Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact. "Much like your life as a warlock, it is important to learn from what we find in the world... before twisting it to our will." ~ Summoner Teli'Larien

We're not hunters. We don't wander about shopping for a pet that catches our eye, like some fashion accessory. We reach through into the nether and wrest demons into this world, binding them to our will. We maintain our bond to this demonic denizen of the shadow, summoning them to our side at need. They are not pets, some companion for the terminally lonely and friendless, they are minions. They are our servants and slaves, powerful beings controlled through dominion, not feeble minded animals cooing for snacks.

This week I will start a review of our minions -- what they can do for us and how best we can use them. My aim is for this to be of use to anyone new to the class and these minions as well as more experienced players looking for tips and tricks. After the break we start right off with our pocket-mage.

Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact. The weak mind fears the darkness because it holds the unknown. Blood Pact knows what resides in the shadows and yes, they should be afraid.

I was afflicted with some kind of corruption of my own last week, not sure if a warrior spell reflected it or what but it had me out of action either way. I don't know how much attention you pay to spell icons but it took me a little while to realize just how nasty the icon for Corruption really is -- nasty enough for China to censor it, in fact. It speaks well of how I was feeling, but hopefully the articles on the PTR changes kept you topped off with warlock goodness in Blood Pact's absence.

This week we're looking at starting a new warlock. This could be for someone new to the game, or rolling an alt. Either way, now is a great time to start leveling as a lot of the world you'll be passing through will be changing with the advent of Cataclysm. So if you've never played a warlock, or even if you have, then get onto that character selection screen and stare blankly at the screen for half an hour while you try to think of that perfect warlock name.

Another week goes by and we see further patch 3.3 developments on the PTR. Last week's changes were pretty far reaching for warlocks. I was pretty excited by just how much they shook up the default raid builds, in terms of which one would pull the highest numbers. One thing that really stood out to me was that the theoretical maximums were all looking pretty even.

There are a couple new elements on the patch notes this week, as well as some reworking. Demonology was previously looking like it was going to be the top DPS spec, as well as the best utility build. The margin was slight, but as ever the number one slot has some prestige and we could have seen felguards cropping up a lot more in raids.

After the break we'll have a closer look at the warlock changes and what they mean.

Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact. The place where warlocks get to relax and reflect, to inspect their inner beings, meditate on their true self. The place were warlocks can, in quiet contemplation, realise just how truely awesome they are.

Glyphs are odd things. We're no strangers to bolting things onto other things to make them better. Gems for example -- you look about for the best one for your class and add them to your gear in the most beneficial way. Glyphs are much the same but instead of boosting the stats of your gear they modify your actual spells. This is something we locks have been thinking about recently what with the Soul Shard changes expected in Cataclysm -- boosting our spells and driving even more power out of them is going to be our thing. I can't wait.

In this article I'm going to take a journey through the glyphs available to us as we level up to 80 and then have a look at those we want to use while raiding. I must warn you that there is no mention of a glyph to make our fire green and I have refrained from any defamatory remarks concerning a certain Mr Belt. I hope this doesn't spoil this week's warlock moment too much for you.

Each week Dominic Hobbs brings you Blood Pact, the sacred text of summoners, the mantra on the malicious, the effusion of evil and sometimes the diatribe of the diabolical. Sit back in your skull-carved chairs, pop your feet up on the imp, and settle in for this week's installment.

"Drawing deep on the power delivered by my demon slave, I hold it in until it fills me completely. I can feel the power wanting to sear my flesh to ash, fire like a thousand suns. More power than I could possibly wield alone, yet too sweet to let go. Before it consumes me I let it flow to those I fight with, torn as if it were my flesh. I know well it will push them further towards achieving my goals."

As a pure DPS class we warlocks have one main measure of performance; the damage meter. If we can't perform well there then our place in a group comes into question. Sure, there are times when our big health pools and bigger incoming heals earn us the job of spell-catcher but those jobs are few and far between. Generally with each patch we're looking for the build that maximises our DPS. In Karazhan it was affliction. Somewhere in tier five it became destruction. Wrath made it all a lot more even but flipped it back to affliction and tier eight flopped it to destruction once more. Poor old demonology doesn't seem to get much of a look-in for PvE... or does it?

Every week Blood Pact serves you up a dish of warlock delight. Chock full of juicy chunks of detail, smothered in lashings of class specific tips all topped off with a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands of mage tears.

This week I'm rounding off the Trial of the Crusader guide with the last three bosses; Faction Champions, Twin Val'kir and Anub'arak. A more diverse trio of boss fights you will be hard pressed to find. As with last week I aim to bring you the flavor of the fights with some insight into how they look through a warlock's eyes. Again, I'll be linking only a selection of the loot from the overly complex table. This week the Horde drops for normal mode.

Faction Champions

This will be one of those fights you either love or hate. If you haven't done it before, and don't know what it's all about, then I suggest you have a look through a full strategy; such as those on WoWWiki or Wowhead. There's a huge amount of detail to the fight most of which is pretty irrelevant when you boil it down to your role. If you are leading the fight for the first time then be ready for a headache in assigning everyone their responsibility. If you're not leading then listen to what you need to do and go for it.

Patch 3.2.2 has brought some new, or rather updated, content and seemingly a few initial performance issues for many. There's the usual smattering of class and item changes you would expect of a minor patch. You have to look pretty hard to find anything about Warlocks though.

Every other class has its own little section detailing the tweaks and tunings of their class or even specs but what about us? True, it does go some way to bolstering our megalomaniacal nature -- we're just too good to mess with, let these 'other' classes change instead. I had to look all the way down to the bug fixes before I even saw the word 'Warlock'.

So what has been fixed?

Welcome to Blood Pact , the column for Warlocks that'll get under your skin and fester. You might need some cream for that or if you like I could cauterize it for you. This might sting a little.

In the far and frozen north of Icecrown, Highlord Tirion Fordring has had an arena built in order to test the skill of heroes. He is looking to take on the might of Arthas, and what better way to prepare his army than to shut them into a room with some pretty nasty creatures and see if they survive? Well, I guess that's the kind of thinking you get when you put a Paladin in charge.

Trial of the Crusader is the latest 10 and 25 man raid instance -- just the place for your modern Warlock to flex his spell book and bag some shiny new loot. With both a Normal and Heroic mode for each size of raid, this instance has a lot of variety despite only having five bosses. I'm going to focus on the Normal mode for now as this is where most of the fights are being held but I'll try and throw in some insight for the Heroic fights as I go along.

A lone shadowed figure approaches the village as it settles down for the approaching night. A hush falls with his passing and all eyes turn to follow. Who can say what has brought him here but there's no mistaking his calling; there's a Warlock in town.

With more than seven weeks since the last Blood Pact column there was bound to be a few things that weren't covered. Not too much though, right? It's not like anything major happened in those weeks. Did it?

I'm kidding of course; the last couple of months have seen huge changes and awesome announcements. There's simply no way I can cover them all, and do justice to any of them, in one article. That said these things can't be left on the shelf to moulder. So I'm going to do a quick run-down of what's been going on in Blood Pact's absence and then we can start plunging into their dark and squishy innards going forward.

Love your Warlock more than your childhood pet? Obsess over DPS charts at the end of every raid? Spend hours scanning Armory profiles of top rated Warlocks to analyze their gear and spec? Read Warlock blogs and Elitist Jerk's Warlock forums on a daily basis? We may have an offer you can't refuse.

WoW.com is looking for a new writer to be our weekly Warlock class columnist for Blood Pact. Every week you will dazzle our readers with your words of wisdom covering everything from leveling guides to raid tactics to PvP strats to major Patch analysis to recommended AddOns for all specs and playstyles. You don't need to play all those ways (we all need a life), but you need to be able to research and write on the topics you don't have personal experience with.

If this sounds like the chance you've been waiting for, you'll find all the information you need to apply on our applications page. Be sure to submit everything asked for. Being able to follow simple instructions is part of the job. You have until end of day, Sunday, August 16th to send in your app before this message is consumed by Hellfire and is no more.

EDIT: Applications are no longer being accepted. We will look at what we received after BlizzCon and will make a final decision by September 1, 2009. If you haven't been contacted by then, you haven't been selected. Thanks.

A shaving of pencil lead, bark of a dead tree, the ashes of one of Kafka's short stories, bound together with a drop of writer's blood. Set it aflame, and the pact is forged! Let all who are bound by this Blood Pact be forever cursed to reconsider content distribution! Also, here's the Warlock column!

Ah, mid June. That blissful period between the end of finals, and Blizzard answering my questions. Time to sit back, unwind, and get back into my gaming and my writing. However, since I didn't spend much time in WoW during this past finals week, I found myself lacking inspiration. So, as I am wont to do now and again, I spent some time perusing the writings of my class columnist colleagues, hoping to happen upon some inspiration. And as it turned out, I stumbled across a gem of a post from the gentlemanly fellow over at Arcane Brilliance. He really is a rather dapper chap.

Sadly, I am particularly ill-suited to write a post on useless Warlock spells. You see, I have a dark and terrible secret. And not just the ones that come standard issue for all card-carrying Warlocks: this is a truly dire bit of personal arcana which I am mortified to admit in public... but here goes: I am a spell pack-rat. I use action bar supplementing addons just so I can keep every single spell or ability I've ever acquired somewhere on my screen. If my raid leader demanded that I ride my felsteed around in eleven circles, then dismount and dizzily cast a rotation made up entirely of Curse of Weakness and WANDING, then I wouldn't even need to open my spell book. Might need to find a new raid leader, but at least I wouldn't be unprepared.

Given my unseemly disability, I've decided that rather than directly emulating my esteemed counterpart, I'll simply write a column from the opposite perspective! Many spells in a Warlock's arsenal are unduly maligned as "useless" by mobs of rampaging children demanding to be buffed. It's downright unfair to call these spells useless when in fact they are only (if you'll forgive my overused joke) usefulness challenged.

With a flash of flame and a gout of smoke, Blood Pact appears again! It demands that columnist Nick Whelan make a sacrifice! Either he must write on a relatively simple subject this week, or be doomed to perform poorly during his finals! Left with no other recourse, Whelan submits to the will of the column.

Spells are the essence of playing a Warlock. Just about every part of playing the game, save role playing, has spell casting as a central feature for us. Fighting for control of Arathi Basin, dueling on matters of honor with some upstart Mage, questing and leveling, or any instance from assailing Defias scum in The Deadmines, to unlocking the secrets of Azeroth in Ulduar. Without spells the only things a Warlock could do would be run, jump, and weakly bonk our foes with our staffs. And there just aren't enough platforming sections in WoW to make that kind of thing fun.

Depending on our spec and in-game vocation, different Warlocks focus on different spells. And the decision of which spells to focus on is based on numbers. Such as the time required to cast the spell, potential damage output the spell has, or the amount of time that the spell will allow us to reign destruction on our foes while they run around screaming in abject terror. Understanding the mechanical uses of spells is essential if we're to be effective Warlocks. But as I've said in the past: Rain of Fire isn't just an area of effect spell channeled over 10 seconds which causes 2-3k non-crit damage every 2 seconds to enemies within a 15 yard radius--it's fireballs falling out of the sky!

Warlocks had best beware! Blood Pact preys on people who wander too deeply into the dark depths of the internet! Author Nick Whelan apologizes for being a tad late this week -- sometimes final projects just don't go smoothly, ya know?

It's no secret that I haven't exactly been in a PvE mood lately. I don't know what it is, but every year around this time I just...lose all motivation to progress. I've come to accept it as the natural cycle of my WoW-life, but lately I've been thinking I want to get back into it. I'm not ravenously trolling Dalaran looking for a raid, but I've been doing some heroic pugs to dust the rust off of my shadowbolting finger.

Frustratingly, though, I've been having an exceptionally difficult time getting back into Affliction. Not only does the rotation and casting style fail to engage me, but it feels like far too much of a struggle to dish out DPS. Back during that golden age between patch 3.0 and patch 3.1, Affliction was a zen thing for me. My rotation was so deeply ingrained that typical spell casting was handled by my subconscious mind. My fingers seemed to move on their own! Post 3.1, Affliction seems to have been made so user friendly that I keep stumbling whenever I try to do something. Like switching from Windows 3.1 to Vista overnight.

The most reasonable course of action, I concluded, was to revisit the first instructions given to me by my Jedi teacher. I needed to unlearn what I had learned, by switching to a completely different spec. So without further ado, welcome to Project Respec: Post 3.1. As clever readers probably divined from the title of this post, the subject this week is Destruction!