[W.I.P] Warlock Guide - General play and Arena Guide

[gaship]

Hello there!

Now before you all go about shouting repost, yes theres been other warlock guides before; however, each warlock plays differently and these are my thoughts and feelings on the class. twocents

I'd like to prove that warlocks arent as 'easymode' as people seem to make them out to be and that especially recently, take some extreme skill to play well.

I also want to set this guide out from others by giving tips about Arena setups, how to support your team AND the tactics used whilst playing them.

I'll also provide a gear, macros and addons section!


So, how about a contents menu?

CONTENTS:

Part 1 - About the Warlock Class

i) What is a warlock?
ii) Pets?!
iii) Soul Shards And Conjoured Items

Part 2 - Talent Specs and Spells

i) Talent Points, Where to put them?

a) Beginner's Talent Specs
b) Intermediate Talent Specs
c) Advanced Talent Specs

ii) Key Spells and Buffs
iii) Stat Allocation

Part 3 - PvP Arena and Duelling

i) L2p, the easiest way
ii) Duels, tips n tricks
iii) ARENA, setups and their strategies.

Part 4 - Macros and Addons

i) Macros, get em while they're hot!
ii) Add-ons, my favourites and why
iii) Professions, helpful?

Part 5 - Anything to add?

i) Feedback
ii) Requests
iii) Additions of your own!

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Part 1 - About the Warlock Class



i) What is a warlock?

The Warlock is one of WoW's primary damage dealing caster classes, their unique ability to turn health into mana is the envy of mages and other mana based classes. Most of the time Warlocks deal their damage in 'Damage over Time' form (DoTs) and using curses and minions to do their bidding. This isn't to say that warlocks can't provide burst damage, as when specced correctly they can be one of the most dangerous burst classes currently in the game.

Much alike a mage, warlocks have life saving crowd controlling abilities to save them and their allies from danger this comes in the form of striking fear and horror into the hearts of their enemies.

Warlocks are one of the two classes that get their own special mount at level 40 (soon to be 30!) and 60, these are gained via quest chain and unfortunately, contrary to popular belief, their level 60 mount is *NOT* free.

The great thing about being a warlock is being able to take on several mobs or people without worrying too much about focusing on one or the other. Their ability to cast DoT's makes them a foe worthy of keeping away from as even if you kill a warlock, your health could still be eaten away.

ii) Minions?!

Thats right! As a warlock you get your own minions to do your bidding, these are a great asset to a warlock and without them, certainly in one of the talent tree's you would lose a great deal of power you have over your enemies.

Lets take a closer look into each of the individual minions you can summon:-

IMP (Gained at level 1 - 4) - The infamous Imp, reknown through many magical games for being a mischievous demon, the imps main role is a basic support minion, they provide the warlock with a little extra health and provide damage in the form of a firebolt, however the imp is extremely fragile and will no doubt die extremely quickly when attacked. The great thing about the Imp is that they *don't* cost a soul shard to summon thus, makes them your primary soul shard farming pet!

The Imp has several abilities that make it a great chocie for PvE such as Phase Shift, a spell that makes it invulnerable to enemy attacks whilst idle, Blood pact which at max level provides an extra ~800 hp to each person in your group! The Tanks will love you for it!

For Affliction talented warlocks the imp is also what you could call a 'mana battery', using hte talent dark pact you gain the imps mana pool into your own meaning you dont have to life tap and thus dont lose health. The Imps mana pool regenerates extremely quickly so affliction warlocks rarely run out of mana.


The Imp also has a 'Fire shield' which alike thorns, when cast on party members, causes damage to opponents when stuck. The damage however is only a small amount and at most will be doing ~20 damage per hit.

VOIDWALKER (Gained at level 10) - The 'tanking' minion, this demon deals only very small amounts of damage but has an extremely good health and armor pool. He is great whilst soloing Mobs and for farming soulshards due to his ability to causes large amounts of threat, taunting the mobs away from the warlock. The voidwalker also has a self heal, costing a little mana he is able to heal to almost full from consuming the shadows around him.

The Voidwalker is not used very much end-game as there are other players such as paladins, warriors and druids who hold the aggro and take damage much better.

In PvP however the voidwalker is extremely useful due to its sacrifice ability which, although kills the demon itself, creates a 30 second damage absorption shield protecting them from around 2,000 damage!

SUCCUBUS (Gained at level 20) - The Succubus is a flirtatious demon, with the ability to seduce opposing players and humanoid mobs keepings them out of the fight for ~10 seconds, greatly useful for PvP and tends to be used mostly by Destruction Warlocks for nuking opponents down.

She is also the primary damage dealing minion available to all warlocks as her 'Lash of Pain' spell that deals shadow damage to the opponent and when paired with a warlocks damage can be deadly.

Unfortunately her damage and crowd control ability come at a cost, yep you gussed it, her health pool is close to non existent and within a few hits she will most likely die. Thankfully, so opposing players cant take advantage of this straight away she has a lesser invisibility spell which to people other than warlocks will provide temporary cover for the demon.

FELHUNTER (Gained at level 30) - The 'Anti Caster' minion, over time your felpuppy will become a favourite of your demons, its ability to cause so much stress to mages alone is a reason to love it!

The Felhunter has extremely high magic resistance and has abilities to counterspell, remove buffs from enemies and remove debuffs from friendly players! They also have an ability called Paranoia to greatly increase the stealth detection of all party members close to the demon. Excellent for discovering sneaky rogues and druids!

FELGUARD (Gained from 41 point talent of the demonology talent tree) - The Felguard has similar DPS to the succubus however can tank almost as well as the Voidwalker, having slightly less armor but the ability to create much better single target aggro generation.

This Felguard has abilities that help hugely in PvP as well as whilst soloing, Intercept being one that allows the felguard to charge and stun whoever the warlock targets for 3 seconds and has a cooldown of 30 seconds,

Its cleave ability also causes excellent damage to multiple opponents however has the unfortuante side effect of breaking crowd control effects because its stupid

iii) Soul Shards And Conjoured Items

Most of the Warlock's skills and spells rely on a reagent called a Soul Shard. These are obtained by using the Drain Soul spell to create a soul shard. The warlock must be channeling this spell as the target dies and it doesnt matter whether you or someone else kills it.

As you will be constantly reminded by blizzard - "Only targets that would give experience or honor to the warlock will yield a Soul Shard."

Soul Shards are used to summon all of the minions except for the imp. Enslaving demons, casting many high level spells (such as Soul Fire), and creating Healthstones (which provide health to the warlock and are tradable), Soulstones (Allows the warlock or one of his allies to resurrect after dieing, has a long cooldown) , Firestones (currently pretty much useless), and Spellstones (removes all magic effects on the warlock).

They are required for the Ritual of Summoning spell that allows a Warlock to summon party members to the Warlock's location.

Shadowburn a talent in the Destruction tree also creates a soul shard if the enemy dies within five seconds of casting it if the target rewards experience or honor, but as it also costs a shard to cast, you basically do not gain or lose anything shards however you DO lose a shard if it is resisted which can be EXTREMELY annoying.

Part 2 - Talent Specs and Spells

i) Talent Points, Where to put them?

Incoming, a LARGE section on talent specs - a good and bad talent spec can make or break a warlock. Even the most talented of you warlocks may wish to give this a read as I'll bring many talent specs that you may not have seen before

I will use a 5 star rating system with 1 star being bad and 5 stars being awesome!

Example:

Battlegrounds: ***** (Such as WSG, AV, AB and EoTS)
Arena: ***** (Being Arenas)
PvE:* (Player versus Enviroment, mobs)
Fun:***


BASIC TALENT SPECS

Affliction PvP/PvE - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft-
The first of the basic talent specs is the Affliction build, based on causing as many debuffs to the opponent as possible via DoT's. With this build you gain several key spells which make this build great

Unstable Affliction, this talent is what every lock wants, it causes a DoT on the target, and will damage and silence anyone who dispels it! Even better, this ability can crit! I've done upto 6k damage to unsuspecting paladins and priests!

Dark Pact, instant ability which transfers mana from your pet to you. When paired with the imp its excellent however you dont want to take all your other minion's mana from them too quickly otherwise they wont be able to use their abilities. Reduces downtime a LOT though.

Siphon Life, a dot which when ticking returns health to the caster.

Drain Life, spammable channeled life drain - vital to the warlocks survivability, hsould be used with caution due to silence effects.

Curse of Exhaustion, self-explanitory, a spell which reduces the target's movement speed. Only 30% slowing effect so hamstring and crippling poison will slow YOU more. However when you use this with Amplify Curse your movement slowing curse effect is increased to 50%.

You gain dispel protection with this build; meaning your spells are less likely to be dispelled AND if they do, a large amount of damage will be caused to the opponent. You also gain Shadowburn with this build which, when paired with Nightfall can cause some serious burst damage!

This build is best paired with a Shadowpriest due to all the shadow damage stacking together!

LOTS of numbers

Battlegrounds: ****
Arena: **
PvE:***
Fun:****


Demonology PvP/PvE - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft-

The second section of the basica talent specs is the Demonology build. This build focuses on improving your minions strength and health pool allowing you to focus more on crowd controlling and Shadowbolt/incinerate/searing pain nuking. There are only 3 DoT's with this build compared to the 5 that you get with the Affliction one.

The Key spells/talents in this build are the 31 and41 point talents:

The Felguard, this beast of a pet dishes out great damage and its intercept ability comes in amazingly useful.

Soul Link, this ability splits the damage you take with your pet meaning you take 20% less damage and you and your pet gain a 5% damage increase! You can take a LOT more damage with this talent.

Wildly regarded as the best talent spec for 5v5 Arena and can also be useful in 3v3 and 2v2!

A great all round build (and has a pet that can pretty much solo bad mages >)

The only downfall is if the pet dies, you're in big trouble, you lose a lot of damage output and you lose your soul link, making you a lot squishier.

Battlegrounds: *****
Arena: ****
PvE:****
Fun:*****

Destruction PvP/PvE - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft-

Last of the basic talent builds is the Destruction build, one of the most underestimated warlock builds in existence. With the right gear a warlock this build is one of the most devastating burst damage classes in the game with Conflagrate, Shadowburn and Backlash all instant casts with immense damage. This spec is based on causing critical damage to the opponent.

Like most things about the warlock, if it gains damage it must lose survivability, which is the concern of most destruction warlocks at the minute, melee is a huge problem and getting away from opponents is the main aim of the game whilst doing as much instant damage as possible.

To do this you have to use your Succubus effectivly and timing your fears and deathcoil well is a must.

In battlegrounds this is my personal favourite as there is nothing like hitting a 8k Critical Soulfire on a poor passing unsuspecting feralol druid.

Key spells/talents in this build are as follows:

Ruin, the destrolocks best friend - Ruin increases the critical hit damage bonus of your Destruction spells by 100%. A normal spell crit is +50% damage taking into account all other damage modifiers. Ruin doubles the crit bonus, so you get a +33% damage bonus on critical hits. On nom nom nom.

Conflagrate, burst damage essential, an extremely useful spell for enemies who are near-death, or when your Immolate spell's timer is about to run out. Also great for combokills, immolate -> incinerate -> conflagrate -> shadowburn for an easy 5k+ damage all in a few seconds.

ShadowFury, is a Shadow direct damage AoE that stuns targets for a short time, great for stopping people in their tracks or giving you some breathing time to get off a fear. Extremely mana inefficient and I only recommend using it when you need it it has a cooldown though.

Battlegrounds: *****
Arena: * (Melee teams /sigh)
PvE:*** (There is a better variation for PvE)
Fun:***** (Who doesnt love seeing big numbers?)

INTERMEDIATE TALENT SPECS

SiphonLife/SoulLink (SL/SL) PvP - Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft-

The first of my intermediate warlock specs is the SL/SL spec, wildly abused by other classes for being 'overpowered' gaining it several nerfs through the last year. What other classes dont realise is that this spec is the most boring spec EVER however warlocks are ushered into speccing it due to its survivability factor which against the melee train teams lately, is necessary.

This spec is not great at damage and has little to no burst damage potential other than the occasional nightfall proc. However your survivability especially against casters is greatly increased.

The Key Spells/talents are:

Siphon Life, a dot which when ticking returns health to the caster.

Soul Link, this ability splits the damage you take with your pet meaning you take 20% less damage and you and your pet gain a 5% damage increase! You can take a LOT more damage with this talent.

Curse of Exhaustion, self-explanitory, a spell which reduces the target's movement speed. Only 30% slowing effect so hamstring and crippling poison will slow YOU more. However when you use this with Amplify Curse your movement slowing curse effect is increased to 50%.

Battlegrounds: *****
Arena: *****
PvE:***
Fun:*

---------------- MORE TO COME ----------------

[Shadowlash]

you are wrong about affliction... im afffli/destru(UA and shadowburn) and having a 1675 rating with a bm hunter

P.S. I have 300 rez

[gaship]

No offense but i wouldnt honestly call 1675 a good rating I'm not saying its a bad spec, just extremely limited in which situations it can be used in.

And anyway, as I said its an opinionated post.
I'm off out anyway, I'll add more later

[Deadist]

Whats creepy, i just bought powerleveling on a warlock :P

+ Rep mate, Give me moar!!!

[Opirity1]

+rep for a good handguide


edit: 2hr cd

[Chenquie]

Damn, nice guide, can't wait for the next parts. Rep for you mistarr

[/wrists]

Great guide. Warlocks are changing in arenas alot though so keep up the good work

[myself123]

Really nice guide, thank you very much. +rep

[scarsfromknives]

+rep for you.

I botted a lock up to lvl 60 and I find myself wondering what to do with him sometimes. Guides like this help me out a lot.

[~Jagris]

Nice guide +Rep

EDIT: I ment to change my talent tree back to demon for a while so thanks for the reminder

[Ticom]

Nice guide its useful

[Thimpey]

Nice one mate!
+2 Rep

[Guitking44]

DUDE!!!!!!! lovin the guide
i've been wondering 2 respec 2 SL/SL at 70, atm im affliction lock with bit of demo and i wanted your opinion on it