Lo-Quality WoW

As I had mentioned, I got to play some of my lower level alts, among which was my warlock. A little bitty gnome, currently at lvl 23, that I’m trying to level up a bit since he’s my engineer and I go through a lot of ammo on my hunter. He’s a bit similar to my hunter in that I have a pet to mess around with, except I’m positive his pets hate him since they have a habit of grabbing a bunch of mobs and getting my warlock killed. That’s what you get when you bind demons I guess.

Now my warlock had access to two pet demons, an imp and a voidwalker, know affectionately as a “blueberry.” In general I keep the blueberry up because he’s really good at holding the attention of a mob while I do all sorts of Damage Over Times spells and channels on the mob. I probably could also focus on the direct damage spells but if I’m not doing any DOTs, I’m going up to it and sticking my sword into it.

Hmm, that definitely sounds Freudian doesn’t it? Anyway, the addition of a pet does change the dynamic a bit, since I’m a soft squishy, having something else for the mobs to focus on is terrific. DOTs are also nice in that since the damage is spread over a period, you don’t have sudden spikes that cause you to pull aggro. They also have spells that allow you to transfer life to your pet, take life to make into mana, or drain life from a mob, which makes for an unusual rotation of spells at times.

As usual, since I’m not as familiar with the differences between the talent builds, I just tossed points willy-nilly into Afflicition since that’s where talents affecting the spells I was using the most could be located. Someday, I swear I’ll sit down and work out builds for all my characters. Except that would take time, concentration, and dedication, all things I rarely have much of.

Now some changes since the last time I played my warlock caught me by surprise. You no longer have to go to the demon trainer to get skills levels up for your demon, which is a change I like since sometimes it was a pain going through and figure out what skills to buy for your pet. The other was that drain soul now gives you a chance each time you deal damage to an appropriately leveled mob. Sure surprised me when I got 4 soul shards out of a tiny little dragonwhelp. Guess they got a lot of soul…

Which leads to my main pet peeve about warlocks. Blizzards did an awesome thing in changing the way ammo stacks for hunters, making them stack higher and moving the haste bonus off of the quiver or ammo pouch. Which returned the bag slot to hunters. Previously, they were pretty much penalized in their carry capability because of their class. And heaven forbid if they lost their mind if they started carrying a profession specific bag in addition to their ammo carrier. Now the question to me is, why do warlock’s soul shards stack?

Okay, warlock can still do quite a bit without the shards. It’s not as tied into their class as the hunter’s ammo. But now I’m able to gather even more soul shards at a time but I have no place to put them. I’d probably be happy if they stacked up to only 5 instead of 20. But I’d like to be able to put aside my “class specific” bag and put another honking loot carrying bag in it’s slot.

Unfortunately, I really haven’t played my warlock enough to get much more of a feel for him. It’s definitely fun to be back at the “send in pet, whittle away at the mob from back here” I’m also trying to get used to being in an alt as short as a gnome. As you can probably tell, I normally play Night Elves, which are much taller and thus give a slightly different perspective in the game.

Oh but I did go and do the chain to eventually get the succubus pet. I haven’t tried her yet, so I’m interested to see how she does. Mainly questing in Redridge at the moment, although I’m tempted to do the Kalimdor quests instead. Oh well, which I could talk more but that’s about the extent of my knowledge and experience with my warlock. We’ll see what other class I’ll talk about tomorrow.