85 Warlock Guide

by Xooch

What to expect in this guide:

• Warlocks in Cataclysm
• Viable comps and Synergy with other classes
• General Information
• Tips and Tricks for Newer warlocks
• Macros and Addons
• Gearing and Talent Speccing

Table of Contents

Warlock General

• Pros
• Cons
• Pets
• Talents
• Reforging/Enchanting/Gemming

 

Getting Comfortable

• UI and Bindings
• Macros
• Addons

 

Starting up

• How to find partners
• What you should be looking for

 

Arena

• Before the gates open
• After the gates open
• Tips & Tricks

 

Warlock General

Pros

The good thing about warlocks at the moment is they are viable with almost any class due to their strong spammable CC and decent support and damage. Can endure a lot of damage with soullink, healthstones, Demon Armor and Various Self-healing abilities, warlocks are also very good peelers, with shadowflame glyph, howl, spammable fear, spell-lock, Deathcoil and even Curse of Exhaustion in some cases. Also the various cruses you can do can be game breaking, with weakness on melee and tongues on casters you can slow down their damage a lot.

Cons

The bad thing about warlocks is of course they are clothies, they will be raped by a lot of melee classes, a lot of warlocks will die to melee if they don’t know how to handle them correctly. Another con is having to sacrifice your health for mana, if you’re healer isn’t ready for it or you really need to tap when your being focused it can be devastating for you. Having to rely on soul link & pets, basically without a pet you’re screwed, so keep it alive or have a soul burn ready, ideally you want to take the demonic rebirth talent.

Pets

Which pets do you want to use? 99% of the time I’d say fel hunter, can dispel a hostile target’s buffs, can spell-lock every 24 seconds, shadow bite doing 20k+ crits, provides mana regen for your team, has high resistance to spells and works well with soul-link. All other pets are situational, stick to fel hunter for PvP.

Talents

Currently Affliction is the recommended spec to go, deals a lot of damage to several targets at the same time, gives a lot of self-healing, can use Unstable Affliction to protect you and other’s debuffs on the target such as hex, HoJ and your own fears.

Recommended for beginners:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#IMGroGsGcdcrM:MRsmqVm0M
provides demonic rebirth so you shouldn’t have pet problems, and improved life tap so you won’t have to life tap too often, I don’t ever take Improved Fear as 30% slow is not a lot, and it only lasts 5seconds. Shadowflame Glyph is awesome for peeling and slowing melee, I always use this on melee before a teleport to get a head start on the kiting. Soul Swap Glyph is awesome being able to copy pasta your dots. The Prime Glyphs are pretty much the only affliction based prime glyphs you can get.

Recommended for advanced:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#IbGroGsGckcbMZc:MRsmqVm0M
This spec doesn’t provide the improved life tap or Demonic Rebirth, but if you’re able to life tap safely and don’t let yourself go oom and tell your healer your tapping it shouldn’t be a problem, also no Demonic Rebirth means you can only get pets back from hard summoning or soul burning, obviously you have you be a lot more careful keeping your pet alive and telling your healer that it needs healing, you also need to Health Funnel it when needed (hence minor Glyph). Shadow and Flame is an awesome talent if you’re able to keep corruption on everything in the arena, which end up providing instant shadow bolts, shadow bolts are really good brust damage and apply the 5% crit debuff.

Destruction with Imp:

http://www.wowhead.com/talent#IZcbMZIrbfRssRbo:zVqqdmM0o
I don’t really like playing destruction at the moment, it’s weak and forces you to use an imp to do decent damage, although Shadow Fury is good peel and can used to link up howl of terrors. As well as nether protection making you a tank vs casters.

Reforging/Enchanting/Gemming

As Affliction you should reforge everything into haste, enchant for int/haste, and lavawalker on boots. Gem for int/haste in yellow, just int in red, and stam/int or stam/hit in blue if you need hit rating (4%). I take the Spell Penetration cape to get my spell pen cap, although I put a 50 spell pen gem in my legs just so I never get resists against enemy felhunters which can sometimes pay off.

Just remember you need atleast 4% hit rating and 200 spell pen.

 

Getting Comfortable

UI and Bindings

This is my UI layout and bindings I use for affliction, pretty standard. Good key bindings are as follow:

1-6, shift+1-6, ctrl+1-6 (although I use these for pet), Q, E, R, T, F, G, Z, X, C, V, H, +shift/ctrl

I try to put my long CDs such as Deathcoil, teleport, Howl, Soulburn macros onto shift modifers as I use them a lot less, more frequent spells such as fear, UA, Corruption etc should be on keys you can use easily, this is so your fingers don’t get a cramp from holding down shift all the time

 

Macros

One of the most important macros I have is the armor switch macro, it allows me to switch between both of my armors in one button:

/castsequence Fel Armor, Demon Armor


Powerup Macro

#showtooltip Blood Fury(Racial)
/cast Blood Fury(Racial)
/cast Lifeblood(Rank 8)
/cast Demon Soul
/use Vicious Gladiator's Badge of Dominance

Curse of Exhaustion Stealth Breaker

spam this while mounted to try and find rogues before they sap you, doesn’t always work but when it does it’s awesome:

#showtooltip Curse of Exhaustion
/console targetNearestDistance 1.000000
/targetenemy [noharm][dead]
/console targetNearestDistance 10.000000
/cast [harm,nodead] Curse of Exhaustion
/dismount [target=target,exists]

Auto Devour Macro

This Macro uses my felhunter’s devour magic every time I use corruption, you can feel free to bind this to every spell if you want, the macro only allows the felhunter to devour IT’S CURRENT target and not YOUR CURRENT target, thus it won’t leave the target it’s on if you’re trying to keep a healer in combat.

#showtooltip Corruption
/cast Corruption
/cast [target=pettarget] Devour Magic

Standard Focus Spell-lock macro:

#showtooltip Spell Lock(Special Ability)
/cast [target=focus] Spell Lock(Special Ability)

Powerup Healthstones macro

can bind battlemaster’s into it aswell if you use it:

#showtooltip Healthstone
/cast Soulburn
/use Healthstone


Fel dom instant Felhunter

Macro which instantly summons a felhunter, useful if your felhunter dies when Demonic Rebirth is on CD, or you want to double spell-lock:

#showtooltip summon felhunter
/cast Soulburn
/cast Summon Felhunter

Spell-lock  current target

#showtooltip Spell Lock(Special Ability)
/cast Spell Lock(Special Ability)

Instant Soul fire macro

#showtooltip Soul Fire
/cast Soulburn
/cast Soul Fire

Pet Raid Mark

this macro puts a raid mark on your pet when you use soul link, useful so you know where your pet is at all times:

#showtooltip Soul Link
/cast Soul Link
/script SetRaidTarget("playerpet",7)

Spamming Wand Macro

only good for doing damage while you’re silenced:

#showtooltip Shoot
/castsequence !Shoot, !Shoot

Trinket Macros

just incase I get a new trinket and I forgot to update my UI/macros:

/use 13

/use 14

Addons

I don’t use a lot of addons, mainly because I don’t like the idea of relying on them, especially if they go out of date:

Gladius – Arena Target Frames, better than the blizzard ones imo as they let you bind macros into them

Spellalterter – tracks incoming spells

Interrupt Bar – Shows Enemy Interrupt CDs, really useful to see if you’ve successfully fake casted

OmniCC – shows numbers on your spells which are on Cooldown

Lose Control – Shows the icon of the debuff CCing you in the middle of your screen aswell as on the debuff bar, useful if you have a lot of debuffs and don’t know what is CCing you and can decide if you need to trinket etc.

Plate Buffs – Shows the dots I do above the enemy nameplates which are better visually for me, not that needed though.

Quartz – Casting Bars addon, also useful for tracking focus casting.

 

 Starting Up

How to find partners

I understand it’s sometimes very hard to find partners especially when you’re a fresh reroll or new to the game, if you’re new your best bet is to play with friends till you think you’ve out grown them, ideally if your friends get as good as you, then you should stick with them. Although if you have no friends on your server, I find advertising in trade not to be the best way, but better than nothing, although don’t just say “LF 2v2 Im a lock lol” try and say what you would prefer, what previous experiences you have, what spec you play, what your goals are, it works a lot better than you would expect, here is an example:

“Afflication Warlock with 1.8k experience LF a Frost Mage and Resto Shaman for 3s, aiming for 2.2k! /w me for more info”

When I started my warlock, I had only honour gear, and no achievements. I advertised my-self by making a post on arena-junkies.com, and got a decent team, which I am still playing with today. Hydramist.tv forums are also decent for recruitment and asking for advice.

Another very important thing is don’t trash talk, you never know who you are going to play with, be polite and don’t get mad if you lose duels. If you end up playing arena with new partners, don’t blame them, and always admit your mistakes, if you start raging it’s going to make you look bad and it’s going to bring your teams moral down, which means less wins and more rage, it’s a vicious cycle so don’t do it.

What you should be looking for

As a warlock a lot of comps are viable, although obviously there are some stronger than others such as Rogue/lock/Shaman or Mage/Lock/Shaman. Although don’t limit yourself to only these comps, if you can play weird comps or with an underpowered class (such as resto druids in 4.2), if you practice it enough and get decent at it, it might be viable in a later patch, and you’d have a huge advantage having learnt the comp already. Ideally you want to be looking for classes which have the most synergy with your warlock, Shadow priests and Resto druids look well as they benefit the most from your dark intent, elemental shamans are also good, aswell as rogues, but like I said it’s not bad to mix it up and try new things.

Arena

Before the gates open

Here is just a brief summary of what you should be doing before the game starts:

Make sure everyone has raid markings, even your pet, as it’s useful to see where everyone else and sort your positioning out. Summon felhunter and soul link it, buff Fel Armor, use dark intent on the class which will most benefit from it (it works both ways!), and create a soul well, or create single health stones and trade them if you’re playing 2s. I also put a portal down in the starting area, just in case I don’t have time to place it when the gates open against a rushing team, better safe than sorry.

After the gates open

First thing is checking what you’re up against, if it’s a melee cleave quickly switch to demon armor and mount up and try and stay back, if you’re playing with a rogue stay back anyway allowing him to get the sap. Put your demonic portal is the best tactical position, usually behind a pillar or any place high up which you can abuse (Dalaran Arena & Blade’s edge). If you are fighting a melee cleave keep your portal quite far back so you can retreat, if it’s a caster team I try to keep it in the middle, and try and land ninja portal fears on the healer.

Tips & Tricks

There is a lot of things you can do as a warlock to outplay the enemy team, the first thing is fake casting; don’t know what fake casting is? I suggest you go Google it, it’s the most basic thing in PvP ever. Taking fake casting to the next level, well ideally you want to be kiting melee, but warlocks have 2 trees, shadow and fire, if you’re having trouble fake casting against rogues/DKs slowing your casts, try using searing pain, if they use their interrupt on it, you’re laughing, and if they don’t well you’re still doing damage, just make sure your instant casts are up first.

• Ninja portal fears – try and put your portal where the healer is LoSing, this way if you need to land a fear on him, you can quickly teleport to him and land an easy fear without too much trouble, if you’re playing with a Death knight get him to grip the healer in and howl everything.
• Fel Flame is really useful if you’re having trouble casting UA, if you already have a UA up, use fel flame to keep it going and make sure it doesn’t fall off, most healers will never dispel when UA is up.
• Soul burn – you only get 3 of these in a game, unless you get a soul harvest off. I ideally use these on pet summons and health stones, although I have used it for teleport and even life drain when I’m in desperate need of health and have already used my health stone.
• You can soulburn a new felhunter and it will reset the CD on your spell-lock, applying a lot of pressure, just don’t forget to rebuff soul link.
• Peeling is something a warlock can do very well, you’re partners should tell you if they need peeling, when they do, you should focus fears onto the DPS by even casting or it using instant howl which can completely stop a whole team for 8 seconds (if you don’t have DRs), and can force trinkets very easily. If my healer gets a deep freeze from a mage, I generally try to keep Curse of Tongues up on the mage, my healer will call it out, and I will spell-lock the next cast the mage does, whether it be frost bolt or poly, this will completely waste the mage’s deep freeze. Ideally if you don’t have any of these spells ready, you can shadowflame onto them, slowing them by a massive 70%, it’s by far the best slow in the game, just be sure to call it out, so then you’re healer can get away by using freedom/ghostwolf/travelform/holywalk.
• Maximizing your damage can be tricky, when you obtain a shadow trance proc (instant shadowbolt) you should cast haunt into your kill target followed the shadow bolt, which will do a chunk of damage and applying 2 stacks of shadow embrace, just make sure you have full dots on the target first. Use Drain Life as damage filler if you can’t do anything else at the time.

 

That’s all I have for now, I hope this guide helps somebody out there, best of luck to anyone reading this.

Xooch