Meet the Warlocks: a tale of three talent trees.

Those that raided endgame content during Burning Crusade may have noticed that any asshole off the street could apparently tear the roof off any dungeon from Karazhan to Black Temple by leaning on a single button that read "Shadow Bolt".

In those days of Demonic Sacrifice the majority of the Warlock player base was hip to the fact that the best option for tightly controlled DPS once you had sufficient gear to be hit-capped was 0/21/40 with a sacrificed Succubus. Many a succubus was sacrificed over the course of the burning crusade making them nearly extinct in most parts of Azeroth. In an effort to prevent Warlocks from outright hunting them to extinction, some subtle and then not-so-subtle changes were made to the Warlock talent trees to steer us away from butchering our whip-lashing ladies and they even managed to make a Felguard spec worth playing.

WotLK has been pretty good to Warlocks thus far, with three very viable talent trees that can provide solid performance and some raid utility that allows for DPS that isn't exactly stunning like it was during Burning Crusade, but does manage to be competitive.

At the time of this writing the PTR for 3.3 is currently up for testing and there are some rather significant changes being batted around for Warlocks, but the bottom line is this:

This is the first time that all three talent trees have been this competitive in terms of raw performance, and it's a good time to be a Warlock. There does seem to be a bit of a gap these days in comparisons to Hunters, Mages and even Moonkin druids, so some folks may be curious what exactly the Warlocks in their raid are doing (or should be doing) and that is what I'm going to try to address here.

Warlocks no longer have Demonic Sacrifice, they took the spell away and removed the effects from the game, so we always have a demonic minion underfoot. The only minion that is questionable is the Voidwalker, but there are encounters (such as Faction Champions) where the blueberry can be used effectively, or in encounters that can be gamed a bit by having a Demonologist Warlock tank something with their Voidwalker in lieu of a dedicated and proper tanking player.

Affliction Warlocks will prefer the Felhunter if they lack a Priest or Mage, since the Felhunter gives a Spirit and Intellect buff to the raid, but they don't stack. If you are caster heavy and lack Mages or Priests (a problem I've only encountered in 10mans occasionally) a Felhunter's Fel Intellect can come in handy. The Felhunter can also Devour Magic and skilled players will be able to assist with cleansing magical effects from your raid. I use mouseover macros for it but other people have other methods they're more comfortable with. My other raiding toon is a Paladin, so mouseover spam works well for me.

If you don't need any of this type of utility, a Succubus is a great option because she does decent DPS and will dutifully follow a target around and whip it incessantly. The Succubus's crowd control ability isn't exceptionally useful except in some larger trash pulls in Ulduar, I've found that in an encounter like Faction Champions she's not going to be able to keep anyone CC'ed very long and is rather frail.

The Imp is a good ranged minion, and gives Blood Pact, which is a large health buff. It's raid-wide now and when talented, the little guy hits pretty hard. The unfortunate thing is that those talent points can be spent elsewhere with better effect for Affliction.

Finally, Affliction is the only spec where using the massive Doomguard is a DPS gain. The Doomguard is an interesting fellow, with a Cripple effect and an AOE attack that you should take off auto-cast because he'll use it in the least effective ways. He's much better off melee'ing the boss or by selectively using his Cripple on add spawns. He's large and in charge, and may be undesirable if you're fighting in close quarters. And good news: it doesn't kill anyone to summon him anymore. He also doesn't drop his enslaved status and start killing priests!

Affliction does good DPS, has a lot of residual healing coming back to the Warlock making them a bit more self-sufficient than others due to Life Tap use, and also allows for enough room in talent points to pick up improved Healthstones for your raid, and can use Improved Shadow Bolt, giving the raid a 5% increase in crit change on the debuffed target. It is one of two specs that can do that optimally, though the preferred Affliction execute is keeping all Shadow DoTs and debuffs up on a target and using Drain Soul when the target is below 35%. It's up to you to find out if you should be keeping Shadow Vulnerability up during this time or not. Your mileage may very. Since most mages I play with these days are Arcane, I've found Improved Shadow Bolt to be a valuable contribution to a raid group since they're not Scorching anything.

The only other spec that will carry Improved Shadow Bolt is deep Demonology.

Demonology was a very weird tree in Burning Crusade. The addition of the Felguard as our 41 point talent gave the spec a truly defining characteristic: a big hulking meleeing minion that has an intercept stun, a cleave, and a taunt. That taunt is surprisingly useful through clever use of mouseover macros -- it can save a healer if you're fast enough, as can that Intercept. Deep Demonology in WotLK gives another trademark skill, Metamorphosis.

In Metamorphosis the Warlock transforms into a demon-like form, complete with special abilities unique to that shape-change. It gives you an Immolation Aura you can activate, providing a cozy, yet fiery AOE effect to mobs in the immediate vicinity. Most Warlocks will drop a demonic circle prior to Metamorphosis, letting them charge into melee range, activate their Immolation Aura, DPS the target, and then quickly teleport back to their ranged brethren for the cost of one GCD. While in demon-form, Warlocks enjoy buffed damage output, increased armor, a taunt (careful with that), and a Shadow Cleave.

Deep Demonology also gives Demonic Pact, which doesn't stack with Totem of Wrath, but may be more valuable depending on level of gear and composition. Demonic Pact gives 10% of the Warlock's spellpower to the raid, which means that the buff can get quite large depending on the spellpower of the Warlock. Demonic Pact will be up as often as your Felguard crits, which means that you should have very good uptime for the buff. Deep Demonology Warlocks should stack as much spellpower as possible to make this buff more worthwhile, and due to the large amounts of spellpower and crit this spec gives, greatly favors haste (note: Demonologists should be farming regular ToC 5-man to get the Abyssal Rune trinket, which with Illustration of the Dragon Soul will be your two BiS trinkets if you're hit-capped).

Demonologists will be able to pick up improved Healthstones, keep Improved Shadow Bolt (since their filler spell is Shadow Bolt) and have an Execute called Decimate that lets them weave Shadow Bolts and Soul Fires with great effect, pummeling the target with shadows and flames. This talent gets reworked in 3.3 and while it is too soon to tell what the final outcome will be, looks like they're trying to change the situation we face now where you have to find the right distance from your target to do a 1-to-1 "weave" of Shadow Bolts and Soul Fires. As of this time the 3.3 PTR relies on a Shadow Bolt to give the Warlock a Decimate buff that lasts `n` seconds, allowing for Soulfire spam that doesn't cost a Soul Shard and with a haste effect. Ordinarily, Soul Fire costs a Soul Shard and is very slow to cast, making it not an ideal choice for everyday use. And since we have to drop summoning stones, soulstone tanks and healers, summon new demonic minions, buff our weapons with self-enchants and bake cupcakes for you fatties every attempt, Soul Shards get used enough already thank-you-very-much.

So Demonology Warlocks enjoy providing talented cupcakes, a large spellpower buff for the entire raid, a lot of survivability, Improved Shadow Bolt for 5% crit for your raid, and while they currently lag behind Destruction Warlocks a great deal, are getting tuned a bit in the right direction for 3.3. The composition of your raid group will dictate if Demonology is worthwhile, groups that lack an Elemental Shaman will probably benefit from one, but don't discount the impact of the Felguard in heavily buffed stacked-with-melee raid groups and the powerful Decimate execute.

There is a variation of the Demonology build that picks up talents for 3% more +hit (Suppression in the first tier of the Affliction tree) and drops Demonic Pact. If you enjoy playing demonology but don't have enough spellpower to be the Demonic Pact Warlock for your group, it's available as an option.

Destruction is a very good spec these days though the subject of a lot of a tuning and monkeying with every release of WoW. They have enough talent points available to pick up talented Healthstones and even to reach Soul Link for improved survivability for harder encounters and learning hard modes, and use the Imp as their demon of choice. Fully talented the Imp is a little gatling gun, and can pewpew nearly infinitely with Judgement of Wisdom on the target.

Destruction gives great tightly controlled burst damage, and finally gets to use Conflagrate giving a nice cast time reduction on filler spells from the Backdraft talent, Incinerate and Chaos Bolt. Conflagrate gets touched a lot by Blizzard developers and they're continuously tuning it. For the most part, Destruction Warlocks are going to use Curse of Doom or Curse of Elements (depending on the presence of a Balance Druid's Earth and Moon or Unholy Death Knight's Ebon Plaguebringer), Immolate, and spamming Incinerate. They should use Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt when it is off cooldown, though depending on gear levels and haste it can be better to save a Chaos Bolt cooldown until after Backdraft charges are used.

In addition to great DPS, Destruction also returns health to the Warlock from damaging with their fillers, and gives access to Improved Soul Leech, which provides Replenishment to your raid. Destruction Warlocks can talent for more crit rating from Backlash if desired, and there is a lot of room in the tree for flavor if you want to pick up Shadowfury for an AOE stun, the previously mentioned Soul Link for survivability, or some of the stat-boosting talents from Demonology. There is a variation of this build that drops Improved Soul Leech for more +hit from Suppression. All variations of this spec will probably want to use Fire Stones instead of Spell Stones for their weapon enchants, though in some cases the difference between the two is modest. Destruction Warlocks cannot reach the Master Conjurer talent, which gives their self-enchants a substantial buff.

Destruction Warlocks will always want to use the Imp, as any other minion is a DPS loss.

All three trees can provide talented healthstones, two of them will provide +5% crit via Improved Shadow Bolt, one of which carries a large spellpower buff to the raid, and another that gives Replenishment. There are many options for Warlocks in WotLK and there is likely a place for them in every raid group, without fear of being redundant. We don't just lean on Shadow Bolt anymore, which lets players differentiate themselves by having more opportunities for demonstrating skilled play, and all three specs can be very engaging to play with a lot of nuance to each.

I think all Warlocks should be looking forward to 3.3 as it will bring some exciting new changes to the game for us, and remind us why we enjoy playing this class so much. While we may not be the top of the food chain, we are a valuable resource to any raid group, though please be aware that if we could enslave you and make you our minion, we probably would. Never turn your back on us.