Filed under: (Warlock) Blood Pact

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying.

I started part one as an introduction, to set everything up. While "yaw" (keybinds and macros) and "pitch" (procs and cooldowns display) are important parts of a UI, you can't start doing your damage dealing job without a health bar to take down. So this week, we're going to look at all kinds of health bars you can find on a warlock's UI.

You can see all my unit frames in action here in the full version of the header image. Remember: I'm using the addons I use as examples, because it's easiest to draw from what I know. You can be an accomplished DPSer with minimal addons on a mostly default interface, if you so wish.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying.

It really tickles me that within a week of each other, two prominent names in the warlock community referred to the WoW UI with the exact same metaphor. One's a cutting edge world-class raider and the other is a former casual PvPer currently on a forced hiatus from intense gaming. Two different sides of warlock life and they both come to the same conclusion.

Maybe great minds think alike. Or maybe it's just incredibly obvious how convoluted and misleading the user interface can become for even the average player in WoW. What makes a UI good?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill spends 50k coins on a trinket for fun because, whatever, she'll be killing things all day on the Timeless Isle anyway.

Last week, I couldn't fit trinkets into the article. I couldn't even fit in enough disclaimer and caveat into the article to address the article's problems. Since trinkets aren't as cut and dry as regular passively statted gear, there are more caveats and situational criteria to collect before passing a final judgment.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets cleansed of disease and starts on a new rivalry.

*cough* *cough* *haaaaaack* Megan coughs violently into a clutch of raggy, mucused-up robes.

It's all good. I'm going to survive. The healers haven't cleansed me since that last time I dropped the Gateway still inside the windstorm, so I'm stuck to my cookie cooldown. I really don't blame them for that. But, I gotta say it was worth a little cough to see all the melee drop dead like that. Don't worry, I'm not cursed or anyth--

What is that. No -- THAT. Who the ... You guys let a mage in here?!

Well. *Megan steeples her fingers.* No matter. Warlocks are still better than those muffinmakers in patch 5.4.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill links all the things, all the time.

Patch week with a new raid tier? It's loot list time.

You know the drill. Just like last time, I'm going to visit the loot for each boss, perhaps saying a word or two, just so you know what's there when you spend a coin on a bonus roll.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks Rygarius rocks at patch-note writing, but we'd still like to summarize it further.

There's a lot of changes besides the usual number tweaking to warlocks in patch 5.4. We'll wrap up the say before patch with a loot list, but here's a prose version of what the patch notes mean before we get into the shiny gear drops.

Overall, there's probably a small nerf in damage since heavy movement fights will affect us once again. Our damage is shifting to our DoTs primarily with some support either from fillers on the move or a twist on our Dark Soul cooldown, depending on the level 90 talent we choose. Since the RPPM system has been tweaked a little to account for haste affecting not only proc bonus but proc chance, we also may see a shift from haste gearing to more solid mastery gearing, also since mastery for all three warlocks boosts damage done in our top damage spells.

But check after the break for more specific changes.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill fails at predicting patch day. Whoops.

So I was moving living spaces and then I thought it'd be only a week before the patch launched. I have the gear drops list set up, and I figured no one wanted 1000 words when the obvious numbers pass happened -- our DoTs went up and our fillers went down. But then the patch release date became September 10th instead of August 27th.

You'd think I'd have learned this by now.

What I have learned by now is to read up on other warlock things, particularly in aspects of WoW I don't personally play. I am in a 5/13 25H guild, but I doubt I'll reach world firsts any time soon, so it's fun to hear perspectives of warlockery from the likes of Sparkuggz of EU-Twisting Nether's Method and Shinafae of US-Illidan's Blood Legion. Fortunately, new video series FinalBoss.tv got the chance to interview both for its third episode about warlocks in Mists of Pandaria.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill attempts many experiments both on live and PTR realms.

Last week, I had this whole thing planned to talk about the Thunderstruck scenario of damage with the olde Glyphe of Lyfe Tapp style Archimonde's Vengeance. But literally before the deadline, the PTR builds finally caught up with the PTR patch notes and Archimonde's Vengeance was completely replaced by the new Archimonde's Darkness. Unfortunately, I didn't feel like I could spend at least 1000 words on a double cooldown; today, I can't even break 150.

But before we get seriously into settled number-tweaking things like the datamined loot, let's talk about some other changes on the PTR.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks up a silly idea for the crap talent.

Although I'm pretty sure no one takes this talent, I'll probably have to preface that statement with an "almost" just to be safe. Kil'jaeden's Cunning (KJC) is the "default" level 90 talent because Mannoroth's Fury (MF) is seriously situational and because Archimonde's Vengeance just plain sucks.

PvPers might have used it in the beginning of the expansion, but most PvErs don't give it a second look. The passive damage often doesn't actually work because unavoidable encounter damage can be termed "environmental" -- the same reason why your pets don't die while standing in green goop that otherwise kills you. The active damage just doesn't hit that hard.

Archimonde's Vengeance (AV) needs to be better if it's going to live in the same tier as KJC and MF.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants to look into a popular counterargument to the nerfing of Kil'jaeden's Cunning.

Or not, as I'll argue we warlocks have our own style of play.

The damage dealing game isn't just about turning a mob down to 0 points at the end of the night, but about using the mob's health bar to vault over cooldown or resource barriers. Turning a warlock into a sitting duck in PvE requires either getting rid of all the mob health bars or getting rid of the warlock, which is usually accomplished by movement or threat of certain death. This struggle against being useless is what makes choices in a damage dealer's arsenal meaningful.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill's raid sadly realized that the changes to KJC mean there will be no more air-bound soulwells.

Well. It's been a hell of a week on the PTR for warlocks, hasn't it? A few of the original patch notes have been changed for the better again in response to player feedback on the forums.

Don't get me wrong, Patch 5.4 is still largely a depressing bunch of nerfs for warlocks. But let's go over the changes and make sure we have everything straight. The usual disclaimer of "things can and may change" still applies to all of these patch notes.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill thinks it's too difficult to convey moving while casting in a static screenshot, so, instead, have the Scholomance potion guy in front of a Demonic Gateway.

We covered Karazhan's pets, mounts, and fun last week, so this week, we'll cover Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in the continuing quest to colle--

No. Sorry. If you really thought I was going to skip this past week's bombshell of warlock PTR patch notes for collecting pets from retro raids, I will scold you later for having no faith in me. Let's talk level 90 talent problems.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill .

Karazhan: the most beloved of retro raids. Players may put on the rose-colored glasses when they talk of how limited raiding was back in the Vanilla days, but Karazhan is often talked of with fondness. Going back is a pleasure, not a painful memory. It's with good reason -- the place is built like a castle tower, going up and up forever, and it's full of memorable mobs and scenery.

Karazhan also has some of the tier 4 Voidheart Raiment for warlocks, as well as a mount and now pets for everyone, so it's a weekly favorite of mine to visit.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill didn't waste time getting a Whole Body Shrinka' so she could re-enact the Genie describing his living arrangments.

Originally, the last part of this column's series on World of Logs (WoL) would be talking about the other parts of RaidBots (EpeenBot and DPSBot) with WoL rankings, but as time went on, I realized I wanted to look at that data over a patch or tier rather than over just a week. Besides, I believe it's time next week for a break in these serious warlock matters.

The previous four posts went over a very basic introduction to WoL, the graphs of WoL important to warlocks, looking at buffs and debuffs on a timeline, and digging deep into the combat log. This final post will look at comparing two logs more easily than flipping between browser tabs.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill is finishing out the World of Logs posts while she hunts for BC-era battle pets.

Have you ever tried to read the combat log? Maybe you're on the PTR testing a spell change or you want to know how often a new trinket procs, so you open the combat log chat window and start reading.

You get twenty-something lines down before you realize something horrifying -- that's only one second of combat. Your jaw slowly falls to the floor and you reach up to pull your hair out as you contemplate reading a combat log for an entire raid fight -- that can sometimes last more than six hundred seconds and includes far more actors than just you and the training dummy.

Luckily for us, when events are printed in a specified format without too much variety, computers can read and process --or parse -- these lines magnitudes faster than we humans can. World of Logs has graphs and charts to help us understand our performance, but it also includes what is basically Google for your combat log. Just like there are tips to speed up and pinpoint your browser searches, there are tricks you can use to query events better in the World of Logs expression editor.