Warlock Power Auras in Cataclysm

     I've ranted in the past about my love for Power Auras, and it's an affair that has only deepened since the expansion.
     Power Auras can be configured to give you the information you want in two different ways: in can give you information about what you are already doing, or it can remind you of what you should be doing. You can ask it to tell you if you are wearing a fishing pole, or if you are not wearing a weapon.
     As much as I love the glowing effects of Power Auras, I think that using Power Auras as an uptime tracker gets cluttered far too easily. It becomes too difficult to digest all of the information it is throwing at you and discern what is missing. Instead, I use Power Auras to keep track of my priorities: a clean screen means that I am doing everything right.

Spell Cooldowns for Destruction

     Many of the Power Auras I use today have not changed much since Patch 4.0. I think using Power Auras to track Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, and Shadowflame are great training wheels when you are just starting out with Destruction. The constant reminders can become a little overwhelming, however, and as you get more comfortable with the spec you might choose to turn these alerts off, or at least turn the opacity down. You are going to have a lot more important things clamoring for space!

     I also created brand new alert for Shadowburn, because not only does this spell have a higher damage per cast time than Incinerate (at least during the brief window it can be used, of course), it can also help remind you to use the ability on adds to regenerate soul shards, which will in turn give you more opportunities for instant Soul Fires, which you need to proc your 8% increase in spell damage. The aura for Shadowburn is set to activate only when the spell is usable - that is, when the target is below 20% health, and the spell is not on cooldown. You do this by combining the Shadowburn aura with a conditional aura tied to your target's health.

Improved Soulfire Tracking

     Prior to Cataclysm, I was happy with the auras I used to track Improved Soulfire. However, once the ability was no longer dependent on the health of the target, I decided to set the aura to alert me when it was not active, instead of solely tracking its uptime. Equally important was tracking the amount of time left on the buff.

     To do this, I separated the alert into two seperate auras: one very large aura to notify me when the buff was not active, and another to track the amount of time left on the buff. Using two auras gives me the information that I want without compromising optimal visibility.
     One of the reasons it is important to track the amount of time left on the buff is to ensure the best use of Empowered Imp procs. The in-game auras are excellent at letting you know when the proc is available, however I added an additional timer to keep track of how long the proc would last. When the Improved Soulfire Buff is fresh, using an Empowered Imp proc to refresh it immediately does not give you much additional uptime on the buff. By using the proc at the last moment, you can maximize the amount of time it refreshes, and reduce the number of hardcasted Soulfires you will need.  

Soul Swap

     This may not seem like a necessity to many, and indeed if you don't enjoy using glyphed Soul Swap to roll DoTs on two targets simultaneously, it isn't all that helpful. I generally use it when I play Affliction on the twin dragons, as it is one less thing to keep track of. You already have your hands full keeping track of the unforgiving, rubber-band like movement on this fight and punsihing debuffs, in addition to your regular DoT uptimes; when you add-in watching those timers tick on two targets, including the all-important Shadow Embrace, well, guessing when Soul Swap is available is just too much. It's an arbitrary line, but hey, that's where I'm putting it.
     This aura is set to activate only when you have a focus target set, which I will do when I intend to use this spell heavily. While I'll still use the spell occasionally in other situations, I can generally assume it is available, and the loss of visibility is more trouble than it's worth.

Hand of Gul'dan

     If you have played Demonology at all since 4.0, you are familiar with the pain in the ass that is Hand of Gul'dan. This is a really cool spell that has not recieved a lot of love from Blizzard. In the early hours of 4.06, the successful modification to the duration of Immolate, meant to make refreshing with this spell easier, was in fact broken when you used Hand of Gul'dan to refresh Immolate. What a headache.
    The effect is working as intended now, however, and gone are the days when you needed to hover over the Hand of Gul'dan button to make sure Immolate never fell off. Even so, it's almost always a good idea to keep track of the cooldown on any spell you use regularly.

Decimation

      I wanted to keep track of Decimation in two ways: I wanted to know the very moment it could be procced, and I wanted to know when the buff was up, and how long it was going to last.
     To do this, I first created a standard aura to track the buff. Then, I created another set of auras to monitor the boss's health, and alert me when we were in Decimation range, but the buff was not active.



Damage Cooldowns

     An aura I did ultimately decide to change since 4.0 was the graphic for Soulburn, which I didn't find was large enough. The purple also tended to blend in too well with the atmosphere in the Bastion of Twilight. I've changed the color to a brighter pink, and made the effect more striking.

     In the same vein, I added a new alert to let me know when Demon Soul was available. Like the Shadowflame graphic, you don't want this one to be too vivid because you will often be saving it for specific burst phases, and you don't want it to get in your way when you are biding your time.

     Finally, any warlocks using the four piece set bonus will want to know when the bonus damage to Fel Flame procs. Remember that this proc will disappear on hit, and not on cast. What this means is that because there is often a travel time involved, and personal damage modifiers are applied on cast, you can squeeze in two and sometimes even three casts that will benefit from the proc.




Other Useful Trackers

     The final aura I'll share is one to keep track of your self buffs. This is to remind you to activate Fel Armor, Soul Link, and our new damage-sharing buff Dark Intent. These three auras are color coded and will be visible when you are not self buffed.

 You can find the coding for these auras behind the cut.

Power Auras and Destruction in 4.0

UPDATE: I have written a new and improved guide for Power Auras for Cataclsym. You can find it here. 


I've been having a lot of fun with the new Destruction playstyle. So much fun I'll probably dual spec both PvE Destruction and PvE Affliction. I've heard the new rotation described as "Whack-A-Mole" style button mashing, and that's not entirely untrue, but turns out I have a soft spot for arcade games that involve jumping up and down and banging things on the head. Warlocks got so much in this patch, we really have had to relearn how to play our familiar specs. My first night in ICC, I was putting out huge numbers, which is great, but man did I feel clumsy. I can't count the number of times I fat-fingered an extra Incinerate and let Corruption fall off. No matter what your DPS looks like, raiding is never fun when you know you were messing up. World of Logs will tell the whole story, man, you sucked at keeping up Improved Soulfire. So, I spent the next afternoon getting hot and heavy with my UI, to help re-train my trigger instincts. 

I am a big fan of Power Auras. I love everything about it. It is a great way to keep track of your procs and cooldowns without making your eyes yo-yo back and forth across the screen. I am thrilled that Blizzard finally got on board and implemented it's own version, particularly since its textures are more vivid than the classic Power Auras. I think the two will end up complimenting each other beautifully, and plan to keep using both. Here are the ways I have set up my auras to keep my DPS output at its best.

DoTs! Hey look, Destruction isn't just a mage with an imp anymore! It is actually worthwhile for us to cast DoTs instead of spamming incinerate! While I will actually be using Forte Xorcist to keep track of DoTs (there's only so many auras you can keep track of!) it's important to know what DoTs you have up. For Destruction, your priority order is Bane of Doom, Immolate, Corruption, and Shadowflame. Yes, that is right, Shadowflame. More on this later.

Cooldowns! This is where I get really excited about Power Auras. Before 4.0, I had never bothered to set up auras for Destruction cooldowns. You didn't really have a whole lot going on to distract you, it wasn't all that necessary. Now it is. Your cooldowns in Destruction are a big deal, it's important to get them off again right away. I like to mix a sound (shotgun was my preference) with color coded images that remind me of the spell. You can use different sounds if you think you'll react better, but I found it more distracting to try to remember what sound meant what since most of the sounds aren't all that intuitive. The important thing is that it gets your attention, and colors are much easier to associate. (Green = Chaos Bolt for instance. Doorbell means...uh, huh?) For cooldowns, I am sticking with Power Auras rather than the new Blizzard functions. While cooldowns are important, they need to take a backseat not just to procs, but to the other stuff going on during a fight, and so I liked that they were less flashy. Here is how I set mine up. 

• Conflagrate: 8 second cooldown. (Glyphed.) Huge percentage of your damage, big priority. You want this aura to be loud, huge, and obnoxious. Do not miss this cooldown. I like using a flat orange graphic to remind me of the tooltip icon.

• Chaos Bolt: 12 second cooldown. Nuke. Again, you'll want a shotgun sound on this cooldown, but you don't need it to be as big a graphic as Conflagrate. I use a bright green graphic to make it easily identifiable from Conflagrate.

• 

• Shadowflame: 15 second cooldown. DoT. The cooldown is longer than the DoT. Remember that you need to be within 10 yards for this to hit the boss. You will also want to pick up the Major Glyph that applies a slowing effect. For this spell, I wanted a softer effect because there will be lots of times when you can't be in melee range to cast it, and you need the graphic to be small enough that you don't feel the need to disable power auras. I found pink to be perfectly appropriate.

 
• Soulburn: 30 second cooldown. Personal DPS. You will definitely want to know when this is up without having to check your bars, but you don't want it getting in the way when you are fighting. While this is a big deal for your DPS, the use of this is strategic and you may not always want to use it as soon as it is up. I put this at the top of my screen in purple, with a different sound than my spell cooldowns. Note that when you soulburn, spells that can be affected will glow. Be careful what casts you are queuing up before you use this, you don't want to be caught auto-casting searing pain when you meant to use soul fire.

For all of your cooldowns, make sure you check the boxes for "only in combat." You won't be all that worried that Chaos Bolt is off cooldown when you are doing laps of Dalaran.

Procs! Procs are especially important to keep track of as Destruction because so much depends on using them correctly, especially in conjunction with your soulburn usage. Blizzard has built a few of them in by default, and I found that those are the ones I want to keep using.

• Improved Soul Fire: Cast Soul Fire at +80% for 15 seconds of +15% haste, 15 second cooldown. For this, you mostly just want to keep track of how much longer the effect will last...so that you can put it back up, of course! I didn't want any more orange graphics cluttering my screen, so I just went with an easily visible countdown on Power Auras and a small glow effect. You may want to set up a sound or other notification for the boss's health dropping below 80%, at which point you can no longer proc this effect. 

• Empowered Imp: Instant Soul Fire! While not a high proc chance, you will want to know about this lovely nuke right away, every time. Luckily, Blizzard anticipated your need and built in a great aura for you. Not only does it pop huge, shiny, fiery brackets (so easily distinguished from any of our other fire-related auras!) it also...wait for it...makes your soul fire button glow! This is a spell it would be impossible to miss. I love it. 

It's up to you whether or not you make auras for backdraft and your doomguard/infernal. I didn't. Backdraft, while it increases you damage, doesn't change your priority order. And your pets, while amazing in their own right, have such LONG cooldowns that they will either be up or not, and you don't really need reminders.

You can copy the coding for my power auras behind the cut.

     I have only been playing WoW for two years, and I have been raiding seriously only half of that time. I thought I was hot shit when all I was doing was pugging, but pushing hard modes and standing next to members of Elitist Jerks at the toil-err, Bank Teller brings home the fact that there is always someone who does it better than you do. Or at the very least, you can push your limits further. Maybe your DPS is great, maybe your guild wipes the floor with whatever boss you meet, but there is something very satisfying about going over your logs the next day, seeing what you didn't do perfectly, and figuring out how to get better.

Make sure to check out my new and improved guide to Power Auras in Cataclysm.