Warlock Leveling Guide – Warlock Leveling Build
OK, so now that you’ve picked the race of your Warlock and worked through your race’s starting area, the next stage of the Warlock leveling guide is choosing your talents. Thankfully, choosing a warlock leveling build is pretty clear cut.
As far as leveling goes, Demonology doesn’t pack in enough damage until higher levels, and Destruction is too mana-intensive. Without a doubt, Affliction is the best warlock leveling build.
Choosing talents as you go is fairly simple. We’ll go in blocks of 10 points at a time.
10-19: Fill out Improved Corruption, Suppression, and Soul Siphon. You get more damage, more reliably, and for less mana. Plus the added boost to Drain Life from Soul Siphon really helps survivability.
20-29: The next choice talents to pick up are Fel Concentration, Improved Fear, Nightfall and Empowered Corruption. Fel Concentration and Improved Fear both help a good bit with survivability, and Empowered Corruption makes Corruption your best scaling Damage over Time spell. Nightfall works great as an optional fight-ender at the cost of a bit of extra mana when it procs.
30-39: Grim Reach, Siphon Life, Improved Life Tap, and Shadow Mastery take us to level 39. You should be starting to feel like an unstoppable monster at this point. Disgusting damage, great survivability, and a decent amount of longevity, which is about to get even better.
40-49: We’ll be picking up Dark Pact, Contagion, Malediction, and then dropping back a bit to grab Amplify Curse. So now you’re an unstoppable killing machine with a tiny demonic mana battery. Do you love being a Warlock yet?
50-59: Unstable Affliction, Pandemic, Death’s Embrace, and Everlasting Affliction are next on the menu, because you didn’t have enough damage already, right? Blah blah blah hot knife through butter, you get the picture by now I’m sure.
60 onwards: Grab Haunt when you ding 60, and at that point, the world is your oyster. You can finish filling out Affliction, go up Demonology for more survivability, or start into Destruction for a side of burst damage to compliment your entree of debilitating DoTs.
At this point, some people choose to respec Demonology for the Felguard and the sheer coolness factor of Metamorphosis. Other people decide to switch it up and go Shadowmage-style with a Destruction build. Feel free to experiment a bit and get a feel for what works best for you.
For me? Well, after experimenting a bit, I realized I’m an Aff-lock through and through, and after filling out a few more talents in that tree, I went into Demonology to grab Soul Link for PVP purposes and that was that. It’s my personal belief that Affliction is the best Warlock leveling build, and it is definitely my favorite Warlock talent build.
Feel free to leave a comment if you have any feedback, and make sure to keep checking back for more of my Warlock leveling guide!
September 1st, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I just made a warlock and found this dandy guide. I am in the mid 30′s at the moment. I’d just like to point out thanks for the guide. It is coming in handy. However, I think you are GROSSLY exaggerating all this damage and non-stop grinding abilities. It just isn’t there with this build. Now, maybe in 3.1 things were different. “You should be starting to feel like an unstoppable monster at this point. Disgusting damage, great survivability, and a decent amount of longevity, which is about to get even better.” Just does not exist.
September 9th, 2009 at 1:20 am
John – You are correct. The 3.2 changes to mana regen have caused a lot of downtime for all mana based classes. Thankfully, you are pretty close to things getting much better.
Once you pick up Dark Pact at 40, you will find things much easier, especially with Shadow Mastery maxed out. I know things are rough now, but if you struggle through to 40, things will pick up.