Posts with tag felhunter

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. Today, Megan O'Neill visits the last warlock spec for Cataclysm newbies and rerollers, before diving back into Mists of Pandaria speculation.

One torment ended as I finally received my beta invite. Then another started as I began to get error #132 over and over again. Whether it's my old toaster of a laptop's problem or maybe beta is just really unstable right now ... you and I are still stuck with old Cataclysm warlockery. So let's finish out the newbie tips for those who are reacquainting themselves with demonology before Mists of Pandaria.

As a class with all three specs dedicated to DPS, warlocks always have one spec that serves up first in simulations. In the standard Patchwerk-style, no-holds-barred contest, who's king of the lab? It's a question I've been asked recently by some dissatisfied moonkin in my guild who are considering turning to the dark side. (After all, everyone knows we have cookies!)

Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The avarice never ends! 'I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored and sell it to make glue.' Look, I don't wanna make waves, but this whole Christmas season is stupid, stupid, stupid!" ~ The Grinch

Hmmm... a look back at changes for warlocks in 2009. Well there was... no, wait, that was 2008. Well what about... nah, that's planned for Cataclysm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Nothing particularly outstanding has happened in the warlock area this year; but so much has happened and, well things have changed. It's like waking up each morning and something is subtly different. Your blue toothbrush is now red... The sofa is now against this wall, not that one... each change is pretty unremarkable in it's own right but by the end of the year you are a stuntman living in LA married to a small, blond Portuguese skier who when she's not training does abstract painting, practices yoga and brews her own beer.

As we surfaced, bleary-eyed into January our memories of sacrificing succubus and SL/SL were fading faster than those of December 31st. Those heady days of power that also led to FotM wannabes flooding our ranks. Skill and complexity had been leaking out of the class for a while and Naxx wasn't really providing any of us with much of a worthwhile proving ground. Affliction spell rotations were causing carpal-tunnel injuries on those who were determined to take the cold-turkey approach to dropping their addiction to Shadow Bolt spam. Fans of demonology were taking felguards like some sort of methadone for simplistic raiding, meanwhile retaining the use of their fingers.

Even more tweaks to the warlock talent builds made it onto the PTR's 3.3 build yesterday. This time we see more buffs for pets. The Imp, the destruction lock's pet of choice, will now benefit from the Ruin critical strike damage bonus. So instead of having its critical Firebolt hits doing 150% of normal damage this will now be 200%. This will work out as a 10 to 15% damage increase for the imp. Since the Imp accounts for a little under 10% of a destruction lock's damage I think this should be a straight buff of just over 1%.

Felhunter's have also had a buff but this one seems slightly odd. On paper it looks exactly the same as the the one for the imp -- Pandemic has been extended to include Shadow Bite in dealing 100% extra damage on a critical strike. The confusion lies in that Shadow Bite seems to be doing that on the live servers already. When tested on the PTR with Pandemic, however, its criticals are looking like they are doing 150% extra damage. It seems this change is going to need some further work, even if it is just to clarify the language. With this confusion, I'm less certain what impact the change will have on affliction DPS but expect it to be something like half of that for destruction. However it shakes out, this is a further buff for warlock damage. It's certainly nice to see some continued attention being applied to lock mechanics as we progress with the patch testing.

Warlock writer Nick Whelan has been quoted as saying that the new WoW.com layout is ''trippin.' Stormwind City Guards later found Infinite Dust in the saddle bags of his Dreadsteed. While he was being held for further questioning, he wrote this week's Blood Pact.

On a whim, I pulled out some of my Dungeons and Dragons books a couple weeks back, and convinced a buddy of mine that we should pick up where we left off in one of our old games. Since then my head has been wrapped around Zalekios Gromar, Vasharan Warlock on a mission to kill the gods that spited his people in millennia past. And while the Eldritch Blast of D&D isn't exactly the same as WoW's Shadow Bolt, it certainly got me in the mood for role playing.

There was a time between my adventures near Northshire Abbey, and my discovery that I had a passion for group content while I was fighting a torrential updraft of trolls in Zul'Farrak, when RP was my primary reason for playing the game. And while you don't usually see me walking through Stormwind these days, there was a time when I was Lord Sentai Grehsk, The Corpseseeker. A Warlock driven by the horrors of war to seek world peace at any cost, regardless of how many people he needed to quietly murder to achieve it.

I was perusing the Blood Pact archives this week, trying to think of a topic which would be a little less dry than my last topic, and I noticed that an in-depth look at a Warlock's minions is rather over-due!

I've long been of the opinion that Warlock minions are far more similar to a Warrior's stances than they are to a Hunter's pets. Hunter pets are very much a separate entity from the hunter them self. They have their own talent trees, different abilities they can train, and regardless of spec can account for 25% or more of the Hunter's total DPS in any given encounter -- closer to 50% if the Hunter is speced beast mastery! Warlock minions, on the other hand, have no customisability whatsoever, save the various talents which can be used to improve them. Often times a minion is used for no other reason than for the buff it provides -- or in the case of affliction Warlocks -- as a mana battery for Dark Pact.

There are a few interesting things in the Demonology tree in Wrath of the Lich King, but this 31-point talent was what jumped out at me the most. Replacing Soul Link, which was moved down to 11 points, Demonic Empowerment is the long-needed uh-oh button for our demons. Kind of like their own version of the PvP trinket. The cool thing is that, depending on the demon you have out, you get different effects.

Demonic Empowerment
Requires 30 points in Demonology
Grants the Warlock's summoned demon Empowerment.

• Succubus - Instantly vanishes, causing the Succubus to go into an improved Invisibility state. The vanish effect removes all stuns, snares and movement impairing effects from the Succubus.
• Voidwalker - Increases the Voidwalker's health by 20%, and it's threat generated from spells and attacks by 20% for 20 sec.
• Imp - Increases the Imp's spell critical strike chance by 20% for 30 sec.
• Felhunter - Dispels all magical effects from the Felhunter.
• Fel Guard - Increases the Fel Guard's attack speed by 20% and breaks all stun, snare and movement impairing effects and makes your Fel Guard immune to them. Lasts 15 sec.

With a cooldown of 1 minute, this spell will come in very handy for a variety of situations. In fact, I've key bound it in the Beta simply because I've found it to be incredibly useful. Let's take a look at the various uses after the jump.

I thought I'd do a Blood Pact on a Warlock's demons and how they'll be changing somewhat in Wrath of the Lich King, but considering there are two other trees to worry about, I've got the next two weeks loaded. Instead, we'll take a short look at one demon each day and see how the new talents and inherent demon abilities change the way you'll be playing with your pet.

For today, we'll take a look at my personal favorite, the Felhunter. I love the Felhunter because its cute, scaly, and eats my opponent's buffs and locks them out of magical schools. Out of all the demons -- with the exception of the Succubus -- Warlocks get the most benefit from micromanaging a Felhunter. This demon changes the most significantly in Wrath owing to a few things. The bad news first: currently in Beta, Felhunters no longer confer Paranoia, so in Wrath you'll actually get stun-locked by surprise instead of seeing it coming and not being able to do anything about it anyway. It also loses Tainted Blood, which won't be missed because a Felhunter with a Rogue or Warrior on it is going to die, -475 attack power notwithstanding.

As Inscription is slowly built into a viable trade skill, Blizzard sneaks more and more glyph data onto the Beta server, even if none of it is directly available thus far. This build, MMO Champion discovered a nice selection of Warlock glyphs, and I have to say that most of them look pretty sweet. Of course, it's hard to say for sure on how good some of them are until we know for sure if PvE damage rotations besides Shadow Bolt spam will be viable in Wrath's endgame, but I'll assume they will be, for the most part.

Let's check them out after the break.

I write a little, mostly intermittent column called The Art of War(craft). As it's a PvP column, I actually intended for it to be a play on Sun Tzu's The Art of War. On the other hand, I'm also an artist and I found that my recent trip to Internet-less limbo gave me enough time off from World of Warcraft and blogging about it to actually work on some illustrations. Of course, being the true WoW addict that I am, what better way to celebrate my withdrawal symptoms than by drawing Warcraft-related art?

I put WoW Model Viewer to good use as I used it as a reference for drawing. Being unable to go online to take actual character screenshots, I drew up a list of my wife's character's gear from memory and added some flair of my own, such as an exaggerated off-hand tome. It was my very first time working on Corel Painter, so I struggled a while with my colors. I was rather pleased by the result, though, specially on Jhuutom, her Warlock's felhunter. In the tradition of true World of Warcraft addiction, I've been working on my own character art as well. A larger-sized image after the jump. Pogi points to the first one who can identify the weapon she's holding.

Been a while since we did a staff, and considering how badass (and just plain weird) this baby looks, why not this one?

Name: Zhar'doom, Greatstaff of the Devourer (Wowhead, Allakahzam, Thottbot)
Type: Epic Staff
Damage/Speed: 145-323 / 3.20 (73.2 DPS)
Abilities:

• +70 Stamina, +47 Intellect, which makes it perfect for Warlocks, though really any caster would probably benefit
• Improves spell critical strike rating by 36, spell haste rating by 55, and increases damage and healing by 259. In other words, it rocks. Having a two-hand weapon limits you a bit, but this baby is your one stop shop for every stat important to a caster. Definitely a beautiful caster staff.
• And it's in the shape of a stretched-out Felhunter, or, depending on any conspiracy theories you may have about Blizzard continuity, a Zergling (more on that in a second). I couldn't find a video for you, but apparently it writhes and the mouth opens and closes as you hold it, too -- pretty weird and wacky.
• So about the Zergling thing -- Zerglings, as you may know, are the lower-rung units in the Zerg race of Starcraft, another Blizzard game. They look very similar to Felhunters in WoW, and it's true, this staff does look a little bit more like a Zergling than any other Felhunter we've seen in Azeroth. Plus, the name of the staff seems to be a reference to a Devouring One, another Zerg groupie. And it comes from Outland (a place out in the middle of space), and we have already seen Zergling noncombat pets in game.
• So I submit to you the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories: What if Warcraft and Starcraft are taking place in the same universe? And what if, depending on timelines, Zerglings are Felhunters and vice versa -- what if the Zerg is an evolved (or primitive) form of the Burning Legion? Just something to bend your mind a little bit on this Friday afternoon.

How to Get It: Drops from the marquee star of the last expansion, Illy Dan himself. Drops at a rate of somewhere between 10-20%, so not super rare, but unless you're seriously farming the guy and/or are a Warlock or high DPS-doer who really needs a nice staff, you might have to wait a bit.

But who doesn't want this thing, really? Put an "of the Devourer" after anything, and it becomes instantly more desirable. Tell me you wouldn't want a "Cupcake of the Devourer." Have you heard about that new Apple product, the "iPhone of the Devourer"? And dude, I'm so jealous -- my friend just got a "Nintendo Wii of the Devourer"!

Getting Rid of It: Sells for 18g 39s 48c to vendors, disenchants into a Void Crystal. You should keep it though -- if the Zerg do invade Azeroth, maybe you can hold it hostage or something.