Unlike almost all the other minions there is no quest to gain the ability to summon the felguard — you simply pop a point into the talent and this demonic knowledge is dropped into your brain. The talent is currently on the ninth tier of the demonology tree, so you will need to be level 50 before you can learn it. Even at level 80 you will need to invest almost 60% of your talent points into demonology just to reach it, leaving little room for anything in the other trees. Because of this the felguard is pretty much only seen with demonology-build warlocks. Hybrid builds were popular at the start of Wrath, but changes to spell mechanics have meant that they are rarely used these days.
So, if you have one of these meatbags, what are you supposed to do with them? It’s hard to say what the original intent of the developers was when they decided to add this guy to our arsenal. We can do this with most of the others — the imp is a ranged damage dealer, the succubus is for melee and CC, the void for tanking and the puppy for annoying mages. The felguard joins the show and not only deals a whole load of damage he can also take a huge amount as well. As such he pretty much makes your voidwalker and succubus obsolete.
by thecore @ MMOwned
Zul’gurub resets every 3 days. Each mount run takes 30 minutes to a hour.
Chance to get a awesome mount! Easy 30 gold from boss.
Bloodlord Mandokir – NPC – World of Warcraftdrops Swift Razzashi Raptor – Item – World of Warcraft 1% chance.
High Priest Thekal – NPC – World of Warcraft drops Swift Zulian Tiger – Item – World of Warcraft 0.6% chance.
I used the following spec for this to make it a lot easier.
Glyphs: You can really use whatever.
So there you are, raiding your way through Icecrown Citadel, merrily destroying everything in your path with shadow and flame, when all of a sudden your raid leader tells you that you’re tanking the next boss. “That can’t be right – surely” you think to yourself, “I’m still wearing this dress, I don’t have a sword or shield, I don’t feel any more stupid than before – why would I suddenly want to tank anything?”. Well, Blood Prince Council is one of those special fights where a clothie can do the job of a meat-shield. When this is called for, there’s simply no better clothie than a warlock to get the job done. So, step up and lets look at how to do it.
Why bother?
Despite some big-name bosses having had designated ranged tanks, some people still think that it can’t or should never be done. Now, I’m not talking about such fights as Sartharion, where a voidwalker could do the same job as a tank in the same way. Nor am I talking about Instructor Razuvious where shadow priests Mind Control adds to tank the boss. I’m not even talking about fights where ranged classes kite a boss. What I’m talking about is having a caster stand away from a boss, get their aggro and take the damage they deal.
What is affliction?
The affliction talent spec is considered by many to be the consummate warlock build. We are known as a DoT class and no one embodies that more than an affliction lock. Through a combination of attacks that each slowly eat away at the target’s health, many passing that vitality back to the warlock, we can wrack a single target with many attacks or spread our abilities across many.
Affliction benefits
Affliction is very strong on DoT damage and as a lot of these spells are instant it affords greater mobility in combat. Casting many DoTs also means that affliction locks can be flexible between single or multiple target damage even without the constraints of AoE abilities. The relatively slow ramp-up time of affliction allows us to start on building maximum damage straight away, with little fear of causing the tank threat issues.
Affliction locks are absolute masters of resource management. With plenty of ways to get health back they can keep their health and mana bars full most of the time. This makes for very efficient farming and questing as well as being useful in group fights.
As with many of these raid/boss guides there’s only so much that is specific to any class. The Plagueworks doesn’t include any bosses that get us locks doing anything fancy or new. That said though they are great fights and interesting in their own right. This guide is aimed at warlocks but probably of use to all casters. No doubt the comments will be full of neat little tricks that I have missed but as I breached 2000 words I had better stop where I am and not start explaining how to one-shot things with Eye of Kilrogg and Dark Pact.
Festergut
Festergut is the simplest of the Plagueworks bosses but that doesn’t make him easy. He’s essentially a gear-check, though obviously you need to know how to apply that gear as well. The tanks get checked to see how hard they can be battered for thirty seconds at a time, the healers checked on how well they can swap from healing everyone a bit to healing one person a huge amount. Then there’s the DPS, we may not be the drums of the raid group but you never tanked or healed a boss to death, we need to end the fight before those support roles fail.
As for what abilities you need to be aware of (beyond knowing everything about everything) it comes down to spores once again. Like Loatheb, you want to have a spore burst itself over you, except this time the penalty for failure isn’t less damage and threat problems but choking to death on the putrid effusions vented from an undisclosed orifice of this abomination. Lets run through the fight:
via Mystic Chicanery
Here is my generalized list of how to maximize your DPS in order of importance. Start with number 1 and work your way down. Don’t skip ahead.
The makeup of your raid, and the buffs each class bring to the raid will greatly influence your dps. Keep this in mind when comparing your dps in different raids.
Once you get to the hit cap hit rating is no longer valuable (I still pick up +hit items and keep them in my bank for swapping gear around), but until you get to the hit cap, hit is -the- most valuable stat. After that Spellpower is valued slightly higher than haste which is valued higher than spirt/crit. Last is int which only shows up on the list because it grants a smidge of crit.
Single/Double Trash rotation: (trash dies too quickly to get a full dot rotation on them).
Haunt, Corruption, Shadow Bolt until dead. (Drain Soul if you need soul shards). Sometimes it may even be better to just spam Shadow Bolt (or Searing Pain) especially on -very- quick dying trash.
Boss/high-HP trash, use a full rotation.
Double Boss/high-HP trash, use a rotation on both. Haunt/Corruption/UA/Curse/Shadow Embrace on one and Corruption/UA/Curse/Shadow Embrace on the other. This is difficult and should be practiced.
Refresh priority:
1. (CotEl) (if it drops)
2. Haunt(whenever it’s off CD to refresh Haunt buff and Corruption)/Lifetap (to keep lifetap buff up or for mana)
3. Corruption (if it drops)
4. Unstable Affliction
5. (CoA) (if you’re not on CotEl duty)
6. If nothing else, Shadowbolt
During the last 25% of the mob:
1. Haunt (should also keep up your Shadow’s Embrace effect)
2. Corruption (if it dropped)
3. Drain Soul. Note that the channeling of Drain Soul should be interrupted after a tick to refresh #1 or #2.
Haunt is kind of special. It’s barely a dot as it does minimal damage. Really it’s there because of the boost it gives to your other shadow dots. You have ~4 seconds in which to refresh it (after it comes off cooldown but before it drops). Anytime within those 4 seconds is fine. For highest DPS you should hold off until it’s 1.5 seconds away from dropping. That way in a full boss fights you have it up the most but spend the least time refreshing it.
If you’re using Curse of Agony, it’s instant and its last tick is really powerful so you do not want to overwrite it. So do not cast CoA until it has fallen off the mob but cast it as soon after it falls off as possible.
Talents
As I said in the 10-40 guide, you can place your talents all over the place and still have a lot of fun. This is certainly true if you focus on one tree in particular. The tree we focused on in that article was affliction, the reason being that it is considered the quickest leveling build until around the 50+ mark. We left you with this build as an example of something to work to at level 40, this can be continued to level 49 with this setup:
Example level 49 affliction build.
This is very much an example and you can move a lot of the points about as you see fit to work with your play-style and preference. At level 50 you have a choice to make. Do you want to carry on with affliction or swap over to demonology and get a felguard?
If you decide to stay with affliction then you can learn Unstable Affliction which is another DoT and a really nice spell. When I say ‘nice’ I’m referring to how I think it’s a very warlock-y spell, especially with its dispel mechanic. It also is a requirement for Pandemic, which is also a great talent.
Moving over to demonology and getting yourself another pet is the ’standard form’ though some suggest waiting until you can support the build with talents from another tree (to boost your own damage). Personally I don’t think that’s necessary. You may be a little nerfed but since you have just swapped spec it’s probably a good idea to spend some time cleaning up some green quests while you learn the new setup.
Anyone who has been playing the game for some time probably remembers at least one occasion where a bored warlock has decided that they have nothing better to do than annoy low-level members of their own faction by setting one of these guys loose. If not then you’ve almost certainly heard stories. It’s these stories that, even though this chaos is no longer possible, make others look at locks with much suspicion and locks sigh for the old days.
A favorite from the Warcraft RTS games, this guy is partly responsible for many players selecting their first warlock. He appeared on the original WoW cinematic looking all ‘ard and then climbing a tower to eat a mage. Those who quest in Desolace in their 30s encounter them in a pleasantly demonic zone. We also find them causing much disruption when we first arrive in Shadowmoon Valley. Strangely though, many locks don’t bother to do the quest to summon their own. I expect this is related to their general lack of utility, but it probably also has something to do with being available at the same time as the felguard talent.
Level 50 is a busy time for warlocks; you have your mind on changing talent build to get the felguard (as recommended by typical leveling guides), you have your Sunken Temple quest to think about (always worth doing at 50) and you have the infernal to learn to summon. Luckily for us the troll and infernal quests come from the same awesome little imp. Impsy can be found stood beside his less interesting ‘master’ (Niby the Almighty) in Felwood, just North of the Bloodvenom Falls. In case you were wondering, yes, Niby does make a return in Icecrown Citadel, where he will sell you your tier 10 gear.
The Infernal quest line starts with Niby but all he does is tell you to talk to his imp. Impsy will in turn send you off to gather three items that drop from demons in Felwood, Azshara and The Blasted Lands. He’ll turn these into a Fel Fire with which you can reignite Kroshius, then you nip off to resurrect and subsequently kill Kroshius. This shouldn’t be too tricky as he’s no longer an elite, he used to be pretty hard to solo or would require a group to kill. Bring back his core, watch a funny skit involving a chicken and receive an off-hand item and the ability to cast Inferno. You can actually learn the spell from a book that drops in Blackrock Spire but the drop rate isn’t great and why would you want to avoid visiting Impsy?
This week we delve into Icecrown Citadel and see what these new bosses are all about. We face a bag of bones that won’t sit still, a somewhat effeminate version of Kel’Thuzad, a lift boss that is actually supposed to kill you and an orc-gone-bad. All in a day’s work for your warlock on the go.
Time to dance with the bone lord. There are a couple things to avoid here. First is the boss himself when he spins around and drunkenly staggers all round the room. He moves pretty quickly so there’s actually little chance of avoiding him completely but it’s not a bad idea to try and minimize the damage you take from him. This ability is called Bone Storm and is well announced, spreading out from others will reduce the chances of you getting hit while he molests someone else. The second thing to get out the way of is Coldflame. He’ll be sending out four lines of blue fire frequently throughout the fight, radiating away from him. This happens even when he’s spinning about the place. Simple and fundamental rule of raiding — don’t stand in the stuff on the floor.
You can completely avoid Coldflame between Bone Storms by standing close behind him, since they spawn just a little way out. This position is normally held by the melee and possibly the healers so you might not be welcome (more people means more risk when he starts to spin). If you are allowed to stand in there then a Circle might be a good idea to get back out fast.
After each Bone Storm his threat list is wiped, so you want to pay attention to your DoTs, especially Curse of Doom. Make sure you allow your tanks a chance to pick him back up and reposition him before nuking away.
The last thing you need to think about is the Bone Spike Graveyards. These get thrown on raid members semi-randomly and need to be targeted and killed very quickly. Melee should really be dealing with any that appear amid their ranks but ranged DPS need to deal with the others. I found that tab-targeting was fine but you might want to put together a macro that gets you onto the target more quickly; something like:
/stopCasting
/tar Bone
/petattack
/cast Immolate
These should be going down in pretty short order so use a burst damage rotation. For destro locks it’s the same as your normal one so carry on. Affliction and demo locks should just spam Shadow Bolts (swap to Soul Fire if you get the chance).
As with the Succubus quests, there is an awful lot of running about required to get these quests complete, so be very thankful you can now ride about the place. The chains are almost exactly the same for Horde and Alliance. First you go speak to someone in the Barrens who sends you to Undercity or Ironforge (respectively). Then you head out to grab a book and a piece of paper (see map).
Once you have those it’s off to the Wetlands to fetch a few sticks (how appropriate) and back to Strahad Farsan in the Barrens for the hand-in. You also receive a soul bag but as I mentioned in a previous article, these aren’t overly handy while questing. It might be worth keeping, but probably not.
If you get all through that and summon your Felhunter at level 30 then he’ll only know the one trick, that’s Devour Magic. This is a cool little trick that will either remove a magic debuff from a friendly character or a buff from an enemy. When soloing a nice macro to target the ability is:
/use [target=player][target=pet][]Devour Magic
This will try and take a debuff from you, failing that from himself, failing that it’ll try and take a buff from your target. As an extra bonus, every magic effect he devours will heal him up a bit. This can come in pretty handy when questing alone and you come up against a caster.
The only time I have actively used this ability in a raid situation was in Karazhan (Maiden of Virtue), mostly having the ability on auto-cast is sufficient.
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