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Warlock Guide Warlock Spells Warlock Combat Pets Warlock Raiding Warlock Raiding Event Warlock Tactics Warlock Strategy Warlock Leveling talents Warlock Tips
Warlock Guide,Warlock WOW Spells,human warlock wow guide
An introduction to warlocks!
So, you want to be a warlock eh? Well, look no further, this is the guide for you. Also, if you’re considering rerolling lock, this guide might be worth a read also. It’ll take you from race selection and level 1 to the basics of high-levels raids. It’ll also take a look on talents, spells, class specific quests and itemization, so hang tight and read on. Seeing as this guide is an introduction, I’ll try to be as brief and concise as possible, while still maintaining a simple and general approach to the class. It assumes some knowledge of World of Warcraft, but I’ll try to explain most of the terms used as I go along.
Terms and abbreviations
This section is used to briefly describe the terms and abbreviations used in this guide.
DoT: Abbreviation for “damage over time”, which is a spell doing it’s damage over a certain period of time in small portions.
Mob: Term used for monsters in the game (originally “mobile object”)
Aggro: When you get “aggro” it means you’re the highest placed person on the mobs aggro-list, thus making the mob attack you.
Tanking: Tanking is a term used to describe the event that the “tank” is taking damage from the mob. While soloing, you will often be tanking, meaning you will be taking the damage from the mob (instead of your pet or another player)
DD: Abbreviation for “direct damage”, which means a spell that applies damage at impact. A shadow bolt is a good example of this.
DPS: Abbreviation for “damage per second”, often referring to your damage output.
Choice of race
I’ve always considered the choice of race fairly important. Keep in mind, you’re going to spend a good amount of time playing this character, so don’t take this decision lightly. Most will already have a preference on choice of faction (horde/alliance), so I won’t delve into this subject much, but instead give you a short introduction to the pro’s and con’s of the available races at the time of writing (pre-expansion).
Pro’s and cons of the different races
Keep in mind that the bonuses of the race shouldn’t be the sole factor of your decision. You’ll be spending a lot of time playing this char, which in my opinion means that your subjective feel on your choice of race is far more important. My advice: Take a look at your avatar, make a char of each race and give them a test drive. Pick the one you like the most.
Alliance races
Humans
The powergamer choice of alliance race would be human. Humans get a 10% increase to reputation gains, which will save you a lot of time in the end game. They also get stealth detection, increased sprit and extra skill with swords and maces, all of which are fairly irrelevant to warlocks.
Gnomes
Gnomes get increased intelligence, the ability to escape from some movement impairing effects, engineering skill increased and increased resistance to arcane damage. Of these, the most useful is the ability to escape from movement impairing effects, but weighed against the human reputation increase, the objective choice should be human in terms of racial abilities.
Horde races
Undead
The powergamer choice of horde race is without at doubt undead, and for one single reason: Will of the forsaken (which makes you temporarily immune to fear, sleep and charm). This is somewhat useful in PvE, but insanely useful in PvP. To boot, undead get increased shadow resistance, the ability to “eat” corpses for increased health regen (very useful to warlocks) and better underwater breathing (practically useless, especially to warlocks who get underwater breathing as a spell).
Orc
Orcs get increased pet damage (not much though), better ability to resist stun effects, enrage ability, and better skill with axes, all of which are pretty much useless for warlocks.
Leveling
So, hopefully you’ve now made your choice of race and are ready to proceed with leveling up your character. I won’t go into much depth on this subject, but I will make a few comments on what type of mobs are good for warlocks to kill and post some references to other leveling guides. Also, I’ll post some information about using your spells to get the most of the time spent killing monsters.
Levels 1 through 5 should be spent in your local newbie area. At level 4, you’ll be eligible for your first pet – the imp. You can get this quest at your local newbie area trainer. The imp is an effective companion up until level 60, so take good care of him.
Once you’re done with the newbie area, you should be level 6 and ready for the big world. At this point, your most important spells will be immolate, corruption and shadow bolt. The latter has a limited usage at this point, but keep it handy. Also, I haven’t included lifetap at this point, which is not as useful on the lower levels, but don’t worry, it will be. For the most efficient leveling setup, I recommend always having your imp out. Pull mobs with immolate, have your pet attack, add corruption and wand the mobs to death.
A quick note on wands: This is, by far, the most important piece of equipment you’ll have until you’re level 60 in terms of leveling Always make sure you have the best available wand at your current level, it will save you a lot of time.
The “base” attack
At level 8 you can add fear and CoA (curse of agony – new dot) to your repertoire. At this point, depending on the level of mobs you fight (lower levels won’t need the added CoA for now), your pulling order should look like this: CoA, immolate, pet attack, corruption and wand. You want to make sure your pet doesn’t pull aggro, since the imp is fairly fragile and can’t take to many hits. Immolate generates enough aggro to keep the mob on you for now, so you want to get it into your rotation as soon as possible. CoA lasts 24 seconds, and is does more damage, the longer time it is on the mobs. Most fights will last less than 24 seconds, so this should be cast as soon as possible. The wand is your most efficient tool of destruction since it doesn’t consume mana, however, since you will be tanking the mobs yourself, you’ll want to create a balance between kill speed (the higher the kill speed, the less damage taken) and mana efficiency (the higher the kill speed, the more mana spent). The reasoning behind this, is that you want to balance off your mana spent and damage taken in a way that allows for maximum efficiency in terms of experience gain.
The “base” attack (CoA -> Immolate -> pet attack -> Corruption -> wand) will take you from 8-60 without trouble. For maximum efficiency in terms of experience gain, you should be killing mobs ranging from 1 level above your own, down to 3-4 levels below.
The “special” attacks
As a warlock, you have a wide array of tools at your disposal. These are useful for different kinds of mobs. Worthy of mention are especially curse of weakness (obtained at level 4), curse of recklessness (obtained at level 14) and curse of tongues (obtained at level 26). Under certain conditions, you may want to switch CoA (since only one curse can be active at any one target at the same time) for one of these.
Curse of Weakness (CoW)
This curse is particularly useful against mobs that hit very fast, but not very hard. What it does is reduce the damage caused by the cursed target by a fixed amount, meaning that the efficiency of the spell is higher, the more times a mob will hit you during a fight. Also, since the damage reduction is fixed, the spell is more useful against weak hitting mobs (which typically also hit faster). Good examples of fast, but weak hitting mobs are: Cats (tigers, panthers etc.), raptors, bats and owls.
Curse of recklessness (CoR)
This curse has it’s usefulness against fleeing mobs, as the curse will make them unable to flee (thus possible aggroing nearby mobs). It also increases melee attack power and decreases armor, which means it should only be applied at the end of the fight, so you won’t have to disregard CoA altogether, but you will lose the full efficiency of CoA. Keep in mind that the higher ranks of CoR cost more mana, and increases the melee attack more while decreasing the mobs armor more, but as it’s usefulness is primarily making the mob not flee, you should stick to rank 1 of this spell in terms of experience grinding.
Curse of Tongues (CoT)
CoT will slow the cast time of the cursed mobs spell by 50%. This is immensely useful against caster mobs, since it will lower mage-type mobs damage output considerably and reduce the healing speed of priest-type mobs. This should always replace CoA against mobs that do their primary damage through spells.
Eating and drinking
Eating and drinking will regenerate your health and mana. Food and water is expensive, especially at the later levels. Your most gold efficient way of regenerating lost mana and health is through your friendly neighborhood mage. You should almost always be able to bribe a local mage for some food and water (always offer to pay for his/her services, it’s polite and it saves you a lot of money as an alternative to store-bought food, so give him a piece of the pie as well). This is especially viable for longer grinding sessions as your mage-delivered food will disappear 15 minutes after logout.
Quest experience and -items
During your adventures, you’ll find that completing quests will yield experience, items and gold. Particularly during the first 20-30 levels, questing is not to be sneezed at. Personally, I prefer just killing mobs and getting my experience and items from them, but this isn’t the most efficient approach. For maximum efficiency, pick up any relevant quests when you go to a new area (several guides are available on this subject in the “links and references” section further down), and complete quests while you grind. Quests will also help you get better gear, that can’t be obtained at the auction house.
Earning and spending gold
During your adventure throughout Azeroth, you’ll pick up gold and items along the way. You should spend your gold wisely, as you’ll need all of it later in the game. Although this guide is aimed specifically at the warlock class, I’ve included a few tips and tricks that everyone should know, in order to save you some time and money:
Sell your blue and purple items at the AH (obviously)
Disenchant your green items and sell the materials at the AH
Be a skinner – skinning monsters is a very good source of income, sell your skins at the AH
Be a miner or a herbalist – mining and herbalism are both great sources of income – sell your ore and herbs on the AH
Buyer beware – when buying an item, make sure the price is right, keep an eye on your class items at the AH, so you know the price levels
Bribe mages for food – alternatively buy the lowest priced food you need (by need, I mean food needed to regenerate the amount of lost health and mana during fights)
Soul shards, healthstones and soulstones
Soul shards are obtained through draining the souls of your foes. The spell “drain soul” is obtained at level 10, and will supply you with the shards you need, through casting it when the monster is near death.
As a warlock you’ll need soul shards for some of your spells. Shards are needed for several spells, including pet summon (except for your imp), creating health-, spell- and soulstones as well as some other spells.
Healthstones work like a health potions – it instantly replenishes a fixed amount of health. You should always have a healthstone in you inventory while leveling – it will save you a lot of grief.
Soulstones work like priests resurrection spells. In dangerous areas, keep yourself soulstoned - the soulstone will allow you to resurrect if killed, without running back to your corpse.
Macros
Macros can be a great help during your life as a warlock. Some like them more than others, personally I used a couple for leveling and currently just one. If you’re unsure how to create a macro, I’ve include a short guide below.
To create a new macro, enter the main menu (esc by default), click macros, click new, select a name and an icon and click ok. You can now copy and paste the text below into the macro text.
CoA/CoT macro
This macro will cast curse of tongues if the monster is a spell-caster, otherwise it’ll cast CoA – using this macro will save you some room on your bar and also make sure you remember to CoT caster mobs.
/script if (UnitMana("target")>120) then CastSpellByName("Curse of Tongues") else CastSpellByName("Curse of Agony") end;
Seduce macro
This macro is quite simple and (obviously) only works when you have your succubus out. The succubus can cast a spell called “Seduction”, which temporarily (12-15 sec depending on how you’ve spent your talents) disables a monsters attacking.
/script CastPetAction("6");
Special warlock techniques (fear kiting and draintanking)
This section will briefly describe the two techniques referred to as “fear kiting” and “draintanking”.
Fear kiting
Fear kiting is a term used to describe casting fear on a mob and killing it while feared. It’s a prerequisite that you’re able to kite it around in an area where the monster won’t easily run into other monster, thus aggroing them. You simply pull the mob with a dot, drag it to somewhere safe, cast fear and apply dots and damage spells as needed. Recast fear when it breaks and keep a distance to the mob.
Draintanking
Draintanking is a term used to describe the warlocks tanking of the mob, while keeping his/her health up by casting drain life and possible siphon life (if you’re specced for it). It can be an efficient way to gain xp but it’s heavy on the manapool, and isn’t really the most effective way of leveling, but has it’s uses depending on the scenario.
Useful add-ons
As a warlock, there’s quite a lot to keep track of. Healthstones, soulstones, soul shards, dots and aggro. In order to most efficiently use your spells, its helpful to have some add-ons to do some of the work for you. You can find most of these add-ons at Curse Gaming (http://www.curse-gaming.com/en/wow/addons.html).
Shard tracker
The warlocks good friend shard tracker is almost a must-have. It keeps track of the amount of soul shards in your inventory, provides an interface for summoning healthstones, soulstones and pets, thus saving room on your spell bars. Also, it can inform you of when your soulstone ability has cooled down. In addition it has many other useful functions, which I won’t go into further details on in this guide.
DoTimer
DoTimer will help you keep track for your dots and other spells like fear, banish, enslave etc. Most importantly, it displays a timer informing you how long your dots have until they expire. Very very useful add-ons.
Enemycastbar
Also a useful add-on used for timing your enemies (and your own) spells.
KLH ThreatMeter
Mostly useful for groups and raids and requires the tank to have the add-on as well (which he/she will often have). It displays how high on the monsters threat-list you are, enabling you to control aggro much more precisely, thus optimizing your damage output without you taking damage.
Pets
In this section I’ll attempt to describe to strengths and weaknesses of the most important warlock pets (imp, voidwalker, succubus and felhunter).
The imp
The imp is you highest dps pet, which also has the weakest tanking capabilities. In addition it’s able to phase shift (making other mobs unable to attack it) and more importantly casts a number of buffs - fire shield, which does damage to attackers hitting your and blood pact, which is a stamina buff, increasing your total hit points.
The imp is, in my opinion, the most effective companion for leveling and in some cases for raiding.
The voidwalker
The voidwalker is the warlocks tanking pets. It has a somewhat limited ability to generate aggro and mitigate damage and a good amount of hit points. It’s not very useful for leveling, as it has a low damage output and will harshly limit your own damage output, should you not want to grab aggro from your pet. The voidwalker does have some uses it terms of killing higher level mobs and more importantly because of it’s ability to sacrifice, which means killing the voidwalker to supply you with a damage shield.
The succubus
The succubus is a very useful, but also situational pet. It has great use in PvP (more on this later in this guide), and a very important ability to seduce humanoid mobs, which can be very useful in groups and during some quests. It has a decent melee damage output and some (albeit not much) tanking ability.
The felhunter
The felhunter is also very useful under certain circumstances. It’s very good against caster mobs, because of it’s ability to silence, draining attack power, and “eating” your enemies buffs, thus replenishing it’s health.
Talents
This section will briefly describe useful warlock talents for leveling and raiding.
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