Filed under: Warlock

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

As of writing, I'm far away from my stash of screenshots for my WeakAuras, so I won't have a post full of example strings for you quite yet. But the discussion of macros for warlocks came up on Twitter, and I can write a while about those while away on a wintery vacation.

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

One of our editors, Adam Holisky, forgot what class he was playing last week, and it made me a little sad. It's great that he wanted to be a warlock again, but we are not hunters. We're not mages either, despite how convinced Matt Rossi is by shared armor. We're not shadow priests, we have demons not totems, and having purple wings is the only similarity between a demo 'lock and a night elf moonkin.

I'm not out to make Adam eat his hat, but warlocks certainly distinguish themselves from other classes, I think.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses more pretty on-screen colors.

One of my raid's mages swears to use TellMeWhen (TMW) over Weak Auras (use WA2, now). I used to use Weak Auras exclusively, but now I use a combination of both addons in further combination with Raven, a buffs and debuffs addon, and AffDots. While I can list any number of buffs and debuffs addons to help track procs and DoTs (ForteXorcist, Raven, NeedToKnow, Ovale, etc.), TellMeWhen and Weak Auras often top the list of mentioned addons.

What's the difference between TMW and WA? What does one do better than the other? And what's the impact that addons like these have on how warlocks play?

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses how to handle one, some, or many whelps.

Before BlizzCon, I left off with the beginnings of how to put together your UI. While it would be easy to generate a post of macros and Weak Auras import strings, that wasn't my intent. User interfaces in WoW are varied and can be unique to the player, so I think it's a greater lesson to learn how you can design your UI to help you, rather than to help patchwork import settings together for you.

So while the setup of unit frames may have seemed incredibly basic to some readers, knowing where some set frames are helps you take control of how your targets are presented to you. Much like healers considering a raid frames grid to be a central part of a healing UI, having damage targets at the ready is a central if often subconscious part of a DPS UI. Today is another basic topic, but it too has a subtle effect on how a proper UI setup can aid in DPS.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets a little excited about a possibility.

I think every month, the universe tries its best to unseat me from the warlock column. November is notoriously my worst month for anything, because everything wants to conflict with anything in November, for every one of my twenty-whatever years.

But thankfully, when it comes to BlizzCon, I can just replay things over and over on the Virtual Ticket with no problem. While I wasn't expecting a lot of warlock changes, given how ridiculously revamped we were for Mists of Pandaria, there were still a few notes of interest we could go over if you missed out on watching or attending BlizzCon.

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.

Over the years Blizzard has created more and more overlap between certain aspects of different classes so as to allow more flexibility in choosing who you bring to a raid. For example, as a long-time druid raider, it still makes me an itty bitty bit sad every time I see a paladin overwrite my Mark of the Wild with Blessing of Kings. I remember the days when those were different buffs, dangit! On Twitter, players have been venting their frustration at Ghostcrawler about just this kind of thing:

@ugadawg9288 @tehstool That is true of everyone but warlocks, who probably bring too much.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) July 2, 2013

Now, that's an interesting response, and it got us at WoW Insider thinking. Do warlocks really bring too much utility? In my 10-man raid team, our guild leader nearly always plays his warlock, and there are certainly a number of perks to that. Summoning is very nice, and saves us a run back out the instance if we need to bring in a different toon halfway through. Soulstones have brought me back to life on a number of occasions, the raid constantly asks for Healthstones, and both warlocks themselves and their minions bring various buffs and forms of crowd control that always come in handy. And portals! Portals make many, many things much more convenient.