Sliding Away

For the last six years, I’ve been playing my Warlock. I’ve raided on her, I’ve farmed transmog on her, soloed bosses I couldn’t on other characters, devoted a lot of time and attention to her and her development. I’ve summoned, I’ve given glowy green cookies, I’ve thrown bolts of pure chaos at my foes and summoned legions of demons to do my bidding.

But now?

Sure I’m still playing as Shokei, the Warlock formerly known as Raenah. She’s still my main, ostensibly. She’s the character I raid on, with my highest /played and the best, shinest gear, but…

Recently Yopaat has taken over more of my time. For all I said I was going to just level the Warlock, Rogue and Monk, and here I am with a Warlock I don’t have fun on any more, a Warrior I barely log into, and a Shaman that’s simply enlightening to play, whether Elemental OR Enhancement.

There’s issues afoot with the Warlock class. They’ve been acknowledged as such by Ol’ Mister Hazzithingybob, but due to a lack of ideas and ways to implement changes, we’re just gonna have to suffer with them until 7.2 at the EARLIEST, and who knows when that will be? Given that it’s going to be a major patch with a raid in the Tomb of Sargeras, and I doubt they’d want to make the Nighthold a short-lived raid, then we’re looking at five to six months where there’s a class that just feels busted to play. How so?

Affliction

Affliction’s problem is, on the face of it, relatively simple. It’s one of the worst specs for single target, but arguably the best for mass AoE. You can’t buff the DoTs too much or they make the AoE and cleave utterly eclipse any other spec in the game. Soul Effigy is a concept that Mages bitched about for the entirety of Warlords of Draenor (Prismatic Crystal) and almost universally approved its removal in Legion, so why not give that awful talent to Warlocks instead? And make it so that it’s the only way Affliction can do respectable single target DPS, and utterly frustrating on fights where enemies move around a lot (Cenarius, Ursoc).

Not only that, but you get the feeling that two of Ulthalesh’s golden traits are just out of place. Back in the beta, your weapon would occasionally release souls that you can kill that would end up triggering your golden traits (the first makes a powerful explosion around enemies you kill, the second increases DoT damage by 2% for 20 seconds, stacking 5 times). These two golden traits are utterly useless on fights where you have no adds to damage (Nythendra, Ursoc) or fights where adds die too quickly for you to even fire off a DoT at them (Elerethe, sometimes Dragons, depending on which ones you get and raid setup). Not only that, the Reap Souls ability on single target stacks up terribly slowly, roughly 3-4 per minute (givng you 15-20 seconds of buff time), whereas when you have adds to kill (Il’gynoth, Dragons, Cenarius, Xavius, Elerethe if your team doesn’t AoE the spiders down immediately) they stack REALLY quickly, and on certain fights (Ilgy and Cenarius), it’s possible to have the Reap Souls buff up the entire fight.

Demonology

The spec I’ve been using most, the one I’m least disillusioned with.

You don’t feel like a mighty conjurer of demons when all you’re doing is throwing small amounts of imps and demon dogs at a target. Demonic Empowerment feels annoying to have to use after EVERY summon; make it a maintenance buff on YOU that makes every demon you summon/have summoned have the usual DE effect, have it give you an aura of power that empowers your demons or whatever you need to do to explain it.

Utterly crippled by movement, Demonology can pump out some ridiculous numbers but the second you have to move? You’re not generating shards, you’re not summoning demons, you’re not empowering them, you’re losing all the DPS forever and you’re not catching back up. Demonwrath tickles, especially on one target, and Doom, once applied, doesn’t need to be recast for, like, EVER. You may be generating shards with Demonwrath, but if you’re moving, you sure as shit can’t spend them.

Destruction

Admittedly I’ve left Destruction twisting in the wind this expansion, so maybe I’m not best placed to comment on it, but hang on? I spent nearly 5 years as Destruction, from the last patch of Cataclysm up to the first of Legion, so what went wrong? What made me drop the spec I loved, stuck with through the Great Pandarian Revamp and loved even more?

Soul Shards.

Burning Embers were the perfect resource. It just made the spec flow properly. They generated at, seemingly, the perfect speed, and you spent them at the perfect speed too. The shift to Shards made the spec, ugh, clunky at best. Chaos Bolt, that fantastic nuke we all knew and loved, doesn’t feel like it hits very hard at all anymore, especially for the cast time it has. Another spec crippled by the slightest movement, but whereas Demonology shines in single target and has passable cleave/AoE, Destruction shines in cleave. Trouble is, if you can’t cleave, Destruction’s a waste of time, thanks to its single target numbers being so damn low.

There was going to be a moan about the current talent setup where you have to choose between doing passable single target or passable AoE and nothing in-between when other classes/specs don’t HAVE to make that decision and can do both and MORE! with just a cookie cutter build, but thanks to a rejiggling of the talents, that’s not as much of a problem in 7.1.5 anymore. Huzzah.

I think my main issue though was that it just doesn’t feel FUN any more, but I can’t put my finger on specifically WHY and that really annoys me. It’s not purely the numbers, as I was still using it when it was the worst Warlock spec (pre-SoO days!) and enjoying myself. There’s just something missing from it and my inability to specify what is a frustration.

General Warlock Stuff

• Healthstones feel junky compared to potions
• While having specific demons be better for specific specs is great for class fantasy!!! it makes for a boring time. I don’t do PvP so my Succubus sees absolutely no sunlight any more, and while I could just summon her regardless, I feel bad that I am gimping my numbers just to satisfy her wanting to see some scenery.
• Make Mortal Coil trigger the healing again, even if the target isn’t affected by the horror. It’d make for a nice “oh shit!” cooldown and provide an actual CHOICE on that talent tier, otherwise everyone’s just gonna take Circle forever.
• Speaking of that talent row, Shadowfury having a cast time kinda sucks. Things move!
• I want my Wrathguard back.
• That’s probably it.

It was light outside when I started writing this and now I’m sitting in the dark. Here’s Yopaat. Bye.

Legion: Destruction Overview

EMBRACE CHAOS!

The second spec overview of three, Destruction doesn’t see too many drastic changes thankfully. If you played it in Warlords or Mists, you’ll know what you’re doing in Legion.

Mostly.

General

• Burning Embers are replaced with Soul Shards, of which you can have a maximum of 5. Soul Shards mainly fuel your usage of Chaos Bolt. You start a fight with 1 shard, and need to build them up, much like Burning Embers.
• Mainly unchanged, thanks to some changes to Havoc it looks to be amazing at 2 target cleave fights, and with the right talent setup, looks to excel at AoE too. You can’t do both at the same time though. It’s either brilliant cleave or brilliant AoE.
• Single target looks to be the same as now; competitive.
• New Mastery is a bit random. By design!

Artifact

The Scepter of Sargeras! Supposedly the weapon that destroyed the real Draenor, when Nerzhul opened a shitload of portals. If Demonology has the most unique artifact, Destruction has hands-down the plain best-looking one!

Here’s your “talent tree” for the weapon. You start at a fixed point (the node with the solid gold circle), and work your way around. The traits with fancy borders are major traits, the rest minor.

Start Point

• Dimensional Rift: Rips a hole in time and space, opening a portal that damages your target. (3 charges, 1.5 second cast, 45 second recharge)

There are 3 potential portals this ability can open, each with an equal chance of appearing, and each benefitting from your Crit rating. Chaos Tear fires a single Chaos Bolt at your opponent. Similar to your Chaos Bolt, it will always crit. Its damage scales with your critical strike chance, as yours does, but NOT from your Mastery or Chaos Bolt-modifying artifact traits.

The second portal is the Chaos Portal. This casts the spell Chaos Barrage, throwing out a projectile every 0.25 seconds for 5.5 seconds, totalling 22 bolts! Its cast rate will increase with haste, as will the next portal, Shadow Tear. This third portal will fire Shadow Bolts every 2 seconds for 14 seconds, for a total of 7 projectiles.

Major Traits

From left to right!

• Dimension Ripper: Incinerate has a 6% chance to grant a charge of Dimensional Rift.
• Conflagration of Chaos: Conflagrate has a chance to guarantee your next Conflagrate critically strikes, and to increase its damage by your critical strike chance.
• Lord of Flames: Once every 10 minutes, Rain of Fire summons 6 Infernals to serve you for 8 seconds.

So more uses of your artifact ability? Excellent! A chance to turn Conflagrate into a mini Chaos Bolt? Awesome! Raining Infernals from the skies! AMAZING.

Once every 10 minutes? Ehhh.

Minor Traits

From left to right again!

• Chaotic Instability: Increases the critical strike damage of Chaos Bolt by 5%/10%/15%
• Fire and the Flames: Reduces cast time of Incinerate by 5%/6%/10%.
• Planeswalker: Transporting through your Demonic Gateway heals you for 50% of your maximum health.
• Soulsnatcher: Chaos Bolt has a 5%/10%/15% chance to refund 1 Soul Shard.
• Demonic Durability: Reduces cooldown of Unending Resolve by 30 seconds.
• Master of Disaster: Increases damage dealt by Incinerate by 5%/10%/15%.
• Devourer of Life: Drain Life has a 15%/30%/45% chance to increase its damage and healing by 15%/30%/45% for 15 seconds.
• Fire From the Sky: Increases damage dealt by Rain of Fire by 5%/10%/15%.
• Flames of the Pit: Increases Fire damage you deal by 4%.
• Residual Flames: Increases damage dealt by Immolate by 10%/20%/30%.
• Impish Incineration: Increases damage dealt by your Imp’s Firebolt by 15%. (Grimoire of Supremacy: Increases damage dealt by your Doomguard’s Doom Bolt by 18%) (Grimoire of Sacrifice: Increases damage by 3%)
• Eternal Struggle: After casting Life Tap, you take 10%/20%/30% less damage for 6 seconds.
• Burning Hunger: Increases the critical strike chance of Immolate by 10%/20%/30%.

 

Mostly we’re seeing passive increases to your rotational abilities. Impish Incineration changes what it does based on which Grimoire talent you choose, which is nice. Eternal Struggle seems to turn Life Tap into potentially a risky damage reduction cooldown? High risk, high reward, we all love that.

Talents

Talent choices in Legion seem to be more meaningful this time around, most of them having some sort of impact upon your rotation. Your basic rotation itself is simplified, and you add complexity through your talent choices!

Row 1

• Backdraft: Casting Conflagrate reduces the cast time of Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 30% for 5 seconds.
• Roaring Blaze: Conflagrate increases your remaining Immolate damage on the target by 50% until Immolate expires or is refreshed.
• Shadowburn: Blasts a target for (340% of Spell Power) damage. Generates 2 Soul Shards if the target dies within 5 seconds. (1 Soul Shard cost)

Destro gets the instant cast spell it’s always wanted but could never have! Costs a shard though. Shadowburn is now usable at any health level, not just in execute range, but it’s still best to kill off a target with it for the shard regeneration. The Backdraft effect is now a talent, but doesn’t operate on a charge system, it just makes your filler and nuke both cast faster for a flat 5 seconds. Roaring Blaze, if you take it, will make you want to bank a charge of Conflagrate for whenever you need to cast Immolate on a target, and I’d assume is best used on a single target fight, otherwise you won’t have enough charges to go around!

Row 2

• Reverse Entropy: Reduces the cast time of Chaos Bolt and Rain of Fire by 0.5 seconds and they restore 35% of your maximum mana.
• Fire and Brimstone: Incinerate now hits all enemies near your target.
• Mana Tap: Consumes 40% of your current mana to increase your damage by 10% for 20 seconds.

Fire and Brimstone also receives the “changed and shunted to a talent” treatment, now it makes Incinerate always AoE. Great for fights when you need that sort of thing, which if this expansion is anything to go by, will be every fight.

Faster Chaos Bolts and less need to cast Life Tap? Reverse Entropy looks to be a powerful choice! Mana Tap does almost the opposite; it’ll cause you to cast Life Tap MORE often, but you get a nice 10% damage buff to compensate. Probably best not to take this on fights where you’re expected to take a lot of damage, or on healer-intensive fights, as the less you’re Life Tapping lost mana, the more they can focus on everyone else.

Row 3

• Demon Skin: Your Soul Leech absorption now passively recharges at a rate of 1% of maximum health every 1 second, and may now absorb up to 20% of maximum health.
• Mortal Coil: Horrifies an enemy target into fleeing, incapacitating for 3 seconds and healing you for 11% of maximum health. (45 second cooldown)
• Shadowfury: Stuns all enemies within 8 yards for 3 seconds. (1.5 second cast, 30 second cooldown)

If the healing of Mortal Coil still only procs when it actually horrifies the target, it’ll be useless on bosses and therefore can be skipped. Might be useful for regular questing though. Demon Skin improves the (now baseline) Soul Leech, and makes it a passive constantly regenerating shield, instead of a temporary shield from damage dealt, and may well prove to be the default talent for this tier, especially if the absorb reduces Life Tap damage. Shadowfury controversially has a cast time now, and is not useful in fights with no adds, for obvious reasons.

Row 4

• Eradication: Chaos Bolt increases the damage you deal to the target by 12% for 6 seconds.
• Cataclysm: Conjures a cataclysm at the target location, dealing (700% of Spell Power) Shadowflame damage to all enemies within 8 yards and afflicting them with Immolate.
• Soul Harvest: Immediately generate 5 Soul Shards. (2 second cast, 2 minute cooldown)

Cataclysm hits like a TRUCK. Almost twice the Spell Power modifier of Chaos Bolt! Great for fights where AoE/cleave is needed, as you can do a serious chunk of damage with this. Eradication best saved for fights where you’re focusing on one target, so you can take full advantage of the 6 seconds of extra damage. Soul Harvest seems pretty underwhelming compared to these two, though if you have cause to spam as many Chaos Bolts as you possibly can (Feast of Souls phase on Gorefiend, perhaps?), then this may see some use. Even better if you take Shadowburn in tandem with Soul Harvest, you can throw out a serious number of high-damaging spells consecutively, though whether you end up doing more damage with this than with Chaos Bolt depends on whether you get lucky with your critical hits.

Row 5

• Demonic Circle: Summons a Demonic Circle for 6 minutes, allowing you to cast it again to teleport to its location and remove all movement slowing effects. Limit 1. (0.5 second cast)
• Burning Rush: Increases your movement speed by 50%, but also damages you for 4% of your maximum health every 1 second. Movement-impairing effects may not reduce you below 100% of normal movement speed. Lasts until cancelled.
• Dark Pact: Sacrifices 20% of your demon’s current health to shield you for 400% of the sacrificed health for 20 seconds. If you have no demon, your health is sacrificed instead. Usable while suffering from control-impairing effects. (1 minute cooldown)

Need massive damage reduction to survive a particular fight mechanic? Need speed boosts? Need to move to a particular, predictable spot every so often? This tier has it all!

But you can only choose one.

Row 6

• Grimoire of Supremacy: You are able to maintain control over even greater demons indefintely, allowing you to summon a Doomguard or Infernal as a permanent pet.
• Grimoire of Service: Summons a second demon to fight for you for 25 seconds and deals 100% increased damage. The demon will immediately use one of its special abilities when summoned (Imp cleanses 1 harmful Magic effect from you, Voidwalker taunts. Succubus seduces, Felhunter interrupts). (2 minute cooldown)
• Grimoire of Sacrifice: Sacrifice your demon to gain Demonic Power, causing your spells to sometimes also deal (100% of Spell Power) Shadow damage to the target and other enemies within 8 yards. Lasts 1 hour or until you summon a demon. (30 second cooldown)

Grimoire of Sacrifice goes from a “definite flat damage increase” talent to a “sometimes AoE damage” talent, though an artifact trait will ALSO flatly increase all your damage by 3% if you take this. Will apparently proc around 20 times per minute, increasing with Haste.

This tier comes down to “do you want big demons, normal demons, or no demons?” Supremacy will be good if you need to move a lot, as the Doomguard will do a respectable portion of your damage while you reposition. Similarly with Service, when you need to move, spit out your extra pet. On Patchwerk fights, or fights with a lot of AoE, you might wanna take Sacrifice.

Row 7

• Wreak Havoc: Havoc now lasts 20 seconds, and has no cooldown.
• Channel Demonfire: Launches 15 bolts of felfire over 3 seconds at random targets afflictied by your Immolate within 40 yards. Each bolt deals (50% of Spell Power) Fire damage. (3 second channel, 15 second cooldown)
• Soul Conduit: Every Soul Shard you spend has a 20% chance to be refunded.

Wreak Havoc sounds AMAZING for permacleave fights (think Twin Ogron, or Hellfire High Council) , as it makes Havoc essentially last forever, almost doubling damage output! Channel Demonfire will be great on AoE fights, especially if you take Cataclysm as well. Cataclysm mass-inflicts Immolate, Channel Demonfire then has a chance to hit ALL the enemies! Soul Conduit will therefore be the single target talent of choice, as the other two talents won’t really have much (if any) benefit.

 

Abilities

Your core spec abilities are a skeleton, to which you can take talents to flesh out. Here’s Destruction’s baseline abilities!

• Immolate is your DoT, and you want maximum uptime on it. Each tick has a 15% chance to regenerate a Soul Shard, 30% on crits..
• Conflagrate has 2 charges on a 12 second cooldown, is instant cast, and generates 1 Soul Shard when used.
• Incinerate is your main filler, and there’s nothing particularly of note to say about it.
• Chaos Bolt costs 2 Soul Shards, and is your primary nuke spell. It always critically strikes, and your Critical Strike rating increases the damage it deals. If your Crit rating is 25%, then Chaos Bolt will deal 1.25x its normal damage.
• Life Tap makes a return for Destruction! Restores a flat 30% of your mana, at a cost of 10% of your health.
• Havoc, as mentioned above, works slightly differently in Legion, in that it debuffs an enemy for 8 seconds, and copies all spells cast on another target to it for the entire duration of the buff, as opposed to working on a charge-based system. You can only have 1 Havoc spell active at a time.
• Rain of Fire makes a comeback, though it never really went away, just… went useless for a while. Not instant anymore, it now has a 2 second cast time, and hits an 8 yard radius of your choosing with fiery rain for 8 seconds at a cost of 3 Soul Shards! Deals VERY respectable damage now, and obviously rains Infernals down with the appropriate artifact ability, so seems worth the cost in an AoE-fest.
• Mastery: Chaotic Energies is a strange one. It increases the damage your spells do by x% (where x is your mastery rating) RANDOMLY. If your Mastery is 50%, then your spells can hit 50% harder, but they’re just as likely to hit 1% harder, or 25% harder, or 15.34% harder. It apparently smooths out over the course of a fight, but I kinda dislike that I can perform flawlessly on a fight, but RNG dictates that my damage is rubbish anyway. It also reduces damage you take by a random amount, up to x%.

Glyphs

Glyphs are working differently in Legion. Major glyphs are apparently gone, and now you apply the glyph directly to the spell, meaning you can have one per (eligible) ability, I guess?

• Glyph of Crimson Banish: Your Banish spell is now red.
• Glyph of Soulwell: Your Soulwell glows with an eerie light.
• Glyph of the Abyssal: Transforms your Infernal into an Abyssal.
• Glyph of the Demon Eye: Transforms your eye of Kilrogg into a demonic floating eye.
• Glyph of the Fel Imp: Transforms your Imp into a Flame Imp.
• Glyph of the Inquisitor’s Eye: Transforms your Eye of Kilrogg into an Inquisitor’s Eye.
• Glyph of the Observer: Transforms your Felhunter into an Observer.
• Glyph of the Shivarra: Transforms your Succubus into a Shivarra.
• Glyph of the Terrorguard: Transforms your Doomguard into a Terrorguard.
• Glyph of the Voidlord: Transforms your Voidwalker into a Voidlord.

Warlocks in Legion: Class Preview Blog

INFORMATION! We have some at last! Here’s my take on it all.

General

To this end, we’re going to once again standardize Warlocks on their most class-defining resources: Mana and Soul Shards

This means that all three Warlock specs will be using Soul Shards. Not only that, but all three specs will also be using Life Tap. Currently, Destruction has a passive ability called Chaotic Energy that replaces Life Tap, which increases mana regeneration by a huge amount (further increased by haste); presumably, this is going away so we become more mana-dependent again.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I know they want to get closer to the class fantasy of trading one’s soul for power, and I’m all for that, but… I did like how Chaotic Energy worked. You still were capable of running out of mana, which is why you used Chaos Bolt to effectively “recover” it; thanks to its long cast time, you took advantage of your 625% increased mana regen.

But yes. All specs use Soul Shards now. 5 is apparently the maximum.

We want to re-incentivize demon variety, strengthening the various utilities that each demon supplies, and causing some demons to be favored based on the Warlock’s spec.

According to a tweet from the developers, Affliction will favour the use of Felhunters, Demonology the use of Felguards, and Destruction will see best success with Imps. I like this idea! I’m sick of seeing observers all the damn time, cool as they are.

Affliction

Affliction is staying mostly the same, except Haunt is apparently being relegated to a talent and is being reworked. Drain Life becomes your filler ability, which I quite like the idea of. It’s still regenerating your health, and for each DoT present on your foe, it increases the damage of Drain Life by 50% (so up to 150% increase!). I like how in keeping this is with the Warlock fantasy; curses to empower your spells, your opponent’s life to replenish yours.

Agony and Corruption are mostly the same. The Nightfall effect gets baked not into Corruption, but AGONY now, and isn’t capped at one target, so the more targets you throw Agony on, the more chance you have of generating a Soul Shard.

Your spender of shards is apparently Unstable Affliction now, so I’d imagine it will see a boost in power to compensate for the potential inability to cast it (shards being bound by the RNG of Nightfall, of course), so potentially like a Shadow Priest’s Devouring Plague spell. There’s also a talent that makes Seed of Corruption cost a Soul Shard, but makes the application of the spell an AoE (currently the only AoE part of it is the explosion, so this is a marked improvement over the current spell!).

In conclusion, Affliction is going back to being all about those DoTs, less about the filler. Single target fights will probably not be your strongest type of battle, but add a target or two more into the mix? Affliction will be the KING.

Demonology

I suppose I won’t be able to use that picture to symbolise Demonology anymore, will I?

Demonology is going to be all about the demon summoning, and the empowering of those demons. I’ll go through abilities a bit more specifically here.

• Shadow Bolt: This is your main filler, and regenerates a Soul Shard. Same old, same old. Well, apart from the Soul Shard bit.
• Call Dreadstalkers: A new ability! This costs 2 shards, and summons 2 Dreadstalkers for 12 seconds, on a 15 second cooldown.
• Hand of Gul’dan: For the cost of 1 to 5 Soul Shards, a meteor full of Wild Imps smacks your target on the head. Hits everyone in 8 yards of the target, and depending on how many shards you used to cast it, you get that number of imps to bombard your foe.
• Doom: Plonks a 20 second DoT on your foe. At the end, your enemy takes massive damage, and you regen a shard.
• Demonwrath: A channeled spell that has no maximum duration! Every second, your demons crackle and inflict damage to every enemy within 10 yards of them, and each time it deals damage, you have a 15% chance to regen a shard.
• Demonic Empowerment: This empowers 3 of your your demons with 50% increased Haste and health for 12 seconds. More haste means they attack quicker, which means more DPS! It favours your stronger demons, so probably your Felguard and Dreadstalkers before your Wild Imps. Has 3 charges on a 12 second recharge time.

And for the preview talent:

• Implosion: Pulls all your summoned Wild Imps to a target. They then explode, dealing damage to every enemy nearby.
• Power Trip: Mentioned in a tweet, this talent apparently makes your Demonic Empowerment power up ALL your active demons, not just 3 of them.

So Demonology is all about summoning and empowering a demonic army to assault your foes! I’m REALLY excited about playing this, I’ve gotta say. The current Demonology is a bit clunky, this new hotness looks really fun to play. Can we have it now?

Destruction

Destruction, like Affliction, is not seeing any overwhelmingly drastic changes, though as I mentioned above, Burning Embers are being replaced with Soul Shards. Immolate is the DoT you want on your enemy at all times (still), Incinerate is your filler (still), Conflagrate provides Backdraft and has 2 charges on an 8 second recharge (still) but also replenishes a Soul Shard. Chaos Bolt functions the same as now, but costs 2 shards. Havoc seems to have changed a bit; rather than affecting the next 3 spells cast (or 1 Chaos Bolt), it places an 8 second debuff on an enemy and copies ALL spells to that enemy for the duration, so you can Havoc-cleave multiple Chaos Bolts! This makes me happy.

The preview talent, Channel Demonfire, throws fireballs at all enemies with Immolate on them over 3 seconds, but this isn’t the only AoE talent. Fire and Brimstone is now also a talent, which passively makes Incinerate into an AoE, but no word on whether it reduces the damage of it, like current Fire and Brimstone does. Also, for those of us concerned at Conflagrate being our only shard generator, according to @WarcraftDevs, “there are several talents that deal with Soul Shards,” so fret not!

Shadowburn returns as a talent too, with “improved usability,” but no word on what that actually is, so wait and see I guess?

The final thing to note is our mastery. Chaotic Energies makes your spells deal up to x% additional damage randomly. So with a (for example) 50% mastery rating, if your Chaos Bolt does 100,000 damage normally, then with this new mastery, it can do anywhere between 100,000 and 150,000 damage, based on luck I suppose.

I… actually kinda like that. It fits with the Destruction fantasy of using chaotic, destructive energies to deal damage. If our very damage has to be chaotic to fulfill that, then I am more than happy to oblige.

So! In conclusion, on the face of it, Warlocks look to be going into a good place come Legion, and I definitely want to carry on playing as one. Phew! Affliction still looks rather boring, but to me it always did compared to Demonology and Destruction, and those two specs looks fantastic! I can’t wait to try them out!

Embrace Chaos! Destruction 101

At level 100, Destruction is not really much different than it was at level 90, which is rather fortunate, but for those of you who have never played it, here’s the basics!

Talents

Tier 1: Self Healing

• Dark Regeneration: Restores 20% of maximum health over 12 sec to you and your pet, and increases all healing received by 25% for the duration. (2 min cooldown)
• Soul Leech: Incinerate, Shadowburn, and Chaos Bolt grant you and your pet shadowy shields that absorb 15% of the damage they dealt for 15 sec.
• Searing Flames: Ember Tap causes 50% more healing, and refunds 50% of its Burning Ember cost.

Searing Flames is better for PvP than it is for PvE. Soul Leech and Dark Regeneration are your talents of choice here depending on what an encounter requires. Dark Regeneration is good for when you need an “OH SHIT” button, whereas Soul Leech helps smooth out constant damage over the course of an encounter.

tier 2: crowd control

• Howl of Terror: Your howl causes 5 enemies within 10 yds to flee in fear, disorienting them for 20 sec. Damage may cancel the effect. Being hit by a damaging attack reduces your cooldown on Howl of Terror by 1 sec. (40 second cooldown)
• Mortal Coil: Horrifies an enemy target into fleeing, incapacitating them for 3 sec, and restores 11% of the caster’s maximum health. (45 second cooldown)
• Shadowfury: Stuns all enemies within 8 yds for 3 sec. (30 second cooldown)

Again dependent on your needs. Does an encounter have adds that need stunning? Shadowfury is the way to go. Otherwise, go with Mortal Coil for the heal it provides.

tier 3: damage mitigation

• Soul Link: 20% of all damage taken is split with your demon pet, and 3% of damage you deal heals you and your demon.
• Sacrificial Pact: Sacrifices 20% of your demon’s current health to shield you for 400% of the sacrificed health for 20 sec. If you have no demon, your health is sacrificed instead. Usable while suffering from control impairing effects. (1 min cooldown)
• Dark Bargain: Prevents all damage for 8 sec, but when the effect ends, you take 50% of the damage prevented over 8 sec. Usable while suffering from control impairing effects. (3 min cooldown)

Soul Link is great for smoothing out low but constant damage. Sacrificial Pact is good if you take large, predictable, periodic hits. Dark Bargain is good if you want to bypass some fight mechanics involving damage, but be very wary of the DoT it applies afterwards!

Tier 4: Utility for health

• Blood Horror: While active, any time an enemy melee attack deals damage to the Warlock, the enemy will run in horror, incapacitated for up to 4 sec. 1 charge. Blood Horror lasts 60 sec. (1 min cooldown)
• Burning Rush: Iincrease your movement speed by 50%, but also deals damage to you equal to 4% of your maximum health per second. Movement-impairing effects may not reduce you below 100% of normal movement speed. Lasts until cancelled.
• Unbound Will: Purges all Magic effects, movement impairing effects, and loss of control effects from yourself and your demon. (2 min cooldown)

Blood Horror has practically no use in PvE, it’s mainly a PvP talent. Burning Rush is the default talent, as there’s always a use for a speed boost! Unbound Will is something you take if you have need of it on an encounter, as opposed to it being an all-purpose talent. Bear in mind these health costs can be mitigated by shields from Soul Leech or Sacrificial Pact.

tier 5: demons!

• Grimoire of Supremacy: You command stronger demons, replacing your normal minions. These demons deal 20% additional damage and have more powerful abilities.
• Grimoire of Service: Instantly summon a second demon which fights for 25 sec. The demon will instantly use one of its special abilities when summoned. (2 min cooldown)
• Grimoire of Sacrifice: Sacrifice your demon to gain one of its abilities, and to increase the damage of your Incinerate, Chaos Bolt, and Shadowburn by 25%. Does not apply to spells affected by Fire and Brimstone. Also causes you to regenerate 2% of maximum health every 8 sec. (30 second cooldown)

In 6.1, Sacrifice is looking to be the best talent for AoE AND Single Target when taken in tandem with Charred Remains. For times of high movement, you’ll want to go with Supremacy or Service, as Destruction has almost no movement DPS if you don’t take Kil’jaeden’s Cunning, and your damage will end up coming from your demons.

Service or Supremacy? Service has higher DPS when taken with Demonic Servitude. Supremacy has higher DPS if not.

A note about Grimoire of Sacrifice. When taken with Soul Link, it also increases your total health by 20%.

tier 6: situational dps increases

• Archimonde’s Darkness: Dark Soul now has 2 charges.
• Kil’jaeden’s Cunning: The cunning of Kil’jaeden allows you to move while casting Warlock spells for 8 sec. Castable while casting other spells. (35 second cooldown)
• Mannoroth’s Fury: Increases the area of effect by 500% and damage by 100% of Seed of Corruption, Hellfire, Immolation Aura, and Rain of Fire for 10 sec. (1 min cooldown)

You need to move a lot in a fight? Take Kil’jaeden’s Cunning. Every other situation, take Archimonde’s Darkness. With the hotfix to Rain of Fire a while back, Mannoroth’s Fury is useless for Destruction.

tier 7: performance enhancers

• Charred Remains: Incinerate and Conflagrate deal 50% less damage but generate 200% more Burning Embers. Fire and Brimstone can now also affect Chaos Bolt.
• Cataclysm: Conjures a cataclysm at the target location, dealing [750% of Spell Power] Shadowflame damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and applying Immolate. (1 min cooldown)
• Demonic Servitude: You are now able to maintain your control over even greater demons indefinitely, allowing you to summon Doomguards and Infernals as permanent pets.

Charred Remains is the talent you want to take for stationary encounters in 6.1, whether for single target or sustained AoE, and in tandem with Grimoire of Sacrifice. For encounters with movement, go with Demonic Servitude and Grimoire of Service, as your demon(s) will do 25-30% of your DPS over the course of a fight, and doing 25% DPS is better than doing 0 DPS! Take Cataclysm if you have 2-3 constant targets, or when you need a quick, strong burst of AoE.

Charred Remains + Grimoire of Sacrifice is viable on movement fights so long as you take Kil’jaeden’s Cunning with it.

TL:DR Talent setups

• Stationary fights: Grimoire of Sacrifice + Archimonde’s Darkness + Charred Remains
• Movement fights: Grimoire of Service + Archimonde’s Darkness + Demonic Servitude OR Grimoire of Sacrifice + Kil’jaeden’s Cunning + Charred Remains

Useful Glyphs

• Glyph of Dark Soul: Reduces the duration and cooldown of Dark Soul by 50%. Great when taken with Archimonde’s Darkness, as it allows you to be able to have a Dark Soul charge nearly every time you’re about to cap on embers!
• Glyph of Eternal Resolve: Turns Unending Resolve into a passive ability that provides a constant 10% damage reduction. Taking constant, frequent damage? Use this and Soul Link and laugh as all your fellow raiders die before you!
• Glyph of Demonic Circle: Reduces your Demonic Circle: Teleport’s cooldown by 4 seconds, which is great if you need to use it often.
• Glyph of Healthstone: Changes how your healthstones work, turning it from an instant heal to a heal-over-time with double potency.
• Glyph of Siphon Life: Each tick of Immolate will heal you for 0.35% of your total health, thus increasing survivability.

Abilities and Rotation

The Destruction playstyle is about generating Burning Embers, then spending them when you have powerful procs/cooldowns active. You typically start a fight with 1 Ember, and the capacity to hold 4. Each full Ember is made of 10 increments, or what some people call “emberbits”.

Ember generators

• Immolate: Burns the enemy for [1 + 45.82% of Spell Power] Fire damage and an additional [5 + 45.82% of Spell Power] Fire damage over 15 sec. Immolate critical strikes generate Burning Embers.
• Conflagrate: Target enemy instantly explodes, dealing [189% of Spell Power] Fire damage and generating Burning Embers. Targets afflicted by Immolate will have 50% reduced movement speed for 5 sec. (2 charges, 12 second recharge time)
• Incinerate: Deals [1 + 132.82% of Spell Power] Fire damage to an enemy and generates Burning Embers.

ember spenders

• Chaos Bolt: Unleashes a blast of chaos, causing [1 + 261.3% of Spell Power] Shadow damage. Chaos Bolt always critically strikes and your critical strike chance increases its damage.
• Shadowburn: Instantly blasts a target below 20% health for [1 + 390.6% of Spell Power] Shadow damage. Generates Burning Embers if the target dies within 5 sec.
• Ember Tap: Heals 6.20% of your health.
• Flames of Xoroth: The flames of Xoroth instantly revive your last demon. (1 min cooldown)

cooldowns

• Dark Soul: Instability: Infuses your soul with unstable power, increasing your critical strike chance by 30% for 20 sec. (2 min cooldown)

CLeave/AoE

• Havoc: Causes your next Chaos Bolt or three other single target spells to also strike this target. (15 second cooldown)
• Fire and Brimstone: While active causes your Immolate, Incinerate, and Conflagrate to consume a Burning Ember, hit all enemies within 10 yards of the target, and deal 43.4% of their normal damage.
• Rain of Fire: Burns enemies in the area of effect for [(7.5% of Spell power) * 8] Fire damage over 6 sec, dealing 50% increased  damage to targets affected by Immolate.

rotation: single target

• Immolate: Make sure this is rolling at all times!
• Chaos Bolt/Shadowburn: When you’re about to cap on embers, or if you have powerful buffs. See below for what to look for!
• Conflagrate: Provides 3 stacks of Backdraft, which halves the cost and cast time of Incinerate, and the cast time of Chaos Bolt.
• Cataclysm: If talented.
• Incinerate: Filler spell!
• Rain of Fire: Only if you’re forced to move, you can’t cast Conflagrate, and you don’t have Kil’jaeden’s Cunning active/talented.

Rotation: 2-5 enemies

• Immolate as many enemies as possible.
• Cataclysm, making sure to hit as many enemies as possible. Stun them beforehand with Shadowfury if you can to guarantee a hit!
• Havoc in tandem with Shadowfury if possible, or Chaos Bolt if not.

Otherwise, maintain your single-target rotation on your primary target.

rotation: 5+ enemies

• Activate Fire and Brimstone
• F&B Immolate. Keep that DoT rolling!
• F&B Conflagrate
• Havoc & Shadowburn/Chaos Bolt
• Rain of Fire so long as all the enemies stay in it for the full duration
• F&B Incinerate

With Charred Remains, your AoE rotation looks like this:

• Activate Fire and Brimstone
• F&B Immolate
• F&B Incinerate to generate embers
• F&B Chaos Bolt to spend embers (bear in mind 1 cast of F&B Chaos Bolt costs TWO EMBERS)

Mastering the Chaos: Further Explanations

When do I cast Chaos Bolt?

• Cast ONE Chaos Bolt if you are about to cap on Burning Embers, and you have no major procs/cooldowns available.
• Cast as many Chaos Bolts as you can when you have trinket procs, Dark Soul, or your legendary ring proc. Best situation is if all these buffs happen at the same time, but don’t waste 1 powerful proc hoping a second one will happen, ’cause it may not!

Try and have as many filled Burning Embers as possible without capping. This allows you to fire off as many super-powered Chaos Bolts as possible when you get powerful buffs.

Why don’t I just sit at 4 embers?

Because you don’t generate any more embers than that. It’s wasted Embers, effectively, and means you cast fewer Chaos Bolts over the course of a fight. Chaos Bolt is your hardest-hitting spell. It’s better to fire one with no procs and get that big hit in and start generating Embers (and thus future Chaos Bolts), than cap on Embers and keep firing out lil’ nothing spells, waiting for the stars to align.

What do I use Backdraft on?

When you use Conflagrate, you gain 3 stacks of Backdraft (caps at 6 stacks). You can use 1 Backdraft stack to halve the cost/cast time of Incinerate by 50%, or consume 3 to halve the cast time of Chaos Bolt.

Generally, you want to be using Backdraft on Incinerate, however if you need to cast a Chaos Bolt very quickly (eg just before a powerful buff fades, or when a boss takes increased damage for a short time) then it’s a DPS gain to squeeze that fast Chaos Bolt out.

What demon do I use?

If using Grimoire of Service, use the Felhunter. If using Grimoire of Supremacy, use the Observer. If using Demonic Servitude, use the Doomguard/Terrorguard.

The Imp, Succubus and Felhunter all do similar DPS, but the Felhunter has an interrupt and those are always useful. Similarly, their Supremacy upgrades (Fel Imp, Shivarra and Observer respectively) do similar DPS to one-another, but Obervers have an interrupt too (and eye lasers!).

The permanent Doomguard/Terrorguard provided by Demonic Servitude eclipses all of those, however, so if you’re running with that talent, then damn well use it!

havoc/shadowburn

Using Havoc and Shadowburn together is a great way to do a LOT of damage. You see, whereas you can only use it with 1 Chaos Bolt, you can cast Shadowburn 3 times per use of Havoc.. The way to abuse this is to cast Havoc on a boss, and then cast Shadowburn on an add that’s below 20% health. Even if the boss is above 20% health, it will take the hit from Shadowburn, and Shadowburn hits VERY hard, harder than Chaos Bolt if it crits. Not only that, but if the add then dies, you get 2 Embers back (the Ember cost is refunded, then you also get a bonus Ember), which allows you to cast futher Shadowburns or Chaos Bolts.

secondary Stat priority

You basically want gear with as much Mastery and Critical Strike as possible. Multistrike is a good stat too, but falls behind the previous two. Haste is your next best stat, followed by Versatility.

Mastery >> Critical Strike > Haste >= Multistrike >> Versatility

Warlock Hotfixes Actually Happened?!

Apparently they did! Let’s start with a general hotfix (*salute*) first.

Secondary Stats

Haste is now 11.1% more effective. What this means is you need 90 Haste rating to gain 1% Haste, whereas before you needed 100. This is a boost for damn near all classes and specs, as it’s pretty much FREE HASTE RATING YAY but the warlock spec it benefits most is Affliction, Haste being one of its best secondary stats along with Mastery. It only really amounts to around a 1% damage boost that everybody gets, but hey! Enjoy it.

Demonology

• Mastery: Master Demonologist‘s effects have been increased by 33%

Whoa. 33% is a large number! Those that play Demonology are saying their Demonbolts hit like crazy now, and Demonology is a very very good turret spec, like Arcane Mages. Thing is, unlike Arcane, Demonology will also be very good at movement DPS, not as good as melee or hunters, but still a lot better than the other casters, so did we just see Demonology become the best spec in the game when you factor in every aspect of an encounter?

@gahddo @Rygarius @WarcraftDevs It's 1/3. 1% per point.

— Celestalon (@Celestalon) January 13, 2015

It’s safe to say that this is a pretty healthy buff. 10-15% higher DPS some people are saying. Gosh!

Destruction

Ah yes, my spec of choice.

• Devastation now causes the Warlock to gain 15% (up from 5%) of the Critical Strike stat from all sources.

As an example! Raenah, my Warlock, currently has 1006 Critical Strike from her gear. 5% of this is 50.3, which is rounded to 50 and added on to her total to give her 1056 Crit. It takes 110 Crit rating to give a 1% boost, which means Raenah has a 14.6% chance of a crit, when you factor in the 5% baseline Critical Strike rating.

With the new buff, 15% of 1006 is 150.9. I assume this gets rounded up to 151, and not rounded down, making her have 1157 Crit. This converts to a 15.5% Critical Strike chance, which is a boost of 0.9, which is a 6.16% increase from the previous number!

The workings out for those who care?

It’s basically nothing to be too excited about at this point, but as gear gets better and stats get larger, you’ll see more and more of an effect from this buff. Obviously it will boost Chaos Bolt damage slightly too, and higher crit means more embers and better AoEing, but for now it’s still a relatively small boost. We’ll see how well this shines when the gear scales upwards!

Merry (LATE) Christmas, fellow Warlocks!

WoW, Street Fighter, Tactics Ogre!

Today, I’m gonna talk about a bit of WoW, and a bit of other games I play, because my blog, my rules. That, and I need to get updating this thing more regularly!

World of Warcraft

Warlocks got a small buff in an area we… kinda didn’t need. Havoc’s base cooldown is reduced to 20 seconds (meaning 15 seconds thanks to the Draenor Perk). Our cleave was already pretty strong anyway as Destruction, it’s our AoE and ember generation that has suffered thanks to the recent Rain of Fire nerf, and our movement DPS that suffers immensely due to the loss of Fel Flame. Obviously, this change will have an effect on our ember generation… provided we have more than 1 target in a fight. On a boss like the Butcher? Useless!

Speaking of him… Merry Christmas! Image courtesy of Wowhead!

Warlocks aren’t in a terrible place at the moment though. On fights where you can cleave, Destruction really shines, and Twin Ogron is a fight almost MADE for Affliction. Strong single target fights like The Butcher? Demonology with Demonbolt is the way to go! Highmaul isn’t too bad for us at the moment, but what will Blackrock Foundry throw at us?

In other WoW news, I’m loving my ol’ garrison and the missions! Gladiator warrior is INSANELY fun. LFR Highmaul is LAUGHABLY easy. Both my 100 characters are on the Abrogator Stone part of the legendary quest.

And I’ve mogged my warrior. FIERY!

Street Fighter

The new patch was released for Ultra Street Fighter 4 on Monday, bringing with it OMEGA MODE CHARACTERS!

And yes, some of them are hilariously broken.

Several characters have infinite combos. Ibuki and Crimson Viper both have slightly technical ones, and Gen’s infinite (GENFINITE) is hilariously easy to do.

That being said, ignoring these slightly glaring errors, Omega is such fun! My favourite characters so far are probably Gen (not because of the Genfinite, but because his custom combos remind me of how he was in Alpha), and Decapre (no charge motions!).

“Execute.”

The Omega mode brings a whole new level of fun and silliness to the game, and best of all? FREE CONTENT! Didn’t have to pay a penny for it!

My favourite non-Omega character however is probably a tie between Gouken and Poison. You know what makes me sad though? I watch a lot of Street Fighter match videos on YouTube, because yay free time, and every time Poison features, you can GUARANTEE that the comments will feature jokes and insults about the fact she’s trans. I know, YouTube comments are generally a fucking cesspool anyway, but I still feel a twinge of sadness for the human race that we can’t just get over this. That every time she’s mentioned, there’s always some joke or insult about her.

This is even with 2 very prominent, well-known members of the competitive Street Fighter player base being trans individuals themselves! It’s staggering how narrow-minded and pathetic some people can be.

Anyway, enough of the serious talk, it’s not what I am good at.

Crimson Viper is totally jealous of Poison’s hot bod.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together

I bought this a while back on my PS Vita, and I’ve finally got around to playing it. It’s one of those SRPG’s I love so much, similar to Final Fantasy Tactics in fact. Isometric grids, character classes, strategy, moving things around, that sorta stuff.

Typical screen you’ll see when playing!

The story is a political one, and your main character, Denam Pavel, is fighting to bring freedom to his country! So, a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics, I guess. Trying to keep spoilers to a minimum, seeing as I haven’t finished it yet, but there are several paths you can take through the game. Law, Neutral and Chaos. I’m on the Chaos path at the moment!

Favourite character class so far is the Ninja (DOUBLE ATTACK!), but I’ve just unlocked a Warlock class, so you better believe I’m gonna be levelling one of those! Rather than the demon summoners of WoW, Warlocks in Tactics Ogre specialise in Draconic magic, and the summoning and controlling of golems. Pretty snazzy, yes?

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing at the moment. You up to anything interesting?

Warlocks of Draenor: Cursory Single-Target DPS Testing

In Stormwind, Flaskataur sells your PvE tier 17 gear! It’s the Heroic version, it’s item level 680, and it allows you to use your tier set bonuses! I equipped all 5 pieces, it shot my item level up to a mighty 624.

Raenah’s got nothing on Chun Li though.

I pointed Raenah in the general direction of the garrison training dummies (located near the mine, or if you have a Mage Tower in there for some filthy reason. Ugh, mages) and fired a few spells at them. Do bear in mind that I’m not used to the Charred Remains Destruction playstyle yet, and Demonology is always one of those inscrutable mysteries to me.

Let’s remind ourselves of what the tier bonuses are for these 2 specs!

Tier Bonuses

• Demonology 2 piece: Hand of Gul’dan now has 1 additional maximum charge, and  Corruption has a 10% chance to generate 1 charge of Hand of Gul’dan when dealing damage.
• Demonology 4 piece: Hand of Gul’dan has a 50% chance to empower your inner demon, temporarily bringing your Metamorphosis form out even while you are not transformed.
• Destruction 2 piece: When Immolate deals damage it has a 4% chance to generate a Burning Ember.
• Destruction 4 piece: When a Burning Ember is filled up, you have a chance to cause your next Chaos Bolt to multistrike 3 additional times.

The Demonology 2 piece is fun at first, but actually gets annoying; at times you’re constantly throwing out Hand of Gul’dans, as you don’t wanna stay at 3 (potential wasted procs = lost DPS), but it comes at the detriment of doing literally ANYTHING ELSE.

The Demonology 4 piece is cool! It summons a small, ghosty version of your Metamorphosis model which throws a few Soul Fires then buggers off again.

The proc chance on the Destruction 2 piece is pretty low, I think I saw it occur maybe once? It ties in nicely to the 4 piece though. That seems to proc often!

Demo 4pc in action. See the faint demon next to me?

Look at those delicious multitrikes from the Destro 4pc!

Demonology

So as you see, the 2pc bonus makes Hand of Gul’dan by FAR your most used spell. The 4pc accounts for around 5% of my total DPS.

I used Grimoire of Synergy and Demonbolt as my level 75 and level 90 talents. When best to cast Demonbolt? Cap on fury, pop Dark Soul and Metamorphosis, throw out 4 Demonbolts then a Soul Fire. If you can, cast another spell, this’ll turn you back into caster form. At more than 4 casts, Demonbolt becomes less efficient in terms of the damage it does vs the cost.

Outside of Meta, you’re building Fury by Shadow Bolting, throwing out Soul Fires if your Molten Core stacks get too high (I aim at around 6-7), and refreshing Corruption and Doom as needed.

With Grimoire of Synergy, thanks to the sheer number of things I was throwing out, the 15% damage buff was active on my demon almost 50% of the time! Due to the demon’s slower attacks however, it was only active on me just over 20%. It’s still a nice, noticeable buff though, giving you a proc to watch out for and react to.

Destruction

Here, I went for the standard Grimoire of Sacrifice choice, with Charred Remains as my level 100 talent. I’m not fully used to the CR playstyle yet, but I suppose it’ll come with practice.

Single target Destruction suffers. Charred Remains means Incinerate and Conflagrate tickle your opponent, but you get to chuck out a lot more Chaos Bolts, as you can see above. Rotation is largely unchanged, only when you get close to capping embers, you probably want to throw out TWO Chaos Bolts, not one. When Chaotic Infusion procs, cast the Chaos Bolt straight away, and look at those glorious multistrikes fly.

It’s still a “build up embers, empty when Dark Soul/trinkets pop” playstyle, but with a LOT more flux in what you do outside of the burn time. Your embers will fill up fast and go down faster if you let them.

Side Note

For both of these tests, I didn’t use any glyphs. I could probably have done with the Life Pact and Dark Soul glyphs on Demonology, but we live and learn.

I’m not going to test Affliction, partly because running from the garrison (where I can test in peace) and respeccing in Stormwind is an annoyance I don’t need, and partly because Affliction just doesn’t interest me any more. The spec just doesn’t engage me like it used to.

In other news, just LOOK at how sexy Gul’dan looks.

#warlords #wow #warlock

Warlocks of Draenor: Patch Note Updates?

I’ve decided all future warlock-related WoD posts will be called Warlocks of Draenor, ’cause heck I read Warlords of Draenor as that half the time.

Since the last blog which went over a massive glut of information regarding the state of play for us in 6.0, 2 more updates have been made to the patch notes! So shall we go over the ones relevant to us?

• Demonic Breath is going away again, and Howl of Terror is going back to being a level 30 talent. This is probably part of the CC reduction we’re seeing, but instead of flat-out removing this one, they’re just making it so you have to forego having Mortal Coil or Shadowfury. Fair enough, that tier was a choice between those two talents anyway. I used Demonic Breath ONCE. Just to see the visual. I surmise that’s the same for many people.
• They clarified points on DoT Snapshotting. Basically, it’s going bye bye. “Periodic damage and healing effects now dynamically recalculate their damage, healing, Critical chance, multipliers, and period on every tick.” The exceptions to this are DoTs that deal damage based on a %age of a previous ability’s damage (Blackout Kick, or the Chaos Bolt DoT when using GoSac).
• Pandemic is gone! But every class gets the Pandemic effect passively, but only to 130% of normal duration, down from 150%.
• Healthstones share a cooldown with health potions, seperate from other potions. This means healthstones become a once-per-battle deal, as opposed to once per 2 minutes.

There’s also datamined changes to some of our spells, however these are not 100% official yet. They’re not in the patch notes, so grains of salt are useful here.

• Corruption for Affliction (and apparently Destruction? I assume then Immolate in that case) now scales with 24% of your spell power, up from 17%.
• The Demonology level 100 talent Demonbolt scales with 400% spell power, up from 300%.
• Agony scales with 35% of spell power (was 26%), Haunt with 394% (was 263%), and Malefic Grasp now scales with 20% (was 13.2%). Its proc that forces your DoTs to tick for 30% of normal periodic damage now ticks for 40%!
• Hand of Gul’dan scales with 20% of spell power (was 14%), and Doom does 4+200% of spell power, rather than 4,004 + 93.75%.
• Chaos Bolt scales with 348.4% of spell power (was 290%), and Conflagrate now scales with 210% (was 173%).
• Glyph of Siphon Life has spec-specific tooltips, and works with Immolate for Destruction.
• Glyph of Soul Consumption also has spec-specific tooltips. You need to kill something with Chaos Bolt for Destruction, or in demon form with Demonology.

It basically looks like a removal of base damage on most abilities, with increased spell power scaling to compensate. Simple enough. These numbers are subject to change though, they were datamined, not official patch note numbers.

A potentially nice bit of news for those that lament the loss of Drain Soul:

We’re planning to merge Malefic Grasp into Drain Soul, instead of the other way around, in the next build. (Celestalon)

So hopefully we keep that iconic spell and visual. From what it sounds, it seems that Drain Soul will function as Malefic Grasp does now above 20%, then it’ll change to Drain Soul functionality in execute range (where your DoTs tick for 100% of their damage per DS tick).

For those that are wondering how Grimoire of Sacrifice will interact with your bigger, badder demons in the Demonic Servitude talent:

Planning to indeed make it a bad idea to Sacrifice your Big Demon. However, we’re working on new abilities for the Doomguard/Infer. (Celestalon)

I guess they’d rather people take the talent because they want the demons, not just to sacrifice them. Fair enough. Worried about the loss of Soulshatter, and fretting that you’ll keep ripping threat from your Voidlord?

We’ll adjust their aggro generation to compensate, so that you don’t need it.  (Celestalon)

It’d be nice if their taunt affected a small area too, so that they can taunt multiple enemies at once, but I suppose that’s just wishful thinking! Finally, Carrion Swarm’s removal prompted a couple warlocks to ask if it’s possible that it will be re-implemented, and here’s the answer they got:

Not likely. It’s power that we don’t want them to have.  (Celestalon)

Pretty straight-forward. We don’t have a “why” yet, but it’s probably part of the general CC/interrupt pruning.

Here’s Raenah and a mantid in a statue form. Look at how my Voidlord refuses to assist either of us. Bastard.

News for Warlocks in Warlords!

So it’s been a busy week! We have a first look at the 6.0 patch notes, and a crap-ton of other news that popped up too, like the Draenor Perks, glyphs, talents, etc. Let’s have a look at what some of that means!

(note, all of this is subject to change, especially datamined stuff! With that in mind, I wanna say a BIG thanks to Wowhead for all their datamined info, it proved so useful in making this blog)

REMOVED ABILITIES

• Soulburn: Unending Breath. No more water walking for us! Unless we take Glyph of Nightmares, of course.
• Soulburn: Health Funnel. That might hurt the affliction soloing potential somewhat, as the damage reduction is a great help to them.
• Soulshatter: Apparently it’s scarcely used. I use it a lot in soloing, but hey ho.
• Rain of Fire: For affliction, that is. It’ll be replaced by Seed of Corruption (much like Hellfire replaces it for demonology).
• Pyroclasm: Its effect has been baked into Backdraft.
• Metamorphosis: Cursed Auras: Now curses affect a 10 yard area around a target, this is slightly un-needed.
• Fel Flame: The controversial one! How will affliction deal with totems now? The removal of fel flame is a very sore point at the moment with most of the warlock community. Almost as much as…
• Drain Soul: Its basic damaging effect is being baked into Malefic Grasp (courtesy of a Draenor Perk), and the soul shard regeneration is going to be balanced around Nightfall procs (which are boosted by 5% courtesy of another Draenor Perk). Upsetting though, as we lose the awesome visual effect, and classic warlocky-sounding name that conjures the images of you DRAINING YOUR ENEMY’S SOUL.
• Soulburn: Drain Life: Again, Draenor Perks are modifying this spell. It’s generating embers?!
• Metamorphosis: Void Ray: Well, nobody used it anyway, to be honest.
• Metamorphosis: Carrion Swarm: Aww. What’ll Demo do for an interrupt now? They don’t use Feldogs/Tentacle Eyeball Monsters.
• Curse of Enfeeblement: They’re removing cast speed slowing abilities because it makes caster PVP terribly unfun.

So the two major ones there are Drain Soul and Fel Flame, ones everyone suspected would get cut, but few actually wanted them to. Personally, I don’t use Fel Flame as I take Kil’jaeden’s Cunning, so I just Incinerate spam when I need to move, but on occasions when I take Archimonde’s Darkness, it’s nice to have the option of using Fel Flame!

In terms of Drain Soul, if they’re dead set on removing it, then if they made a minor glyph that replaced the visual of Malefic Grasp with that of Drain Soul, I’d like it, even if it only worked in execute range. As for having our in-combat shard regeneration depend entirely on the RNG of Nightfall, they really need to make it a reliable source. If we’re sitting at 0 shards for an extended period of time because we’re not lucky enough, then that’s bad. Maybe make a passive that regens a soul shard every 15 seconds in combat?

The loss of the soulburn abilities is no great loss, bar Health Funnel for a soloing warlock. The loss of Soulshatter though is not fun. Manage my own threat?! I think not!

CC Changes

• Blood Horror’s cooldown is now 60 seconds. Shares diminishing returns with other Mesmerize effects.
• Spell Lock only interrupts spellcasting, no longer silences.
• Mortal Coil shares DR with other Mesmerize effects.
• Optical Blast only damages and interrupts, not silences.
• Sear Magic’s cooldown is now 30 seconds.
• Seduction and Mesmerize have a 30 second cooldown.
• Terrorguards no longer cast Terrifying Roar when they die (I never even knew they did tbh)
• Unbound Will’s cooldown is now 2 minutes.
• Voidwalker/Voidlord’s Disarm is removed. Seems to be replaced with Suffering at the moment?

All classes are getting changes to their CC to tone it down in PVP somewhat. I’ll miss being able to disarm Warbringers though!

Warlock Patch Notes

So what else did the 6.0 patch notes bring for us? Not much else, but here goes.

The cooldown on a healthstone will no longer begin until the player leaves combat. This is making them a once-per-battle dealy, and can no longer be a critical heal. It’s effectively merging them with health potions.

Demonic Gateways no longer have charges! Yay! Unfortunately, you can only use them once every 90 seconds, and the gates can only be 40 yards apart. Ouch.

Drain Life heals for 30% less than before. The Glyph of Drain Life doubles healing from Drain Life.

Shadowburn no longer generates mana. Not a good change, as even though our mana regen is high, there are still times when we run low. We cast a Chaos Bolt at this time, and most of our mana is back by the time the LOOOOONG cast is done. With Shadowburn being an instant cast, we don’t give our mana a chance to regen in execute range, which’ll encourage either “wasting” an ember on Chaos Bolt during execute, or literally standing and doing nothing as our mana regens to a comfortable level. This was an issue in the MoP beta, and it was fixed by making Shadowburn generate mana in the first place.

Draenor Perks

I’ve mentioned these a few times already, what are they? When levelling from 90-100, you randomly get one of these perks when you level up, appropriate to your class/spec. At level 100 you will have learnt them all. They basically act to augment your current abilities, rather than grant new ones.

Affliction Perks

• Improved Demons: Increases all damage done by demon pets by 20%.
• Empowered Drain Life: Health gained by this ability grows by 10% each time it heals you.
• Improved Life Tap: Life Tap grants 20% additional mana.
• Empowered Agony: Agony now stacks up to 12 times.
• Enhanced Haunt: Haunt lasts 2 seconds longer.
• Improved Corruption: Corruption deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Unstable Affliction: Unstable Affliction deals 20% additional damage.
• Improved Malefic Grasp: Malefic Grasp deals additional 100% damage on targets below 20% health.
• Enchanced Nightfall: Nightfall is 5% more likely to proc.

The affliction perks seem pretty straight-forward. Damage boosts on your main spells, stronger demons, stronger life taps. Malefic Grasp becomes your execute, Nightfall is your only shard builder.

Demonology Perks

• Improved Demons: Increases all damage from demon pets by 20%
• Improved Molten Core: Molten Core reduces cast time and mana cost of Soul Fire by a further 25%
• Empowered Demons: Grants your demons additional 10% haste and 10% crit chance.
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Shadow Bolt deals 20% more damage.
• Enhanced Corruption: Corruption generates 1 additional Demonic Fury per tick.
• Empowered Doom: Doom has 20% increased crit chance.
• Enhanced Hand of Gul’dan: Hand of Gul’dan’s radius increased by 2 yards.
• Improved Touch of Chaos: Touch of Chaos deals 20% more damage.
• Empowered Drain Life: Health gained by this ability grows by 10% each time it heals you

Again, improvements to your main spells, and also further improvements on your demons! Makes sense, Demonology is the demon-empowering spec after all.

Destruction Perks

• Enhanced Chaos Bolt: Cast time of Chaos Bolt is reduced by 0.5 seconds.
• Empowered Immolate: Immolate deals 100% additional damage on the initial hit on the target.
• Improved Conflagrate: Conflagrate deals 20% extra damage.
• Empowered Incinerate: Incinerate has 20% increased crit chance.
• Improved Ember Tap: Ember Tap heals you for an additional 20%.
• Improved Shadowburn: Shadowburn deals 20% more damage.
• Enhanced Backlash: Physical strikes against you have a 15% increased chance to trigger Backlash.
• Enhanced Drain Life: Drain Life now generates embers.
• Improved Demons: All damage done by demon pets increases by 20%.

Ah, the one I most care about! Destruction sees some nifty changes. Our ember spenders improve slightly, our ember generators do too (and with that 20% increased crit on incinerate, we may well be swimming in embers!), and Drain Life actually becomes somewhat useful! Will I put it on my action bars? I may well do, watch this space.

New Glyphs

• Glyph of Curses: Increases the radius of Curse of Elements and Curse of Exhaustion by 10 yards. Double radius! Woop.
• Glyph of Dark Soul: Reduces duration and cooldown of Dark Soul by 50%. Ergo, we use it more often for a shorter period of time? Sounds good to me.
• Glyph of Flames of Xoroth: Flames of Xoroth is now free to cast. Great for those “oh shit my pet’s dead” moments, but as it stands we all use GoSac anyway. Maybe that’ll change?
• Glyph of Life Pact: Mana costs on all spells reduced by x%, Life Tap can no longer be cast, and your health will drop by x% per second. You health can’t drop below x% from this effect. Sounds like healers are gonna hate warlocks this time around! We don’t have the exact numbers for it yet (tooltip shows 159677%!) but it sounds really interesting! Hoping for more info on this soon.
• Glyph of Metamorphosis: When you activate Metamorphosis, you no longer transform into a demon, but instead grow wings on your normal form. Cosmetic glyph yay!
• Glyph of Shadowflame: Increases the movement speed reduction on the Shadowflame effect from Hand of Gul’dan by 20%. PVP benefits I’m seeing here, but also useful for slowing dangerous adds in PVE.
• Glyph of Soul Swap: You can hold inhaled period effects from Soul Swap for an additional 27 seconds. Oh look, reverting that change are we?
• Glyph of Twilight Ward: Twilight Ward now absorbs damage from all magic schools. Awesome! I love this spell, and making it apply in more situations can only be a positive in my book.
• Glyph of Strengthened Resolve: Unending Resolve reduces damage by a further 20%, but the cooldown is increased by 60 seconds. A more powerful effect, but less often, basically. Great for predictable periods of heavy damage.

Datamined Warlock Stuff

Again, a massive thanks to Perculia and Wowhead for this stuff. As usual, take it with a massive grain of salt, datamined information isn’t exactly gospel! A lot of changes can and will occur between now and when Warlords comes out.

Our Command Demon ability for our voidys seems to be Suffering, so we get an on demand taunt! This makes the binning of Soulshatter slightly better, as we can manually get our pet to taunt crap off of us! Does this mean that Suffering will no longer be able to be autocast though? This’ll also solve that little problem in dungeons of people using voidlords that taunt off the tank, similar to the “HUNTER TURN OFF GROWL!” problem.

Enslave Demon sees a change too. When you enslave something, its haste is reduced by 32%. This is a 2% decrease in haste, but we’re likely seeing a boost in damage by PvE sources, as our health pool is effectively doubling in size, so the reduction in haste was a necessary evil to keep things getting too outta hand. The increase in monster damage was to balance out the increase in health in PvE, which was implemented to increase survivabilty against other players in PvP.

Glyph of Siphon Life sees a change too! Instead of Corruption/Immolate healing you for 0.5% of your maximum health per tick, it’s now 0.35%. Small change, will it have a big effect? We’ll see.

Pandemic by all accounts seems to be gone! We’ll have to be refreshing our DoTs more often I guess.

Grimoire of Sacrifice is getting changed too. Demonology gets a spec-specific version that halves your crit chance, and doubles the crit chance of your minion. How useful that is remains to be seen, but it kinda makes thematic sense that Demonology retains the pet in all circumstances, even when taking the sacrifice talent!

Grimoire of Sacrifice for Affliction and Destruction is also getting changed. It retains the health regen, and health boost with Soul Link, but instead of a flat damage boost on some of your spells, it increases the critical strike chance of them by 35%.

This means your incinerate, with the perk Empowered Incinerate, has a 55% crit chance. 55%! That doesn’t take into account Dark Soul: Instability (making it 85%!) or your own personal crit rating! If you’re taking the Charred Remains talent, then HELLO EMBERS! You know what, I’m very excited about that. It also gives a 35% boost to Chaos Bolt damage, and Charred Remains doesn’t reduce CB damage. Looks like 6.0 is gonna be the day of the Chaos Bolt! BOOM!

Mortal Coil and Dark Regeneration are seeing reductions in their healing, presumably to balance out personal survivabilty (of which warlocks have a crapton) and make healers more aware of how their raid’s health is. Users of that Life Pact glyph may well tax their healers, which for some reason amuses me.

The healing reduction may also be a necessity because of how our health pools will be different. You have no base health, and all your health comes from Stamina. Base damage and base healing is also gone, and all damage will be scaled to whatever stat you use for it (in a warlock’s case, Intellect!).

Metamorphosis is getting an armor boost of 35%, and reduces the duration of stun/snares by 35% too! This isn’t a buff though, it’s a baking of the passive ability Nether Plating into Meta.

Fel/Wrathguards seem to be losing Pursuit, Axe Toss and Wrathstorm? A bit of speculation on MMOC says they may be changing the level the abilites are learned at, so they come with the pet and not as seperate abilities in the spellbook. It’s either that, or they’re removing the abilities of the Demo-exclusive pet. Wait and see, again.

Glyph of Drain Life increases healing by 100%, up from 30%. An attempt to make a rarely-used spell more useful?

Well, all in all, a large number of changes in store! And the coming weeks/months will only bring more. Exciting times, that’s for sure.

And I promise I’ll start on the ICC solo guide soon.

So You’ve Boosted a Warlock to 90!

Or the Beginners Guide to Destruction

Meet Inxy, the not-so-newly boosted goblin warlock. She’s currently decked out in a mixture of the 483 boost gear and 496 Timeless Isle gear, with a 535 set of bracers for good measure. What’s this blog post about? It’s gonna be about the basics of playing a destruction warlock, and just how to handle gearing up though that pesky Timeless Isle, and getting a decent weapon and trinkets from Throne of Thunder.

A Basic Look at Destruction

So, the first thing you want to do when you log into your boosted character is to select your talents.

The first tier of talents is all about health management, and I nearly always go with Soul Leech. When you deal damage, it grants you an absorption shield equal to 10% of the damage dealt, capping at 15% of your health. This is kinda reminiscent of the death knight’s Death Strike, in that it provides you with a means of damage mitigation as well as attack. The other talents are okay if you need on-demand healing, but you have many other sources of that, make no mistake.

The second tier is your short-tem CC tier, and as you can see, I tend to opt for Mortal Coil. It causes an enemy to run around in horror 3 seconds, and restores 15% of your health. Shadowfury is good for if you need the AoE stun. Personally, I’ve never used Demonic Breath. Maybe the snare effect is good for PVP?

The third tier is all about damage reduction! I tend to stick with Soul Link. When you have a demon active, 20% of damage you take is transferred to it, and you are both healed for 3% of damage you do. If you opt to take Grimoire of Sacrifice as a talent however, then Soul Link increases your health by 20%. Dark Bargain makes you invulnerable for 8 seconds, then puts an 8 second DoT on you equal to 50% of the damage done. Sacrificial Pact sacrifices 25% of your demon’s health (Or yours if you have no demon), and puts an absorption shield on you equal to 400% of the health lost. Both are really good when you know that a massive damage spike is incoming. It’s a free choice here.

Fourth tier is all about self-preservation, at a cost. Burning Rush drains 4% of your health per second when activated, but increases your speed by 50%, and you can’t be slowed to below 100%. Useful for when you need to move quickly in a fight! Unbound Will removes harmful debuffs, and loss-of-control effects, at a cost of 20% of your health. Got a debuff you want to get rid of, but save a healer a job? Use this! Blood Horror is a PVP talent with only slightly situational benefit in solo content. For 5% of your health, it places a buff with 1 charge on you. When someone melees you, the charge is spent and the attacker flees for 4 seconds.

Fifth tier is all about your demons! All of these talents are close in performance to one-another, so go with what your situation requires. I tend to go with Grimoire of Supremacy when out-and-about in the world, or doing solo stuff (the Voidlord is an AMAZING personal tank), and Grimoire of Sacrifice in group content (raids, dungeons, world bosses and the like).

Tier six. Your DPS increasers. Kil’jaeden’s Cunning allows you to move when casting your spec’s filler spell. When doing solo stuff, I tend to stick with this one. Archimonde’s Darkness grants you two charges of Dark Soul, your major DPS cooldown. I tend to use this in raids. Mannoroth’s Fury increases the size and damage of your AoE for 10 seconds on activation, but honestly? It falls behind. It’s fairly situational in use.

Now then, how exactly does one do destruction?

Embers

You have 4 embers, and each one consists of 10 “emberbits”. Incinerate is your main method of filling them; each hit grants 1 emberbit, critical hits grant 2. Conflagrate grants emberbits in the same way; normal hits grant 1, crits grant 2. Immolate grants 1 emberbit on critical strikes only. Rain of Fire has a 12.5% chance of granting 1 emberbit on a hit. There are four ways of spending full embers. Chaos Bolt (your main nuke), Shadowburn (your execute), Flames of Xoroth (instant demon resurrection) and Ember Tap (your self-heal).

Important Spells

1. Curse of Elements increases magic damage done to the target by 5% for 5 minutes. Always have this on your target. If there’s a rogue in your group, you don’t need to apply this; their poisons do that job for you. Happy days!
2. Immolate. It’s your main DoT, keep it up constantly. Refresh it at around 5 seconds left to ensure it doesn’t drop off.
3. Conflagrate on cooldown! This provides you with a buff called Backdraft, which lowers the cast time and mana cost of Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 30%. It has two charges, and generally you don’t wanna keep more than 1, as it’s potential wasted charges in the future.
4. Chaos Bolt is your main nuke. It costs 1 full ember, and it always critically strikes. In addition, the higher your crit rating, the bigger the boost to Chaos Bolt’s damage! You shouldn’t just spam them whenever you can however; I’ll go into more detail on this below.
5. Shadowburn replaces Chaos Bolt in your rotation when an enemy reaches 20% health.

What do I do in cleave or AoE situations?

In a cleave situation, you want to start using Havoc. When you cast it on a target, it duplicates any single-target spell you cast on another target, up to three times (once, in the case of Chaos Bolt). So you Havoc an add, and fire an Immolate on a boss. It’ll hit the add too! In an AoE situation, you want to start using Rain of Fire, which is a targeted AoE spell. Does extra damage to immolated targets. You can use this in a cleave situation too, if the enemies are close enough together. You also want to start using Fire & Brimstone. This modifies a number of your single-target spells to affect a 10-yard area around the target. Spells affected are Immolate, Conflagrate, Incinerate, and any Curse Of… spells.

What major DPS cooldowns do I have?

Dark Soul: Instability is the first major one. On a 2 minute cooldown, it increases your critical strike chance by 30% for 20 seconds. Probably best to use this whenever it comes off cooldown for a serious DPS burst. Summon Doomguard/Terrorguard and Summon Infernal/Abyssal share a 10 minute cooldown, and summon a powerful demon to aid you for a full minute. The Doomguard is best on single target, the Infernal if you need some strong AoE.

When should I be casting Chaos Bolt?

1. If you’re about to cap on embers. Generally, it’s recommended fire off one at about 3.5 embers, to prevent getting 4 full embers (it makes any future ember gain wasted, as you can’t go above 4)
2. You are under the effects of Dark Soul, or powerful intellect/crit trinket procs. This is the point when you want to cast as many as you can, to take advantage of the potential massive damage boost!

Note that you can replace Chaos Bolt with Shadowburn when your target is below 20%, with the same criteria.

I’m using Grimoire of Supremacy. What demon should I use?

If you’re just mooching around the world (Timeless Isle for example), then you want the Voidlord. It’s a great personal tank, very resilient, very good at holding aggro. For group content, if it’s a single target fight, the Observer has a very slight DPS increase over the other demons. Fel Imp is good in fights where you change targets a lot, as it doesn’t have to run around all over the place, it’s a bit of a turret.

I’m using Grimoire of Sacrifice. Which demon do I kill?

Harsh way of putting it. It depends on what ability you want. You see, you have an ability called Command Demon, which changes based on what you have summoned or sacrificed.

1. Fel Imp: Singe Magic, which removes debuffs.
2. Felhunter: Spell Lock, an interrupt.
3. Succubus: Whiplash, damage and knockback.
4. Voidlord: Shadow Bulwark, boosts hp by 30% for 20 seconds.

Something’s attacking me! Help!

You have a number of cooldowns to help you defensively, don’t worry!

1. Ember Tap. Costs 1 ember, heals you for a percentage of health, boosted by mastery rating. Instant cast. No cooldown.
2. Unending Resolve.  Reduces damage taken by 40% and prevents interrupts and silences for 8 seconds. Instant cast. 3 minute cooldown.
3. Soulshatter. Reduces your threat by 90% against everything in a 50-yard radius. Instant cast. 2 minute cooldown.
4. Twilight Ward. Absorbs an amount of shadow or holy damage based on your spellpower for 30 seconds. Instant cast. 30 second cooldown.
5. Healthstones! Restores 20% of your health. 2 minute cooldown.
6. Howl of Terror. Causes up to 5 enemies in 10 yeards of you to flee for 20 seconds! Damaging them may break the effect. 40 second cooldown.
7. Fear. Causes an enemy to flee for 20 seconds. 1.7 second cast time.

So how do I gear up on Timeless Isle? 

Simple. Open chests scattered around the isle and kill things! You may receive special tokens that when used, turn into an item level 496 (or 535 when used with a Burden of Eternity) piece of gear! You can only use cloth tokens though, warlocks can’t wear leather or anything like that.

But… How do I kill the elites there?

Oh it’s simple really. Have your demon tank for you, this negates a LOT of danger, and makes the Timeless Isle less dangerous for warlocks than nearly any other class. Remember that you have a way of healing your demon. Health Funnel siphons life from you to your demon!

• Pink birds: Avoid their conal cast, Gust of Winf. When they start to use it, you see the area of effect on the ground. Step out of it.
• Big blue crabs: Claw Flurry is what you wanna avoid here. When you see it begins to cast it, MOVE AWAY FROM THE FRONT OF IT. This one CAN kill you very quickly.
• Turtles: When they spin, run away. When they do Snapping Bite, don’t be in front of it.
• Tigers: Avoid the leap, it stuns you. Avoid the conal AoE, it puts a nasty bleed on you. You pull one, you tend to pull a few, so be wary.
• Big snakes: They have 1 attack, it has a 3 second cast time, and it does 25% of your maximum health in physical damage. Ouch. Definitely have your pet take this one, while you stay far away and blast it to bits.
• Froggies: Another you’ll need your pet to tank. Every time they attack, they also apply a DoT to their target. This deals periodic damage, and when it stacks to 10, the target dies. Pull them one at a time!
• Elementals on the beach: Has a nasty cast called Steam Blast that hits in the region of 100k. Can be interrupted, can be kited. You move far enough away from them, they have to stop casting and move, as it has a range of only 10 yards.
• Elementals in the cave: Use the blue campfires beforehand to place a buff on yourself that reduces fire damage. Interrupt their cast, even with the buff it’s nasty damage. Get out the circle when they cast Spiritflame Strike, it’s close to a one-shot.

Once you’re slightly better geared (496/535 in most slots), you can also take on a few of the Ordon enemies!

• Ordon Fire-Watcher: Pyroblast hits quite hard, but if your voidlord has aggro, you’re golden. Try and avoid the areas Falling Flames hits, they do about 200k.
• Ordon Candlekeepers: Breath of Fire needs to be dodged. When they start casting it, they don’t turn around to re-aim it. If given a chance, they’ll explode for a stun and big damage when near death. Shadowburn them fast!
• Ordon Oathguards: Cracking Blow can be sidestepped. Generally it focuses this on your voidlord, so try not to stand directly behind it. When paired with another Ordon mob, they channel a 75% damage reduction on themself AND the other mob. Just damage through it, or interrupt it if you must. When it uses a shield ability, damage it from behind.
• Burning Berserkers charge for a big chunk of health if you engage them from too far away. Avoid their small AoE. Can buff their damage dealt. Voidlord tank!
• Blazebound Chanter: Pyroblast still hurts. Avoid falling flames. Summons a big-ass golem that hits VERY hard (think Vengeful Spirit from a Warbringer, only worse). To handle this, use a Rain of Fire on it when it spawns to get it to aggro onto you, then kite it.
• Eternal Kilnmaster: Definitely send your voidlord in for this one. If you’re too far away, they charge like a Berserker only worse. Blazing Blow hits in a narrow cone centered on his target. Make sure it’s your voidlord! Summons a kiln that increases casting speed.
• High Priest of Ordos: I really wouldn’t if I were you. They’re like the above 2 enemies combined on steroids.
• Molten Guardians. Be at max range from them. Send in your demon. Move out of black things on the ground, it’ll erupt for massive damage. Horrid for melee characters, but you’re not melee, are you?

Honestly, those last 4 enemies should only really be tackled when you’re in decent gear, there’s so much that can go wrong with them.

I need a weapon! Should I buy one from the vendor?

I’d say no. Spend your Timeless Coins on Mogu Runes of Fate instead. These grant you a bonus roll from bosses in Throne of Thunder, with a nice chance to get some loot! Which bosses should you spend coins on?

• Horridon: Dinomancer’s Spiritbinding Spire (2h staff), Venomlord’s Totemic Wand (1h wand)
• Megaera: Fetish of the Hydra (offhand)
• Dark Animus: Athame of the Sanguine Ritual (1h dagger)
• Twin Consorts: Suen-Wo, Spire of the Falling Sun (2h staff)
• Lei Shen: Lei Shen’s Orb of Command (offhand)

And while on the subject of coining bosses in ToT, you can’t go wrong with getting a trinket or two, especially if Timeless Curios are refusing to drop!

• Council of Elders: Wushoolay’s Final Choice
• Megaera: Breath of the Hydra
• Dark Animus: Cha-Ye’s Essence of Brilliance
• Lei Shen: Unerring Vision of Lei Shen

With your Timeless Isle armor, and Thone of Thunder weapons/trinkets, you’ll be ready for everything Siege of Orgrimmar has to throw at you! And it just so happens that the first boss, Immerseus, drops the best trinket for warlocks (and casters in general, it seems)! Go forth and claim your prize!

EDIT: I forgot to mention another method of getting some good gear, though in hindsight, it may seem obvious. When you have 50 Lesser Charms, turn them in at the Shrine for your Warforged Seals, and go find yourself a Celestials group (And Ordos, if you’re eligible!). 553/559 gear is not to be sniffed at!