Tag Archives: warlock

alts, outlands, screenshots

The Littlest Heroes

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Over the last three and a half years I have sent three hunters and two druids through this portal but this is my first warlock.

Obviously the ceremonial screenshot had to happen.

I love how Tawbree is as big as Lil’ XT.

Now my favorite part about going through the Dark Portal is the hugely scary Pit Commander on the other side, because it makes me stop and go “whoa” every time. So I charged in, eager to be reunited with my big scary friend again, aaaaand he was dead. Guess that says something about the state of the Outlands these days. Good times…

alts, druid

Oh man, you guys.

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I can’t decide which is more fun, my warlock or my rogue.

My warlock is currently level 47 and I’m leveling her with my boyfriend’s warrior tank. His goal with the character is to Tank Everything In The Fracking Game at the Correct Level. That means if he has to XP-pause at 60 to tank the raids, he’ll do it. And if he has to XP-pause at 70 to do the same, he’ll do that too. And he has roped me into his nefarious plans.

For the record– The Boy is an amazing tank. And he is decked out in blues that are enchanted with stuff like Mongoose. And the other day in ZF I pulled aggro off of him on the final boss.

THAT IS HOW AWESOME MY WARLOCK IS.

Also fun. Did I mention fun yet?

Oh by the way, I never die. Like the other day, after the ZF run was finished, it was just me and The Boy left in group and we were kind of running around for fun and we ran smack into a respawned pack of mobs.

The Boy charges into the fray and is promptly Hex’d and turned into a frog.

Mobs all beeline for me.

/Howl of Terror
/DoTDoTDoTDoT
/Drain Life
/point
/laugh

Yeah that was fun.

But then there is my rogue. Oh my gosh. I have the goggles + the heirlooms and my rogue never dies either. …okay, that was an exaggeration. I’ve died a couple times on my rogue. Sucks to not have heals. Still, I’ve also taken on unexpected packs of like four mobs, and lived to tell the tale. I usually have like 5 hit points left, but still. I LIVE. Also solo’d Hogger at the appropriate level. Did I mention that Evasion + BoA items + dynamite is OP? I love it so much.

It’s probably too early to say anything definitively about the class this early on, though, but it is SO FUN, I am so excited to do more leveling with this one. How did I never get into rogues before? Silly Pike!

So, I’m seriously considering changing mains for Cataclysm (assuming I am still playing– I still have so much stuff going on IRL that I’m really just playing it by ear at this point). No real major reason, just kinda want to try something different. The question, though, is change to what? Healy Druid was my original inclination but I still haven’t recovered from the impending Loss of Perma-Tree, since Tree Form was the entire reason I rolled healy druid to begin with (I know, I’m lame), so now both warlock and rogue (and maybe Goggles Bear) are at the top of the contenders list. We’ll see how things go!

(Also toward the top of the list: Gnome Priest, and Goblin EVERYTHING.)

alts, screenshots, thoughts

Brutal Honesty

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Is it possible to love something too much? Perhaps. I’ll tell you my story…

I have this tendency to crash and burn on things, and WoW is no exception. I pretty much hit rock bottom the other day. See, I love raiding with my guild. A loooot. But because I wanted to be able to contribute, I probably went way overboard. Suddenly, my days were concerned with stuffing them full of heroics on both my hunter and druid so I could get badges for gear. Suddenly I was doing tons of dailies every day on two characters, to be able to fund flasks, repairs, new gems and enchants and the like. Suddenly I was an unwilling slave to Recount, not because of outside pressures so much as because of my own impossibly high standards for myself.

And suddenly I snapped.

I logged on to grudgingly do dailies the other day and was invited to Onyxia 10. My DPS was absolutely atrocious. Later I found out it was because my pet’s special attacks all decided to turn themselves off, but it took me a while to realize that, and I felt useless.

I had this growing desire to just shut the game off and not worry about it anymore, but I was scared to accept this, because I’m a blogger right? And I love hunters right? It terrified me to think that I wasn’t having fun anymore.

In desperation I threw a bunch of gold at the hunter trainers in the Dwarven District for a respec. Contrary to popular belief, I actually like all the hunter specs (not just Beast Mastery), and I have this secret dream to become really good at all of them. So, hoping a change of pace would fix things, I spec’d Survival, went to the training dummies, and discovered that I still stink at it. It just feels relentlessly clunky and there’s no rhythm to it. Frustrated that there is some aspect of hunters that I am not good at, since I am a perfectionist, I switched over to Marksmanship, which is as fun as ever, but even that couldn’t salvage anything. I spec’d back to Beast Mastery and then logged off as fast as I could, terrified by that feeling growing inside of me…

“This isn’t fun.”

I went and read a book for a while. Then I played Nintendo DS. Then I played Megaman 2. Comfort food. I didn’t let myself think about WoW. I was scared of what it might mean.

Then I went out to buy some ice cream. See, I am basically to ice cream what a foodie is to cuisine. Unfortunately my freezer doesn’t work very well at the moment, which is torture and means that I cannot keep my own ice cream unless I want it to turn into a soggy melted mess. But I really needed some ice cream, so I went out and bought some. The plan was to watch a movie while I ate when I got back.

But something was calling me…

See, a couple weeks back, I randomly made this gnome warlock. I’m not sure why. I’d made warlocks in the past and always quit when I discovered that they weren’t anything like hunters. I’d find out my imp was a failure tank, and so I’d quit. But something had me making a warlock, and I lavished her with gifts like the heirloom shoulders my druid had used for so long, plus an heirloom trinket and an heirloom staff enchanted with +30 spellpower.

And once I’d realized and accepted from the start that Warlock does not equal Hunter, running her around Elwynn Forest and Westfall had been… the most refreshingly fun thing I’d done in WoW in a really long time.

So I thought about it a little.

Then logged into her.

TawbreeAndFriends

Suddenly, I didn’t have to worry about Recount anymore. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about dailies. Suddenly I didn’t have to worry about badges. I didn’t have to worry about being a perfectionist with talents and rotation, since I had no idea what I was doing, and that was okay. All I had to worry about was how long I could /dance before Curse of Agony, Immolate, Corruption, and my voidwalker destroyed all the Defias in Moonbrook. This was followed by /giggles, because the gnome giggle is adorable. It was really fun. It was me and my blueberry vs. the world, discovering things at our own pace, the same way it had been with Tawyn and Tux two and a half years ago.

You’re wondering why I’m posting this, perhaps. It’s probably more for my sake than for yours. For a while, I was denying that I could even have fun playing anything else other than my hunter(s) and then my tree druid(s). But mostly, I think I wouldn’t let myself. Well… screw that.

I’m Pike, and I’m a gnome warlock. So there.

To those of you wondering if this is the End of the Blog as We Know It… no, I don’t think it is. I still have huntery stuff in Drafts, and I still plan on raiding on my hunter (though I think a break is in store, shortly), and writing about that, although I no longer want it to consume my WoW life, simply because “I’m a hunter blogger”.

So we’ll see how things go…

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Guest Post: Hunter/Warlock Synergy by Mr. Pike

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I gotta admit, I don’t normally do guest posts, or even really like the idea of them very much. The reason is because I dunno about you guys, but a big reason that I read blogs is because I enjoy the blogger. And as such I’d like to think you guys come here to read Pike and not a bunch of guest posts. (Though I could be wrong!)

That said, because I am busy this week and still want the site to maintain relatively active, I’ve succeeded in getting a certain someone to guest post for me. He comments here as “LS” although you may know him better as my mysterious significant other. Let’s see what he has to say about hunter/warlock synergy, gathered from all the billions of times we’ve two-manned stuff:

Hey there hunter buddies! I am LS, or as I have been more often referred to here, Mr. Pike. I came to hang out with you guys today at the request of my most esteemed lady friend, who has come down with a rather dreadful case of ‘moving-to-a-new-apartment-itis.’ I told her it might be lupus, but she told me that I needed to stop watching old episodes of House and start lifting boxes, or she was going to force me to entertain her readers while she was busy. So here I am!

With every intent of taking this request seriously, I sequestered myself away to consider what I should write. Also to hide from the task of heavy lifting. While I was thusly pondering I thought to myself; what can I write that my dear Pike’s lovely audience, would enjoy reading? I thought, perhaps, that I might regale you with humorous tales of what living with Pike is like, or perhaps amuse you with anecdotes of her past (mis)adventures. I then considered, however, that perhaps something a bit more meaningful might be appreciated. A different perspective on the game for people to consider and perhaps learn from. But what could I, a warlock, offer to an audience whose relationship with magic ended when they removed Arcane Shot from their rotation?

What I decided, is that the best use of this opportunity would be to write a brief entry of the form ‘what warlocks want their hunter buddies to know.’ While this is perhaps limited in focus, I think it will serve well as a subject on which I am capable of speaking, and on which you might perhaps be interested in listening to. With my subject thusly decided, and my girlfriend already knocking on the door insisting that she had been kidding about writing being an option, I got to work.

In all my considerable time being a warlock who works with a hunter, I think that perhaps the most fundamental misconception is that we’re both pet classes. While this may seem obviously true to some, it is actually a misnomer of sorts. A warlock’s minions have about as much in common with a warrior’s stances as they do with a hunter’s pets. While it is true that they are a separate entity from us, with their own HP and mana, and we have the ability to tell them to attack, or defend, etcetera, that’s really where the similarities end. Even as demonology our pets are not a significant portion of our DPS. I think the highest DPS I’ve ever personally seen a pet contribute is about 300 damage per second; and that was with a really wacky pet-heavy spec I was experimenting with. While it may be possible to eke out a little more than that, our pets will never approach the damage a hunter pet can put up. What’s more, our pets do not tank—not really.

Pike and I have solo’d a LOT of elites together in our time, and though I love my voidwalker Heldok a great deal—even Tux tanks better than he does. Particularly due to the superior healing abilities of mend pet over health funnel. Again, with a pet-heavy spec I was able to solo the first boss in normal mana tombs with level 80 Heldok, but it was a taxing ordeal. All in all, the voidwalker’s ability to take damage seems superior to hunter pets, but the warlock’s relative inability to heal it and its rather slow threat generation, makes my poor Heldok a rather inefficient personal tank. (Which is not to say that he doesn’t have a bevy of uses, they’re just nowhere near as powerful as a hunter pet’s are.)

Furthermore, while a hunter, or at least Pike, has a tendency to think of a pet more as a companion, for a warlock it is simply one more trick in a bag of tricks. We use our imp if we need health or slightly more DPS, we use our voidwalker if we absolutely can’t do something without a tank, we use our felhunter for the buff it gives us, the spell lock, and perhaps to steal its mana, and we use our succubus for CC.

Speaking of succubus CC, allow me to shed a bit of light on how it works for those who do not know. If for no better reason than to demonstrate why I think ‘seduce mobs’ should almost always be killed prior to ‘freezing trap mobs.’

After Pike became so exceedingly well known in our group as a top-notch CC-er with her freezing trap, I decided to see what I might accomplish with my own under-rated form of CC. I actually achieved some level of success at this, and have been complimented on my powers of seduction often. After all, how do you think I managed to get Pike to hang around me so long? But I digress. What I’m driving at, is that Succubus CC is by far one of the most complicated and unwieldy things I’ve ever tried to do in this game. And I once ran an RP / Raiding guild of over 200 people. (By far, the two most drama prone groups of people I’ve ever encountered.)

Seduce is unique among the spells I’ve encountered in WoW because it is a channeled effect which has a casting time. That there is really the trick. Because it’s a channeled effect with a casting time. What that means is that after the first seduce, there is a period of time when the mob is not CC’d, and new CC cannot be applied until the casting time is done. During these few moments, said mob will charge towards the succubus and—in any instance worth CCing in—one shot her. Since the effect is channeled, there’s no way to move the succubus to greater range whilst the effect is active. Thusfar, the only way I’ve found to stop the succubus from being killed, thus rendering the CC useless, is to break the seduce on the mob by attacking it myself, getting it to aggro on to me rather than the succubus. I then hope desperately that the succubus can re-seduce (dark gods help me if the mob resists) before I get killed—which, as a clothie, is probably between 2 and 4 attacks. What’s more, I can’t easily maneuver my succubus to be any distance from me when she seduces, meaning that next time seduction breaks, the mob is going to be within arm’s reach of her. Oh, and did I mention that seduce is on the same diminishing effects as fear? Cuz seduce is on the same diminishing effects as fear.

Aside from those two major issues, I honestly can’t say there’s a great deal of things that I feel I should say as the warlock’s delegate to the hunters. At least, nothing that is terribly pressing or interesting. I guess I should probably mention that damage meters are an atrocious way of displaying a warlock’s damage output. So if you’re ever a raid or group leader, don’t decide that your warlock is a scrub until you’ve looked at the damage output for just the boss fight.You may be surprised, or even shocked by how much the numbers change. I certainly know I have been in the past.

Oh, and Eye of Kilrogg kicks Eagle Eye’s butt. So next time scouting needs to be done, know your place: protecting the warlocks body. (Nya nya =P)

In closing, I’d like to say that despite their apparent lack of synergy, warlocks and hunters are two very interesting classes to play together. Individually, they are among the best classes for soloing content, so when attempting to two-man something, Pike and I often find that each one of us is uniquely equipped to help our combined group deal with some particular challenge. For example, the way she stacks agility and the way I stack stamina makes for some really fun times in the bedro—nevermind. >.>

That’s all I’ve got for now. I hope that some of the information here was helpful to you hunters, and if it wasn’t…well, I doubt Pike will let me guest post again anyway. =P

Thanks hon <3 and if you readers liked what you saw here, Mr. Pike has decided to branch warlock stuff away from his own personal blog, and stick them all over here at Curse of Senility. Be sure to check it out!