Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses macros for warlocks.

As of writing, I'm far away from my stash of screenshots for my WeakAuras, so I won't have a post full of example strings for you quite yet. But the discussion of macros for warlocks came up on Twitter, and I can write a while about those while away on a wintery vacation.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses class identity.

One of our editors, Adam Holisky, forgot what class he was playing last week, and it made me a little sad. It's great that he wanted to be a warlock again, but we are not hunters. We're not mages either, despite how convinced Matt Rossi is by shared armor. We're not shadow priests, we have demons not totems, and having purple wings is the only similarity between a demo 'lock and a night elf moonkin.

I'm not out to make Adam eat his hat, but warlocks certainly distinguish themselves from other classes, I think.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses more pretty on-screen colors.

One of my raid's mages swears to use TellMeWhen (TMW) over Weak Auras (use WA2, now). I used to use Weak Auras exclusively, but now I use a combination of both addons in further combination with Raven, a buffs and debuffs addon, and AffDots. While I can list any number of buffs and debuffs addons to help track procs and DoTs (ForteXorcist, Raven, NeedToKnow, Ovale, etc.), TellMeWhen and Weak Auras often top the list of mentioned addons.

What's the difference between TMW and WA? What does one do better than the other? And what's the impact that addons like these have on how warlocks play?

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill discusses how to handle one, some, or many whelps.

Before BlizzCon, I left off with the beginnings of how to put together your UI. While it would be easy to generate a post of macros and Weak Auras import strings, that wasn't my intent. User interfaces in WoW are varied and can be unique to the player, so I think it's a greater lesson to learn how you can design your UI to help you, rather than to help patchwork import settings together for you.

So while the setup of unit frames may have seemed incredibly basic to some readers, knowing where some set frames are helps you take control of how your targets are presented to you. Much like healers considering a raid frames grid to be a central part of a healing UI, having damage targets at the ready is a central if often subconscious part of a DPS UI. Today is another basic topic, but it too has a subtle effect on how a proper UI setup can aid in DPS.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets a little excited about a possibility.

I think every month, the universe tries its best to unseat me from the warlock column. November is notoriously my worst month for anything, because everything wants to conflict with anything in November, for every one of my twenty-whatever years.

But thankfully, when it comes to BlizzCon, I can just replay things over and over on the Virtual Ticket with no problem. While I wasn't expecting a lot of warlock changes, given how ridiculously revamped we were for Mists of Pandaria, there were still a few notes of interest we could go over if you missed out on watching or attending BlizzCon.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying.

I started part one as an introduction, to set everything up. While "yaw" (keybinds and macros) and "pitch" (procs and cooldowns display) are important parts of a UI, you can't start doing your damage dealing job without a health bar to take down. So this week, we're going to look at all kinds of health bars you can find on a warlock's UI.

You can see all my unit frames in action here in the full version of the header image. Remember: I'm using the addons I use as examples, because it's easiest to draw from what I know. You can be an accomplished DPSer with minimal addons on a mostly default interface, if you so wish.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill extends her thanks to her guildmate @FinalflameWoW for his 'copter flying.

It really tickles me that within a week of each other, two prominent names in the warlock community referred to the WoW UI with the exact same metaphor. One's a cutting edge world-class raider and the other is a former casual PvPer currently on a forced hiatus from intense gaming. Two different sides of warlock life and they both come to the same conclusion.

Maybe great minds think alike. Or maybe it's just incredibly obvious how convoluted and misleading the user interface can become for even the average player in WoW. What makes a UI good?

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill spends 50k coins on a trinket for fun because, whatever, she'll be killing things all day on the Timeless Isle anyway.

Last week, I couldn't fit trinkets into the article. I couldn't even fit in enough disclaimer and caveat into the article to address the article's problems. Since trinkets aren't as cut and dry as regular passively statted gear, there are more caveats and situational criteria to collect before passing a final judgment.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill gets cleansed of disease and starts on a new rivalry.

*cough* *cough* *haaaaaack* Megan coughs violently into a clutch of raggy, mucused-up robes.

It's all good. I'm going to survive. The healers haven't cleansed me since that last time I dropped the Gateway still inside the windstorm, so I'm stuck to my cookie cooldown. I really don't blame them for that. But, I gotta say it was worth a little cough to see all the melee drop dead like that. Don't worry, I'm not cursed or anyth--

What is that. No -- THAT. Who the ... You guys let a mage in here?!

Well. *Megan steeples her fingers.* No matter. Warlocks are still better than those muffinmakers in patch 5.4.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill links all the things, all the time.

Patch week with a new raid tier? It's loot list time.

You know the drill. Just like last time, I'm going to visit the loot for each boss, perhaps saying a word or two, just so you know what's there when you spend a coin on a bonus roll.

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Filed under: Warlock, (Warlock) Blood Pact, Mists of Pandaria