Filed under: Warlock

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill continues to pinch herself, hoping to wake up from the nightmare of dying to a training dummy in Stormwind.

I admit, destruction in Mists of Pandaria looks very cool. I've been leveling with it, and although a handful of buttons can get boring, I like the back-and-forth rhythm of Incinerates and Conflagrates. To top it off, Chaos Bolt looks totally badass, even if it still casts like slow fire.

But as I hit the level cap once more, I decided it was time to return to my roots: affliction. I've always loved the flow of affliction -- health is mana is health is mana is health.

To scare an affliction warlock, a master of fears, you can do something sneaky like spell reflect or spell stealing. Or you can just drain me of all my self-healing and expect me to continue tapping as normal -- that horrifies me just the same. I find myself fervently hoping that dried-up self-healing streams as affliction are just bugged.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill wants you to take a look (it's in a book!) at what warlocks are all about.

We've snuffed out Old Gods. We've unseated the unruly undead. We've eradicated old empires. We've banished demonic eredar lords. We've slaughtered powerful dragons from Ultraxion to Onyxia, including the former Aspect of Magic himself. We've drowned lieutenants, purged second-in-commands, and dissolved elemental councils.

We've braved the deepest lairs, delved into the elemental planes, and pried the latest corruption off Azeroth limb by limb.

What should mortals do now?

Who cares about what we should be doing? You heard the Lifebinder -- the Age of Mortals is dawning! Power is for the taking!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill finds DoTs no longer crash her client, so she sets about corrupting every soul she can find. Unfortunately, she finds her Abyssal Bag empty, and with frustration wishes that shards could be as plentiful as before.

The Soulburn system of Cataclysm was a big bust for affliction, offering plenty of utility but lacking in role-buffing damage abilities. The biggest issue was that Soulburn didn't feel like a real resource. Soulburn largely felt like a complicated set of "oh, crap!" buttons.

In Mists of Pandaria, demonology and destruction are each departing from soul shards to gain new secondary resources. Soul shards will be affliction-only, so it's finally time to tailor shards to affliction purposes. Unfortunately, beta is where many things are broken or unfinished, including soul shards.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill finally dives into beta and found that she was having more fun flinging fire than draining souls.

I got into the beta a week ago (and with the last Annual Pass wave, a lot of the rest of you should be, too). So I went marching around Jade Forest and found myself continuously crashing to affliction spells triggering a fun little error. I'd heard things about moonkin and fire mages also having troubles, primarily when DoTs or debuffs were being cast. But errors are odd things, and I found I could cast Immolate all day long on my destruction spec.

So I did destro for a day of questing and flinging fire at the training dummy. Here are a few of the first thoughts I had.

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!)

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

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

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

Warlocks are the most changed class in Mists of Pandaria, and demonology is getting some serious attention from Ghostcrawler as its new playstyle is flushed out. Notable in Ghostcrawler's discussion is that the days of using both fire and shadow spells with a lot of demon damage are being looked upon as something that weren't super compelling. Importantly, Ghostcrawler also says that demonology warlocks aren't intended to be melee casters anymore.

As a raiding demonology warlock, I find that Ghostcrawler's design intentions really make me pleased. Right now, if you want to do good DPS as a demo 'lock, you're going to be in the melee group as much as possible to get the most benefits from Metamorphosis and Immolation Aura, while at the same time staying stationary to turret out your DPS. In Ghostcrawler's plan for Mists, the necessity of melee-range spells is going to be situational. No longer am I going to be pestering my raid leader to put me in the melee group for Zon'ozz, and I should be able to stay at range and enjoy such benefits there as much as I can (which, at least in my perfect world, would include less movement).

It'll be interesting to see how this kit plays out in the end. It always seems to be one of those specs that gets changed around a fair amount in one way or another, and Ghostcrawler does say that Blizzard is looking to make a home for demonology.

So have faith, fellow 'locks! Things are looking evil.

Ghostcrawler's full statements, after the break.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. Today, Megan O'Neill is still breaking for beta, and in the meantime, brush-fires up on her flame-flinging techniques.

Destruction has evolved a lot since the one-button Shadow Bolt days of The Burning Crusade. Now in Cataclysm, destro has a convoluted cast rotation, still retains shadow DoTs despite being the master of fire, and has a clunky buff mechanic to boot. While skilled warlocks can pull off amazing numbers with their fantastical weaving of spells, the clunkiness of the spec is still present for beginners.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. Today, Megan O'Neill is taking a break from beta, instead offering some Pointilism 102 advice.

My friends, Blizzard is trying to torture me. The large number of drastic changes to the warlock class makes for cool columns. I have no beta access yet (c'mon, late Burning Crusade wave!). The greater likelihood of people playing through beta on weekends rather than on weekdays means those with beta access update information threads on the weekends. I write most of my columns before the weekends. The timing of new information contrary to my writings has had me wanting to drain my own soul out for a couple of weeks here.

... OK, you got me. The real reason I don't want to talk about Mists this week is because Wryxian broke my heart with the no green fire trickery. Don't worry, though! I got my evil groove back by proving my preparedness and fast reactions to my guild. I gloriously dropped a QQ train during a heroic Ultraxion attempt when my raid leader jokingly called for it.

Sadly, the next night, many guildmates brought train-wreckers to raid. What are you saying? A Heroism filled with choo-choo yells and fist pumps isn't the best DPS buff ever? Blasphemy!

While green fire is something that Blizzard wants to do for warlocks in Mists of Pandaria, it's been clarified that it won't be coming with Mists release after all. More so, there is no timetable for the release of green fire, meaning it's best to just keep it in the back of your head as something cool but not expected.

This is no doubt a disappointment for many, especially for warlocks when combined with the news from last night that a demonology tanking spec isn't in the cards. It is, however, important to keep in mind that Blizzard still has done a lot with the warlock class, and all is not lost. There's a ton of changes to the way each spec will be played, and the talent revamp only has a few holdovers from current-day methodology.

The full blue post clarifying this situation after the break.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. Today, Megan O'Neill is your host, and she wants to remind Matticus that warlock fire cannot be rainbow-colored in Mists of Pandaria, else we'd kill all our wild imps that we summon.

Everyone's excited about the warlock tanking glyph for demonology. I'm cautiously excited. It's one of those things we warlocks always put on our wish lists, alongside green fire and warlock flying mounts.

While we still wait on the flying mount, EU CM Wryxian noted that green fire might be in the works! As soon as I saw the glyphs that change cosmetic things like the felguard's weapon or the color of a bear's fur, I went hunting in the datamines for green fire. I didn't see one, but Wryxian says there's "hope" that we'll get a quest for green fire. I do hope it involves Gorzeeki Wildeyes or Mor'zul Bloodbringer as a throwback to the old Dreadsteed epic mount quest chain.

I'm also aware that this is beta, and betas are for testing things, not for setting things in stone. Like Wryxian's statement about fel fire coloring, things can and will change. I want to be realistic about demo tanking. I don't want the hype surrounding warlock-style tanking to lead to disappointment. Looking at some of warlock and tanking mechanical history, I have some major caveats that Blizzard would need to address if warlocks are to become tanks.