warlocking around azeroth…
SIX
days before nerfs
FIVE
attempts
FOUR
wipes
THREE
Gurthalaks
1 offspec, 1 for PvP, 1 DE’d
TWO
days a week for 25mans
ONE
Big Bad Boss Is Dead
I’ve had it with the Caraway Blood Pact posts. I really have. Twitter knows it and now my guild knows it as I logged on in a fury over the first way listed to increase my warlock’s DPS.
WoW Insider is regarded as a news source and a general starting point for players playing new classes. The articles are shorter than your average blogger’s novel, and it looks meant to convey concepts either briefly or in terms that players unfamiliar with whatever the column’s topic is can understand and implement.
While his math and theorycrafting assumptions are generally correct, I feel he presents those concepts in a disastrous way. Caraway applies the advanced maths to newer players who are not into as advanced activities as heroic raiding. It leads to newer warlocks trying to pick up Demo because the highly visible WoW Insider guy says you should and then being turned off from playing a warlock by the steeper learning curve that is Demo finesse.
I’m sure Caraway is a fantastic moonkin, but from his warlock column writing, I wouldn’t know that he even plays his warlock that often, if at all.
I know WoW Insider column articles won’t ever be as long as this post is, but I feel like this Blood Pact post needs a little help. Read more of this post
#4 No Longer Works
I used to walk my felhunter through Scarlet Monastery’s Cathderal by putting him on Aggressive and strolling the grounds, but now that the Aggressive pet stance is gone and Assist took its place, it’s just not the same anymore.
I have to actually go run old raids and kill things with him. Bummer.
#3 City Hide and Seek with Friends
This started with a guildmate of mine, whom I haven’t seen in a while, so I don’t know where he went. He’d turn into a furbolg and /lick me when I was doing other things in Stormwind (banking, AH, standing around looking pretty, etc.) and fly off.
If you emote me in game, I almost always have to emote back. It’s just a thing I do. While it’s easy and more expected to say hello through the various chat channels, I find it utterly cool and it makes me giggly when someone just emotes me randomly.
So I had to find him.
I went looking everywhere, and it’s harder if you’re not in group and don’t get hints other than “in Stormwind.” When we’d do several hunts, one would sit in his/her “hiding spot” outside with the Romantic Picnic Basket, waiting for the other to find them. One of the harder ones I remember was him sitting on top of one of the towers at the front gate that Deathwing clawed. I’d been so limited to looking at the ground or popular rooftops that I forgot to go check the gates.
You can also do this on your own by picking guild members who are already in Stormwind and looking for them.
P.S. Target macros are cheating. 
P.P.S. It doesn’t have to be the capital city; I sometimes do it when I spy guildmates in my zone, and I fly around just looking to say hi or /wave at them.
Friends are also fun for BGs, so have my 100th mount.
#2 Mammoth Mushroom Jumping
Another suggestion by a guildmate after I got my Ice and Grand Ice Mammoths and commented how bouncy and happy mammoth riding feels to me. I love bouncing and jumping everywhere, and she mentioned to try jumping off the tops of the mushrooms in Zangarmarsh. Without a Slowfall and combined with my somewhat fear of heights/falling, it’s exhilarating and fun to see how far I can go, just off the tops of mushrooms.
BOUNCE. BOUNCE. BOUNCE. BOUNCE.
*giggle*
#1 Grizzly Hills Log Flume
I touched on this at the end of Elder Poneria, and I revisited it for After the Raids.
Do you have any “games” you do in Azeroth for when you just need a happy kick to the soul?
This is for Effraeti, who asked for a portrait of my raiding main through an in-game mail. I decided that instead of a forum PM, I can just do a little fiction on my blog and share multiple screenshots and links.
The outfit is my Shadow Sorceress transmog, which is on my raiding affliction gear.
I go just about everywhere with my felhunter, Bheezhem. He’s been my constant companion for years, so I can’t really go anywhere alone without feeling strange or almost naked.
While Pon’s title changes by what I’m currently doing, her “default” title is Poneria the Seeker, as she’s out exploring more often than not.
For land mounts, I love the bounciness of mammoths, though my quick-go-places mounts are smaller so I can dismount through doorways. The Fossilized Raptor and AQ bug mounts are the closest I can get to small and bouncy.
And the setting? My favorite happy kick to the soul is the Grizzly Hills log flume. The roleplay timeline for Pon is after Firelands but before Dragon Soul raiding.
The gryphon touched down at Amberpine Lodge, just a few steps from the blacksmith’s anvil. The warm embrace of Tarecgosa encircled Poneria, and the gryphon stirred as it felt the warmth rustle through its wings. It gave a soft goodbye caw as the warlock dismounted and she gave it a goodbye pet through its feathers.
“There’s something different about you, Seeker,” Hierophant Thayreen said.
Poneria turned at the voice; Thayreen had been almost a shell of a person since Vordrassil was cleansed. She always stood at the edge of Amberpine, gazing at the Hills across the river that flowed from the north. It was the first time the druid had spoken to Poneria since the furbolgs’ corruption was stopped.
“It’s nice to see you feeling better, Hierophant,” Poneria replied. The druid smiled and, for a moment, the warmth spread to her eyes, before she returned to gazing across the river.
Poneria called up a simple travel spell, and her Ice Mammoth, Snorri, came bounding out of thin air to meet her. The mammoth let out a trumpet and reared back on his hind legs as a greeting, and she patted his trunk in a hello. She whispered another travel spell that put a second saddle on the mammoth, one with two extra seats for friends.
“Up, Bheez,” the warlock commanded her felhunter, holding her arms out to help the felhunter into the left seat. The felhunter slobbered and butt-wriggled back a few steps. He took a running leap and jumped into the saddle with footing off the warlock. He was far too big a felhound to be entirely caught by the human. He settled into the seat, hanging his antennae out the sides to smell all the smells.
“No protodrake? Not flying today?” Vana Grey, the gryphonmaster, said.
“Nope,” said Poneria. ”Today we’ll hoof it through the scenery.” She climbed onto the mammoth and slid herself into the center seat. ”To the logging lake, Snorri!”
The mammoth galloped off, bouncy as ever, up the northeast road towards Grizzlemaw. They rode under the great tree trunk remains, and turned left when Vordrassil’s Heart was to the right.
Now they’d arrived at the Blue Sky Logging Grounds. The logging grounds were a sudden and desolate break from the peaceful forest, but the Alliance and Horde had been fighting over the wood supply for years now. Poneria didn’t plan to stay here long, so she tipped a salute to the Valiance Expedition’s Sergeant Hartsman as the trio continued past the Alliance camp.
Snorri jumped over logs on the ground and headed for the sawmill up the hill. Poneria smiled at the wooden aqueduct over her head as they passed under it, but this wasn’t the correct aqueduct for her purposes. The Grand Ice Mammoth forded the river just past the saw mill, and threw off his passengers onto the logs on the water. Poneria jumped logs over to the left aqueduct while Bheezhem swam around the logs, and Snorri took off for more swimming in the lake.
Poneria smiled; they’d be back later, and Snorri loved swimming sessions while his master was out riding the flume. She walked up the spiral staircase to the beginning of the aqueduct. A portly, bald dwarf with a fiery orange beard stood at the top. He wore the blue and gold lion’s head tabard of Stormwind.
“Ahhhhhahaha, another day of riding, my valiant friend?” he said to the warlock, letting out the laughter that dwarves do.
Poneria grinned at the dwarf. ”Yes, please find me a suitable log, Gordun.”
“Ye haven’t been out here much lately, lass,” the dwarf said, working the pumps to move the logs.
She patted Bheezhem and the felhunter took off in a spectacular belly flop into the aqueduct’s water, sliding down until he disappeared off the edge into the logging grounds’ man-made river.
“Our expedition into the Firelands took a long while.” The warlock was exhausted from her guild’s battles in Firelands.
It had taken months to beat back Ragnaros’s lieutenants, until finally they’d faced and conquered Ragnaros himself. Guildmates came and guildmates went, not least of all one of Poneria’s solid friends in the dark arts. That warlock had had enough of the expedition life, she thought. She didn’t know exactly, for he had just not come to battle one day.
Alongside the fight for the druids of Hyjal, Poneria had been chosen to help the Blue Dragonflight pick a good leader to take Malygos’s place. While her heart was in it completely to help out, it was long and hard to keep her own morale up to see Tarecgosa’s life to the end, or not-quite-end as it turned out. Poneria nearly broke at the last steps of binding Tarecgosa to her.
Now, though she was fearful of letting it show, she sometimes leaned back on the dragon’s strength. She wanted to be prepared for the new battles at the Future Wyrmrest Temple, but she wasn’t quite sure how much of her prowess was hers alone.
She was almost more afraid now than before.
The log flume rides were one of the ways she could find her morale in times of tough battles.
“Here’s one now!” The dwarf worked some controls at the pumps to pick a log up from the lake using a no doubt gnome invented claw, and dropped the log lengthwise into the aqueduct’s channel. The warlock climbed on, straddled the log, and grabbed at a cut limb’s stump to secure her seat.
She could still spot Bheezhem’s tail and antennae as he disappeared over the rocks into the river proper. She didn’t worry; she’d still beat him down to the southern face of Grizzly Hills via the log flume.
“See ye in a wee bit!” the dwarf shouted as the warlock took off down the river on her log.
The log fell her face-first into the man-made lake, and she came up while leaning the log to the right to turn for the river. The log flew threw the water with gaining speed and launched off the tall waterfall at the end of the logging grounds.
The log fully almost submerged but buoyantly bounced up to the surface again. She leaned again, this time to the left, and guided the log off the other tall waterfall on the river.
This time the log fully submerged, and Poneria looked up as she always did on this part to see the bubbles float up above her head. The log zoomed back up in a slight leap out of the water before passing under a wooden log-panel bridge. To the left was the road to Amberpine Lodge; to the right, the road to Granite Springs. The bridge behind her, she passed a couple fishing bears on either side and went over another rocky waterfall.
She leaned left, a big jump, right, left, right, left, right through the land rapids, among more bears that were fishing in the river. One bear smacked at a leaping fish as the log flew through the air off a rapids launch. Another bear was chasing a certain felhunter down the left side of the rapids, a pearly salmon wriggling in the felhound’s firm jaws. Poneria laughed out loud at the sight. The felhound made his almost-caught escape over the left side of the rocky waterfall just as his master crested the right side into the Blackriver Logging Camp.
She skirted the Horde and went around the right side of the camp, beside the sawmill and ducking under a load of logs that dangled over the rived. A glance to the left and she caught two antennae winding slowly around to the left side of the mill island. She chuckled and sped on down. Alliance and Horde were fighting on both sides of the river and even on the islands. A duty bristled at her, but the ride wasn’t done yet.
She rode under the tree trunk bridge, where the road led to the Horde’s Conquest Hold on the right and Voldrune on the left. Though she avoided the Horde outposts alone, the tree bridge was a great place to go when she needed to think. She’d sit in one of the notches on the side and listen to the water rushing below her. The birds were chirping here, and the river drowned out the sounds of fighting. She could be at peace amid the chaos for a while.
The log crested another waterfall, and floated down the river towards the final waterfall. It gained speed off the falls, but the river was widening into the Frozen Sea now, and the current was slowing down. The river curved smoothly to the left and she landed the log onto the shore of Venture Bay.
The elite horsemen of the Westfall Brigade saluted her at their watch over the Alliance’s stand at the Bay. As she squeezed water out of her robe, one walked his horse up to her.
“Sarge’s been wondering when ye’d show,” he said to her. Sergeant Downey was in charge of the expedition on the island while Commander Howser tood for the Alliance at the Bay proper. The horseman looked around and said, “Where’s yer pup at?”
“Oh, I’m not sure,” Poneria looked back up the river and shook the water out of her hair. ”About the tree bridge, maybe?”
“Och, ‘e di’n't ride with ye?”
“Nope, he wanted to fish, and stole a bear’s catch.” The warlock giggled with the horsemen. ”When he floats down, send him to me in the Bay, will you?”
“Aye, lass.” The horseman saluted her again as she headed to the central part of the island where honor and duty began.
When he saw Poneria approach, the sergeant turned to her in half-surprise and said, “You’re stopping in between runs?!”
“Gotta find a felpuppy first before I go back up for another ride,” the warlock replied, grinning. ”In the meantime, I can knock a couple of orcs about.”
“Aye, you can do that. Let’s start with ten. Your pup oughta be back by then.”
We did 6/8 on Wednesday night, which was fantastic considering we’re fresh off holidays and recruiting, and we haven’t done more than half the instance in one night in a while, I think. We also breeze through Blackhorn now; he’s not nearly as much the wall he was when we were still figuring it out.
And then we had some rough start to tonight’s Spine progression, but we kept it together and killed the jerkface! We even had two Tendons go down in one shot, and the 3rd just didn’t want to give up the last 100k.
That brings us to 7/8 in 25man!
Buff? Pbbbbbbbbbbbbt. We don’t need a stinkin’ buff.
And now, off to do things like eat the other half of my dinner and write some things.
P.S. While UR isn’t actively recruiting at the moment, you can still /cheer us on and look at my purdy kill pictures.
There’s a point, I swear.
I was trucking along in my trial of Scrivener, writing essentially two posts on why I thought the latest Blood Pact just didn’t do it right on its topic. I say two posts — it started as one, but as I typed more and more I felt like the topic was actually two things. There’s survivability in PvP and the dynamics of healing, both self-healing and actual healer-heals, and how that all works with your team an objective.
Then there was a reprise of Cynwise’s DPS Pick, which I absolutely love to do, so I was going off on tangents on which Mists talents would make great warlock flag-carrying tanks and which would make great chaos-bringers & distracters. Because, because, because random battlegrounds are just not ever about the pure one-on-one that a warlock might lose. Not even Arenas are like that. And I just felt like Caraway totally missed the point of not only affliction warlockery but the point even of PvP.
And even then, I’d had a page of just why I’d prefer to use Howl on resources BGs like Arathi and why I’d prefer to have a stun (Shadowfury) on CTF BGs like Twin Peaks. I’m personally a fan of chaos-bringer playstyle — I don’t really care for Ironman but Not In My House would be SO COOL for me to have — and I was just on a speeding train about all the things Caraway missed in his 1500 word overview of the talent calculator.
And then I set it aside. It’s in a draft status. I’m not Cynwise; I tried to make a posterous to get me to write more, but the more I write, the more I want to post it on Fel Concentration. It’s almost like my style of mains and alts are applied to my blog, too. I love my bear druid, I’ll play her all day long, but there are some things I just don’t give a shit about except on my warlock.
Anyway? The Point?
The point is I took a break, because I hadn’t even separated out the two posts from each other — it’s just one giant long text file — and it’s full of my note-taking typing of not even full words forget full sentences. It has to flow, I have to find pictures to break things up, mainly because I realize even I don’t like plowing into a blog article that is just nothing but text for ages. It works for books, but not for really long articles unless you’re already quite into it.
That was a really long sentence, and rather an example of the kinds of “full” sentences I had in there. My name is Poneria and I am long-winded.
Anyway? The Point?
The point is I came back today to finish writing it, and I opened up my feedreader to start jogging my mind a little. And there was Cyn’s Five Rules of Field Notes.
And I had to stop for a moment.
Rule the First is my posting resolution goal — 10 posts per month. Resolutions make me feel guilty, so I’m going to flip the perspective and go for the word goal, because I’m less likely to beat myself up about it if I miss a month of goals (I’ll still be disappointed) than if I miss a month of resolutions. But my goal, since I’ve been writing single-digit monthly posts for 2010 & 2011, is so I get my writing out there, even if it’s not “perfect” or “important.” I saw that even after I’d cleaned it out once, my Drafts folder had as many files in it as my Published one did, and that felt wrong.
Fear is a big thing in my life whether online or off. Anxiety is probably the closer term, because it’s less that I fear something and more that I’m agonizing over bothering to punch that fearful thing in the face and tell it to step aside because I’m walking this way.
So here we go, first draft. Though, it’s much easier for me to talk about something that relates to me, to talk anecdotes, in a first draft and hit publish, than it is to construct a counterargument against what I thought was a poor post and make sure that I covered all my bases and am not about to make a complete fool and/or ass of myself.
Rule the Second probably won’t happen for me very often. I am a constant rewriter — mid-sentence, mid-pararaph, mid-word, whatever. In fact, that sentence just got typed for about 2 minutes before I decided on a satisfactory wording. I am very much that person on the other end of and IM chat who sits there with the “Poneria is typing…” message across your screen for five minutes, only to have it end as “so, how was your day?” If you’re in the room, I furiously type when I’m on a speeding train of thought, and the rewriting just hops on with me.
But I hardly ever do the whole rewriting thing after I finish. Once I finish, it’s trash or drafts or publish. It looks like I go back, because I’ll do a bare-bones outline half the time and then write it not-in-order, but once I finish a section, it’s fucking done.
Rule the Second also revealed a twinge of jealousy that I knew was there. If those are Cynwise’s first drafts… My first drafts are terrible and discombobulated. Where can I find zen like Cyn has for writing?
Rule the Third has already seen some action. Last post, for example. Completely silly thing to post about, a bank in Theramore and punching raptors, but there you go. It’s the kind of things I find cool in WoW and why I love leveling among other exploration things.
Rule the Fourth, too, has seen a bit since I gave up around high school on writing to constraints of words. It’s my blog, I post wordy things. You can always bookmark it and come back later if you want. Or you can just stop reading halfway through and never come back, in which case I should get a little better at writing because I clearly can’t keep you entertained for post, let alone a book or a column.
Rule the Fifth … I tell my inner editor to fuck off all the time, but I always come mentally and emotionally crawling back and sit under the menacing parental finger-pointer that is my inner editor telling me to fix this and fix that and “No child of mine would ever walk out of this house wearing that.”
Anyway? The Point?
This article was originally titled “PvP as an Exercise Against Anxiety,” as that’s what I set out to publish (by taking a cue from CFN), as it’s one of those blog posts that hangs around in my brain and pokes its head in everyday to play.
Anxiety is a thing I struggle with all the time. It’s the reason why every month I disappear from Twitter for a day or two because I didn’t take my laptop with me when I went home for a 1-hour session with a counselor.
Where I talk about things that frustrate me, like not being able to leave my apartment because my roommate and her boyfriend are cuddling on the couch. How it’s a great mental & emotional burden for me to dodge the awkwardness of passing an intimate session on our couch — our, mine & her’s & my other roommate’s — which my roommate is totally free to use for whatever she wants, just like me, and how I’m just awkward in normal social conversation, forget dodging the obvious interruption of cuddling by a third party… How all that battles me in my mind to create an almost physical-feeling barrier between myself and my apartment door than I just don’t let my apartment until they go out to dinner or end up falling asleep.
Or, how Twitter knows, I’ll endure hours of somebody’s Charlie Brown Teacher Wahm Wahm Wahm voice through my bedroom wall in the wee hours of the morning before I finally dig out my Benadryl which puts me to sleep in a matter of minutes…rather than get up and tell the guy to take a hike because I’d like to sleep in the space I pay to sleep in.
Anxiety is a thing I have and do. Offline it’s fairly more obvious, because I’ve been online for half my years now, and I’m far more comfortable in the land of text than I am in the land of spoken words and body language. It’s far more obvious when I’m in a new online place than when I’m in a place I’m comfortable being, like my guild. Online you can also hide more easily than you can offline. It’s far easier to become someone else for a day online.
Writing is cathartic for me. I really ought to do it more often, but I’m so lazy at bothering to keep an actual journal for longer than a raid lockout. I think in monologues to myself all the time, especially those moments in which Anxiety is beating Myself up for something or other, why be redundant and keep it in a journal? But the truth is, I’m pretty sure I’m just terrified of admitting things to myself that I don’t want to admit. The few times I’ve written in a journal, I’ve either started crying at conclusions I drew or have thought I come off as a whiny little girl who belongs better with a bedtime and worksheet homework.
Writing gets my thoughts together. I have pens and pencils everywhere and index cards wherever I don’t have my actual spiral notebooks laying about. Most things, when I have a problem, I write and draw them to death, until I’m done letting it all out, and then I usually leave it to collect dust in a folder or actual physical dust in my room.
As I was typing about Cyn’s five rules I figured writing is a sort of Offline PvP. Constructing arguments about whatever topic is at hand is certainly my thoughts and reasoning versus this other guy’s thoughts and reasons. It’s also a personal struggle for me, the obvious and cliched inner editor versus the quiet and frankly terrified self esteem.
The Point
The original post was PvP vs. Anxiety. You might say I’ve strayed far from that so far. I’d say I never left it. PvP in World of Warcraft is you and your toolkit versus other people and their toolkits.
PvP for me is also an exercise against anxiety. Leveling & exploring are pleasures for me. Raiding can be a pleasure and it can be a struggle, depending on what side of the raid leading or DPS-standard-holding I’m on.
PvP is a struggle for me. Obviously, it’s a struggle in pure finger mechanics, as I’m not a top PvP player by a long shot. I am that very C swear word “casual” of a PvP player. But finger mechanics can be learned. PvP is an emotional struggle for me and some days it boosts me and some days it’s completely draining. One of my prideful faults is being right or being good at the things I do, because ever since being a kid I was always just magically great at what I did. It’s a classic fault, but there you go.
Dying is a thing that doesn’t happen in PvE unless You Done Fucked Up, and it took a while for me to accept dying lots in PvP. I’d sit an angry ball of frustration at the GY and would already start tripping over my anger when I finally rezzed, which led to more stupid mistakes and more dying. Snowball.
So I have to tell myself to chill. At first it was guildmates who knew that when I’m happy I’m fun to play with, so I just needed to chill and they told me so. Now it’s more internal. The GY visit isn’t a punishment anymore. It’s 10-45 seconds for me to take a solid breath, like the ones in band class, and to calm myself for the next storm of finger mechanics. It’s the time I can have to myself, the introverted break I get for just me, before I have to dive back into the crowd and do social mechanics like following or breaking away from the crowd.
There’s also the BG chat thing. Maybe it’s part of social anxiety or maybe I’m just actually paranoid half the time — I’m not a psych expert at all — but I always feel like I’m being watched, particularly for when I’m about to fall pretty damn hard on my face. It’s like tiptoeing everywhere, frantically making sure I’m 100% right about what I’m doing, and even then, when I am great and good, it’s not satisfying, because the performance fatigue almost always kicks in immediately. Pon’s good, but she’s always good, so pulling ridiculous DPS is nothing to write home about. Megan’s good at math, but she’s always good at math, so acing a test is nothing to write home about.
BG chat is the cesspool of epeen and people pointing out your every mistake. Everyone points out the people fighting on the road, or the guy who’s wearing mostly raid gear with no resilience. BG chat is an exercise for me to not get upset over what people think of me. Previously I had to either turn it off or PvP with friends, because I couldn’t handle being yelled at when I was alone. Even if I wasn’t the reason they were yelling, it felt directed at me.
I can queue solo and play with BG chat on and finish feeling like I did my part with the calling incomings and thanking healers and like I did something useful rather than feeling like I was a scrub failure. Maybe it’s trivial for you, but that’s a big triumph for me. It doesn’t happen as consistently as I’d like it to eventually — I still refuse to PvP during the evenings without guildies, because that seems to be when the Alliance really digs into the bullying and self-attacking.
I still need to work on my smack talking, though. Typically, when I start talking smack about the teams, that’s my anxiety showing. And by smack, I mean posturing smack, not legitimate pluses and minuses of the teams. That smack talking is me in defensive mode trying to shift the failure off my shoulders rather than owning up to it.
The Point?
The point is, I don’t think PvP is ever really about will I survive the rogue’s stun because I have five million Corruptions streaming Siphon Life heals to me. I don’t think it’s about whether I have the ability to peel off melee at any time I want because I now have all the CC that Mists is forcing me to choose between. I agree that it’s about the 1v1 encounters, but I have a different sense of the person I’m fighting against.
I’m fighting against me.
So I didn’t like the Blood Pact this week because it felt like Caraway is saying be OP or go home in the land of PvP. It felt like he was giving up because he feels affliction’s healing is being nerfed and our CC is being nerfed, so clearly our survivability is being nerfed. I feel like he thinks finger mechanics are all that matters in PvP, when I believe that finger mechanics are a very small part in the PvP land.
So there, I’v had my say about what I think the purpose of PvP is. It might take my arguments in a different direction than Blood Pact was aiming or even able to go in, but there we are.
I’m going to take a break, log in and play a bit (maybe PvP!), and then visit those posts I was writing about yesterday. Maybe finish them, but I feel like I need to explore each a bit more before that happens.
…that there’s a bank in Theramore now?
I don’t remember this guy being a bank before, so maybe it’s a Cataclysm thing. I almost feel like he used to be a quest giver?
Well, anyway, he’s now a bank, and the chest beside him is a guild bank. He’s up with Captain Vimes in the Foothold Citadel.
Edit: brilliant thinking by a guildmate of mine:
@slowpoker Wait, so they put a bank in Theramore, just so they can blow it up? :P
—
Jamie (@Effraeti) January 15, 2012I’ve also been beating up raptors by hand to capture them, since Dragonwrath and my Mastercraft Kaluak Fishing Pole both one- or two-shot the raptors.
This post is brought to you by the letters L & Z for Loremastering Zones while the nonexistent warlock posts are brought to you by the letters P & E for Procrastinator Extraordinaire.
Edit: The reason I didn’t know there was a SB: UA is because there isn’t one and the Wowhead comments aren’t updated. GG.
Recently, the guild chat conversation turned to beginning a warlock. One of my guildmates started a new warlock, and had said earlier in raid that she could never get one above 20, to which I jokingly said I’d teach her.
So now we spent the next 20 minutes or so talking warlock stuff in guild chat.
She’s only 12 or so right now, but we got into what exactly soul shards and soulburn are and do. She had a warlock back in Wrath, but it’s different now in Cataclysm, especially the whole soulburn mechanic. As she put it, you have to relearn it all over again.
So I hit “Save Draft” on my glyphs post, and put it aside as I pulled up a fresh blank post. Let’s talk about soul shards and soulburn. Hold onto your cowls! Read more of this post
Inspiration from WoW Insider.
First there’s the DoTs. Lots of DoTs. I like spreading them around.
I love multidotting. I don’t really love multidotting for the damage — though, that’s great, too! — but for the activity you do. It’s a common complaint of people leveling DoT specs for the first time that stuff takes too long to kill. You cast a DoT and then…you wait for it to die.
Well, if you pull one mob at a time, and you’re sitting around with a full health bar, you pulled too less. Affliction is almost made for chain pulling. Spread the love around town! Affliction warlocks are like delusional, demented care bears. Haunt Hug Everybody!
I love the fluidity of health and mana on the affliction warlock. It’s even more so than shadow priests, who just return a tiny AoE bit for damage. We can burn our health away and then get some back. We can burn some mana away and then get some back. My mana bar is my health bar is my mana bar.
It also provides a great tandem with healers for me, and I feel like I respect them a bit more than other damage specs. Other damage specs are merely being kept alive; I’m being handed more fuel for my resource bar.
I love the Fears. Especially in battlegrounds, oh man, I love the Fears. I really don’t care about being an Ironman or being the lead demolisher. I love being the chaos-bringer, the distracter, the assist in battlegrounds. There’s nothing more satisfying than running into a horde of Horde and fear-bombing all of them off my FC.
I love the various curses, and will be sad when they all get combined into a few. It makes sense, game-mechanic-wise, considering I have Exhaustion and Tongues in the same macro anyway, to make them into one Enfeeblement in Mists. I love putting conditions on people and watching them squirm their way out of it. It’s just “Not Fun” to watch a curse disappear off in a dispel.
I love using mobs to spread my DoTs. It’s almost like Warlock Chain Heal. Almost. Soulburning a Seed and watching the mobs (or players) pulse in numbers as Corruption is now everywhere is supremely satisfying. Jinxing one player and seeing the debuff elsewhere makes me smile. Soulswapping immediately is almost like personal Pong.
I love the felhunter because I believe it fits most with the affliction warlock, roleplay-wise. The imp shoots fire, the voidwalker protects, the succubus plays off someone’s lust and emotions, the felguard is a demonic brute, but the felhunter is a predator of magic. They seek it out and they seek to consume it. They use your own magics against you.
What’s the difference between a shadow priest and an affliction warlock? Roleplay-wise? I think shadow priests are focused on the mental self; they have so much Mind things, anyway. Although faith for the Light (or whatever Light you have) is generally assumed from the heart, the defectors come from the mind, most often anyway.
Affliction, on the other hand, deals with corrupting your soul. Affliction deals with fear and curses and…afflictions. What’s an affliction? What does it mean to afflict someone? I think of afflictions as eating away at you. They might start as something not very powerful, and they might not do much damage to you in a single instance, but over time, they wheedle you down until you can’t overcome them.
Afflictions eat you from the inside out.
It’s that satisfaction I get when I die in a boss fight but my DoTs are still going. Or when I die in a battleground and get a Killing Blow notification while I’m a ghost. Or when I’m doing Tol Barad dailies and have 5-6 mobs beating on me. I don’t really care that I’m not dominating now.
I’ll just kill you later.
Affliction to me is playing with your food. Oh, you’re going to die, there’s no doubt about that. But I’m going to twist and torture you before I snuff you out with a DoT tick.
Why kill you now when I can have fun now?
You know you’re an affliction warlock at heart when there’s people (or mobs) screaming about you, but it’s an otherwise pleasant day, and you start giggling. Not laughing — laughing is for destro. Destruction warlocks also love chaos (it’s why we love them, too), but they end up ruining the view in the process. Charred Forsaken is just not delectable. (Okay, Charred Tauren is delicious.)
Your mirth is in proportion to your damage dealing. Destro locks have great thundering laughter in spurts. Aff locks giggle endlessly, and sooner or later end up rolling on the floor an hour later about it. It’s good for the lock’s soul in the end.
There’s an almost childish levity to it. Giggling, but also the playstyle of affliction. Demonology feels bulky and RAWR SMASH. Destruction feels fully loaded and firmly locked on the ground. Affliction is frolicking among the fears.
I love affliction.
About 5 levels out is when I start looking at the optimal things for max level for my currently leveling character. ”Optimal” for raids, though half my toons are stopped at “good enough” for 5 mans.
80 is also the start of Cataclysm questing content, which is where you are introduced to the factions of reputation and can start leveling while gaining rep. So the zone progression is important. My tanking toons go to Vashj’ir for Earthen Ring rep, and everybody goes to Hyjal for at least the front half of the zone for the Molten Front quests. I do Deepholm every time (love it!) and then Uldum (maybe minus the Jones lines) and Twilight Highlands (for Crucible & the end quests with good 325 items).
80 is when Cataclysm started for everybody a year ago, so you’ll get a few extra cool tools for your spell toolbox, but you should have most of if not all of your spells by this point. So you now have 5 levels to seriously practice with it.
So at 80, I start looking ahead. I get the glyphs and talents down so I can hit the ground running. I have been using spells for whatever the proper priorities I need to be doing, and I start looking ahead to plan my gear.
My second warlock started as a means to an end; the guild bank wants an 8th tab, and one of the race/class combos we need is a dwarf warlock. Then I figured I could do a brand-new 85 warlock, since I haven’t kept my old questing gear on Pon.
Chobole may be rerolled several times over and I’m fine with that. For now, he’s my guinea pig to redoing an 85′s gear list to LFR. I know you can craft the PvP gear and get into LFR easily, but I’m going for the “proper” way of PvE gearing, which, if you want to raid seriously, you’ll need to learn anyway.
Chobole is 78. Whoops, he’s 80 now. Halfway into 81. Questing is so much fun! :3
Time to start gathering the pieces for writing about the 85 warlock.
Affliction
I’m an affliction warlock first. Always have been. I just love it to pieces. And I want to share it with you as we move into Mists.
If you want to do demonology or destruction, the EJ threads are great places to start. Jmickey & Zalakwe do an awesome job of keeping the warlock threads up to date. Just be warned, EJ doesn’t bump threads, so there may be times like between BlizzCon and 4.3 where no new posts on the spec threads cause them to “fall off” the default 1 month thread view.
I have made for myself a list of warlock resources, ranging from blogs to news columns to sim tools.
If you want to do affliction, then maybe I can help. Or, at least, entertain.
I figure I will start with the talents and glyphs, since those are easiest to think about & correct. Then maybe I’ll touch gear and gear priorities, since that’s probably next easiest. Then, the spell toolbox, because, oh boy, I can go for miles on the spells.
I’m not sure if I want to do a learning-rotation spells post or not. There’s always that hour I spend at the training dummy with someone’s blog & the EJ thread open whenever I have to learn another spec’s buttons. Likewise, some people have said affliction is hard because of the DoTs, while I think it’s probably the easiest warlock spec to pick up. The dummy practice period is also when I get my addons mostly sorted our, and I pay attention to what’s proccing for my Power Auras.
So I’m toying with the idea of writing up a personal & general dummy session on affliction.
New Resolution?
I’ve said a lot in the past about things I want to write about but aren’t sure to and end up not doing. One of my personal WoW-related resolutions is to just write about the things I want to write about, because I still have my Self Defeater far too much far too often in my head.
Sleepy Bear Has Nothing To Do With This Post.
Another of the secret resolutions was to add more pictures to my posts, since I have so many in my screenshots folder. I’ve found I like doing this. Even when the picture has nothing to do with the post. Like Sleepy Bear. I might be going overload on this post, though.
I love questing. I love affliction. I love hilariously-executed boss kills that should have been wipes. So expect more of that to come around, and if it doesn’t, I’d appreciate someone sending me a group invite to go kick Self Defeater ass & collect esteemed loot.
As a starter point, I want at least 10 posts a month. And yes, the past two years have been spent with single digits per month, if at all, for the most part. I figure I can start with a baby step rather than something unwieldy or vague. I can also plan drafts and things for when my depressions & anxieties crop up in a council fight with Self Defeat.
I want to stop being so perfectionist about my writing. I want to craft brilliant posts like Rades or Cynwise or Vidyala, but it’s not going to happen if I don’t post often. I wasn’t a great warlock overnight, and my past self needs to realize I lost my writing fu a few years ago when I *shocker* stopped writing. I need to start whacking the keys. I need a training dummy session with the keyboard.
So I apologize if the crap starts flowing. But my goal is first to find a flow and then refine it.
Learning 2 Ret...in my mostly Prot gear.
Click for more info about UR
-- Guildmates' Blogs --
Restokin by Lissanna
Treebound by Maerdred
WTS Heals by Juvenate
Effraeti's RP by Effraeti
Malchome's Mind on Gaming by Malchome
Light's Wrath by Amowrath
Derp Kn00b by Aesadonna
comments