Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘warlock’

Remember how I talked about the painfulness of being at the low end of the dps meter?

I modified Paynne’s spec a bit to a variety of the Felguard/Emberstorm spec, put Incinerate on that easy-to-reach key where I used to have Shadow Bolt, and dove head first into the world of raiding again. And it payed off!

Paynne is at the top of the DPS chart!!

Admittedly, this is on one fight only, and one that is very good if you are an aoe’ing dps class, but look at the stats from the last time Paynne was there:

In these 2 weeks since that first Gluth fight she has almost doubled her total dps output and went from a measly 2300 dps to more than 3900.

Granted, she has had a few gear upgrades, but mostly her boosted dps is a result of me sitting down and actually looking around for a spec that would suit me for both raiding and solo play. This spec is allegedly not putting out as much hurt as an affliction one, but it is also allegedly a lot easier to play since you don’t have to keep track of a lot of different dots ticking down.

This is how I play it:

Trash packs

Dot a mob up with Curse of Agony and Corruption and send the Felguard in with his Cleave enabled, empowering him whenever it comes off cooldown. The shadow damage ticks from the dots will proc Molten Core, and you rain fire down on the mobs’ heads. See all the pretty yellow numbers pop up on your screen!

Bosses or single-target trash mobs

Dot dot dot (no, I am not referring to Mamma Mia) the big ugly mofo with Curse of Agony,  Corruption and Immolate and start spamming him with Incinerate. Send the Felguard and empower him as often as you can. Like before, the dots will trigger Molten Core, and take care to always keep a fresh Immolate up for the damage increase to Incinerate.

See, not very difficult! :-)

So, the raiding is going ok with this spec, but how about the solo play and questing?

Well, since this spec leaves Paynne with only rank 1 in Mana Feed and completely devoid of the Fel Synergy and the Demonic Resilience, her Felguard is a bit more fragile when he is taking on the mobs as a tank instead of a dps, and she needs to Life Tap and  feed him up a lot more often than before. It’s not a huge difference in questing speed, and the increased raid damage makes her more than willing to live with it :-)

Last night we ran a guild 25-man, we went to Obsidian Sanctum with our regular raiders and a few guildies who usually don’t raid that much. After a few tries we downed Sartharion with one of his drakes still alive when we engaged him! Cheers all around!

The battle for Wintergrasp was in progress so we couldn’t stop by for a quick VoA run, so we decided to go to Naxx.

At Naxx we realised we may be running with a healer or two too much, so I offered to swap to my warlock to save the other healers a respec cost and because I thought it would be fun to take my little gnome for a raid spin.

And so I did and so we headed off into the Construct quarter.

Paynne has mostly been having a nice and quiet levelling in Northrend, questing with her trusted Felguard and her gear and spec is maybe not the best for a 25-man raid.

Thus, I did have a feeling that I was not topping the dps charts (well, more than a feeling actually, I knew I was not putting out any really big numbers), but I tried my best, blew my cooldowns, kept Curse of Elements up to help my fellow raiders dish out more hurt, and I only died twice (except for our wipes on Thaddius, but even then I was amongs the last ones standing), once on a trash pull before Thaddius where the huge ugly mofos wandering around there kept knocking me back, and once on Frogger.

I felt I was holding up good enough.

At the end of the evening I had gotten me some badges and an achievement, and I logged off a happy warlock, having had a good time with my friends all night.

And then the following morning I checked the WWS reports.

It was kinda painful.

The other warlock in there with me, he had done 50 % more damage than me on all boss fights, on some even double my damage!

For someone who really does not care that much about dps charts, I was surprised at how much seeing this actually hurt. And how useless I felt – although my dps was more than zero and thus better than nothing, and although I kept telling myself that someone’s got to be at the bottom of those lists, I still didn’t like that it was me!

But at least I could put the WWS reports to good use, I compared myself to the other warlock, checked what spells he were using and how much they hurt for, and tonight I will check out my spec. I am not that fast on the uptake all the time, and Paynne’s spec has served her good for a long time, but maybe it is time to do some spring cleaning! And she could definitely use some new fancy spring clothes, I think I will send her shopping or maybe levelling her tailoring so she can make herself some new pretties.

Because the next time I take Paynne for a stroll through a raid instance, I will be prepared!

Sir, yes sir!

So last night I was in Karazhan again. Was a fun run, we started at The Curator and worked our way up to the Prince with only a few minor glitches.

The Curator dropped a token for the imba warlock gloves, but I passed on them since I was wearing my own imba gloves, complete with sparkling stuff and a nice enchant, while my fellow warlock in there only had some blue crap on.

Anyways after the big ugly mofo was down my newly be-gloved fellow meddler in the dark arts asked me about Curse of Doom crits during the mofo’s Evocation.

Well, truthfully, I am usually to busy to check how much damage I do while in the middle of a fight, but after everything has settled down I am likely to head over to WoW Webstats and take a peek at my performance and see what things I can work on to improve my damage output, especially since I recently went Destro and am still trying to work out how to handle this fiery spec :-)

So I headed off there and looked. Idd, the Curse of Doom does some very serious spike damage when it goes off!

20 902 damage!! Too bad it is on a 1-minute timer, eh? ;P

I am a sucker for macros to save key space, and my warlock Paynne has quite a few of them for her most common spells.

I know there are addons and stuff like that to help out with many of these things but I like fiddling around with the macros, trying to make them work :-)

Banish
#showtooltip Banish
/focus [harm, modifier:shift]
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/cast [target=focus, harm] Banish

You target the mob you want to banish and click the macro while pressing down SHIFT to set your focus to this mob and banish it, all in one click. If you just want to set the focus to be prepared, if you are not ready for the pull yet or something, just jump after you have clicked the macro to cancel the spellcasting. Click the macro again (without SHIFT) and you will Banish the focused mob, regardless if you have any other mob currently targeted, like the skull mark perhaps.

The white glow around the Infernal portrait shows that it is my current focus and pressing my macro will keep banishing him.

When the mob dies, the focus is cleared and you can chose another focus if you like.

This macro also works well when you want to Enslave something, (provided of course that you replace the Banish with Enslave Demon in the macro ;P)

Pet Attack/Follow
Have you ever had that horrible sinking feeling in your gut when you see your minion storming up to a mob with his/her axe/whip/whatever raised, pulling way too soon and maybe even wiping the group/raid? And you realise that you have accidentally clicked the wrong key, perhaps left-clicked instead of right-clicked when you were being a good warlock and turning off your Felguard’s Cleave to not risk breaking any CC?

If you ever experience something like that, this might be useful to you: I have mapped the Attack and Follow commands to a macro, and placed it on my Q key for easy access.

/petfollow [target=pettarget,exists]
/petattack [target=pettarget,noexists]

Press Q once to attack, click it again to make your minion come back.

DoT
Paynne also has a macro for the most common DoT-sequence that she uses when grinding or farming

#showtooltip
/castsequence reset=combat/target Immolate, Curse of Agony, Corruption

When the target dies the castsequence resets so you always start with Immolate on a new target (or whichever DoT you want to start with).

(For some more warlock macros see my earlier post Demonic macros)

So,I couldn’t resist anymore, I specced my little lock back to demonology…

I use her too much for questing still to be comfortable with that destruction build I tried. Also, I heard that for a destro build to be really effective you need an awful lot of spell hit, which I didn’t have (always good to find some scientific reasoning to back your decision, eh?)

Anyways, I like the demo spec and I just luuuv my Felguard, he’s so protective of my little gnome (well he is more than twice her size so she can hide very well behind him).

Paynne has by far the most spells possible to use at the same time than any other of my girls (or maybe I just haven’t discovered all the other girls’ spells…ah well) and I use a lot of macros when I play her.

I have scoured forums and other venues of information to get my macros the way I want the, and I have shamelessly stolen snippets from anything that I thought I could use…so I figured maybe I should share some.

Summon Minion [Edited 2008-03-05]
Since I usually quest with my Felguard out this is a very convenient macro:

#show Fel Domination
/run PetAbandon()
/stopcasting
/cast [nocombat, nopet] Summon Felguard
/castsequence [combat] Fel Domination, Summon Felguard

[Edit: the bold text above (nopet) added to make the macro work as intended]

The macro is read from the top down. The first line shows if the cd on the spell Fel Domination(15 minutes) is ticking.

What this macro does is the following:

If your Felguard is out, in our out of combat, one press on this macro will dismiss him.

Why is it useful to dismiss your pet in the heat of the battle, you might ask. It is useful only if you plan to use your Fel Domination (you know, the spell that lets you summon your minion in 0,5 second – whooosh and he’s back) and resummon him, because when you do that, he will come back with full health/mana and all those buffs he had on when you dismissed him! If he dies and you Fel Dominate him back, he will come back unbuffed (although still with full health/mana). Takes a bit of concentration to see what how your minion is getting damaged and keep track of his health as well as your own, and get that key-clicking to work, but if you manage to pull it off the difference between unbuffed and buffed might help save the day :-)

The next line checks to see if you are in combat and if you are not you summon your Felguard the usual 10 second way.

The last line also checks to see if you are in combat, and if you are you cast Fel Domination on the first click and Summon Felguard on the second click.

So, to sum up:
Pet out – click once for dismissal
No pet and in combat – click twice to summon
No pet and out of combat – click once to summon

Pretty nifty, eh?

Paynne and her darling Felguard in the big city.

Seduce
Yeye, I am a warlock, we have a way to cc humanoids, and its called SEDUCE. Ever heard of it? I think many people, including warlocks, have not. It is a tricky thing to pull off correctly, and since it relies on a spell channeled by a succubus who might as well be made of glass, it has a big risk of gettin fubared unless you have practiced it before trying it on in a multi-pull in a 70’s instance.

/focus [modifier:shift]
/cast [target=focus, modifier:ctrl] Curse of Shadow
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead]
/petpassive
/cast [pet:Succubus, target=focus, harm, nomodifier] Seduction

We have a hunter in our guild who is one of the best trappers I have ever seen (well we have many bit this particular one I have played with a lot), and when I tank with him in my group I never worry about the mob with the blue square on. I know he will take care of it most assuredly, trapping, kiting, whatever’s needed, while at the same time dishing out an enormous amount of damage on the other mobs.

I want to be able to use my succy seduce like that hunter uses his frost traps. I am not even close at the moment, but I will get there (I hope).

This is how you use the macro (btw if you choose the red ? as the icon for you macro it will display the correct icon for whichever spell you have in it):

You target the mob you want to seduce and then you hold down shift while clicking the macro. The mobs portrait will get a shiny border so you see that you have set it as focus correctly.

Now you can target any other mob you like, your focus will still be set on your chosen mob. When the pull starts, I usually hold down ctrl and click the macro to cast a Curse of Shadow on the focused mob to lower its resistance to the Seduce and to get it running in my direction, to me and my succubus next to me, and then I hit it with a Searing Pain to get me high on the mobs threat list. After that, click my seduce macro, watch the mob start spouting hearts, and switch target to the skull.

Now I blast happily away on my nuke target pressing my seduce macro about every 15 seconds or so (I have improved Seduce) to keep the focused mob in the seventh heaven. The Curse of shadows and the Searing Pain is usually enough to keep the mob from going for the healers or my made-of-fragile-glass succy the first times the seduce is reapplied.

Paynne and her hot succubus out on a Seduce practice run.

I have some more nice warlock macros that I will post at a later time, now I better post this or I will keep editing it forever ;P