You might have heard that warlocks are pretty busted in Wrath of the Lich King, and maybe you've been seduced to play one in PvP. So with this guide, we'll go over the fundamentals covering everything you need to set up your Destro and Affliction warlock for the PvP arena in WoW WotLK Classic.
Best Races for Affliction & Destro Warlock
Starting with the best race on both the Horde and Alliance:
For Horde Player, Orc will be your strongest option, Hardiness gets changed to having a flat-out reduction on any stun against you, this makes it excellent into anything given how valuable stuns are, but more so against rogues who have access to a lot of stuns and are exceptionally good in season 5.
For Alliance players, it should come as no surprise that Human will be the strongest choice, especially during later seasons in WotLK, this is due to the human racial acting as a medallion trinket which essentially means you have three trinkets in the arena, it will allow you to gain two damage trinkets from PvE instances providing more damage overall. This will be especially true in season 8 gaining charred twilight scale and dislodged foreign objects giving you an insane amount of damage.
Best Talents for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
Moving on to talents, they will also change a bit depending on your specs, so let's cover both Destruction and Affliction:
Best Talents for Destruction (Succubus Build) Warlock
Improved Sayaad
We have a popular succubus build for Destruction, this mainly involves picking up Improved Sayaad which will allow your succubus to seduce enemies much easier. It's essentially going to be more common in 2v2 games but it can work in rare occasions during 3v3 as well. The reason why it's good is that you can create 1v2 situations with ease since the quick cast time is hard to avoid. In 3v3 it will be more difficult since there are more enemies that can disrupt the succubus as well as being able to outright kill it.
Chaos Bolt, Shadow Fury
The core part of the build consists of picking up Chaos Bolt and Shadow Fury being your most powerful spells. Shadow Fury is commonly used as a way of getting off your Chaos Bolt or to land fears depending on the situation. Chaos Bolt will be your big burst spell which could be combined with a con flag or coil to improve your offensive setups.
Conflagrate, Backdraft
Conflagrate in general is also excellent for pressure being further buffed by the Backdraft talent, not only will it allow you to gain big burst damage but it will help get out additional casts and globals after it's been used.
Master Summoner, Fel Domination, Soul Link
A staple few talents you'll need as a warlock is Master Summoner, Fel Domination and Soul Link. This is essentially what keeps warlocks alive in any arena game, not only would you lose out on extra spells without your pet but you will lose out on Soul Link which will make you far more susceptible to pressure. Without a pet, you are practically half as strong. Fel Domination will basically give you a second lifeline allowing you to resummon a pet quickly if it goes down, you can also use Fel Domination for a quick summon on felhunter to use spell lock this can be great where the CS can help you land to kill or stop a teammate from dying. Be careful when using it though as it can be offensively dispelled which can eliminate the chance of you getting back a pet quickly.
Other Talents for 3v3 PvP Warlocks
If you're going to play 3v3 mainly and don't want to use succubus much, then you can look to put these talents elsewhere:
Suppression - A primary choice will be Suppression depending on your hit rating, you'll need 4% hit rating in PvP, so if you don't have this from your gear, you could put your talent points here until you achieve hit cap
Pyroclasm - Otherwise you could look to put the points in Pyroclasm, this can help a tiny bit with extra damage when you crit with searing pain or can flag.
Best Talents for Affliction Worlock Build
As stated before if you don't want to play Destruction then Affliction is the only real alternative and your talents will look something like this - most of these are core talents which will stay in place with a couple being a bit more situational:
Master Summoner, Fel Domination, Soul Link
As we explained before Master Summoner, Fel Domination and Soul Link will also be essential for Affliction, once again playing without a pet makes you significantly weaker in arena.
Unstable Affliction
Unstable Affliction is the bread and butter for Affliction giving you extra pressure, more importantly it protects your other dots from being dispelled due to UA dealing a massive chunk of damage when removed. This will be important for protecting Corruption as this is your most powerful dot.
Corruption Talents
There are plenty of talent and Affliction (such as Improved Corruption, Empowered Corruption, Eradication) that revolve around your corruption spell which all helps with dealing more damage. Keeping your corruption on up multiple targets is a huge part of min maxing damage. Corruption also provides you with self-healing having another reason to maintain this dot on your enemies as much as you can.
Haunt
A big damaging spell that will be significant for your burst pressure is Haunt, ideally, you use this when you have all of your other dots rolling just after an unstable affliction is put up, so you can deal an incredible amount of damage. While the haunt is amazing, the problem with this ability is that good teams will stop this cast from going off at the time you want. Part of this reason is that in season 5 you don't have very much haste making it harder to land this cast. The other reason is that there are plenty of interrupts in the game and with priests and paladins having spammable magic dispel, it can be difficult to land this spell in general.
Other Situational Talents for Affliction Warlock
There are a couple of situational talents that you can change that depends on your personal preference or knee:
Improved Life Tap - Usually Improved Life Tap is chosen to give you a bit more mana per use which is quite good in any arena game.
Suppression - However if you need the extra hit rating then you should pick up the points and Suppression brings you closer to hit cap.
Improved Curse of Agony - If you don't need the hit rating or the extra mana from lifetap, you could also put points in Improved Curse of Agony, this can be nice if you want extra damage in the arena, however other curses can be more valuable to use depending on the match-up, as such this talent is not used too often but is one way to min-max damage.
Improved Health Funnel, Improved Healthstone - Last of all you can swap between Improved Health Funnel to Improved Healthstone depending on what you want more, usually Improved Health Funnel is chosen so your pet is less prone to death while you're channeling the heel, however having a stronger healthstone will increase your own survivability, so the trade-off here really depends on your needs.
Best Glyphs for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
Let's go over glyphs which can seem confusing at first no worries though we'll break it down:
Best Glyphs for Destruction Warlock:
For Destruction, you'll be looking to take Glyphs of Immolate, Glyphs of Conflagrate and Glyphs of Shadow Flame as your default three that you'll use all the time.
Glyphs of Conflagrate will be your best glyph by far, considering it keeps your emulate and shadow flame up on your target when used. This makes it excellent for keeping up your DPS having no penalty when using conflag.
Glyphs of Immolate is just a straight-up DPS increase in the dot damage which is nice, considering it makes up quite a bit of scoreboard damage
Glyphs of Shadow Flame is an excellent utility glyph that will heavily snare targets in front of you, this can be amazing for kiting away or to stop the enemy from running out of line of sight for your next cast.
Unfortunately for the minor glyphs, there aren't any noticeable ones that will help you out in PvP, the only one that is slightly useful is Glyph of Drain Soul, having a chance to create more shards will be handy for warlocks. Honestly, the remaining minor glyph slots aren't that impactful, so choose whichever one suits your needs.
Best Glyphs for Affliction Warlock:
As for affliction, your major slots will include Glyph of Howl, Quick Decay and Shadowflame having a cool-down reduction on your Howl of Terror can come in clutch whether you need to peel targets or look to create offensive setups more often:
Glyph of Quick Decay is also excellent to improve the damage of your corruption spell increasing your overall pressure
From earlier, Glyph of Shadow Flame is nice as appeal or as a form of lockdown for keeping targets in loss of casts, that being said Glyph of Howl is replaceable for two other options
Glyph of Siphon Life could be used if you want a bit of extra healing from your Siphon Life talent, once again this can be useful if you're finding it difficult to survive
You could also use Glyph of Unstable Affliction instead, simply put this will help try to get out more UA cast by having a reduced casting time.
When it comes to your minor glyphs, it's essentially the same story apart from one minor glyph being useful being Glyph of Curse of Exhaustion, having the five extra yards to apply this curse is excellent, as it will improve your ability to kite targets, this will be commonly used into melee where you want to keep them snared and stay maximum distance. Other than that, Glyph of Drain Soul could be used again to help generate soul shards.
Best BiS Gear for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
Stat Priority
Having the right gearing for PVP will be in your best interest as any class let alone for warlocks, let's kick things off with the stat priority which applies to both affliction and destro:
Resilience - First of all, you'll want as much resilience as possible being your strongest defensive stat, warlocks are naturally squishy so having extra damage reduction is a necessity in order to live. Without this, you may be too much reliability in the arena as you're too easy to kill .
130 Spell Pen - Next up, you should try to aim for around 130 spell penetration. Having your spells resist can be a huge pain for warlocks to bypass the holy paladin shadow resistance aura, you'll need 130 spell pens so your spells don't get resistant, you can sort of bypass resists with curse of the elements but you can't rely on the spell alone since it can be dispelled by a few classes.
Haste & Spell Power - After brazil and spell pen, you should be stacking as much haste and spell power as possible, both of these provide a great amount of damage increasing your pressure and allowing you to get off damage with greater ease.
Spell Hit (4%) - Last of all, you want the spell hit cap which is at 4%, this will make sure your spells don't miss randomly, so you won't have to miss out on damage or CC spells.
With your stats in the right priority, it's time to go over your gearing, starting off with Pre BiS gear which excludes arena and rating:
Best Pre BiS Gear (Armor & Weapons) for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
Head: Savage Gladiator's Felweave Cowl
Shoulder: Savage Gladiator's Felweave Amice
Chest: Savage Gladiator's Felweave Raiment
Hands: Savage Gladiator's Felweave Handguards
Legs: Savage Gladiator's Felweave Trousers
Weapon: Wand of the San'layn
Two-Hand: Staff of Draconic Combat
Neck: Choker of Betrayal
Back: Ancient Dragon Spirit Cape
Feet: Sandals of Crismon Fury
Waist: Plus Sahd of Guzbah
Wrist: Savage Wound Wrap
Finger: Signet of the Kirin Tor
Finger: Band of Guile
Trinket: Mark of the War Prisoner
Trinket: Ancient Pickled Egg
You want to get the 5 pieces of Savage gear as soon as possible picking up the important set bonuses plus a ton of resilience. As for the other pieces they will mostly come from heroic dungeons as well as rep grinds, these give you the best stat distribution gaining a lot of haste and spell power.
Gems
When it comes to gems, there are mainly two priorities depending on what color you get:
For blue gems, you want to have spell penetration gems in order to get that 130 value we talked about earlier
Outside of that, you should look to gem for as much resilience as possible this means using orange and yellow gems including the JC gems which give you a bunch of extra resilience.
It's worth noting that most socket bonuses are worth going for if you play a non-human race, then you should replace your Ancient Pickled Egg trinket for the Medallion as you'll need the hit rating from the other trinket.
Best BiS Gear (Armor & Weapons) for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
Amulet: Deadly Gladiator's Pendant of Subjugation
Shoulder: Deadly Gladiator's Felweave Amice
Back: Deadly Gladiator's Cloak of Subjugation
Chest: Deadly Gladiator's Felweave Raiment
Hands: Deadly Gladiator's Felwave Handguards
Waist: Deadly Gladiator's Cord of Dominance
Wrist: Deadly Gladiator's Cuffs of Dominance
Legs: Deadly Gladiator's Felweave Trousers
Finger: Deadly Gladiator's Band of Ascendancy
Weapon: Gemmed Wand of the Nerubians
Main Hand: The Turning Tide
Off-hand: Deadly Gladiator's Grimoire
Head: Titan-Forged Hood of Salvation
Feet: Titan-Forged Slippers of Salvation
Trinket: Dying Curse
Trinket: Flow of Knowledge
As for your season 5 biscuit, things change up a bit as you'll be able to pick up a lot more PVP pieces. Most of your slots will be the Deadly Gladiator gear following your stat priority gaining a ton of resilience. The helm, boots, and flow of knowledge trinket are accessible from a vendor with a currency from winter grasp, these also add to your resilience, spell power and haste values which are the best stats to have on your gear. Last, there are a few raiding pieces that you can farm which all come from Noxramus being the main hand trinket and wand, all these pieces are excellent for higher damage, so we highly recommend you get.
Gems
Again make sure to follow the same gemming priority, picking up socket bonuses using resilience or spell penetration gems. Also if you're not playing human then you can change the Dying Curse trinket for the Medallion depending if you want the hit rating or not.
Best Professions for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
When it comes to your profession as a warlock, there are only a few options for you to consider:
Jewel Crafting - The one profession that you should 100 have is jewel crafting, having extra resilience from the Mystic Dragon's Eye gems is just too good to pass up, it gives you a sizeable amount of extra resilience which is the most favored stat you want as a warlock.
Engineering or Blacksmithing - Aside from that, you'll have a choice for your second profession between Engineering and Blacksmithing. Blacksmithing gives you two extra gem slots which allow you to pick up even more resilience. At the same time, engineering offers a glove enchant with an on-demand haste boost or rocket attack, which are both great for extra pressure depending on the composition you play. The Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket can be more niche considering you'll ideally want to play with other classes that use this as well, so you can look to global your enemies with a bursty spell that is off the GCD. Blacksmithing will be a safe bet giving you stats that you'll have all the time, so we recommend that you choose blacksmith as your second profession but having engineering instead will also work just fine.
Best Arena PvP Macros for Affliction & Destro PvP Warlock
One of the most important parts of setting up your character are macros, so let's go over which ones you should be using:
/cast [@focus] Fear, /cast [@focus] Spell Lock, /cast [@focus] Seduction, /cast [@focus] Focus Coil, /cast [@focus] Devour Magic, /cast [@focus] Banish
Starting off both focus and arena 123 commands are incredibly helpful as they allow you to use key spells and select opponents without needing to target them. When it comes to focused target macros, you'll want it on all the spells listed here but you could add more if needed. Once again this will just make your gameplay more fluid removing the need to change targets to use quick reactive spells.
/cast [@arena1] Fear, /cast [@arena2] Fear, /cast [@arena3] Fear, /cast [@arena1] Seduction, /cast [@arena2] Seduction, /cast [@arena3] Seduction
You could use arena 1g3 commands for this instead depending on your personal preference. Generally speaking, you want to use arena123 for spells you use quite often which is why we've included both fear and seduce, just like before, feel free to use arena123 on other spells if you have the keybinding budget to do.
/cast [@party1] Devour Magic, /cast [@PLAYERNAME] Devour Magic
Having Devour Magic macros for your teammates will also be advised, so you can dispel important debuffs without needing to manually click your party frames. Ideally you should have four macros used to dispel all three players in the arena as well as being able to dispel the pet itself. You can do this with either player name macros or party123 macros again depending on what you prefer.
/petattack [target=mouseover,harm]
Finally having a mouse over pet attack macro will also be nice to keep up your pet's DPS, more importantly though you can use this to kill off important totems especially tremor in order to land fears.
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