Posts with tag Warlock

WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

The launch of WoW was a magical time -- everyone who played the game back then would agree. The concept of questing rather than grinding was fresh and exciting. The world felt immense, full of secrets and adventures.

Classes, on the other hand, were very raw compared to today. While many players yearn to play on vanilla-only servers, I doubt that most of those players would prefer their class to return to its vanilla version. Though some were better than others, every class had its problems. In this column, I'd like to highlight the biggest aggravation, as I see it, with each of the original eight classes -- and how Blizzard has since fixed every one of those issues.

We've said before that there's a WoW class for every type of player and if you find yourself a bit drawn to the darker side of WoW, perhaps warlock is the one for you. Warlocks have a unique playstyle in the game: they're a bit like mages, in that they're cloth-wearing casters, and a bit like hunters, in that they rely on pets. And yet they don't play very much like either class, relying on DoT (damage over time) spells and channeled spells to do damage and restore their own health and mana.

So is it time to go over to the dark side and level a warlock? Let's look at what the class has to offer.

Just what is a warlock?
As mages are master of the arcane, warlocks are masters of the dark arts, focusing on shadow and fire spells. They summon demonic minions, place curses on their enemies, and drain health from their opponents, and can even send the most fearsome of warriors running in terror. Their abilities are powered not only by their mana pool, but will sometimes cost health, which warlocks can drain from their foes as they die. They do their damage at range, using curses, banes, DoTs, drains, AoEs, and direct damage spells. Warlocks also offer a good amount of utility to a group with conjured Healthstones (which restore health on use) and Soulstones (which can bring a dead player to life) as well as their curses (which cause a variety of negative effects on a monster).

If you're a warlock and you've been eagerly anticipating Patch 5.1 and the upcoming quest to gain green fire effects to your spells, you're going to have to wait a bit longer.Lead Designer Dave Kosak tweeted today that the quest has been bumped to patch 5.2. So, sorry if you're a warlock player waiting for this, but apparently the current plan is 'to do it all in patch 5.2' rather than delay it over several patches.

So the bad news is no green fire today, but the good news is, when patch 5.2 drops you'll get it all in one gulp.

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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When the new 5.0 patch flips over on Aug. 28, will you be ready with glyphs? Blizzard is recycling old glyphs instead of making new spell IDs and charring old ones. Some glyphs are staying the same, some are new, but some share IDs with old Cataclysm glyphs.

Below is our list of new or changing glyphs for warlocks. This is not a list of changing tooltips, just which glyphs you ought to have if you want to automatically have the new glyphs when the patch flips over.

Warlocks have no new glyphs but do have a lot of name switching or morphing from old abilities into the related new ability. A lot of the warlock glyph changes shift into cosmetic minors.

Glyphs that are changing into new majors:

• Chaos Bolt becomes Burning Embers
• Immolate becomes Dark Soul
• Metamorphosis becomes Demon Hunting
• Felhunter becomes Demon Training
• Lash of Pain becomes Everlasting Affliction
• Imp becomes Imp Swarm
• Corruption becomes Siphon Life
• Drain Soul becomes Soul Consumption
• Haunt becomes Soul Shards

Glyphs that are changing into new minors:

• Seduction becomes Carrion Swarm
• Soul Link becomes Crimson Banish
• Voidwalker becomes Falling Meteor
• Incinerate becomes Hand of Gul'dan
• Death Coil becomes Nightmares
• Howl of Terror becomes Subtlety
• Bane of Agony becomes Verdant Spheres

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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One of the interesting things about converting a real-time strategy game series into a MMO is how the units of the game are converted to playable classes -- or aren't converted, in some cases. While some heroes or units are folded into the classes like Far Seers into shaman and others make it straight into the game like paladins or death knights, others will make it in more as components or abilities sometimes not even given to the thematically suitable class. Such was the case when mages gained the signature Mirror Image from the blademaster hero class instead of warriors, who would seem to be the most appropriate match.

Reading over this post on Scrolls of Lore about the Demon Hunter got me wondering again about these elements' making it into the game. Several posters mentioned that quite a few demon hunter-themed abilities have made their way into the warlock toolkit, making a separate demon hunter class redundant and unlikely. It's a fair point, and it's mirrored in other places.

Mages in WoW make a specific archmage class unlikely. Paladins have pretty much absorbed the knight unit into themselves. Warriors are getting abilities reminiscent of the Mountain King and Tauren Chieftain heroes. At this point in the game's existence, with 11 classes come Mists of Pandaria, are we likely to see any more introduced? Is it better that the trappings of the RTS make it into the MMO at all, or do they have to come packaged with the heroes and units that made us love them?

The level 75 talent option Grimoire of Supremacy grants the warlock more powerful minions, and now those minions have their own voice emotes for their actions. Every demon gets a few options for summoning, attacks, spellcasts if the demon casts, dismissing the demon, and a joke for idling or clicking on them. Wowhead compiled all the voice emotes into one video and have transcribed them all.

Each demon's general personality is reflected through the voice emotes. We have the combustive fel imp, the slow but steady voidlord, the ravenous observer, the self-serving shivarra, and the brutal but loyal wrathguard.

Fel imp: (spellcast) Yeah, it's fighting time! It's burning time! Let's heat things up!

Voidlord: (dismiss) When I consume your world, my armies will save you for last.

Observer: (joke) Did you see that, hehehe? Uh Uh Uh Uh. I see what you did there.

Shivarra: (summon) How dare you summon me? I am not some trifling toy for you to call upon as you please.

Wrathguard: (attack) By your orders! I live to be commanded.

Since warlock pets are moving from a spec-based choice to a situational decision, master and minion personality compatibility means more than ever!

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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Demonic Gateway is one of the many new abilities for warlocks in Mists of Pandaria. With the beta level cap rising to level 88, making Demonic Gateway learnable, we can now see how fantastic the portals are.

This pair of fel stargates works with party members. The first portal (purple) sits where you are standing, and the other end (green) is directed to anywhere with a small target circle. Demonic Gateway has both a minimum range of 20 yards and a maximum range of 70 yards.

Once you've selected a spot to spawn the portal, the finishing cast animation looks like Glyph of Shadow Bolt plus Glyph of Verdant Spheres. Around each portal in its respective green or purple color will be up to five fiery orbs. These represent the number of charges the Gateway currently has, and it recharges one every 15 seconds that it's not being used, starting at zero charges on the summon.

To travel, simply walk through the opening and fly to the other side in a fel green or purple ball.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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Green fire is coming, again! Maybe. Side effects of speculation may vary.

Not only has the Codex shown up in recent datamining, but curiously also warlock spells with green fire as icons. Conflagrate, Fel Hellfire, Rain of Chaos, and Fel Immolate all have minimal descriptions and could very well be just creature or boss spells. But Fel Incinerate gives me hope, for it has not only the range and cast time, but the base mana that the real warlock Incinerate does. What boss would need to know the base mana cost, hmm?

After the original flurry of excitement, Wryxian noted in the subsequent denial of green fire implementation that the devs wanted green fire "to be an epic accomplishment" for players. With the beta appearance of The Legacy of the Masters (Part 1), players are speculating among other things about a Quel'Delar-like quest line again.

In the end, nothing might happen and green fire will stay unfulfilled on our warlock wish lists. But I for one haven't been so excited since I got my Dreadsteed the old way.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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If you're on the Mists of Pandaria beta, you might have heard about one of the cooler new bits of lore, the in-game text Legacy of the Masters. This book contains lore about new warlock abilities, where they came from, and who developed them and how they did it.

There are all sorts of neat implications in the text. For one thing, the mortal races of Azeroth seem to be meddling with great powers more than ever before after the fall of Deathwing, and the warlocks of Azeroth are afraid of being eclipsed by other rivals (like, say, mages and their weird time magics). In addition to the mention of figures like Ritssyn, it creates the idea of a secret warlock super-cabal that dispenses fel magics to other groups of warlocks and ties in events from the death of Illidan to the recent destruction of Deathwing as teachable moments that gave various warlocks eureka moments. "So that's how you turn into a demon! I get it!"

It's definitely worth a read, so go check it out.

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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If you don't read Cynwise's Warcraft Journal, you probably should. Cyn's been doing an excellent series of posts about warlocks in Cataclysm that are interesting and thought-provoking -- even if, like me, you're not a warlock and don't really know much about the class. For me, one of the most striking tidbits was that rogues are the second-to-least-played class overall, but the second-most-played class in high-end PvP, implying that people only play rogues to PvP. There's a lot of interesting data in there about class representation, role representation, and who is playing what and at what levels.

The post that really grabbed my attention was this one about warlock complexity in Cataclysm because it highlights an extreme form of something we've talked about before, the design philosophy that argues for increased complexity in a character's suite of abilities. In its simplest form, it can be summed up as the hitting buttons is fun argument, although at the extreme Cyn describes for warlocks, it becomes a game of if X, then Y that resembles programming your first computer in Basic. If you remember making a chain of dirty words scroll on a loop up the screen, congratulations on being old with me.

Cyn's comparison of the destruction rotation in Wrath and Cataclysm shows a rotation with seven elements mushroom out to one with 14 elements to remember and consider. That if X, then Y flowchart just got as complex as a subway map. In my experience, all DPS rotations in general have a little bit of this kind of gameplay nowadays. The difficulty is in hitting the sweet spot where the rotation is designed so that random elements or procs serve to liven up an otherwise predictable set of abilities (providing the fun in the hitting buttons scenario) without making a rotation so complex you need six to seven addons to help you plot it out.

We've been hearing a lot about the changes to glyphs in Mists of Pandaria. And sure, they all sound neat and all. But the most exciting glyph for our demon-loving warlock friends? It's the Glyph of Nightmares.

This glyph lets you cross water without the services of a stinking death knight. Even cooler, you leave huge streams of fire behind you. Not sure if it'll look awesome? Check out this video from the beta -- streams of fire across water. Sure, it's no one-hit kill, but it's about the most visceral, awesome warlock effect possible short of green fire.

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