Posts with tag demon

This is actually kind of sweet, especially for a class that spends the larger portion of its time channeling dark magic and cursing everything in its path. When patch 4.0.1 hit, warlocks suddenly found themselves toting new and unexpected minions around. No, new pet skins didn't go live, and Blizzard didn't program any new demons into the game, but many of warlocks' trusted minions are sporting different names.

For example, my own baby warlock has had an imp named Pagfip who's accompanied him since his earliest days in the Tirisfal countryside, but now I've got ... Garloz? That can't be right. Most warlocks have had at least one demon's name changed. Many have lost demons they've had since classic WoW and -- to put it mildly -- they're not happy about it. Even non-warlocks have chimed in: "Zilnip, our GM's imp, is an important member of our family and we'd like him back, please."

If you're not familiar with minion names, the usual deal is they're randomly generated upon creation (whether of the minion or the warlock toon itself, I'm not sure) and remain the same thereafter; lorewise, it's assumed that you're summoning and resummoning the exact same demon from the Twisting Nether. If you really wanted to play with this, you could run with the story that your real felguard's on vacation or whatever, but this seems to be a bug that most warlocks would just as soon have fixed as quickly as possible. That's assuming it's fixable at all, and I'm a little worried that it's not; the only other recourse would be petitioning a GM to have the names changed individually. Notes Cornpuff of Uther, "It's like someone came into my house in the middle of the night and swapped all of my children with evil clones."

Thanks to Scott and Zhiva for writing in!

Update: Bornakk and Bashiok hit the forums to provide an update on this issue. Warlocks, you'll be getting your original pets back during the next maintenance period!

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This is it! Patch 4.0.1 begins the slide into December's upcoming expansion. It's a whole new game from here on out. Get oriented with our roundup of everything there is to know about patch 4.0.1 and how it changes the game until the launch of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

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Earlier this year, we wondered just what would happen now that my favorite dreadlord, Varimathras, was vanquished in the Battle for the Undercity, and now Kisirani has provided us with a hint: someone whose name includes a "B." When someone repeats the question on the forums, she posts a note delivered by a bronze whelp hinting that someone will be back in Varimathras' place as of patch 3.3. The note is signed only with a "B," and (as Kisirani probably intended), it's anyone's guess just who that is.

And if by "anyone," you mean the denizens of the Blizzard forums, they all seem to think it's Nathanos Blightcaller, a Forsaken who has been sitting in the Eastern Plaguelands since the game began. He's recently been mentioned again in the game, as Varian Wrynn has sent Alliance players after him in Bolvar's place, and so it makes sense that he may rejoin the Banshee Queen and take his place at her side. Balnazzar, Varimathras' demon brother, is another guess, though he's currently serving secretly with the Scarlet Crusade, so who knows how he'd come to that position. And of course, besides Bornakk, anytime you hear B you have to think of our friend Bolvar, whose fate we'll probably learn in patch 3.3 no matter what. As for who it really is, we won't know for sure until we see them in the Undercity.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the seventeenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

Priests in the World of Warcraft are a single class that incorporates a wide variety of characters. They are best known for casting spells that call forth the power of the Holy Light, but the priest using these spells in the game mechanics doesn't necessarily have much connection to the Light as such -- rather they have a connection with their own religion which grants them similar effects to those of the Light.

When WoW was being developed, Blizzard realized that night elves and trolls, for instance, would not follow the Light in the same way humans and dwarves do, so they tried to represent a bit of this diversity through race-specific spells. It didn't work out, though -- some were too powerful, while others weren't worth reading about, much less putting on one's action bar. The end result was that they made some of these spells universally available to all priests, and completely removed the rest. Here the lore had to surrender to the game mechanics in order to provide the best game balance.

In roleplaying, however, there is a lot of room for players of different races to behave differently, and draw their powers from totally different sources. Greater Heal, for instance, could come either from the Light or the power of Elune. A Shadowfiend could either be a spawn of the Forgotten Shadow, or a dark trollish voodoo spirit. If you are roleplaying a priest, the only thing that really matters is that your character have some sort of faith or profound belief, which could serve as the source of their divine magical power. A priest's magic revolves around his or her strong beliefs and ideas -- but what those beliefs are is entirely up to you.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the fifteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

The Warlock is the ideological counterpart to the Paladin. Where paladins strive to wipe out evil wherever they see it, warlocks enslave those evils and use them for their own purposes. Being a warlock is all about harnessing the most wicked, corrupting, and evil forces in the universe.

Why are these forces evil, you ask? Aren't magical powers neutral in themselves depending on how you use them? Isn't killing with one weapon more or less the same as killing with another? Well, if you consider that a warrior basically cuts or bashes things, and a paladin cuts or bashes and brings down the righteous energy of justice. But a warlock uses curses and spells, which, like horrifying biological weapons of modern days, destroy his enemies' minds and eat away their bodies from the inside; wreaks massive havoc with great explosions and persisting fire; and sucks the souls out of people and creatures and uses them to power even more horrifying abilities, such as summoning demonic creatures who would just as soon pluck out your eyeballs as look at you.

To suffer at the hands of a warlock is significantly more excruciating than the attacks of any other class -- a slow, painful, torturous, agonizing death. If warlocks existed in modern earth, their abilities would be against all international agreements on human rights and rules of warfare; they would be squarely in the evil company of terrorism, drug-trafficking, slavery, and biological germ warfare development.

And yet if your warlock works for the Alliance or the Horde, he or she claims to do all of these things all for the greater good.

The reliable Voidwalker won't be changing much in Wrath of the Lich King, but will be getting a few improvements with some talents from the Demonology tree such as the consolidated Fel Intellect and Fel Stamina, now called Fel Vitality, which rightfully increases Stamina as well as Intellect. Along with all demons, it also gains Avoidance, a baseline ability that helps it mitigate AoE damage by a massive 80%. Improved Voidwalker has not been changed, but a key talent that used to be perfect with the big blueberry -- Soul Link -- was reduced to a 15% damage absorption and no damage bonuses. The good news, however, is that Soul Link is now a Tier 3 talent, allowing almost any Warlock to pick it up for more survivability.

Warlocks, it's time for you to get some love. In this week's Addon Spotlight we're going to take a look at lock-centric addon. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing my warlock was that I had a hard time remembering which abilities my demons had trained on. I thought it was interesting that Blizzard opted to make demon training a unique system, as opposed to skill training at your class trainer or even pet training for Hunters. Cool! I can teach my blueberry about sacrificing itself via a grimoire, the ultimate in fel magic publications.

Then came the caveat; I bought this damned pamphlet on Seduction, used it, and now the merchant didn't save my purchase records like any other bookseller! I didn't expect him to suggest other grimoires I might enjoy based on my interest, but come on! I am aware that I can burn through some shards to summon each of my demons to check at the trainer, but what a waste! There had to be an easier way.

Then I discovered Grimoire Keeper, an addon that aids budding demon-wranglers in remembering which abilities, and ranks thereof, their demons already have. Keep reading to discover it for yourself.

In fact, Mary Sue isn't just one person -- she is a demon-spirit possessing all those characters in roleplaying and fan-fiction, both male and female, who rely on clichés, melodrama, and/or supposed intimate relationships with one or more characters in the original story to such a degree that they actually try to upstage those characters, their fellow roleplayers, and indeed, the entirety of the original lore. Other roleplayers often see this sort of thing and get frustrated out of their minds.

And yet there's something about Mary Sue: she keeps reappearing all over the place, from seductive blood elf hunters who claim to be Thrall's secret lover, to angst-ridden human warlocks who insist that they are the half-demon offspring of Kil'Jaeden. What is it that continually attracts people to these ideas, couched in phrases like "tragic past" and "missing one eye" and "emits a deep sorrow that makes you want to cry?"

The answer is darker, more disturbing, than you can possibly imagine.

Warlocks who have always been a bit frustrated when they go into Shadow Labyrinth and see all those huge, delicious demons who refuse to be enslaved will get a kick out of this: It seems that a warlock on the PTR managed to enslave one of the biggest, baddest demons we've yet seen in the World of Warcraft: Brutallus, the pit lord boss in the Sunwell Plateau. Not only that, he then managed to get him out of the instance and set him loose on the docks, where he proceeded to smash up all the level 1 sightseers and the level 70 Adventurers alike and generally make a huge mess of things.

This is a bug that is almost sure to be fixed before the patch goes live, of course, and with good reason. It'd be a bit of a drag if life for the Shattered Sun Offensive was a constant stream of fighting off massively powerful pit lords unleashed by a stream of bored warlocks. But still, for one brief, shining moment, all you Demonologists can bask in the glow of true power, and know that you once caused one of the mightiest of the Burning Legion to bend to your whim. Yeah, that's right, it's good to be the Warlock. And your parents said studying the dark arts would never get you anywhere.

Thanks for the tip and the screen shots, Pamine!

Yesterday, a player posted on the official WoW forum asking about the current state of the Doomguard and Infernal Warlock pets. It's a hassle to learn how to summon these demons, requiring the completion of multiple quests for each, and summoning them requires reagents, including the death of one of your party members (for the Doomguard at least). With all these requirements, one would think the pets would be worthwhile, but their cost and unpredictability (they have to be continually enslaved, which is on diminishing returns and may break at any time) make them worse than the normal Warlock pets.

Eyonix answers the original poster, saying that the devs are concerned about these pets and will buff them sometime in the future. That "future" may be the next expansion, but this is a better answer than the class has received on the subject in a long time. To the best of my knowledge, previous answers were something along the line of "These spells may have situational uses and will not be changed from that role". Now there is once again hope that these cool and iconic (watch the original WoW cinematic, if you don't recall) Warlock pets will become more than simple novelties.

Straight from the realm of "you have to be kidding me" comes this post from the General Forums. In it, the poster Millock warns us of an extremely problematic bug -- cross-faction looting. Also, just in time for another Monday workday, the thread highlights some really charming behaviour involving stealing taps on a Boss while mid-event, and more than fulfills the General Forums drama quotient for the day.

According to Millock (Horde), he was working his way through the Shartuul's Transporter event, got to the end, spawned Shartuul, and before he could get the tap on him, two Alliance Players decided to charge in and take the tap from him. This was after they sat and watched Millock work his way through the event at a distance. Why? Because he's Horde, and it's a PvP server, of course! What is troubling is that after the two Alliance players died, Shartuul's nameplate reverted to colored (untapped) at which point Millock got what he considered his own tap back, killed him, and went to loot his item. However, apparently there is some bug in the event whereby both the two Alliance players and the one Horde player were all able to roll on the loot from Shartuul as if they were in the same party, despite being of completely different factions that shouldn't ever see each others loot windows. Millock rolled need, the other two did as well, and despite his kill, and all his work up to and including killing Shartuul, he lost the item to the two Alliance players.

Reader Diogenetic of Mannoroth sends in this shot showing off his favorite way to farm Aldor rep. Of the technique, he says, "this guy can pretty much clear out all of Legion Hold for me before the diminishing returns on enslave become problematic..." Must be nice!

Do you have a unique shot of Azeroth or Outland that you'd like to show off to the rest of the world? Tell us about it by e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com! Or perhaps you'd just like to see more of your pics from Around Azeroth.

I apologize for this week's Build Shop being a day late; I've been driving all around North Carolina and internet access has been spotty. This week we look at the master of fire and shadow, the Warlock. I've got a lock at approximately level 55, so I'd rate my knowledge of the class "medium." This one should be a bit less noobish than last week's Warrior write-up, at any rate.

This build comes courtesy of Rixnor, of Serious Business on Duskwood (H), who "thought [he] would show you a Raiding Demonology build that doesn't get much love." He's tried 0/21/40 and 41/X/X, and likes 0/40/21 better for raiding. He says he "felt gimp" in 0/21/40 due to having to have a pet out all the time, a lot of the Destruction talents not doing much for him (he likes shadow), and aggro limitations. As he rightly points out, pretty much any good caster is putting out as much dps as he can without pulling aggro off the tank, which means anything that reduces threat increases available DPS. One thing I don't know is how much Soulshatter changes this balance, but still, reduced threat is nice.

With every new expansion comes a new mob to hate. Pictured here is my most hated mob for The Burning Crusade. Found in the Shadow Labyrinth of Auchindoun, these Fel Overseers hit cloth really hard, and have a very annoying Intimidating Shout fear effect that is annoyingly resistible and resets aggro on the tank until the tank is back in melee range. When I say "annoyingly resistible" I mean that I often resist it, and the tank doesn't, so the tank is halfway across the room and I'm being stabbed at for for 1,200 to 1,900 hit points per swing, with a very nice critical hit one time of 4,796. My favorite part is how this thing is classed as a "demon", but immune to both Banish and Enslave.

The best method I've found for dealing with them is to make sure everyone is in very short range, so everyone gets feared, including the healers. Hunters are excused if they can feign fast enough to achieve the same effect. This generally means the mob will follow the tank around. Since there's no warning, and he hits so hard, trying to stay in berzerker stance to have anti-fear abilities up is somewhat hazardous. The cool down on the fear is very short, on the order of 30-45 seconds, so even fear ward and berzerker stance will eventually be on cool down when the fear hits. If I don't get feared, I either will try and drain-tank the big guy, or simply run after my tank, so the tank is in melee range as soon as the fear fades. Either way has about a 75% success rate, where success is me not needing a rez at the end.

So, The Burning Crusade has been out for about a month now, have you found a new most annoying mob?