TALENTS
If you don’t have enough hit gear (below 14% hit), use this spec to gain %3 more hit. (I’d suggest putting the extra point into Shadowfury:
Destro Spec +hit/SF

If you have at least 14% hit and always have a shadow priest and/or a boomkin, use the spec I’m currently running:
Destro Spec +nomnomsouls/SF

***PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THE GLYPHS AS WELL***

PETS
The only pet you’ll use is the imp. You’ll want to keep him out of phase all the time. Always keep him in defensive unless there’s a good reason to change it. You rely on his crits for your crits and every buff your raid can give him helps. This is why you have pet healing in your demon tree.

I hardly ever have problems with him dying unless he’s in a puddle of goo and my attention is drawn elsewhere. He deserves it.

ROTATION
Put the following on your bar:
1. Life Tap (Rank 1) and (Rank 7) See macros section below
2. Curse of Doom and Elements See macros section below
3. Immolate
4. Chaos Bolt
5. Conflagrate
6. Corruption
7. Incinerate

Usually right before a boss fight starts, I hit 1, then throw Curse of Doom as I’m running into position. If it’s a longer run than usual, I also throw Corruption as this is pretty much your only other instant opening cast.

Rotation goes like this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7, 3, 4, 5, 7, 7, 6, 7, 1
repeat: watching the count down on Curse of Doom

You can go about two full rotation cycles before using Life Tap. Use either rank 1 or 7, depending on your need. Now this rotation won’t always go perfect or match up 100% of the time (especially depending on your haste or boss fight mechanics). Your main goal is to keep Immolate and Corruption up at all times (also your Doom) and always time your Conflag’s right so you can get 3 improved Incinerates off.

****NOTE****
When you pop conflagrate, don’t waste a cast re-applying Immolate. You have 3 casts with increased haste, so use your Incinerates first before re-applying Immolate.

TRASH MOBS
Don’t underestimate Shadowfury because it can mean the difference between life or death on trash mobs if you or a healer pulled agro from aoe. It can also save a tank, giving them a few extra seconds to get healed up. It also does a nice bit of damage, so keep it handy. Speaking of aoe, your best weapon of choice is Seed of Corruption for pulls of 3 mobs or greater. Otherwise single targeting DPS is better. You might have to life tap a few times during the fight, but you can easily double your normal DPS on aoe pulls.

When it’s a single target trash and it has conciderable amount of health (takes more than 2 full rotations to kill it, throw Curse of Elements up, and rotate like the boss mob rotation.

If it dies quickly, don’t bother with Curse of Elements and just go straight for your high DPS:
2,4, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7, 4, 3, 5, 7, 7, 7 usually is more than sufficient.

GEARZ
Since you have Life Tap Glyph and Fel Armor, you want to get as much spirit as you can. Spirit = Spell Power.

Currently, I get 527 extra spell power from spirit. I have 3400+ spell power just standing there with just my Fel Armor and Spirit Tap, and can get upwards over 4500 during a boss fight, occasionally reaching over 5k.

You’ll also want crit and haste gear as well, so you’ll balance dps and healer’s gear. Crit usually comes with caster dps as well as +hit, and you’ll get haste from the healer pieces.

I would suggest going with the tier Warlock pieces and collect spirit/healer gear for the offset pieces.

GEMS
Here’s the gems I’ve found to be most effective:
Yellow:
Reckless Ametrine +12 sp +10 haste
Quick King’s Amber + 20 haste
Rigid King’s Amber + 20 hit

Blue:
Purified Dreadstone +12 sp +10 spirit

Red:
Runed Cardinal Ruby +23 sp

MACROS
The only two macros that come in handy are the ones you place in hotbar 1 and 2. Easily switch from Life Tap 1 to 7 using shift, as well as control your curses you have up.

Hotbar 1 – Life Tap

#showtooltip;
/cast [modifier:shift] Life Tap(Rank 7);
/cast [nomodifier] Life Tap(Rank 1);

Hotbar 2 – Curses

#showtooltip;
/cast [modifier:shift] Curse of the Elements;
/cast [nomodifier] Curse of Doom;

ADDONS

The only addon I run specifically for my lock is ForteXorcist
This nifty little addon keeps track of everything you could want to keep track of. I use it to watch the dots on my target as well as become more aware of things like when to pop a soul well so you don’t waste a shard, see who you can soul stone (and if their battle rez or reincarnation is up), and also become more efficient when summoning people.

Here’s my UI thrown in just because. I know this post is kinda long but thanks for reading and I hope you can pick up a few tricks from this. Any feedback and/or suggestions are welcome!

1. World of Warcraft
2. Lord of the Rings Online
3. Aion
4. Eve Online
5. Final Fantasy XI
6. City of Heros
7. Champions Online
8. Dark Age of Camelot
9. Warhammer Online
10. Age of Conan

We are going to get more familiar with the following:

• JavaScript Arrays
• For Loop
• Functions
• ID’s and Divs
• ordered lists

Ok, now on to the good stuff. Let’s create an array.

If you’re not familiar with what an array is, think of it as a mini spreadsheet (at least I do). It holds variable data in more than one ‘cell’. It can hold a list of items (one dimensional) – imagine a row of data in a spreadsheet. It can also hold more than one row of data (multi-dimensional), just like a spreadsheet. We will be working with the simple, one dimensional array.

var games = new Array(10);
games[0] = "World of Warcraft";
games[1] = "Lord of the Rings Online";
games[2] = "Aion";
games[3] = "Eve Online";
games[4] = "Final Fantasy XI";
games[5] = "City of Heros";
games[6] = "Champions Online";
games[7] = "Dark Age of Camelot";
games[8] = "Warhammer Online";
games[9] = "Age of Conan";

I want to point out three things here.

1. You notice the array starts at 0, not 1. Computers count from 0 naturally, so keep this in mind when you’re programming.
2. The number 10 in new Array(10) does not have to be there. You can put a number here if you want to limit how big the array gets. You might want to do this for data you get from an outside source.
3. There is more than one way to create this array. You can create the same array like this:

var games = new Array("World of Warcraft", "Lord of the Rings Online", "Aion", "Eve Online", "Final Fantasy XI", "City of Heros", "Champions Online", "Dark Age of Camelot", "Warhammer Online", "Age of Conan")

The comma separates each item and each item is numbered automatically (remember it starts at 0).

Now we have the array, we need to create a function to start our for loop when our body content is loaded. Otherwise, you won’t see anything. Before we do that, let’s go ahead and create our body text and add the function call to our body tag.

<body onload="pageLoaded()">

 <div style="width: 600px; margin: auto; padding: 15px; border: 1px solid gray; font-family: sans-serif;">
 <h1>Top 10 MMO's</h1>

 <div id="result">loading data </div>
 </div>

</body>

What we’re mostly concerned with is the div with the id #result. We’re going to use this to identify the div we want our text placed in. Ok, back to our JavaScript.

We are going to create our function:

function pageLoaded(){
//create variable to hold the text generated by the for loop
var list = "<ol>";
}

We create our variable “list” to hold the text that will be generated by our for loop. We are going to output our items in an ordered list, so we add the opening ordered list tag to the variable when we declare it. We don’t want this repeated each time the for loop runs, now do we?

The For Loop

Let’s break down what this for loop does, shall we?

// set parameters for array - games.length refers to the number of items in the array
 for(i=0; i<games.length; i++){
 // adds a list item to the variable 'list' - we use += to add our strings
 list +="<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";
 }//end for

The for loop needs three parameters within it’s parenthesis. This is key to telling it how many time it’s going to repeat.

(i=0; i<games.length; i++)

i=0 – We created a variable called i, and set it’s value equal to 0 (because our array starts with 0).

i<games.length – as long as i is less than the length of the games array (how many items are stored), it will run

i++ after loop runs, add 1 to i

list +="<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";

Notice we are using += instead of just an =. If we just used an =, it would replace the old data with the new, instead of adding to it. Slick, huh?

"<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";

We cycle though the array, adding a list item each time to our variable.

We’re done with our for loop but we have a few more things to add. We need to close off our ordered list.

// created variable 'list' that will hold our ordered list
 var list = "<ol>";
 // set parameters for array - games.length refers to the number of items in the array
 for(i=0; i<games.length; i++){
 // adds a list item to the variable 'list' - we use += to add our strings
 list +="<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";
 }//end for
 // since the loop is done, add the end tag to the ordered list
 list +="</ol>";

The last thing we’re going to do is add the contents of our variable into the #result div.

// created variable 'list' that will hold our ordered list
 var list = "<ol>";
 // set parameters for array - games.length refers to the number of items in the array
 for(i=0; i<games.length; i++){
 // adds a list item to the variable 'list' - we use += to add our strings
 list +="<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";
 }//end for
 // since the loop is done, add the end tag to the ordered list
 list +="</ol>";
 // write the variable list contents (now filled with the array items) to the div #result
 document.getElementById("result").innerHTML=list;

document- this html page

getElementById(”result”) – find the element that has id=”result” tag in it. Note that this can refer to something besides a div such as an image or a link, as well as other elements.

innerHTML – while it isn’t 100% correct to use this, it works just fine in modern browsers as well as some older ones.

=list – Long story short, we’re replacing the HTML code within the #result div to what we have stored in our variable. Note that when we set the HTML code to our variable, it replaces any code or formatting you have within the div.

Here is what our finished code should look like:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>Fun with JavaScript Stuffz</title>

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var games = new Array();
 games[0] = "World of Warcraft";
 games[1] = "Lord of the Rings Online";
 games[2] = "Aion";
 games[3] = "Eve Online";
 games[4] = "Final Fantasy XI";
 games[5] = "City of Heros";
 games[6] = "Champions Online";
 games[7] = "Dark Age of Camelot";
 games[8] = "Warhammer Online";
 games[9] = "Age of Conan";

function pageLoaded(){
 // created variable 'list' that will hold our ordered list
 var list = "<ol>";
 // set parameters for array - games.length refers to the number of items in the array
 for(i=0; i<games.length; i++){
 // adds a list item to the variable 'list' - we use += to add our strings
 list +="<li>"+games[i]+"</li>";
 }//end for
 // since the loop is done, add the end tag to the ordered list
 list +="</ol>";
 // write the variable list contents (now filled with the array items) to the div #result
 document.getElementById("result").innerHTML=list;
}//end pageLoaded Function

</script>
</head>

<body onload="pageLoaded()">

 <div style="width: 600px; margin: auto; padding: 15px; border: 1px solid gray; font-family: sans-serif;">
 <h1>Top 10 MMO's</h1>
 <div id="result">loading data </div>
 </div>

</body>
</html>

View Example HTML Page

I hope you enjoyed this!

I am working on a more robust flash application for a final project in my AS3 class this semester, but I figured I’d test the waters with one of the many features my project includes – Twitter. I have had a Twitter account for over a year, but only recently got back into it, all thanks to the folks at Aion. Now I’m hooked… thanks guys.

Anyways, thanks to a tutorial found here, Creating a Twitter Widget in Flash, I was able to import Tweets into Flash (never done this type of thing before). I whipped this up in a few hours this afternoon and thought I’d share it with everyone and ask for any feedback. Now granted, this is a very very basic widget, so please keep that in mind. I might expand on this if I get enough people yelling at me.

Features that I will add in final project (and this one):

• pictures (avatars)
• drop down for name selection
• date of post
• make urls linkable

Also, clicking on the Shugo will take you to the currently active Twitter feed owner.

Add the following code to your site or blog:

Merrick on Lumiel Server

Valhalla on Lumiel Server

Unfortunately, I didn’t get my first pick of warrior, since I originally misspelled Valkyrie. By the time I deleted her and remade her, it was gone. *sadface* That’s OK though, I have alternate character names in line to take it’s place come retail launch.

Of course the servers weren’t up at the specified time (I am a web developer, I know these things tend to happen), but that’s OK, because now, I had my day planned out until this moment, but now I don’t know what to do except blog. So here’s my two ladies, take a lookie. They rock.

I plan on leveling Valhalla (warrior) first with the hubby’s healer. Val will probably be a Gladiator (tank), I still have time to decide.

Come the 20th, I will have plenty of beer, caffeine, and munchies so I can get as far as humanly possible during the weekend with minimal interruption, including sleep. Wewt!

I could not connect though a web browser or my FTP software. I tried through all my browsers and though 4 computers with 3 different OS on my home network and not one of them could open this page. Of course, this made me look like a moron when I asked my contractor if their server was up. But anways…

It was up. I could reach it though my phone, and I had a friend access it though their computer. I called my ISP and they said it was the router. Great. I go searching for Linksys posts on my problem. 5 hours later, I find the answer in the most obscure places: a World of Warcaft forum.

Quote from Loyant in this thread: 

I had this exact same problem, I spent a week working on it, Tech Support (phone style) had no real suggestions. They liked to say my ISP was blocking me, which was silly, Tech Support (web style) offered suggestions but they did not apply to the problem. When I asked my ISP if I was being blocked they litteraly laughed, saying Can you imagine how many calls we would get if this were the case?

I had a linksys router, that for some reason, would pull a different IP from my ISP than say, a different router, or no router at all. This IP always ended in “Zero” (XXX.XXX.XXX.0) which is strange, because an IP address that ends in zero usually means a network, not a computer.

As soon as I was assigned a non-zero IP address, I was able to access the wow sites again, like you I could play the game but could not access www.worldofwarcraft.com or the armoury.

I doubt that its linksys router that is causing the problem, because I am using one right now, and have used one for a long time, and many, many other plays do too. However, I would be willing to bet the linksys customers with an IP ending in Zero are rare, and I’m willing to bet that for some reason, the webmaster for wow.com etc is not allowing access on port 80 for these IPs.

I was able to access the game, and I could tracert to the site, but could not resolve the page in any type of browser on any computer, and I couldn’t do it with different routers either — I had to get an IP address not ending in zero.

Sure enough, my router’s IP had a 0 at the end. All it took was to force my router to change it’s mac address, and presto, access granted.