Curse of Senility

Whoops, forgot to refresh my Soul Stone...

2011-09-19T16:57:00.000-07:00

In case you had not noticed already, this blog is dead. I have decided to keep it online since it was such a big part of my life for a short time, and led to me meeting a lot of amazing people and having some really great experiences. I'll probably never blog about WoW again. Much as I still enjoy the game, it comes and goes from my life. I probably spend more months out of the year without a subscription than I do with one.

If any of the few who are still following this blog (don't think I haven't noticed you!) would like to follow me elsewhere, I am still writing. I presently (as of September 19th 2011) maintain two public blogs.

Comma, Blank_ is my primary blog at this point. There's no focus to its content, I started it because I wanted to return to writing regularly. I figure I'll write there for six months to get myself back into good writing habits, then I'll set up a blog with an actual focus based on whatever I happen to be writing about the most.

I also post at Sailing The Garage Seas which is primarily a seasonal blog about Garage Sales, but I also post a few other bargain-hunting finds there as well.

To anybody reading who doesn't want to follow me further, thank you so much for being with me while I wrote Curse of Senility. I still look back on that part of my life very fondly. I learned so much, gained such great confidence, and feel like it really started me on a positive path in my life.

To any who might be joining me at one of the blogs mentioned above...thank you. Your support means a lot. I hope I can continue to entertain you.

Regards,
Nick "Sentai Grehsk" Whelan

The Dread Citadel: Prologue--Chapter 1

2010-05-01T16:49:00.000-07:00

Tobias Whetstone felt ill.

Every bone in his body ached, his skin sagged, and most distressing of all, he was secreting a foul smelling, green liquid from his mouth. As he walked, or rather, shuffled, through the lamp-lit streets of Stormwind City's night, he spat another mouthful of the foul-smelling stuff into the canal. He'd always hated people who did that, but attempts to dispose of the spittle any other way had proven inadequate.

He started feeling light headed...what had done this to him? Surely, this was no simple sickness. A curse, perhaps. Something done by an Orcish warlock to that shipment of cheap grain he'd bought down by the harbor. Yes, that was it! He'd thought the merchant who had sold it to him looked untrustworthy. Probably came straight from Orgrimmar...nether blast the man.

He spat again, looking around. He needed to resupply his shop with better grain regardless of why his current stock was so bad. But even as cheap as the grain had been, he didn't know if he had enough money left to purchase a supply of better grain. Still, he couldn't EAT what he had, much less sell it.

One thing the illness didn't seem to affect was his appetite...he was so hungry. It'd been hours since he'd eaten, and thoughts of food seemed only to increase the amount of green puss flowing from his mouth.

This time he didn't even bother to turn towards the canal when he spat, spewing the green mess onto the pavement--just in time to catch the eyes of a beautiful young woman. Oddly, he didn't feel embarrassed for his crass behavior. He just stared at her, feeling something primal deep in his gut...and not the kind of feeling a lovely woman normally inspired in him. He began moving towards her.

His mouth hung open now, dribbling a green mess all over his chin. The woman's eyes widened when she saw it. She took a step back, and sputtered

"By the light, are you okay? What's that on your face!?"

Tobias' eyes were fixed on her now, as he responded;

"Feeeeeed...."

-----

"And the parrot says, 'Durotar, they've got em' all over the place!" Fent burst into laughter at his own joke, slapping his fellow patrolmen on the back with a 'clang' as he did so. "Come on, you can't tell me that isn't hilarious!" he shouted as the two of them walked through the streets of Stormwind.

"Sorry" Garrik responded, "I'm I little preoccupied with this story I've been thinking about...it's about a couple of gnomes who find this bracelet and--"

"What is that?" Fent interrupted, suddenly serious. Garrik looked over to see a woman lying in the street, with Tobias leaning over her.

"Hey! You there! Step away!" Fent shouted, drawing his sword and rushing forward, Garrik close on his heels. Tobias spared them only a glance, but that was enough for the two young guards to recognize what they saw. Enough for decade-old memories of their childhood, and the third war, to rush back to them from their nightmares.

"Ghoul!" shouted Fent, falling backwards and dropping his sword in terror. Garrik, meanwhile, drew his own sword and swung it with all the his strength, but the nimble undead easily leapt away, evading the blade, then sprang forward onto his attacker. By the time Garrik hit the ground, the ghoul's teeth were already biting into his throat, causing his howl of terror and pain to take the form of a gurgling sputter.

All his courage having fled, Fent made a scrambling dash to his feet, and set off at a mad dash for his life. But the ghoul was too quick for him, leaping again, landing on Fent's back and taking hold there with a grip like iron.

Facedown, pressed into the hard pavement, Fent began to hyperventilate, knowing he was about to die. Any second now he would feel the teeth of the creature sink into his spine, and he wouldn't feel anything ever again.

Instead, he heard a shout, and a crack, and an instant later, his head still pressed to the pavement, he saw the ghoul's head rolling along the ground to his side, harmlessly snapping its jowls at the air. For a heartbeat Fent just lay there, unmoving, unable to believe that he was safe. Then a powerful hand forcibly rolled him over, and he knew he was right to disbelieve in his safety.

A massive pile of muscle and rage stood over him, red skin barely covered by the bit of armor it wore. In its hand, it held an axe with a blade as large as Fent's torso. Before he could even scream, two more of the creatures appeared, spreading out to either side, as though they were securing the area.

A moment later, a woman stepped from behind the creature on top of Fent, and into his field of view. She wore long robes of fiery crimson, with hair to match. In her hand she carried a green, leaf-embossed staff, with a yellowing worgen's skull atop it. Her green eyes seemed afire with the emerald flames of the twisting nether. She ignored Fent, walking through the grisly scene as though it were perfectly ordinary, to look down at the ghoul's head. She stared at it quietly, as if contemplating how it got to be there. Then, with a motion too quick for the young guard to follow, she raised her staff and brought the butt straight down on the dismembered head, crushing it flat, and spattering the base of her robes with a green mess.

"Adequately done, Jhuughun. Next time, though, do try to be quick enough to save both of them." the woman said, speaking to the monster standing on Fent's chest. The creature growled at her, and Fent thought for sure it would tear her head from her narrow shoulders. But the woman merely raised an eyebrow, as if she was amused by the monster's implied threat, and carried on.

"Thaamon, Malateric," she said, looking at the two other demons in turn, "Take this young man back to his barracks. Ensure he gets there safely, then rejoin me at the meeting. Jhuughun, you will continue to accompany me as my escort. And get off the boy already, you're terrifying him."

Without another word, she turned and continued walking down the street. Jhuughun took one last snarling look at Fent before reluctantly resisting the urge to crush his skull underfoot, and following his mistress down the street.

Fent continued to lay there for several breaths. He was so surprised to still be alive that he couldn't think of what to do next. Then he scrambled to his feet to run after the woman, only to be stopped by two muscled, red arms blocking his path. The Thaamon and Malateric had been ordered to escort him to the barracks, and they didn't seem interested in any delays.

"Who are you?" he called after her, at a loss for anything better to ask. She was much further down the road now, and in the light of the moon he could only see her silhouette. But she turned, and he could swear he still saw her bright green eyes within her dark form.

"I am called Moreven...the Corpseseeker."

Then she continued on her way, and Fent allowed himself to be pushed in the direction of the barracks--so bewildered by her stare that he forgot to be afraid of the two demons herding him home.

A Life Tap Too Far

2009-08-10T07:16:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning, it was announced on WoW.com that a new Warlock columnist is required. The brilliant among readers of this proclamation deduced that I am no longer filling that role. And, since I'm the kind of talky-fellow that likes to blather on endlessly when nobody is listening, I figured I'd give an explaination to the endless tubes of the internet.

Working at WoW.com has been one of the coolest experiences of my life thus far. The people I worked with there were not my coworkers and bosses; they were my colleagues. The work I did there was not drudgery; it excited and challenged me. And even the flames and trolls directed at me are not something I will look back on with scorn; they were my teachers. They gave me some small glimpse of what it means to write professionally. I would be lying if I said they never got to me--I remember a handful of comments which continued to mock me within my own mind for days after they were posted. But looking back, there's not a single one that I regret.

In fact, WoW.com has absolutely nothing to do with me resigning from my position there. Rather, I resigned because I had to accept that my disinterest in World of Warcraft wasn't going to go away anytime soon. In fact, I haven't played the game for its own sake since patch 3.1 dropped. I won't try to explain why I'm not interested any longer--attempting to express what it is about the game that keeps me playing would be a seven thousand word digression from a five hundred word post.

I kept playing, and I kept writing, because I loved working with WoW.com. I loved the people, I loved the challenges, and I loved what I learned. But over the last few months I've run dry. One can only keep writing about a subject they don't care about for so long before they need to recognize that their apathy isn't the passing phase they wish it was. So I regretfully informed my editors--who are far cooler than any bosses I'll ever have again--that I couldn't write anymore. And that, is that.

In a way its a bit of a relief. The biggest barrier between me, and writing actively, has always been guilt. It's the reason I stopped writing on Live Journal several years ago, and it's largely the reason I've been writing so sparsely lately. The guilt I was heaping upon myself because of columns I had failed to finish was like a vice on my brain. Now, perhaps, I can get back to basics, and start producing some things worth reading again. Probably not here at Curse of Senility of course--though I actually do have a few non-Warlock related WoW posts that I might pop out over the next few days.

I wish only the very best of luck to WoW.com in the search for a new Warlock writer. And to whoever gets the job: don't forget how lucky you are, and try to learn from those who degrade your work, rather than allow them to wound you.

Thanks for giving me a place to put my words.

-LS

The Online Equivalent of a Major Life Decision

2009-05-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I was forced to disband my raid group recently, largely due to scheduling problems. And since then, I haven't logged in much. I didn't even participate in Noblegarden--so that's at least another year until I can get my hands on the violet-proto drake. It's actually kinda funny; I always get into a slump this time of year. This is the third Children's Week since I started playing the game, but I've never actually participated before. Though, since there's no Children's Week achievements directly related to finding a new raid group, I guess I'm pretty off topic right now.

Raiding with friends is great. Sitting down with 10 of my pals and trying to take out 'Count Monsterton, the Evilest of the Bridge Trolls,' is part of why this game still holds any appeal to me at all. Unfortunately, schedules don't reconcile with one another just because people are friends, not unless everybody thinks it's important enough to plan their lives around. I've spent the last 18 months, off and on, trying to schedule raids with tanks who quit the game or have to spend every other weekend obliging their family, DPS whose work schedules fluctuate so much that it's impossible to raid with them unless you're willing to change the time of the raid every week, and healers who have to get up at 7 in the morning to make it to our 3pm raids, due to time differences. It doesn't work. I've tried every reasonable course of action I can think of, but half the time or more I end up sitting in /2 recruiting DPS who have deluded themselves into thinking that their 900 DPS is actually 4k DPS.

The worst part of it is that these players are not just my friends, they're the best damn tanks, healers, and DPS I know. I wish I could have them there on every run, because when I can actually get them into the same raid with one another, things are amazing. This is a group that full cleared Naxx in two attempts, even with some of our best players missing. But without consistency, it becomes difficult to maintain the level of knowledge I feel Blood Pact deserves.

So I'm faced with a simple question: how do I get the raiding I need? There are really only two answers. The first is most obvious: join a raid group. Or, failing that, start my own raid group. Of course, I could just wait around in trade every week for somebody to starting shouting "LFG DPS," but I don't think I need to waste my weekly wordcount on explaining why that's a bad idea. So, we come to the meat of the article. Join a raid group, or start one?

Join a Raiding Group

Pros:

1) A lot less work for me than the alternative. Which is good, because I'm a rather busy fellow.

2) Easier to shop around. If I join a raid group, run with them a couple times, and discover they suck, then it's no big deal. I tell them thanks, but it's not for me, and I shop around a bit more.

3) Experienced players. I'm not arrogant enough to think I'm the best. Hardly, there is a lot I could learn about how to raid and how to play. Not every group is going to have much of substance to teach me, but thanks to point #2, I could make such a quality one of my search criteria.

4) A ready-made raid group would be proven. Unless I do a terrible job of selecting who to run with, then I can be relatively sure I'll be able to clear significant amounts of content right off of the bat.

Cons:

1) Loot distribution isn't up to me. I'm quite used to, what I consider, the perfect loot system. I've never actually run into another guild that used it, though I know at least some other people do. Finding those people might be difficult though.

2) If something is going horribly wrong, then all I can do is make a suggestion. If the raid leader doesn't like it, I have to deal with mounting repair bills while he fumbles to find a solution.

3) Availability. Most good raid groups have spots that open and close as applicants join, and groups that accept anybody anytime are usually absolutely atrocious. This might make Pro-point #2 a bit difficult.

4) I'm a leader. That's not to say that I'm the best leader, but being in charge of a project causes the project to bring me an immeasurably larger amount of pleasure (or pain) than simply being a component part of the project does. That's not to say I can't handle being subordinate, nor that I can't enjoy being a subordinate. It's just not my strong suit.

Screenshots haven't worked so well since 3.1, but here's a picture of me, as the only member of my potential new guild, rocking the DPS meter in Kara!

Start a Raiding Group

Pros:

1) I like being the guy in charge. And sure, it sucks balls when I fail to do things right, I've demonstrated in the past that I can do things right.

2) Any success is something I can feel much more proud of than I would be able to if I joined a raid group rather than formed my own.

3) Loot distribution will be up to me, so I'll be able to stick with the system I'm most comfortable with.

4) I can continue raiding with those members of my old raiding group who are able to commit to the raiding times I set.

Cons:

1) Mistakes are my mistakes. Obviously I can't know everything, and sometimes things just...go wrong. But if a group is bad, then it's the raid leader's fault for putting together a bad group.

2) I would need to do somewhere between a shit ton and a fuck ton of work to keep everything running smoothly.

3) It would take a lot of time to actually get a group together.

4) Even if I force everybody in the raid to go through an interview process that includes a few heroics, I can't be sure of how well they'll work together in a larger group.

I've been wrestling with this decision for a week now, and I'm still no closer to a real decision. At first, I was determined to find a raid group I liked, and try to join it. It would be fast, and I would finally be relieved of all the stress that had built up over the last few weeks. But at the same time, I knew I was coming off of a string of failures, and wasn't in the best emotional state to make that decision. It didn't take much time for me to realize how much I would hate dealing with being some other raid leader's subordinate. It's a weakness of mine, but it's not one I can simply wish away.

Over the last week, I've been talking with friends who have known me and raided with me for a long time about what they think I should do. One of my friends told me that I should join another raiding group, at least for awhile. His rationale was that I could learn a lot about how other people manage their groups, and it would help me progress more quickly than starting my own group would. Another friend finds the idea of me playing any part in a raid other than leading--or at least assistant leading--almost laughable. Talking to her, I'm surprised my pals haven't organized an intervention for my power addiction.

Even without input from my friends, I've had a tough time settling on a decision. For the last seven months or so, I've had a lot of ideas I wanted to implement in a new raiding group, and this is a golden opportunity to put those ideas into practice. But the process of finding people interested in joining the group, making sure they're fit to be part of the group, and getting started on clearing content will take time. A lot of time. A problem I wouldn't have if I joined another person's group.

Whatever I choose, it needs to be soon. I haven't killed KT in almost a month, and that's just silly. Haven't even seen Ulduar yet.

Any suggestions would be keen.

Old people hate change

2009-04-25T00:03:00.000-07:00

So, long time readers may recall a post I made earlier this month, where I noted that I was having difficulty keeping Curse of Senility and Blood Pact separate, and that Curse of Senility was suffering because of it. The whopping three posts I've made this month attest to this being a continued problem. But luckily for people who are masochistic enough to read the drivel I post here, I'm a philosophy major! Solving problems is what I'm trained to do. Sure, most of the time the problems I apply myself towards are so convoluted, difficult to support, and obscure, that there's no real solution to be had. But as far as I'm concerned, that should just mean a problem with a solution will be a cake walk!

So here's the deal. Blood Pact will continue to be updated weekly, cuz...it's my job. I will officially commit myself to posting on Curse of Senility at least once a week. Posts will likely be somewhat shorter, but the alternative is that I simply abandon the project, and I'm still not ready to let go. Not quite yet.

This arrangement, however, has me writing roughly 3k words a week. And that's a pretty weak weekly quota. So, I've set up a third (or seventh...>.>) blog, which I intend to be a daily work. I might eventually start taking weekends off. The idea is to carry on the spirit of what I tried to do with Curse of Senility when it first started: produce publishable, interesting material on a frequent and regular basis. The content of this new blog will be a mixture of creative essays, short stories, poetry, and the interesting kind of philosophy. It's not just about writing, it's about writing something that people want to read.

If that interests you, check out my little reincarnation of Wearing Black in the Back. If not, keep checking back here, there will be some content for ya.

And on the theme of change, I find myself temporarily without a raid group. My little PuG group, which I love to death, has really had some scheduling difficulties lately. Our Main Tank is a long haul trucker on occasion, one of our healers and best DPS had power outages that lasted for several days, and so on, and so forth. Little by little we had to fill too many spots with untested scrubs who drew the group down (though I did find a gem of a tank who probably thinks we were the worst group ever.) Long story short, I informed the group today that I would be taking a brief break from raiding, to start working on the foundation of a more formal, and strict raiding group.

Cane-shaking good times.

Old Man Sentai's Pedigree

2009-04-15T23:30:00.000-07:00

When I started Curse of Senility, I had a mission statement of sorts. It wasn't particularly detailed or anything, nothing like the mission statements they tell you to write in those worthless business classes. Really, it was just a short list of things I did not like about my past attempts at self expression, which I wanted to avoid in writing Curse of Senility. One of the things at the top of that list was that I wanted to be more open about my flaws. Which isn't to say I feel my previous writings were too arrogant, or that they were deceitful. Self deprecating humor has long been a fundamental element of my style. None the less, there was a time when I would not have written about how I caused a wipe on my first Naxx run by killing the Grand Widow's add before she enraged.

As part of that openness, I'd like to disclose an uncensored history of my raiding experience. I want to do this for several reasons.

1) I don't know how well I've actually done with this whole 'openness' thing. And while it shouldn't be, the brevity of my raiding history is something which makes me feel somewhat inadequate sometimes.

2) A large part of what I do, here at CoS, is offer advice. And now that I work for WoW Insider, I do so from a position of relative authority. It's only appropriate that I hang my degree on the wall, so that everybody can see I got it from a Russian correspondence school.

3) Many people, most people even, assume I've got a hell of a lot more experience than I do. I blame this on the authority I tend to inject into my speech, and the compulsion I've always had to get into the history of a thing before actually getting into the thing itself. I'm that guy who gets nostalgic for things he wasn't even around for.

So here goes;

I was born in a log cabin in Illinois...wait, wrong one.

I rolled my very first character sometime during spring quarter, my sophomore year attending college. So that would have been sometime in March 2007 or so, after Burning Crusade shipped. My primary interest in the game, at that point, was just to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn't terribly interested in participating in the group content, but doing some role playing really appealed to me. I wasn't the speediest leveler, and the fact that I had to re-start my character once he hit level 32 or so (he should still be on the armory; Sentaigresk of Silver Hand) didn't help. Still, I managed to get to 70 by...September I think it was.

But the day I ding'd 70 isn't exactly the day the story of my raiding began. The roots of that can be found somewhere in Sentai's late 40s, early 50s, when I started . Originally it was an RP guild, but as time went by and our membership grew, I became more and more interested in instances. There were some people in the guild, mostly those who could never level a character past 30, who weren't so fond of this shift in interest. But instance after instance, the core members of the guild really seemed to catch on to the idea. And by the time we were all level 70, we were calling Entelechy an RP / Raiding guild.

Heroics were our thing at first. Actual raids seemed like an impossibility for us, something hardcore players did. So we 5-manned, and we 5-manned, and we 5-manned. It was somewhere around here, in September of 2007 that I realized I was terrible. I had discovered DPS meters, and I wasn't happy with consistently being ranked third or even fourth. So, my own instincts having failed me, I did research. Mountains of it. I read everything I could get my hands on, and when I was done with that, I posted a thread in the warlock forums titled "I suck at this class." and asked for people to tear into me. They did, though with one exception it was surprisingly civil. I improved, I was even pretty good. We started Kara -- it was late 2007.

We had an eclectic bunch in Entelechy, and there was something of an unofficial code of honor about how we did Kara. We didn't want easy victories, we didn't want to group up with a bunch of BT raiders and clear the place in four hours. If they had offered we would have said no. We didn't just want to clear Kara or get geared up, we wanted to make Karazahn ours. And we did. We scratched and clawed our way through bosses, week after week. First time in, we one-shot Attunemen and got Moroes on our second try (would have one-shot him if our pugged priest knew where his shackle button was.) By our third or fourth week, we were knocking on Shade's door. But the guild was becoming strained--the RPers weren't happy with the raiders, and aside from our core group of six or so people the raid was never really capable of getting anybody to commit. People started to drop off. And shortly after my first, or maybe second, Prince kill, I left the game.

I don't really want to talk about what happened to Entelechy after I quit the game -- largely because there's no reason to open old wounds. Suffice to say that it doesn't exist anymore.

When I returned to the game in late summer of last year, I did so with a new sense of clarity. The time away from the game had allowed me to distance myself from my warlock playing habits, and I was able to approach the class from an objective perspective -- while still pulling on my experience and research. My style and overall damage output improved dramatically, and when 3.0 hit I was able to out-perform every other DPSer who was willing to compete with me against test dummies.

When Wrath hit, and my girlfriend bought it for me (sweet girl that she is) I decided that I would use it fresh start to approach raiding from a more object-oriented standpoint. I want to be a the best warlock I can be, and I want to clear as much content as I am able. And those are the principles I've been operating on since then.

With almost all of my raiding buddies scattered to the wind, I had to start from scratch. I made that part particularly difficult on myself, because I can get really anal about what kind of raid groups I'm willing to raid with. I'm not willing to kiss some guild's ass for the privileged of rolling on loot dropped by a boss I topped damage on. I'm kind of an asshole that way.

I've raided with several groups since Wrath hit. Originally I ran with a guild on my server called . That didn't last terribly long, unfortunately. Great guild, but they had a "guild-first" policy for raid signups, which isn't at all unreasonable. But, once there was a larger pool of level 80 characters for them choose from (I leveled to 80 quicker than most people did) I was faced with the decision to either join their guild or look for another group. And if I ever leave the guild I'm currently in, it will be because I want to take another crack at running my own guild.

It took me a little bit of time to find another group after that, but the one I found was a gem. My healer buddy, Sidrea, introduced me to a Death Knight named Jyssana. Jyss was a master at putting together functional PuG groups -- I think there were only 2, maybe 3 people I saw at all (or almost all) of his raids. He ran both 10 and 25 man Naxx, and while we never got a full clear out of either, we did have a lot of good times and gained a lot of experience. I know that I personally learned a lot from Jyssana. His style of raid leadership was very unique to my experience, and I incorporated much of his style into my own.

I don't rightly know what happened to Jyssana. One day, Sid and I noticed he wasn't on our friends list anymore. Nor on the lists of any of the contacts we had made while attending his raids. Armory searches revealed nothing either, until a few days later when he started showing up. Turns out he and two of his R/L buddies had transferred to an Oceanic server. I can't really blame him, dude lived in Japan.

Round about this time, two of my old buddies from back in the day got their characters to level 80, and based on my now slightly more well-rounded group of possible raiding contacts, I decided it was time to take matters back into my own hands. I set up a calendar event for Naxx-10, carefully selected PuGs for the empty slots, and in our first attempt we cleared 3 wings. By our second attempt, we had full cleared. We continue to run the instance weekly, with a few exceptions, and now that Ulduar is out, we're looking forward to seeing if the group coordination we've been building will pay off.

And that's it. I'm not the most experienced raiding warlock out there. Hell, I've never full-cleared anything save the easiest max level raids available to me. At least, so far. I'm just a guy who likes warlocks, and tries to get the best performance out of the class that he can.

Cool story, huh bro?

Patrick Von Peabody is No Friend of Mine

2009-04-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

Before I even begin approaching the preamble to the prologue which will lead-up to this post, I want to make something absolutely and painfully clear: I am not qualified to speak on this topic. I've always tried, with this blog, to avoid speaking with absolute authority on anything, because there's always some elitist jerk who knows more than I do and will be quick to point it out. But I've also kept my writings rooted rather firmly in what I know: Affliction PvE DPS.

Playing a Warlock, or any class, in PVP never held even enough appeal for me to bother buying the Insignia of the Alliance / Horde. To be frank, I'm not very good at it. I've never been particularly skilled at playing games against other players, though I usually enjoy a few matches, even if I lose them. But by the time I started playing WoW, resilience and twinks essentially meant that the only way to participate in PVP at all was to spend a bunch of time getting the gear to make your character capable of doing so. I'm not willing to spend a bunch of time on something that only holds a small amount of appeal for me. I try my best to avoid owning any gear with resilience on it.

That said, every now and again, I do queue up for a battleground.

Stupid geezer! There are two pallies!

Battlegrounds are my favorite kind of PVP. Arenas are a pain in the ass to get into. You need to find a team and pay for a charter, then you get to wait 30 minutes for a 30 second match to start. And not only can you not participate in them on a whim, but you've entered into an implied contract with your teammates that you'll be around to help them get their ten games a week or whatever it is. World PVP would be my favorite if it actually worked. But on non-PVP servers nobody has the balls to flag, and on PVP servers I can count the number of times I've been attacked by somebody who wasn't 10 levels higher than me on one hand. Those few times are good memories though. Some of the most memorable moments I've had playing the game, actually. That leaves Battlegrounds, most of which I really can't stand. In fact, to be honest, the only PVP I really do is Arathi Basin. It's my favorite basin in the game.

For most of the time that I've played WoW, I've been content to pop in there for a few games now and again, utterly fail at it then get bored and not PVP for a few months. However, for reasons I might discuss in a later post, I'm something of an achievement fiend. And a few months back, when I was working on getting the Merrymaker meta-achievement, one of the tasks required was to get something in the ballpark of 50 honorable kills while wearing the gnome costume. A costume which disappears when you die.

I seriously considered skipping this achievement, but I decided instead to power through and get those HKs. It was rough going at first. I was lucky if I survived long enough to get 2 HKs before slowly waiting for the AB to end so I could go re-costume. Frequently I died before getting my first kill. Since continuing on like that would have meant DAYS of work to get the requisite HKs, I eventually had to develop a system.

First, I set up an alternate action bar I could switch to when I PVP. Nothing fancy, just a different arrangement for the first row. I designed it around speed, rather than optimal DPS.

It starts out with Siphon Life, since that's an instant cast and it helps keep me alive, at least a little bit. Then comes Corruption, for the massive DPS output, and Curse of Agony, because the more DoTs I can get on a target while running away the better. Unstable Affliction and Immolate are the next ones up, though as of the next patch I'll have to choose between one or the other. Once a target is covered in DoTs, if I'm still alive for some reason, I start spamming Searing Pain as fast as I can. If I was actually going to put together a set of gear for PVP, it would be all about haste.

Thank. Fucking. God.

I find that I don't use Fear or Howl of Terror as much as I probably should. It seems like every time I try to cast it, I either get stun-locked while casting, or my target has some trinket / racial to get out of it. I could of course simply cast it a second time, or a third time, or as many times as it takes for them to run out of ways to cancel it. But fear doesn't last very long, and I find players often turn their ire on opponents who CC them. The last thing I need when I'm trying desperately to survive a battleground is some bastard with 500 resilience deciding to make me their special project.

I use the imp as my pet most of the time, to take advantage of the superior health. Nether knows I need it, since my PvE gear is based on stacking useful stats, rather than stamina.

And that's pretty much the strategy. It's clunky, inelegant, and serves only to barely keep me alive more than my previous strategy of flailing my arms wildly did. But at least it's a strategy.

Be quiet you damn kids! I was trying to sleep!

2009-04-02T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, that was a lovely, restful, and entirely unannounced vacation. Actually, the only one of those adjectives which applies is 'unannounced.' But whatever happened yesterday is in the past, and now it's time to get back to waving my cane and casting my dots. As something of a rejoinder, I guess I'll talk about stuff that has changed in my personal game-life lately. This post won't be long or terribly interesting, but is intended as a quick stretch before I start posting more regularly again.

I've been running Naxx10 and fully clearing it weekly for over a month now, and our group has managed to get our time down to about 4 hours, give or take 15 minutes. I'm exceedingly happy with our progress. Deaths are uncommon due to our fantastic healers -- though Heigan still drops a few people each time around. We've had a bit of difficulty maintaining a regular set of tanks, but I'm relatively assured at this point that the two MT ready tanks, the the one OT ready tank we have will be reliably available for most of our runs. The only thing really left to improve at this point is the overall output of the DPS, which is getting higher and higher every week. An unfortunate number of them have even started to out DPS me on most fights!

The group has also made an attempt at Malygos, which was long overdue. It took us a little while to get the Death Gripping down, but once we did our Death Knights were able to do it almost without fail. Those times when Malygos managed to chomp on a spark probably fell more on the shoulders of the tank than the Death Knights. We only got to phase 2 once, but I think we'll be able to do better if we get more members of our regular group in there. That attempt was almost half friends-of-friends.

Phase 2 kinda threw us for a loop...

I'm also trying to get used to casting Drain Soul instead of Shadow Bolt once a boss is below 25% health. I'm having an atrocious time remembering to do it, though. Near the end of a boss fight I'm usually so deep into the rhythm of my casting rotation that changing it around just slips my mind. Still, below 25% Drain Soul ticks for roughly the size of a small Shadow Bolt crit (5-6k) so it's certainly worth using, even if the damage takes an extra .5 seconds or so of casting time.

I've also taken a stab at using the Doomguard in fights where it is appropriate. The extra ~500 DPS is certainly welcome, but a little frivolous in my opinion. At this point I've little doubt that my group could lose 2 of our DPS, and still kill Patchwerk before he enraged. So I don't see why everybody seems so gung-ho about the Doomguard. I certainly liked breaking my personal best DPS record (without situational buffs, such as on Loatheb or Malygos) but the Doomguard feels like a fun little gimmick that can be pulled out now and again for extra DPS, rather than a useful class mechanic. Maybe in Ulduar, if there is a boss similar to Patchwerk with more HP and a shorter enrage timer, it'll feel more useful.

Never broke 4k on my own merits before. Very cool.

The only other news that comes to mind is the I finally replaced my last blue. Sentaigrehsk is now in full epics, which feels like such a hallow achievement in light of how easy some of those epics were to get, but meh. Interesting thing is that my newest epic is the Tier 7 shoulders, which, when combined with my Tier 7 chest piece, gives me the 2-piece set bonus. Now, it's not the first set bonus I've had by a long shot -- but it's the first one I've had that actually feels as though it will have a positive impact on my DPS. Every tick of Corruption or Immolate (both of which I'm casting now, though, after 3.1 I'll only be casting Corruption) has a chance to increase my critical strike rating with my next Shadow Bolt by 10%. Additionally, each Shadow Bolt crit in turn increases my shadow damage via the Improved Shadow Bolt talent. I haven't had a chance to do any good tests since I got the set bonus, but it seems like the proc is going off nigh-constantly when I'm casting corruption, so I have little doubt that this set bonus is going to cause at least a moderate jump in my DPS.

Not a huge fan of the Tier 3/7 look, but it's good to see Sentai looking epic again.

I should also perhaps note that at the moment, Curse of Senility is in something of a limbo in my mind. While I greatly enjoy writing for this blog, I find it somewhat difficult to write two separate warlock blogs at once. Not only do I need to worry about overlapping content, but my WoW Insider blog, Blood Pact, and Curse of Senility require significantly different frames of mind, which I'm obviously having a bit of a difficult time switching between.

What I'm considering at this point, and it's still only a possibility in my mind, is sticking with Blood Pact for most of my writing. Meanwhile, I'll start a new blog with a new subject matter, and I'll focus on writing there regularly. When I'm struck with the desire to write about World of Warcraft, those posts will still be put here, but I wouldn't hold myself to any sort of schedule. I wouldn't be entirely happy with this arrangement, but Curse of Senility was never meant to be a permanent thing. I will of course make note of it in future posts if I decide for or against this idea.

How you too can be a mediocre warlock like me!

2009-03-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Applying all necessary scientific standards and rigor, I have come to a most startling of inductions: switching from making posts a big deal, to making them quick little things is not as easy as it sounds. There's this whole mental battle involved, where my brain is like "NO, WE MUST TRY HARD TO BE AWESOME, IT'S WHAT WE DO," and then my other brain is like "STFU NAB, IT TIEM WRITE NAO" but the first brain is quick to reply "NUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU." And then I usually go cross-eyed and pass out. I am losing SO much time to these frequent blackouts. Fortunately there is less than 24 hours left in finals week, so for better or for worse I'll have more time on my hands soon.

But you didn't read this far just to hear me bitch.

I've been thinking a lot about gear lately. More specifically, I've been thinking about gear that can be acquired relatively painlessly after hitting 80. This thinking really started after the criticisms I received after my first post at WoW Insider; Gearing your Warlock for Naxx-10. But more recently it has been fueled by the fact that my good buddy Kolrawn is fast approaching 80, and I'd like to get him geared up as fast as I can so I have somebody to compare myself against.

Hey, that's not warlock gear!

With that in mind, I took a look at my armory page to see how much of my gear I could get into his hands ASAP. I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I'll be able to get him geared up, and was hit by a fresh wave of disappointment over how easy it is to get geared up in this expac. So without further ado: my gear, and how to get it.

The Mantle of Deceit, Azure Cloth Bindings, Rod of the Fallen Monarch, and Woven Brace Leggings all have an extremely high chance (25%-50% according to armory) off of the end-bosses in heroics. Which I can easily drag my buddy through.

The Plush Sash of Guzbah, Ward of the Violet Citadel, Sundial of the Exiled and Band of Channeled Magic are all purchasable from badge vendors (the last one is the only one which requires 25-man badges) for a decently small number of badges.

Both the Ebonweave Gloves and the Deathchill Cloak can be crafted by yours truly, or purchased off the auction house. And speaking of purchased off the AH, my Chain of Latent Energies was a BoE drop in 25-man Naxx, so it's probably on the AH every now and again as well.

And lastly, the Sandals of Crimson Fury I have come from exalted reputation with Wyrmrest Accord.

When all is said and done, you need to do a surprisingly small amount of work to get all of that gear, and if you do get it all, you're more than ready to be a valued participant in full-clears of Naxx-10 or 25. But of course, there are a few pieces of gear I have that can't be acquired quite so easily.

My main hand weapon, the Grieving Spellblade was an extremely lucky drop the first time I was in Naxx-10, but the Flameheart Spell Scalpel from being revered with the Kirin Tor is an excellent hold over until you get similarly lucky.

Just over the weekend, I got two new pieces of gear in Naxx-10; the Heros' Plagueheart Robes and the Cowl of Winged Fear But before I had those I wore the easily craftable Ebonweave Robe, and the Argent Skullcap -- which is a reward of one of the easiest quests ever.

All that leaves of mine that isn't easy to get is my second ring, the Ring of the Fated from Naxx 10, and Dying Curse from Naxx 25. But there are more trinkets and rings in the game for warlocks right now than I could possibly count. Mark of the War Prisoner and the Signet of Hopeful Light both come to mind, but there are tons more out there.

Muuuuch better...

So yeah, that's what's been on my mind as of late. I'm actually glad I took the time to write this down too. This will serve as a check-list for when my buddy Kolrawn finally makes it to 80. And who knows? Maybe if you thought the list I made for WoW Insider was too easymode, this will be more to your liking. Though I don't know if any of my readership actually overlaps.

...DAMNIT. This was supposed to be a short post. I really suck at this.

What the fuck is this shit?

2009-03-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

So I did some doodling last night. It happened to be a warlock, and I thought to myself 'huh, I could not post this, and have a day without content, or I could post it and have a day with content that people will make fun of me for.' And since I'm all about your entertainment at my expense, I present to you "Dumb looking, petless, Level-23 warlock"

I assure you, this will never be an art blog.

I totally didn't mean for him to look Asian. When this was still black and white, I thought I'd give him unusual facial hair. Then I decided to color it with my colored pencils, but I don't know where my good colored pencils are. So, I only had a handful of colors at my disposal, and I'm no good at color mixing. This was all that was available for the face. W00t for incidental racism.

I'm actually reasonably happy with it. I'll never be able to draw anything more than bulky doodles, but this is one of the first times I've done a pose, without extensive reference. And while there are certainly things that could use improvement, it overall turned out a little better than expected. The hands turned out much better than hands I draw usually do, though one of them got messed up while I was inking. The hat is also a low-point. The idea was to make a relatively classic looking, villainous warlock, and I've always liked the witch hat look. But it simply didn't work at all. On the bright side I think I figured out how I could have done it better, so maybe I can fix it next time I attempt something like this.

Regularly scheduled word crafting will resume next time I decide to write.

Thoughts on 3.1 Affliction

2009-03-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Aside from briefly popping online to prepare for a work related project, which I obviously can't write about here, I haven't logged in since the Naxx run detailed in my previous post. Well, actually, while running a standup comedy night on ventrillo I did spend time grinding water elementals between Arathi Basin matches on Arnoux -- who ding'd 38 by the way. But her recent adventures have hardly been worth writing home about. Or worth writing the internet about, as the case may be.

Doesn't stop me from arbitrarily selecting this screenshot to break up the wall of text though!

After the comedy-a-thon was over though, I spent maybe twenty or thirty minutes talking about my thoughts on the future of affliction warlocks to my buddy Kolrawn, who has been too busy tanking for me on his prot pally to really keep up with all the warlock rigmarole. After working through all my thoughts on the matter, I realized it might be something you, my imaginary groupies, might be interested in hearing about.

As a disclaimer, I should note that I haven't been on the PTR, so I haven't actually been able to get any testing done. Any opinions I hold at this point are largely speculative, and based on the latest warlock changes that I'm aware of.

Blizzard's aforementioned intention to simplify the affliction rotation has, unfortunately, come to pass. Not only is Siphon Life being removed as a damaging spell, but now Immolate and Unstable Affliction occupy the same 'slot' on a target, meaning only one of them can be active per warlock at any given time. These changes effectively remove two spells from my active rotation.

What's left is Shadow Bolt > Haunt > Corruption > Curse of Agony > Unstable Affliction > Shadowbolt Spam. Corruption is obviously removed from the rotation after the first cast, meaning that affliction will become roughly a 4 button spec. This is starting to feel a lot like the 3-button days of Burning Crusade.

Particularly annoying is the sudden lack of timer synergy between dots. Right now Siphon Life and Curse of Agony are cast together, because they have similar timers. Same thing with Unstable Affliction and Immolate. The way this caused the rotation to work out was something like two shadow bolts, then haunt, then two dots, then two shadow bolts, then haunt, then two dots, and so on. Very comfortable and easy to work with. Now that the timers of each dot are so astoundingly disparate, it seems likely that switching between shadow bolts, haunt, and dot refreshment may become a bit hectic. But it's far too early to actually say.

Supposedly the upside of this simplification is that it will allow affliction warlocks to do better damage on bosses that require a lot of moving. The oft-heard complaint about affliction is that it is the 'Patchwerk-spec,' and that it doesn't really excel in any other fight. Speaking from my own experience however, I've found this to be absolutely untrue. I certainly do my best damage on Patchwerk -- find me a class that doesn't -- but I frequently top the meters on a variety of other bosses. Sometimes I don't, but that's just the way the game works. Different classes and specs excel in different situations. It would be terrible game design if one class was able to top DPS 100% of the time.

I actually ended up in second place overall for this fight, but the fact that I was able to lead by a significant margin after such a large percentage of one of the most rotation-jarring fights in the game is a clear indication of affliction's versatility.

Frankly, since this change will cause a larger percentage of our overall damage output to rely on Shadow Bolt, I think we're going to see a DROP in DPS for fights which require a lot of moving. At least dots kept on ticking away when we were too busy to cast. But again, such speculation is perhaps getting a little ahead of myself; particularly considering some of the other buffs the tree is getting.

I might say that I look forward to figuring out the best rhythm for the new affliction once patch 3.1 hits the live realms, but that would be a lie. The longer I get to play with my belovedly complex affliction spec, the happier I'll be. I mean, I'm a crotchety old man; you expect me to welcome change?

Repo man, here for your dread citadel!

2009-03-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

It took me awhile after Lich King hit to really get back into the swing of raiding. My guild had largely fallen apart in the last few months of Burning Crusade, and many of my raiding contacts from those days have yet to actually hit level 80. So Lich King was almost a fresh start for me, save for the few close friends of mine who stuck by me. My raiding progression was further pushed back when the raid leader of a group I was starting to raid with semi-regularly decided to uproot and transfer over to another server -- taking several other members of the group with him.

So a few weeks ago, quoting Godfather III the whole time, I decided it was time to start raid leading again.

Bigglesworth didn't like my post about Addons. He thinks Necrosis is awesome.

Between the group that actually stuck around, a few friend-of-a-friends that have started running with us, and even a pick-up-player or two, we've actually assembled a relatively reliable group. It's not perfect of course; I maintain my proud tradition of never being able to find a fucking mage, and our group has such variable schedules that getting us all together can be hell. That said, the two runs of Naxx-10 we've done so far have gone remarkably well. The first time we got together, I scheduled 4 hours of time, and considering that many of the group members had yet to see Naxx at all (some were still in level 70 raiding gear) I predicted to the tank beforehand that in that time we'd clear spider wing, and possibly plague wing. I figured we'd pop over and kill Patchwerk at the end of the night, as a nice easy note to go out on. As it turned out we absolutely tore through Spider, Plague, and Military wings in the allotted time, and took out Patchwerk as well.

We had some difficulty with the schedule, but this Saturday just past we went to Naxx for the second time. This time I scheduled 5 hours of time, figuring that given our previous success, it would be wise to give the group some more leeway to really see if we could clear the content.

The group managed to clear the first 3 wings in only 3 hours total, edging out our best time from the previous week by an hour. (Though I DID die on Heigan, ending my perfect record of dance-survival) With two hours to spare, the abomination wing was about to become our bitch. I think there were two wipes in all; one on Grobbulus and one on Gluth. Thaddius went down like a chump; one-shot by the kickass peeps it is my privileged to raid with.

Abom wing was new content for the group though, so it took us a bit of time to clear it. By the time we were done, we were only fifteen or twenty minutes away from the eight o' clock end time for the raid. But we were running high on the adrenalin that comes from clearing content smoothly, and decided to extend the raid time a bit to try our hands at frost quarter.

Saph was easily one-shot, despite only two or three of our people actually possessing prior experience with the fight. Kel'Thuzzad took a tad bit longer, but after four or five attempts, Naxxramas was ours. Full cleared after two weeks.

I think I'm going to stick with the skull theme, as I rather like the aesthetic. But I'm going to do some serious cleaning in the plague and spider wings. Get those wall fixed up, and remove the giant mushrooms. Maybe turn them into guest quarters and a dining hall respectively.

Generic QQ

2009-03-06T13:06:00.001-08:00

Those of you with sherlockian deductive abilities may have noticed, Curse of Senility didn't update yesterday. Or the day before that. Or indeed, CoS has hardly updated at all for awhile now. What it breaks down to is this: when your 50 hours per week school program requires a lot of writing, and your job requires a lot of writing, and your hobby requires a lot of writing -- guess which one of them gets the shaft during a crunch period? It's horrid, really, because Curse of Senility is by far my favorite writing project at the moment. There's something about submitting your work to be graded, be it by professors I respect, or by ravenous hordes of commentators that I don't, which kills a little bit of my writing spirit. But you don't want to listen to me QQ, and I don't want to subject you to it.

And let me assure you, gentle reader, that the purpose of this post is not to tell you that I'm giving up, or that I'm taking a hiatus, or even intending to lower my ideal post frequency (which is about 3 times a week.) I'd be rather ashamed of myself if I accepted any of those alternatives, and indeed, am rather ashamed of myself for how little I've posted here as of late. However, I must be reasonable. I have been posting a great deal less, despite my sincere desire not to do that. I would be a moron to think it's even an option to change nothing, yet still do a better job of making myself proud than I have in the past. Something has to change.

The solution came to me a moment ago when -- right as I was about to post my analysis of the warlock changes in patch 3.1 -- Pike informed me that there are a bunch of new ones. Thus making my post obsolete before I even set it to go live. I internally went through a miniature version of the stages of grief ("oh shit no," "I took too long," "FUCKING BUSY SCHEDUEL," "Maybe I can post it anyway," "Well, I guess that's that.") then decided that it was time to make some alterations to the way I view this blog. Always before I was wary of any post under a thousand words, thinking that perhaps I selected far too narrow a topic. However, producing 3k+ words of well edited and interesting material every week, while maintaining my other more necessary writing projects has proven to be too demanding. At least, too demanding for my current level of self-discipline.

So as a compromise, I'm going to change my standards for what constitutes a worthy topic on Curse of Senility. Things I previously avoided writing about, such as specific instance runs, brief anecdotes about my game related experiences, and commentary on WoW related media I find around the internet will start appearing on Curse of Senility within the next couple days.

This does not mean that I intend to stop writing the longer and, in my estimation, more interesting posts I've written up to this point. Those posts are far more fun to write, and I would rather stop writing this blog altogether than abandon them. That said, writing seems to me very much like eating is. If you insist that all your meals be gourmet, then you're going to go hungry sometimes, or you might even starve. In the interest of avoiding starvation, I've decided to be willing to hit up Pizza Hut now and again. (Starvation in this metaphore is me giving up on the blog.)

Thank you for reading, and for your continued patience.

(TL;DR: I'm going to start posting shorter blog entries.)

Oh, and as a final note on the 3.1 changes that I was going to comment on; I will probably be posting on them sometime soon. But, in the interest of getting to the fucking point:

An ADDONis among posts

2009-02-26T04:24:00.000-08:00

Over the weekend, I got my very first email from a reader of Curse of Senility. It may seem silly, but it meant a lot to my old-man brain that somebody took the time to write me. Better yet: it wasn't even hate mail! It was a request! And as though to top it off, it was written in proper English. So, since the request should actually make a relatively interesting post, here's the breakdown of my interface addons:

The funky way my character portrait, target window, and raid information are displayed can be attributed to X Perl, a classic unit frames addon. There are more uses for X Perl than I could possibly make use of, much less cover here. What I do use it for is to display more information in less space. For example, you'll notice that rather than my buffs being in the upper right, they're right under my face. What's more, I can see all my party's buffs, and the target of every person in my party, as well as the casting bars of everyone in my party. It also gives me a lot of customization in how my debuffs are displayed--which was immensely helpful before I started using Dot Timers. More on those later.

One thing about having so much information on my screen at once is that, while it is extremely useful, it can be overwhelming if I need to access a specific piece of information in a split second. To take care of that, I use ArcHUD2, which is the reason for those half-circles on either side of my character. From left to right, starting with the red bar, is my Target's health, my health, then the health of my pet in the small crescent, and on the other side of me my pet's mana, then a casting bar which appears whenever I cast, then my mana. For me, ArcHUD is for my eyes what the home-row on a keyboard is for my fingers. It's the default position my eyes return to after they glance somewhere else for some tidbit of info. [EDIT: I messed up what some of the ArcHUD bars do. They're fixed now.]

One of the most difficult thing about playing the game, for me anyway, is figuring out what abilities do what, and how well they do it. I throw up a DoT, and I'm left to gauge it's effectiveness based roughly on how fast a monster dies. I can look at my combat log if I like, but the combat log is a giant mess of numbers representing dozens of different things. Scrolling Combat Text and SCT Damage keep me in-the-know. Those two addons are responsible for what most people dub the 'clutter' on my screen. And perhaps it IS a little cluttered -- but I always know where to find any information I need, so it works for me anyway. To break it down, scrolling downward to the left of my character is the damage I'm dealing, to the right is a display of things like healing and mana replenishment, and scrolling upward above my head is a representation of all the damage I'm taking. Using these, I can see in real-time what the difference is between Corruption, Corruption with Haunt, Corruption with Curse of Elements, and Corruption with both Haunt and Curse of Elements. Extremely useful for working out your DPS.

This is how 'cluttered' my interface is outside of combat.

While in the past, I refused to use addons to help me time my dots, affliction eventually reached a level of complexity that forced my hand. And honestly, I'm happy it did. The depth of the current rotation requires a quick tactical sense and a good sense of rhythm in order to make the most of it, and DoT Timer just looks plain sexy in the bottom center of my screen. Dot Timer shows countdowns for all over-time effects on a targeted creature, and moves effects further toward the bottom of the list depending on how little time they have left compared to the other dots. It goes a long way toward helping a player create that all-important rhythm that goes with playing affliction these days. And as an added bonus, it keeps track of your cooldowns!

Yeah, I'm dead, but LOOK AT THAT SEXY INTERFACE

It has always pestered me that Blizzard gives some classes more abilities than can possibly fit on an action bar. Most people are fine with this. They simply don't put their useless abilities on action bars, keeping only the most essential buttons easily accessible. I, however, am certain that one of these days I'm going to suddenly be in some sort of situation where Curse of Weakness is useful, and I don't want miss the moment while I'm digging around in my spellbook for it. So, to supplement my action bars, I use Bartender 4 to give me the extra space I need. It also allows me to move the action bars into the corners, giving me some more real estate on my screen. (Bartender is also what let me move my reputation bar to the top of the screen.)

Prat 3.0, while it doesn't directly help me be a better warlock, helps me be a better group member because I'm not chewing my fingers off while trying to manipulate the clunky default chat interface Blizzard gave us. Well...I guess that would mean it makes me a better warlock, since I doubt I'd be very good without fingers. Prat has a multitude of useful features, including the ability to use a wheel mouse to peruse chat, as well as showing the level and class of anybody who says anything, so long as you're familiar with them. And perhaps my favorite feature is that when I'm talking in one of the /# channels, Prat remembers that I'm doing so, and next time I hit the 'enter' key, I don't need to re-type my channel number.

Similar to Prat in the way it helps me avoid a stubby-handed fate, cartographer is a much needed escape from the positively evil default map interface. I've hated that interface since day 1. You can't move while it's up, unless you were already moving when you brought it up. And that hardly matters anyway because you can't turn, or see where you're going. With Cartographer, I can resize the map, move around while it's up, and it even gives me handy tidbits of information about the zones I'm hovering over.

Then of course there are the essentials. Recount, in the lower right, is my damage meter of choice. Below it is actually another recount window. That one displays my personal DPS in real-time. And of course, if I click on the little purple bar with my name on it, I can see a pie-chart style breakdown of my damage. All of them helpful tools to maximize my usefulness to a group. In the upper right, between my minimap and my target, is Omen, my threat meter. And Sir Not-Appearing-In-Any-Screenshots is my handy-dandy raid-leading helpamajig: Deadly Boss Mods. Everyone, regardless of class or role, should probably have these three addons (or an equivalent) if they plan to do any raiding.

This example of recount's pie chart feature was taken during a brief experiment as destruction.

Those aren't all the addons I have installed, but the rest are either dubiously helpful, silly, or are going to be uninstalled whenever I stop being lazy. If I missed anything that you're terribly interested to hear about, or you have an addon you'd like to recommend I try, please feel free to comment!

A CLOSING NOTE ON NECROSIS: It sucks.

Curse of Reform

2009-02-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

So as the hardcore fans I pretend that I have probably noticed, the rotation being used in the screenshot I posted recently is different from the one I advocated in my post on casting rotations. And for the non-imaginary among you, you'll note that I'm using Curse of Agony instead of Curse of Elements. In forum threads entitled "LS has sold out!!!11eleven" the more astute of my imaginary idolaters no doubt pointed out repeatedly that there is clearly a boomkin in that party, rendering Curse of Elements pointless, and freeing me up to use Curse of Agony instead. And while this is very true, it's not actually the reason for the change in my preferred curse. The truth of the matter is, I have reformed.

As part of my reformation, I've decided to use only level 70 gear from now on.

Before the imaginary flame wars continue, let me explain myself. The catalyst for my decision was the recently announced changes to affliction. Most notably among them, the fact that Corruption and Siphon life are going to be combined into a single casting time. This change comes in response to the fact that Blizzard believes the current affliction rotation to be 'too complicated.' And in truth, affliction warlocks have possibly the most complicated rotation in the game right now.

I love that complexity though. I realize the removal of one global cooldown from the active rotation won't completely kill that complexity, but it will simplify it somewhat. It will make affliction more accessible to all the people who stopped playing their warlock because it became 'too hard.' And before that happens, I wanted to get in a few hours of play with the most difficult rotation I'll ever be likely to have. And I wanted to kick ass with it.

So does this mean that once the rotation is simplified, I'll go back to using Curse of Elements like a good warlock? Nope. While I will, of course, still use it if I feel the situation calls for it, I've noticed that, as of late, I seem to be the only one benefiting from it much. My group/guild is positively notorious for never once having a max level mage that wasn't 'too good' to run things with us, and most of the DPS we DO have is of the physical variety. Hunters, Death Knights, Rogues, and so on. Curse of Elements certainly helps them a little (arcane shot comes to mind) but given the rather significant increase in personal DPS that I've seen since talenting and glyphing properly for Curse of Agony, I think it's time for me to officially replace CoE with CoA*. Not to mention the fact that the boomkin I ran with in that screenshot seems to be playing much more actively again, so this might not be the last time I run with her!

Note the prominent percentage of damage CoA did

So, for those imaginary fans of mine who strive to emulate my play style to the best of their ability, here's my new casting rotation. It's been modified for my newfound lack of trinkets with use function, as well as my new curse preference:

1) Cast one Shadow Bolt, causing the Shadow Embrace effect.

2) Cast Haunt, causing both that debuff, and a second stack of the Shadow Embrace effect.

3) Cast Corruption (I now have this bound to Ctrl+3, since if haunt is re-applied properly, it only needs to be cast once in any given fight. Moving it here allows me to keep my subsequent rotations rooted in keys 1-7. 8 is a little hard for me to reach.)

4) Siphon Life

5) Curse of Agony

6) Unstable Affliction

7) Immolate

8) Re-apply dots as necessary, avoiding clipping (re-casting a dot before it has 100% completed.) Cast haunt whenever it's up--don't worry about clipping it. If not otherwise occupied, be casting Shadow Bolt. Life tap / Dark Pact when you've got a moment of free time too short to cast a shadow bolt in.

*I honestly never thought I would say that.

How LS became a whore:

2009-02-18T01:00:00.000-08:00

After I finish writing this post, I'm going to sign up for Google's ad service, and start putting advertisements on Curse of Senility. Actually, first I'm going to finish writing tomorrow's post, THEN I'm going to put advertisements on this site.

Now usually, I wouldn't feel it necessary to inform readers of such a thing. I put a lot of work into this blog, and while my primary satisfaction comes from a job well done and from making the lives of my readers just a tad bit more amusing; I also need to keep a roof over my head. And for the record, that's exactly what it has come down to: keeping a roof over my head.

The reason I decided to make a post about this is because many of my readers found me through my girlfriend's blog. And in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if at least a FEW of my readers are only following me so they can wait for me to mess up badly enough that they might have a chance with Pike. Not happening guys. =P

Getting back to the heart of the matter, Pike has taken a firm stand against advertisements on Aspect of the Hare. It might appear to some people that Pike's boyfriend allowing advertisements on his blog somehow weakens that stand of hers. Somehow makes her a hypocrite, simply by association with me. I'd like to nip that idea in the bud before it lifeblooms. (GET IT?) Pike and I have always had extremely disparate goals for our respective blogs. Aspect of the Hare is, for pike, more of an end in itself. While Curse of Senility has always been a means to an end for me. When I first started, it was a means of forcing myself to write regularly in the hopes that my style would improve. Now that it has taken off the way it has, I'd like to see if maybe it can be a means towards my next meal.

Know that I will do my utmost to ensure that none of the advertisements placed here are at all intrusive. And I encourage anybody who notices any popups or noise-making advertisements to inform me post-haste so I can rectify the situation with great immediacy. Thank you all for your understanding, and your continued readership.

P.S. By the way, to make up for last week's lack of posts, I'm attempting to post every day this week. This post, of course, does not count.

RP so hardcore, it walks OUTSIDE of town

2009-02-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

It would be a lie for me to say that I'm an active Role Player, but I still like to RP in my mind. Thinking about my character as more than a 'toon' goes a long way towards deepening the gameplay experience for me. I enjoy considering their motivations, their histories, and the way the world around them would appear to a fellow who wasn't looking at it through a 17 inch CRT monitor. I don't always hold to my character's opinions on things. In character, Sentai thinks Varian Wrynn is a tyrannous bigot, and I've gone into self imposed exile in Dustwallow Marsh. Out of Character however, Stormwind is still my favorite city in terms of layout, so I spend a lot of time there.

As of late, I've greatly enjoyed thinking about my spells from this semi-RPing perspective. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about my spells as pure mechanics. They are piles of numbers representing casting time, base damage, damage modifiers, and so on. But they do have names, icons, and fancy animations. Rain of fire isn't just an area of effect spell which is channeled over 10 seconds and deals 2-3k non crit damage to every enemy in a 15-yard radius every 2 seconds. It's fucking FIREBALLS falling out of the SKY. So lets dive in shall we?

FIREBALLS FROM THE SKY! (Damn, level 70 numbers, amirite?)

Haunt, as has been made clear in this blog before, is one of my favorite new spells. Based on the fact that it's called haunt, and the way it makes my dots hurt the target more, as well as how it returns to me when it's done, I like to think of haunt as a 'controlled release' of one of the souls imprisoned in my soul shards. My warlock imbues a shadow bolt with this soul, and launches it at the victim. The tormented soul then haunts the body of my target, exacerbating any debilitating ailments their host has, as some kind of blind revenge for their own suffering. They are then forcefully drawn back to me, unwillingly healing their own tormentor.

Corruption corrupts. It rots away the insides of my victims. Premature decomposition--a necrosis, if you will, of the intestines and stomach and so forth. Those afflicted by this spell frequently gush forth liters of bloody vomit--as is depicted on the spell's icon.

Curse of Agony doesn't actually cause any physical damage to the target. It is rather, an affliction of the mind. Over the duration of the spell, it causes the victim to feel exceedingly severe sharp pains, every second or so. The agony the afflicted suffers becomes still more painful with each burst of pain, mounting one on top of another until even the most stoic of warriors is left in the fetal position, weeping.

A soul stone is like a temporary phylactery that can be applied to a living person. I drain the lucky target's soul from their body, and place it in the soul stone, and I replace their soul with one of the souls imprisoned in my soul shards. Given as the soul-sharded soul is bound to my will, I can allow the soul of my friend to remain in command of their body, despite no longer inhabiting it. After the spell runs out, or the body dies, the imprisoned soul--having done his duty--is set free to return to the afterlife, and the Soul Stone crumbles, forcing my friend's soul to return to their body.

You can't tell me RP isn't awesome.

Long before I started playing WoW, I created something called a Blood Mage for Dungeons and Dragons. The idea was that it was a constitution based caster class (constitution being the equivalent of stamina) who took damage every time they cast spells--the more powerful the spell, the more damage they would take. In character, the Blood Mage carried knives, and made cuts on their body. Their own blood then became the reagent for the spell they would cast--and they could keep casting for as long as they had health. Given that bit of history, my masochistic interpretation of Life Tap should come as no surprise. I don't figure life tap is actually a cutting-upon-one's-self thing though, rather I think it's just an immense physical pain--similar to what curse of agony causes--and that suffering is converted into mana.

Damn...writing this post makes me feel like a bad person. Sentai Grehsk is a nice guy! Honest! He's all about peace and love, and he only fights when he believes the cause of world peace will be served by it. Arnoux is pretty mean though...Astien too. They'd be perfectly okay with how horrible these spells are. >:D

slash roll 100 >.>

2009-02-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

Gee willickers, midterms can sure have a way of showing you when you've bitten off more than you can chew. Turns out updating a blog 3ish times a week through thick and then, while also attending university full time isn't a walk in the park. This round of midterms is done with now, however, and I'd like to get back in the swing of things by adding to my ever-so-slowly-growing collection of posts that might actually be helpful to somebody. So, in the spirit of being helpful, lets talk about gear.

Gear selection is a contentious issue for many warlocks. Hell, if you've ever debased yourself by visiting the official forums you should know that for many people, gear selection is tantamount to one's worth as a person. Rubes of the official forums aside, though, there is more than one school of thought about how to select gear. Some of them are absolutely terrible (we call these "Stamina Stackers") while some of them have a legitimate case to make. Since my goal with this blog has absolutely nothing to do with objectivity, what follows is an approximation of how I select my own gear. It seems to have worked pretty well so far.

*Cough* >.>

As a forward to my discussion on gear selection, I want to reiterate--for those who have never read my blog before, or those with a poor memory--that I'm talking about PvE affliction gear here. Usually I go ahead and leave that unstated, since it's implicit in the way I talk about things. However, when discussing gear that distinction is nowhere near as clear--and far more important. PVP warlocks, PvE demonology warlocks, and PvE destruction warlocks have different priorities for each of their stats--even if we all use the same ones.

I'd also like to say, before I start, that I could have simply written about specific pieces of gear I think a person should get, but that wouldn't really be helpful in the long run. You might say that rather than giving you a gear-fish, I'd like to teach you how to catch a gear-fish. Gear-fishing, however, is no simple matter; there's MATHZ involved. And while a good WoW player should never be too lazy to play with the numbers, I think there's a threshold where it becomes acceptable to approximate and move on. I call that threshold the "damn, where the fuck is my old calculus textbook" line.

Having said all of that, lets start to break this down. Selecting gear is, essentially, a choice between various stats. There are seven stats a warlock should care about, and every other stat is absolutely and utterly pointless for a PvE affliction warlock, and should be completely ignored. Each of those seven stats serves a specific purpose, and should be weighted according to the importance of that purpose.

Spell Hit is of paramount importance--at least until you get 446 of it. This is a pretty standard requisite for all the DPS classes but frequently I hear some young warlock proclaim something akin to "I never miss anyway, so I don't need spell hit." To which I must respond that anybody who thinks they never miss isn't watching their combat log closely enough (May I recomend Scrolling Combat Text Damage?)

Consider this: haunt is the groundwork for any affliction rotation, and it has a nice big 8 second cooldown on it. If haunt were to miss, then that's at least 8 full seconds of unbuffed dot ticks--a massive blow to any warlock's standing on the DPS meter.

Stacking hit isn't very fun, though. In fact, it's pretty boring to stack compared to things like crit. Fortunately, there is relief if you spec correctly. While it is true that without talents, you must get 446 hit rating to be hit-capped, if you put even 1 point each into Suppression and Cataclysm (in the affliction and destruction trees respectively) that will bring your requisite hit rating down to 420 to be hit capped for all of your spells. If you put TWO points in each, the hit-cap is lowered still further to 394! And if you're able to put a total of six points aside for putting 3 in each of the two talents, then the hit cap goes all the way down to 368. Obviously those talent points might be better spent elsewhere, but they are a nice cushion that can allow you to play a bit above your gear level.

Spell Power is a warlock's bread and butter. There really isn't too much more that can be said about it. Gearing up is largely the quest to make this number higher and higher without getting un-hit capped.

Spirit was, until very recently, utterly useless. However, in patch 3.0.2, things changed! Not only does Life Tap scale with this stat, but (far more importantly) 30% of our spirit is turned into Spell Power by our Fel Armor! This isn't horribly significant, but it is worth keeping in mind if you're ever faced with a tough decision. Lets say, for example, that you're trying to choose between two pieces of gear. One has 30 spell power, and the other has 100 spirit and 10 crit rating. Now, spell power is always preferable to crit rating for an affliction warlock, but, that 100 spirit will be turned into 30 spell power by fel armor, meaning that the second piece of gear effectively has 30 spell power and 10 crit--a clear winner when compared against the first piece, which has only 30 spell power.

Crit Rating is everybody's favorite stat, and thanks to Pandemic, now affliction warlocks can play with it too! That doesn't mean we're allowed go go wild, however. But thankfully, most pieces of endgame gear have at least two green stats (Spell Power, Hit Rating, Haste Rating, or Crit Rating) and once one has gathered enough hit rating, it's a perfectly legitimate strategy to use mostly Spell Power / Crit Rating gear. In fact, that's precisely what I do.

Intellect is to crit rating what spirit is to spell power...sort of. Intellect has two primary uses. First, more intellect means deeper mana pools, which means less life tapping and more pew-pewing. More relevant to the aforementioned relationship however is that intellect raises crit rating. To be precise about it, 167 intellect translates into 46 crit rating at level 80. 46 crit rating being the requisite amount for a full 1% crit chance. So, much like the example I used with spirit above, enough intellect can make up for losing some crit rating on a new piece of gear--and in fact, it's preferable to get your crit chance off of intellect, since intellect also increases your mana pool.

Haste, I will be honest, is a bit of an enigma to me. Rather than try to sound like I know what I'm talking about when I don't, I'll say this: it makes your spells go faster, this is awesome. However, in most cases it seems like you must choose between gear with spellpower/haste, or spellpower/crit. Which either means accepting a very low crit chance, or balancing out the two stats and having them both be mediocre. Personally, I stack crit rating. This may well not be the best choice, as I have seen spreadsheets that imply haste to be the superior stat. I am slowly building up my haste, and hope to get a better idea of just how much it helps my DPS in the future.

Stamina happens. That's really all there is to say. Yes, stamina is an important stat for warlocks, it keeps us alive and it allows us to do mad life-tapz...but it doesn't need to be considered. Sentai's unbuffed HP has fluctuated from 14,000 to 18,000 and back again, and it doesn't matter. All gear has loads of stamina on it these days, and a piece of gear would have to be an absolutely titanic loss of stamina in order to warrant even a passing consideration in the decision making process. In honesty, the only reason I even included it in this list is because there are PVE affliction warlocks out there, the bad ones who showed up to Kara in Gladiator gear, who think stamina is the absolute most important stat for warlocks. It is not. At all.

And that's the four-one-one on warlock gear selection. The most important thing, of course, is balance. 446 hit rating is worthless if you've got 100 spell power, and by the time you've got 1800 spell power you should probably have at least 15% crit, or a nice bit of haste if you decided to go that rout. I'd like to thank my warlock-buddy Kolrawn for helping me work out the best way to break this all down, and I hope that it ended up being helpful.

A closing note on spell penetration: It's essentially useless. Here's what WoW Wiki says on the matter:

PvE, targets of a higher level than the caster have a base resistance (2% of mitigation per level difference) which cannot be overcome by spell penetration nor by any other stat. Otherwise, very few mobs and raid-level bosses have a substantial amount of resistance to overcome.

My Personal Norris

2009-02-10T22:49:00.000-08:00

So, it turns out breaking down gear selection into a pleasurable read isn't as simple as I was expecting. Do I break it down into simple 'this stat is always more important than that stat?' No, that would be wildly inaccurate. Do I give weighted averages and graphs detailing a particular stat's effectiveness in conjunction with other stats? No, cuz then I might as well just copy paste a spreadsheet. So I'm trying to work out a balance for the post, and while I've been doing that, this blog has gone five days without being updated--oops!

So, lest I allow myself to be considered a poor host, I'll bake you a delicious cake as an apology for my lack of productivity. This cake just so happens to be made of words. Words on a web page. Words on a web page which appear to be 'humorous anecdote' shaped, rather than cake shaped. Words on a web page which probably taste like electricity and death if you try to take a bite out of them. Still, it's a delicious cake damn you!*

From about level 45 or so, and on through Karazhan, I was a member of a close-knit group of friends who instanced together. Very much at the heart of this group was our tank; a warrior who went by the name of Espado. Espado is a lovable, artistic fellow, who becomes an absolute bear of a man when he tanks (not literally, that's druids silly.) Tank is hardly even an appropriate word for what he did for our group. This man was a combine harvester, who shredded his way through groups of mobs while the DPS and the heals tagged along behind him, never fearing that anything would escape his massive pile of aggro.

Espado and I pause for a moment after a fierce battle--can you tell I was a clicker back then?

I'll not list all the many exploits of my good tanking friend because my reader's heads would explode, and I rather enjoy having readers with heads. Instead, I'd like to fast forward to last week, when Espado and I were hanging out together, talking about art in the manliest possible fashion, and at some point, I asked him if he would mind if I leveled his toon--which has been neglected due to how very boring he finds Wrath of the Lich King (I told him not to level in the Boring Tundra!) He readily agreed.

He got me logged into his account, and I stepped into shoes that I would attempt to fill by using approximately one metric fuckton of tissue paper. I promptly logged back out again because who the heck plays using the number pad!? Rather than mess up his settings, I installed bartender so I could set up my own action bars--which I populated primarily with things I already understood from the 28 levels of McJiggins I've played so far. And, since my understanding of the class is pretty much limited to tanking--and because it's ESPADO--I decided to tank something. I found a level 76ish healer, two level 71ish DPS, and headed off to Utgarde Keep!

Words really don't do the rest of this story much justice, so I'll turn it over to a more visual medium:

Huh, those first dozen pulls weren't so bad! The death knight only pulled from me a time or two, and he's REALLY good...maybe I can pull this off after all!

HOLY SHIT I JUST TANK'D A LEVEL 70 INSTANCE WITH ONLY A SINGLE DEATH! (Wasn't my fault either, the lock got hit by too much AoE!)

My accomplishment filled me with such exuberance that I started shouting Espado's old catchphrases! PANTS OFF, GAME ON!

That was one of the most fun things I've done in World of Warcraft in MONTHS. And I've been to Gnomergan.

Seriously.

See?

*Anyone found iterating 'the cake is a lie' in the comments just because cake was mentioned will soon find me on their doorstep with a notarized document from a judge, which grants me the right to harm him/her for the e-crime of repeating that god-awful phrase.

Changes on the Horizon!

2009-02-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

Extra! Extra! Changes for warlocks are a-coming!

I was planning to do a post today about how to select gear as a warlock at any level, but the information which was just release means I'll have to save that post for another time. For now, lets dive right into the changes announced, and my thoughts on them.

Improved Shadow Bolt – this talent now provides a 5% spell critical strike buff (similar to Improved Scorch)
This is clearly in response to Blizzard's stated concern that Improved Scortch was, as they put it, "too much of a unique snowflake." That said, I'm not sure how happy I am about this change. On the face of it it seems very obviously to be a buff, but if this new function of the Improved Shadow Bolt talent removes the OLD function, then this is probably going to work out as a nerf for affliction warlocks. On the bright side, perhaps, it might make shadow destro / shadow demonology a more viable choice (provided more changes are enacted) which will certainly be beneficial to people who don't like casting nothing but fire spells these days.

Improved Soul Leech – this talent now provides Replenishment (similar to shadow priests)
I'm pretty happy about this change. It will add some badly needed utility to the destruction spec, which I'm always happy to see. Furthermore, it turns destruction warlocks into a mana battery, which makes them more attractive for raids. Move over shadow priets! We're here to take your raid spot. =P

Drain Soul now has a chance to produce Soul Shards even if the target doesn’t die.
I'm not quite sure what this means, but I'm really happy to see that blizzard is continuing their recent trend of making soul-shards less of a pain in the ass. Between resummoning your pet after every death, making firestones, summonging people, passing out healthstones, and soul-stoning the healer, I'm ready to accept any change that makes acquiring some souls easier in situations such as PVP, and instances with very few trash pulls.

Siphon Life no longer as an active ability but the talent grants the old Siphon Life effect to Corruption.
What precisely this means is a bit confusing. Fortunately Blizzard explained it a bit further later on. So it seems that the simplest way to put this is that Siphon Life will no longer be a button on your action bar; rather, it will simply be automatically applied when you cast corrupion. Two dots, once cast. Good news for everybody who thinks affliction is too complicated, so-so news for everyone who relishes in that complexity. I can only imagine that the new Siphon Life will join corruption in being re-applied by Haunt.

Curse of Recklessness and Curse of Weakness have been combined into one spell.
More curse combinations! If these keeps up, the debuffer class will only have a handfull of debuffs left. Still, this conjunction of two semi-useless debuffs will hopefully be more useful than their contingent parts were.

Consume Shadows – this Voidwalker ability is no longer channeled but has a cooldown.
Nice little quality of life buff here. No longer will we have to stand still while our voidwalker heals himself. Instead, he can run along beside us while he regens health!

Several other warlock talents have had their ranks reduced, their effects changed or removed. This list includes but is not limited to Demonic Empathy, Shadow Embrace, Eradication, Suppression, and Pandemic.
I'll avoid speculating as to what exactly these changes are. My sincere hope is that the shadow damage buff afforded by Shadow Embrace has been increased, that the amount of dots Pandemic applies to has been improved, and the internal cooldown of Eradication has been lowered. I'm also wondering if, perhaps, suppression is being combined with Cataclysm. Damn, I speculated. >.>

Additional new talents have been added.

I trust they are as generally promising as these have been! =D

Obviously, as the blue post points out, this is all subject to change. I remember there were a LOT of things in 3.0 that I was looking forward to with great anticipation; things which never saw release on a live server. Still, this is at least a good indication of things to come, and we can always hope that things will only improve for the better as this patch is developed further.

In closing, I'd like to thank Blizzard from the bottom of my heart. I want to thank them for being more open with us--the community--than they have been in the past. It makes the game much more fun for me to be able to follow the development process in something like real-time. And I further think it is our duty, as the World of Warcraft fan community, to respect Blizzard's decision to be more open with us. We should respect it by remembering that they could have easily kept all of this secret from us until it was more finalized. We should respect it by not bitching if a change we liked is reverted before the patch goes live.

Where Went the Warlock Quests?

2009-02-04T20:02:00.000-08:00

Sentaigrehsk's Journal; Level 1, I met a lady standing in the graveyard behind the chapel today. She looked scary. Beside her was a dark man, with a wicked little creature dancing beside him. She had a task for me--much like everybody else around here seems to have. Like a fool I took her at her word. I hunted down and killed three people--defias scum, no real loss I suppose. But when I returned to her she revealed that what I took from them had never been hers in the first place; she revealed that the defias theives had played right into her hands by stealing a book that she had wished to steal herself. I'm unaware of how I should feel about this...but she taught me something in exchange...

Back in the day, there were class-quests. Why the hell did they quit making those? Granted, many of them were stupidly easy, and those that were not easy had somewhat lackluster rewards (I imagine to placate those who wouldn't be able to find groups.) But they added a depth and immersion to the classes and to the game itself that I simply don't feel from level 61 onward.

Astien's Journal; Level 10, 'At green-stached codger Blackwrench gave me some bit about needin' ta head ta the ol' stormie city to talk ta some tall bastard 'bout getting meself a blueberry. Fucker said he'd fallen in with some pretty young thing and lost 'is shiney bauble. Now it's my job ta go get it back jes cuz these tallies can't keep it in their pants. Nether blasted assholes must not be gettin' enough air bein up so high likes they is.

Going to the trainer and simply learning new abilities has no charm, no flair. I certainly understand why it's necessary for most of a class' abilities. After all, if we had to quest for every single one, than most people wouldn't bother getting half, or more, of their spells--but blizz had a good balance in vanilla WoW, why'd they abandon it altogether?

Arnoux's Journal; Level 20, Men of honor and goodness, the blind one was right in questioning their existence--for there are none. Their race is week; subject to the whims of their flesh-bound form. In all the world only two were said to exist, and even those two cursed me as I cut their hearts from their chests. What honor can there be in such an ignoble entrance to death? I was fortunate that the Succubus accepted my offering despite the impurity of weakness with which it was tainted.

Not just abilities either. I remember gathering shards of a crystal from Shadowfang Keep and Blackfathom Deepths (I think) to forge an off-handed item with some killer stats. And back before all the gear was re-itemized in patch 2.3 (when spellpower and other stats were added to low level gear) the bloodrobe was one of the best pieces of non-endgame gear in vanilla WoW. I know at least a few warlocks who stuck with it until Outlands. (Though I managed to upgrade to the Robes of the Lich myself.)

Sentaigrehsk's Journal; Level 53, I was working with the druids in the Fel Wood today, trying to use my knowledge of demonic magic to help them reverse the demon-taint that pervades the land. We made only a little progress, but that's not important. Far more noteworthy than my continued failure to apply my knowledge as a force for good is this pompous little gnome I met. He promised me the ability to summon a guardian of immeasurable physical strength if I helped him out. While the gnome's petty ambitions are of no concern of mine--perhaps this knowledge he promises will prove the key to unlocking Fel Wood's cure!

Wait, wut? (Yes, I was a terrible warlock in those days.)

There are a lot of mechanics blizzard has abandoned as time has gone on, thanks to WoW's development team has learned and evolved. On most issues, I applaud them for that. I may be a fan of the old, more hardcore-oriented content, but speaking in terms of the big-picture, I think most of blizzard's decisions have been for the better. Making raids more accessible, creating more 5-man endgame content, giving classes like druids and pallies the ability do do something other than heal--these are all excellent things.

Sentaigrehsk's Journal; Level 60, I constructed the cage as I was instructed, and used the device Mr. The Decrepit had me build to ensnare one of the legion's Doomguards here in the tainted scar. Thank The Shadows Lord Kazaak no roams there. As promised, I learned the secret of summoning and controlling one...but the secrets that were imparted to me fill me with fear. Such terrible power at my fingertips, with a cost only a demon would be able to bear upon his conscience. I wonder, not for the first time, if the path I have chosen will leave anything left of my soul.

On this matter, however, I think the devs made a mistake. I'm certainly not an experienced game designer, but I'm familiar enough to know that adding 2 or 3 quests for each of the ten classes would not be a terribly difficult thing to do. Certainly not as difficult as many of the other projects blizzard undertakes. An NPC here or there, some quest text, toss a named mob into some unused bit of real estate and boom.

Sentaigrehsk's Journal; Level 70, Today I helped my young student Moreven master her Dreadsteed. For months she's collected spell components, bartered with demons, and ventured into lethal danger, and today I watched as she single-handedly subjugated a Nathrezim with the skills I have taught her. My eyes welled with tears at the sight...and I'm not sure if it is my pride in her for succeeding, or my shame in myself for enabling her to do so.

Given that two expansions have gone by since the last class quest, with one or two exceptions, I doubt we're going to see any more of them in the future. However, if Blizz is listening, then please heed the words of this humble old warlock, and give me back this little bit of immersion that you abandoned. I don't care if the rewards are absolutely worthless, or if there are no rewards at all. I just want my class to feel special again.

Pirate Urination (Arrrgh, pee!)

2009-02-02T00:47:00.000-08:00

Silver Hand (US) is my home. I love this server, and I doubt I'll ever seriously consider leaving it. Often, some (truly brilliant) witticism I make in /2 will quickly be followed by one old friend or another responding with "HEY SENTAI!" or some old enemy responding with "FUCK YOU, SCRUB." I sometimes joke that everybody on the server either has me on their friends list or their ignore list by now. Good times.

Silver Hand is also an RP server. And while there were a multitude of factors that led to me rolling there, among them is my long and sordid history of role playing. Be it over a table top or across the endless tubes of the Internet, I've always loved trying on different identities. My thoughts on World of Warcraft RP are--perhaps--a topic for another time, however. Today, I'd like to take a moment to talk about RP descriptions. Terrible ones.

For those who have never attempted to 'immerse themselves in a fantasy role playing environment,' you may perhaps be unaware of the addon FlagRSP. All one must really know is that it allows a person to write a role play description of their character, which other FlagRSP users can see by selecting that player. Naturally on RP servers, it is a somewhat common addon. And as any intelligent person can no doubt guess; many, if not most, of these descriptions are nothing short of cringe-inducing.

And so, without further ado, your humble servant LS submits to you a non-comprehensive satire of Bad-RP-Description Archetypes:

The English Mayger: This guy had a 7th grade reading level when he was in 6th grade, and is convinced he's William fucking Shakespeare. His RP description can be marked by bizarre similes, always referred to as metaphors, and unnecessarily long words, often used improperly (so in those respects, you might say his RP description is very much like this blog.) Frequently his entire persona will change just to give him the opportunity to use a different big word. Rarely will he ever be seen actually RPing, because nobody can match his particular brand of intellectual prowess.

Smugly, the majestic magi Aznorzondicumulese masticates his tongue in his mouth as he observes you gazing upon him. His silken hair, draped elegantly across his elegant shoulders, glides down to the cold hard earth with the grace and elegance of a dove. His heavy-set jaw in clenched in admonition, and his eyes exude the feeling that he will stomach no soilment of his most auspicious honor. Between his long fingers, he spins an elegant crystal disk, which shimmers as though Beelzebub's fury were encased within it.

You win the RP if you're more badass than the other guy: For these people, the only reason they're RPing is so they can impress people by one-upping everyone with imaginary accomplishments they often make up on the spot. Pity them; they only do it due to a lack of any real accomplishments to brag about. Their RP descriptions are marked by excessive length, and the assumption that your character is able to make wild inferences about their past just by looking at them. Additionally, these characters are almost always rude, and will make an insincere attempt to repulse any attempt to talk with them--an attempt which is really just a cry for attention by the player.

You see before you a regal Night Elf. His glowing white-hot eyes glow with an inner fire, that express a deep and profound sadness, along with a memory dating back to the very creation of Azeroth. A deep scar runs down the side of his face--it looks as though it was made by Frostmourne in a three-way-battle between Illidan, Arthas, and him. His arm is marred by the teethmarks of a dragon, could it have been Deathwing? His armor is pitch black, and when you look at it you feel as though you are looking into eternity itself. His flowing cape brushes the ground, and is made by the finest clothiers of Silvermoon--who have interwoven the threads with mithril, making it indestructible. On his back is a sword forged by the breath of Alexstraza (his former lover) and set with magic gems that allow the wielder to sprout magical dragon wings. From his belt hangs a dagger etched with magical runes, and if you look at it you seem to see black rose petals wafting off of it. As you stare at him, he telepathically warns you to stay away.

The Guy who wants you to think he's a girl: Does it mostly for the hot lesbian cyborz. Never plays anything but a Night/Blood Elf, or very occasionally a Human, always female of course. If it's ever discovered that he's a guy, he'll defend himself by saying that he strongly identifies with femininity.

Petite and and cheerful, the bubbly young lady smiles at you when she notices you looking at her. Short and curvaceous, her eyes glitter with a mischievous glint and a dimpled grin never leaves her cheeks. Her dress is modest, though you get the distinct impression that she's not quite aware of her own sexuality yet; as her bountiful bosoms are left to bounce freely with every bounding step she takes.

The Girl who wants you to know she's a girl: Probably either a fat sow whose never had sex due to nobody ever being able to find her genitals*, or (more often) an emotional leech of a girl who will 'confide in you' that she cuts herself within 10 minutes of getting your attention. (If the latter case ever engages in cyb0rz, she will treat it more seriously than most girls would treat losing their virginity to a rapist.)

Shy and reserved, she is usually found sitting in the back of the room, gazing listfully at her hand, and twisting an old wedding ring around her finger. Her simple, long sleeved dress looks to be hand-made, and aside from her ring, the only piece of jewelry she has is a locket draped around her neck, with two small pictures inside.

So beware, WoWrriors! If you ever dare to venture onto an RP server, do so with courage in your heart. For if you venture into the lair of the beast, the beasts that prowl there will soon find you and pester you with their terrible characters! Your best defense is a macro bound to Keystroke #1 that goes "/y LOL RP."

Best of luck, adventurers.

(*Yes, I am a horrible person. I'm comfortable with that.)

Meta-Blogging

2009-01-31T00:08:00.000-08:00

RAWR! I'm blogging about my blog!

So, I'm currently in the middle of two posts with are both personally interesting to me, as well as being very challenging to write! Which is good, I like to stretch myself whenever possible, but it does mean I need to take breaks. During my break today, I decided to make a new bit of art for the site.

Because you didn't notice the one 3 inches above this one.

It's not fantastic. It's pretty horrid actually. Been several months since I worked on a serious image editing project, and this is the first time I've tried to create art from scratch for such a project. All in all I'd give it a 3 out of 10 on my personal quality scale. Particularly due to how poorly the word bubble turned out, but also due to how awkward it makes the page look in general. It's better than the supremely generic design I've had to deal with thusfar (though the dots make for a fun pun) but I will probably be replacing it by a (hopefully) better image very soon.

While I'm Meta-Blogging, I'd like to mention that I don't think I'll be doing a post about the changes made to warlocks in the most recent patch. There's simply not enough to say--if only because several of the changes only affected warlocks who are spec'd differently than I, or use different tactics. I will say that the new summoning spell is AWESOME, and Blizz' artists deserve massive grats for this one. I'd also like to say 'thanks' for giving our pets a bit more health. That's pretty much all there is to say on that topic.

And one last note, since I prefer not to clutter up my other posts with off-topicness. I'd like to thank the 4 or 5 people who have actually been following this blog. Yes, I see you! It's good to know that people are reading, keeps me motivated to improve. I'd also like to thank all the people who linked to me, I don't know WHY you did it, but it has been very helpful both to my traffic and to my self esteem.

In closing; I'd like to invite anybody who has been reading to leave a comment telling me what they'd like to see more or less of from me, and I will do my best to oblige if I can!

This is McJiggins!

2009-01-28T18:16:00.000-08:00

After my preposterously prolix post just past, I propose a respite from my persistent warlock posting, perhaps instead I'll pen some prot-poganda. To that end, I'd like to introduce you, my readers, to a friend of mine. This is McJiggins. Or, perhaps more properly, Samuel McJiggins III. He is my gnome prot warrior, and one of the very first characters that I ever rolled.

Allow me to begin more properly, at the start of it all with McJiggins the First;

When I began playing World of Warcraft, I went through a frustrating phase that all new players must go through. You see, just about every friend I'd ever had came out of the woodwork, after ages of ignoring me in favor of their polygonal peers. And of course, each and every one of them insisted that I make a character on their server so that I could play with them. Not a single one of them was on the same server as any others, either. I'm still convinced they did that to annoy me.

And so, at the behest of one of my oldest and dearest friends, I rolled a hordie on the Burning Legion PVP server. I really fell in love with this character rather quickly. I enjoyed the mechanics of the class, and the little RP that I began making up in my head. I don't remember what any of that was, though, because just as I was starting to get to level four or five or so, my friend informed me that his priest, Melmagil, was a NIGHT ELF.

This, understandably, made me a bit sad. I was forced to delete my now forgotten hordie, and roll something that wouldn't be obligated to stab my friend in his priestly face. I scrolled through my options, not finding any of them terribly compelling at that moment. But when I got to gnome, and the default class of 'warrior' was selected, I got an idea!

Someday, I imagined, I would get whatever character I rolled here to level seventy! And, furthermore, my friend Melmagil was a healer in a raiding guild--so whatever character I rolled would likely be joining them in their raids--at least this is what I imagined in those tender days of my WoW-youth. And in these imaginings, a plot began forming in my mind. A plot for revenge against those who had forced me to delete my beloved hordie! I would roll a gnome, a silly little creature with a mocking grin and green comb over. That character would be a protection warrior, and it would be oh-so-emasculating for them to cower behind my diminutive form whilst I bravely stepped forward and tanked the creatures that would one shot their squishy asses.

Not exactly a master stroke of vengeful brilliance, but it made me giggle, so I went with it.

At least, I went with it until about level 10, when I got my own account and had to delete him.

I quickly started McJiggins Jr, but by then I had been playing long enough to realize that I would never get that character to max level, and the poor guy is still sitting over on Burning Legion, at a level no larger than his placement in the order of McJigginses.

I don't recall exactly how it happened, but at some point I decided that I loved McJiggins far too much to leave him on a server that I would never play on. Not only did I have fond memories of those ten-or-so levels that I put into the original, but the RP I had constructed for him made me giggle even more than the vengeful plan that had led to his creation. You see, McJiggins is alleged to be a Psychopathic Murderer, but nobody was ever able to press charges against him due to all the evidence being lost when Gnomeregan was irradiated--so McJiggins went free, but was shunned by gnomish society.

Seriously! >.>

Anyway, the end result is that at some point, I re-rolled him a third and final time on my home server, Silver Hand. I really didn't play him very often at all; occasionally popping on to RP or quest with him, but it took several months to get him up even as high as level 11. By this time, you see, I was busy doing Shadow Labs and Mechenar on my Warlock, and couldn't be bothered with lowbies.

Some months after that, however, I got BORED with the instances available to me. All but a few heroics were a breeze, Kara was on a week-long cooldown, and my favorite aspect of the game--instancing--was quickly losing its luster in my eyes. That's when McJiggins stopped being an alt, and became a project that continues to hold a great deal of interest for me.

'Hey,' I thought, 'what about the instances that I got run through? Like Deadmines! And what about the instances I only cleared after I became overleveled? Such as Blackrock Depths! And hell, I've still never seen the inside of Maradon! Surely those instances have as much to offer to a character in the appropriate level range as heroics have to offer me at level seventy!'

Driven by this mode of thinking, I quickly turned to my forgotten prot warrior. McJiggins was low enough level that he would still have to do a few quests before he was ready to take on even the lowest-level instances in the game--meaning that as he leveled up, I would have a chance to do all of them at the proper level! What's more, it would give me an opportunity to learn a completely different aspect of the game from DPSing, and perhaps allow me to someday heal the crippling tank-shortage my guild was feeling at the time.

In preparation for this venture, I mentally drafted the rules of McJiggins:

1) From Deadmines onward, quest only when necessary to attune or key for an instance. Some necessary quests--such as the quest to become unfriendly with the timbermaw--are also valid exceptions to this rule.

2) Run every instance in the game in the order that their queue becomes available in LFG.

3) Don't run any instance twice if there is an instance you haven't done available to you.

4) An instance isn't done until you've killed all the bosses--exceptions may be made if summoning a boss requires you to break rule 3.

5) An instance isn't done unless you tanked it.

6) RFC, raids, and Heroics are excepted--though if possible they are desirable.

7) Never accept a player into your group who is outside the upward bound of the instances level range.

8) Seek out advice from any credible source available to you.

9) Be awesome.

Rule 9 goes into pretty much every list of directives I've ever written for myself.

Here we see the prot warrior outside his native habitat. As you can see, he's confused and disoriented away from the mechanics which define him.

I've stuck to these rules well thusfar, which is a point both of pride and of frustration to me. Three Deadmines runs which ended due to various reasons while we were in the middle of clearing the boat left me so discouraged that I abandoned the project until only a month or so ago. The buffs given to warriors in 3.0 (yeah, I'm kind of a carebear I guess ;_;) have made it much easier for me to force my groups to maintain a rapid pace--which in turn has reduced the number of people who drop group significantly.

Unfortunately it has been remarkably slow going despite that. Even as a tank, it tends to take quite a long time to find groups until I've got a healer. And my rules mean that any healer I meet is either played very rarely, or will be a great deal higher level than I am in a very short time. (For those of you who read my girlfriend's blog, Tamaryn, was originally rolled so she could heal for McJiggins. Something I still occasionally guilt trip her for, cuz I'm a horrible guy.) Despite that, however, I've managed to clear Deadmines, Shadowfang Keep, Wailing Caverns, and Stockades so far. And let me tell you--it's fucking fun.

I'll leave the story of McJiggins here for now. Now that I've said who he is, and what he does. In the future, I think I'll post tales of some of the misadventures of McJiggins, the minuscule marauder. The tale of the DPSing healer should be good for a giggle or two...

Time To Talk Talents (Totally Titanic Tirade!)

2009-01-26T18:26:00.000-08:00

I don't think I can rightly have a blog about a class in World of Warcraft without taking a moment, at some point, to talk about my spec. To talk about why I think it's the best spec for me, why I made some of the controversial decisions that I did, and some alternative ways to spend points that I'm looking at using in the future. So rather than wait for later, how about I go over it now!

This is a broad topic, so I'm going to try to narrow it down as much as I can. I've talked about why I spec the way I do in a more general sense, so I'll not do that again here. I've also dedicated two posts already to the tactics that I use with this spec, so I'll not waste my reader's valuable time with recitations of that either. What I am going to do is list every single talent in the affliction tree, and why I did or why I did not put points into it. I'll also briefly mention at the end of this post why I decided to put my extra points into destruction rather than demonology, and why I decided to place them in the places that I put them. Hopefully by the end, I'll have a comprehensive guide for locks looking to spec affliction for the first time--even if they don't make the same choices I made.

I'll warn you right now that this post is going to be rather long, though I'll do my best to keep it from becoming dry. So, without further arbitrary addition to the already sizable length of this post, here's my spec:

54 / 0 / 17
I call it 'Affliction Mach 3' (seriously, it's my third major variation on affliction since 3.0

Affliction Tree

Tier 1

Improved Curse of Agony (0/2): Right off the bat is perhaps my most controversial decision. Almost all affliction warlocks these days--and even many demonology and destruction warlocks as well--put two points in here for the improved damage. I, too, would join them, save for the unfortunate fact that I don't have any boomkin or deathknights to run with reliably. This means I'm still casting Curse of Elements frequently enough that it doesn't seem worth it to spend two points on something I would only get to use very occasionally.
Suppression(3/3): Three points here makes getting myself up to the all-important hit cap much easier. However, if I ever reach the point where my gear easily gets me all the way up to the spell hit cap of 446 (which it almost has by now) then these three points will very likely start going elsewhere, since the mana-cost reduction to my affliction spells is insignificant. Two of them will probably go into Imp'd CoA, if I haven't already moved points into there by then.
Improved Corruption(5/5): This is an absolute, and obvious, must for all affliction warlocks. Corruption one of the most important spells to any affliction rotation--and in fact as of late I've noticed that it has become my single highest damaging spell, beating out shadow bolt by 1% of my damage dealing pie. As such, improving it whenever possible is crucial. Any affliction lock who doesn't r lyke ttly skrub. Also ghey, lawl.

Tier 2

Frailty(0/2): Despite being improved since Burning Crusade, this talent is still absolutely terrible, and should never be taken. Evers. Double ever.
Improved Drain Soul(0/2): This talent is something of a tossup. It's a soloing/PVP talent, so in a raid or instancing environment it helps only a very little bit. However, the rather lackluster talents of tier 2 make this an acceptable choice, if only to give you enough total points in the tree to make your way to the next tier. It's certainly a fine alternative to putting any points in Frailty.
Improved Life Tap(2/2): Life tap is fundamental to a warlock's ability to do damage. Our spells are mana inefficient, we can't regen mana the way priests or magi do, and the only way we're going to be able to keep casting is if we're able to life tap or dark pact to keep our mana up. I would go so far as to say that this is a must-have talent (though more due to the poor choices on this tier than to how awesome an extra 20% mana is I think.)
Soul Siphon(2/2): Much to my embarrassment, I only recently noticed that this talent was changed in the Echoes of Doom patch. You can tell I'm smart because it only takes me three months to notice a fundamental change in a talent that I've put points into after several respecs. Having now noticed it, I am tempted to move these points either to Improved Curse of Agony, or to Improved Drain Soul. However, Drain Life is very helpful when soloing Onyxia--which is fun even though they recently halved the gold you get from doing it. So I may keep it here. Regardless, I don't view it as important enough an error to deal with immediately. After all, it's not like I put the points in frailty. (Which you should never do. Ever.)

Tier 3

Improved Fear (0/2): I imagine that this is a kickass PVP talent. It's probably also sexcellent for soloing. However, I do not PVP, nor do I use fear much when I'm soloing things. I'm weird that way. As such, I've never put points here, and doubt I ever will. Cool talent though.
Fel Concentration (3/3): Another great soloing talent that ends up being completely useless in a raiding or instancing scenario; provided the healer is doing his or her job. However, since there really isn't much else to put points into at this tier, I think it's a good choice, since without this talent, drain-tanking is effectively impossible.
Amplify Curse (0/1): I'm bouncing back and forth on this talent. It was initially very appealing to me, so I took it to try it out. After leveling up with it, and using it in my first raid or so, I concluded that it was a bad talent for me. My conclusion was based on the fact that I always used Curse of Elements, and my typical tactic for using that spell was to cast it while the tank was gaining aggro. As such, a faster cooldown didn't mean I got to start DPSing faster, because I was waiting for the tank to build aggro anyway. I even went so far as to sugguest on the warlock forums that this talent be changed so that it reduced the global cooldown of lifetap and dark pact--spells that often need to be cast in the heat of casting rotations, which has a tendency to throw off a person's sense of timing. However, due to how much easier threat generation has become, and due to the increased use of Curse of Agony in modern raids, I am beginning to reconsider whether or not this talent would be useful. My personal jury is still out on this decision.

Tier 4

Grim Reach (0/2): The equation with this talent seems very simple in my mind. Any affliction casting rotation I've ever seen contains shadow bolt. Most good ones also contain Immolate. Immolate and Shadow Bolt are destruction spells, and will not get the increased range from this talent. So, unless you're willing--and able--to put points into the destruction talent which also increases range, Grim Reach is silly, because you'll still have to stand just as close as you would have without it in order to cast your destro spells. Furthermore, I've noticed a distinct lack of fights in Wrath of the Lich King which really require you to stay as far away from the boss as you can. In fact, there are a surprising number of fights where you actually have to stand on top of the boss in order to be successful. Perhaps things will change in Ulduar. If so, I shall reconsider.
Nightfall (2/2): I'm a bit dubious about the amount that this talent actually helps, but again, poor alternatives leave me with only a few equally dubious alternatives. I've heard that the benefits of this talent are much better now than they were in BC, which is good, because I have points here. It should be noted that Glyph of Corruption DOES stack with this talent, so it's probably a decently good idea to get both--given the lackluster quality of warlock glyphs. (A subject I should probably write on sometime soon as well.)
Empowered Corruption (3/3): Woot, another chance to improve my corruption. If I didn't take this, I'd be a moron!

Tier 5

Shadow Embrace (5/5): This talent is an absolute requirement for any affliction spec. In general, things that make ALL your dots do extra damage are a very, very good thing. This is also the reason why, in my boss rotation, I open up with a shadow bolt before I cast haunt, followed by all my dots. That way, this effect is stacked to the maximum of height of two before my first dot ticks.
Siphon Life (1/1): Siphon Life, even after being Glyphed, will probably end up being your lowest damage-dealing DoT. However, without it your overall damage would still be significantly lower. What's more, the healing effect (combined with your Fel Armor's heal, combined with the healing effect of Haunt, combined with a Death Coil now and again) help you keep yourself healed through all that life-tapping you'll be doing during boss fights. The healing effects mentioned are enough, in fact, that it allows affliction warlocks to solo some rather tough elites with ease. Not only is this talent useful enough that you should get it for instances and raids, but it's also an utterly fantastic talent for both soloing and PVP.
Curse of Exhaustion (0/1): A dubiously useful talent, that requires you to take another dubiously useful talent. Curse of Exhaustion is great for PVP, and a very useful tool when soloing, but for a spec geared toward group-content, you really can't allow yourself to waste the point most of the time. (Not to self: find a thesaurus that has terms such as 'PVP' and 'soloing.')

That's a lot of text...Random screenshot time!

Tier 6

Improved Fel Hunter (0/2): This is a decision I may have to seriously reconsider. The primary benefit of this talent is that it allows your fel hunter's main attack to return mana to it--which in turn allows you to dark-pact mana from your pet more frequently. (it also improves the Fel Intellect buff, but I did the math on it once, the improvement is utterly negligible. Not even worth considering the the decision making process.) Now previously, I rejected this talent because on 98% of bosses in the game, if I sent my fel hunter in to attack them they would one-shot him with some kind of AoE or whatever. However, due to the recent change (which raised my fel hunter's health from 7k to something like 17k unbuffed) the fel hunter may be significantly more capable of surviving, making this talent much more viable. I will do testing on this over the next few weeks--though my initial concern is that the fel hunter will only last slightly longer than he did before with this new HP buff, since I refuse to waste valuable casting time using a channeled heal on my pet. We will see, however.
Shadow Mastery (5/5): RAWR, Shadow Damage! Even if Siphon Life were the most useless spell in the game, it would be worth getting it just to get your hands on this talent. The only spell in my rotation that this talent doesn't improve by 15% is Immolate.

Tier 7

Eradication (1/3): Eradication is an interesting little talent. I, like many other affliction warlocks, once had it topped out at 3/3, until I saw the math. See, the way the internal cooldown for this proc works (it's unusually long) means that if you increase the probability of it happening, as you would by putting two or three talents into it instead of just one, all you really do is cause the ability to proc during the cooldown--meaning essentially that one point in here has almost exactly the same benefit as having three! Do yourself a favor and put those two points somewhere more useful. (I put them in Cataclysm, which made me hit-capped.)
Contagion (5/5): 5% isn't all that impressive for a 5-point talent, and the dispelling effect is really just for PVP, so it's not really a viable reason for taking this talent in a PVE spec. However, a buff to corruption is a buff to corruption. I've never seen a good affliction warlock without this talent, and I doubt I ever will.
Dark Pact (1/1): Dark Pact has gotten a lot of heat lately. Many warlocks feel that it scales poorly compared to lifetap, and has been rendered useless. Now, one or two people complaining about that and I would disregard it as poppycock spouted by morons who can't play their class. However, it is a complaint that is gaining a great deal of purchase in the warlock community, so I decided to do some tests myself. I won't bore you with all my numbers, but what it comes down to is that Life Tap returns roughly 2800 mana, and Dark Pact returns about 2800 mana. There are variances as my stats change, but all in all they usually return within 200 mana of one another. Pet mana and personal health regen are such that I'll likely only be able to get 2 Dark Pacts off before the pet is empty, but if I'm wise enough to dark pact early on in my rotation, rather than when I'm out of mana, I should be able to get away with going 50/50 between life tap and dark pact, which will be a great help to the healers. Now, it should be noted that these numbers may be vastly different for different people, because Dark Pact scales depending on a warlock's spell power, and Life Tap scales--as of 3.0--depending on how much spirit a warlock has. However, I don't see any reason why my spirit / spellpower ratio wouldn't be at least roughly representative of most level 80 warlocks. Perhaps I am wrong in thinking this, I don't know. That said, pets COULD use a larger mana pool. This is something I'd really like to see from blizz in the near future. (They do seem to be reconsidering the dark pact mechanics, given the various PTR changelogs I've seen over the last 6 months.)

Here you can see my Spell Power, Spirit, and an example of both a Life Tap and a Dark Pact, with the mana returns scrolling to the right of my character. Don't ask why Life Tap has such a random icon.

Tier 8

Improved Howl of Terror (0/2): I wish this talent was viable for PvE ;_; It's just so bloody awesome. An instant cast fear? Holy crap is that cool! Unfortunately, a warlock should only rarely use fear in an instance, and this deep into the tree you have to start being very frugal with your points, because almost everything is necessary to take.
Malediction (3/3): While the 3% bonus to spell damage that they added makes these three points worth it all by itself; I largely took this talent for the improvement to Curse of Elements. By this point in reading this post / my blog you should be more than familiar with why.

Tier 9

Death's Embrace (3/3): While the bonus to draining is a boon for soloing and PVP, the improved crit chance is really what makes this talent worth taking. Warlocks have a notable lack of 'cooldowns' to 'bust out' when the raid leader starts shouting "ALRIGHT, SHE ENRAGED, BUST ALL YOUR COOLDOWNS!" So this talent is really very helpful in giving affliction damage a little extra 'umf' in the home stretch. (I actually covered exactly what that umf amounts to very recently.)
Unstable Affliction (1/1): Must have. Period. Second best warlock DoT there is.
Pandemic (3/3): This is an astoundingly interesting and innovative mechanic, and it's one of the biggest reasons that affliction is able to remain competitive in Wrath of the Lich King. See, in Burning Crusade, warlock raiding went like this: first, you spec affliction. You get to about SSC / TK level, you get the magical stats (202 hit, 20% crit, 1200 spell damage if I recall correctly) and then you respec 0/21/40. Why? Because affliction didn't get much of a benefit from all that crit, and since your gear ended up having crit rating on it anyway, destruction was indisputably more powerful than affliction at this level of gear, by several orders of magnitude. The size of a destruction warlock's crits in BT gear are seriously something I didn't start to see on Sentai until he was Naxx-geared at level 80. So anyway, in response to this, blizz created Pandemic, which (essentially) allows dots to crit, allowing affliction to scale with gear in a way that it was unable to do previously. It's really quite ingenious. That said, I'd like to see the effect altered somewhat to include all periodic effects, rather than just corruption and unstable affliction, because based on what I've seen on my damage meter's pie charts, pandemic isn't doing quite enough damage to really keep affliction competitive with destruction in T9. However, we will see as time goes on! (I should also note that blizz recently said that they had managed to re-code the way dots work in such a way that they could--if they wanted to--allow dots to crit on their own. They also said that they have no plans to do that at this time; but it could be an interesting mechanic in the future.)

Tier 10

Everlasting Affliction (5/5): As if the additional spell damage wasn't enough to make this talent worth taking, the fact that it allows Haunt to re-apply corruption is a beautiful thing. You see, with Haunt re-applying corruption, a whole spell--and its 1.5 second global cooldown--are removed from the extremely complicated affliction rotation. As much as I love the depth of affliction DPSing, I welcome this bit of simplification with open arms. I would like to see the talent modified in the future, however, so that Drain Life does NOT renew corruption. Drain life has a rather short duration--particularly if the warlock is getting hit. And most of the time when you're casting Drain Life, you're casting it over and over again--meaning that your corruption spell often doesn't even last long enough to get a single tick off before drain life re-applies it. [EDIT: I stand corrected on this! Apparently the re-application of corruption caused by this talent does not break the flow of damage ticks. My bad!]

Tier 11

Haunt (1/1): Haunt is living proof that blizz is full of smart people. This is exactly the kind of innovative mechanic that I love to see. All at once, it both plays to the already established strengths of this spec, while also bringing something completely new and unfamiliar to the table. Bravo, warlock dev team. Bravo.

Poor Sentugrehsk is so hungry! But what does he have to do with affliction specs?

Destruction Tree

With 54 points spent in affliction, that leaves me with 17 points. There are a multitude of interesting things that could be done with those points. For example, 13 points in the demonology tree to grab Demonic Aegis would not only increase the amount of healing Fel Armor does by 30%, as well as turning the 180 base spell power from that spell into 234, but it would also convert 40% of my spirit into spell power, instead of the default 30%! However, as you can see I haven't done that in this spec, as tempting as it is. Instead I've put those 17 points into the destruction tree, due to the fact that the low-tier talents in that tree are more useful for straight DPS than the low tier talents in demonology. At least, that is, on average. As stated above, I'll only go over the talents I actually took in the destruction tree, for brevity's sake.

Improved Shadow Bolt (5/5) This is an astoundingly good talent, particularly for affliction warlocks, and particularly since the recent change made to it in 3.0. With five points here, every single time your shadow bolt crits against a target ALL OF YOUR DOTS (except immolate) do 15% more damage for the next 12 seconds. And let me tell you, even as an affliction warlock, I crit quite frequently. What's more, as of 3.0 the effect is now a buff for the warlock, rather than a debuff for the target--meaning the bonus damage will hurt all of your targets, rather than just the one which you crit against. I can't imagine going without this talent.

Bane (5/5) Back in Burning Crusade, when I was hanging out on the warlock forums trying to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I heard a warlock say 'there's no such thing as a raiding spec without bane.' And as far as I can determine, this has only become more true for affliction warlocks since Immolate is part of our rotation now.

Cataclysm (2/3) This is a recent addition to the Mach 3 version of my affliction spec, and wasn't here in Mach 2. Much like suppression, I have this talent to shore-up my hit rating numbers. With the combination of those 5 talent points spread throughout the 2 trees, I am far above the hit cap for all my offensive spells. When my gear eventually reaches the point where I'm easily maintaining the 446 hit, I may decide to move these talents into something more useful, since the mana-cost reduction is (as mentioned) negligible.

Ruin (5/5) Sexy, sexy ruin. There isn't a warlock in the world who doesn't want to have the five talent points to spare so they can put them here, thanks to the way Blizzard rearranged the destruction tree in 3.0, I now do. This makes my shadow bolt crits very big. They're like..."BOOM!" and seeing numbers like "9538" on my screen causes some of the bloodflow in my body to be diverted elsewhere, if you know what I mean. *wink wink*

So there you have it, the grand spec post. Kind of daunting, now that I look back on it. I hope I didn't get anything massively wrong, since this post is likely to be one that a lot of people find my blog from. But hey, couldn't put it off forever right?

Anyway, despite the fact that I can't quite think of a way to end this post, anybody who read this far is doubtless hoping that this post is going to end soon, so I'll grant their wish without any further delay.

Server First! (?) Heroic Training Dummy...

2009-01-24T21:16:00.000-08:00

So, I was running around Stormwind on a lowbie earlier, looking for a stockades group. And I happened upon something peculiar: the Heroic Training Dummy, usually at about 11 million hit points, was down to a paltry 2.5 million. This was a job for a hit-capped level 80 affliction warlock, who had never quite been able to get a decent reading on how much the 3 points he put in Death's Embrace (Improved crit chance when the mob is below 35%) really helped him.

Quite a bit as it turns out. That's an increase of about 250 damage per second over my normal peak of 2.5. I usually only hit 2.2 on the training dummy, so this improvement seems to indicate why I tend to do better on real bosses.

It was a long battle. Recount clocked it at about 20 minutes I think.I don't know for sure though, for I was far too intent on the zen of casting rotations to take a look at the clock, or even screencap during most of the fight (screenshot lag causes lack of rhythm which causes slight drops in DPS!) However, I can tell you that after long minutes of furious battlecasting...

I emerged victorious.

Curses! Cursed again!

2009-01-23T14:03:00.000-08:00

The mainstay WoW's 'debuffer class,' which curse to use is often the source of some contention among warlocks (since only one can be used at a time.) While not all curses are created anywhere near equal I thought it might be fun to run them down, and give my thoughts on them.

Curse of Weakness easily makes my list of the top five most useless warlock spells, (I actually made that list once.) The pittance of attack power (478 at level 80) that this spell removes from the target is so insignificant that it's not even really viable as a PVP talent. And while it can be improved by talents, it can't be improved nearly enough to avoid much more useful talent points, such as the improvements to drain soul, life tap, and drain life. In complete honesty, the only time I can think of that I might use this spell, is in-between levels six and eight, when it's the only curse that I have. (Or, I suppose, if you're in a raid with an inordinate amount of warlocks--but even then Curse of Agony or Doom is probably a better choice.)

Curse of Recklessness is one of the most under-rated curses in the game. Not so much for the armor reduction, which is really just incidental, but rather for the fact that it causes mobs not to flee. This can be extremely handy in instances filled with humanoids, where a mob with low health is often likely to run off and pull a second group of enemies, causing the wholesale slaughter of a warlock and his or her compatriots. Back in the days, before all these whippersnappers started playing the game, some warlocks used to practice a tactic called 'yo-yoing,' where they would fear a mob, CoR it, then throw another curse on it and fear it again--effectively causing the mob to run away from, and towards them over and over again. Unfortunately as of patch 3.0.2 CoR no longer causes creatures to ignore fear effects, but it still prevents them from fleeing.

Curse of Tongues I like this curse. I actually like it a whole lot. I just don't know what to do with it. I imagine it'd be rather handy in PVP, but I don't really PVP all that much. Never was able to get into it. As such it spends a lot of time next to curse of weakness on my action bar, gathering dust. However, it DOES make the stuff you say sound funny. And that's just cool.

And now, a random screenshot to break up the wall of text!

Curse of Exhaustion Much like Curse of Tongues, I love this curse, yet I never get to use it. Though, much unlike its counterpart, the reason I never get to use it is because I never get to *have* it. Curse of Exhaustion is great for kiting, which is something warlocks could certainly use help with. If I was to create some kind of soloing spec, or a PVP spec even, Curse of Exhaustion would be a must. However, in the instancing/raiding specs that I use to optimize my performance in what I consider the best part of the game, the two talent points required to get this little gem are much better spent elsewhere.

Curse of Elements is my curse of choice. Not only does it give a huge buff to all of my damage, but it gives buffs to the damage of my buddies who play magi as well! What's more, now that 3.0.8 has gone live and endgame BM hunters start using arcane shot, it'll help them too! By far this is the best curse to use for warlocks in an instance, unless there is some other warlock there casting it (since the effect does not stack,) or some other class casting a debuff that CoE doesn't stack with. (Boomkin and Death Knights do this.)

Curse of Agony is, according to every single source (reliable and unreliable) the curse you should be using in Wrath of the Lich King. You can distinguish (roughly) between the reliable and unreliable sources, because the reliable ones will add "unless nobody is already casting Curse of Elements or something that supersedes it" under their breath. Honestly, I'm still having a bit of a hard time with this. I believe I may have mentioned in the past that when I was being raised, a warlock could get quite a talking to for using Curse of Agony in a raid. I remember one raid leader once saying "Could all the warlocks putting Curse of Agony on the boss try doing something USEFUL instead?" As such, I've been conditioned against using it, A Clockwork Orange style. That said, I've begrudgingly accepted that it's useful these days, and as soon as I find a boomkin to hang out with, I'll start using it.

Curse of Doom was once called "Curse of Takes-forever-to-proc" by my guild's main tank. Back in Burning Crusade (damn, I say that alot,) this was the spell you were supposed to use if somebody else had Curse of Elements up. And at level 80, if you don't have points in Improved Curse of Agony, the 11k damage of this spell still ends up being slightly superior to CoA according to my damage tests. Though whether there's actually time for it to proc depends on whether or the mob will stay alive forever I suppose. That said, if you're using damaging curses rather than CoE, you should probably have points in Improved Curse of Agony.

Really, the layout of curses right now is pretty dismal. You'd think that a core class mechanic would be less cast aside than curses have been. Healers get more and better ways of healing, DPS gets more and better ways of DPSing. Why doesn't the debuffing class get more and better ways of debuffing? This is something I plan to address in more detail in a future post.

How all my WoW dreams came true.

2009-01-21T12:34:00.000-08:00

(As a quick prefix to this post, I'd like to note that I am aware that a new patch came out yesterday, and I'd love to comment on it, but every single change for warlocks that I am in a position to comment intelligently on...didn't work. My pet still has the same amount of HP, I can't seem to summon anyone, etc. So, I'll save that post for (hopefully) a few days from now when they fix these issues.)

I am a dark person. I'm not a sad person, or a depressed person, nor am I a fan of bad poetry, and hackneyed vampire books; but I am dark. I love old gothic churches, I love dark rooms, I love the color black, and if you play D&D with me you'll note that I almost never run a campaign without undead of some kind in it. For awhile I kinda wondered if I would grow out of it, but honestly I don't want to. Gothic aesthetics appeal to me on a very fundamental level, and I embrace that.

So, as you can imagine, my first instinct when I started playing WoW was to roll an undead. However, the server I was rolling on was my friend's alliance server, so after a bit of deliberation I settled on human. I like dwarfs a bit better, but I was really in the mood for trying out this 'warlock' thing, so human it was.

At some point while I was leveling away on my warlock, some 40+ hordie rode past me, on the most glorious mount I had ever seen. The horns seemed a bit much, but the skeletal frame, the wicked grin, the tasteful cloak draped over the bones--I had to have it. I resolved that no matter what, this mount would be mine when I was high enough level to attain a steed of my own. You can imagine that I was crushed when I learned that this glorious mode of transportation was available only to the horde.

Sometime after that, I had become content with the fact that I was in possession of the second coolest mount in the game. I mean, come on, my horse is on fire. Beat that, non-warlocks! (Warlock mount > Deathknight mount by the way.)

Then I got a little higher in level, and I--predictably--became absolutely engrossed both in the Plaguelands, and in the three instances that inhabited them. Each of the three was magical to me. Scholomance is still, in my opinion, the single greatest five man instance in the game. Naxx was this grand unattainable, something I always hoped I'd be able to venture into, and something I always regretted never being able to conquer in its level 60 fourty-man incarnation. And stratholme...

...Stratholme renewed my hopes that I would someday get my hands on the reigns of that most glorious of mounts.

That was nearly two years ago now. For almost that long I've farmed, and I've farmed. First in five man groups, then later, in groups of two. I was one of the few clothies I knew who could easily solo the place at 70--more due to memorization of the rout than any skill. And by level 80 I had my runs down to roughly 16 minutes.

And then, just the other day...

...all my dreams came true.

Oh...uh, hey Mor'zul. Sooo...I've got a better mount now. But man, thanks for all that help back in the day, that was really cool of you!

...awkwaaaard... >.>

I won't deny that every time I see another person with it, I cringe a little, thinking of how hard I worked for it, and how easy the recent patch made it. But honestly, I'm just happy to finally have an undead steed to call my own.

I think I'll name him 'Checkers.'

Affliction DPS on Trash Mobs

2009-01-20T14:50:00.000-08:00

NOTE: A lot of people are getting to this post after searching 'affliction dps 80' or something of that sort. And while I think this post is helpful, it's probable that you're looking for something a little more like this.

"Woe to you, affliction warlock! For your dualistic lot in life is one both of glory and of shame; for while you may top the meters on Patchwerk, never will your name be seen above rank the tenth when there is trash to clear. And so will you remain in obscurity, your true skill remaining hidden due to the lies told by 'overall damage' reports."

~Anonymous Raid Leader

I'm not one to complain about the weaknesses of my class, or the strengths of other classes. I may have suggestions for improving things, but I really do hate to bitch. That said, affliction warlocks have it bad right now as far as trash DPS goes, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing. Trash mobs are just what their name proclaims them to be--trash. If a group can't manage to tear through trash mobs with relative ease, then they really have no business attempting the bosses that come after said trash.

The problem with affliction's low trash-mob-damage comes not from any actual problems with the in-game situation, but rather, from the damage meter, and the perception it creates in peoples minds. Now don't get me wrong--damage meters are wonderful, amazing tools. If not for damage meters, I never would have found out that I was consistently one of the worst damage dealers in any group, which means I never would have sought help and never would have become the symbol of mediocrity that I have become today. Furthermore, without damage meters I would have no way to test my new rotations and specs. And hell, without damage meters, I wouldn't be able to playfully compete with my fellow DPSers for the top DPS spot.

The problem with the damage meter is that most people don't know how to use it properly. Almost everyone keeps the thing stuck on 'overall damage,' which in my experience both as a DPSer and a raid leader, doesn't do anybody any good. Far too often this method of looking at the numbers allows a small group of people to climb to the top of the meter doing trivial things such as slaughtering the trash mobs or spamming AoE on nonelites, while their actual contribution in difficult situations is frighteningly lackluster.

Furthermore, as a motivating factor, damage meters become meaningless when only overall data is used. Invariably, in any instance, a small group of people quickly establish themselves as the 'top' DPS, while other players are left in the dust. Given a boss or two, the damage meters will settle into a rather stable arrangement, that won't be changed even if the people at the top stop trying, and the people at the bottom use every trick they've got in an attempt to pull ahead.

Damn hunters! >.>

Personally, I find the most accurate way to view the data is to set your damage meter to only show the numbers for the current fight. This way, everybody has a clean state at the start of every single pull. When I've been doing well throughout the instance thus far, this forces me to 'keep it up,' in order to maintain my lead. Similarly, when I've been doing poorly, I am less likely to get discouraged, and more likely to try harder to improve my standing on the next pull.

All of that aside, I am most firmly of the opinion that even though affliction warlocks can't be expected to do good DPS on trash, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. To that end, I've begun to play with a variety of alternate tactics for trash mobs, and while I've yet to achieve any truly great level of success, I have managed to put forth a decidedly respectable showing on individual trash pulls now and again. Once or twice even managing to get the top spot! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Before you really begin to think about how to do good damage on trash mobs, you must try to understand why it is that affliction has so much trouble with them in the first place. Affliction Warlocks are sometimes called "DOT locks," after their primary form of attack. DOT, as everyone knows, is the acronym for Damage Over Time. And that, there, is the root of the problem. Time. Affliction warlocks require some measure of time before they can really begin to do damage.

I've done extensive testing of affliction damage using things like real time graphs, as well as friends who agreed to serve as a control group of sorts. What I've noticed is that even several seconds into my rotation, my damage output is altogether pitiful when I'm using my full casting sequence. Then, about 25-35 seconds into combat, my numbers suddenly shoot up at an astronomical speed, as all my dot ticks start going off in force. Before this, however, my numbers would shame a level 65 elemental shaman.

At this point, the issue should be clear. When fighting trash mobs, each target is only going to be alive for a scant few seconds, meaning that the 'shooting up' part of my damage never happens. Ergo, it would seem reasonable to conclude that the only way to really do damage against such mobs is to either significantly alter my rotation, or respec--something I'm not willing to do when my damage output in more important situations is phenomenal.

Altering the rotation, however, is a tricky business, because it either requires memorizing every trash mob in every instance, or it requires tactical senses good enough to analyse a target mob's life expectancy after a glance at it's HP, and formulate a viable tactic based on that. Given the near impossibility of the former, I fear I am stuck with attempting the latter, even given my lackluster tactical skills.

To make things simpler, I've devised a hand full of rotations for different situations. And, whenever I find myself faced with trash pulls, I try and approximate which one of these rotations might work best for that particular pull.

Boom Theory: Seed of Corruption, Rain of Fire, and a Shadowflame now and again for good measure. If you've got a good tank, then this is by far the easiest way to go about things in larger pulls. Not just pally tanks anymore either! I've used this tactic to great success with both warrior and death knight tanks*. Be careful though, if you pull aggro you're very likely to end up dead, and if you piss the tank off, you're very likely to end up looking at a window that says "You are not in the instance group, you will be ported to [Insert Hearth Location here] in X amount of seconds."

(*No offense is intended to my feral druid buddies--I just haven't run with one since Karazhan, so I can't speak from experience.)

The Resilient Trash Mob: Some trash pulls are almost like mini-bosses in terms of how much HP they have, but that still doesn't mean you're going to be able to get your full rotation off. So I abbreviate it: Curse of Elements, Haunt, Corruption, Followed by Shadow Bolt spam, and a re-cast of Haunt whenever it's up. After the first 7 seconds of combat or so, all your casting time will be spent on direct damage casting, so you won't be losing any global cooldowns on dots that won't finish. I sometimes modify this to include Unstable Affliction as well, if the mobs are particularly hearty.

Humanoids Got No HP Humanoid trash mobs last only barely longer than nonelites do in most instances. For these, the AoE approach is by far the preferable one, but if there's only one humanoid left, or if your tank isn't comfortable with the threat created by your AoE, then your best bet is to just sit there spamming the Shadow Bolt button. These mobs will likely go down so fast that even Curse of Elements will be a waste of valuable shadow bolting time. I've considered trying to use Searing Pain on these mobs, given its shorter cast time, but the significantly lower amount of damage it does, and the significantly higher amount of threat that it pulls, makes me dubious that it will be more successful than straight up SB spam.

An example of the 'Resilient Trash Mob' tactic

I've found that, in a general sense anyway, one of these three approaches will almost always serve well enough to get the job done, and keeping available tactics down to three also helps avoid confusion. I think it was Bruce Lee who said that a person shouldn't try and learn too many ways to react to a single situation, because if they do, then when they're in that situation they'll find themselves paralyzed with indecision about which way to react. Something to that affect anyway.

So that's how I deal with trash DPS as a level 80 affliction warlock. It's not great, it's not even 'very good' if I'm trying to out DPS a hunter, rogue, or kitty druid. However, the results I've got from it are certainly respectable enough that I can rest assured my performance on the boss will be noticed, and my actual skill--good, bad, or mediocre--can be judged at least somewhat accurately by the rest of the group.

How One Relates to Three

2009-01-16T16:36:00.000-08:00

Affliction, Demonology, Destruction. Warlocks would seem uniquly suited to me, given that ADD diagnosis I was handed as a kid. Puns aside, I thought it might be intersting to write a post about why it is that I chose affliction as my tree, rather than one of the two Ds. It doesn't have much to do with my playstyle preference, or with how easy it is to play. Honestly, I don't like to think of myself so much as 'an affliction warlock.' Rather, I view myself simply as a warlock. All the skills in all the trees are part of me--even if they're not active at the moment.

When I first started my warlock, (who, by the way, was also my very first character,) shadow bolt seemed to be the thing. It was solid burst damage that took people out pretty fast. It was also the attack with the least confusing application. As such, when I recieved my first precious talent point at level ten, the choice seemed obvious. Why improve my hit chance with affliction spells, or lower the casting time of corruption? Why improve my imp, or my healthstone, or my stamina, when I could shorten the casting time of my shadow bolt? It is, after all, the mainstay of how I play!

Alls I need is my Shadow Bolts, my wand, and my hunter!

As levels went on, destruction continued to draw my points. Double crit damage? heck yeah. An instant cast direct damage spell that gives me a soul shard? who could say no! It was right around the time that I was greatly enjoying the benefits of 'Backlash' in Un'Goro crater, shortly after I started , that I started to get annoyed with how much I was dying. Looking back on it, it probably was far more due to my skill, and my tactics than it was due to my spec. These were back in the days before I'd ever done an instance with a group of my peers, and still had no frame of reference from which I could determine just how terrible I was.

At the same time, a friend of mine with a level 70 warlock was continuing to insist that I should spec affliction. I don't like to give in to the insistance of friends for no reason, but this particular friend has the uncanny ability to be completely unreasonable, yet still be right about things. And, since I was dying constantly, I decided to take his advice and spec affliction. I wouldn't say that I absolutely loved it, there are many things that I missed--and still miss--about destruction. However, with a whole new set of skills and abilities unlocked for me, I gained a new appreciation for the depth of the class, and the pleasure I could have playing it. Save for a few brief stints respeccing to destruction or demonology just for the fun of it, I've been affliction ever since.

There's still a part of me, though, that really thinks of myself as a destruction warlock. A part of me who holds on to shadow bolt as the core of my damage-dealing ability. And while I have much less of a connection to demonology--I don't actually know my fel guard's name--I do have fond memories of the amazing things I've been able to do back when I had points in Improved Voidwalker. You might say that, in spirit, I'm a 72/73/73 warlock.

However, in body, I'm spec'd 56/0/15, because I'm good at it. I started spec'ing this way because I was told it did the best damage and I wanted to do the best damage. I stayed spec'd this way because I've since become very familiar with the proceses involved in optimizing this spec for good DPS. If, someday, some other tree, either demonology or destruction, is the clear leader in DPS. Then I'll switch. It would have to be a rather large gap, I think, for me to so readily give up the expertise I have with affliction, but I would relish the chance to play with a different aspect of my whole. As you might imagine--I can't wait for dual specs to open still more of the class up to me.

And there it is. I spec affliction because it does good damage, and because I'm good at it. I have no compulsion to cast dots, no passionate love for this particular placement of talent points. Not because I don't love the intricacies of playing affliction--but rather because I love the intricacies to be found in each of the three specs.

P.S. (First person to notice the pun in the post title gets a cookie.)

Adventures in Scarlet Monostary

2009-01-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

I'm often considered weird in my circle of friends for playing as many locks as I do. Not that I've got anywhere near the reputation that my girlfriend's Hunterington's Disease has, but still, I get more than a few strange stares over vent. I could go into some detail about why it is that I enjoy leveling a class that I already have a max level of, and I intend to do so in a later post. That's not what this post is about though, I just wanted to establish that I have a low level warlock in addition to my max level one.

And so, out of my interest in leveling a second warlock, Arnoux was born. She was named for the object of Frederich's passion in Flaubert's Sentimental Education which I was engrossed in at the time that I rolled her. That's not what this post is about though, I just wanted to establish that Arnoux is the character in question, and explain her unusual name.

What this post is about is an instance run. I like to run instances, it's my favorite thing to do in this game as a matter of fact. Grouping together with other people who all have vastly different abilities and specializations to surmount obstacles that they could not individually conquer is very appealing to me. Unfortunately, instance groups are hard to find when you're low enough level that even a level 50 could give you a run-through without breaking a sweat. As such, I'm left to take what I can find--though I did draw the line with the group who invited a hunter when we needed a tank for gnomer.

So on this particular day I was, as I often am, running around doing nothing of great importance while sitting in LFG with the note "Experienced Warlock LF any instance group." I figure that given the one hundred and thirty-three levels of warlock that I've gone through between my three highest level locks, I'm allowed to call myself experienced compared to the large majority of other players looking for a Scarlet Monostary group.

Anyway, I get a tell from a priest interested in doing Library. Apparently on the earlier run some warrior ninja'd the Robes of Doan and he was rather intent on reacquiring the misappropriated garment. Since I was already wearing the thing myself, I didn't have a problem agreeing to pass on it. So I get my summon, and we head in there.

Now, not to say these players weren't fine gents, but it quickly became apparent to me that at the very least, they were somewhat new to the game. Not really a bad thing though--Library could be three manned by a decently competent group at level 30, so a five man group of level 30+ players shouldn't have a problem. And it's not like they were stupid or anything; the tank tanked, the healer healed, and the DPS made sure things died. And, as a nice little bonus for me, I had to put Curse of Recklessness on all the humanoid mobs to prevent them from fleeing and pulling extra groups. It was nice to be in an instance where I was able to bring some utility to the table aside from just summons and healthstones. I don't get to do much of that kind of stuff in instances these days.

The instance started out well. We were clearing groups at a reasonable pace--save for when the tank and healer stopped to have a discussion about whether or not we should put the instance on heroic for better loot. After roughly ten or fifteen minutes of clearing, we got to the houndsmaster. The healer and group leader initially didn't want to do the fight, due to the apparently very high level of difficulty, but all three DPS insisted, and he rather easily assented to our request.

It's a good thing that we insisted too, because upon entering his tiny chambers we discovered that he was already dead! Apparently, the leader had forgotten to reset the instance since last time (an understandable mistake really) and we had just been clearing respawns. Thank goodness we discovered this before wasting 40 or 50 minutes clearing our way to Doan! So we all popped out, reset the instance, lost our feral kitty druid to a never-ending AFK, and started clearing again.

*facepalm*

It is at this point--with only two DPS--that I shouold perhaps point out that the other guy was a resto-spec'd druid in cat form. I know it's silly of me to be all hardcore raider about Scarlet Monestary, but the guy was barely out-DPSing the healer, and half the time he seemed to just be AFKing while on follow. That honestly wouldn't have been such a problem, except for the fact that I *could not* get the healer to heal me during pulls. Being the only DPS in the group is terribly mana-intensive; particularly for a warlock at around my level, when mana efficiency is at its worst. As such I found myself furiously life tapping just to try and scrape together enough mana to batter down the zealous humans without resorting to going meleelock on them. Apparently DPS doesn't need heals, even when they're at about 15% health and the healer is spending 50% of his time idle. Remind me to make more bandaids next time I log in.

About the time we reach the courtyard, kaloo kalay, another DPS is found! A fellow warlock! A destruction warlock. What's more, he seems to be a rather experienced and capable player, which really helps to speed things along. Something I find really quite interesting about low-level instancing is that it is, in general, easy enough that the players don't need to do everything "the right way." And hell, even if the content was hard, most players just don't want to take the time to look up cookie cutter specs or casting rotations for their lowbies.

A Devious Scheme!

Anyway, what I'm driving at is that this lock was really interesting to me. I mean, first of all, he's level 32 and destruction. I'M the only other warlock I know who ever did something as stupid as leveling destruction, and I loved every minute of it. What's more, this fellow had his succubus out, of all things--and managed to do an excellent job picking up a stray mob with a seduce now and again throughout the instance. Not the easiest of feats, effectively CCing with your succubus.

The rest of the instance was relatively uneventful, save for the resto druid switching from cat form to bear form on the last boss. I assume it's some kickass strat that I've never read.

Good Group. Friendlist adds all around. (Seriously, it was fun.)

That's how I raid, whippersnappers!

2009-01-14T01:54:00.000-08:00

Today I'd like to take a moment to talk about level 80 affliction instancing; be it in heroics or raids. In particular, I'd like to touch on what my rotation is, how I settled on it, and compare it against some of the stuff I've heard from other people. First though, I'd like to clarify that I am not talking about the way I do DPS on trash pulls here. Affliction warlocks are, very possibly, the worst DPSers when it comes to doing trash pulls. I do have methods I use on trash pulls to attempt to maximize my damage output on them, but that's a post for another day.

In Burning Crusade, affliction instancing wasn't actually very dot heavy. It was pretty funny actually, I was throwing up two dots--Unstable Affliction and Corruption--on any boss, and only had to worry about keeping them refreshed while I spammed the shadow bolt button. It's no surprise really that once you had decent enough gear, the poor scaling of dots made destruction absolutely mandatory.

In WotLK, things have changed significantly for affliction. Not only have the previously lackluster dots had their damage significantly buffed in comparison to Corruption and UA--but a multitude of new buffs in the affliction tree which affect 'all your periodic effects' has made dot-locks far more dot-heavy than they were in the BC days. Not to mention about three hundred times more confusing! What's more, the introduction of Pandemic means that your dots scale not only with your spell damage, but with your crit rating as well, making it far less likely that destruction will prove to be the definitive best spec in higher tier content.

When I was first coming in to LK, I took my knowledge of BC raiding, and modified my rotation to fit my new best friend: Haunt. First, I'd open with Curse of Elements, and probably hit one of my spell damage trinkets. Then I'd begin my rotation with Haunt, follow it with UA, followed by corruption, and finally shadow bolt until either UA or Haunt needed to be refreshed. This actually worked exceedingly well, and I don't believe I actually felt the need to improve it until I had been doing heroics for awhile.

On the suggestion of a friend, I decided to try out some of the dots which I once scorned other warlocks for using. Siphon Life was the first addition to my rotation, after I noticed that I could get upwards of 500 damage per tick on a dot that didn't need to be refreshed very frequently at all. This gave me a nice little chunk of bonus damage. My rotation was modified again only recently, after I read the excellent post by fallenman on the warlock class forum. After reading it, I did some DPS tests on my own, played around with the numbers, tried to guess what I could expect to see in actual instances, and finally added immolate back into my primary rotation--a position it hasn't enjoyed since shortly after I made it through the dark portal I think.

At present, my casting rotation goes something like this:

[IMPORTANT NOTE: This rotation has been updated.]

0) If at any time, either of my two spell damage trinkets are up, I use them. They don't even have a global cooldown, so it shouldn't interrupt the rotation.

1) Get Curse of Elements on the target while you give the tank a moment to build a bit of threat.

2) Cast one Shadow Bolt, causing the Shadow Embrace effect.

3) Cast Haunt, causing both that debuff, and a second stack of the Shadow Embrace effect.

4) Corruption

5) Siphon Life

6) Unstable Affliction

7) Immolate

8) Re-apply dots as necessary, avoiding clipping (re-casting the dot before it has 100% completed.) Cast haunt whenever it's up--don't worry about clipping it (or corruption, the dot which it re-applies.) If not otherwise occupied, be casting Shadow Bolt.

Bad warlock! Lrn2lifetap!

The logic behind my casting order is thus: First, I get the Shadow Embrace and Haunt debuffs on the boss first thing, so that *each and every tick* of my dots gains the benefits of those effects. Corruption comes next because it is by far the most powerful dot in an affliction lock's arsenal, with UA being the closest second. Unstable Affliction and Immolate go together because they have very similar durations (thus allowing them to be re-cast together) and they go at the end of my initial rotation because their durations are very short, giving me the maximum amount of time to shadow bolt before I need to re-apply my dots.

Now in general, this is relatively close to what a lot of endgame raiders who play affliction do--which kinda surprises me, given that only recently did I read anything approaching an authoritative 'how to.' And that only led me to make one major change to the way I was doing things. However, there are some differences between what I do and 'what is best,' that I feel can be reasonably justified. Furthermore, there are a few things I've heard a large number of people insist upon which are frankly just dumb.

Perhaps the biggest divergence from the norm is the fact that I don't use Curse of Agony. It's not even easily accessable on my casting bar. At first I didn't use it because back in BC, using CoA was enough to get you booted from the raid if the leader knew even a little bit about warlocks. Then I started seeing everybody insist that in LK, it should be in your affliction rotation. I was skeptical, so I did tests. Curse of Elements came out on top for pure damage--which is something that all of the better affliction locks seem to agree upon. The reason that none of THEM use CoE is because--apparently--both boomkins and death knights have some kind of debuff that doesn't stack wich Curse of Elements, and is perhaps even better. I say apparently because I haven't grouped with any boomkin that I remember since level 70, and while I do know a DK who I group with often, I've yet to recieve a message saying 'a more powerful spell is already active' or something like that. Perhaps this is something I'll have to look into soon.

Another thing I've heard a great deal of is warlocks demanding that haunt be the LAST spell cast during the first rotation, rather than the first. The logic of this positively baffles me. Supposedly the idea is that you start with corruption, cast all your other dots, then cast haunt, refreshing the corruption that you started with, and giving you some time to shadow bolt before you have to recast haunt. I can't understand, however, how this minor benefit is supposed to make up for the roughly 1-2k damage more that your dots would have done if haunt had been active earlier. Not to mention shadow embrace! No no, I really don't see it.

Well, this old man has rambled long enough I suppose. So there you have it. My method, my results, and my defense of my results. All of this is of course, liable to change, because like anybody I am always trying to learn and improve. Sometimes my stubborn pride has a tendancy to stunt my ability to learn, (like hell will you ever see me cast Curse of Agony on a boss! >.>) but eventually I do.

I should perhaps note that there are a variety of topics which I touched on briefly here that require a bit more justification than I gave them. Said justification was excluded in favor of doing an entire future post on those topics, rather than cluttering up this one any further.

A Brief Introduction

2009-01-03T21:52:00.000-08:00

Welcome one and all, the the dreary drafts that I, your most humble and decrepit dot-lock, throw up here on the intrawab. Despite my usual long-winded ways (a side effect of getting old you know,) I'm going to attempt to keep this introductory post brief, since I doubt anyone will ever actually read it even if by some miracle this blog becomes both regularly updated and popular.

A little over a year ago, I started a blog called Wearing Black in the Back. The intent of the blog was to give me some place where I could write things, and post them, and show them to people. I wanted to keep myself motivated to write on a somewhat regular basis, without the social net that places like livejournal snare you with. In this regard, Black in the Back has been a moderate success.

I ran into something of an issue, however. I frequently found myself wanting to write about World of Warcraft. Either by putting up entries devoted to my adventures, or by writing about my experiments with my most beloved warlock class. And, given the popularity of WoW as a search term, and the popularity of my girlfriend's WoW blog, those entries invariably became somewhat popular. While it was nice to see people reading what I was writing, I didn't like the image I was accidentally giving myself. People have linked to that blog as 'a warlock blog,' which is manifestly untrue. However, a great deal of the entries on the blog WERE about warlocks. And what's more, there are a great deal of entries I didn't write, because I didn't feel they reached the standard of quality I was trying to hold the blog to, and wanted to avoid giving the blog more of a gaming connection than it already had.

Ergo, after some prodding from my girlfriend, I decided to make this place. If I ever want to write about World of Warcraft, my adventures in it, or the class that I play, they will go here, safely away from the rest of my writings.

And with that said, I'll end this introductory post. Yes--that was short.