Burning Crusade crunch had finally wound down… and those of us that composed the quiet little Blizzard guild decided we would take on the challenge of defeating Illidan together. Jeremy, our raid leader during Molten Core and BWL, decided that he wanted to relax a bit more and asked for volunteers to help run raiding teams for Karazhan and beyond.

Joe and I, both raid designers who missed our former raiding guilds (back in those days, if you were part of the raid dev team, it was considered inappropriate to remain part of a competitive raiding guild – so we’d both quit when we started at Blizzard) volunteered to run 10-man groups.

There’d been a fair share of bumps along the way this expansion – there’d been overcrowding in Hellfire, server performance issues in Shattrath due to the lack of Line of Sight blockers, but overall, the expansion had gone pretty well.  Players were happy and the experience of seeing the content we’d created enjoyed by millions was a huge thrill.

After weeks of running our individual groups, Jeremy declared it was time to forge our groups back together to take on Gruul, Serpentshrine Caverns, Tempest Keep and beyond. It had been a long time since I’d had a chance to organize the warlocks (which had been the role I held in my previous AQ raiding guild). So with a relish I started planning out curse macros, ability and specialization plans based on the team we would field and figuring out exactly which spec we each should play. My inner control freak was having a blast – we’d be ready to kick ass in no time.

Selecting the best geared Warlocks from our guild, it was decided Mather, Kandroth (my orc lock, as opposed to Kanrethad, my Alliance Warlock) and Garlock would be attending.  Mather loved Affliction, so she was assigned the uber shadow curse, while Garlock was assigned Destruction and curse of elements, leaving me with the despicable, yet my favored spec – Demonology and the final curse slot to assign based on the individual fight.

It came as a bit of a shock when after a few nights of raiding, when Nathan, the Shadow priest assigned to the Warlock DPS group, whispered me and said… “I think you are playing demonology all wrong.”

Defensively, I replied: “What do you mean? I am keeping up my dots and using Doom only where appropriate.”

Nathan: “Yeah… but why are you pushing anything besides shadow bolt?”

The One-Button Warlock

Needless to say I was at first arrogantly derisive towards the suggestion, but after being challenged to a DPS test, sure enough, Nathan was right. by specing deeply into destruction and always sacrificing my Succubus, I was able to achieve consistent, high and visually satisfying damage by just spamming Shadowbolt.

I went in the next day to Kris, the numbers Guru, to figure out what was going on.

Kris: “Bah! I TOLD someone this would happen eventually.”

Me: “Can you explain it?”

Kris: “Of course! What do you know about scaling?”

Me: “Uh, just that you want things to be about the same power.”

Kris: “There’s a lot more to it than that.”

Stepping over to the whiteboard, Kris, a former middle school teacher, flipped into education mode.

Kris: “Scaling is the rate at which power grows. Let’s take a look at how damage increased in Classic wow.”

He pulled up a chart of Shadowbolt’s min and max damage for levels 1 through 60. He created a series of dots on the rough chart, one of each max damage and spell rank.

Kris: “As you can see, the damage of Shadowbolt increased at a rate of 10-20 damage per spell rank from rank 1 at level 1 to rank 11 at level 60. This is very flat, linear growth.”

Kris drew a flat diagonal line going from 40 to 220.

Kris: “It’s very controlled. No problem. However, raiding gear changes things.”

Kris: “Dungeon and Raid content at level 60 demanded that the offensive power of casters increase. As you may have noticed back then, Rogues, Warriors and Hunters were incredibly strong, because their gear allowed for their damage to continue to increase with the Strength and Agility stats.”

Kris: “Casters had +Fire, +Shadow, +Arcane and similar gear leveling up, but then +Magic damage was added to reduce the amount of gear that needed to be made for dungeons.”

Me: “I follow you so far, but okay, the power of the gear increases your spell power by some amount. So what?”

Kris: “Well, it wasn’t enough for the gear to just increase in power. We did some research and realized that just increasing spell power by 10 doesn’t feel very good each tier of raid gear. Going from 10 to 20 feels great… and going from 100 to 110 feels okay… but going from 320 to 330 feels insignificant.”

Kris: “After some experiments and trying out variations with different groups of QA testers and friends, we came to the conclusion that people don’t notice or appreciate increased in power if they are lower than 12.5% – let’s call it 13% to make it easier.”

Me: “This makes sense…”

Kris: “So… during the original level-up phase, gear was based upon the level at which you acquire it.  Level 10 white gear is generally what you would have from a vendor at that level. Green, Blue and Purple (Magic, Rare or Epic) gear tends to have a flat bump up from that level. So an rare at level 30 might be equivalent to gear you’d find from a level 50 vendor.”

Me: “With you so far… this is really starting to drag on, how does it connect back to Warlocks?”

Kris: “Hang with me just a bit longer. In dungeons at level 60, we could award blue gear.  Then in Molten Core, we release epic. Naturally those are item level 70 and 80 respectively.  But what happens when BWL comes out?”

Me: “You start giving out Legendary gear?”

Kris: “Right, but then we would have to create legendary gear for everyone and suddenly, Sulfuron, Thunderfury and Atiesh become far less special and memorable.”

Me: “I see. So instead, you just cranked up the item levels instead.”

Kris: “Right! Due to the way Bob (a programmer from Starcraft who’d worked on WoW back in the day) setup the initial data tables for WoW, 1 item level is roughly equal to 1% more powerful.”

Me: “So this is why gear goes up by 13 item levels between raid tiers.”

Kris: “Bingo. Likewise, spell power increases by 13% per tier of gear.”

Me: “Soo…..”

Kris: *sigh* “Alright. Let’s sit down and look at the breakdown of Warlock talents in the Sacrifice, Shadowbolt spec. “

Talents

Warlock Talents

Minimum Required Level: 70

Required Talent Points: 61

Demonology Talents –  21 point(s)

Improved Healthstone – rank 2/2

Improved Imp – rank 3/3

Demonic Embrace – rank 5/5

Improved Health Funnel – rank 1/2

Fel Domination – rank 1/1

Fel Stamina – rank 3/3

Demonic Aegis – rank 3/3

Master Summoner – rank 2/2

Demonic Sacrifice – rank 1/1

Destruction Talents –  40 point(s)

Improved Shadow Bolt – rank 5/5

Cataclysm – rank 2/5

Bane – rank 5/5

Devastation – rank 5/5

Shadowburn – rank 1/1

Destructive Reach – rank 2/2

Improved Immolate – rank 5/5

Ruin – rank 1/1

Emberstorm – rank 5/5

Backlash – rank 3/3

Soul Leech – rank 1/3

Shadow and Flame – rank 5/5

Analysis

Me: “So the big one is Demonic Sacrifice.”

Kris: “Is it really though?”

Me: “Hrm…. well, it’s one point that provides 15% of damage. That HAS to be the broken one.”

Kris: “Sure, it looks like that, but you need to factor in more than just the talent. What did it cost you to get there…”

Me: “Well, let’s see… there’s improved armor, which is good, improved health at the cost of spirit, then about… 10 points in talents that are used to improve your pets.”

Kris: “10 points which now no longer do anything. Add in the extra 5 points of value you should be getting from ‘gold medal’ talents and suddenly you’ll see that you’re getting 15% of Shadow damage at 20 points worth of talent cost.”

Me: “Strange… it seems like it’s worth it though.”

Kris: “Kevin was going for versatility when he put together the demonology talents. Letting you have the better pet talents and also be able to kill-off a pet for raw damage, was an idea to let Warlocks still be able to be Demonology and go raiding.”

Me: “That’s also why the demon pets all got AoE damage reduction, right?”

Kris: “Yeah. No one’s going to take the time to heal a pet.”

Me: “Okay, so where’s the problem.”

Kris: “If the problem isn’t in column A…”

Me: “… yes?”

Kris: “… never mind. Take a closer look at Destruction’s talents.”

Me: “Alright:“

• ISB – increases direct shadow damage by 20% from 4 sources, triggers on brits.
• Ruin – increases critical strike damage bonus to 100%.
• Backlash – increases critical strike chance by 3%.
• Shadow and Flame – increases the bonus spell damage for Shadow Bolt and Incinerate by 20%.

Me: “A lot of direct damage increases and crit boosters.”

Kris: “Do you remember what I was saying about scaling factors? Spells grow from two sources – base rank-up (leveling) and gear (spell power).”

Me: “Ah, it has to be Shadow and Flame, right? That increases the growth rate of Shadow Bolt and Incinerate”

Kris: “Shadow and flame is a definitely a big factor. But it alone isn’t the big issue. Otherwise, you’d at least be putting up Immolates, Incinerating then throwing up Conflagrate at the end of the spell.”

Me: “So what’s left?”

Kris: “You forgot something – Bane.”

Me: “Bane…? That just makes Shadow Bolt not take a long time to cast, which means you get more per time, but it doesn’t change the amount of max mana you have. It just means you have to start life-tapping sooner.”

Kris: “Well, yes, but look at it this way. What’s the spell power coefficient (multiplier) on Shadow Bolt?”

Me: “Well…. huh, it’s 0.877.. roughly 6/7. ”

Kris: “Yeah. Back in the day, Warlock Shadow Bolts and Mage Fireballs were 3.5 second cast time spells. This was picked as the “Baseline” for spell damage.

Me: “So spells with a damage coefficient less than one have a cast-time less than 3.5 seconds.”

Kris: “Right. At some point the cast time of Shadow Bolt was reduced down to 3.0 seconds… but the damage coefficient wasn’t slightly too high. This information isn’t shown in the tooltips, so it went unnoticed for a while now – spell power didn’t get up to huge levels, so the difference was hidden by the overall randomness of the spell’s damage.”

Me: “Until it was increased by 20%.”

Kris: “You got it.  Suddenly, a spell with a 2.5 second cast time has a 1.02 spell damage coefficient. Let’s compare some alternative spells and rotations.”

• Immolate:  X damage + 0.2 coeff  + 0.13 coif per dot tick (5)
• Incinerate: X damage + 0.57 coeff
• Corruption: X damage + 1/6 coeff * 6 ticks
• Curse of Agony: X damage + 1.0f coeff
• Curse of Doom: X2 damage + 1.0 coeff

Me: “Huh…. nothing has a coefficient higher than 1, not even Curse of Doom.”

Kris: “Yeah… Curse of Doom should probably have a much higher coefficient… I’ll make a note to fix that. But for now, do you see what’s going on?”

Me: “Yeah. Because there’s no other button with a better coefficient, there’s nothing better to cast.  I mean, technically, keeping up corruption would be a good idea, but since you can’t pick up all of the talents to make it instant and get the uber Shadowbolt, it kind of washes out.”

Kris: “Yeah, it’s a marginal increase instead of a significant one. Furthermore, Corruption doesn’t benefit from Improved Shadow Bolt… so suddenly a 1.02 becomes a 1.14 coefficient spell.”

Me: “My head hurts. I just realized that as crit chance increases, not only do you get more critical strike damage – but you also boost the power of the other warlock’s shadow bolts even more frequently.”

Kris: “Yeah. It’s kind of broken. But we aren’t making any big changes until we can patch, so good luck and go have fun with your shadow bolt spamming.”

Me: “Heh.”

Kris: “We’ll take a look at how to go about fixing this sometime in the future.”

Segue – interesting and strange talent choices

If you take a close look at Demonology in Burning Crusade – you’ll notice a number of talented related to defensiveness. Including a 3% anti-crit talent that also reduced pet damage taken by 15%.  Demonic resilience was created with the idea that like in AQ, Warlocks might be called upon again to be temporary or caster tanks.

In the end, this ended up being a mostly PvP talent, with marginal benefit.

Serpent shrine and Beyond

I went back to the Warlock guild channel thrilled to let them know we could just focus on one-button spamming for the remainder of the patch.  The reaction was not as I expected.

Garloc: “Whoo hoo! Easy mode!”

Mather: “Oh…. really?”

Me: “What’s wrong?”

Mather: “Well, I was really enjoying affliction. I liked the DoT cycling and always felt like I was getting better at not wasting time and mana. Life tap makes me feel kind of unsafe, so Dark Pact was a perfect fit for me. “

Me: “Huh… yeah, you know, I really miss having Soul Link and being able to live longer from an in-a-pinch Voidwalker to save me from a wild trash mob.”

Garloc: “Yeah, that happens when Born isn’t tanking.”

Me: “Mather, you know, we’ll still want the 2% extra shadow damage for us locks and the three shadow priests. So if you stay affliction, I think it will be alright.”

Mather: “Oh good, because I was going to do that anyways.”

Me: “lol, nice.”

Garloc: “But yeah, it kind of sucks – we’re down all of the way in destruction, but we aren’t even getting to use the super cool AoE stun ability. Like… its kind of lame.”

Me: “I hadn’t really considered that.”

Takeaways

• Talents are tiny, but potent.
  • Especially multiplicative talents. 2% more doesn’t mean much. 2% stacked multiplicatively 30 times is 80% stronger.
• When building a spell rotation, you need to look at base damage and coefficient contribution.
  • At a baseline, if there’s a better button to push (better coefficient per cast time), you should push that instead.
• All together, if you attach too many bonuses to the same thing, they’ll get out of control.
• Balance and rewards are important
  • Warlocks who aren’t into that style of play will give up on mastering the play style they enjoy
  • Bonus effects brought by a spec or talent tree, if big enough, can give those players an excuse to stay in their play style even when its lower in damage.
• A fixation on damage throughput degrades the play experience and denies the player of interesting and thought provoking tools.

It was a cloudy day in Irvine as I snuck through the UCI campus to the dark little blue and grey building that Blizzard called home. Bulletproof glass had been added to the front of the building after some upset players had showed up on day after a round of Diablo 2 bans. Connie, the cheerful and hard-nosed receptionist, who would someday become a writer and designer on Wildstar, pleasantly buzzed me in after forgetting my badge at home for the third time this month.

Connie: “If you forget again, I am going to staple the next replacement badge onto your forehead!”

She was probably joking, but with Connie you could never take the risk.

A reminder, my blogs are distilled from the depths of my memory and often paraphrased for the sake of the reader. If there are inaccuracies, please let me know and they will be corrected.

Expanding Upon the Whole

Burning Crusade crunch was in full swing – it would be the longest – and most draining – crunch of my career. Some of the artists had been already doing overtime for months before I started. We were fortunate to be only doing 10 hours mandatory overtime per week, though many of us stayed late and on Saturdays.  Half in a show of dedication, half because we barely believed we deserved to be there. Fortunately, as draining as this lifestyle was, it was fun.

I was assigned to developing monsters for dungeons and Karazhan before working with Mike on the outdoor world. Yet as much as possible, I would sneak over and talk to Kevin about his class design work. He took it with good humor; when I apologized for lurking so much, he replied: “It’s nice to chat with another designer who plays so much. So long as you don’t sit here and whine about nerfs like Roman or Chad, you’re fine.”

His office mate, Eric, had just finished working with the UI artist on the changes for talent tree. The philosophy for this expansion was straightforward – add 10 more levels just the same way that they’d built the original game. In this case, that meant three new spells and ten more points of talents.

Me: “That seems to make sense.”

Eric: “It does, doesn’t it? But if you look ahead, you’ll see this just isn’t sustainable.”

Kevin: “Look at a healer’s spellbook. There are 11 ranks of Healing spells. Of which there are three varieties. Your spell bars can’t handle just those; let alone the other utility spells. Adding new spells means things will just get more and more complicated.”

Eric: “Yeah, likewise, we are able to stretch the talent pane vertically to put in two more rows, but eventually, it will either have to scroll, or fundamentally change.”

Kevin: “But for now, it’s fine.”

Me: “What are you planning to add?”

Kevin: “Well, it depends on the class. What do you usually play?”

Me: “Warlock.”

Kevin: “Alright, pull up a chair and take a look. Here’s what we’ve got planned.”

Base Spells

Me: “Fel Armor?”

Kevin: “Yeah. Watching how Warlocks played out in Molten Core and beyond, it was kinda obvious they were a huge drain on healers.”

Me: “Well, I mean, if you can do even more damage on someone else’s bill, that’s exactly what you’re inclined to do. My guild assigned specific healers for each Warlock and then the Warlocks had to be careful to mind their health didn’t drop too much.”

Kevin: “Yeah. Now, Demon Armor is all about reducing the damage you take – but its basically useless in raids. If anything attacks you, you are dead. However, Healers love to be up there on the healing meters…”

Me: “So by granting a healing boost to anyone who throws a spare heal over time or direct heal at a warlock, you reward their attentiveness.”

Eric: “Heheh, you could say meters are motivators.”

Me: “Why haven’t we put our own damage meters into the game?”

Eric: “Hrmm… well, I’ve thought about it. But they are so ugly. I’m not even sure if that information is something you really need down to the digit.”

Kevin: “Which conveniently leads to this spell.”

Me: “Soulshatter. Reduce all threat against you by 90%.”

Kevin: “I spoke to Geoff and he thought it might be a problem if you could remove yourself from the threat tables entirely – I’m not looking to make another vanish or feign death – but if you nuke a little too hard, you just die. Other classes have options. Ice block, self shield, etc.  But raids depend too much on the Warlock Imp for them to run around with a blueberry incase they mess up. So this should help.”

Me: “I get the feeling I’m going to be spending a lot of time farming shards before raids now.”

Eric: “Because of summoning the entire raid, you mean?”

Me: “Well, yeah. I got a core felcloth bag in my guild so that I could use the extra two slots to summon more people to BWL.”

Kevin: “You’ll like this then. Ritual of Souls: Creates a portal that allows any raid remember to summon another raid member if at least two other party members are nearby.”

Me: “Whoa. That’s a pretty big deal.”

Kevin: “When a class is bringing huge utility to the group, you want to make it easier for them to do the right thing. Repeatedly clearing monsters inside a dungeon just to harvest shards isn’t exactly helpful.”

Eric: “Jon and I are doing a few additional things too this expansion.”

Me: “Like what?”

Eric: “Jon’s working on profession items and adding a new type of bags. Specifically, for ore, herbs and well… Warlock soul shards.”

Me: “That seems a little unnecessary.”

Eric: “Is it? I guess I forgot to mention… they’re huge. 20 slots at the first rank and even more later on.”

Me: “I’m still not entirely sure, but then again, I have been getting most of the Onyxia 18 slot bags due to the summoning responsibilities in my guild.”

Eric:  “I think you’ll come around. It auto-sorts the items into the right bag – so you won’t have shards cluttering up your other bags.”

Me: *OCD tendancies twitching* “… yes, you might have me there.”

*Specializations*

Kevin: “We’re making a few other changes too. We’re adding some spells for specific specs.”

Me: “You mean like new talents?”

Kevin: “Well, that too. But in this case, I’m adding a new specifically for destruction. They are all about fire spells and fire damage, yet have to spam Shadowbolt. It’s a small change, but I think it will be a good one. It will be clearer what kind of Warlock you’re facing when they are nuking you from a distance?”

Me: “Which is important because it tells you… what, exactly?”

Kevin: “Well, Destruction Warlocks are kind of the glass cannon of the Warlock class right now. They are fragile and bursty, while Demonology locks are tougher. However, bursty moves don’t have much of a cast-time, so you can’t see from a distance what you’re fighting. I want each spec to have more of a visible signature move.”

Kevin: “Demonology will have the little axe swinging pet I showed you last time. Destruction will have  this really cool fire nuke Roman put together.”

Me: “Oh yeah, the programmers are even working on a way for it to trace the ground Dan showed it to me yesterday.”

Kevin: “Affliction was feeling a little left out. Since their dots usually just get dispelled in PvP, I’m adding a spell that silences the healer if it gets dispelled.”

Me: “Yikes.”

Kevin: “Eh, it will be okay.” *grin*

Takeaways

• The majority of the spells in burning crusade were meant to address major pain points related to the responsibilities of being or supporting a warlock.
• Professions were used to support the burden of the Soul Shard system.
• Unique and visibly distinctive spells were added to the class to make specializations more obvious and fit the talents better

http://rpgworld.altervista.org/classic_vanilla_talent/warlock.php http://db.vanillagaming.org/?talent#I

If you can’t read Italian, use Google translate. It will get you the gist of what’s going on here…. or I can google for 10 seconds longer and find an English one. There’s probably a life lesson here. … use that one.

If you can find a talent tree earlier than the 1.6 Warlock rework, I’d love to review the changes and how philosophy shifted between those iterations.

 

 

Did you know that players were outraged when the initial talent tree reworks happened post WoW Launch? In general, players tend to respond negatively to change; even good change, so all developers need to be cautious and take feedback and emotional reactions with a grain of salt.

https://www.engadget.com/2012/10/05/wow-archivist-strange-choices-behind-wows-earliest-talent-tree/

 

Understanding the Warlock Classic Talent Tree

The Warlock talent trees, like many of the classical WoW talents, was inspired by the D2 Talent Tree. Filled with lots of minor tweaks, these tress added up to impactful end points – even though each individual point didn’t feel like much. At the time, this was desirable – talents helped smooth the gaps between abilities and give you a personal investment in each level.

Last time, we briefly reviewed how the Warlock was unique in that it had an in-combat casting cycle: Use abilities, life tap to regen mana, use abilities to restore health. Mages, Priests generally had to rely on mana conservation to last out the fight. Later on we’ll discuss GDC locking and the price that Life Tap brought to the Warlock class – and all of its healers.

But for now, let’s focus on how the talent trees were broken down. In a world before ‘specs’ existed, the way players defined themselves was how they spent their talent point.

Affliction focused on the ‘witch-like’ abilities of Warlock – debuffs and damage over time effects.  It amplified the ease of multi-dotting in several ways. The hit chance increase meant tab-dotting was less likely to fail, while the additional mana management option via Dark Pact

Destruction focused on the direct damage aspects of the class. (It’s worth noting that even in this stage, with the exception of Rain of Stun chance, and the unusable Searing Pain, Destruction stayed away from RNG when connected to damage. Instead of on-crit effects, its major damage boost talent was focused around a consistent damage increase on critical strikes.)

Demonology is intriguingly focused on the durability and flexibility aspects of the class. In fact, the only damage boosts in the tree are either from having a succubus alive (a risky dungeon proposition) or sacrificing it entirely.

Through these lenses and the experience players of over a decade having with the game, the issues become clear:

Demonology talents doesn’t make sense in a context outside of the solo and pvp arenas. Yet, it definitely matches the concept for how a Warlock should be distinctive from Mage.

Problems

Laced within all of these small decisions lies a rats nest of issues. However, for the most part, you need to give credit to the sheer variety and understanding of “what made a warlock a warlock” in this era. Destruction gets a burst button (or 2!).  Demonology learns how to lift (or sacrifice). Affliction slows, kites and multi-dots better.

As a general rule, talents were valued at a 1% damage increase per point, with the exception of ‘gold medal’ talents which were general 5x as impactful.  A few talents, such as the trade spirit (lol) for Stamina, gave +3% per point, but in general this rule made sense. Pet talents were much bigger numbers because pets were a marginal amount of your damage per minute (10-20%).   Still, these amounts felt incredibly small unless you do a full respec.

However, WoW is a very broad game – soloing, pvp, dungeons, raids – and the larger / more competitive the group size, the more important marginal changes became.  For this reason, its clear why Demonology was a fairly unpopular spec. It added little value in massive raid groups that focused on throughput, not survivability, often with an abundance and overflow of healing.

Similarly, there’s traps laced in the talents. Cataclysm vs. Improve Shadow Bolt? A reasonable, if weak choice. Bane vs. Aftermath?  The feel improvement alone would be good enough, but a 15% increase in damage on your primary damage ability is enormous in an era before spell haste existed. Again, these problems emerged not as a function of bad conceptual design, but rather as a function of being “the best gear in the machine” – not “be the best at making smart use of your talent choices”.

In a world where Damage Meters existed, I’ll just quote my friend Tom Cadwell: “Incentives count.” Many talents brought hard to recognize effects when combined with a raid. Worse, some, like the Warlock AoE stun talent, would confuse tanks during raids.

At the end of the day though, you really have to give them a lot of credit for trying to create impactful and appealing decisions… that simply couldn’t hold up to the meatgrinder of massive guild, forum and class leader critique / fear of uncertainty.

Takeaways

• Warlocks were a very consistent class in this period.
• Incentives created due to damage bonuses changed-up the ability prioritization of Warlocks by spec.
• Destruction’s randomness was linked to secondary effects – and universally dismissed as not good back then.
• Damage was generally consistent. DoTs were unable to have variance, which lead to stable damage output.
• Demonology was disdained for raiding due to lack of damage throughput and pet survivability.
• Affliction’s proc-based RNG due to Nightfall rarely interfered with DoT management, but often was just auto-used while spamming bolts
• Raiding destroyed the underlying DPS -> Lifetap -> Recover cycle due to massive healing availability
  • Deeper here – the initial tuning for a Warlock in “burn out” mode became the baseline for Warlock DPS, rather than a spike they could achieve on-demand to push themselves further for a cost. (The value concept that drove the original concept)

 

I am headed off to the funeral of a good friend who passed away last Saturday. It may be a while before I continue this series again. He was a huge fan of Warcraft and loved this game and it’s world. I am commemorating these last Warlock posts in his name.

In Memory of John Trickett, 2016

Alex