Advertisement

Blood Pact: Soul Shards, talent specs and the 4.0.1 warlock

Zach Yonzon
Updated ·7 min read

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology and destruction warlocks. Today, Zach Yonzon fills in while the new warlock columnist dusts his robes off after his trip from the Twisting Nether. A new warlock columnist? Why, yes -- holding the warlock columnist position here at WoW Insider is akin to holding the Defense of the Dark Arts teacher position at Hogwarts, you know.

Let's get this one out of the way: The game isn't balanced for level 80. You can't cry about being broken or your spec not being viable or your DPS not being up to par because, right now, everything is in flux. The new mechanics are balanced for level 85 and some values in the game aren't properly scaled for this level, so none of the numbers you see will be truly representative of how it's going to be a couple of months down the line. You won't even get a feel of how important mastery is because there just isn't the proper gear to support it.

Unless you're hell bent on being on top of the meters at a time when it's largely meaningless, you're better off using this period to get a feel for how the class plays.



Soul Shards and Soulburn

Like paladins and balance druids, warlocks get a brand new mechanic through Soul Shards, which are similar to the old Soul Shards in name only. Mastery of this resource will be critical to eking out the best out of the class. If there's anything you'll need to get used to, it's that warlocks are a cooldown class now. The correct use of Soulburn can mean the difference between a bad warlock and a good one, mostly because it will involve timing and good judgment.

You can choose between utility or DPS, which gives the class a bit of flexibility. For the most part, you won't have trouble adjusting to the new mechanic -- you can DPS without using up a single Soul Shard. But if you want to maximize your potential, you'll want to use Soulburn three times throughout the course of an encounter and just replenish with Soul Harvest afterwards.

If this is your first time logging in your warlock after the patch, there are a few things you'll need to do first. If your warlock is level 10 or higher, you'll notice the Soul Shard interface right below your character portrait. You likely won't have any soul shards yet and you're probably wondering why you don't have a pet bar. You can solve this by heading over to your trainer and picking up some new abilities such as Soulburn, Soul Harvest and even something as simple as Control Demon, which should restore your pet action bar. Once you learn Soul Harvest, use the ability to quickly fill up your Soul Shards, which won't decay until you use them.

Even if you don't use Soulburn often, it's still important to understand what it does for certain abilities so you'll be able to use it whenever you need to achieve certain things. Here's a quick recap of the abilities that Soulburn affects:

Using Soulburn to empower Soul Fire and Searing Pain will contribute to a DPS jump that looks good in short fights but evens out in longer fights, while using it for Seed of Corruption gives affliction warlocks a bit of help in AoE situations. The latter is a situational talent and should only be picked up if you have a point to spare. The new mechanic isn't critical to playing a warlock -- using Soulburn isn't required in any rotation -- but knowing when to use it should define how well you know your class. In PvP, in particular, using Soulburn for Demonic Circle: Teleport, Healthstone, Drain Life and summoning demons will be extremely useful in key situations.

Other things to consider

Remember when Blizzard tried to make spirit useful by making it confer spellpower? Well, it's useless again. Because spirit has been revised to be a pure mana regeneration stat, it's absolute junk again to warlocks. If you can reforge your gear to get rid of spirit, do it. You'll want hit and more intellect, which now gives spellpower to warlocks like a proper caster stat should. You'll want to re-gem to reflect this, so while I hope nobody actually gemmed up for spirit, you'll want to make sure your +hit is up to par after the loss of talents such as Suppression. If you're already at the 17 percent hit mark, you should consider getting gems with mastery to get a better feel for how mastery improves your spec. (EDIT: Except, of course, as readers pointed out, mastery gems aren't obtainable in the game yet ... I thought they just weren't on the auction house or something. In which case get some Intellect into your gear.)

The specs

Affliction Not a lot has changed for affliction, as you'll be using the same spells on a priority basis, with a slight change to Bane of Agony, which is now a bane effect rather than a curse. (This means you can have Curse of the Elements applied and not lose out on a DPS spell.) You're looking at Corruption, Haunt, Unstable Affliction, Bane of Agony and finally Drain Soul at the 25 percent mark. Filler spells will consist of Shadow Bolt, especially if Shadow Embrace isn't at three stacks and Haunt is on cooldown. As always, knowing when to cast Drain Soul is huge for affliction DPS, so be mindful of it. Use an addon such as Mik's Scrolling Battle Text to alert you if you must. Despite the changes to DoT clipping, do not clip Bane of Agony as much as possible because the spell scales upwards in damage as it expires, which means you should wait for it to fall off before reapplying.

Note that Drain Soul is a primary means to recover Soul Shards in combat and works in a similar fashion to obtaining Soul Shards pre-4.0.1. The main difference is that having Drain Soul applied as the target dies will yield three Soul Shards, which means ideally you will have burned through all three shards to make the most use of the resource. If you still have Soul Shards when your target's about to die, use them up and make sure to recover them.

Your glyphs should be Glyph of Haunt (prime), Glyph of Bane of Agony (prime), Glyph of Lash of Pain (prime), Glyph of Life Tap (major), Glyph of Shadow Bolt (major) and Glyph of Soul Swap (major). With regards to the last glyph, mastery of Soul Swap will allow the affliction warlock to be competitive in quick, multiple-target situations, without having to build up DoTs on a new target. This ability should see the most use on trash. Because of the Glyph of Lash of Pain, the highest DPS pet an affliction warlock can use is the Succubus, which means the felpuppy should be put away except for PvP encounters. If you haven't already filled out your talents, try out this affliction spec for PvE.


NEXT >>