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What’s the one thing that would prompt me to post again in spite of the fact that I’m swamped busy with schoolwork and other real life obligations at the moment? OH YEAH THE CATACLYSM BETA IS OPEN. All that crying and moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth over new abilities, talents and configurations?

Let it all out and don’t stop throwing tantrums until Cataclysm goes live!

I’ve been looking over some of the new information on Mmochamp and I’m both annoyed and satisfied with quite a lot of the talent restructuring for Death Knights so far. The Blood tree, and it also looks like Blood presence, is shouldering all the tanking responsibility as previously announced. One thing I wanted to make particular note of is the way they’re really pushing hard to make you choose between good talents. Naturally, after that I’ll post the disjointed word vomit that constitutes the rest of my initial reactions to the changes.

Choices choices choices!

Blizz has been saying they want to make us choose between good talents for a while now and from the looks of the beta talent trees they’re off to a good start.

Suppose you’re a Death Knight tank and you’ve spent most your talent points in Blood and are now looking for things in Frost and Unholy to pick up. We’ll assume you’ve spent 57 points in Blood and that your build now looks something like this.

So what next?

Personally, I really have a hard time living in a world where I know I can’t drop DnD every 20 seconds or so. Do I ever actually do that? Of course not but its nice to know that if I need to drop DnD for whatever reason I’m not going to be limited by its innately long cooldown. Ok, so I want Morbidity. Uh oh, its pretty deep in Unholy now. Well, I suck it up and spec for it anyway because I value it just that much and now my talents look like this.

Huh, only one talent point left! But I wanted to make my Icy Touch hit harder and I wanted to pick up Runic Empowerment! Tough.

Now the theorycrafting may end up saying that Runic Empowerment is as much a staple as Sanguine Fortitude but that isn’t the point right now. I want Runic Empowerment. I want Morbidity. I can only have one. This feels like an interesting decision to have to make.

I’m looking forward to seeing how these talent trees evolve in the coming months.

Word vomit

• Hysteria is called Unholy Frenzy and is on the third tier of Unholy now. Still able to be picked up by tanks, still handy to have around.
• Sudden Doom lost to deeeeeeeeep Unholy. Also reverted back to just making your next Death Coil free, not automatically launching one for you. Another button to push when your runes are down likely.
• No cost to activate Icebound Fortitude again, yay!
• Vendetta, now called Exsanguinate, moved to tier one of Blood. Has anyone ever taken this ever? Surprised its still kicking around.
• Dancing Rune Weapon gives 20% extra Parry chance now. On the fence about this one. Perhaps I’m still locked into the historical mindset of Parry being mostly garbage but I was hoping for a little bit more from the reworked 51 point talent.
• Magic Suppression/Anti-magic Zone still in Unholy. I’m being entirely greedy with this but uh… can Blood get those instead? We’ll trade you uh… Blood Parasites and um… Exsanguination!
• On a Pale Horse retains its mounted movement speed increase thus ensuring its place as my leveling tree for the second expansion in a row.
• Pillar of Frost sits on the fifth tier of Frost and prevents you from being knocked back and boosts your Strength by 20%. No knockbacks for 20 seconds, nice!
• Lichborne unchanged, still stupid.
• You can still kinda make a really super ghetto Frost or Unholy tank spec but only kinda… kinda. Not that I recommend those sorts of shenanigans of course.

Guys, I have but one thing to say to you all today and it is this:

STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Yes, MMOChamp has “new” talent trees out so what do 99% of people seemingly think of this?

OMG THAT’S WHAT THE CATA TREES ARE GOING TO BE LIKE!!1

I’m baffled. This is not a new process that Blizzard has when it comes to developing talent trees. They start with a baseline, in our case that baseline is the existing talent trees currently live in WotLK, and then they iterate on that baseline THROUGHOUT THE ALPHA, BETA AND THE LIVE EXPANSION ITSELF.

The idea that these are “finished” talent trees or even mostly complete talent trees is ludicrous. They’re giving us an idea of how things are shaping in the alpha at the moment, that’s pretty much all. Remember that post I did a while back about the history and evolution of the Death Knight class? Of course not because you didn’t read it. That’s ok, I’ll go over the gist of it again.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK alpha.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK beta.

This is what the talent trees look like for Death Knights currently.

Do you get it? There’s a lot of changes between those three setups and there were many more changes in between them too. This is the process that ALL classes are going to be put through in the months ahead.

Stop assuming these new talent trees are anything close to what you’re going to see the first day of Cata. They’re not. At the moment they’re pretty roughshod with only minor initial changes. THESE TALENT TREES ARE GOING TO CHANGE DRASTICALLY. So drastically, all your conclusions about what you’re seeing right now will be completely irrelevant.

Really, all this shows us is how much work they have yet to do to get Cata ready for even the beta testing.

You’re getting a look at an evolving organism. Don’t mistake it for anything else.

All this talk about Cataclysm class changes has made me think about all the changes and speculation that happened in this expansion before Wrath went on sale. I thought it would be nice to go back now and review some of the ways the Death Knight class has changed over time. Its good to know where you come from after all.

The Prelude

Way back in 2007 was the first time we had official word about the Death Knight class. At the time, patch 2.2 was on the PTR and my first character was level 42 in Stranglethorn Vale. I didn’t yet know how frustrating it would be to be a paladin tank, wrestling with mana issues, playing the inferior sidekick to warriors but staunchly refusing to admit the truth, and the pressures to raid as a healer and only a healer. I didn’t yet know how much I would love tanking as a Death Knight in the far future.

Fast forward to Blizzcon 2007 and we have MMOChampion reporting on the brand new Death Knight class. Most notably and relevant to our situation today we have a sneak peek at a few Death Knight abilities:

Known Death Knight skills

• Unholy Embrace
  Instant Cast. 5 min cooldown.
  Target is embraced by a silhouette of darkness for 6 seconds, corrupting any healing spells and effects cast upon or currently affecting the target to cause damage for 50% of their healing potential instead of restoring health. Any damage shields cast upon or currently affecting the target will also be instantly consumed, dealing 50% of their absorption potential in damage. Once afflicted with Unholy Embrace, the target cannot be afflicted with Unholy Embrace again for 1 minute.
• Army of the Dead
  Raises several temporary minions (ghouls)

A clear reminder that a lot of iteration happens during the testing process leading up to the release of a new expansion.

Skip ahead a little and we’re approaching the Alpha testing of Wrath of the Lich King. The most talked about topic concerning Death Knights is which runes they’ll imbue their runeblades with and the various pro’s and con’s of each configuration. Popular configurations include 4 frost, 1 unholy, 1 blood and other setups like 6 frost and the balanced 2 frost, 2 unholy and 2 blood. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Ultimately the Most Pointless Phase in Death Knight History” as a result of these discussions.

Alpha

Closed alpha begins. Leaks begin flying around the interwebs with videos popping up on Youtube showing Tauren Death Knights rampaging across the Plaguelands demonstrating what is theorized to be one of the best and most interesting Death Knight abilities: Corpse Explosion. This period of Death Knight history could be entitled “Omg I Can’t Believe I Ever Thought That Ability Would Be the Best” as a result.

We are given our first look at the first talent tree setup for Death Knights: Alpha Build 3.0.1.8303.

A select handful of Alpha testers begin to gain notoriety for their analyses and insights into playing as a Death Knight with Jayde arguably the most popular scoring a win for female Blood Elf Death Knights everywhere. Jayde posts three videos that made a huge impression on me showing the playstyle and abilities as each of the three Death Knight specs. I have the Unholy video but the one that made the biggest impression on me was the Frost one and I cannot for the life of me find that video anywhere. In the video, Jayde is in Terokkar Forest fighting Warped Peons. He casts Hungering Cold freezing them all and then follows it up with Howling Blast to light the screen up with big numbers. At the time, Howling Blast was a guaranteed crit if your target was frozen so it worked fairly well with Hungering Cold. It certainly made for a whoaaaa moment watching the video.

The Vision

The devs have frequent conversations with testers and players generally about their intentions and design goals for Death Knights. They state one of the most important concepts for the Death Knight class is the ability to use any talent tree for tanking and dps alike. They say that the Death Knight is their great experiment in this regard and if it goes well, paladins and warriors will almost certainly get the same treatment. They talk about how they almost gave Arms warriors the ability to block with their two-handed weapons but decided not to for a number of reasons, one of which was to see how the Death Knight worked out first.

Beta

Closed beta begins and I begin spamming the refresh button on my inbox hoping for an invitation. I get my invitation after a short while and I quickly install the Wrath of the Lich King beta. The current talent build at the time: Beta Build 3.0.1.8770.

As you can see even by simply looking over the picture, we’ve come a long way since Alpha. One of the prominent issues being discussed at the time was how blood worms should be spawned. Death Knights were finding Outland leveling a breeze thanks to the enormous amounts of self-healing they could generate and blood worms were a particular concern. They spawned every time you hit Death Strike which led to some pretty strong burst healing. I was Blood even back then and I was enjoying my immortality.

I ran my first instance as a Death Knight around this time. Thanks to the Improved Blood Presence talent it was possible to run instances with groups made up of nothing but Death Knights. Death and Decay had a horrify effect to it that randomly caused enemies to cower in fear before you and that crowd control combined with the damage put out by 5 Death Knights dropping Death and Decay and smashing skulls was more than enough to keep the whole party topped off. Hellfire Ramparts and the Blood Furnace had never been roflstomped so badly before.

Death and Decay, like so many other Death Knight abilities has had a pretty sad history of completely justified nerfs. It was good damage, could be cast to a specific place on the ground at ranged, CC’ed enemies without having them run away from you and provided a ton of self-healing with the Improved Blood Presence talent. Then the Blood Presence talent got reworked, then the horrify effect was shunted to a glyph and then ultimately removed altogether. All of which was necessary because that spell was totally broken. Unholy Blight, Lichborne and Shadow of Death looked to each other nervously in anticipation.

Throughout Beta you can really see the evolution of the talent trees go from a very Burning Crusade mindset to a more “enlightened” Wrath of the Lich King model. Talents like Blood Rune Mastery are phased out and Death Runes become the preferred method for utilizing “wild card” runes to preserve the original intent to let you imbue your runeblade with whichever runes you wanted.

Wrath Live

Wrath of the Lich King goes live with this talent build: WotLK 3.0.3.9183.

The night the expansion goes on sale at midnight, I’m walking into the mall alone. There’s more cars in the parking lot than I expect. I enter the door and turn the corner and see three very long lines already formed. I stand in the first line to pre-pay and talk to some guys who I would describe with my best raider leet-speak as “total noobs” until we’ve paid for our copies. As we finish paying we’re instructed that the lines for distribution are divided into a Horde line and an Alliance line. The noobs as it happen are Alliance players. This strikes me as being very right.

The employees of Gamestop rally the people in line by having the Horde line shout out “For the Horde!” as loud as they can. The Alliance people shouted something too but its quickly drowned out by continual Horde shouting. Rude? Sure, but come on Allies, give it a little oomph.

I race home with my copy and find myself headed to the Dark Portal a few hours later. Nine days later my Death Knight, Shayzani, dings level 80. I leveled entirely as Unholy since I wanted to give something new a try and because I was wise to the On a Pale Horse’s value while questing.

My first heroic is Violet Hold which I dps’ed as Unholy. I was in one of the first ventures into Naxxramas on my server and saw Patchwerk die when the raid was mostly decked out in leveling greens and tier 6. My first epic is the Chained Military Gorget. My tank spec was likely 7/8/56 (as pictured below) or some such nonsense and I had Rune of the Fallen Crusader on my tank weapon since we weren’t spoiled with Stoneskin Gargoyle like today’s kids and also maybe because I forgot about Rune of Swordshattering.

Changes

Throughout this long process of ups and downs in Death Knight iteration a lot of really cool abilities were introduced, some were radically changed seemingly every patch and some were lost forever. Notable mentions include the following:

Lichborne – Today its nigh on useless but early on, existing even into the live builds for a short time, Lichborne was one of the most rockin’ tank talents ever. When you popped it you were given an additional 25% chance to be missed by enemy attacks and you could use your Death Coils to heal yourself a bit. It was a great emergency button and once it was gone Blood and Unholy tanks were free from having to put 11 points into Frost.

Dancing Rune Weapon – Sure its only a little different now but back when it was first implemented there was no damage penalty on the Rune Weapon’s swings. You could also cast Army of the Dead and your Rune Weapon would cast its own Army right along with you. I ended up beating Krystallus in my first Heroic Halls of Stone run with only myself, another Death Knight and our 26 ghouls left alive at the end. The word you’re looking for is “epic”.

Death and Decay – I covered Death and Decay earlier but as a quick recap its history is as follows: awesome ranged AoE with built-in CC > good ranged AoE with glyphed CC > good ranged AoE.

Bone Shield – The original implementation of Bone Shield led many people to believe that Unholy would be the strongest tank spec in endgame raiding due to avoidance reaching a point where Bone Shield’s uptime would allow an amazing amount of damage reduction. But 20% off isn’t all that much though right? I mean its good and all bu—wait, what? Bone Shield granted 40% damage reduction? That’s right, 40% damage reduction. Awesome.

Shadow of Death – One of the most novel talents we’ve ever had in the game was this talent. It proved to be a nightmare for pvp where after killing off your stupidly over-powered Death Knight opponent she would get right back up off the ground and start eating your face off as a ghoul. Also, if you died in an instance you could run out as a ghoul and if you finished zoning out before the Shadow of Death buff expired you were alive and whole once again. Ultimately the devs pronounced Shadow of Death to be way too difficult to balance right and scrapped the whole concept.

Unholy Blight – This spell was deemed too awesome for players to have and was mutated into the horrifyingly lame version it is today as a result. At one point, popping Unholy Blight gave a self-buff that generated a black cloud of insects around your body that would do damage to all enemies in a 10 yard radius. The spell effect looked awesome, it added a truly unique flavor to the Death Knight experience and wreaked havoc on groups of enemies, npc’s and players alike. Rather than overwhelm players with such a high amount of pure awesomeness, the devs decided making it into a simple debuff with no visible particle effect was a better idea.

Suffer Well

We’re at the end of the Wrath expansion now and its been a long ride. Now we’re looking ahead at another expansion and with it, a host of new changes and radical shifts in gameplay. The great experiment with three tanking talent trees has concluded and the developers have decided to do an “about face” on the issue entirely. Some people are overjoyed, some people are disappointed. No doubt the change will free up developer time and ease their workload but I still see the vision of using any talent tree for tanking as the most brilliant idea Blizzard ever had for class design and wish it could have gone further by extending the same treatment to other tanks as well.

Regardless of whatever changes are made, be they to the rune system or to the talent trees or any of a myriad of individual spells, its going to be interesting to see where the Death Knight class goes in the future and what creature it becomes. No doubt we’re in for a lot more growing pains but hey, we have to grow quickly to catch up to the other classes right?

Through it all, suffer well.

Since I’ve been asked for my thoughts on the Cataclysm Death Knight preview I’ll share some general impressions.

New abilities

Outbreak – Ok. That’s about all I think of this.

Necrotic Strike – Very cool. As they said, this fits the Death Knight theme/motif/flavor perfectly. Obviously pretty sweet in pvp but anytime you have a mob that can heal its going to be useful in pve too.

Dark Simulacrum – It ain’t gonna work like so many people seem to think its going to work. They told us if it can’t be reflected by Spell Reflect it probably won’t work with this either. So no, heals most likely won’t be effected, you won’t be making any death knights teleport to Moonglade or Stonard and you most likely wont be Blinking or Ice Blocking or Bladestorming or any other of a host of things people are convinced you’ll be able to steal. This is going to let you spit fireballs like Mario and not a whole lot more.

And that’s still pretty freakin’ cool!

Rune System Changes

I’m afraid I don’t quite get what they’re planning for the way runes will work so I can’t speak to that. Yes I’ve seen the diagrams and the illustrations and the clever explanations and I still can’t make heads or tails of it. I’m just going to have to see how it goes once they start giving out beta invites. The only coherent thought I have about this right now is “…so…do I… do I still get to do Heart Strike spam?”

Talent Changes

Speaking as someone who has been a Blood tank since Naxxramas, Blood turning into Prot kinda sucks. I have no doubt whatsoever that it’ll make Death Knights better tanks just as I have no doubt that they could have balanced it so we could still tank as any of the three talent trees. I think they’ve done a damn fine job of keeping things balanced throughout this expansion. Yes, Blood has been ahead but the other specs haven’t fallen so far behind that they’re unusable even in progression raiding. So, meh.

But whatever, I dislike the decision quite a bit but realistically all it means for me is that the tank spec I’ve already been using is going to get super-buffed. Still…

Extremely disappointing.

Mastery

Healing Absorption looks interesting and if it works off overhealing then its awesome and I love it. If it doesn’t, its neat in theory but rubbish in practice. Frost and Unholy are dead to me forever since they’re no longer going to be potential tanking trees so I wouldn’t even care if they were deleted entirely, let alone care about their mastery effects.

This is a crazy fight. Nocturne’s first kill came late last night and by the time Rotface’s health had hit 5% everything had started to fall apart. Little oozes were everywhere and the big ooze was kersploding and Rotface himself was of course, vomiting all over everyone.

Having been in the role of Ooze Kiter Extraordinaire for each of our attempts, I share with you now some (hopefully useful) tips on the care and management of oooooze.

Spec

I tried two different specs for this job and custom-made them specifically with the Rotface fight in mind but also serviceable for general tanking should the need to fill in for a fallen bear arise. The first one I used was a Frost spec and the second one was an Unholy spec.

Frost

The spec: 10/56/5

A two-handed Frost spec that trims out the points needed to beef up dual-wield featuring extended range howling blasts and the Improved Icy Talons buff in case your raid group needs it.

This spec played pretty much exactly how you think it would. Howling Blast on cooldown, Icy Touch if a bit more threat is needed, etc. It is what it is. Were I to use such a spec again I would go for Hungering Cold as well, honestly not sure why I didn’t.

Unholy

The spec: 13/8/50

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner to go with an Unholy spec.

Here’s what makes Unholy awesome for this fight:

• 20% less damage taken throughout the entire fight (you’re not getting hit by anything that removes a charge of your Bone Shield thus it has a 100% uptime.)
• 6% less damage taken from magic
• Stronger Anti-magic Shell

I didn’t end up using Anti-magic Zone very much even though there were moments where I could have for a few seconds I suppose. It probably isn’t worth picking up and the point could be swapped for Unholy Blight or something else to beef up the abilities you will be using. Sad because I do love me that Anti-magic Zone. Someday I’ll find a justification for taking it (besides the fact that its hella cool looking)!

Faster Pussycat, tank tank!

Despite the header for this section I don’t advise actually trying to tank the big oozes. The header was also my guild note for a long while but I never figured out why. Ashmaw, enlighten?

So now it comes to the actual kiting part. We found it easier to cleanse the debuff asap since dealing with the 50% healing reduction was just too risky. People with the debuff would run their ooze to me until it merged with the other little one at first to make the big ooze. Right around the time the first big ooze is created you’ll have a section of the floor just about to flood. Go the other way if the flooded part is close by you and strafe away from the ooze.

Ever heard of a jump-shot? Its what you should be doing with your Death Coils to keep the big oozes fixed on chasing you. Don’t know what a jump-shot is or how to do it? Let’s ask our hunter friend Pike from Aspect of the Hare!

This movie of Pike’s helped learn me to jumpshot proper-like back in the Burning Crusade and hopefully she won’t mind me linking it here. If she does mind of course, it’ll be gone right quick!

To see the original page this video comes from, head on over to Pike’s site.

So coming back to Rotface, we find ourselves strafing away from the big ooze and we’re being awesome and jump-shotting it with Death Coil and we’re very pleased with ourselves.

Uh oh. The room just flooded right in front of you and the big ooze makes turning around a bad idea. No problem. You were probably getting a little starved for runic power anyway right? Pop Anti-magic Shell and continue on through the flooded area as normal. Anti-magic Shell will nullify the slow effect of the flood and convert the flood’s damage into a full runic power bar. Blessing of Freedom is pretty handy too if you’ve got a paladin in the raid. Yeah, I still call it Blessing of Freedom. Deal with it.

Remember also that if you’re dealing with a stubborn little ooze who won’t play nice and merge with the big ooze you can hit it with Chains of Ice to make sure it gets eaten up. To clarify what kinds of snares and taunts are effective against which ooze type here’s a reminder.

Little ooze

• Immune to taunt
• Immune to Death Grip (both the taunt and the pull)
• Susceptible to Chains of Ice and other roots and slows

Big ooze

• Susceptible to taunt
• Susceptible to Death Grip (the taunt effect, wasn’t drunk enough to try pulling it closer)
• Immune to Chains of Ice and other roots and slows

If I’ve missed anything or got anything wrong (I never get anything wrong, ever) just holler at me! Good luck on your own attempts at this guy!

I’m sick. I don’t know what with. I know I’m dizzy and tired and feel sick to my stomach.

I also know that in my delirium tonight I’ve felt compelled to work on the site a little. There’s a new link on the sidebar here to a page about Blood tanking info that I’m calling “The Blood Furnace” for now. The Blood Furnace in the game is a place where the servants of Illidan worked to extract, refine and improve the blood of the demon Magtheridon. It was a research center essentially and I think that concept fits with what I’d like my own Blood Furnace page to be like eventually.

For now I just put up some random bits of information. I’ve put off doing this for so long that I figured I’d start putting up drafts of the page if I couldn’t post a finished and polished product immediately.

I think I'm a fan of these little dropdown boxes.

You can hide the info you’re not interested in and show all the stuff you do want. Novel concept.

Anyway, I’ll be working on the page more in the future when I’m not clutching the armrests of my chair to keep from spinning off into space.

If I were to spec into Unholy for tanking now that the patch is released I would probably go with this build.

Subversion for the extra crit on Scourge Strike since Unholy needs some help with single target threat. Bare minimums in Wandering Plague, Scent of Blood so points can be spent in Bladed Armor. Floater point in the perma-ghoul which can be moved somewhere else like Desolation or Necrosis, not certain which would be better for threat quite yet as I haven’t had time to run any tests.

Anyway, I just wanted to put this out there for anyone looking to try out Unholy tanking and needing some ideas for specs to use.

A little while back Kahleena and I decided to co-author a little warlock Q&A with questions taken from our readers. The post was delayed a bit due to various reasons but fear not, today it is here!

Questions appear in italicized black text, Kahleena’s answers appear in classic warlock purple and my own responses appear in dark blue.

Temitope:

*I’ve got loads of questions, but they’re all kind of specific to my playstyle – like “what advice would you have for a level 66 Warlock trying to three-man Outland with a Cow Warrior and a Tree”.*

Cut down the tree and use the fire to cook up some steak?  Actually, my advice would pretty much be the advice I’d give anyone else, since you seem to have the tank and healer legs of the trinity covered.  Do as much damage as you can, but don’t pull aggro.

You’re going to pull aggro anyway. You’ll die but hey, a healer will be right there! Get used to dying after pulling aggro, its a warlock legacy. Oh hey, that should be better now that soulshatter is on a shorter cooldown right? Warlocks are awesome because how many other classes get half of their threat taken away every three minutes provided the target didn’t resist?! Sigh. …I got off on a tangent in this post a lot quicker than I expected.

In your case, as you are CC and DPS wrapped into one (and you have no backup), I might suggest learning to use seduction macros with your succubus.

Ewwww seduction D:

Out of the box, as it were, her cc is completely useless, but with adequate macroing, she’s very useful for crowd control.  Well, fairly useful.  Okay, she dies if you look at her crosseyed.  But she’s more useful in an instance, at any rate, than any of your other crowd controls (unless your enemy is a demon), given the tragic and untimely demise of fear-kiting (RIP Curse of Recklessness).  Consider Heroic Magister’s Terrace, which I’m led to understand from Tam’s blog is a favorite.  How awesome is it to be able to banish one of Delrissa’s minions, seduce another, and fear a third, all by yourself?

Quick story to illustrate that point:

In BC, before I finished leveling my warlock, I had a very scary looking lock in my Underbog party. The pulls were beating me up and back as the tank so I asked if the lock could do something to CC one of the Naga mobs. He said he’d take care of it so I pulled. He got its attention with Searing Pain and then ran away down the stairs we had just come up with the mob following after. Then he was gone for a very long time. Just as the rest of us killed the last mob in that pack he came back up the stairs alone. I asked if he had managed, he said he had taken care of it and was fine and shouldn’t we be pulling the next group?

Warlocks have an amazing box of tools for managing mobs, learn how to use them and you’ll make other people blink in awe.

More Temi:

*I’m running Destro at the moment – if you can remember anything about how Destruction plays in late Outland that’d be cool.*

Destruction, in late Outland, played for me like shadowbolt spam, but that was the old 0/21/40 build.

When we were gods among men! /brandishes fist

Destruction now is far more interesting, thankfully.  But I have no idea how it plays in late Outland, as I only started playing it at 80.  One suggestion:  pick up the glyph of Conflagrate.  It is absolutely critical to a functioning deep destro build.

Yet more Temi:

*Ooh – that was what I wanted to ask: should I invest in Improved Soul Leech?*

Depends – Improved Soul Leech is a tradeoff.  You’re passing up on the opportunity to gain DPS in exchange for utility.  Replenishment (the buff ISL procs) is a very important buff in group play, but there are several possible sources for it, including frost mages and shadow priests. Basically, given the three-person group you describe above, if you go into ISL, you’ll be doing it to help your tree stay in mana (you don’t need it personally, as a warlock – this is pure party utility).  Personally, I have it for raiding, because I’m not infrequently in situations where I don’t have a shadow priest or frost mage in my party, and in raiding, Replenishment is critical on long boss fights.  I look at it as doing my part for the healers that keep me in HOTs as I Life Tap my blackened, withered little heart out.

When you’re out leveling or grinding on your own or what not you tend to get beat the hell up as Destruction. No pet to take the heat and no Haunt healing coming in can really make you feel like you’re made of paper. ISL can help you feel like slightly more resilient paper. Brawny paper towels kind of paper maybe.

Aurorai:

*I would like to know why it is that your T3 set (which looks like a gas mask in garish colors and is just plain horrible) is beloved of warlocks? They seem to think they look GOOD, when really, they just look comical. Is bad taste a thing that goes with playing a warlock? I just don’t understand.*

The questioner must be a mage – “You’re ugly and your art department dresses you funny” is the level of discourse one expects from vending machines. Besides, the mage set has glowing purple crystal antlers.  Such things breed hostility towards one’s sartorial betters.

Seriously, though, I actually agree with the criticism of the T3 set.  In fact, when I read that they were recycling the art, I wrote a post on the forums (which I now can’t find) more or less /wristing over it (my precise phrase was, I believe, that the set looked like the 1970s had thrown up all over a hazmat suit).  I’m still not entirely crazy (to put it mildly) about the 10-man T7 (which is identical to T3).  The recolor in T7.5, on the other hand, is very, very nice looking, and quite warlock-y.  Black and red suits the design much better than  yellow and green and brown and whatever other colors form the T3/T7 melange.

Like the 1970′s had thrown up all over a hazmat suit… goodness that’s the best description of that set that I’ve ever heard in my life. While I also hate the T3/T7 look I do have to say one thing in its favor. The shoulders emit poison gas. That’s pretty darn cool.

Astoreth:

*What glyph(s) do you find most useful? Why?*

Depends on your build.  I could simply recite the cookie-cutter list of the glyphs that Elitist Jerks claims are the highest DPS glyphs, mathematically speaking.  As I’m a raider, and so much of raiding comes down to math, I tend to be partial to such lists.  It doesn’t help that warlocks are a bit (well, a lot) short on the “sexy” glyphs.  As I mentioned in response to Temi, even ignoring those lists, if you are Destruction, you simply must have Glyph of Conflagrate, or the rotation doesn’t work.  That may be the closest thing we have a to a truly sexy glyph.

Nearly all the warlock glyphs are fairly boring “increases damage of x by y%” or “reduces cooldown of x by y seconds” sorts of things. Conflag is, as mentioned several times already, absolutely a must if you’re Destruction. If you’re feeling spiteful towards your raid members you can opt for the Glyph of Succubus. This makes it so Seduction clears away all debuffs on your target. You can do this after the mages put up Scorch and Living Bomb and what not to lower their dps.

Not that I recommend doing that!

*Aside from pulling worms and standing in fire, what should I absolutely NOT do?*

Never permit a mage to show you up on the DPS charts.  Never Life Tap to 5% moments before the pull and expect your healer to heal you.  Never put your pet on aggressive.  Never cast Fear in an instance (Death Coil may, and I stress “may”, be okay, depending on layout and proximity, but “Fear” or “Howl of Terror”, absolutely not – better to die than to wipe the group/raid by pulling more adds, which Fear tends to do).

Its shocking how many warlocks will cast Fear in a crowded instance. If you’re ever in a situation where a mob is coming after you because you pulled off the tank or something then you damn well better handle the consequences like one of the big kids: stand up straight, look stoic, mash the crap out of soulshatter and when that fails and your tank doesn’t like you enough to get the mob back, you die like the fragile scrap of tissue you are and then do your best to act sheepish about it.

*I tend to use my voidy and felguard as pseudo-tanks when I’m levelling, and the imp for (what I understand to be) a party-boost in instances… but I have this nagging feeling that I’m overlooking better ways to use my pets. Do you have any recommendations?*

For soloing, use whatever works (felguard/voidwalker for tanking is definitely one effective approach – I tend to either drain-tank, if affliction, or nuke-the-mob-down-before-it-reaches-me, if destro).  In instances, pet selection is very situational.

Yes use whatever works. The imp works for Destro, the felhunter or succubus for Affliction and the Felguard for Demo. The voidwalker doesn’t work for anything and even if he does work, he works poorly.

If you’re Demonology (you mention the felguard), you should be using your felguard in instances, not your imp.  Make sure, however, to turn your felguard’s taunt off autocast (I would say “ditto the voidwalker”, except you should never be bringing out a voidwalker in an instance anyway).  You might also consider turning off cleave, unless you’re facing multiple mobs. Cleave’s a major mana-suck.

With the point in Mana Feed the cost of Cleave shouldn’t be too problematic, especially if you’ve got replenishment going. It used to be that Cleave would sometimes break crowd control if your positioning was bad but that’s not so much an issue in a time when crowd control is needed so rarely.

The succubus has a bad reputation as a crowd control, largely because without macros, her Seduction is nearly impossible to use effectively without a level of micromanagement that gimps the rest of your performance. Also, she dies if she’s so much as downwind of a mob.  With assistance, though, her crowd control can be useful – see wowwiki for a good one-button seduction macro.  Also, as of the last time I checked (which was, admittedly, 3.1), the succubus is the top DPS pet for an affliction build.

Right, I haven’t seen anything yet saying any other pet outperforms the succubus for Affliction after the patch. Just to make sure the point is driven home, the succubus dies quickly and easily! She has absolutely terrible performance anxiety, give her something important to do and she’ll muck it up quick.

Don’t be fail and use a voidwalker in instances.

The felhunter is another situational pet – I recommend practicing with its Spell Lock and Devour Magic until you’re very comfortable with them.  They are very powerful abilities, used properly.  The Int/Spirit buff isn’t terrible.  Despite that Felhunter-buffing talent in the Affliction tree, though, the felhunter is not top DPS for Affliction (or any other build).

If you’re Destro spec, then barring special cases (for example, I’m Destro spec, but I tend to drag a felhunter with me through around half of Naxx10′s Military Quarter to eat the bone shields), you bring out the imp.  Also, if your party needs the stamina boost to survive, bring out the imp.

…I’m totally useful in the Military Quarter like that too. Definitely. I never forget to do helpful things like create soulstones or healthstones or dispel things or… ok so sometimes I’m a little fail. I can change!

Some of those pet control macros at Wow Wiki really are quite good. Damn near essential really.

*Even when I’m spec’ed destro, I seem to be doing lower DPS than the fire and arcane mages of equivalent level (high 60s/low 70s) I run around with a lot. If nothing else, I FEEL less effective. What should I be looking at first to improve my damage?*

First, make sure you’re comparing apples to apples – is your gear equivalent?  Second, not to sound like a broken record, use the Glyph of Conflagrate.  Your cast priority (and it’s not a rotation, it’s a priority) should be: (a) Immolate (don’t clip, don’t let it fall off), (b) Conflagrate (this is why the glyph is so key, because if you’re not glyphed, you have to then reapply immolate, or drop Conflagrate altogether), (c) Chaos Bolt, (d) Incinerate.  If it’s a lengthy boss fight, go Curse of Doom, otherwise don’t bother with a curse (unless your party needs CoE – something you should be doing at the beginning of every instance run is looking for a Boomkin or an Unholy Death Knight to see if Curse of Elements duty is covered).  Now, you’re missing about ten talent points from what a level 80 Destruction warlock would spec, presumably from the Demo tree.  So you’re missing some nice DPS-boosting talents like the talent that improves Fel Armor.  Finally, realize that even in your burstiest tree (Destruction), you still take longer to get up and running than a mage does.  I often start runs in the mediocre middle of the pack.  Then we hit the first boss fight, and I tend to jump ahead (and stay there).

If you’re not specced Destruction, then at least on short fights, you have no possible way to keep up with a mage.  So don’t try.  Know that where you really shine is long fights, the longer the better.  On that 10-minute boss fight, when the mage is gasping for mana, you will be continuing to perform at the top of your game.  If you’re Affliction, the longer the fight, the higher your DPS goes.  Until the mob’s down to the last 25% of its health, and then you really start to bring the pain.  Embrace it.  And make sure to look at boss-fight-specific DPS meters – you’ll be more encouraged.

One thing I notice a lot with people new to caster dps is that they don’t chain-cast like they should. You aren’t melee so you don’t have an auto-attack doing white damage while you ponder what you should cast next.

Increase the number of Incinerates you cast, increase your Immolation uptime, keep Chaos Bolt on cooldown, mash Haunt whenever its up, don’t waste Decimation procs, don’t let your dots fall off generally. There shouldn’t ever be a time when you’re just standing around with nothing to do. Time your casts so that the second the first one goes off you’ve got a second one starting immediately. Again, no gaps between casts!

I wondered how and if they’d handle Bone Shield’s overpoweredness when they reduced its cooldown back down to a minute. Mmochampion has new patch notes listed today that address the issue.

• Bone Shield: This ability now has 3 charges instead of 4. Cooldown reduced to 1 minute.
• Glyph of Bone Shield: This glyph now grants 1 additional charge instead of 2.

So instead of six charges when glyphed, it’ll have 4 total. Hopefully this will mean it will have a decent and reasonable uptime instead of being completely broken. I like Unholy and all but its nice to have a choice between tanking trees instead of being shunted into just one.

This is the part where I smirk at the paladins, warriors and druids.

In 3.2.2, Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield are going back to a one minute cooldown. Icebound Fortitude will be (as it has for a little while now) on a two minute cooldown.

When the new patch changes were first leaked on mmochamp a day or two ago it wasn’t readily apparent that the cooldowns on the talented signature abilities had been reduced. All I saw was that they were reducing Vampiric Blood’s duration and hacking the bonus time that the glyph gave as well. I blanched, suffered an aneurysm, started rebuilding an Unholy spec and then fell into a childish, stubborn pout. I was quite relieved and a little surprised to see more of the picture. Two thumbs up on these changes.

This is how I always thought things should have been after the first time they nerfed the talented signature tanking cooldowns, i.e. Vampiric Blood, Unbreakable Armor and Bone Shield.

You see, once upon a time the signature tank cooldowns for Death Knights were all on a one minute cooldown. Icebound Fortitude, a baseline tank cooldown, was also on a one minute cooldown. This setup was deemed to be overpowered. The solution Blizzard chose was to double the length of the cooldown on the talented signature abilities and to leave Icebound Fortitude alone.

I facepalmed when that change was rolled out. It seemed fairly obvious to me that out of the four cooldowns it was Icebound Fortitude that was the most troublesome. The talented cooldowns are all very good yes, but they’re not as heavyhanded as a simple "You take half as much damage now" ability.

Vampiric Blood for instance boosts your health and increases the effectiveness of healing done to you. I like this concept. You’re still going to take just as much damage as you would have without the cooldown but your ability to handle that damage is greatly improved.

Unbreakable Armor is a Frost thing and therefore not something to be cared about. It wasn’t any good at the time anyway.

Bone Shield was a little iffy, I admit. With high avoidance levels it was potentially very powerful with a one minute cooldown. Get lucky enough and its uptime could be extremely high.

Then you have Icebound Fortitude. Something not spec-dependent and is simple, straightup damage reduction. A lot of damage reduction in fact.

I always said that the talented abilities should have kept their minute long cooldowns and Icebound Fortitude should be on a 2 minute cooldown.

Enter 3.2.2 and look what’s happening.

Yeah. I approve.