Pets, Tooltips,

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

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.

More Assorted Miscelleny

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

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. The third mastery bonus is not part of your spec, but gained at level 75, after which mastery from gear will contribute to it.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Names are sacred for a reason

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.

Cataclysm Gemming

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.

Cataclysm Loot Pt. 1: Blackrock Caverns

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.