I did say at the start that there wasn’t anything outstanding. To be fair this did mean we no longer had to head out and find things to kill for our fragments of soul. Instead we find a load of locks lining up by the practice dummies before and after raids, presumably gathering wooden practice souls.
Well, Ulduar was fun and destruction fairly interesting, the tiered items pretty nice (if a little weird); things were ok and moving along. Then the Argent guys finished their arena and… well, not much changed really. If you weren’t raiding but leveling then you could summon your mounts sooner and just by speaking to the trainer. Also Banish could be removed by yourself or some other warlock with a sense of humor. For those that were raiding, demonology (or more specifically Demonic Pact) was making a name for itself and felguards making a raiding return.
Now we’re seeing Arthas’ homestead invaded and the pull between affliction and destruction hotting-up as they are both up to fighting weight — with demo looking on in amusement throwing spell power to them both. It certainly feels a different world that we woke up in 12 months ago and there sure seem to be less locks kicking about these days (where did all those death knights and paladins come from?).
Looking forward to the next year seems a little odd since there’s high hopes that it will contain the release of Cataclysm – the expansion set to shake up the warlock class as much as Deathwing shakes Azeroth. Certainly I hope for a shard system that feels more like a benefit than a burden. I quite like the sound of the new system as it has been communicated so far, but I do have some reservations that it’s just going to be another set of numbers to watch. This is the burning of a soul — the very essence of a being — to unleash its power for our own aims. It should be something emotive and worthy of the sacrifice made, not a simple resource like a rune or a candle.
Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. “The avarice never ends! ‘I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored and sell it to make glue.’ Look, I don’t wanna make waves, but this whole Christmas season is stupid, stupid, stupid!” ~ The Grinch
Hmmm… a look back at changes for warlocks in 2009. Well there was… no, wait, that was 2008. Well what about… nah, that’s planned for Cataclysm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Nothing particularly outstanding has happened in the warlock area this year; but so much has happened and, well things have changed. It’s like waking up each morning and something is subtly different. Your blue toothbrush is now red… The sofa is now against this wall, not that one… each change is pretty unremarkable in it’s own right but by the end of the year you are a stuntman living in LA married to a small, blond Portuguese skier who when she’s not training does abstract painting, practices yoga and brews her own beer.
As we surfaced, bleary-eyed into January our memories of sacrificing succubus and SL/SL were fading faster than those of December 31st. Those heady days of power that also led to FotM wannabes flooding our ranks. Skill and complexity had been leaking out of the class for a while and Naxx wasn’t really providing any of us with much of a worthwhile proving ground. Affliction spell rotations were causing carpal-tunnel injuries on those who were determined to take the cold-turkey approach to dropping their addiction to Shadow Bolt spam. Fans of demonology were taking felguards like some sort of methadone for simplistic raiding, meanwhile retaining the use of their fingers.
