Lens of the Mind

2009-12-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

Nice piece, ain't it? This thing's an upgrade for anything short of 25 man Trial of the Grand Crusader weapons going into 3.3, and it's the undisputed best weapon available outside of raids. A holy weapon that defended the hallowed ground of the Sunwell Plateau from Arthas himself, this is exactly the sort of thing that any self respecting warlock would want to ~~defile~~ wield righteously to defend the world from a renewed Scourge threat.

So what does one have to do to get their hands on this ~~future abyss crystal~~ precious relic? Check it out:

The quest line starts from the Battered Hilt, a trash drop from the three wings of the Icecrown 5 man heroic dungeons. The hilt is a single drop, so the group will have to roll on it, and it isn't BOP, so expect fierce competition and ridiculous auction house prices.

The Battered Hilt starts a quest called... The Battered Hilt. This sends you to a representative of the Sunreavers or the Silver Covenant at Quel'Delar's rest, south of the argent tournament grounds. This is an area already in game - you can see two archways, a dragon's skeleton frozen in the ground, and a sword embedded into the glacier and through the top of the dragon's skull.

The next step is to meet with Krasus on top of Wyrmrest Temple, then report back to your faction enclave in Dalaran. A simple fetch quest.

The other faction's up to something, the next step of the quest line is to go down into the sewers of Dalaran and hunt down the Sunreaver/Silver Covenant agent dealing in the black market area, kill him, and find out what he's up to. Now you get to sneak into the opposing faction's area in Dalaran, a Shady character at the Threads of Fate will provide a counterfeit tabard, and you get the ancient dragonforged blades from the dead agents contact.

Now that you know what you've got, you need to reforge the damaged blade. To do this you need 5 bars of Infused Saronite, from the trash mobs in the Pit of Saron, and the Forgemaster's Hammer from Forgemaster Garfrost. Before the brittle reforged blade can be used, it has to be tempered in the crucible of the Forge of Souls. To do this you'll have to kill the Devourer, the last boss of the Forge.

The sword still doesn't possess the powers it should, but the quest giver tells you that you tell him that the sword is telling you to go to the Halls of Reflection. You'll have to take the sword to Arthas' personal quarters in the Halls of Reflection, where you discover that the sword answers the will of the Lich King, meaning it cannot safely be wielded.

To cleanse the blade, it must be dipped in the Sunwell. This will be a phased post-war Sunwell, already freed from demonic influence and returned to it's former glory. Halduron Brightwing won't let you just walk in, though, you'll have to get the blessing of Thalorien Dawnseeker, the previous owner of Quel'Delar, to confirm that the sword is indeed Quel'Delar and that you have permission to be fucking around with it. Dawnseeker's remains are at the south end of the portion of the Dead Scar that extends over Quel'danas island.

Now it's time to go into the Sunwell. This isn't the raid, but a phased version. You'll be able to proceed through to the Sunwell and cleanse the blade safely, then return it to Quel'Delar's Rest.

At this point, one of two things happens. As warlocks, we're sent back to Dalaran to present the blade in our faction's area and you get to pick your chosen version of the sword as a reward. Classes that can't equip swords are sent to the Argent Tournament Grounds, where they'll hand the sword over to Justicar Mariel Trueheart, who will find a suitable person to wield the blade, and you get to pick a mace reward.

The sword looks pretty cool. They're large for one handers (though small for two handers, and the two hand version uses the same graphic). They're more stylized than Quel'Serrar, with a shining gem in the hilt and better defined runes along the blade, and a much more defined penis shape to the blade itself.

The maces suck, though, the caster mace looks like an oversized wand. Be glad we get the sword.

Killin' a Bug (Heroic Anubarak)

2009-12-06T15:54:00.000-08:00

Not the hardest fight currently in the game - I still reserve that distinction for Yogg 0 and perhaps Earth Wind and Fire - but still the pinnacle of the current raid tier. Like Twin Val'kyrs, Anub'arak is a fight that fundamentally changes going from normal to heroic.

25 man heroic Anub'arak has four adds, and for most of the fight, you'll have to deal with these four. This gives it a unique distinction among the four versions of the Anub'arak fight, in that it's an intense AOE fight, not a single target fight. Like the ultimate tier 8 encounter, this is also a fight that pulls us away from the spec that's dominant throughout the zone.

Spec
Meta/ruin gets the center stage here, being a powerful AOE spec. You'll want to use metamorphosis and immolation aura on the first wave of adds during each above ground phase. Meta does have one problem, however. It's an absolute mana hog, and phase 3 is very mana restrictive for warlocks. You'll need a full bar going into phase 3, and even that might not be enough.

Destruction also gets a gold star, but only if you have shadowfury. Preferably if you have improved soul leech, as well, even though shadowfury doesn't fit as comfortably into that spec. Each wave of adds will shadow strike 30 seconds after they spawn (this is usually on a strict timer, DBM and DXE are quite good at pinpointing it), all four must be stopped. Holy wrath, shockwave, and shadowfury all work for this, it's advisable to have two option in place.

Affliction even gets off with a passing grade, but with a big asterisk. It's the only spec that can reliably life tap during phase 3, however every point of healing you recieve eventually becomes healing for Anub'arak, so it cuts both ways.

Phase 1
There are 4 adds in each of two waves, tanked on a frost patch near Anub'arak. They'll either be tanked by two tanks (some guilds do this on two frost patches, one on either side with Nub in the middle), others by a single tank (a warrior in a specalized block set able to handle the four buffed adds).

Killing these adds is priority, but so is DPS'ing anubarak. Destruction has it easy - just rain of fire. Demonology will want corruption and CoA up for MC procs (pre-3.3 only, that is). The best place for demo locks to stand is right under Anub'arak's butt. Demo threat isn't severe, and from this position you can spam ROF and use immo aura without readjusting.

Shadow Strikes
If you're destro with shadowfury, watch the shadow strike timers. As soon as the timer is over, all four adds will start to cast shadow strike. Stun them immediately after the timer ends and stop them. This is very straightforward in phase 1, but there's a trick later that I'll cover.

Phase 2
The raid will reposition going into submerge phases, it's important not to break the initial frost patch right away, so watch your angle from where Anub'arak was standing when he burrowed.

Kiting is actually more straightforward than you'd think. Your guild needs a system that will cover which patches to go to, and communication is key. If you get a hand of protection, stand with the spikes right on the edge of the patch and walk on when there's 2 seconds left on the bubble. Some guilds will even trust pain suppression and heals to delay freezing the spikes.

Unless you're an engineer with rocket boots, don't try to get terribly fancy with kiting. Spikes catch up to you pretty fast, and if they catch you you'll get shredded quickly.

Dealing with bugs is simple - just single target them, nukes only for affliction and demo, DOTs should never get time to tick to usefulness. if the raid is dealing with them quickly, there should never be enough up close enough together to justify AOE. Watch decimation procs as demo. Bugs will die too quickly to use them on the bug that procced it, but you can use the soulfire on the next bug anyway.

When Anub'arak emerges, you can begin attacking immediately, even though he doesn't become active. Curse and pet, but move into position. Demon portal can be useful for this repositioning, but there's no guarantee he'll be in the same place he was during the last above ground phase.

Phase 3
Things are intense in phase 3, and most of the class specific strategy involves this. The goal is for as much of the raid to be very low health as possible. You should have this macro:

/cancelaura Prayer of Fortitutde
/cancelaura Commanding Shout

And if you're destro take blood pact off autocast and make sure it's disabled. This will reduce the maximum HP of as much of the raid as possible and lower the capacity to overheal anub.

Healers will be letting people get very low, too low to safely life tap. This is why you want to go into phase 3 with a full mana bar. During the health lowering portion just after Leeching Swarm starts, life tap anything you still need while you've still got it.

Penetrating Cold is the main worry. Frost protection potions will only eat one tick, but they're still generally used. Penetrating cold does come with a benefit, though. You must be healed during it, making it possible to life tap during the DOT.

If you get unlucky and don't get penetrating cold, death coil and your health stone can also buy you just enough health to steal a life tap. Last resort, wand - judgement of wisdom will give you enough mana quite quickly to start casting again.

AOE is still required on adds, however on mana limitations it's not easy. Rain of fire is mana intensive. Unless the raid can't do without your AOE, just single target on Anub'arak. Affliction and demonology in particular are both strong execute range DPS.

Shadow Strikes, Again
Shadow strike still happens in phase 3, and is even more important since nobody's going to survive (as opposed to probably no one in phase 1). There's a trick to watch for now, though. The first add wave to spawn completely inside of leeching swarm might shadow strike early. I don't know why, but it's only this wave and not always this wave. Watch them like a hawk for that early strike and make sure the raid has multiple AOE stuns ready just in case.

The Fear
Tributes are won and lost on Twins quite heavily, but the pressure is higher on Anub'arak, because the consequences are immediate. You can look at your remaining attempts and know exactly what you're losing from the tribute chest if you fail, it's not just a nebulous possibility anymore. One person can wipe the raid, and that person can be you. Don't be that guy.

The Profit
Anub'arak's got some nice loot.

Reign of the Dead/Reign of the Unliving wins the gold medal. It's unique-equipped tag doesn't restrict using it with the non-heroic version, and they work completely independently, even using different buff stacks to trigger (and in certain situations can even proc off each other). "Stacking buff then shoot" trinkets have always been a bit lackluster, but sheer spellpower and damage paired with the lack of good tier 9 trinkets makes these two spectacular trinkets.

Band of Deplorable Violence, a crit/spirit ring with a yellow socket and a 5 spellpower bonus is a decent ring option. It isn't the best stat spread, but there's a shortage of 258 rings anyway.

He's also got a lot of cloth: Icy Floe, Hit/haste boots with two gem slots are a solid best. Ashen Saint, haste/spirit bracers with a gem slot are another good option if you don't need hit from elsewhere. Lastly, there's a pick between Deepening Void, hit/crit legs rocking 3 gem slots and Lifeless touch, haste/crit gloves with two slots. While not on the BIS profile, these are viable 5th slot items alongside 4pt9. I'd favor the gloves, as our t9 pants are quite good despite only having two gem slots.

The Additional Profit
The biggest prize here is the Tribute Chest, after you're done looting Anub'arak. This is home to some of the best loot in the zone, but it's restricted by your performance on all five bosses.

As long as you actually kill Anub'arak, you get a minimum of 2 tokens redeemable for the top level 258 tier 9 set. These tokens are class limited, but not slot limited - the recipient can pick what they want to spend them on.

If you get Tribute to Skill, you also get a weapon. Notables here are the crit/spirit staff Clemency/Sufferance, and the haste/crit sword Blade of the Unbroken Covenant/Mortalis. These are still itemlevel 258,but have elevated spellpower compared to other ToGC weapons. The sword is a solid best in slot, and the alliance version has the advantage of not looking like one of those chintzy Christmas ornaments that spin around when you hang them above a light bulb.

At Tribute to Mad Skill, 45 attempts left, you get two additional set tokens.

Tribute to Insanity picks up an itemlevel 272 cloak. This is the best loot in the game folks, with 105 spellpower, a red socket and a spellpower bonus. There's two options, the spirit/haste Bolvar's Devotion/Liadrin's Conviction is likely the favorite, but there's the also excellent haste/crit option in Jaina's Radiance/Aethas' Intensity.

Totem of Wrath vs. Demonic Pact

2009-12-05T04:31:00.000-08:00

The battle between the spellpower support talents is nothing new, and it's gotten a lot of blue post attention lately, most recently this one. Take a second to review it if you want. It hits some high points of several issues elemental deals with right now, but one in particular is caused by warlocks. Totem of Wrath provides secondary support, so even when it's main function is useless, shamans aren't always given their fire totem back, and likewise, demonology's buff scales.

GC raises a few points. Among them, a shaman without ToW is more attractive for a raid slot than a demo warlock without DP - they still provide other strong support. GC assures that fixing the disparity between the two abilities is a priority... But it's been assured a priority now for soon to be three patches as it's gone from a nebulous idea to a reality of raiding.

The thing that gets me, the solution is both elegant and already in-game in the attack power department. Trueshot Aura (marksmanship), Abomination's Might (blood), and Unleashed Rage (enhancement - right next door to elemental) all scale based on the buff recipient, not the provider.

At high gear levels, where the disparity really means something, this is a buff to Totem of Wrath, but a nerf to Demonic Pact (nobody has the sheer spellpower of a demo warlock), though not a nerf to demonic pact's personal DPS, since the warlock himself will still be getting 10% of his own spellpower. It is a nerf to both at lower gear levels, however if this were implemented in 3.3, the emblem system would bring even non-raiders into the gear levels where the Demo:Ele conflict comes into play, and this would be done much more with an interest in Icecrown balance than previous tiers.

Socket Bonuses Part 2

2009-12-05T03:38:00.000-08:00

Previously, I posted a fairly detailed writeup of how you can decide wether to go for a socket bonus or not. The system works, but of course a couple of the questions people have distracted me with in the middle of heroic goddamn Anub'arak is, "Is there a way I can just get a list of what's worth it or not?"

Well, here I am, again to the rescue. Note, you're not going to completely escape the math here, but I can pare things down a good deal.
EJ has some simple rules. I like to get involved in my character - doing the work yourself gives you a better understanding of why things do what they do, it's one of the little things that helps separate the really good from the pretty damn good. However, those are both still awful good, so if you do like easy answers, here's the estimates:

A yellow gem costs: 4 spellpower, 6 haste, 7 crit, 8 spirit, or 23 intellect
A blue gem costs: 6 spellpower, 8 haste, 10 crit, or 32 intellect

A socket bonus has to pay for the cost of any non-red gem you need to hit it. You can consider your two blue gems required for the meta to be free, but use them to get the best bonuses you can, the weaker ones have to pay for themselves.

I'm ignoring hit bonuses, here, because as I've often said, you should treat hit as a binary capped/not capped situation, not a sliding scale. If that hit bonus will cap you, get it. If you're capped, obviously never even look at it.

Obviously, I harp on the fact that scale factors are not constants, they shift with the breeze and yours are not the same as mine or EJ's. So obviously, one set of rules won't always be right. However, the hand out rules won't steer you into any truly bad decisions - you might lose some DPS on them, but not a meaningful amount. They will steer you away from the really bad ones, too.

But you want to be Grand Crusader material, not Tribute to Mad Skill material, don't you? Don't you? Shut up, just read the stuff, I had to think about this shit.

Ok, first up, we need to Simcraft up some scale factors, of course. Here's my recent batch:
Spellpower: 1.61
Spirit: 0.62
Crit: 0.9
Haste: 1.00

The cost of a non-red gem is 23-12=11 spellpower minus 10 of the on-color stat. So a blue costs 11*sp-10*spi, and a yellow 11*sp-10*haste.

Red cost: 0 dps
Blue cost: 17.71-6.2=11.51 dps
Yellow cost: 17.71-10=7.71 dps

So, there we have the cost of a socket color, the bonus has to pay the cost or it's not worth getting. On to the examples. I'm actually going to rapid fire burn through all the sockets everywhere on my current gear, just to give plenty of examples.

Head: Kel'Thuzad's Hood of Triumph
Blue socket, 9 spellpower bonus
9 spellpower=14.49 DPS

The cost is paid, the bonus is hit. Note this also accounts for one of the blue sockets required by my meta gem. Keep track of this fact - you might find at least two worth it for the bonus alone, but in case you don't cover both required blue gems, you'll want to look for the least loss to complete your meta gem.

Neck: Pendant of Fiery Havoc
Yellow socket, 5 spellpower bonus
5 sp=8.05 dps

Note that my shoulders, Kel'Thuzad's Shoulderpads of Triumph and my cloak, Shawl of the Refreshing Winds, are the same socket layout as Penant of Fiery Havoc - one yellow socket for 5 spellpower.

In all four cases, of course, the cost is paid and the socket is worth it.

Robe: heroic Flowing Vestments of Ascent
Red/blue/yellow socket, 9 spellpower bonus.
9 spellpower=14.49

This is a special case. Note that 14.49 will not pay for the combined cost of both the blue and yellow socket, but it WILL pay for either alone. This means that if you don't have a profitable place for a meta-required blue gem, this is a good place for one, the net loss for this bonus is 4.73 dps

Bracers: heroic Felspark Bindings
Yellow socket, 4 crit bonus
4 crit=3.6 dps

Not a big surprise here, crit bonuses normally won't pay their bills.

Cord of Biting Cold
Red/blue/prismatic socket, 7 spellpower bonus
7 spellpower=11.27 dps

11.27 doesn't quite cover the 11.51 cost of a blue gem here - note that this one does end up breaking the EJ guidelines - they say 6 spellpower is enough to pay for a blue socket. The margin is tiny, though, this is one that could literally become a profitable bonus for me with my next gear change. This is also a very good place to put a blue gem to finish off my meta, the loss is only 0.24 dps, trivial regardless.

Pants: heroic Kel'Thuzad's Leggings of Triumph
Red/yellow socket, 7 spellpower bonus
7 spellpower=11.27 dps

This time with a yellow socket, 7 spellpower is worth it.

Boots of Fiery Resolution
Red/yellow socket, 6 haste bonus
6 haste=6 dps

Haste bonuses fare better than crit ones, but still, they don't often make the cut. However, ToC and Icecrown are the land of the spellpower bonus, and crit, haste, hit, and especially intellect bonuses are much less prevalent here, so socket bonuses are going to be more and more worth it.

Now, I've gone through all my gear (well, I skipped two items that only had red sockets anyway - their bonuses are free regardless). Remember I told you to keep track of how many blue sockets were worth hitting? We only had one, the one on my head for 9 spellpower. This means I still need one blue gem somewhere, I have two options: My robe and my belt. The robe would require a second gem to complete the bonus and mitigate the dps loss for the blue gem, with a net loss of 4.73 dps. However, my belt's bonus was on the razor's edge of profit as is, with a loss of only 0.24 dps. So the second blue gem goes in the Cord of Biting Cold.

So, there you have it. While this is presented differently, this is basically the same system I've presented before. However, this front loads most of the math into figuring the cost of a gem socket, which makes quick review of your entire setup quite a bit easier.

Simcraft Supplemental: Version Changes

2009-12-05T02:16:00.000-08:00

The Simcraft UI has been revamped slightly. This post is here to cover a few of the changes.

Of minor note, the in-UI browser for importing off of Armory isn't broken anymore, it actually displays fairly well.

The Options Panel is of main note. It's been split into several sections. The raid support buffs and debuffs have their own panels, which is honestly a bit more inconvenient than the old way, but two good changes are included. There's a completely separate options tab for Scaling, and you can turn off scale factors you don't care about. This will shorten simulation times, since you can turn off melee stats, stats with trivial DPS contributions like intellect, and hit, which mots people treat as a binary capped/not capped problem and not a sliding scale.

There is a more interesting feature added, stat plotting. More on this one through the jump.

Some more pretty colors. Note that these are very process intensive charts, and it takes much longer to generate them than raw scale factors. Think carefully before you turn this option on.

Anyway, what this is here is a more dynamic view of scale factors, and also gives a glimpse into why they're such dynamic things.

The chart on the left is a wider view of what your scale factors can do, showing how your DPS will change with the gain or loss of up to 200 points in any given stat. Note the waviness in haste scaling, it even dips at certain points. I've mentioned this in other simcraft threads, it's an artifact of simcraft's shortcomings in certain fringe case scenarios. So when in doubt, it may be useful to plot both haste and crit, just to see if your current scale factor is an artifact or not.

Also note hit, it drops off rapidly below the hit cap, but is completely flat above. As you can see, it shows mine flatlining at just above +0, this is because Simcraft doesn't model the +1% hit from the Draenei racial aura, and I'm currently not hit capped without that aura.

The right chart is nothing really new, just a sort of speedometer of stats. It gives a nice visual look at your scale factors to make large decisions, like a spirit robe vs. a haste one, but it doesn't bring anything new to the table.

If you want to really use either feature, turn off haste scaling and haste plotting, because you'll get a heavily skewed graph. Haste, crit, spellpower, spirit... even intellect look very close in both charts because hit is pushing them all down the speedometer on the right, and is greatly extending the bottom of the plot on the left, in both cases crunching the other stats into a tiny window.

Icecrown Gear Roundup Part 2: Frozen Halls

2009-12-04T03:16:00.000-08:00

Icecrown Citadel is bringing with it an unprecedented three 5 man dungeons, collectively called The Frozen Halls. They're individually short instances, having a total of seven boss encounters culminating with player's first hostile encounter with the Lich King himself. You don't get to kill him here, but you do set the stage for his demise in Icecrown Citadel itself.

Normal mode loot consists of itemlevel 219 epics, heroic of itemlevel 232 epics - the zone is itemized at tier 8 equivalents, and drops emblems of triumph like all heroics, so this is a potential one stop shop for all your welfare gear needs. In addition, the heroics are the starting point on the quest obtain Quel'Delar: Lens of the Mind, an itemlevel 251 epic sword which will be an upgrade to anyone not packing a ToGC25 weapon.

I'll be covering the fights themselves in a bit more detail after I've had the chance to see them on lives servers, but for now, the loot lists are up and robust enough to be assumed complete, so let's check out the profit.

The first of the three zones is the Forge of Souls, where machines called Soul Grinders... uh... grind... souls. You know, for... stuff. I dunno what they do, but they drop loot, so hope they break well. You'll join forces with Sylvanas Windrunner or Jaina Proudmore (depending on your faction) in this zone.

Bronjahm, the Godfather of Souls
Not a cheesy name at all, but not a happy lot of loot for the warlocky types.
Normal
Cold Sweat Grips
Hit/crit cloth gloves
Heroic
Very Fashionable Shoulders
Hit/haste shoulders just begging for some flavor text.

The Devourer of Souls
Not much of a devourer if they have to be ground up first, doncha think? He's sure devoured a lot of nice loot, though.
Normal
Blood Boil Lancet
Crit/spirit staff. Not particularly a good one.
Essence of Anger
Hit/haste belt. Probably going to be forgotten in this era of crafted 2 socket monstrosities, but not a bad belt in it's own right.
Coil of Missing Gems
Crit/hit necklace. Not sure where the missing gems fell out, there's no sockets.
Heroic
Seethe
Hit/haste sword, nice option for the non-raider looking to upgrade their Black Knight dagger, nice stop gap until you can get your Quel'Delar.
Mordrethar Robes
Crit/spirit robes. The lack of gem slots gives it away, the ToC robe is going to give it a hard time I think.
Arcane Loops of Anger
Haste/crit necklace, a solid pick for the itemlevel.

The next zone up is the Pit of Saron, you'll need to clear Forge of Souls to unlock this instance. Here you have to free trapped allies to help fight Scourgelord Tyrannus, lord of this zone which appears to be a saronite stripmine. With three boss encounters, this is the longest of the three five mans.

Forgemaster Garfrost
Master blacksmith of the Pit, Garfrost doesn't like warlocks. You'll see why in heroic.

Normal
Unspeakable Secret
Unspeakable haste/crit staff. Slightly better one than Blood Boil, but it's still a staff. A good one, if you like that sort of thing.
Ice-Steeped Sandals
Haste/spirit boots. A solid addition to any nonraider's wardrobe.
Heroic
Shit. Unless you like MP5, in which case you're a bad person.

Krick and Ick
Krik's a gnome. Gnothing good comes from dealing with gnomes. Especially ones that ride things called Ick.
Normal
Wristguards of Subterranean Moss
Haste/spirit bracers, another solid drop in our list.
Heroic
Ancient Polar Bear Hide
Hit/haste robe, another solid option from the zone, but again I'm struck by the lack of gem sockets. ToC 5 man gear's going to give a lot of Icecrown 5 man gear a run for it's money because it was somewhat generous with gem sockets.
Braid of Salt and Fire
Not sure how you braid salt with fire, but you get haste/spirit when you do. Nice belt.

Scourgelord Tyrannus
The big bad guy of the Pit. This means he's got the longest loot list, and he has some of the more notable warlocky items of the zone.
Normal
Palebone Robes
Haste/crit robes. Still no gem slots, ToC 5 robe still has two. Underwhelming, but a solid pick nonetheless.
Rimewoven Silks
Sounds appealing to the crossdresser inside every male clothie. Haste/crit pants with a socket. A socket you say? Yep a socket.
Heroic
Engraved Gargoyle Femur
Hit/haste. Another good one. You know, if you're a staff person.
Nevermelting Ice Crystal
Now THIS is what I'm talkin' 'bout. 111 spellpower DPS trinket. The use effect isn't spectacular, it's just crit. But it's just NINE HUNDRED AND TWENTY crit, which is nothing to sneeze at. The buff lasts 20 seconds, but every non-DoT crit will cut 184 crit off the total. This will be of notable use for affliction warlocks - remember, Corruption updates it's spellpower level on EA refreshes, but keeps it's crit and haste as long as it doesn't expire. That's 20% crit to your corruption that you get to keep, if you use it effectively. 3 minute cooldown sort of hurts the trinket as a whole, though.

After clearing both previous zones, you get to to come into the last (and shortest) of the five mans, the Halls of Reflection. These are the Lich King's private chambers, where he comes when he's not sitting atop the Frozen Throne, where he cries himself to sleep every night because Tirion Fordring just doesn't feel the same way about him.

Falric and Marwyn
The first encounter in the zone is against two of Arthas's captains from his days among the living. Loyal unto death and then loyal unto death again, these guys have a fairly long combined loot list.
Normal
Marwyn's Macabre Fingertips
For some reason these supposedly drop off Felric. Crit/spirit gloves with a red socket, not bad. 4 intellect bonus, though, which is. Still, it's nice to see some gem slots where they belong.
Splintered Icecrown Parapet
Haste/crit sword, one of the better nonheroic options from the zone.
Frayed Abomination Stitching Shoulders
Haste/crit shoulders.
Heroic
Soulsplinter
Hit/crit wand, not a bad option, particularly if you don't have the triumph wand.
Bracers of Worn Molars
These guys have a body part thing going on in their gear. Like these hit/crit bracers.
Sightless Crown of Ulmaas
Hit/haste helm with a meta socket. A solid pick - PVE meta gem helms are always limited options outside of raid gear.
Suspiciously Soft Gloves
These drop from Marwyn. I think they're soft because for some reason Falric drops this poor guy's fingertips. Crit/spirit gloves, no gem slot this time around, but still, 105 spellpower's not bad for pre raid gear.

The Lich King
Jaina and Sylvannas come seeking a glimmer of hope that Arthas may yet be saved and bloody vengeance, respectively. This fight is merely a setback, you won't be defeating Arthas here, but this is the first chance the world will have to really gauge his power.
Normal
Chilled Heart of the Glacier
Hit/haste dagger with a gem slot. It's blue, and the bonus sucks, but the extra spellpower still makes this a very solid 219 weapon.
Tattered Glacial-Woven Hood
Haste/spirit helm this time, but still has the meta socket, with a yellow second and 9 spellpower bonus - a candidate for a spellpower/haste gem with that bonus. Meta sockets are always a nice thing pre-raid, they're even annoyingly sparse in tier 7 gear.
Heroic
Shriveled Heart
Haste/crit offhand, only one from the trio of zones, too. Likely going to be one of the best offhands outside of raids.
Strip of Remorse
Haste/crit belt.105 spellpower, but with no sockets this looks like another one lost in the status quo of dual socketed crafted behemoths.

And of course, they're not heroics without trash. The Frozen Halls aren't overflowing with trash pulls, but there is trash loot, and it's epic this time around. A nice touch for a 5 man area.

Normal
Coffin Nail
Haste/spirit wand, a good pick for people without the triumph wand.
Mantle of Tattered Feathers
Crit/spirit shoulders. There are some haste options around the zone that would be better.
Heroic
Ghostly Wristwraps
More crit/spirit trash loot. Again, there's more attractive options in the zone.

And of course, the Battered Hilt drops from trash throughout the zones, launching an epic quest line that will end with Quel'Delar, Lens of the Mind. On the PTR, the hilt was a BOE, so expect some frustration greed rolling this against others in your groups and some truly epic auction house prices in the first few weeks. The result is the undisputable pre-raid best in slot weapon, not to mention it looks pretty cool, being all long, curved, and vaguely phallic in the outlining.

All in all, not a particularly amazing collection of loot. After the ToC 5 man, I would have expected much more generosity with gem sockets, especially in the 5 man finale of Northrend. Nevermelting Ice Crystal looks like the main attraction here. It's not a bad trinket, abusable for affliction, but I'm not entirely sold on it, either.

Killin' Chicks (Heroic Twin Val'kyrs)

2009-12-03T03:38:00.000-08:00

What's black, white, has a hundred pairs of balls, one health bar, and just wiped your raid? The Twin Val'kyrs. Yes, that's a terrible joke, but it's not nearly as bad as the one I briefly considered when a paladin in my guild made a tasteless joke about being black and hitting the white woman.

On normal difficulty, the Twins are an amazingly dynamic and fast paced fight, you're running everywhere, dodging balls, collecting balls, watching threat, monitoring upcoming abilities, and changing color.

On heroic difficulty, the Twins are an amazingly dynamic and fast pace fight where... you stand in one place and do DPS. Yeah.

There's actually two things you can do on this fight. Pitch or catch. Yes, I'm done with the bad jokes for this article now.

The basic setup for this fight is that the twins are tanked together in a fixed position, while the majority of the raid piles up together very tightly close to them. Two main variations have this either at the door, or at the front-left white portal. Several people are assigned as blockers, they'll have light essence full time, and their job is to intercept as many white orbs as they can, and as few dark orbs as they can.

Blocking
Hunters are a popular pick for this, because deterrence is so useful. However, most classes can suffice, and warlocks have some very strong tools to their advantage as well.

Spec wise, there's several things you want. In demo, you want Demonic Embrace, Fel Vitality, Soul Link, Demonic Aegis, and Master Demonology, use a felhunter as your pet. In Destruction you want Molten Skin and Nether Protection. Nothing else really matters, you won't be doing anything that can be called DPS. The purpose here is to maximize your survivability against massive spell damage. You will be hitting dark balls, as hard as you try not to, and you'll also be called on to eat the full brunt of dark vortex when it comes up, you won't have the chance to switch colors. Improved healthstone is useful, it'll help the raid out and give you a tiny bit of extra healing, but nothing else means anything, you can even leave the other points unassigned for all the good they'll do.

You'll also want all the health you can get - PVP gear, tank trinkets and jewelry, frostguard stuff, everything. Our blocking warlock almost hits 40k, and he's the lightweight in the bunch, our hunters are racing to 50k.

You'll be assigned a section of the room to sweep clear of light balls. When in doubt, take a dark one too - the group will need empowered darkness less than they'll need to not be hit by light balls, which can quickly devastate a raid if two or more get through. Stay in range of the healers, both for your own safety as well as for the raid's - the farther out you are the less longer it'll take you to react if a white ball is heading in a bad direction.

You'll always be light essence. When dark vortex happens, you'll just have to trust the healers to save your ass - you'll take a massive amount of damage very quickly, but nether protection can kick in, and resistances do mitigate it. Aura mastery fire is one of many lifesavers on this phase.

Nobody's saying don't toss corruption or CoD on Darkbane, but don't watch your timers - we've noticed the higher our soak's damage gets, the more white balls slip through. Tributes are really on the line on this fight, as is Anub'arak attempts if you're not really in a position to get one of the higher tributes.

DPSing

Useful Macros
Two things:

/target Fjola Lightbane

/target Eydis Darkbane

You'll need to be able to rapidly and seamlessly switch targets. Adding a /cast immolate is a good idea so you can switch and launch your rotation in a single action.

Spec
Destruction really rules the day here for riding the gimmick gravy train. Affliction can't really abuse the two targets well, because whichever essence you have you deal 50% more damage to the opposite and 50% less to the same. That means you're only doing a third as much to Darkbane as you are to Lightbane. The same applies to all specs - dotting the off target isn't worth it. Demo's still got it's obligatory raid support position... That does seem to be all it ever has pre-3.3, but actually, the next article in this series will change all that, and demo will be one of our featured attractions.

Cooldowns
The fight revolves around four abilities that happen at fixed intervals. Each interval, one of the twins will either bubble and begin channeling a massive 50% heal (if this goes off on heroic, it's a wipe, unless it's on the first cooldown, in which case it's still pretty bad), or they'll channel a massive AOE damage on the raid for 5 seconds.

Light Shield
This is the easiest cooldown: You're already dark essence, and you're burning Lightbane. The shield should prove no challenge to your raid.

Dark Shield
For both the door and the portal strategy, this is the make-or-break moment for DPS. This is where you're macros come into play. You may even want to pre-immolate Darkbane a few seconds before a cooldown so you can launch directly into a conflag>chaos bolt if dark shield comes up, and not waste time immolating.

Door strategy, just switch targets and burn the ever loving Jesus out of her. Heroism will be used on the first Dark Shield. If you get a second, you'll have to use your speed potion to get through it. If you get a third... Well, you would be screwed, but you're past the enrage timer by then so it doesn't matter.

Portal strategy is a bit less demanding, but still tight. You'll need to very quickly look around, ensure no dark balls are immediately incoming, and switch to light essence behind you, then target Darkbane and start burning the shield. Most guilds will have healers move out to form a shield that will absorb any incoming orbs rather than risk them hit the raid, if this is the case, don't bother checking the incoming orbs, just start killing. Heroism and potions aren't required to break the shield with a favorable essence, but time lost can still make things very tight, so your goal is to absolutely minimize time lost.

After the shield breaks, inturrupting isn't your job, so immediately head towards the dark portal accross the room and switch back, then return. While crossing, dodge ALL balls, light or dark. Other people crossing earlier or later than you may not have the same essence, so what will just splash off you could kill your buddy.

Dark Vortex
The easiest of all, you're already dark, enjoy getting free empowerment stacks.

Light Vortex
Not a serious issue for a portal strategy, but this is the killer for door strategies.

Door strats will absolutely need raid-wise divine sacrifice to even have a chance at healing the very sudden 10,000 DPS incoming on almost every member of the raid. And in 3.3, raid wide divine sacrifice is getting nerfed into oblivion. So if you're doing a door strategy, my very strong advice is to STOP, don't be that guild that suddenly lost weeks of progression work when a farm encounter was rendered impossible using their previous strategy.

Portal strategy, though, things aren't so bad. There is no healer shield this time, but there's a second of reaction time. Ensure no orbs are about to hit the raid - blockers should be sweeping the entire area between you and the dark portal during this time to ease the process. When it's safe, switch to light essence and start working your way towards the dark portal (no pressing need to DPS Lightbane, you'll want to switch back in 5 seconds anyway). As with dark shield, you'll want to avoid ALL balls during the switch - others will have switched before or after you, and what's safe for you will kill them. Healers won't be at 100% for this, and random raid damage will put people in considerable danger from the passive damage aura you suffer from throughout the fight.

The Profit
One step closer to the real gold, Anub'arak and that tribute chest. Probably the biggest prize of the fight, even if the pixels are pretty big.

Gear wise, there's the hit/haste Skyweaver robes, with three gem slots and massive stats, these are excellent to wear alongside 4pt9. There's also the hit/crit Dark Essence bindings. Not the best option in the zone, but still not terrible.

There's the hit/crit offhand, Chalice of Searing Light/Mystifying Charm. Again, a viable option, but not the best in the zone, even though offhand options at itemlevel 258 are pretty limited.

Lastly, there's the haste/crit neck Cry/Wail of the Val'kyr. With a gem slot and a good chunk of haste, nothing wrong with this neck except perhaps unfavorable socket layout for the bonus.

The Fear

This is an important fight, one of the hardest in the zone, and even though the heroic strategy involves nullifying the extreme complexity of the fight, it's still a brutal test of your raid. Don't get sloppy, don't play 90%, and don't get your teammates killed.

Tributes are won and lost on this fight worse than anywhere else.

The first three fights in the zone all have ways to almost guarantee a person's death, which can be very frustrating when Tribute to Immortality is on the line. But Twin Valk'yrs is all in your hands - the only things that will kill people is mistakes, and they'll kill very quickly. Frustrating as losing a tribute to the boss can be, losing it to yourself is far worse. Don't be that guy.

Icecrown Gear Roundup Part 1: Emblem of Frost and Primordial Saronite

2009-12-03T02:43:00.000-08:00

3.3 is really looming now. Loot lists are far from complete, and we haven't seen all of the Ashen Verdict rings yet, but two lists are presumed complete. We've known the crafted items for some time, and Emblem of Frost vendors are up with some nice itemlevel 264 goodness.

So let's browse the shop and see what we like, eh?

Crafted items this time around are made with Primordial Saronite, the Icecrown raid material. Patterns this time around are boots and pants.

The two options are pretty much identical aside from one stat. Deathfrost Boots clock in at 122 spellpower, 64 hit, 80 crit, red/blue sockets with a 7 spellpower socket bonus. The socket bonus is nice, socket layout is favorable for hitting it (it's a good candidate for your meta gem requirement if your spirit scale factor doesn't justify the bonus alone). The alternative is Sandals of Consecration, with 122 spellpower, 64 crit, 80 spirit, two yellow sockets with a 7 spellpower bonus. The socket colors make the bonus a no-go. Honestly, neither one is likely to be attractive to an Icecrown raider, there'll likely be a haste alternative in the zone itself. They're both good options for the warlock still in lower content or the non-raider.

Pants have Leggings of Woven Death and Lightweave Leggings. Both have a massive 164 spellpower (just beating out ilevel 258 ToGC epics), R/Y/B sockets (Three socket pants, at that - two has been the norm in tier 9 content) with a 9 spellpower bonus, which isn't bad at all, Woven Death have 84 crit and 108 haste, Lightweave trade the haste for 108 spirit. Neither is at all bad. There will likely be a haste/spirit option in the raid that would take preference over Lightweave, but Woven Death has some hefty haste attached and isn't a bad looking pair of pants.

That's the patterns, how about the Emblems?

First slot up is two robe options. Meteor Chaser's Raiment and Ermine Coronation Robes. Again, crit/spirit and haste/crit. Both have three gem slots and a 9 spellpower bonus, and both edge out ToGC loot by a few spellpower.

There's a belt, Circle of Ossus. Dunno who Ossus is, but he damn sure likes haste/spirit, with two gem slots and the best stat spread you could ask for, this will probably be a high priority for many buyers. With red/blue sockets and a 7 spellpower bonus, it's probably one to go for, too.

Gloves of Ambivalence, with two yellow sockets, look more like healer gear, but still, monster spellpower, crit/spirit, and even though the sockets probably aren't worth hitting for a 7 sp bonus, they're not complete wastes of itemization.

Volde's Cloak of the Night Sky is the only real cloak option. crit/spirit again, yellow socket with only a 5 sp bonus. Still, at 97 spellpower, this isn't a cloak to take lightly.

Lastly, we have a trinket. Maghia's Misguided Quill pretty much lives up to it's name: Misguided. There's a reason the Triumph trinket wasn't popular, and it's because there's really no reason to invest so much hit in a trinket in the equivalent level gear, let alone so much more than previous versions. The use effect is pretty lackluster next to Icecrown Citadel loot, too. Dying Curse is still the one good hit trinket in all of Wrath. Note that while this trinket has doubled Dying Curse's hit, it's proc is still less effective spellpower than that ancient tier 7 itemlevel 213 trinket. If that hit were... anything, anything at all except maybe intellect or MP5, this could be a good trinket. Haste, crit, spellpower, even spirit would look good there. But hit makes this one a great big pass.

Dark Coven's Regalia

2009-12-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

So, T10 looks official now. A number of caster items were changed recently, so the sets are no longer identical, tier vendors are up, and today's PTR build is marked as a release candidate. Background downloaders also kicked in for another 200 or so megabytes compared to last week's.

Lots of people noticed one thing: No spirit. There's a lot of theories on this, one of them being that blizzard is weaning us off spirit in preparation for Cataclysm, but I don't entirely buy that - there's a lot of spirit on icecrown gear.

My personal theory: We just got Holy Pally'd. Holy Paladins hated tier 8 because it wasn't itemized at all like they favored stats. Not just poorly like tier 7, but counter-intuitively to how their spec worked. Their talents were changed so they preferred how tier 8 was itemized more... Then tier 9 was itemized more like they USED to want stats. Tier 10 is exactly the dream set just about every warlock would have put together going into Naxx late last year. Spirit wasn't a huge stat for us, just not a waste. Crit and haste were our DPS stats after the obligatory hit and spellpower.

I've joked for a long time that tier sets aren't allowed to have more than two of our three favorite stats. We've liked spellpower, haste, and crit for much of this expansion, and our sets were very haste poor. As we've come to like spirit more and more with patches, it's also moved well up our lists, far eclipsing crit. More detailed stats through the break.

There's three sets, as with tier 9. Dark Coven's Regalia, at itemlevel 251 (not a stat upgrade from heroic tier 9 if you have it), purchased with Emblems of Frost. Sanctified Dark Coven's Regalia at itemlevel 264, purchased with tokens plus the lower level item - similar to tier 9, but without doubling up the emblem cost if you already have the cheap version. Heroic Sanctified Dark Coven's Regalia is itemlevel 277, and purchased with heroic tokens, though probably (hopefully) not so restrictive that they only drop off Heroic Arthas. My guild's gotten so many defender's tokens one almost went to off spec last week.

Socketing stays the same through all three versions, just like tier 9 (It remains to be seen if the widely follow the rule of adding sockets to heroic gear like they did so much in tier 9). The sets aren't ideally itemized, but they're not terrible, and it's not like that's something new. Tier 9 wasn't ideal, just not awful. Tier 8 and tier 7 were both much the same.

Set Bonuses
2 Piece: The critical strike chance of your Shadowbolt, Incinerate, Soulfire, and Corruption spells is increased by 5%.

The familiar bonus that's been in some form on all our Wrath sets, 5% crit. This time it's pretty extensive, giving something for everyone. Incinerate for destruction, Shadowbolt and corruption both for Affliction, and all three nukes for Demonology.

4 Piece: Each time your Immolate and Unstable Affliction spells deal periodic damage, you have a 15% chance to gain 10% damage done by you and your pet for 10 sec.

Not the familiar +10% DOT damage that's been on all our sets. 10% damage increase to both you and your pet at a 15% proc rate from every 3 second tick on one of your DOTs. Pretty big bonus all around, though note demonology would normally drop immolate from their execute range rotation, so you will have to adjust to keep it. I'd have to play with it, but I'm almost positive it would be worth keeping immolate up for procs. With no internal cooldown, the uptime isn't bad at all, you have nearly a 40% chance of it refreshing within it's own duration.

Stats

Head: Dark Coven Hood
Stamina: 109/123/139
Intellect: 109/123/139
Spellpower: 140/162/186
Haste: 80/92/106
Crit: 88/100/114
Gems: Meta/Blue
Bonus: 9 spellpower

Shoulders: Dark Coven Shoulderpads
Stamina: 81/92/103
Intellect: 81/92/103
Spellpower: 116/132/150
Haste: 63/72/82
Crit: 71/80/90
Gems: Yellow
Bonus: 5 spellpower

Chest: Dark Coven Robe
Stamina: 109/123/139
Intellect: 109/123/139
Spellpower: 149/171/195
Haste: 80/92/106
Crit: 96/108/122
Gems: Red/Yellow
Bonus: 7 spellpower

Hands: Dark Coven Gloves
Stamina: 81/92/103
Intellect: 81/92/103
Spellpower: 116/132/150
Hit: 63/72/82
Crit: 71/80/90
Gems: Blue
Bonus: 5 Spellpower

Legs: Dark Coven Leggings
Stamina: 109/123/139
Intellect: 109/123/139
Spellpower: 149/171/195
Hit: 80/92/106
Crit: 96/108/122
Gems: Blue/Yellow
Bonus: 7 spellpower

Nothing fancy like shaman shoulders big ghost pig proc, but the set bonuses are powerful and the set's no worse itemized than tier 7, 8, or 9. In fact, the argument can be made it's better - haste is the stronger stat than spirit, so instead of spirit/hit/crit, it's haste/hit/crit, which is a net improvement. Set bonuses are spellpower all the way around, though I'd like to see a few less yellow sockets and a few more red. If normal/heroic item changes look in ICC like they do in TOC, I'd expect the chest to be the item to drop, in favor of some amazing 3 socket robe woven of uncut death and win. It'll probably be a recolor of that mage set, though. Gah.

3.3 Additional Conflag Change

2009-12-01T12:48:00.000-08:00

Conflagrate: This spell will no longer benefit inconsistently from the talents Emberstorm and Improved Immolate, as well as the Glyph of Immolate and Tier 9 set bonus. Just as for Immolate, all stacking percentage increases will be applied additively instead of multiplicatively (+10% and +20% make +30% instead of +32%). In addition, Conflagrate used with Shadowflame will now scale properly from spell power.

This is, strictly speaking, a further nerf to conflag, though not a large one. It's larger if you happen to use 2pt8, which will now function the same way that 4pt9 does. The spell currently benefits very oddly from several talents, though, differently than other spells in the tree, and differently than immolate, which it should technically scale identically to.

Killin' the Baddies (Heroic Faction Champions)

2009-12-01T03:20:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest fights in Trial of the Crusader, and the biggest progression cockblock in tier 9 is the faction champions.

These guys don't play fair, they don't obey the usual PVE rules, and they don't like warlocks. Nobody does. Not even me. And I'm a warlock. So are you. So either piss off or read this article about how to survive against the Heroic Faction Champions.

Spec
This is the one fight in ToC that really calls for a nonstandard spec. You can get away with a normal spec, but the more survivability you stack on, the better off you'll be.

PVP specs are the standard fare on the fight. Soul link, especially with the glyph, is a godsend. A demonic brutality boosted bubble is also a lifesaver, absorbs are always better than heals on this fight. However, traditional PVP specs aren't completely ideal, either - the fight does call for more sustained damage, since your opponents all have millions of health rather than just tens of thousands. The specifics don't matter too much, though, and DPS isn't a factor in the fight, survival is.

I personally prefer using a standard meta/ruin build, but with a voidwalker out instead of a felguard. I use metamorphosis as a defensive cooldown against melee attackers, and demon charge to quickly move away from an attacker.

Buffs
Ditch your frost wyrm flask for a tank flask on this fight. You can go back when you're comfortable, but learning the fight you'll want every edge you can get.

Don't use fel armor on the fight, at all. A lot of warlocks died testing, but for some reason fel armor is a magnet, given the choice between two identical warlocks, the one with fel armor will almost always get beat on more heavily. Demon armor gives you a decent amount of armor (the most dangerous champions are melee) and more importantly increases the healing you receive.

Use a spell stone, as well, regardless of your spec. More of the fight is about CC and avoiding damage than it is doing damage. A spellstone will speed up your fear and banish casts a little bit, and give you an easier time firing them off on the run.

Gear
Any stamina gear you have - PVP gear, tank trinkets you saved from shards, Brightbrew and Balebrew charms from Brewfest. One of my favorites is my Titanium Frostguard ring with a stamina gem. Use it all, get as much health as you can pile on, anything that'll put a bit more buffer between that rogue and your favorite body parts.

Threat
"Threat" works strangely with this fight. It's not entirely understood, but a lot of tests have been done. One big factor is how "wounded" you are. If you're not at full health, you're a more attractive target, and the lower your health, the more attractive you are. This is why you want to absorb every point of damage you can - a voidwalker is your best friend here, sacrifice the second one of the champions looks at you funny. Shadow ward should be in an easy to reach spot - if the shadow priest, warlock, or DK starts messing with you, pop that for a bit more buffer.

This thread over on Maintankadin has some of the more extensive collection of faction champion agro mechanics you can find. Their findings were that the three primary factors were ARMOR, PROXIMITY, and HEALTH DEFICIT.

Armor is why you should use demon armor at all times, and also why warlocks tend to be such attractive targets. A warlock in fel armor is the lowest armor player controlled object in the game. This makes you a very attractive target.

Health deficit is what I've already covered, and why absorbs, dispells, mitigation, and avoidance are all very important - no matter how much you can heal, to heal you have to take damage, which gives you a health deficit.

Proximity is a hard one to control, since the fight is very chaotic. Turn on enemy nameplates if you normally have them off, ideally you never want to see a bar on your screen, but the nameplates make a good early warning if a champion is moving towards or past you.

Proximity is also why I mention that demon portal is a big risk. You move farther from your current attackers, but you move closer to others. If you use it while you're already wounded, you suddenly become a very good target to new attackers, and can doom yourself even worse than you already were.

Survival
You'll most likely be assigned a CC target, or two to alternate between. You may be given the rest druid, who you'll alternate banish>banish>banish>fear>fear>fear on to keep it locked down as much as possible. Focus on this, make a macro to quickly reaquire your assigned target(s), and don't try to hard to DPS.

The less you do, the less attention you seem to get. There will be people not assigned to CC who will be dealing with the kill targets. As targets thin out, it's safer to do more to help out elsewhere in the fight. Melee DPS is the most worrysome, try to stay out of trouble until they're thinned out.

The rogue, warrior, DK, ret pally, and hunter are the particular threats, and should all be high priority kill targets for the whole raid. In fact, it's generally a better idea to kill melee first rather than healers, it can simply become unhealable if three of them get on a clothie.

When you have agro from a caster, don't worry too much. None of the casters pose major damage threats, though some pose serious disruption hazards. Make use of sacrifice and shadow ward to stave off damage, but melee are the real dangers. Kite them through hunter traps, run away, deathcoil them, whatever you have.

Demon Portal
This is the one exception to the "whatever you have" rule. Be careful about when you use your portal, and make sure you move it to a safe place regularly. You don't want to come out of that near the warrior or rogue especially. It's always good to escape your current attacker, but teleporting seems to make nearby champions "reevaluate" you as a potential target. Portaling with low health can be a worse death sentence than taking it like a man.

The Profit
A common story in TOC, with short loot lists and few bosses, there's not many attractions here. Two items of use. A belt, Biting Cold, is a hit/crit belt. Not an amazingly itemized option, but it does edge out the hit/haste belt from heroic 10 man slightly. The boots, Mourning Widow, are an excellent haste/spirit option, with two gem slots, red/blue with a good bonus.

The trinket, event hough it's a tank trinket, gets special mention because of it's use on this fight specifically - 216 stamina is a lot of extra health, particularly backed up by demonic embrace and fel vitality.

Killin' a Demon Lord (Heroic Jaraxxus)

2009-11-29T00:05:00.000-08:00

So, we talked about the first boss in Trial of the Grand Crusader, might as well follow the theme for the duration. I know Icecrown looms, but heroic ToC is still a prize that's eluded a great many warlocks.

Demons, portals, summoning, green fire, gnomes pulling agro and getting killed. Everything a warlock could want in a fight, right?

Specs
There's really no two ways about this fight: It's destruction's playground. There's only one significant DPS check, and that's killing portals within the strict time limit before a second mistress appears. Affliction can't muster the DPS fast enough, and demonology will have limited use of it's DPS boosting tricks. Not to say demo doesn't still have it's place as a support spec, of course.

Macros
An important macro you'll want:

/target [nodead] Nether Portal
/target [nodead] Infernal Volcano

These are both high priority MUST DIE NOW targets. It may be advisable to tie /cast immolate to this macro so you'll launch directly into your rotation with a single action. You can even get fancy and have a single macro with two modifiers to cast immolate on Jaraxxus or the current priority target. Note that the [nodead] modifier isn't just for show - even though they leave no visible corpse, you can target dead volcanoes and portals, and it can mess with the macro if you don't exclude dead targets. There's no need to have two separate macros, if by some freak scenario you have a portal and a volcano alive at the same time, you're going to wipe, and it's going to be spectacular.

There's lots of other targets to kill in the fight, Felflame Infernal, Mistress of Pain, and Lord Jaraxxus himself, but none of them are extremely urgent, the DPS check is not meaningful at all, except on the portals.

You'll also need to deal with a special debuff. This debuff will inturrupt whatever your next cast is and lock that school. The easy way to deal with this is to trick it into locking out a shadowbolt by doing this to your incinerate macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:shift] Shadowbolt; Incinerate

Swap the two as needed - you want the second to be your primary filler nuke.

Threat
If your tank is a rage-based class, be aware that Jaraxxus is a pansy. He doesn't hit as hard or quickly as other bosses in the zone, and if you're inturrupting all of his fel fireballs, the tank's rage can be a pretty limited commodity. DPS on Jaraxxus is not at all urgent, don't blow your wad and need to soul shatter. If you do get threat capped on him, just bugger off for a bit, you'll want soul shatter for a Mistress emergency, not Jaraxxus.

Phase 1

As Wilfred Fizzlebang takes all afternoon to introduce the fight, be happy that if you wipe, you don't have to watch this again. That's the pain everybody who spent weeks wiping on Kael'thas once knew.

There's no reason to spread out while it's just Jaraxxus at all. His fel lightning ability jumps a long way, and doesn't increase damage each jump (if you're getting killed by it, dispellers aren't getting Nether Power dispelled fast enough), it's going to chain regardless. Stay close to him, you want to be in range of any possible portal or volcano spawn.

When you get legion flame, remember to move - each tick drops a fire under you, and if you stay put for even a couple ticks, you'll be taking tons of damage. When you get Incinerate Flesh, all the healing you get will be absorbed to remove the debuff, but this is actually a good time to life tap, you'll always get a few hits of overhealing. You can also use deathcoil or a healthstone to help beat the debuff, but it shouldn't be necessary (any passive healing like siphon life or soul leech also contributes, but again shouldn't be necessary).

Phase 2 (Portals and Volcanoes)
Watch timers like a hawk. 10-15 seconds before a portal or volcano spawns, drop conflagrate and chaos bolt from your rotation. Your DPS will tank for a bit, but remember: DPS on Jaraxxus is not urgent by any measure.

When the new target spawns, hit your target macro and launch immediately into a burst combo with both your cooldowns. Volcanoes are not quite so tight as portals (if you're a bit slow you may get four infernals instead of five, but that's not as bad as getting two mistresses instead of one).

Add Phase
Mistress
This is where you'll want to hang on to soul shatter, though it probably won't be needed - when one spawns, you'll have just blown your burst on the portal. They do two things to worry about. The first is Pain Spike, a sort of spinning body slam. This does massive damage based on your maximum HP, and if you happen to get it while you have legion flame, it's pretty much a death sentence, you'll drop one or two fires and then get body slammed right into them with the DoT still ticking.

The more important one is Mistress' Kiss. If you get this, the next spell you cast will be inturrupted and you'll be locked out of that school for 8 seconds. The best way to deal with this is to eat it with a shadow bolt to keep your fire school clear (or incinerate to keep your shadow school clear). This is where the shift modified macro I included above comes into play.

Mistresses are where you as a caster get in DPS time on Jaraxxus, as well. They go down faster than infernals, and leave plenty of time to burn Jaraxxus before you have to worry about saving cooldowns for the next volcano.

Infernals
Infernals are easy to deal with, but slower. You'll actually want to be more spread out on these, and if you see one turn into a meteor and streak for you, haul ass out of there, doesn't really matter where. You'll take a good chunk of damage from the meteor, but if you hang around you'll be getting hammered with about 2500 dps worth of AOE fire. Ranged should try to focus fire on the infernals with assist targets or raid icons, but it's easy to outrange the primary target. If that happens, DPS what you can reach rather than chasing the main infernal down, just be careful about threat.

Melee isn't going to be on infernals, between them running around and having all sorts of close range AOE, and with all the running around, the infernals can be a check of their own. If you have any hope of beating the second Mistress spawn from a portal, infernals should be no problem, but just be aware of the Nether Portal timer when you finish with the infernals, you won't have much time on Jaraxxus and you'll want to have your best burst ready for the portal. You'll also want to make sure to collapse back close enough to Jaraxxus to ensure a clean switch to the portal when it comes up.

The Profit
3 Emblems of Triumph is never something to sneeze at, even if you're past the high costs and have all your 245 tier 9 set, this is still 1/5 of a Crusader Orb, which will cover many a repair bill on the AH.

Loot wise, Jaraxxus has a short list, and an even shorter list of appealing loot.

Soothing Touch are a fine pair of spirit/haste pants. You're much more likely to want tier 9 in that slot, but if you get the 4 piece bonus through other slots, this is your best option for the 5th.

Talisman of Heedless Sins/Symbol of Transgression is one of only two offhand options in the zone, neither of which are really ideal. This option is hit/crit, the alternative is spirit/crit off twins.

And... that's it. The ring, Darkmender, is MP5. There's a shortage of 258 rings, but Firestorm Ring from heroic 10 man is superior to Darkmender, and it has hit. Any build without suppression will have a tight hit situation if you get close to all 258 gear.

Solace, the trinket, has a lot of spellpower, but if you roll on this MP5 version of Eye of the Broodmother you're a bad person and should feel bad.

Killin' Animals (Heroic Northrend Beasts)

2009-11-26T16:07:00.000-08:00

The first boss in Trial of the Grand Crusader is a pretty harsh lesson in what hard mode means for somebody who goes in expecting pretty much the same fight as normal difficulty. For some guilds it's the most difficult encounter in the raid to get down the first time after Anub'arak himself. DPS requirements are high, tank damage is ridiculous, raid damage is punishing, and every mistake tends to compound into more deaths.

Warlocks have a few tricks to excelling in the fight, maximizing DPS, and protecting your pets.

Specs
Affliction can actually outperform it's usual disadvantage on this fight, though inferior scaling still tends to bury it (pre-3.3 at least). Maintaining a full round of dots on off targets in phases 1 and 2, and having dots already rolling during charges both help affliction more than other specs.

Demo has no particularly special tricks on the fight, but it does have a key disadvantage: You can't use immolation aura on phase 1, as Gormok does a powerful stomp that also inturrupts casting for 8 seconds.

Destruction is generally the best DPS performance, but ranged pets are actually at greater risk on this fight than others in the zone. There's a very simple trick for dealing with this.

Useful Macros
/target macros are useful, specifically for Snobold Vassals. A macro to quickly target Dreadscale and put him on focus and then target Acidmaw will let you get set up in phase 2 immediately.

Set up all your dot spells like this:

#showtooltip
/cast [nomodifier] (spell)
/cast [modifier:shift, target=mouseover] (spell)

While holding shift the spell will be cast on your mouseover instead of your current target. You can also use target=focus, and set the secondary target (such as Dreadscale in phase 2) to focus.

Phase 1: Gormok the Impaler
This is where destruction has pet issues. Gormok's little snobold helpers throw fire bombs at the raid. Each tick you stand in the fire stacks a DOT on you. The fire itself counts as AOE and is greatly reduced by pet avoidance, but the DOT does not, meaning an imp standing in the fire is going to die very quickly.

The fire has to limitations: Pets are not valid targets and targets inside of stomp range are ignored. The problem with stomp range is that now your imp is getting locked out of casting for 8 seconds repeatedly. Staggering stomp is huge damage, almost 10,000, but it's AOE, so imps can shrug it off easily with fel synergy. The lockout, however, isn't so good. With the raid spread out, standing room is at a premium, the imp's just not safe standing with the raid.

So what to do? Gormok will generally be tanked facing his entry gate. Nobody will generally be standing back here, meaning you can set your imp on stay back there and he'll be completely safe. Before the fight is activated, tuck your imp into the corner of the door and set him to stay and passive, then just give him the attack order at the start of phase 1.

Each guild has different rules for dealing with snobolds. Usually if they're on a melee or hunter, they're lower priority than if they're on a caster or healer. When a snobold is called for death, focus your DPS on it. Keep DOTs rolling on Gormok as well, if you're using shift-focus macros set Gormok as your focus for this phase.

You've got a very tight time limit in this phase, hence the reason for not immediately killing snobolds if they're on low priority targets. You can increase your overall DPS output by putting DOTs on low priority snobolds, but the number one priority is to kill Gormok before Acidmaw and Dreadscale enter the arena. As long as you kill him before the worms enter on their own, you'll have a sufficient window to finish off any remaining snobolds.

Phase 2: Acidmaw and Dreadscale
If you're using focus macros instead of mouseover, here's where that worm macro I mentioned is useful:

/target dreadscale
/focus
/target acidmaw

This doesn't need to be anywhere convenient, you'll only need it once. Rolling dots on both targets isn't just meter padding here like it is (arguably) in phase 1, since both worms must die in the same strict time limit. When doing this, destruction warlocks should remember to put their second curse of doom on Dreadscale - they won't get a second on Acidmaw. Heroism will likely be used very early in this phase, in an attempt to kill Acidmaw before or shortly after the first submerge. It's entirely possible to do this before the submerge, but more likely that he'll submerge at low health and need to be finished off. If your guild does have a chance to kill him before the first submerge, destruction warlocks should put their first CoD on dreadscale, or it might not tick at all.

There's only some small positional awareness involved here. The raid has to be spread out so burning bile and paralytic toxin don't shred the raid, and you can't be in the frontal cone of the mobile worm - it's a very long frontal cone, it's often safe to assume it goes forever, it certainly feels that way when you get caught in it from halfway around the arena wall. Standing room is prime real estate in this fight as well, especially if you want casting range on both worms at the same time (which is a good idea). Don't risk endangering your raid to get DOTs on the off target.

While acidmaw is alive and stationary, before the first submerge, is when you're likely to get paralytic toxin. When this happens, immediately drop what you're doing and move towards the mobile worm's tank, they're the only person who's pretty much guaranteed to have burning bile, which will remove your poison.

Icehowl
If you're here and the raid is intact, congratulations things just got really easy. There's really no tricks here except to watch where you are just before a crash. Watch the line from the center of the room, through you, to the outer wall. You don't want that line to end at any of the four gates, and preferrably not near one of the pillars, since these make for a longer escape route. Try to aim to an open spot between pillars on the wall.

The only DPS trick is to make sure you refresh DOTs right before a crash - it may even be a good idea to clip them. When he jumps to the middle of the room, even destro locks should try to get a corruption off at the last second. The goal here is to have as much damage in place already when he hits the wall and stuns. By the time affliction get's DOTs on him normally, the stun is over and you did nothing with the double damage window.

This is the phase you want to save soul shatter for at all cost - even switching your main DPS to dreadscale while acidmaw is still alive is preferable to not having soul shatter in phase 3. Even here it's largely a safety net. Coming out of stun, Icehowl almost always does his freezing breath, giving an ample window for tanks to taunt if people over-agroed during the stun (which is very likely).

The most important thing is that you (and everybody else) never get hit by a charge. This is guaranteed death, and the enrage it triggers almost guarantees the next person dies too. The enrage can be removed, but even in the time it takes to get it off Icehowl hits like a freight train loaded with mack trucks carrying train parts, and missing an enrage will put you behind the hard enrage timer.

The hard enrage timer has one small forgiveness: The way it's timed, it often hits a split second AFTER a crash. Provided nobody gets hit by the charge, you can still have one more stun to finish him off. A deterrence tank can even buy you precious seconds past that. However, it can also hit just as Icehowl jumps in the air for a crash, causing the crash to do 100,000+ damage to everybody.

The Profit
3 emblems of triumph is never anything to sneeze at - at the going rate of crusader orbs on my server that means the equivalent of 150g.

T9 loot's always a pain to talk about, since horde and alliance get different names, but the general themes are the same. Either way, this is your first taste of itemlevel 258 loot.

Refreshing Winds, a haste/spirit cloak, is one of the better non-hit options in the zone. Tenebrous Mist is a haste/spirit belt with two gem slots and a favorable socket bonus built in.
Robes of Ascent are the first likely upgrade from Merlin's Robe or another crafted option - having three gem slots, not a bad socket bonus, monster spellpower, and haste/spirit.

Main attraction here is the Blade/Barb of Tarasque, though. A hit/haste dagger with 692 spellpower and a blue socket with a spellpower bonus. This is an upgrade of 71 spellpower before socketing from the normal 25 version - the potential to pick up nearly 100 spellpower in a single upgrade is immense. The only other option in the zone is Blade of the Unbroken Covenant/Mortalis, from the tribute chest. With 9 more spellpower and crit/haste, it is the slightly more appealing option, but the line for this weapon is going to include every warlock, mage, and holy paladin in your raid, and being a tribute drop it's much harder to come by than Tarasque.

Wrap your DKP around this weapon and don't hold your breath about replacing it until Icecrown. Even Quel'delar's not going to pry it out of your hands.

3.3 Patch Roundup

2009-11-24T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've been holding off on this, the 3.3 PTR has been breakneck in how quickly things change direction, though for most of it, warlocks have been in a fairly stable place. Many of our changes were in fairly early and stayed put.

Now, changes are trickling in much slower, loot is in, raid testing is winding down, it looks like the patch is looming. So here's a full list of what 3.3 means for us.

Threat reduction
Improved Drain Soul and Destructive Reach have both been increased from 5/10% to 10/20%. This puts us on par with most ranged spec threat reduction. Poor fire mages are still left in the cold, but I feel much less sorry for them since arcane has the second highest reduction in the game.

Affliction
Affliction's back, not just to viability, but topping simcraft and making a good showing in ICC raid testing.

The bulk of this is due to Glyph of Quick Decay, which decreases the tick time of corruption. There's a few very fun facts about this: Everlasting Affliction refreshes Corruption to 18 seconds duration, but does not change the tick interval - it keeps whatever haste you had when you hard cast corruption. The key to maximizing the talent is hard cast corruption at max haste - eradication and a speed potion will go a long way - and immediately refresh it with haunt.

Three minor additions are buffs to the felhunter. Improved Felhunter decreases the cooldown of Shadow Bite by 2/4 seconds, and shadow mastery now effects shadow bite as well. These changes solidify affliction's improvement, but they do chain affliction to the felhutner and spell the end of the doomguard's useful days. Lastly, the bonus to shadow bite from your own DOTs on the target was raised from 5% per DOT to 15% per DOT, making for a hefty 30% boost to the ability.

Destruction
Things are rough for destruction, it took a huge hit to burst damage for PVP, but in PVE, it's walking away largely unscathed.

The conflag nerf is mitigated for PVE by a few facts: The DOT portion of conflag can crit, and it crits with the same rate as conflag itself. So the average damage per conflag is the same. The DOT crits do not proc pyroclasm, and the DOT does not benefit from a pyroclasm procced off it's parent conflag (it does, however, benefit from a pyroclasm that was up when its immolate was up), which also leaves it equal to the current conflag. The only loss is that the 25% of conflag tied up in the DOT portion does not benefit from the 1% direct damage firestone increase. This means a 0.25% loss off of each conflag. The sky is not falling.

On the flip side, imps now benefit from Ruin, doing 200% damage on crits instead of 150%. Similar to the empowered imp trade attached to the last burst nerf, destruction's picked up a net DPS gain.

Demonology
Demo made off like a bandit this patch. First, a 5% spell damage increase on Demonic Pact, which means not only a direct 5% increase to personal (not pet) DPS, it also means that 3/53/15 is a dead spec - demo can't lose that 5% spell damage, even if demonic pact isn't useful.

The rest of demo's changes are tied up in complicated mechanic changes.

Decimation is the easier one: Soulfire itself now procs decimation, and it's no longer limited to your next soulfire only, so there's no spell weaving, no range finicking, once you proc Decimation, you can spam soulfire for the duration of the fight. This has a few implications: First, you can still meta>charge>immo aura in decimation range, second, you can't depend on shadow bolt for molten core procs in decimation range (though shadow bolt no longer procs molten core anyway), so your execute rotation will be corruption>Soulfire.

Molten Core is a huge clusterfuck of a talent now. The exact patch notes read:

Molten Core: Redesigned. This talent now increases the duration of Immolate by 3/6/9 seconds and provides a 4/8/12% chance to gain the Molten Core effect when Corruption deals damage. The Molten Core effect empowers the next 3 Incinerate or Soul Fire spells cast within 15 seconds (Incinerate: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and reduces cast time by 10/20/30%; Soul Fire: increases damage done by 6/12/18% and increases critical strike chance by 5/10/15%). Molten Core now has a new spell effect.

The duration increase to immolate is nice (Note that this does not increase the damage of conflag in any way), but the main attraction is the 12% proc from Corruption. This is why you want corruption up in decimation range, for the increased damage and crit chance.

Outside of decimation, Molten Core is the warlock Eclipse. When it procs, incinerate is a better filler nuke than shadow bolt, meaning you'll fire three incinerates before returning to your usual nuke rotation. And you thought meta's rotation was bloated already?

Pets
Avoidance was buffed a tiny bit - from 80% to 90%, but no longer functions in PVP. This makes very little difference in PVE, as currently any damage reduced by avoidance can be shrugged off as long as you have fel synergy.

Doomguards and Infernals now have Avoidance, just in time for neither of them to see daylight again until Cataclysm at best. Infernal cooldown was also dropped to 10 minutes, but it's still locked out of Arena use.

Level 1 warlocks now start out with an imp. This falls into the same vein as rogues starting with dual wield, it makes classes closer to their full function earlier, and combined with the low level regen changes, will greatly ease the early levels for warlocks. Why hunters still have to dick around for ten levels without a pet is beyond me, those were infinitely worse than going 10 levels with a one weapon rogue or two without an imp for a warlock.

Icecrown Citadel
Not an in depth look here, not yet. But mainly what ICC means for our newly rebalanced trees. More and more spellpower means more and more demand for demonology warlocks in raids. Even without the DPS boost this would be the case.

Affliction is barely beating Destruction in Simcraft, meaning in real scenarios it could still be run out of viability by raid mechanics. Thankfully, of the fights tested so far, this doesn't seem to be the case - affliction's lead isn't nearly as solid as it is on paper, but it doesn't vanish as it could easily have. Valithera Dreamwalker is Gothik phase 1 all over again for affliction, trash waves full of MUST DIE NOW targets. The airship battle is not nearly so bad, however, there are many adds, but they have relatively high HP and survive full rounds of DOTs, letting affliction really make use of multi target DOTs.

What's NOT Happening
None of the full pet scaling hinted at Blizzcon - no surprise to me, honestly, the balance implications mean that was pretty much doomed to be part of the big 4.0 talent tree overhaul.

While there was some promising talk about infernals and doomguards being overhauled as guardians - DPS cooldowns like a DK's gargoyle - that's not happening now. It's not promised per se for cataclysm, either, but if it happens, that'll be it.

No ponies. BUT GHOSTCRAWLER PROMISED!

The real threat problem

2009-11-09T17:18:00.000-08:00

I'm probably one of the biggest "make your tanks better" person when threat problems come to the boards. All four tank classes have the tools to pull through the sort of threat warlocks and mages put out on gimmick fights. Enough have done it that the only explanation for those that can't do the same on ungimmicked fights is a lack of skill.

But if it's so simple, then why do warlocks specifically get singled out as the agro whores? Well... There is a threat issue, but it's not with warlocks. It's with almost everybody else.

Let's go through a catalog of threat reduction in the game:

Death Knights have 20% passive in DPS presences, and can spec for another 25% for a potential 45% threat reduction
Elemental shamans have 30% for 3 talent points
Enhancement shamans have 30% for 1 talent point
Balance druids have 30% for 2 points

Feral druids have 30% passive in cat form
Retribution paladins have 30% for 3 points

Rogues have 30% passive reduction with a 100% drop
Shadow priests have 25% for 3 points
Warriors have 20% passive in battle/berserker stance, fury can spec for an additional 10% passive for a full 30%
Arcane mages have 40% for 2 talent points and a 100% drop on a long cooldown that's not always reliable

As you can see, all the specs above have at least 20%, most have at least 30% passive reduction, and none give up single target DPS talents to get threat reduction (you actually can't see this, but all I can say is check the spec threads on EJ or the individual class forums).

Now, for the rest of the classes:
Hunters have no threat reduction, but a relatively reliable 100% drop on a very short cooldown - it's not 100% reliable, but it really only needs to work once to get them through a fight. There are fights that it doesn't work on at all, or is very unreliable, and on those fights hunters have significant threat issues.

Demonology warlocks have none without sacrificing DPS talents, but split their DPS with a pet, so their personal threat generation is actually fairly low.

Frost mages have 10% for 2 points, but don't do DPS to make it a serious issue. 3.3 is improving their DPS significantly, but by way of making water elementals permanent pets in PVE, so their threat isn't going to be going through the roof, all the new threat will be on their pet.

Affliction has 10% for 2 points at the cost of DPS talents. Affliction's low DPS keeps it a nonissue right now, but that's likely to change in 3.3. Their slower ramp up time will be a considerable help, though. Back loaded DPS may generate the same threat as front loaded, but it generates a smoother threat curve that isn't likely to spike ahead of the tank suddenly. On the other hand, affliction has no "off" switch if it's in danger of pulling threat - half of it's DPS will continue undeterred if the warlock pulls off entirely.

Destruction has 10% for 2 points, 1 of which is at the cost of DPS talents in 0/13/58.

In addition, to set warlocks apart from fire mages, who are in almost the same situation, fel synergy, fel armor, and soul leech healing and life tap, dark pact, and improved soul leech (the immediate return, not replenishment) all generate healing threat.

So why not buff mage and warlock threat reduction to 30% like just about everyone else? Well, to be honest, that's probably the easiest option. It'll go down easier than an accross-the-board nerf to almost every class in the game. Even mages won't be untouched, as arcane has significantly superior threat reduction to fire or frost.

However, Blizzard's defense in the past about doing just this has been that they don't want raids to ignore threat. They want threat to be an important mechanic in raids, to influence what people do and how they handle certain encounters. And that's good, threat management is a major part of PVE and keeps DPS from blindly pushing buttons until loot falls out - buffing warlock threat reduction would put the game to the point that threat was just about trivial.

But on the other side of the coin, most classes are already to the point that they can simply ignore threat. Destruction warlocks and to a lesser extent fire mages can't, and can potentially be quite constrained by threat issues, especially with undergeared or underperforming tanks. Hunters feel the same pain on Razorscale, among other fights, where fein death doesn't work.

Blizzard really needs to decide whether threat's meant to be a serious raid mechanic, or only a serious raid mechanic for fire mages and destruction warlocks and nobody else.

Killin' a God of Death: Alone in the Darkness

2009-11-05T21:56:00.000-08:00

Yogg-Saron's hardest version still stands as arguably the hardest fight in the game. A tier later, despite significant nerfs and a significant improvement in gear, only 312 guilds in the world have completed the encounter since the world first in July, compared to 566 heroic Anub'arak kills in barely two months.

So, as a warlock, what can you expect on the fight?

Despite being a very challenging fight for a raid as a whole, it's actually fairly straightforward for warlocks, and no real change compared to what you've done since your first four watcher kill. This is the fight that drives downloads of DXE over BigWigs or DBM, I'll explain why in phase 2.

First, let's talk spec. Destruction's the king of tier 8 content, but Yogg Saron throws a curveball in this, though. The standard spec is affliction, and in fact if you're still working on this encounter post-3.3, I'd suggest sticking to this flavor of affliction (with Glyph of Quick Decay over Curse of Agony), since an imp is considerably easier to manage than a felhunter or succubus, and you still have some talent support for an imp in this spec. Melee pets can't attack crushers, and there's always a risk that a felhunter or succubus will be killed out of your sight on corrupter totems.

Affliction's performance on this fight stems from phase 3, the only phase where DPS outside of the brain team is very urgent. Yogg comes into phase 3 almost in execute range, affliction is one of the specs that carries the bulk of single target DPS on Yogg, not just because of drain soul execute, but because you don't need to be facing yogg all the time to do it, so you don't need to full stop during Lunatic Gaze.

Meta/ruin also has a place in the fight. Phase 3 calls for heavy AOE, and while warlocks aren't the go-to source of it over shadow priests or unholy DKs, we're not slouches, either. Demonology also has a powerful execute, but does have to come to a full stop during lunatic gaze. This little extra AOE comes at the cost of a good chunk of Yogg damage, I personally don't think it's worth it but it's still something to consider.

So, we're specced, let's fight.

Phase 1
You know this fight, it hasn't changed from four down to zero watchers, but there's one consideration for a zero light kill: You're likely going to have a lot more DOT heavy classes than you did for a one light kill. Unholy DKs, shadow priests, and affliction warlocks all play key parts in phase 3 that they didn't for one light where you could still kill adds and single target and burst ruled the day. In phase 1 this means you basically can't stop DPS on an add. If it drops under 50%, it's going to die regardless, so tanks need to be aggressive about getting them to the middle.

Phase 2
More familiarity for a warlock. The burden of phase 2 lies entirely with the brain team, which is generally a job reserved for melee and hunters.

Your primary concern above all other things is to preserve sanity. There's a lot of random, unavoidable sanity loss, but it will stop if you drop below 30. It is possible to go into phase 3 with some people as high as 50-80 sanity yet, so take every step to avoid unnecessary sanity loss.

The raid should be moving as a group as much as possible, which keeps brain links in control - remember to watch and listen when you do get brain linked, you may have to follow the person so they can reach a portal. The biggest thing, and the reason DXE sells itself on this encounter, is Malady of the Mind.

Malady is something you just ignore on 4, 3, or 2 watcher kills. Sanity isn't a limited commodity. It's possible you don't even know exactly what it does if you haven't begun preparation for a 1 or 0 watcher kill. It's basically a deathcoil that does sanity damage, but at the end of the horror effect it will attempt to jump to a nearby target. It's possible for a single malady to absolutely destroy the raid's sanity if it gets a few jumps. DXE will give you an arrow and a range counter pointing away from whoever has malady. The minimum safe range is 15 yards, the arrow will be yellow at that distance. Run in the direction the arrow points, make sure you're at least at 15 yards and the victim isn't running towards (the range counter will be getting smaller) you and controlling chains is easy.

Phase 3
This is the fight. Phases one and two are just like one light, except with 10% less DPS and a lower margin of error. Phase 3, however, is entirely different. Where all other modes, the Immortal Guardians die when they reach 0 health, in 0 light, without Thorim present, they will never die. They need to be burned to low health to reduce the damage they're doing, tanked, and then the marks need to be controlled. This job can be handled a number of ways, hunters being the most popular, but regardless of how it's done, it's not YOUR job.

Your job is twofold: Beat on Yogg-Saron himself until loot comes out, and don't go insane.

The trick to doing this is to stand with the healers. This will be out of the action and the huge pile of immortals, you'll be able to see what your doing, but you want to stand with the healers because they're more important than you, and their camp will be the best protected place in the room.

"Look upon the true face of death, and know that your end comes soon." This is your queue: When Yogg says this, start putting dots up while working your way into position. He's not in execute range yet, just get as much damage into him as you can right away. As soon as he drops below 11 million health, switch to your execute rotation.

Your job from here on out is to keep dumping damage into yogg and not eating Lunatic Gaze. Be aware of the cooldown timer on gaze, and try to time haunt refreshes just at the end of the cooldown. Haunt refreshes and starting drain soul channels are the only time you should be facing yogg, and try to only turn just enough to get him in front of you to get spells off and then turn away. Drain soul keeps channeling while you're turned away. Continue to drain soul through gaze if your DOTs are falling - you can start refreshing near the end of gaze, but you won't be able to pick up drain soul immediately if you break off, so be careful not to lose DPS time.

If you're successful, you'll have a chance to roll against 24 other people for the most prestigious flying mount so far this expansion. Hope you like the sounds Mimiron makes during combat, because with that thing you'll be hearing them a LOT. The rest of the loot isn't of any special note, a TOC 25 normal clear can net you upgrades to all of it.

There's still a lot of servers with Realm First! Death's Demise up for grabs, as well, leaving you the chance to pick up a prestigious (and pretty bad ass) title.

Sophie's Choice: Immolate's last tick

2009-11-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

I know I've been posting a lot, but this is mostly a great deal of fleshing out the information on the blog - as I cover the high points and common questions it'll taper off. Then Cataclysm will hit and I'll have to start from the beginning.

Tonight we're talking about immolate and the destruction rotation. There are two cardinal rules in destruction: Never clip immolate, and never cast another destruction spell on an unimmolated target. But what happens in that last two seconds of immolate? Sometimes the remaining duration is less than the cast time of your next incinerate, but longer than immolate's. So you have to break one of the rules. Which one's more important?

We'll, let's run some numbers (Ideal raid, my armory profile):

Incinerate hit average: 6380
Incinerate crit average: 13319
Incinerate overall average: 10569

Now, the 10% loss from fire and brimstone would be:

Hit: 638
Crit: 1332
Overall: 1056

Incinerate also does an additional 174 to 203 damage on immolated targets that we also lose. We'll use topend, and 412 for crits (accounting for Chaotic Skyflare Diamon's increased damage):

Hit: 841
Crit: 1744

Immolate tick average 1831

As you can see, regardless of whether incinerate crits or not, you'd rather lose the immolate bonus than clip immolate.

Now, what about Chaos Bolt? Going back to my table:

Average hit: 7815
Average crit: 16330
Overall average: 12989

The flat 10% immolte bonus:

Hit: 782
Crit: 1633
Overall: 1299

Just as a note of curiosity, yes, incinerate loses more without immolate than chaos bolt does in my gear. Incinerate gets 10% plus extra base damage accounting for just over 3% of it's total damage. The higher your gear is, the smaller that base damage is going to be, of course. The Fire and Brimstone bonus scales, incinerate's base bonus does not. That's just an aside though, you can still see it's better to eat the weaker nuke than clip immolate.

This is a pretty rare situation, but it's still something you're likely to deal with often enough over the course of a raid week. Remember, if incinerate or chaos bolt leaves your hands while immolate is up, it will get the benefit even if immolate falls before the spell lands. It's also possible to precast immolate so that it falls during it's own cast time. There's a very narrow window of time in which you have to make Sophie's choice on which spell to take the hit on.

Worst case scenario, we're talking about 200 damage every 15 seconds - 13.333 dps (repeating of course). That's nothing. Literally. Don't sweat the small stuff.

Simcraft Supplemental: This thing or that thing?

2009-11-01T01:37:00.000-07:00

This post is going to read a lot like the gemming post from the other day. The basics of picking between two upgrades is much like determining the ideal gems or enchants for them.

Step one is, of course, get your scale factors with simcraft. We'll be comparing a couple pairs of items. First up is two itemlevel 245 robes that are available to everybody regardless of the content they're doing, but also a situation where the standard rules of warlock itemization don't give a clear winner. Specifically, the two crafted robes from ToC:

So, we have our scale factors (I'm just pulling the 13/58 cookie cutter profile here):

Intellect=0.41 Spirit=1.14, SP=1.62, Crit=1.05, Haste=1.45

First off, let's talk about the hit cap. I recommend not including hit in your calculations. Rather assure that you're always hit capped, and weigh items only on their DPS stats. If you include hit, you greatly inflate items with hit, but the fact is they're either much higher weighted than that calculation would give (i.e. you're not capped) or they're wasted itemization (i.e. you already are).

Second, note that there's a lot of redundancy in these two robes. We'd be repeating a lot of work to do everything, when the identical portions of the two items are giving the same benefit. It's the differences that make one better than the other, right? So what's the same: Sockets, socket bonus, the enchant you hopefully plan on adding, 103 stamina, 103 intellect, 131 spellpower, and 66 crit.

Wow, that went quick, didn't it? So the decision comes down to 90 spirit (Moonshroud) vs. 90 haste (Merlin's). You can see why the general rules of thumb break down: The choice is very often haste vs. crit when picking gear, which tends to make the decision easy, and why the "haste not crit" rule of thumb is so commonly repeated. However, it's haste vs. spirit here - two strong DPS stats. Since it's equal points, haste's higher scale factor wins.

This is a bit of a trivial scenario, but often just knowing which item has a higher scale factor is enough, provided items are the same itemlevel. Let's toss things up, though.

Let's compare this one to Merlin's Robe (Moonshroud is the clear winner having both more haste and an extra socket for more spellpower). Now here, we'd need to do the work and see if the socket bonuses are worth getting. I'll make things simpler here and pretend they're not.

So paring down the identical stats (stamina, intellect, two sockets) we're left with Merlin's robe having 131 spellpower 90 haste 66 crit and a socket (23 sp), and Flowing Ascent having 140 spellpower 74 haste and 90 spirit. This boils down to a difference of:
Merlin's Robe: 14 spellpower, 16 haste, 66 crit

Flowing Ascent: 90 spirit

Now, the rule of thumb here would tend to lean towards Flowing Ascent, having pretty much the perfect warlock itemization. But, what about that extra socket? Hm... Again, let's look at our scale factors:

Intellect=0.41 Spirit=1.14, SP=1.62, Crit=1.05, Haste=1.45

So this means:
Merlin's Robe:
14*1.62=22.68

16*1.45=23.2

66*1.05=69.3

Total: 115.18

Ascent:
90*1.14=102.6

So the slight edge to Merlin's, but why? Let's ignore spellpower a moment. This leaves Merlin's Robe at 92.5. The spellpower tips the scale.

Merlin's is only better because of the extra socket. Which is an important point - sockets are underitemized when compared with the gems that go in them. Any item with more of them is going to have a higher effective item budget than one with less or none. This is why in BC, where Blizzard was very generous (even indiscriminate) with gem slots, there mid-level blue items that remained best in slot until Hyjal for some classes because they had two or three gem slots, and entry level epics in that slot had none.

This is something to keep in mind: Item budget very often wins out. More of a bad stat can beat less of a good one, but primarily the higher spellpower can often carry the weaker piece. This even holds true of PVP gear. Koralon drops can potentially be better PVE gear than Naxx epics because sheer spellpower makes up for the otherwise terrible DPS itemization. MP5 gear can be a solid upgrade, despite the same problem. There's plenty of reasons not to use either in PVE, including simply not being "that guy" who comes in PVP gear and rolls against healers, but sometimes if there's no alternative, bad is still better than what you've got.

ZOMG CASTAR LEGENDARIE!? ...No.

2009-10-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

The new Quel'Delar lore info has a lot of people excited, and it really should, it's exciting news.

For any class that is unable to wield it, however, the Sunreaver blood elves and the Silver Covenant high elves will gladly take this relic of their history in exchange for a usable weapon.

But this bit has a lot of people are a bit TOO excited about it.

So, let's start out with the cool news: This is an epic quest line that anyone in the game can do to get a cool weapon. How good we don't know yet, but it's nice to see epic quest lines, especially epic quest lines with epic rewards for all. Not only that, but the quest is focused in the 5 man areas with points of interest throughout Azeroth. There is an interesting quest mentioning the Sunwell, but nobody knows yet if that means returning to old content or if it's a phased quest line taking place in the Sunwell as it exists after being liberated from the Burning Legion. Unless it is a content revisit in Sunwell, this is also a completely non-raid quest line - it's open to casuals and raiders alike (and will likely reward some of the best weapons for non-raiders, though Icecrown raiders will certainly get better from the raid).

However, this is not a legendary weapon, which a lot of people think. The only legendary confirmed for Icecrown is Shadowmourne, which has it's own epic quest line, but you can't trade in Shadowmourne for an equivalent weapon of another type. Shadowmourne, like Val'anyr, Thunderfury, or Atiesh, is (lore wise) one of the extremely powerful weapons of the world, and nothing like it exists in mortal hands to trade for.

But Quel'Delar isn't quite that good. It's very good, but it's only an epic weapon - think more like Rhok'delar or Benediction than Thunderfury or Val'anyr. There are equivalent weaons in the world that you can pawn it for, and the idea of pawning something as priceless and historic as Quel'Delar for a bit of power seems exactly the warlock style.

Regardless, this is a quest line I'm looking forward to greatly, and I think everyone should be excited about. But be excited for what it is. Don't be blind sided when your coveted welfare legendary turns out to be a "crappy" itemlevel 260something epic.

Emblems of Confusion: Triumph

2009-10-30T03:38:00.000-07:00

I have emblems and there's so much to spend them on! I don't know where to start!

Well, start by clicking this little read more link down here.

There's a lot of stuff on the Triumph vendors, and it can be pretty daunting, but it's pretty easy to narrow things down really fast. The biggest complication is that alliance and horde have different gear, so I'll be referring to gear primarily by it's defining stats and any shared words in their name.

The first thing I'll say: If you're in a position to get Trophies of the Crusade, I'll simplify things for you greatly: Don't buy any armor. You'll want 4 pieces of tier 9, one way or another. Your 5th set slot can come from a few places, but the best options include Merlin's Robe and the robes from Beasts of Northrend and Twin Val'kyrs, or take the tier robe and the Nemesis Skullcap from Onyxia if ToGC25 gear isn't an option. Nemesis has a huge amount of spellpower for itemlevel 245. Because of the cost of trophy gear, budgeting is important, so don't bother with itemlevel 232 set pieces unless you absolutely must have a set bonus now.

In this case, the wand and the Band of the Invoker are still both solid options. There's not many alternatives for itemlevel 245 wands, only from Imprisoned Souls (haste/crit) from ToGC10, ToC25 has no wands at all. These two items are two of the most solid options regardless of your armor situation.

Now, if you aren't in a position to get trophies, you're probably also not in a position to get a huge flow of triumph emblems, but remember that set bonuses are big - our tier 8 and 9 set bonuses are big enough that the only thing more important than accommodating them in gear is the hit cap. So one of your goals should be 4 piece t9, or at lest 2pt9/2pt8. This is quite expensive, as tier 9 pieces cost 30 or 50 emblems, and the four piece bonus will cost you minimum 160 emblems. However, these items are cheaper than the non-set pieces, and because of the set bonuses, are much better gear overall.

If you're not getting trophies, I'm assuming that any TOC25 drops are basically out, so you do have three options for your non-set piece. Merlin's Robe is the strongest, or the Nemesis Skullcap for the immense spellpower if Onyxia's open to you, but there are two good warlock items on the general triumph vendor: The hit/haste helm (Aftermath), and the haste/spirit shoulders (Revered Mortality).

Another consideration is tier 8.5 2 piece, which is easily attainable from the helm and robe through conquest emblems. T9.232 is very side-gradey from t8.5. In this case, the best combination you can get prior to replacing 2pt8 with 4pt9 is getting 2pt9 through the gloves and pants, and taking Aftermath for your shoulder off-set slot.

The other two cloth items, Clouded Sight (spirit/crit helm) and Catastrophic Emanation (hit/crit shoulders) are inferior for most specs, but are both options for Affliction in 3.2.2, where the gap between haste and crit is very small. With 3.3 looming and haste becoming a much stronger stat for affliction, I wouldn't consider either.

Merlin's Robes came up several times in this thread, they're a solid, if expensive, investment at 8 crusader orbs. There's a second slot with Crusader Orb crafted gear, and that's bracers. The selection isn't cut and dry here, either, and it's a situation where it helps to know your scale factors.

The options are Bejeweled Wizard's Bracers (50 haste/42 crit) and Royal Moonshroud Bracers (42 crit/50 spirit). The pick is haste vs. spirit. Bejeweled is generally the safe bet, but at high gear levels, spirit CAN outweigh haste at high gear levels, making Moonshroud the preferred pick - demonic pact builds might also favor the higher spellpower for raid support. However, at these gear levels, itemlevel 258 options from ToGC25 are probably on the table anyway, making the point moot.

Now... You'll notice I never mentioned trinkets in here. That's because quite simply, both caster trinkets suck. Shard of the Crystal Heart has a huge amount of hit on it, and it does make a good hit "crutch" similar to Dying Curse. On one hand it shouldn't really be necessary to use a big hit crutch at this gear level, but on the other, it does simplify things. However, the spellpower effect is significantly inferior to Dying Curse, which is still a pretty immense hit crutch, and is even still one of our better trinket options.

Talisman of Resurgence actually gets an honorable mention. The immense amount of intellect generally isn't the warlock flavor, but just like Pandora's Plea from Ulduar, there is an argument for picking it up. 25 man heroic Anub'arak has a very mana restrictive phase 3, similar to hard mode Vezax. Rather than mana regen being turned off, life tapping is quite difficult and may actually prove impossible. An extra 2000+ mana does give a lot of wiggle room to play with while learning the encounter, but I wouldn't want to depend on it long term. At least this trinket you can pick up on your own if you feel the need - you're stuck fighting healers for Pandora's Plea (and generally losing - it's an awful trinket for us except on one fight, but good for them on all fights).

3.3 Spotlight: Black Magic

2009-10-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

Black Magic is a pretty well known enchant. It costs far more in terms of materials than the 63 spellpower enchant, yet contributes a tiny fraction of it's DPS, applying a DOT for barely over 1000 damage total around once a minute.

3.3 has finally gotten around to changing it. It's now a 250 haste for 10 seconds proc. Definitely an immense improvement over the previous version, which was soundly beaten out by the ancient spellpower enchant used back in level 60 raiding. But how good is it? Should you rush out and buy all those mats right now?

Well, let's find out.
First thing to note, black magic seems to be an oddball auto-proc ability. Unlike trinkets or lightweave embroidery, it's effect has a 35 second internal cooldown, not 45 seconds. Like them, it has a very high proc rate, ensuring a proc within only a few casts after the cooldown finishes.

Modifying the usual approximation for 45s internal cooldowns to work on the shorter cooldown, this gives an expected uptime of 20%, making it 50 effective haste. Things just got pretty simple looking, right? Well, let's press on.

I'm using best in slot tier 9 scale factors. This gives black magic it's best case scenario for DPS - scale factors are lower, and spellpower better relative to other stats, at lower gear levels.

0/13/58 Replenishment Destro
Spellpower: 1.62 x63=102.06 dps
Haste: 1.45 x50=72.5 dps

3/13/55 Suppression Destro
Spellpower: 1.61 x63=101.43
Haste: 1.16 x50=58

55/0/16 Felhunter affliction*
Spellpower: 1.79 x63=112.77
Haste: 1.83 x50=91.5

0/41/30 FG/ES
Spellpower: 1.41 x63=88.83
Haste: 1.45 x50=72.5

0/40/31 Imp/Conflag
Spellpower: 1.47 x63=92.61
Haste: 1.51 x50=75.5

0/56/15 Meta/ruin*
Spellpower: 1.50 x63=94.5
Haste: 1.52 x50=76

So, as you can see, Black Magic is still not the best pick for PVE DPS. But at least it isn't a pathetic failure of an enchant, and I can live with that.

Now, as for the *'d builds - Meta/ruin should never consider Black Magic. Not only is it lower DPS, but Meta/ruin is first and foremost a support spec, and it's support is dependent on it's spellpower being stacked as high as possible. So even if it were the technical best, I would still advise against it in favor of raid DPS. For this reason, I also generally recommend against hitting favorable socket bonuses should they come up, unless the bonus give a net gain in spellpower over straight red gems.

Affliction gets honorable mention as being the best recipient of black magic, with their powerful haste and spellpower scaling in 3.3. It's still not the best, but also note that much of affliction's power in 3.3 comes from the new haste scaled corruption. Meaning if you don't have a corruption refresh in the 10 seconds you have the buff, you get considerably less benefit from it.

Simcraft Supplemental: Socket Bonus or Socket Spellpower?

2009-10-28T17:39:00.000-07:00

One of the most important reasons to use simcraft is to find your scale factors, which will determine your best course of gearing, gemming, and enchanting. Today, we're going to discuss gemming. For our example, I'm going to show off the new robe I won the other day, the heroic Flowing Sanctum Vestments

This makes a good example piece - three gem slots, a good socket bonus, and no particularly fiddly stats like hit.

First thing's first, you'll want to use simcraft to get your scaling factors. Mine, for destruction:
Spellpower: 1.58
Haste: 0.94
Crit: 0.71
Spirit: 0.71
Int: 0.62

Now, it's easy to see why spellpower is a strong stat - it has the highest scaling factor, and costs less itemization, so spellpower gems have 23 spellpower, compared to 20 of most other stats. When hitting a blue or yellow socket, it's best to use a split gem with spellpower, to reduce the opportunity cost of that socket.

What gem per socket? Red is easy - spellpower. We've already discussed why it's the one stat to rule all others.

Blue sockets are also easy, blue being such a sparse socket color with only four stats. MP5 isn't a viable DPS stat, stamina contributes no DPS to most builds and a trivial amount to demonology, and spell penetration doesn't have any effect against PVE targets. Spirit is our only option, but it's a strong DPS stat for all of our builds. My simcraft parse above was done without glyph of life tap, and even then, it's equal to crit rating. With glyph of life tap, it can potentially be your second strongest DPS stat after spellpower itself.

Available stats for yellow sockets are intellect, haste, and crit. Intellect can be tossed aside immediately, only improved soul leech builds that don't use glyph of life tap will have a significant scale factor from intellect, and it'll still be by a good margin the worst DPS stat. You want to go with the one that's your highest scale factor, which in my case is haste. Destruction and demonology builds will almost always have higher scale factors for haste than crit. Affliction, however, isn't always so simple.

Let's take a look at the 3.2.2 tier 9 affliction best in slot profile. It's scale factors for crit and haste are 1.03 and 0.95, respectively. Wait, what's this? Yep - crit, not haste. Affliction doesn't scale particularly well with haste OR crit currently, since it has a good deal of damage that isn't effected by haste. Now, this isn't really a big consideration for affliciton, since both stats are fairly weak, it's less likely to bother with set bonuses.

So, on to the part you care about!

We've got our scale factors, and we know our best gem selections for each color. Our robe has one socket of each color, and a socket bonus of 9 spellpower - quite good as bonuses go.

Case 1: Straight Spellpower
23 spellpower x3=69 spellpower
69 spellpower x1.58=109.02 dps

This is the bog standard boring bonuses be damned for spellpower. And it's pretty good.

Case 2: Socket Bonus
Red socket: 23 spellpower
Yellow socket: 12 spellpower, 10 haste
Blue socket: 12 spellpower, 10 spirit
Bonus: 9 spellpower

Totals: 56 spellpower, 10 spirit, 10 haste
56 spellpower x1.58=88.48 dps
10 spirit x0.71=7.1 dps
10 haste x0.94=9.4 dps
Total: 104.98 dps

As you can see, it's a net loss here, BUT, it's a small one. Somebody with better gear, meaning a higher haste scale factor, and the glyph of life tap may just have what it takes to make up the last 5 dps.

Case 3: You need the Blue Socket Anyway
As you know, your Chaotic Skyflare Diamond requires you to have two blue gems to activate anyway. What if one of them is in your robe? Doing this with straight spellpower yields this:

Blue socket: 12 spellpower, 10 spirit
23 spellpower x2=46 spellpower

Totals: 58 spellpower, 10 spirit
58 spellpower x1.58=91.64 dps
10 spirit x0.71=7.1 dps
Total: 98.74 dps

Which is actually a bigger loss than getting the socket bonus, so you're better off finishing the socket out to get some spellpower back. However, there may be better places to use those gems, look for items in your gear with just a blue socket (like the tier 9.245 helm, which has only a blue socket and also give a 9 spellpower bonus), or an item with a red/blue pairing, which also means no additional tradeoff to get the bonus.

So, how does this effect you?

I prefer to do this process on a per-item basis. I get a new item, I play with the options for it and find the best gain for myself. Occasionally I reevaluate items with good bonuses, like the tier 9.245 pants, which have a red/yellow socket pair and a 7 spellpower bonus. You can take this so far as to test your entire configuration every time you change something, find the optimal place for your required blue gems, find the optimal set of socket bonuses and straight spellpower, etc. It can get expensive, but it's an option. As you can see above, we are talking about differences of as little as 5 DPS, you may honestly just prefer to get socket bonuses just because, and it won't hurt you terribly, provided you do it right.

Just remember, if you're going to try to min/max down to this level, don't just take the scale factors off of ElitistJerks, or even on this blog. Use simcraft, get accurate and current figures for your own gear. Your scale factors aren't the same as mine, and unless you happen to have the absolute best in slot gear, they're not the same as the ones posted on EJ. Scale factors are not constants to be used in a vacuum. They will change with your gear, spec, and glyphs - everything that changes your character will potentially change your scale factors.

The Crittacular Agrognome

Pets, Tooltips,

Lore Series 3: Notable Warlocks - Richard

More Assorted Miscelleny

A smokescreen no doubt, but a potentially awesome one

Names are sacred for a reason

Cataclysm Gemming

Cataclysm Loot Pt. 1: Blackrock Caverns

Runaway Haste

Mini-Lore: Dwarf Warlocks

Existing Itemization Overhaul

Intellect:Spellpower

Hybrid Superiority

Beta is Beta

Cataclysm Rating Conversions

Lore Series 2: Artifacts - The Book of Medivh

Warlock Races, Cataclysm Itemization, random miscellaney

No, Deathcoil was not nerfed

Cataclysm Talents

NDA LIFTED

Warlock Ninja Bluepost

Lore Series 1: Demon Lore - Felhunter

The Caster Legendary "Delay"

Long delayed Cataclysm Roundup

Haste reduces channeled duration... Wait, no it doesn't. Wait, now it does again.

Possible good news about boring mastery bonuses

Crittacular Agrognome Supports our Gnomish King!

Warlock Q&A sortakinda

Shaman Q&A gives hint of Demonic Pact's future

Rotation speculation

More followup blue posts

Not bad... not bad

What I DON'T want to see in today's blue posts...

Cataclysm Class Preview Tomorrow!

End to all your shard problems

Eating my words

Life Tap hotfix

Fel Armor hotfix

Told ya' so

3.3.3 Checklist

Hunter tears bring up good point... unintentionally.

Get off my armor class!

Dark Pact range fix

Life tap coefficient, future of Dark Pact

Pets don't get Strength of Chin

Cataclysm Itemization Pt. 2: Hit/Crit

Cataclysm Itemization

Oh PTR, you're so funny

No spec change for Demo 3.3.3

Life tap change

BLIZZERD EHATS WAROLKS

Immolate critting: It's that big

Imp force-cast macros

Developers investigating Demonic Pact/Divine Spirit bug

4pt10 Bugged

Strong Imp not so strong after all

ZOMG NEW PET IN CATALYZM

Getting the Touchdown

If I could buff one thing...

No impending nerf for affliction (that's basically a buff in itself!)

More buff specifics

Warlock Buff Specifics (Maybe)

Possible Incomming Something

End of Arena Season 7 Announced

Killin' an Orc (Deathbringer Saurfang)

Simcraft Supplemental: Set Bonus Hackery

Killin' a Boat (Gunship Battle)

Seed of Corruption buff Official(ly Awesome)

Blue weighs in on Conflag DOT and Empowered Imp

Killin' a Lady Lich (Lady Deathwhisper)

Affliction Hotfix Incoming. Again. Again. Maybe.

Undocumented Seed of Corruption buff

Affliction Hotfix Incoming. Again

Ashen Verdict Rings

Well, THAT didn't take long

Demonology Power Auras

Killin' a... Bone... angel... demon... thing. With wings (Lord Marrowgar)

3.3 Shopping List

Quel'Delar: Lens of the Mind

Killin' a Bug (Heroic Anubarak)