Season of Discovery Demonology Warlock DPS Leveling

Demonology Warlocks are known as the tankiest casters in the game. You have multiple talents to make yourself and your pet harder to kill, while having a large Sacrifice shield from your Voidwalker when in danger when neeeded, or just sit back and let your Felguard carry. Demonology has access to the powerful Felguard to cleave through your enemies, with talents to make him hit even harder. You will also have Fel Domination for those emergency situations when you need to pull another demon out. Most importantly, if you want to, you can turn into a Demon yourself with the infamous Metamorphosis Rune, making you extremely hard to kill.

Demonology is all about survivabilty, with you and your demons being the tankiest that they could possibly be. To enable this, start by putting five points into Demonic Embrace for the 15% Stamina. This will help give you a ton of extra health. After that put two points into Improved Healthstone to make your Healthstones give you more health when you use them. Drop down and put three points into Improved Sayaad. After that put one point into Improved Health Funnel.

From here, put one point into Fel Domination to reduce the casting time the next time you summon your demon. This is helpful for whenever your demon dies or if you need to pull out an emergency Voidwalker for the sacrifice. This talent also synergizes extrememely well with another talent called Master Summoner that you will end up taking. After that put five points into Fel Stamina to give your demon 15% more Stamina, making them tankier and making Soul Link last longer. Place two points into Master Summoner to get that quick summon back whenever your demon dies, like we mentioned earlier.

Next you'll want to put five points into Unholy Power to make your demon do 20% more damage. Next up put one point into Demonic Sacrifice, which won't be used, but you need in order to later unlock Soul Link. Then put five points into Master Demonologist, which will reduce all physical damage done to you and your demon by 10% for some magnifiscent damage reductions. Lastly put your final point into the infamous Soul Link. This makes it so 30% of all damage you take will be taken by your demon instead. This talents provides insane mitigation and will help you survive. This will also buff both you and your Felguard to 3% more damage. Side note, you can no longer use Soul Link while in Metamorphosis, so you can choose to not take Soul Link and put the point elsewhere if you plan to use Meta. Otherwise if you want to use Soul Link, then just use a different rune.

After that you put the remainder of your points into the Affliction tree to further boost the damage of your DoT's. Improved Corruption makes your Corruption instant cast. Improved Life Tap will give you more mana back whenever you Life Tap. Improved Drain Life will give you more healing back from your Drain Life, which will be up full time, thanks to the Master Channeler rune. Improved Curse of Agony will buff your Curse of Agony damage, with Amplify Curse to further buff that Curse of Agony. Lastly Grim Reach will extend the range of your DoT's and Nightfall gives you the 4% chance off of each tick of Corruption, Drain Life and Drain Soul to give you an instant cast Shadow Bolt.

• Bracers — Unstable Affliction
• Head — Pandemic
• Gloves — Metamorphosis or Haunt
• Pants — Demonic Pact
• Chest — Master Channeler
• Belt — Shadow and Flame
• Boot — Shadowflame
• Cloak — Soul Siphon
• Ring 1 — Shadow Specialization
• Ring 2 — Fire Specialization

Metamorphosis is nice as this makes you super tanky and also you get Searing Pain on an instant cast. You can also opt to use Haunt as this Rune buffs all your Shadow damage by 20%, meaning your DoT's will do 20% more damage. Not only that, but when it expires or when the target dies, it heals you. Using Haunt also allows you to be able to use Soul Link, which you cannot use if you're in Demon Form from Metamorphosis.

Master Channeler is another mandatory Rune for leveling as Affliction. As mentioned above, this Rune will make your Drain Life a DoT, rather than a channel. This is nice because you can put this up with your other DoT's and be able to wand, Shadow Bolt or do whatever else you want to.

Shadow and Flame is great Rune for Affliction as this buffs your damage by 10% whenever you crit, which thanks to the Pandemic rune, your DoT's can crit, making you have high uptime on this buff. Invocation is a great rune for leveling as well, since this allows you to refresh your DoT to do instant damage.

You've got a few options for leg Runes, and to be honest none of them are great. Demonic Pact can be used, since whenever your pet crits, it will buff you for 10% of whatever your spell damage is. This is a nice passive buff that you'll get and make you do more damage. The other Runes on this slot are far less impactful.

You've got a few options for boot runes in Phase 4, which all of them being pretty good to use. Shadowflame stands out more than the rest since this was reworked and is now a very powerful DoT that is buffed by a multitude of your talents. This can also put up the Improved Shadow Bolt debuff to give you 20% more shadow damage. Demonic Knowledge was nerfed and now only givs 3% instead of 10%. Mark of Chaos is a new rune implemented in Phase 4 and allows you to apply Curse of Recklessness, Curse of Shadow, Curse of Exhaustion and Curse of the Elements to the target whenever you Curse of Doom or Curse of Agony. This sounds great, but loses value leveling since mobs typically die too fast to gain solid value out of your curses, but still can be very helpful when leveling.

Unstable Affliction is mandatory as this is a powerful damage over time ability that is buffed by all of your Shadow Talents, while also having a short cast.

Pandemic is a phenomenal Rune that allows all of your DoT's to crit. This is also mandatory for Affliction if you can get it while leveling. Vengeance is a tanking Rune and Backdraft is for Destruction Warlocks.

Soul Siphon was drastically reworked and is now a good rune. This causes your Drain Soul to to deal damage 3 times faster and increases the amount drained by your Drain Life and Drain Soul spells by an additional 6% for each of your Warlock Shadow effects afflicting the target, up to a maximum of 18% additional effect. When Drain Soul is cast on a target below 20% health, it instead gains 50% per effect, up to a maximum of 150%. In addition, your Drain Soul can now trigger your Nightfall talent. This is great since you will have Drain Life on the target for a large portion of your leveling thanks to Master Channeler, making this rune a great one to use in the Cloak slot.

Ring runes were added in Phase 4 and the only two you need to worry about once you find them are Shadow Specialization and Fire Specialization. These ring runes give you 6% hit to each school of magic.

More Engravings are likely to come out as we reach higher level caps, so make sure to checkout our general Rune guide to get a better understanding of what all tools you have available to your Warlock.

Leveling as an Demonology Warlock is rather straight-forward. Make sure you're in your demon form from Metamorphosis and send your demon in, put up a Corruption, Shadowflame, Unstable Affliction and Drain Life, which is now a DoT thanks to the Master Channeler Rune, then wand or spam Searing Pain until the enemy dies. Use your Voidwalkers Sacrifice when in danger if your using him, otherwise send your Felguard in and watch him cleave everything down while you rapidly rot away your targets.