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.

Succiu's Guide to Reforging for Warlocks in 4.0

*Updated to reflect the hotfix to Searing Pain. 

       Reforging is a pretty daunting project, and it is easy to get overwhelmed with all the choices and throw your hands up in the air. Breathe. It's not that bad!

        When you go to reforge your warlock's gear, your goal is to turn less useful stats into more useful stats. Approach it in the exact same way you do the rest of your gear, think about the order in which stats affect your DPS. You want to start at the bottom, turning your useless stats (spirit, excess hit) into your highest performing stats (mastery and haste) and turning over a good deal of crit as well. The devil, of course, is in the details. You cannot reforge an item to have more of a stat already on the item. The best reforging candidates, then, after the aforementioned empty stats, are items that do not already have your best stats on them, like haste. Start with hit, and then treat each item individually, from the bottom up. Scaling is still a little up in the air, and it can vary by spec. But here is the basic priority order you are looking for, based on the numbers we have.

Affliction: Haste > Mastery > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit. 
Drain Affliction: Mastery > Haste > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit
Destruction: Mastery = Haste > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit 
Demonology: Haste > Mastery > Crit > Hit (above 17%) > Spirit 

(Note on scale factors: Subject to change! There was a hotfix to Searing Pain sometime on Wednesday night that seems to have halved it's base damage and reduced it's spellpower coefficient, making Incinerate more efficient. Incinerate scales much better with Haste than Searing Pain did, and so Haste is now more valuable than it had been for Destruction and Demonology. Keep this in mind when you reforge, and re-reforge, as we will likely see a lot more number juggling in the near future.)

       Here are some basic guidelines to get you started.

Before you go to the forge:

• Re-itemize. First, change out your spirit gear. Lots of warlocks have a piece or two, and those of us who were Demonology have more than that. If you have any comparable alternatives, switch them out. Your spirit is now an empty stat. If you don't have any comparable pieces, that's okay. Spirit is a cheap source for reforging.

• Re-gem. You are hitting every socket bonus now. With haste roughly equaling the damage per stat value of intellect, it is still always worth it to gem full Reckless Ametrine's in all your yellow sockets. In a blue socket, you will want to gem Veiled Dreadstone. The reason for this is that you can forge your hit elsewhere if you go over the hit cap, but here you get to pick up the socket bonus in the bargain. You are aiming for 17% hit now. If you are lucky, you will easily be over the hit cap before reforging. Pre-4.0 Affliction locks will have the most trouble with this, and may even end up reforging to pick up a little hit. Any Spellpower/Hit gems you were using before are purple now, so make sure you replace them when you look at your socket bonuses.

Across all three specs, your first priority is to become hit capped. If you find yourself needing to reforge to reach the cap, this is the priority order you should use.
 

Now that you are done with that, here is the priority order for reforging when are above the hit cap. Go through and reforge your pieces in this order.

When you reach the hit cap, stop. You may end up juggling the last piece or two back and forth to get the most out of your hit reforging. Don't be scared to spend the gold to try it a couple times, or get out a spreadsheet and do the math yourself. (26 hit rating= 1% hit). Then follow these guidelines for your remaining items.

       Unless you are insanely over the hit cap, you will probably end up with an item or two that doesn't need to be reforged. It's tempting to think you should reforge everything, just because you "can,"  but you don't. You can't turn those stats into anything more useful. You need that hit right where it is, and why would you turn your most useful stat into something less good? If you are using haste trinkets, like Dislodged Foreign Object or Charred Twilight Scale, leave them alone.

      There might be cases, when you are over the hit cap, where you backtrack to trade stats with another item. Maybe you are sitting half a percent above the hit cap, but your only remaining gear has haste and hit on it. You can't reduce even one piece because it will take you below the hit cap. But maybe you have some spirit gear that, instead of forging mastery, you can forge enough hit that would let you reforge the hit on one of your other pieces into a greater amount of mastery than the spirit was giving you. You'll be able to see these patterns as you finish reforging.  

       The reason that Mastery is a better stat for Drain-Life Affliction is simply that more haste, for affliction, usually just means more Shadow Bolts. When you aren't casting Shadow Bolt, the increased shadow damage from your Mastery will give you greater returns. Drain Life Affliction does not yield as high numbers as Shadow Bolt using Affliction, but it has great potential for higher survivability.  
         Finally, lets look at Destruction. Destruction values mastery and haste about equally, with mastery having just the slightest edge. You will want to pick up as much mastery as you can, without turning over any of your haste. 

       Above all, don't let reforging intimidate you! In a couple months, all of this will be second nature, but for now, just take it step by step to get rid of the things you don't want first, and work your way up the ladder. 

Free Write on WhyWarlockAreAwesome

         Warlocks are just awesome. 

         Maybe other classes are fun to play, I dont know, but I get a little shiver of excitement everytime I think about putting up my Affliction rotation. I really do. Its not like I am like "ooooohhhhh pressing buttons" I just go "man, yes, this is like, something I am good at and I know exactly what to do and why I'm doing it and wow would you look at those numbers and those stacks of shadow embrace and wow. And its so great, because I have these spells that I cast, and they are SPELLS. Like haunt, where I send a soul that I have collected from another victim into my current target and it bounces around inside him like a firefly in a glass jar and then it steals his life force and brings it back to me, his pain giving me new life. Man that is so cool. I have always thought Haunt should cost a soul shard for lore reasons, and then of course you get it back and all, but like, its a soul right? I should send that soul shard away and then get it back. And then wow, unstable affliction. It just has a great name. I am just sending the power of the nether into my enemy, all that dark energy. And unlike curses which are instant bursts of spite and malice (as they should be) unstable affliction requires concentration. It is deliberate.
 
         That deliberateness is really why I like the warlock class. I'm not a machine gun that stands and pewpews. I am carefully crafting a long, slow, tortuous death in pain. Can you imagine what it would feel like for shadow to burn? How it must hurt not your flesh but inside, inside your bones, inside your soul. Like smoking hot metal. Like screaming when your throat is raw and the pain is so much that you dont even think anymore it is just what you are, not sharp pain, not point-source, but everywhere and everything that is you.

          Man. And so casting those spells is like...you are thinking about it. You are winding up. You are cranking the handle on the rack. You are paying attention.  You are planning your next move. You are very much conscious and in the moment.

          And those spells arent going up willy nilly, oh no. You have goals. You arent a mindless robot, you are a surgeon. You know you want to see that shadow embrace. You are running towards a boss, raging in battle formation. He sees your tank, and that devious lump of meat is going to beat on him. You know what your job is. You are lifetapping, breaking into your shadow powers, mouth watering. Running, your demon, bound to you by blood conquest, hate, and long loving companionship ready to do your will. He feeds on your thirst and charges. Your comrades in arms are already on him, bloodthirsty and swift. You claim your ground, back from the melee where you can be in full command of the whole room. You wind up your first pitch, warming up, ready for the big smackdown. WHOOSH. Shadowbolt. Then  you swiftly and surely reach deep into the void for one of the poor souls that you own and blow it towards the boss with white hot mindforce. Smoldering, you throw him your unstable affliction, which is both your dark shadow damage, and too the fever of hate. Breathe! Fill him with corruption! Curse him with agony! You can feel Earth and Moon making him more vulnerable to your spells. You know that he is afflicted, tick by tick, with the full weight of torture from every direction. That power is affecting you too. You are up, in a totally different mental state. Wind up again. Hit him with a shadow bolt while he is down. Hit him again. Gasp a breath! You can feel the soul in your power is almost exhausted, it wants to return to you. Get ready to catch it in one hand and send out another in the same heartbeat, the two passing each other in mid air. Hit him again! Again! Watch for it, wait for it, keep the full weight of your arsenal on him. Your companions are feeding you. You know that they have poured their strength into you before the fight, made you stronger. You know that they are sharpening your focus, and feel a sharp ping every time you score a critical blow. They are urging you to cast faster, all together now, spells flying and clouding the air, a controlled fury that is so, so addicting. You can feel those moments, those powerful moments of eradication, when you hammer the boss with shadow bolts and turn and grab refresh your spite faster than ever. You can feel the sacrifice another warlock has made, sharing in his demonic pact that has weakened him, and bled inspiration into you. 

          It is not a warm feeling. It is a burning feeling. But not hot, not uncontrolled. It is a starburst inside your chest that radiates into your fingertips and out your ears and lifts your brow and the corners of your mouth and halts your breath and drinks in the world. Everything is in sharp relief, you didnt know your mind could be so clear or so good. Execution. Perfect. It feels good.
          
         And then the scent of the kill fills your nostrils, and all at once that desire to batter him into oblivion is gone, and you want to savor this fight, suck it down and swallow it. You go crazy with lust and with your power on him, you drain his soul. Nothing is so satisfying, it is four times more painful to him than your spells alone, and you know that to keep that feeling, you need to hold onto your own control, and you do, you do. And as he gets ready to die you feel your excitement rise, a satisfaction that yanks that last drop of life out of him and when it does, the stream of light connecting you rocks, and for the merest moment you trace his outline of death before he yields the dead, dry, fragment of his soul into your keeping. It is done. The lust fades, and you are yourself again, the power your brothers imbued you with seeming so much weaker after what just passed.

          You know the rest of your group is crowding around his corpse. Shiny possessions of a dead man are all well and good, but what is that hollow pride of ownership to the feel of battle? In time, you know you will want it, in the calm, ordered city of Dalaran you will want that worldy status of yes, I was there when he died. But in this moment, denied the indecently wanton state of being, you grasp instead the fleeting smugness of a raider, a feeling that is simultaneously hunger and fulfillment. You are never sated. But you know that you cannot begin that wind up anew just yet, you are too hot, you need to come down. And you do. You chase that high again and again, and because it is the feeling you crave, and not the death, you will never find fulfillment at the end of raid, an expansion, none of that matters, only that you get to do it again, and do it well.

          But that is why you play a warlock. It is the cycle. Where is the pride in the machine gun firings of a mage? Where is the existential soul deep connection when you pierce him with arrows? Where is the dark pleasure in the pure energy of a lightning bolt? You cant even think about bashing his skull with a mace, or slicing into his kidneys with a dagger. Where is the magic? You like the wind up, the maintenence, the constant affirmation of "I know what to do next" and perfect differentiation between a fight and a kill. A beginning, a middle, an end. And again. Of course again.

Carpal Tunnel

So Loremaster has morphed from "The Project of a Completist," happily tracking down every experience in Azeroth, to "Boremaster," slogging through piles of unread quest text, to "Soul Killing Needle Head of Anguish" in which I start to bleed out of my eyeballs after staring at the computer screen for 72 hours.


This three day weekend saw a heroic leap from 440/685 quests in Kalimdor to a whopping 650/685 in Kalimdor. Please watch that I don't crush my headset when I faint.


I am at the point where I have been the lazy way through every zone, and I am combing Everyquest and Lightheaded with a magnifying glass looking for missed quests. They are usually drops from rare spawns (The Harvester) or ones that are not unlocked without another quest chain. It is looking like I am going to have to do the Onyxia Attunement chain as well, which while I'm sure will be pic, sounds long and painful. Running back and forth from Winterspring to Tanaris 800 times has also been a treat.


Still, I am in the final stretch and should be read to move on to, oh crap, what next weekend?

Untalented

Okay so Scofield and I are terrible at um, writing stuff. This has a lot to do with Scofield being all "Guild drama!" (and crying) and me being all like "Sleep is for the weak!" (and being weak) and also with gnocchi. Gnocchi has a lot to do with why Scofield and I are bad at getting in vent together. We are eventually going to write more SUMMARYZ of The Guild, but in the meantime I will say this: "Game On" is not funny.

I've been watching the warlock talent trees develop, and a lot of my concerns have been downsized as they start to resemble things that follow the laws of logic. Kind of. In playing with them and putting together specs I start to get annoyed that I have to have silly talents like "Mana cost reduced" and "damage reduction." I'm a lean, mean, pew-pewing machine, frown on that noise. While the trees are much better designed now, I am finding myself inversely frustrated with them. In any given tree, the number of points you are forced to invest leave you with only one or two things you AREN'T picking up.

This has led me to the conclusion that I hate talent trees. 31 point, 71 point, whatever. People poke fun at "cookie cutter" specs, which generally are what most people end up with because they give you all your damage increasing abilities. No brainer, right? Then there are utility specs, where you enhance your survivability or utility in ways to ensure you will lose the least amount of damage, which can be fun to balance between tier levels. Like a destruction spec, where you need to pick up Replenishment AND Shadowfury, so you drop a point in Backlash. These kinds of specs won't really exist in the 31 point trees. You will pretty much already have everything you want for any given situation, and you won't have to make these kinds of choices. Not that they were perfect in the 71 point trees (Try getting anyone to pick up Improved Healthstone. You cant even think about it unless you are Destruction.) but there was still a lot more variability, and I for one liked taking advantage of that. Now it is pretty much, well, everything. So what's the point?

I'm not advocating for no talent trees whatsoever, exactly. Yet. Customizing your spell enhancements will be great while you are leveling. But at the end, you aren't investing points so much as you are just training the skill set for the spec you have chosen. Accessible to new players without the help of a spreadsheet? Yes. But specialized? No.

I'll be back soon, Scofield and the funnies in tow, to make fun of Codex being an e-slut.