Warlock Leveling Guide From 1 to 70 for TBC Classic

Leveling as a Warlock in The Burning Crusade can be one of the smoothest leveling experiences in the game. Between all your Damage over Time(DoTs) spells, your ability to quickly burst any target down, and your demons, including the new Summon Felguard, you will have no issues at all leveling in TBC Classic. Warlocks are exceptionally quick at solo leveling and they excel even more when placed in a group. They get early access to an Summon Imp which gives them the best kill speed in the game from 1-10, before getting a Voidwalker at 10 that can tank enemies for you all the way to 70 (if needed). With the combination of Life Tap and Drain Life, Warlocks can trade health for Mana, letting them always make the most out of their resources, which allows them to minimize time drinking and eating. Warlocks are also one of the two classes that get a free mount at Level 40, ensuring the earliest access to a vitally important tool while leveling. With their powerful DoTs and utility access to wands, a handful of demons, Warlocks are top-tier levelers that should have little trouble getting to 70.

Providing non-Warlock leveling advice is outside the scope of this article and is covered in our general TBC leveling guide.

Warlocks have many viable leveling specs and builds, but the most common is a combination of Affliction and Demonology, which revolves around using your DoTs and wand to kill enemies while either your demon tanks enemies for you, or you face tank them yourself, while letting your demon dish out even more damage. While each spec is strong, Destruction is much more Mana-intensive than the other two specs, which leaves you sitting to eat and drink far too often and is also more of a build made for dungeons. Given this, we do not suggest using Destruction to quest and instead we urge you to try the following builds.

Affliction is the recommended leveling build. It has superb damage, almost an endless supply of Mana and health regen, allowing you to go quite a long time without stopping to eat drink. Affliction relies heavily on the damage over time spells to gradually kill enemies, while having many tools to keep yourself alive.

Demonology is also viable to level with. It is quite a bit slower than Affliction to start, but once you get to Level 50, you are able to get the new and mighty Summon Felguard and that is when the build speeds up and you will find yourself cleaving through the levels in no time.

Warlocks are one of, if not the best levelers in the game. Their toolkit allows them to spend very little Mana and still do massive amounts of damage with their arsenal of damage over time spells, which slowly rot their enemy away from a distance, all while your demon is smacking away at the enemy as well. While it is true that the builds are heavy relying on Affliction, Demonology still have many talents that you will use to survive during your adventures in Outlands. For this playstyle questing, Destruction loses much of its value since it is based around big, hard-hitting, and Mana-intensive spells like Shadow Bolt and Incinerate. Destruction is never suggested while questing, as it has the most downtime out of these other specs. It has its place in dungeons, which we will get to at the end of this page.

Contrary to popular belief, leveling with a partner or as part of a group is not a terrible thing. In fact, for most classes leveling with a partner is better than leveling solo. While Warlock are strong solo levelers, they are possibly the strongest duo class in the game. A strong duo such as Warlock/Paladin, Warlock/Druid, or Warlock/Shaman can compete with Warlock for leveling speed, and will be faster than either player leveling solo. Warlock can pair with anyone, but do their best when paired with a strong support ally that can provide healing and buffs to help limit their downtime. When supported, Warlock can play much more aggressively, using DoTs on multiple allies and casting Life Tap as needed to get Mana back instead of potentially stopping to drink and eat. Warlock also can be strong in dungeon groups as well due to their high sustained damage and ability to recover Mana without downtime.

Many of us will be in a hurry to level and all of us do not want to deal with the crowded Outlands. So naturally, most will dungeon cleave. Similar to questing, there are some options on specs for you to choose from. Now, dungeon cleaving is all about your Tank grouping up as many enemies as they can, and then the party doing as much AoE damage as humanly possible. The only problem is, we do not get Seed of Corruption until 70, so in the meantime let us look at our AoE options. Starting with the scenario many many people will be doing — and that is geared players speed running via dungeon cleave. For that, a couple builds come to mind that are worth running. The first one being DS/ES — Demonic Sacrifice/Emberstorm.

The beauty of this build is how much Fire damage you have(use a Create Firestone as well) With Improved Immolate.your Summon Imp. On top of that, you get Aftermath and eventually Pyroclasm, which ultimately is not the best proc rates; however, they still do happen frequently enough to notice. On top of that, you are sacrificing your Imp for 15% more Fire damage. Your Gameplay revolves around spreading Immolates as your Tank gathers up the mobs, run in while casting either Curse of Agony or Curse of the Elements and as soon as you are in range, just start Hellfireing. Yes, Hellfire over Rain of Fire. It does much more damage. Make sure to pay attention to your health and do not kill yourself with Hellfire. The reason I chose this over dropping down to take Shadowfury is while Shadowfury's stun is nice, the damage is nice as well — about the damage of a Shadowburn in an AoE effect, you have to waste quite a few filler points to reach Shadowfury, just for the stun. Shadow and Flame and whatever else you decide to take to reach Shadowfury is more or less worthless when the goal is to do as much damage as possible in AoE form.

Now, if you plan to dungeon Cleave, but maybe not in that big of a hurry, more or less just in a dungeon with a group or plan to level solely in dungeons, but not a breakneck speed, I would suggest a nice Summon Felguard build. This is the build we suggest.

This is a pretty simple spec that does a respectable amount of damage, while not leaving you out of Mana after the pulls like you would if you went full Destruction. After picking up Summon Felguard, start tossing your points into the Destruction side of things for faster casting and harder-hitting Shadow Bolt. With any extra points, we suggest putting a point or two into Improved Corruption so you can get Corruptions out faster, while still matching the global cooldown. Your goal here is to simply put up Corruption, then Immolate and spam Shadow Bolt while your Summon Felguard does what he does best. Be mindful of your Summon Felguard though, make sure you always have him positioned behind the targets, so he does not get hit by any cleaves. If you see him standing in stuff or getting cleaved, call him back and reposition, then let him charge back in. Also, do not forget to pick up some Scroll of Agility and Scroll of Strength to buff him up even more and do not be afraid to ask for some party buffs and heals for him!

A quick note regarding dungeon cleaving as the other specs. Affliction is not suggested to pick for dungeon cleaving. It is arguably the worse spec to be if killing things quickly. Simply because the mobs die before you can get your DoTs to tick. As for Shadow Destruction, spamming Shadow Bolts all the time leads to not only Mana issues, but threat issues. Fire Destruction can work better than Shadow in dungeon cleaves. Pretty well really since you Demonic Sacrifice your Summon Imp, you just cannot go all the way down to Shadow and Flame, however, like I mentioned, it is not the most important talent in a fast dungeon cleave.