A Rant About Raids

I've been dealing with a raid issue lately, but this isn't a normal raid rant. Unlike some raid rants, I don't have anything to bitch and moan about concerning bad tanks, healers who couldn't heal their way out of a paper bag, or DPS that just doesn't deliver. Why not? Because in the raids I'm doing, I'm the only one there.

Or at least, I would be, if I could enter a raid solo. I'm trying to work on the Zandalar Tribe faction, and as you all know, the only way to get rep with them is to do Zul'Gurub over and over and over for the rep, coin drops, and bijou drops. However, finding raids to do the instance is almost impossible. I can easily solo trash mobs, but Blizzard has set raids so that you must be in a raid group to enter the instance. This means I've got to find someone who isn't questing (can't do regular quests in a raid) and get them to group with me in a raid. If one of my friends is online grinding rep with another group and not questing, it's all good. However, that rarely happens.

So I'm left with spending my hard-earned gold on the AH to buy coins and bijous. This is sometimes fine since the prices usually aren't horrible. However, it's rather annoying. Personally, I think these low level raids should be changed so that solo characters can enter them.

OK, that's my rant for today. Time to go check the AH for coins!

New patch 3.1 notes

I know they're all over the internet, but I thought I'd list the current Warlock changes. These are of 3/6/09, and chances are, things will be changed before the final release.

• Curse of the Elements (Rank 5): Increased to 13% spell damage, up from 10%.
• Curse of Recklessness has been removed.
• Curse of Weakness: Now also reduces the armor of the target by 5%.
  Drain Soul: Each time Drain Soul deals damage to a target which can grant experience, it now has a chance to generate a Soul Shard.
• Enslave Demon: Spell haste penalty reduced by 10%, Melee haste penalty reduced by 10%.
• Doomguard: Cooldown reduced to 30 minutes, down from 60 minutes. Damage reduced approximately 30%, and health reduced approximately 30%.
• Warlocks now innately have an increased 10% spell hit chance on the Enslave Demon spell.
• Fire Shield (Imp): You can now cast this ability on raid members, rather than party members.
• Ritual of Summoning: The summoning of the initial portal is now instant cast, down from 5 seconds.
• Soul Shard: This item now has a maximum count of 32 in inventory.
• Voidwalker: The health bonus on this pet has been reduced from 60% to 10%.

Talents

Affliction

• Eradication: Whenever you deal damage with Corruption, you have a 6% chance to gain the Eradication effect. The Eradication effect increases your spell casting speed by 6/12/20% for 10 seconds.
• Haunt: Now only increases your shadow damage-over-time on the target. (No longer includes non-Shadow damage over time spells.)
• Immolation and Unstable Affliction are now in the same exclusive category (both damage over time effects cannot be present at the same time by the same caster on a target).
• Malediction: No longer increases the effect of Curse of the Elements, but now also increases the periodic critical strike chance of your Corruption and Unstable Affliction spells by 3/6/9%.
• Pandemic: This talent has been reduced to a 1-point talent, now grants your Corruption and Unstable Affliction the capability to critically hit.
• Shadow Embrace: Now only increases the damage done by your shadow damage periodic spells.
• Siphon Life: The Siphon Life spell has been removed. Siphon Life now causes your Corruption spell to instantly heal you for 40% of the damage done. In addition, the damage done by your Corruption, Seed of Corruption and Unstable Affliction damage over time effects is increased by 5%.
• Soul Siphon re-designed: Increases the amount drained by your Drain Life and Drain Soul spells by an additional 3/6% for each of your Affliction effects on the target, up to a maximum of 9/18% additional effect.
• Suppression: Now increases spell hit for all of your spells.
  

Demonology

• Demonic Empathy has been removed.
• Demonic Empowerment: This talent spell now has a unique spell effect.
• Demonic Sacrifice: This talent has been removed.
• Fel Synergy has been moved to tier-1. No longer increases Intellect, Stamina and damage of your summoned demon.
• Improved Enslave Demon talent removed.
• Mana Feed: This talent is now a 1-point talent, down from 3-points. Now is the 21-point talent in Demonology. Now grants 100% mana return to your pet, up from 33/66/100%.
• Master Conjuror: Increased from 15/30% up to 150/300%.
• New Talent: Decimation: When you Shadowbolt or Incinerate a target that is at or below 35% health, your next Soulfire cast time is reduced by 30/60% and costs no shard. Lasts 10 sec.
• New Talent: Nemesis: Reduces the cooldown of your Demonic Empowerment, Metamorphosis, Soulstone and Fel Domination spells by 10/20/30%.
  

Destruction

• Aftermath re-designed: Increases the periodic damage done by your Immolate by 3/6%, and your Conflagrate has a 50/100% chance to daze the target for 5 sec.
• Backlash has been moved up to tier-5, up from tier-7. Now requires Intensity (pre-req).
• Cataclysm: Now reduces the mana cost of Destruction spells by 4/7/10%. No longer increases the chance to hit.
• Conflagrate: Spell now works similar to Swiftmend, consuming an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the target and dealing damage based on the strength of that effect. Reduced to a single rank.
• Improved Immolate: Now increases the damage done by your Immolate by 10/20/30%, rather than just the direct damage.
• Improved Shadow Bolt: Now increases the damage done by your Shadow Bolt spell by 1/2/3/4/5%, and causes your target to be vulnerable to spell damage, increasing spell critical strike chance against that target by 1/2/3/4/5%. Effect lasts 30 sec.
• Improved Soul Leech: Now has a 50/100% chance to proc Replenishment.
• Molten Core: This talent has been moved to Demonology (Tier 8).
• New Talent: Molten Skin: Reduces all damage taken by 2/4/6%.
• Pyroclasm re-designed: Now increases your Shadow and Fire spell power by 2/4/6% when you critically hit with Searing Pain or Conflagrate. Lasts 10 sec. Also moved down to tier 7, down from tier-5.

New Glyphs

• Glyph of Chaos Bolt: Reduces the cooldown on Chaos Bolt by 2 sec.
• Glyph of Demonic Circle: Reduces the cooldown on Demonic Circle by 4 sec.
• Glyph of Haunt: The bonus damage granted by your Haunt spell is increased by an additional 3%.
• Glyph of Life Tap: When you use Life Tap, you gain 20% of your spirit as spell power for 20 sec.
• Glyph of Metamorphosis: Increases the duration of your Metamorphosis by 6 sec.
• Glyph of Shadowflame: Your Shadowflame also applies a 70% movement speed slow on its victims.
• Glyph of Soul Link: Increases the percentage of damage shared via your Soul Link by an additional 5%.

That's all I have time for now. Later, I'll come back and comment on some of these potential changes.

This is not broken?

Any other warlocks having issues with their felguard and his health? Here's what I've been experiencing for several months now. My felguard is at full health. I mount up (ground or flying, in Azeroth, Outland, or Northrend) and then dismount. Sometimes my axe-wielding minion has full life. Sometimes, he only has half! And it's not because of a debuff or anything, and a quick Google search shows it's not just happening to me.

So I open a GM ticket, and I later get an email that says this is "not considered to be "broken" and should be functioning normally." Wait...so the fact that one pet is losing half his health randomly when I dismount is SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN? WTF mate?

Here's hoping this gets fixed soon. It's not functioning normally, and it needs to be dealt with.

I'm A Fool for Love After All?

Rumors say patch 3.1 will be changing the Love Fool meta-achievement so that you only need six of the eight candies! Looks like I may be Dippy the Love Fool after all!

So I haven't blogged lately....

Why? Because I knew what I'd want to blog about, and I just didn't want to deal with the annoyance. I'm going to have to rant and get all worked up again. About what? Valentine's Day. More specifically, candy hearts.

See, I missed my "Love Fool" title by one achievement, and I missed that one achievement by one tiny little part. I was one candy heart short. ONE. I had seven of them going into the last day of the event. I logged in every hour hoping to get a candy bag. Finally, at 4 am, I got one...and out of all 10 hearts, nope, did not get the one I needed! Noooo!

I did get the achievement on two alts. Bleh. Oh, and I got over a dozen picnic baskets and seven lovely black dresses. But candy bags? Dippy got three or four, and the alts didn't fare any better (they just got lucky on the candy draw). I've heard other people had the same experience. It was a really crappy drop.

Also, it's an achievement. Doesn't that imply that I go out and, well, achieve something? The candy heart thing was more or less pulling numbers out of a hat and hoping to get lucky. That doesn't seem like an achievement....

Oh well...the child's week stuff looks like a pain in the ass. I'm sure I'll be ranting about it, too. All that PVP stuff...oh joy.

Goodbye Lunar Festival, Hello Valentine's Day

So I failed in my quest to find all the elders of the dungeon...I ended up with all but five of them. Oh well, next year will be much easier.

As everyone knows, we've moved on to the Festival of Love now. The instance part here is much easier than the Lunar Festival. All you have to do is get a bouquet of roses from certain bosses, much like the Santa hat achievement, for My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose. The easiest boss is Prince Keleseth in UK, but you can also do Maiden of Grief in HoS or Prince Taldaram in Old Kingdom. I hopped into a PuG for Keleseth last night, and all five of us had our bouquets in a little over an hour.

Other annoying parts: getting all of the candy hearts, finding the right class/race combinations to shower with rose petals, and pitying the love fool in Naxx (you can do it right inside the instance portal, but you've got to be in a raid group). All in all, however, this event looks to be much easier than the Lunar Festival since it doesn't require running all over the world.

Easiest rep ever?

I'm now honored with the Thorium Brotherhood, and I have to say, it was the easiest rep ever!

Getting from neutral to friendly simply takes turn-ins of a piece of coal, two incendasaur scales, and either ten heavy leathers, four iron bars, or four kingsblood. You'll need 220 scales, 110 coal, and 1100 leathers, 440 iron bars, or 440 kingsblood, or any combination thereof. I did a combination of iron bars and heavy leather. With heavy leather selling on Sisters of Elune for 4-5 gold a stack, I had no problem buying up enough to suppliment the iron bars I had on hand. All in all, I believe you need about 120 turn-ins to get from neutral to friendly. Not bad.

The next step, friendly to honored, is even easier and cheaper! On Sisters, the dark iron residue goes for less than 2 gold for a stack of 100! All you need is 960 residues to hit honored. For less than 15 gold, I gained a whole level of rep! Seriously, the most difficult task at this point was turning in the items. Thankfully, there's this cool macro:

/script SelectGossipAvailableQuest(1)
/script CompleteQuest()
/script GetQuestReward()

Create this macro and then assign it to a hot key. Right click the dude (Master Smith Burninate), then smash your assigned macro key three times. Now do it again. And again. And again. And again....I suggest watching a movie while you do this. Seriously, it's going to take some time. You've got to do it 240 times.

Congratulations, you're now honored with the Thorium Brotherhood!

Getting to exalted...well, that's going to be a bit more difficult. Seems like, unless you run Molten Core often (and who does that nowadays?), you only have two options: turn in dark iron ore and Blood of the Mountain, a gem that rarely appears in dark iron nodes. Ten ores = 75 rep, while the gem = 500 rep. Sigh...it's 33,000 points from honored to exaulted, so that's 440 turn-ins, or 4,400 dark iron ores. Thankfully, blacksmiths can also grab some quests in Gadgetzan from Derotain Mudsipper. He's got 7 quests that yield a total of 2850 rep. You can have all that for 135 bars of thorium. Not bad. Oh, and you get 7 new blacksmitthing plans, too! Do these quests and you'll only need 4,020 dark iron ores! Wooo!

So it's off to mine thorium and dark iron...unless the price is right. Then I'll be buying rep by the truck-load! If all goes well, I'll soon be one faction closer to having the 40 faction grind completed, which means I'll be Dippy the Exalted!

Minions, Minions!

We love our minions. Well, most of the time. But all too often, I see warlocks running around with their Voidwalker when they really should be using one of their other pets. Granted, I usually use one minion about 90% of the time (my Felguard), but there are times when he's not the best. Here are my thoughts on minion use.

The Imp - My little Kupkin only comes out in instances these days, and even then, that's usually only when the tank can't keep threat off me or we really need the stanima bump. I also use him in situations where my Felguard tends to get eaten by a special ability. There are a few bosses that require you to hide behind pillars and such, and convincing your minion to do that can be a little difficult! Taking the imp, phase shifting him, and telling him to stay put can be easier.

The Voidwalker - He's great for soloing until you get the Felguard. Other than that, he's not what you want to see in instances. In fact, many groups will tell you to put him away if you haven't already done so. That's because he's mainly designed for tanking, and your group should already have a tank. His DPS isn't good enough to warrant keeping him out when you could use the imp or succubus.

The Succubus - She's all sexy and kinky, but honestly, I very rarely pull out my succubus. She seems to get shredded in only a few hits. The only time I use her is when I'm asked to help with the crowd control. Her seduce ability can help handle humanoids, but that's all it works on. Some warlocks like to sacrifice her for the 15% shadow damage increase, and that's certainly not a bad idea in some areas.

The Felhunter - My little felpuppy has limited use in PvE, but in PvP, he can be a warlock's best friend. He can lock casters out of a spell class for a certain amount of time, stun them, remove magical buffs/debuffs, and provide a 10% reduction in damage from spells (his master demonologist effect). If you're fighting a lot of casters in PvE, he can be handy, too, but Voidy/Felguard are usually more effective there. I pull him out for battlegrounds, though, and watch him eat mages for lunch!

The Felguard - The Felguard is my minion of choice for PvE. He tanks fairly well (although Voidy seems to be able to take more abuse), has good DPS, and has a couple of nice abilities. His dash attack stuns the enemy for a few seconds, and cleave does damage to multiple enemies at once. In PvP, dash can be useful, especially since it can interrupt casting.

I honestly don't have much to say about our two other minions, the Infernal and the Doomguard. I haven't used either that much. With the recent changes to the Infernal (the ability to summon it indoors and the instant-enslavement) may make it something of a last resort if an instance encounter is going badly.

All this work for a freaking title....

Argh, the Lunar Festival is a bit frustrating! Tracking down all of those elders has been, I'll admit, a bit tedious and annoying. However, it has made me go into several low-level instances that I had skipped over, such as Blackrock Depths, LBRS, and Maraudon. I had planned on doing those anyway to get the achievements, but I wasn't planning on doing them all at once!

The Elders of the Alliance achievement was fun, I'll admit. I enjoyed riding into Ironforge and Stormwind, avoiding guards and trying to get as far as I could before I died. I only had to make a few corpse runs, and all in all, it was easier than I expected. I only had one alliance player attack me in Ironforge. Well, two, if you count the level 12 hunter who decided to take a shot at me while I was being beaten by guards. I threw a few curses on her before I realized she was level 12...OK, so I realized it when she died after about three ticks! Oops, sorry low level hunter!

Picking up the elder in Darnassus and Dolanaar was incredibly easy. Since I'd already been over there for my Explorer title, I knew what to expect.

At first, I wasn't sure what I thought about this more or less forced PVP to complete holiday achievements. I'm not a huge fan of PVP outside of battlegrounds (which I'm a big fan of). However, my experience seems to show that most players are fanatically protecting the elders in their cities. That may be different on other servers or at other times. Personally, I think players should be considerate. I saw a few alliance players at the elder in Org. earlier today. Granted, I was on my level 24 alt and they were both 80, but even if I had been on my level 80, I would have let them be. They just want the achievement, after all. Now, if they had been trying to take down Thrall....

Anyway, I've got all the elders done except for the seven in the Northrend instances. I'm going to try to complete that task this weekend. If you're on Sisters of Elune and need a DPS for your runs, hit up Dippy the Warlock.

Oh yeah, and who else is annoyed at the elder mailbox spam? I don't want your rockets or your spotlight stones!

Summoning Stones, please!

With update 3.0.8a, it looks like the new warlock form of summoning is finally up and running. If you haven't seen the incredibly cool Reaper-looking stone, find your neighborhood friendly lock and ask him or her to call one up. Finally, Dippy's Taxi Service won't suck up all my shards!

Testing!

This will be a weekly blog featuring my thoughts on WoW, especially on Warlocks and their oh-so-cuddly minions.