MoP Night One

Completely unoriginal title, I know. Everyone else is likely recounting how they did The Dew all night and blitzed to levels uncounted. SO MANY LEVELS. Like a fighter jet made of biceps.

I derped around for about an hour. Went something like this...

First time logging into a new server? Oh yeah, all my local macros are gone. Exit, copy paste, reload. Ah, there they are. Hmm... things still look like crap.

Logout, check "out of date" box (WHY WON'T YOU JUST STAY CHECKED), reload.

Forgot this. Reload.

Forgot that. Reload.

Why is the bar not moving? Alt-F4. Alt-F4. Alt-F4 MOTHA.... screw it, Ctrl-Alt-Del. Task manager, Click-click-click.

Re-login. Hmm, let's uncheck this, and that. Nope, still not loading.

Task manager, Click-click-click.

Re-login. Don't need that or this. Uncheck, uncheck.

Ah, there we go. This doesn't look half bad. What am I again? Right, Warlock. Let's make these bars pretty. Ooh! A quest... Anduin?! Noooooo!

Crap, it's midnight. I gotta work tomorrow. *sigh* Exit game...

So yeah, my first night was a typical first night with a patch. More time spent getting things set up than actual playing. Maybe tonight I'll actually kill things.

Random Points of Interest

I actually played a felton over the weekend. A metric felton. I got dailies, got HH runs, got WG runs and dailies, hit up a few BGs, and even had time to finish up my the last "Classic" achievements in my bucket list (Classic Dungeonmaster and Argent Dawn Exultation).  All around it was time well spent.

I also picked up an addon called Auctionator at the behest of the Fuubaar.  With Auctioneer being out of commission at this time and me putting my little toes in the AH waters to see if I can tolerate it (since it is the best way to make money), she badgered me enough that I finally caved.  I'll be giving in the ole college try this week, but I hear it makes posting relatively brainless.  You tell how much you want to undercut, and it does the rest for you.  We'll see.

I'm actually fairly close to the gold mark I need to get 310% riding on my main toon.  With the addition of the fishing daily to my ICC dailies, I average almost 150g/day for an hour spent.  If I get a valuable reward from the fishing daily (nabbed a Str gem the other day), then the profits rise (sold it for 100g).  It's not the most efficient way, I know, but it's pretty solid for a small daily commitment (and not having to worry about "finding a niche").

The decision to top off my Argent Dawn rep came directly from my runs to finish off the Classic Dungeonmaster achievement.  I'd been wanting to take a day and knock out that achievement for a while, since a lot of those dungeons are going to change.  I'd actually done many of them before, but it was so long ago that I'd not gotten credit.  Stratholme was one such instance.  It's also a big one to farm for a mount/rep.  Thus, Fuu came with me on the off chance of a mount to drop (she gave the mount a good 20 runs a while back before deciding luck was not with her... it apparently drops about 1 in 420 some-odd runs, so she was pretty sure it'd land on her 421st run).  In any case, she had the route down for a quick clear, but what we didn't realize was how freaking efficient low dungeon running is with a Demonology Warlock in tow. 

You see, if you're specced for it (which you should be), you have mobility-enabled Hellfire.  This spell is absolutely killer for old instance farming.  Especially with Fuu on her Priest.  She would toss me a hot and off we'd go.  I'd just keep hellfire up and we'd literally run through the instance.  No stopping.  No looting.  Just running.  Efficient as hell for rep (and getting to the final boss quickly).  It probably took me 15 minutes to run the dead side of Stratholme, netting about 1500 rep in the process.  Hence why I decided to just top off the AD rep.  I did stop to loot the Corrupter's Scourgestones off of the bosses for the rep turn to speed the process even further.  There are 6 big guys that drop a Corrupter stone every time, and each stone turn in nets you about 150 rep (more if human).  Thus, it didn't take long to finish out.

Which brings me back to my newfound love of all things Demo.  I've been spending a lot of time playing in the spec.  Lack of raiding combined with the pure pleasure that is Demo right now has contributed very directly to a marked absence of Affliction experience.  I don't want to update my rotation stuffs until I actually get to give it a good, raiding test run, so I may try to work on my Demo stuff this week.  We'll see how it goes.  A business trip may or may not get in the way.

For now, I wanted to point you at Abi's great post here.  I will likely be regurgitating a lot of what he says and does (and, fwiw, have come independently to a lot of the same conclusions that he lays out).  I'm also planning to take a closer look at Affliction stat weights later in the week.

To wrap up this randomness, I wanted to post a rather striking screenshot.  I took it during my random travelings to get all my dungeons wrapped up in the old world.  I'm sure we've all noticed the new water texture, but have you seen the sun's rays?  And then seen them combined?  It really is quite breathtaking, and really makes me excited for the landscape changes in Cataclysm proper.  If they give every bit of texture a similar facelift... we'll it really will be like Warcraft 2.0.  Check it out.

I'm a sucker for sunsets on the beach.

I Kissed A Raid And I Liked It ('Lock Update)

We got our first chance to raid something last night. What with many of our addons still busted, and most of us feeling like we no longer know how to play our class, we decided to aim low and hit Ulduar up last night. We figured it was a good middle ground of non-faceroll and not too hard (also not requiring us to reset our LK ID).  Thus, I got two hours of very good practice in last night.

The first thing I noticed is that I do feel a little lost in my Affliction rotation right now.  Just enough has changed that it's throwing me off.  That, and the fact that my X-perl is broken, so I'm forced to go to the backup timers in Fortex, which aren't bad, just not what I'm used to.  Necrosis is also broken.  Those were two biggies for me.  The things I miss about Necrosis is just the convenience of the wheeled, pull out menus.  With demon summoning getting a built-in pull out, this isn't such a big deal.  However, I miss the all-in-one buttons for healthstones and soulstones.  I may just write up a macro for these when I get some time.  I'll pass it along if I do.  For X-perl, I loved the bigger personal debuffs with countdown numbers, plus I don't really like how the deault UI handles buffs and debuffs. 

Does anyone have a clever addon that deals with only these things and doesn't replace the raid frames?  I'm not altogether displeased with the out-of-box solution that Blizz provided, and the free colored flares are awesome for raid leading.  Made fight explanation a lot easier (i.e. you stand on the green flare, we'll stand on the blue flare, go team!).  Also, the role check is nice too.

Otherwise, overall I'm actually rather happy.  For the first time since Wrath dropped, it feels like they've made Affliction harder to play.  Not only are you juggling one more DoT (since you can chose both a Bane and a Curse), but you have decisions to make near the end of each mob.  Do you soul swap?  Do you drain soul?  Do you blow a shard to empower your drain soul?

On a single boss, the answer is easy: Drain Soul as usual.  Apart from adding BoA to the mix, your approach should really remain unchanged.  Under 25%, swap in DS for your Sbolt spam.  Make sure to keep your Shadow's Embrace up, but otherwise it's all DS.  When you can begin to anticipate a long "spam session", (that is: when your DoT refreshes are lining up so that you can spend an extended time not worrying about them) that's when it's a good time to blow a shard, empower your DS, and go to town.  I was getting huge numbers doing this, but it was rather difficult to weave in, and you really only get one shot at it on a typical raid boss due to the empower cooldown.  Thus, it's important to choose the spot wisely.

Soul Swap adds another interesting mechanic to trash and fights with adds.  Since I'm glyphed for it, it means that when I use it, I basically make a copy/paste of my DoTs instead of the default cut/paste.  Thus, it's a good idea for me, when a trash mob is close to dying, to make sure I get a Soul Swap in there (it is even if you're unglyphed, though you want to make sure the thing is going to die or suffer the wrath of a RL).  The length of time you "hold" the DoTs is longer than you'd think, and the cooldown is shorter than you'd think (at least how it felt to me), so it really seemed effective at keeping my DPS up on fights where I used to completely suck (read: Razorscale).  It's important to note that, if you're using a typical rotation, Soul Swap will only swap three spells: Corruption, BoA, and UA.  Therefore, I usually start right away with a CotE and Haunt, then get right into S-bolts.  It might even be advantageous (if you've got the AoE CotE) to pop elements on the last target to die so that you're not having to reapply it.  It's an interesting thought I'll have to play with some to get used to the range and such. 

I'm thinking about changing my starting salvo to work better with soul swap.  I found myself trying to get DoTs up on quick dying trash because, thereafter, I could soul swap and get three spells for the GCD of one.  It's a great trade.  Also, I think I want to get used to putting CotE and Haunt first, then follow with two s-bolts to get SE up, just to get in the habit of it.  That way, when I swap, I'll already be reaching for those buttons.  Hence, my starting rotation is working towards something like:


CotE - Haunt - SB - SB - BoA - Corr - UA - Refresh - Spam - Under 25% DS, empower at a good spot


For quick dying trash, I may just try to get my DoTs up first, I don't know.  The goal is to get comfortable with something, so I can spend less time staring at my debuff timers, and more time watching the fights.  I did get a chance to throw in some DSs when the boss was above 25%, and they didn't really seem as effective as shadowbolts.  The under 25% bonus really makes them worthwhile, plus the empowerment makes you see some really huge numbers (I think I got average crits around 30k!  Plus I was critting more than normal ticks).  I just used the recount data to analyze these things, so hardly anything concrete and scientific, but still, it's something.  My most significant sources or damage were my three main DoTs (mostly Corr) and Sbolts, as one would expect.


My damage output appeared pretty decent.  When comparing my normal position on the charts (running with roughly the same group of folks), I was pretty much in the same place: fighting for the top spot.  Mages, S-priests, even Hunters still looked pretty solid.  Ret Pallies got sucker punched it seems, though one of our resident ret pallies seemed to kick it into high gear near the end of the raid.  I think, perhaps, the class has just been made a bit more complicated.  He said he really had to work on being more precise with a rotation/priority systems.  I think I feel like my overall DPS might have been lower than normal, but also, we're hardly running at 100% efficiency at this stage of the game.  Learning is still an issue, so is getting my setup back to where I want it, so I'm not sure where that leaves me in the grand scheme of things.

I think Affliction is in good shape overall.  I worry that across the board we might all have gotten a slight nerf at 80, which may negatively effect raiding.  I'm hoping that the all the new spells and utilities help out.  I'm certainly enjoying mine.  Even on trash/add fights, my DPS is far more consistent, which is pure win.  Not having to worry about shards for things like summoning (both demonic and human), health stones, and soul stones is win as well.  I didn't get a chance to try out the addition of a Doomguard or Infernal yet, but they're on my bar (just had other things on the mind).

I plan to update my Affliction guides within the next week to reflect 4.0 changes.  I've already done some of the preliminary research that I need to do, and I wanted to pass along those links for those of you chomping at the bit.  For the 4.0.1 EJ Simulationcraft data, go here.  I will pull my new pawn values from here, and use that to figure out what the new stats mean to me.  Affliction is coming in a close second to Destro, so it looks like a good balance.  I'm more of the "affliction_drain" spec they have on there, if you look, but we've touched on the fact that I'm picking up things like S&F first because of the group utility it provides.  In my typical ten man group, it's useful.  You may decide otherwise.  Finally,  I've read that the pet comparison really hasn't changed all that much, though I haven't really seen the numbers to back it.  I need to read more of this thread here at EJ.  For now, I'm using my Felpup because he's my fave.  I think the Succubus is a few (like 50) DPS higher.  You should probably be using one of the two as Affliction. 

That's all for now!  I'm going to have to save up to 5k gold so I can buy 310% flight speed.  I'll probably just do a bunch of Argent dailies.  Especially the kill quest.  That'll help me get used to the new-ish rotation.  I also need to give my demo spec a run.  I'll be giving a look at that early next week as well.  I haven't even specced my DK yet.  Oh, and also, I'm missing all of my non-80 toons from my login screen.  The server still thinks I have 5 toons, but they don't show up.  Anyone else having this problem?  I'm thinking a ticket is in order...

A Peek At My UI

I don't do a whole lot of UI or addon posts around here, you may have noticed.  It isn't that I'm against addons or anything, I'm just pretty vanilla.  I find an addon I like and then I stick with it for a long time.  I'm not constantly looking for the latest and greatest as long as the old works.  Thus, I'm probably not very qualified to tell you what is best when it comes to a Warlock UI.

I can, however, tell you what works for me.  I got a comment the other day asking about an element of my UI, so I thought I'd do a proper post on the subject.  I pilfered one of my screenies from the other day and went around numbering the visible addons.  I know a lot of folks have well over 100 addons.  I'm somewhere below 50 and above 25.  Like I said, pretty vanilla.  I also don't like to do a whole lot of set up.  I'm a set it and forget it type of guy.

With that stuff in mind, here's a little peek of what I'm doing as far as a UI.  Look for the yellow numbers...

1. X-perl - My unit frames addon.  It's been around so you've probably heard about it.  I pretty much use it out of the box.  I think the only set up things I've done is to move around things like the raid boxes, pet frames, etc, which is simple drag and drop.
2. Necrosis LdC - A great warlock addon.  I mostly use it for easy spell access.  I love the wheel.  I turn off the messages, but basically use this one as-is as well.  I've also turned of the DoT timer function because I use the big icon that come with X-perl.
3. Dominos - An action bar addon.  Again, minimal on the setup.  Basically I've just dragged, dropped, and resized things to suit my fancy.  I macro most of my used spells and don't do a whole lot of clicking.
4. SexyMap -  Basically a circular map on a square screen bothered me.  This addon fixes that "feature".  Also, it lets the little minimap buttons hide themselves unless you mouse over them.  Kind of nice.
5. ForteXorcist - A nice little addon that has a ton of features.  I basically turned everything off except for the DoT timer and the SS/Summoning lists.  The DoT timer is my backup to X-perl since sometimes X-perl likes to freak out and not display all my debuffs.  Also, ForteX shows self-buffs, so it is easy to see how long I have left on things like my Life Tap Glyph buff or a trinket.  The two lists to left of the minimap are just generically helpful, especially when I was raid leading.  The summon list lets you know who might need a summon (based on proximity) and the "SS" list shows a lot of major cooldowns in it.  It's great for spreading out the Soulstones of multiple 'locks.
6. Fubar is across the top. It is a basic addon that allows you to get some plugins up there.  Conversely, you could get a small bar mirrored on the bottom too, but I turned that off.
7. There are two little plugins on the left side up there: GuildFu and ChannelWatchFu.  These simply display the people on in my guild and in any custom channels I've joined.  You can configure ChannelWatch to display only certain channels if you'd rather not have them all too.  It's pretty simple.
8. There are three plugins in the middle: OutfitterFu, DurabilityFu, and MoneyFu.  Yes, I still use Outfitter as a relic from the time when it wasn't built in-game.  I mean I have all my outfits set up there already, why change?  DurabilityFu auto-repairs my stuff when I click on an appropriate vendor.  MoneyFu shows me some basic info about my spending, like whether I'm in the black or red today.
9. LocationFu - Because sometimes it's nice to know where you are.  Also, the little bar beneath is part of Dominos.  I have it slightly invisible because it's just my crafting stuff.
10. There is no ten, but I wanted to point out that my chat box is just the default UI.  I've split it in two and put the chatter on the left side with information on the right.   The "info" box shows crap I'm not too concerned about and is transparent.  A transparent chat box bugged me because it was hard to read, so I made it darker.  All this can be done through the settings if you right click on the chat box tabs.  Simple stuff.

 There are also several key things I wanted to mention here that are unseen.

• Omen - The ubiquitous threat addon.  Great for it's flashing warning of when I'm about to be squished.  A must have for raiding.
• Deadly Boss Mods - Also a must have.  I'm generally the one who has everything set to announce as well.  That's a hold over from my raid leading days.  Only works if I have assist though.  I've mucked around with it to turn off certain things that annoyed our group.  Like if we said not to worry about a certain mechanic, then I've tried to turn off the announcement.  It has check boxes for that purpose that are pretty self-explanatory, though sometimes hard to decipher (i.e. "Shiny Disco Ball" isn't one of the options for Kinetic whateverthefuck... you have to know the real name).
• Addon Control Panel - It allows you to checkbox on and off addons and then use a /refreshUI to enable/disable them.  Totally useful for troubleshooting after a patch.
• Questhelper - I still have it.  I toggle it with ACP whenever I get lost.  That doesn't happen much any more so I could probably do without.  
• Recount - So I can epeen.
• Auctioneer - This is another one I could toggle if I were experiencing latency issues (on my end) since this is a resource hog.  I generally leave it running though.  I don't scan the AH very much any more, but the interface is nice.
• Pawn - My loot ranking addon.  I define my scales based on the weights given in the Elitist Jerks Simulation numbers.  Sometimes I'll use Nibuca's numbers too.  Other times I'll just make up my own.  It basically formulates gear choices based on your weights, allowing me to easily compare if something is "better" than something else.  Like any calculator though, garbage in = garbage out.

That's it.  Pretty simple.  A lot of these may have other dependencies (like Ace or whatever) and I use Curse to manage them.  I don't have a lot, but I think I make them all work pretty efficiently and don't spend a lot of time tweaking.  It's really nice to be one of the first ones ready to go on patch days because my reliance on addons is pretty minimal.  You can get as complicated as you want, however, as I'm aware there are a lot of really good addons that I don't use.  I like to think that you could just give me a DoT timer and my number keys and I'd be able to play effectively.  That may not be the actual case, but I suppose that's my "minimalist" aim.  My biggest reason for getting rid of the default UI?  It took up too much of the screen.

Affliction Warlock Update And Addon Suggestion

I realize it's been a while since I've talked about anything that's truly afflicted. Between alliance politics and DK PvP'ing, I've pretty much only been raiding on my 'lock. I've been doing a lot of raiding, but there hasn't really been anything to report. I'm still using the same specs, glyphs, and rotations that I have bookmarked over there on the right of my page.

A lot of warlocks have switched over to Destro, and for good reason, but that's never been my bag. I'll sometimes swap over to my Demo spec on add wave heavy fights (like Gothik), but even then I miss my affliction. I've gotten a little better at leading off with a life tap to make sure to get that free buff up early, but otherwise just weave it in as needed. I don't play cleanly enough to insert it in at a specific point in the rotation; just have to be flexible with it.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Ulduar, even though we've started the first few bosses as I evidenced in pictures last week. I can offer one trick for Loot Leviathon: If you're the one being launched up there, pull out your phase-shifted imp before the fight. He won't die when you're doing your superman thing, and he follows you on the ground giving your cyclists a good indication of where you're going to land. Sometimes it's easier to look for the grounded imp than the flying warlock. Hell, you can even mark him. I'm sure he'll love that feeling of importance. Other than that I haven't found anything too tricky yet.

I am playing around with a new warlock-targeted addon called ForteXorcist (or Fortex for short). Lodur over at World of Matticus wrote a post recently about it that brought it to my attention. I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I have to say, there are some really nice features in it. The best is that each feature can be independently disabled and enabled based on what you want. This allows me to slowly work some of the features into my play without overwhelming me right off the bat. It also is nice that I can turn off stuff that is covered by my other warlock addons like Necrosis. I think the most helpful thing it does for me right now is provide a summoning helper that lists all the folks in the raid that aren't near you. This can be useful for warlocks and raid leaders a like.

It also has a fairly easy to use buff/debuff timer that is great to use as a backup to X-perl. I've always like the large, number inscribed debuffs that are part of X-perl, but sometimes they seem to wig out and disappear or stack on top of each other, making it really hard to see. The built-in necrosis timer doesn't really work for me either (it always seems slow). Fortex's timer is pretty good. I'm also finding it helpful that it shows the duration of my self buffs. This is a great tool for watching your life tap spell power bonus.

The cooldown timer is nice to have as well. I find that I use it on both my DK and my Warlock, and there are some benefits to each. So, if you're looking for another addon to play with, I'd definitely recommend it. It seems highly customizable and helpful for anyone who uses spells with durations or cooldowns (who doesn't?).

That's about it from here. Are there any Warlock issues/questions out there that I'm unaware of at this time? From what I read, the Warlock community seems pretty quiet and content right now. We may get a couple of changes with the new patch, but I'll wait 'till it goes live to speculate, and there will always be a few QQ's. However, as a class on the whole, I think we're pretty solid right now. In any case, Blizz seems to be pretty focused elsewhere.

Patch Day!

I'm so behind in my reading it's sad. I'm temporarily laid off for the week, which means 50% pay and all the free time I can handle. However, it also means I've been running around doing all the crap we're behind on. Thus, I've been traveling the last few days and not had the time to keep up on my blogs or even play. That's why Fuu's been helping me out because she's been working as usual. I'll be gone Friday and Monday as well, so don't expect any posts those days unless I can crank one out early and/or Fuu helps me out.

That being said, you're getting a two for Tuesday today as I wanted to post the 3.1.2 patch notes real quick and my scant thoughts on them. So, here's the few that may interest us...

General
* Equipment Manager
o When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
* New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion's Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).

Warlocks
* Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame.
* Fire and Brimstone: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 3/6/9/12/15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25%. In addition, the increased critical strike chance of Conflagrate provided by this talent no longer requires the Immolate effect to have 5 seconds or fewer remaining on the target.
* Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
* Sacrifice (Voidwalker) redesigned: Sacrifices a portion of the Voidwalker's health, giving its master a shield that will absorb X damage for 30 seconds. While the shield holds, spell casting will not be interrupted by damage. 1-minute cooldown.
* Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.

Death Knights
* Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
* Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.

Other
10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs.

As far as Affliction Warlocks and Frost DPS DK's are concerned, none of this really changes how we play. So far, I'm still using Outfitter, though the Equipment manager is cool, it's not as nice as the addon I think. It just basically appears to allow you to save full sets of equipment in a pretty boring manner. I can't really tell the difference between the mounts, but maybe I'm just blind. Patterns dropping off of 10-man bosses? Sweet.

That's about it for this edition of boring patch update. I guess no news is good news for our classes...

Oh For The Love of Love.

Yes, Fuu roped me into doing some "love" quests. Since my warlock refused to go, I took my DK instead. Apparently I was quite lucky with a bunch of the earlier stuff, so I quit while I was ahead, having gotten a couple lovely dresses for her and knowing I wasn't going to be able to do the title being under 80. I think its kind of dumb that these require you to be 80. I could understand 70, but if you're catering to casual players, I know some who aren't quite to 80 yet. Are you punishing people who took their time? This makes me wonder if Blizz has in their master plans how long it *should* take someone to level. Like, a portrait of their "ideal" player.

It's obviously not a hardcore person, because they'd burn through stuff too fast and then be a nag. But this is evidence that it's not an uber casual person either, someone who would take their time to smell the roses (so to speak). I guess that makes sense then, shooting straight down the middle and hoping for the best. You can't please all of the people all of the time and all that jazz.

Long story short, I will NOT be a love fool this year. It's not really manly or warlocky, so I passed. I did hop over to my RP toon to pick up the purple suit for my belf DK. I'm gonna grab him a red pimpin' hat too. Anyone know where I can get a snazzy cane?

And why is it that all of the male's pants in suits look like you're wearing spandex? Are we really supposed to go around pumping our fingers through the air and declaring ourselves to be two "wild and crazy guys"? Is that what they're going for? If so, I'd really like that emote. If not, give me some saggy jeans ftw. Or at least normal, non form fitting dress pants. Frivolous complaint? You betcha!

I did have a point to these random musings. Your nugget of wisdom for the day (or something). If you're into dress up, RP, looking cool, or switching lots of gear, get an addon called "Outfitter". I don't have a good picture of the interface in use, but when running around all you'll see is a nice little entry on your bar (or minimap if you don't use Fubar). Here's the bad pic...

Woot For Tiny Paint Circle @ Top

In any case, the cool part about this addon is it lets you pre-arrange sets of gear into titles like "Normal, Birthday Suit, Battlegrounds, etc" and also lets you define your own (i.e. "Casual"). Then, by just clicking on the bar icon, you can drag down to the title and ,Viola, you have on the set you want, instantly and heralded by a cacophony of bag sounds.

It's probably more useful for a hybrid, but I've found it fun to use on my Warlock as well. One of the things I like doing it ditching my spell hit gear when I run into Clustergrasp in favor of some better PvP type items. It's not a complete second set, just a few choice items. Outfitter makes this a snap.

So that's your nugget of the day. I'll actually be gone the next two as I leave for a coaching clinic. In case you haven't read the short blurb about me on the left, I do moonlight as a high school assistant football coach, which requires going to some clinics and a lot of my time in the fall. If you know nothing else about Indiana, know this: High School football is some serious business. Not quite what you hear about Texas, but pretty good all the same. Friday Night Lights and all that stuff... But you didn't come here for that :-).

Edit: Found this over at TSF and had to link it... In case you were wondering if that damned Ice Stone has melted: http://hastheicestonemelted.com/. I lol'ed at work, which always earns stares.

Pawn Pleas

So at the advice of a fellow min/maxer (much more hardcore than I), I decided to give the addon "Pawn" a try. The basic premise behind this addon is that it allows you to set your own "value" to a piece of gear. You do this by giving each type of gear stat a static number that acts as a multiplier to what is actually on the gear. The numbers get added up and, viola, you get a simple rating system. This should allow you to compare two pieces of gear quite quickly and discern which is better.

The problem for me with using this tool is: how does one weight each stat? I just went in a basically put some random numbers in to see what was up, giving some preference to the stats that I look for in a piece of gear. For instance, spell power and +hit were highly rated, but strength and agility didn't see any type of rating since they're not useful to me as a Warlock. What I'm wondering is if someone knows of this addon and, if so, they also might know where there exists example Warlock values that someone else has taken the time to figure out. I did some basic google searches and looked in the usual places and either missed it, or they don't exist. Either way, help is needed.

Also, if you happen to use the addon and would like to share your personal numbers, please do. If there seems to be interest here, I'll pop my own numbers up for viewing, but be forewarned that they're based more on feeling than math.

Edit: I had originally put this and the following post in one big post, but felt that I wanted to split them up... Thus two posts today! :-)

Edit Edit: Courtesy of Inga in my comments, you can find some good values at Elitist Jerks here. In case you can't find it, they refer to Loot Rank values here. Thanks!

Lewis and Clark Ain't Got $&!# On Me

Cartographers. If you're wondering about the Lewis and Clark reference, its cartography. This is your American History lesson of the day. Louisiana Purchase, go west, you remember that whole story right? Well, besides being explorers, they made maps. Thus, the addon I'm spotlighting today is Cartographer. I was going for clever, but perhaps fell short.

You see, Lewis and Clark would have perhaps made something like the Blizzard default map. It's large, takes up your whole screen, and is just sort of clunky. Technology being what it is... we have made advancements. Cartographer is one of those advancements.

One of the things I hated most about the out-of-the-box map function in the game is that I can't see what I'm doing while checking my map. What if I was keeping one eye on the map and the other on where my trusty steed is leading me (or the person beating on my poor horse's flanks)?

Enter Cartographer, the map replacement addon of your (or maybe just my) dreams. Here at the pics:

Full Screen

Zoomed In

As you can see, the map appears now it's own window. You can drag the window around to a position of your choosing. You can zoom in and zoom out with your mouse wheel. You can drag your cursor around to see other parts of the map. It even works with questhelper. In short, it does everything your Blizz map does... only better, without taking up your entire screen.

It also has some of the dungeon maps pre-loaded with locations of bosses, etc. These can come in quite handy I've found. Usually they don't get the new ones right away though. Also, it can show you the location of guild members in the same zone. There are all sorts of neat tricks I'm sure I haven't figured out myself.

This is an addon I highly recommend and use a ton, if only because it doesn't take up my full screen. Besides, isn't a map an explorer's best friend?

I'm Too Sexy For My Map

For your reading pleasure, I'm going to be sprinkling in a few short posts about the addons I'm using currently to keep my UI clean. I had a big screenie a few days back where I just did a general layout. I plan to reuse that screenie and zoom in on certain parts, just letting you know what they are and perhaps a tip or trick to using them. I don't plan on making long exhaustive posts on how to use them, often times this has already been done. If there are questions though, feel free to ask them in comments and I will try to hit you up with an answer.

First, one of my recent additions can be found in the upper right hand corner of the big screenie re-pictured below.

The Big Picture

Zoomed In

You'll see a nice, neat little square mini-map. My love of this add-on stems from the OCD-engineer in me. I mean, the screen is square, so why the heck is the default minimap round? Aren't maps usually square too? The roundness bothered me, just so much wasted space. Plus all those little bubble buttons staring back at me.... ugh!

Enter the SexyMap addon. I can't claim to have discovered this all on my own and credit must go out to Phaelia over at Resto4Life for the original inspiration. She has a great guide on how to make a tree-friendly skin that can be easily adapted to make something more... evil. If you want a great in-depth look at how to customize the addon, head over there.

For my part, I just use the "Simple Square" preset that comes with the addon. It is what it says it is: a simple square. Go squares!

But Mr. Ful, there are not buttons and no clock! How shall I know the time or tweak some settings?

Do not panic, they will appear via magic when you mouse over the map. This is perfect for me. I don't want to see them 90% of the time, but when I do need them, I don't want to have to hunt for an hour through menus. Just mouse over, and there they are, just where you left them!

Additionally, you can set the clock to be "always shown" or even replace the clock with a display of your coordinates. I've toyed with both depending on my needs. I usually like the coordinates to be on when leveling, but like the clock when counting down to another exciting adventure in Clustergrasp. You can even set the "Always show, never show, show on mouse over" choices for each individual button.

The functionality of the mini-map remains the same. You'll see the same maps, the same quest indicators, the same blinky-target-thingy-when-someone-in-the-group-accidentally-clicks-up-there... you know, all the good stuff. You can still zoom in and out. This just makes your map... sexy. I guess in the world of the OCD enginerd, simple square is sexy? Ugh... I need to get out more.

Fuuuuuuuu!

Dot, Fear, Run Away: PvP Bar Stylings

Sorry for the long, post-free weekend. It was my birthday and Fuu took me on a wonderful trip. Mostly we skiied for a day, and contrary to Fuu's precognitions of what the day would mean for her, she did not die. She does have a couple of pretty new bruises. I suggested that she wear plate instead of cloth next time we ski. What does a Pally know about wearing cloth anyways? The trip was great, but obviously Internet free, so sorry for the lack of posts.

I did get to play a bit once we returned home and was able to accomplish a few things. First on that list was the construction of a PvP bar for Clustergrasp. My PvE bar just wasn't cutting it; I needed different spells at hand. So here are a couple of pictures to get this discussion started. First, a full screenie so you can see how I'm rolling nowadays:
Clockwise from the top left, you can see I'm employing a frame replacement addon, some fubar addons, a map addon, a minimap addon, a bar replacement addon, and a warlocky addon. I won't go into specifics on which ones I'm using, but if you'd like to see such a post, leave a comment. For the sake of this post, we're going to zoom in on my action bar at the bottom (the one bound to the numbers):
This is what I came up with for my PvP guilty pleasure. Keep in mind that I pretty much only do Wintergrasp, so this is tailored with that in mind. From left to right we have:

• "PvP" macro - All my instant casts are here: SL, Corr, CoA; for quick application. I like SL first because it keeps my health up if I spread it around a lot. Corr is the next best thing and CoA is the third. The nice thing about this is it gets 3 DoTs up in <6s.>
• "PvPB" macro - This is just binding two spells to one button: Haunt and Shadowbolt. My s-bolts can be shot with "alt" held down. Good to have at finger's reach.
• "DoTs" macro - This is the same one I use in PvE. It has UA and Immolate in sequence. Again, good to have at finger's reach. I also have my bolts and dots on the same keys I use in PvE so that I don't confuse myself.
• Fear - This has high priority since I'm supposed to keep it up a lot. Since almost every class seems to have multiple ways of being immune or getting out of this, I get pissed quite often because I don't seem to have an equal number of ways to get out of their crap. QQ of the day here. Everyone got so pissed about fear that we got nerfed to hell through added abilities to other classes, yet what can warlocks do to avoid? We have what.. that new portal crap to break out of stuns or traps? We can't blink or run fast. Bah!
• Death Coil - See Fear rant above... need to have close by for obvious reasons.
• Howl of Terror - See DC and Fear above... I have all these stacked on one key for PvE, but for PvP I have the nasty habit of pounding on my keys when I've been stunned, etc, to try and get a fear off before I die. Having these on their own keys is a must for me, for facerolling purposes.
• Drain Life - Helpful to have around
• Drain Mana - I'm hoping this gets buffed, but when I'm OOM and can't anything else, might as well have this one around.
• Curse of Tongues - Remember this one? I sure didn't. I'd like to use this on casters. Good stuff.
• "LT" Macro - This is the same macro I use in PvE that has three spells on one button. Life Tap is the unmodded key, Dark Pact is with an "alt", and I can apply my super cool warlock armor with the "shift" key.
• Rain of Fire - For those times when you really wanna AoE...
  
• Curse of Doom - Not for PvP at all, but because I wish it could be. Imagine being able to hit a couple people with this and having Doomguard pop amongst their ranks. Fun stuff. This button isn't really used, I just put this there as a place holder. I've been playing around with this in PvE too, as it can be useful for farming low level stuff since you can put on all your instants quick and just run around, fearing as necessary. I've been playing around with CoD there and that's why its here.
• What you don't see - You may think "but what about bandages or food, etc?" If you look at the full screenie, you'll see I have some stuff that is clickable above my action bars. This is where my general utility stuff like food goes in both PvP and PvE environments. I saw no need to change this.

So there you have it, my brand-spanking new PvP bar. I haven't been able to run a Clustergrasp with it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Got any questions? Suggestions? Obviously I am by no means a PvP god, just looking to make it fun for us UP (under powered, not upper peninsula) 'locks.

Cast Sequence Update: Carpal Tunnel for 'Locks?

I wanted to make an updated post on how my cast sequence is working for me. To start, here is a rough picture from our recent ZA run showing my entire UI:

You may notice several familiar addons here:

• X-Perl is my frame replacement addon. I love the large debuff icons with timers inside. Also, highly customizable. My one complain is that it does not show "readycheck" feedback.
• Necrosis is my one-stop shop for warlocky needs. Glad they updated this one.
• Dominos is my button bar manager. Very similar to Bongos if you had that one back before the patch. Highly customizable. You can see various self-created bars around the screen. I like the auto-fade options too, because you some buttons are a pain to go dig for, but you don't want clogging up your screen as well.
• Fubar is at the top with various plug-ins. These are just nice to have: RaidFu, MoneyFu, LocationFu, DurabilityFu. I think that's what I have up there.
• Questhelper is hidden. I'm also trying out the atlas map replacement addon. So far I like how it comes up in its own window and has instance maps. Auctioneer is another must that is hidden.
• You may also notice that I've split my chat window in two. This isn't an addon or anything, but I like to have all my guild chat and party chat in one window and then all the other crap in another so it doesn't get so clogged up.
  

That's not really an in-depth look at a UI, but I may spotlight some addons at a later time. There are numerous other blogs that have done that though, so no need to reinvent the wheel. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to see more about a particular addon.

What I wanted to zoom-in on is my main action bar. Last time I just gave you the numbered buttons, but I thought I should add the whole thing:

You can see the same main bar I pictured before, plus the pet bar, and some bars of my own creation. One is a vertical bar on the left containing my banish and fear macros (I need to post my banish macro at some point), along with a summoning button. These are not used enough to get a key bind, but its nice to have them close by. On top is a bar that I use for miscellaneous crap that I feel the urge to use. Food and drink live there, as do my trinkets. You can see the mage-food I popped in there on the far right. Also, newly added: Haunt.

This brings me to the main point of this article. With the rotation macro I discussed in an earlier post, I find it necessary to refresh haunt on its own sometimes. I like to have the Haunt button for that reason. My goal is to start with haunt and keep it up the whole time in order to get the most out of my DoTs. Also, it's nice that it keeps you topped off if you need to life tap. A solid dose of Haunt will keep your mana pool from being exhausted even without tapping your demon.

For trash mobs, when they take longer than, oh say 2 seconds to die (which is hard to find nowadays it seems), the only DoTs I've been putting up (in order) are CoA and Corr after Haunt. Why? Because they are the two instant cast DoT's and the quickest to get me to s-bolts. With things dieing so quickly, its tough to justify DoTting it any further. For some of the tougher trash, I will use a full rotation. In short though, an aff'lock is gonna be hard pressed to eek out respectable DPS on trash mobs.

This makes focusing on the boss more important to salvage our reputations as killing machines.
My generic strategy for a boss fight is simple: get through one solid rotation, then refresh as you can. This is hardly news to any warlocks, and doesn't probably result in the best possible DPS, however it is practical. Even when completely focused and in my "element", I'm finding it much more difficult to keep all my DoTs up. I can't really see losing a DoT or two to make it simpler either. The bottom line is that Blizz has made the affliction warlock's job a very active one.

Is this bad? I don't really think so. It's challenging and I like a challenge. However, it can mean you feel like you're a complete noob when fighting some of the more difficult bosses. I've had occasions where I get lost in my rotation and just start it fresh for the sake of my sanity. This is greatly exacerbated when I raid lead or on fights with a lot of movement. However, the mobility of an affliction 'lock really helps in comparison to other classes on the same fights.

All that being said, I've seen some very respectable numbers on the meters. I use recount (not mentioned above), and have been consistently one of the top few in Damage Done. This means I must be doing a decent job of killing stuff. When you get right down to it, that's what matters: burning that SOB down.

Random thought(s): Does anyone know why that is abbreviated S.O.B and no S.O.A.B? I mean, is "of" really that much more important than "a"? *shrug*. Also, the zombies are getting particularly annoying, some are not immune to fear however. If you're quick upon landing to hit a howl of terror, sometimes you an avoid an unfortunate bite. Also, its funny to watch them all run and then kill them... slowly.

Addon Update

Yes, three posts today. I'm a busy bee trying to get some content up.

In reality there are just a plethora of topics to discuss with all the crazy changes lately, it's not too hard to pound out some posts.

I just wanted to note that it had been brought to my attention by a fellow 'lock that Necrosis has been updated to work with the patch. This makes me happy and I will now go try it out.