This sticky will remain at the top of the blog until the end of the Hex Factor contest on December 13th. New posts will appear underneath.
For more information about the contest, including rules, prizes and why it is being held, please see this post.
in conjunction with 
Previous winners:
The answer to this week’s question will be after the break.
Firstly though, I’m yet again sad to announce that nobody entered this week’s Hex Factor contest, and so another discount code is going to go to waste. I suppose I could award it to myself for that “sterling effort” at writing poetry… Anyway, don’t forget that Azeroth United are still going strong in their charity drive, and at this time have raised a whopping $6700 for Child’s Play, so if you haven’t yet donated go right ahead!
Courtesy Dominic Hobbs of WoW.com
- Create Soulstone: The cooldown on this spell and duration of its buff have been lowered from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
I’ve always felt that the cooldown on this ability was rather long, and it’s nice to see it’s being shortened to bring it in line with the fact that instances these days are much shorter and faster than they used to be. More wipe recovery is good, no?
Affliction
- Improved Drain Soul: This talent now reduces threat by 10%/20%, up from 5%/10%.
There have always been issues with Warlock threat, whatever Blizzard have said, and hopefully this will address some of them. The main problem is often that we can’t simply just let our dps drop to 0 to prevent any threat being generated, as our DoTs will continue to tick. Obviously this problem is therefore especially apparent with Affliction, which relies heavily upon DoTs, and so 20% less threat from two points in this talent will help out the spec quite a bit.
- Improved Felhunter: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the felhunter’s Shadow Bite ability by 2/4 seconds.
The developers are pushing quite hard for the Felhunter to be viable again (so Affliction will use it instead of the Succubus or mana battery Imp) and allowing the puppy’s main attack to hit more often – leading to increased damage – is a good way of doing it.
- Shadow Mastery: This talent now also increases the damage done by the felhunter’s Shadow Bite ability by 3/6/9/12/15%.
As above – the more damage done by the pet, the better. Whether or not we’ll see the Felhunter become the de facto Affliction pet again I’m unsure, but it’s certainly going to be more of an option.
Warlock Tier 10
This post will be updated as the patch notes are changed.
Well, with patch 3.3 looming ever closer I’ve decided it’s finally time to do a review of the patch notes and take a look at what we can expect, both as Warlocks and in general. Today, we’re going to look at the new features (from a Warlock point of view) that stand out to me as well as anything notable to do with other classes, and tomorrow we’ll examine the actual (much more exciting) Warlock changes themselves in detail. Here we go!
- Meeting Stones: To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character’s minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.
This is a very useful change for people who want to boost lower level characters, or even for people who previously would have been just slightly too low or high to use the stone when in a normal group and would keep the others waiting. I can also see the meeting stones being used as a method of transportation now – “Hey mister, can you summon me using that stone for two gold?”. At least it might relieve the pressure on us Warlocks to do it!
- Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but simply put, they’re preventing AoE damage spells from doing too much damage by giving the spells a damage cap. If you’re attacking 10 mobs or less, you’ll see no change from how it works currently, but if you’re attacking more than 10, you’ll only do as much damage as if there were 10, and the damage will be divided equally up between the mobs. I can see why this change is needed – Rain of Fire, for example, does some pretty crazy damage sometimes, and the dps does spiral out of control.
Image blatantly stolen from Google Images
Now then!
Let’s imagine you have three teams – England, Scotland and Wales – competing for two trophies, one for golf and one for tennis. How many different outcomes, with regards to winners, of the two competitions are there?
6, 8, 9 or 12?
Vel.
The rules and information for the Hex Factor contests can be found in the original post here.
We’re over halfway to the end now and AU’s charity drive is still going strong! So let’s keep supporting them in their cause with this week’s Hex Factor contest – poetry.
Now, I use the term ‘poetry’ loosely. Obviously there are many different kinds, and as always I’m open to interpretations. All I want from you is a short poem (unless you really want to do a long one) about either Child’s Play, Azeroth United or the Hearts, Hands and Voices drive.
You could do a witty limerick:
There once was a Child’s Play charity,
Whose money raising brought much hilarity.
They raised so much cash,
That the children had a bash,
And sadness became quite the rarity!
Okay, that was awful. Maybe a haiku?
Hearts Hands and Voices
Azeroth United calling
Raising funds for kids.
Well, you get the idea, and I’m sure you can do much better than me! I look forward to your emails at veliaf AT hotmail DOT co DOT uk.
Vel.
It’s Saturday and it’s the weekend, so let’s relax with some random funnies and/or links.
Firstly, the newest Filmcow Studios video is out, and oh boy is it hilarious:
I’m considering buying the DVD, actually. Anyone else tried it who can give an opinion?
This week I asked you all this:
In eight years the combined age of my two sons and I will be 124. What will it be in five years time?
The solution is after the break!
Well unfortunately Thursday is here and I haven’t actually received any entries to this week’s contest! I’m somewhat disappointed because I do enjoy giving out prizes, but oh well, so long as people continue to support the Child’s Play charity drive.
On which note, Azeroth United has amazingly blasted past their original goal of $5000, and (at the time of writing) are sitting at about $6400! It’s certainly an incredible achievement, but with several weeks left, their new target of $10000 is definitely attainable with your help. So if you haven’t already, head over and donate – a lot or a little, it all counts and it’s all for a good cause.
Vel.
As many of you have no doubt read or heard, an interesting and controversial situation developed earlier today when Gevlon of the Greedy Goblin posted an article: No means no!. In this article, he wrote about how Markco of JMTC allegedly emailed him with a business proposition.
Markco’s idea was simply that Gevlon, being the author of a popular socio-economics blog, could have a small ad on his site which linked back to the JMTC gold making guide, a product Markco sells which contains what are apparently the best tips and tricks on how to make gold i.e. the ones which are better than those posted on his (free) blog. Now I’ve never bought his guide and can’t say what is inside, but it’s a normal and fair enough idea to want to advertise it.
Right into it this week:
In eight years the combined age of my two sons and I will be 124. What will it be in five years time?
Answers will be up on Friday!
Good luck,
Vel.
