So, last night I settled in for a fun filled evening of Cataclysm.  Release nights are so exciting!

First, I tried to log in.

I was successful.

So successful, in fact, that the game sat on ‘Success!’ for a good half an hour to remind me that, yes, I am indeed the most successful person in the universe.

Yes, yes, Blizzard does think I am awesome.

Then, my character popped up in all her awesome hawtness.

I logged her in, and stared at the loading screen.

Then I went and made dinner.

Then I came back and stared at the loading screen.

Then I ate dinner.

Stared some more.

Cleaned up after dinner.

Stared some more.

Logged out and in.

Actual success!  As in, in within 5 minutes!

I got to Stormwind, started making my way out to Vashjir… when some twatwaffle didn’t dismount on the boat.

So, the event bugged.

We all, of course, died.

And then I spent the rest of the evening getting chain disconnected because half the server was clearly at the same graveyard.

Oh release day, I do love you!

… On the plus side, I watched some Top Gear, re-read another Stephen King Dark Tower book, painted my toenails, and ate a full bag of lollies.  A very productive and eventful evening indeed!

Thought I should reassure you all.

I’m just busy fighting off the zombie apocalypse.

And trying to be awake at a time that I can call Blizzard support so I can actually play WoW.

I might write something meaningful in a few weeks.  Until then, thanks for sticking around I guess! <3

I had a blast at BlizzCon, don’t get me wrong.  However, I think that Blizzard need to work on a couple of things for next time.  Always room for improvement and all that.

1.  Community chat

I can’t remember the exact name for this part of the weekend, but there were various times scheduled where people could come together and talk about various aspects of WoW, all moderated by a Blizzard employee.  Kinda like RL forums.  Actually, exactly like RL forums, but probably without all the swearing and the trolling and the carry on.

I thought that this was a great idea from Blizzard, but I really would have liked to see them take it a step further and invite some MVP’s (you know, the guys and girls with green text on the forums) to participate.  After all, these guys are a huge part of the face of the community – they aren’t employed by Blizzard, and all the hard work they do on the forums is solely because of their love of the game, or their class, or whatever else it is they like to talk about.

I mean, really, how hard could it be to get into contact with these guys and offer them a BlizzCon ticket if they are able to give up a little bit of their time to participate in the chat?  I know that I’d love to see some of the MVP’s from the forums I occasionally use, and talk to them about my ideas, thoughts, and concerns.  It would also be another fantastic way to recognise all the work those people do.

2.  Being prepared

We all know that someone at Blizzard has the responsibility of reading blogs and media to find out what the public are saying about WoW.  It just makes sense.  So how were they not prepared when someone asked about the clothing women wear in the game?  Concerns around this very area were the topic of conversation on blogs for a couple of months.

Having a flippant answer (which to me demonstrated a total lack of understanding of what so many people are concerned about) showed that Blizzard either a) had been slacking on their research, or b) just really didn’t give a stuff.

Guys, you need to recognise that promoting one very specific type of body image (for both men and women) in the game just isn’t good enough anymore.  And if you can’t understand that, then you need to at least recognise that it is a valid concern that many people have, instead of just dismissing it with a poor attempt at humour (really, did you have to try and belittle the woman who was asking the question?)

Whoever is reading blogs for you guys… perhaps you need to read a wider variety.  Or pay more attention.  Or something.  Blogs, like the forums, are a great part of the community (and one which I feel gets very little recognition from Blizzard) and reflect the diverse player base and their opinions.  Take notice of what we are saying, because we love the game probably almost as much as you do, as do each and every one of our readers.

What about you guys?  What did you think they could have worked on at BlizzCon?

The convention itself was rather disappointing for me.  Nothing too exciting on the WoW front (what a surprise…), and we got trolled massively by Blizzard at the end (World of Jersey?  What?  If it’s anything like Jersey Shore, I’ll send it to my ditzy sister).

However, I did have a wonderfully fantastic time meeting friends both old and new, and getting myself into many many different kinds of mischief (not all my fault!).  Warlocks pwned at almost everything (yay Hydra, Zabine and Nib!), repping our class well and partying as hard as most everyone else.

I accidentally got horribly drunk at The Raid pre-screening (fantastic, by the way, although I may have yelled “Slimes in the raid!!” just a little too loudly).  Turns out every drink had a good 2 or 3 drinks worth of alcohol in it.  I spent most of the last day staggering around hungover and tired.  I was also apparently super loud in ihop (lies and slander!), and was teased mercilessly by a certain dorf Hunter.  Harumph.

I guess the sad thing is, I don’t have a great deal to report.  Like I said, there was very little news (apart from finding the sole Jaina fan in existence), and I spent most of the time trying to find all the people I wanted to see and talk to.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to some, I gave up completely on even bothering to talk to a couple, but for the most part I had a brilliant time meeting people.

And no, I made absolutely no crude jokes.  Or lewd comments.  I was a perfectly proper Warlock at all times.  You guys would be proud.

Because, really, there’s nothing at all wrong with coin throwing contests (inside joke is funny to me… yeah, I know, I fricking suck)

(Totally not WoW related, sorry.  Probably won’t even make sense.  You’ll understand why at the end!)

Well, what Hellfire used to be before it got all wimpified.

So, stupid me came up with the following plan to deal with travelling this week:

- No sleep Tuesday night, to ensure sufficient sleepiness for Wednesday

- Sleep all afternoon/early evening Wednesday

- Leave home at 10pm, to arrive at airport at around 8 or 8.30.

- Win!

Step one went perfectly.  A very tired grouchy Sar rocked up to work Wednesday feeling exhausted and irritable.  Which meant that grouchy Sar reacted really badly when her day went to crap. Which meant that by the time she got home (late, because some asshat moved all the work she left for her students while she was away because people are inconsiderate morons who like to try and ruin her teeth by making her grind and gnash away so she doesn’t hurl abuse at them… or shoot them in the face with a shotgun.  They are lucky there wasn’t a shotgun around!) she was in a vile rage and did not feel at all like sleeping.

So, she went to bed at 8pm, and tried to sleep.  Of course, she started to drift off, then realised it was 9pm.  So, no sleep again that night!

Now, driving 10 hours on such a small amount of sleep, in a bad mood, is not a good idea.  Crap that can happen (and did happen!) includes:

- veering all over the road when your arms decide to die

- dropping the clutch like crazy when you happen to be in horrible stop-start traffic.

- actually realising your eyes are closing if you try to glance down at the speedometer

- then realising you are almost falling asleep every five minutes… thank goodness for that weird noisy bumpy paint that warns you about running off the road!

- misreading speed advisory signs for corners (mixing up 45kmph and 85kmph?  BAD.  If I wasn’t a half decent driver I’d be at the bottom of a cliff right now)

- struggling with pea soup levels of fog (hey, it doesn’t get that foggy where I live!  We don’t have mountains, valleys, or hills for the fog to hang around) when you can’t even keep your damned eyes open

- being completely unable to sing along to the most singalongable songs ever.  That’s when you KNOW you are tired.

I think Blizzard is secretly trying to kill me so I stop complaining about them.

And yes, that sentence is grammatically awful, but I’m too tired to decide which end needs fixing :-P

Sar’s brain, after 51 hours of no rest, signing out!

In amongst all the hubbub surrounding 4.0.1 (which is still trying to download, curse you bad internet!), I was pondering the last patch like this – namely 3.0.1.

Before 3.0.1 hit, people were panicking everywhere.  “Oh no, we can’t pot more than once in a fight!”  “Oh no, it’s going to be so difficult!”

And then, of course, the absolute opposite happened.  It was so disappointing that I wrote a massive post on it (almost two years ago exactly!  It really doesn’t feel that long ago; I remember it as if it were yesterday).

Circumstances aren’t the same this time.  The universe isn’t getting nerfed to the ground, for starters.  But I still feel like I’m stuck in a Chicken Little story all over again.

Relax guys.  The sky isn’t falling.  Sure, you may need to learn how to play again.  Or at least change how you play a little.  But you’ll get there.  And as someone who has played all three roles in the game, I welcome some new challenges.  Especially when I’m healing.

That is, if I can ever get this insurmountable patch downloaded!

With 4.0 literally on top of us, I thought it was high time I got off my rotund rear and wrote a guide to what I think is the best spec for Destro Warlocks.  This, of course, comes with the previously mentioned caveat that I haven’t played in the beta or the PTR, and so I could make a mistake.

Click me to go to the talent calculator page

We are forced to put 31 talents into Destruction, which really makes those choices a bit of a no brainer.  However, for those who might be curious, I have highlighted my choices below.  To be fair, it’s more a matter of ‘what don’t I need’ than ‘what do I need’ with these trees.  But hey… let’s see anyway.

Bane (3/3): A reduction of cast speed wasn’t the first thing I reached for, simply because I wasn’t sure how Haste works out in 4.0.  However, it is a handy talent to have, and you are forced to choose it to progress further down the tree.

Shadow and Flame (3/3): I think Shadow and Flame is worth having solely for the 12% increase to Incinerate.  However, the Improved Shadow Bolt is always nice for those looking for utility, and if you are lacking an equivalent buff in your raid, it could be very handy.

Improved Immolate (2/2): Again, kinda a no brainer.  20% to your Immolate is pretty shiny.

Improved Soul Fire (2/2): Improved Soul Fire changes up the Warlock rotation, giving us a hard hitting opener.  Improved Soul Fire causes you to receive a 15% increase to spell haste for 15 seconds if you hit a target at 80% or greater health.  Think of it as a reverse execute.  I’m not sure yet how this pans out mathematically, but you’ve got to spend the points somewhere regardless.

Emberstorm (2/2): Another boring, make you cast faster talent (this time affecting Soul Fire and Immolate).

Improved Searing Pain (2/2): This talent confuses me, as it would confuse anyone who hasn’t played PTR or beta.  I’ve heard talk that Blizzard have buffed the holy hell out of Searing Pain, although this spell still scares me.  An increase in damage is fine, but is it accompanied by an increase in threat generation?  Because, really?  More threat?  I’ll test Searing Pain out when the patch hits and see what happens.  It is also worth noting that it only increases the crit chance of Searing Pain when the target has less than 50% health.  Searing Pain is probably not worth casting before that point.

Aftermath (0/2): PvE stuns are a snore.  Especially when half the crap in an instance is immune to your stun effects anyway.  If you are lacking in stun effects in your raid, I guess you consider it, but I am not seeing any PvE raiding worth in this talent.  Probably a fight specific talent.

Backdraft (3/3): Pretty similar to the old Backdraft (as in, y’know… not new).  Just as worthwhile as before.

Shadowburn (1/1):  Shadow damage, but it will be interesting to play with, considering the new Soul Shard mechanic.  I imagine it will kick absolute arse on long boss fights with more than one target  (something in the style of High King Maulgar).

Burning Embers (2/2): Finally, getting to the new stuff in the tree!  Burning Embers puts a DoT on the target, caused by your Imp’s Firebolt or your Soul Fire, equal to 30% of the damage dealt by said spell.  The DoT lasts for 7 seconds.  Again, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.  Things I would like to know: do you and your Imp have separate Burning Embers DoTs?  I am guessing that it can not proc while it is up, although it may be that it refreshes if it procs while it is going.  Lots of question marks here, but it’s nice to see something new and interesting.

Soul Leech (2/2):  Same ‘blah, play nice with the others’ raid utility as Soul Leech and Improved Soul Leech, condensed down into two talent points.  No reason not to take it, really, and I’d make a comment about utility here if every other bastard didn’t have some form of Replenishment as well.

Backlash (0/3): It’s PvE.  Stop getting hit, foo’.

Nether Ward (1/1):  Eh.  It might be useful, and I had to throw a point somewhere.  Basically takes Shadow Ward, and makes it better by turning into a damage absorption bubble of every magical flavour.  No, it won’t stop that Rogue from hurting you when he stabs you in the kidney.

Fire and Brimstone (3/3):  Increases damage, increases this, Increases that.  You know the drill: it makes you hit harder, it makes you crit more, you want it.  Because, really, Destruction Warlocks are like diamond connoisseurs – the small ones are pretty, but the big ones are so much better.  And yeah, I had to use diamond there, because the other things that are better big, just aren’t pretty when they are small.  No one likes a small yacht.  Just ask Ghostcrawler.

Shadowfury (1/1): I’m not enthused at all about Shadowfury.  I know a lot of people who think it’s an exciting PvE spell, and it does give us a little more mobility, but I have just plain never liked it.  I put a point into it because I had to, more than anything else.  I’m totally not all about the Shadow either: while I have always thought it would be nice to have to use a mix of shadow and fire in our rotation, the buffs we receive to fire through specialising in Destruction make me disinclined to use Shadow spells.

Nether Protection (0/2):  PvE raiding.  Stop pulling aggro, foo’.  Or, you know, only spec into this when the situation requires it.  Which won’t be too often, except for if you are Lock Tanking. 

Empowered Imp (2/2): Imps handing out Instant Soul Fires, hopefully like candy.  Which leads to (hopefully) more Burning Embers uptime.  Nommy.  … OK, so maybe not like candy.  4% seems pretty low.  I’m hoping this gets increased or something. 

Bane of Havoc (1/1): The other new hotness in the Destro tree.  To be honest, my first thought was ‘This is REALLY going to screw some people over in PvP’, but it will also be pretty damn awesome in PvE as well. Add fights?  Whoo hoo!  For those who can’t click through to wowhead, bane of havoc causes 15% of the damage dealt to other targets to also hit the baned target.

Chaos Bolt (1/1): Do you have to ask?  It’s shiny, it’s fun, and we hopefully get to use it quite a bit.

Crap in the other trees

This was actually a more difficult decision process than the Destruction tree.  I decided to go with the following:

Improved Corruption (2/3): I’ve heard that Corruption is working its way into the Destro rotation.  However, if it is not, then of course you do not want this. 

Dark Arts (3/3):  More Firebolts = More chances for Empowered Imp and Burning Embers to proc. Just makes sense, really.

Thoughts, queries, notions, theories?  Fire away in the comments!

I don’t think I’d let your kids read this one without reading it first.  Or, if you are a child and your parents aren’t around, you might want to skip this one.  Lots of love, the amazingly maternal Saresa.

Not that it’s BAD or anything… but it’s not great either.

I know I promised you guys a look at talents and things… but every time I blink, Blizzard seem to be changing something about the way Warlocks work in 4.0 and Cataclysm, and I don’t really want to write a whole heap of stuff that is going to change five seconds later.  Yeah, I know, I’m lazy…but, to be fair, how often do you guys look to me for spec advice and stuff like that anyway?  I’m pretty sure you can wait a day or two or ten.

So, instead, I’m going to share a bucket load of Blizzcon excitement and stress with you.  Because I am sure that you all want to hear it!

What, you don’t want to hear all about it?
Really?
Well, too bad, looks like you are reading anyway.

I’m just a wee bit stressed at the moment, because I have no money, which means that I have to choose between paying for my accommodation and eating.  At this point in time, a bed is winning over food, but only just.  Of course, this ridiculous level of poverty is entirely my own fault, so I wouldn’t start feeling sorry for me if I were you *looks at her 50+ pairs of shoes and sighs*.  The plan at this point is to buy a loaf of bread and some salad, and live on sandwiches for most of the trip.  If I can somehow con the entire group of people attending various meet ups to buy me drinks, I should be well and truly covered on that front.  Of course, seeing as I have basically never tried to get anyone to buy me a drink ever in my life, this could be really interesting.  I’m trying to decide whether being nice (I really suck at being nice), or being all Crocodile Dundee and waving a knife about will be a better method of getting drinks out of people.  Of course, if I don’t have a knife, I’ll have to make do with a straw.  Or a bobby pin.  Or a lethal contraption made out of a hair band, a piece of gum, and a rock I found in my shoe.

Just call me MacGyver.

However, I am also immensely excited, because this time I am going to take a heap of photos, rather than last time, when I did something stupid like forget my camera battery charger or something.  So you will all have to suffer through photos of me posing with the Deathwing statue, photos of me snogging the Deathwing statue, photos of me making inappropriate gestures at the Deathwing statue… you get the drift.  And probably some photos of other people I run into as well.  I’m hoping to meet as many bloggers as I did last year, if not more (I know a lot of the same people are going, although there are one or two fantastic people I met last year who can’t make it this time, which makes me sadder than a Mage who just realised he’s been taken to raids this whole time solely for the strudel), and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get into all sorts of shenanigans.  I vaguely remember something about drinking contests… (although anyone who thinks they can beat an Aussie with an Irish heritage in a drinking contest is clearly hallucinating), which should at the very least be entertaining (although entirely reliant on my afore mentioned drink scabbing skills).

I’m also pretty excited about the whole three Diablo III panels (seriously… three?  Really?)  I’m really looking forward to D3, although it’ll be interesting finding the time to play it.  A lot of my old Diablo playing time came from sitting in university lectures, trying to keep myself entertained… although if the internet connection was reliable you’d usually catch me playing WoW instead.  Yep, I paid lots of money for that degree! (Actually, scratch that, the government paid lots of money for that degree thanks to a convenient scholarship – I don’t see too many people essentially getting paid to sit around and play WoW and Diablo 5 days a week!)  I think if I tried to play computer games at work, I’d get my arse handed to me, right before it got booted out the door.

Although I have always wondered what WoW would look like on the electronic whiteboard in my classroom…

I’ll be most likely taking my computer with me, although I’m still deciding, since (thanks to the US’ entirely asinine rules about luggage) I will have to check my laptop or my camera or both. Thanks, idiot terrorists. Which means, if I’m feeling up to it, I’ll be posting crap during the trip.  I’m not making any promises as to quality, especially if the posts are written after said drinking contest.  If you can come up with an extremely entertaining photo idea, let me know, and I’ll see if I can pull it off (although you’ll have a challenge beating the photo of me at a party in a fluffy pink robe, holding a hot pink penis shot glass and drinking cocktails out of a blender jug).

If you are going to Blizzcon, by chance, you can also catch me at the following fantabulous venues.  You are also encouraged to buy me a beverage… if you do, I’ll try to find an awesome story to regale you with.  Or something.  I might say hi, and thanks, and then retreat into a weird nervous blush as well… so don’t think this is a promise.

Thursday Evening: I might pop in at the WoW Insider Reader Meetup.  I skipped this last year, because large crowds kinda scare me, and then was devastated to hear that I missed the entertaining sight of an anonymous blogger being so drunk they had their head in a toilet.  Damn it.

Friday Evening: The Twisted Nether Blogcast Meetup.  This was one of the highlights of my trip last year, and I am pretty sure that it will be pretty kick arse this year.

Saturday Evening: The Raid pre-screening.  If you have a ticket, and you can find me (I’ll be the blonde or brunette – I can’t decide yet, darn it! – Aussie girl.  That should eliminate most of the crowd: just listen for the obnoxious and annoying girl with the accent).

If you are a reader, and you are at Blizzcon, and you do happen to run into me, you may end up in a photo.  Fair warning.

Can’t half tell I’m getting kinda psyched for Blizzcon on a Pauper’s Budget, can you?

/squee

So, I’ll be in Anaheim from Thursday to Sunday, and I have no idea what I am doing for the vast majority of that.  So, this is where you guys come in!

I need you to fill my itinerary up for me, so that I am able to get everything I possibly want done, well… done in the four days I am there.  All I have so far is the following:

Thursday

6.30am: land at LAX

2pm? *shrug* pick up ticket/swag bag etc.  I can’t remember what time they open, and this is more likely to actually occur when I have people to entertain me in the queue.

Friday

All day: Blizzcon!

All night: TNB meetup

Saturday

All day: Blizzcon!

All night: The Raid pre-screening and party

Sunday

???

10pm: get to airport

Midnight: fly out of LAX

So, this is where you guys come in.  Fill in the gaps for me!  I want to catch up with as many people as possible in that short time, and I happen to be brilliant at going without sleep, so I don’t mind if plans mean I don’t get to actually go to bed all that often.  Because, seriously, at this point, that’s all I’ve got.  Oh, and I’ll be actually remembering to take photos this year. :-D

So… what events or people am I missing?  Let me know!

I have to preface this with the obvious warning – I haven’t played in the beta.  I haven’t played in the PTR.  Hell, I haven’t played in live in forever and a day.  This series is compiled purely on my intuition, and a smidgen of research.  As I have a minimal depth of knowledge of the other trees, my choices in talents there could be very questionable.  There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of information floating around on the interwebs about Warlocks in Cataclysm (perhaps because there is a lot of discontent with the state of the class currently, but I am not really qualified to comment on that, being that I haven’t been playing and all!)

So.  With the arrival of Patch 4.0 staring us in the face, I am sure we are all asking ourselves ‘What the fricking hell am I going to do when my talents reset?’  Which, of course, is a damned good question.

Cataclysm and 4.0 bring us the most drastic overhaul to talent trees I have ever seen.  With a mass culling of talents, the introduction of ‘masteries’, and a different way to approach talents, the game is looking very different.  But, of course, you knew all this already.  So let’s get down into the nitty gritty.

Affliction: Shadow Mastery grants you a lovely 25% increase to Shadow damage.  Certainly nothing to scoff at. At 80, you are able to train into your Mastery: Potent Afflictions (no link available, alas), which also increases all periodic shadow damage by 13.04% at level 80, increasing by 1.63% with each point you gain in Mastery.

Demonology: Demonic Knowledge grants you a 15% increase to Fire and Shadow spell damage.  Your Mastery: Master Demonologist, Increases damage done by your demons and by yourself in demon form by 12% at level 80.  This increases by 1.5% per point.

Destruction: Cataclysm (see, Destro is so damned awesome that the name of the expansion is in our talent tree!) increases fire damage by a shiny 25%.  Our Mastery: Firey Apocalypse, increases all fire damage by 10% at level 80, increasing by 1.25% per point.

While the above are interesting to consider, they don’t actually help you much in the way of choosing a tree to follow.  I can’t make a substantive judgement at this point to say which tree is shaping up to be the best damage in Cataclysm, and (unless I am blind, which is very likely), there is little around on EJ or other sites to suggest which is most viable at the moment.  I would say to go with the playstyle you are most comfortable and happy with for the remainder of Wrath, operating on the (perhaps foolish) assumption that each of the specs will be more than viable for end game raiding at this point.  Preliminary speculation suggests that Affliction is the strongest tree, with Destruction being a close second (Affliction edges us out with their Execute) and Demonology being third (which I personally find to be rather disappointing).

A breakdown of the talent trees and glyph choices will be published over the next few days.  As each post is published, I’ll put a link at the bottom of this post for future reference.  I more than welcome any criticisms or queries on any of the following – I know that my research is bound to be flawed, and I’d love to be able to fix errors!

4.0 Destruction Derby: Guide to speccing for Destruction ‘Locks

All About Affliction: Guide to speccing for Affliction ‘Locks