Life Tap > Mages

Life Tap Rank 8

Instant

Converts [1490 + SPI * 3] health into [1490 + SPI * 3] mana. Spirit increases quantity of health converted.

Life Tap is the core spell in a warlock's arsenal. I'd even go as far as saying that Life Tap is the spell that defines all that warlocks are about. So when I saw a mage say 'oom' four minutes into a boss fight the other day, I couldn't help let loose a little grin.

A new warlocks gets this spell at level six, which doesn't take too long to get to. After this, you should aim to get to level fourteen as fast as possible so you could get Drain Life. What this spell does is obvious from its name. In conjunction with Life Tap, leveling as affliction becomes a real breeze. Sacrificing some health for mana, and then getting that health back from anything you kill is what makes a warlock so awesome while leveling. You never need to stop and drink. You're an unstoppable force in those early levels, and just wait till you get Siphon Life.

From those early stages all the way to your first raid, Life Tap's gonna be on your bars. With my somewhat decent raiding gear, Life Tap gives me 2498 mana at the cost of that same amount of health. Something mages could only dream about. For a raiding warlock, it gets even better. Through Glyph of Life Tap, 20% of your spirit gets converted to spellpower which for myself means a 67 spellpower boost. Mind that that's completely unbuffed, the number goes higher with spirit buffs and kings!

One more great application for Life Tap, off the top of my head, is to kill yourself. While the spell on its own can't kill you, it fizzles out when you're too low on health to tap, you can use it with Hellfire to get some warlock dying action. That's how awesome we are, we can kill ourselves. Yes, Paladins can do it too but they need someone else to help them do it, so they suck anyway.

You may be wondering why a warlock would want to do this. Back in the day I used it to get past the Dire Maul entrance without needing a key for my doomguard quest, dying next to the door and spirit walking through to the other side. The same could be done for Scholomance. A more modern use is to do it when your raidleader calls for a wipe during a boss. Killing yourself gives no durability loss; so it's a neat trick to reduce repair costs.

To summarize, Life Tap is awesome, and mages suck for not having it.

No Dun Morogh critters were harmed in the making of this post. Actually that's a lie, I killed at least thirty rabbits trying to get the perfect Drain Life shot.

Warlocks in Cataclysm.. instant fear what?

So I've been tuning in to the live stream, and I see they decided to bring up warlocks first in the class panel.

Soul shards are GONE.. from bags!

Instead we're gonna have three soul shards on cooldown per battle, which seems pretty neat. They're gonna be part of our interface, much like the death knight runes, but they only refresh out of combat.

These shards are gonna be used for a single, 30 second cooldown ability that's off the GCD. All other spells that had a soul shard cost no longer need a shard. Once you use this, currently dubbed 'Soul Burn' spell it will power up your next spell. These are the spells it affects so far:

Fear - Makes it instant

Death Coil - Longer horror time, and a larger heal

Summoning - Instant

Soul Fire - Instant

Searing Pain - Next three will crit

These look very neat, and will definitely make soul shards fun. I'm definitely looking forward to whatever comes out from the class panels.

With regards to itemization, they've also made some rather drastic changes. For one, spellpower is gone. Instead, intellect will provide spellpower, along with mana of course. We also won't be needing spirit anymore, which in a way I wasn't too happy about. I enjoy juggling many different stats.

That's all I've heard for warlocks so far. I'll stay tuned tomorrow and post anything new I hear.

Not one, but two worms

So we stepped into the Coliseum today with a full raid, surprisingly, and we did eventually get the bosses down. While it wasn't difficult once we figured out the mechanics it was definitely new and exciting. Here's a quick rundown of what you're gonna be doing as a warlock in the Northrend Beasts encounter.

Gormok

• FIRE IS BAD. MOVE OUT.
• Nuke the snobolds hitching a ride on fellow member's backs.
• Stay away from said fellow raid members.
• Keep a 15yd distance between you and the boss.

Acidmaw and Dreadscale

Here's where things get different. These two worms both do a different type of attack; Acidmaw casts Paralytic Toxin that eventually slow you down then stuns you, while Dreadscale casts Burning Bile, which just does periodic damage. The catch is that they neutralize each other. The easier kill order is Acidmaw then Dreadscale, one gets a 50% damage done buff when the other one dies but it's not much of a problem on the normal mode.

During the first phase Dreadscale will be mobile whilst Acidmaw will be stationary. They both need to be tanked, but the mobile worm will cast his debuff on the tank, and the stationary one will cast it on random raid members. Therefore in the first phase random raid members will be getting the toxin that eventually stuns them. If this is you, you have to run to the tank tanking Dreadscale who'll have the burning bile debuff. This will neutralize the poison.

After a few minutes, both worms submerge and reappear. They swap roles in the way that now Acidmaw is mobile. This means the tank will be getting the paralysis poison. Random raid members will now be getting the burning bile debuff, who have to run it to the tank to get rid of the poison.

Rinse and repeat until they're both dead. Once Acidmaw dies all you have to do is heal through the burning bile debuff as there will be no more poisons.

Oh and stay out of the poison clouds.

Icehowl

Another straightforward, but still enjoyable boss. Force your tank to drag him to the middle and spread out around him. Every now and then he knocks the entire raid to the walls, looks at someone and charges at them. If it's you, you're smart enough to read this blog and know that you have to move. But anyone else is gonna get hit, and die. You could also be a nice warlock and tell people to move, then the boss crashes into the wall and gets stunned. At that point he takes 100% more damage so you can stay on top of the meters. It's a win/win however evil you decide to be.

Ha

So a certain mage in the guild who never admits how aweome I am and links recount to me when he beats be because I was busy thinking of posts for the blog finally admits it. He was having problems, disconnecting as soon as he logged in and such. Now I'll make this clear, I only helped him to stop the login spam, not because I like him. So of course, being the genius that I am solve the problem. I'll give you a warning in advance Chillout. I'm gonna be linking this post to you every chance I get.

Patch 3.2 tomorrow

So it's been confirmed that 3.2 will be applied during the downtime tomorrow, and it wasn't really a surprise after the Frenchies leaked all over the place. There aren't really any interesting warlock changes to boot, none that will change our dps rotations or whatnot. In a way I'd rather there was at least some very minor change that would leave us with something else to do. It'll probably get boring doing the same things we did in Ulduar all over again in the new raid. I actually haven't seen much of the PTR live streams, so I don't know what they're like, but I'm hoping that it won't be the same mechanics over and over again.

The most game affecting change from what I've heard is the resilience one and what it's gonna do to warlocks. I've seen various people starting to whine about how awesome we're gonna be in PvP, and it wasn't worded like that, it was more like "omg you killed me in 1v1 after I've been owning you for the past 7 months, nerf". It's definitely gonna make me try out some battlegrounds again, and by battlegrounds I mean the new Isle of Conquest.

I've been a fan of the whole vehicle combat thing since the release of Wrath. Malygos P3 was awesome. I think FL would be one of the funner bosses in Ulduar if he wasn't so easily tuned. The way they seem to have integrated ground combat with the whole vehicle thing in the IoC seems to be an act of genius and it's probably because one of the developers plays a warlock. How else would you explain it?

The first thing I'll do tomorrow is go to the Alchemy trainer and get the new transmutes, and after that try out the new 5man. We'll be doing the new raid that evening as well, seeing as Wednesdays are raid days for us. Realm Firsts will be out of reach, as I'm sure those 'awesomer' (recruit a billion players at the start of wrath and have 100 people sitting out every night. Yes I'm exaggerating but it's mostly true) guilds will be trying to log on as soon as possible. And there's probably gonna be some more photoshopped screenshots.. like anyone cares.

That's all I have to say really. To all you raiders, good luck in the Crusaders' Coliseum, I'll keep you updated on our progress.

Quartz hack you have to get

I guess it's time for me to impart some little secrets of mine.

If you've ever been an affliction warlock for a while you know the importance of cutting your drain soul channel at the right time to get the most out of those beautiful 15k ticks. You might think you're awesome enough to just know it off by heart when your next tick is gonna be, but let's be honest here, only I'm good enough to do that.

As you can see from the screenshot above, this fix puts vertical lines on your cast bar showing you when the next damage tick will happen. Due to server lag you can cut off the channel just a bit before that line, and nukage still happens.

Now that you know what it does, you need to know how to install it. The creator has updated the file a bit so all you have to do is unzip it into your addons folder, so without further delays, here it is.

YOU CAN FEEL THE AWESOME ALREADY

A Welcome Post

Welcome to my blog, I'm Iriya!

I'm a Gnome Warlock on Ghostlands EU and I started playing around September '07. Some of you might consider me a late TBC bloomer, and it's true. I originally wanted to roll an Undead Warlock back then, but after a whole 2 levels my friends on the Alliance side figured out why they couldn't talk to me. After some tough consideration I ended up deleting my hordie! Those 2 levels seemed to take forever.. I had no idea what I was getting into.

So I started my little gnome and realised that there was a quest I didn't notice on my undead lock. My first trainer wanted to show me the ways of the warlock. It was the quest that made me stick to being a warlock forever. It was the quest that got me the awesomest spell ever. One that can summon the biggest(....), baddest, cutest demon ever; Belfip! I didn't know it then, actually I found him quite annoying, but Belfip was indeed decked out in awesome.

I started steaming through the levels and I hit the big one, level 10. That's when I got a new demon, my big blueberry Mezzthak. Of course I found him awesomer than Belfip back then, but then again, what did I know? I was only level 10.

Eventually I hit level 60. I joined some guild called The Ancient Ones which focused on getting people attuned for Onyxia (Yes, they were level 70s and trying to down Onyxia, no I wasn't very smart back then). A few months passed here and there and eventually we hit December, month of gift giving, and in my case, the month I decided to get TBC.

There I was, a gnome in Outland. I started levelling together with my hunter friend who got the expansion at the same time as me and we had some fun moments. Eventually I got to 70 and I had decided to leave The Ancient Ones, I mean they hadn't even killed Onyxia yet, honestly. And that's when I joined Phoenix Knights. It was the guild my mage friend was in, and we enjoyed those raids together.. most of the time atleast (you know I never asked you to pass those pants) So I stayed in that guild for a while, cleared Kara a couple million times and after a while things went awry.

Eventually that guild disbanded after tragic events which I don't really remember and we reformed it under the name From The Ashes. Some of you on Ghostlands might recognise it. I didn't last long in there, I wanted bigger things. I heard of a guild called Hide n Seek which at the time were trying to clear SSC, but before I joined they had disbanded and formed..

Cake! I joined this guild thinking I'd be moving up to the next tier of content from Kara, which would be T5, but nope. On my application I was at 10/11 Kara, they accept me, and there I was, dumped straight into the epitome of content at the time. We started clearing through Hyjal and BT slowly. We got hit by summer raiding syndrome a bit, but I didn't notice much at the time, I was too busy enjoying the raids.

Fast forward a bit, we downed Illidan before 3.0 hit. 3.0 hit, we clear Naxxramas and I get my Plagued Proto-Drake from the 10man achievement and here we are at Ulduar. Me and Belfip together trying to be the awesomest evil duo ever.

So this is my blog.

And it's awesome.

This post is really only here so I can see what the elements of the post layout will look like. I'm hoping this blog will end up being something I'll update daily.

Small tidbit update, I'm probably just gonna use this blog post as my sandbox for trying to learn HTML, so you can pretty much ignore anything that happens here!