- Author: Zephan
- Date: August 30, 2022
- Updated: November 20, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Destruction Warlocks talents all are lined with a focus to increase our Fire Damage as much as possible, through talents such as Improved Immolate, Emberstorm, Pyroclasm, Shadow and Flame, Fire and Brimstone, or new Fire Damage Spells namely Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt. Additionally Destruction also brings extra support and control to the raid in the form of Improved Soul Leech, Shadowfury, and Aftermath. The Destruction Warlock also isn’t the only one shedding our Fire Damage, he brings along his best pall “The Machine Gun” Imp, which gets buffed to teeth with Demonic Power, Empowered Imp, Ruin, and Improved Imp.
This talent build includes all the mandatory talents to full fill your role optimally and deal as much damage as possible, these are highlighted in red. As you can see this talent build still leaves you with 2 (+3*) optional talents that you can spend as you please, either to further increase your damage or quality of life options, these are highlighted in the above picture in yellow and blue.
* Three more optional talents when you aren’t using Demonic Aegis
Red | Mandatory and optimal |
Yellow | Offensive Options |
Blue | Utility Options |
Talents
The following is a summary of all the most important talents, what they do and why you should have them, or what choices you have.
- Increases the effect of your Imp’s Firebolt, Fire Shield, and Blood Pact spells by 30%
Not only does this talent to cause our Machine Gun Imp to hit harder with his Firebolt, it also increases the health provided by Blood Pact. Blood Pact is one of the support reasons that Destruction Warlocks are brought for to raids, so improving upon it is always a good idea.
- Increases your total Stamina by 10%.
More health isn’t too important from a DPS perspective, but it also doesn’t hurt us to have some more of it. We also need a specific amount of talent points in this tier to move over to the next tier of talents, which this achieves.
- When active, 20% of all damage taken by the caster is taken by your Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter, Felguard, or enslaved demon instead. That damage cannot be prevented. Lasts as long as the demon is active and controlled.
We want at least one point into this talent, and not only to move over to the next talent tier. The Imp has the least amount of health of all the Warlock Demons, making them extra squishy. A single point into Fel Synergy will help keep your Imp alive, you can put a second point into this talent but diminishing returns will kick in quickly (in other words the added healing will be less compared to the first point due to overhealing).
- Increases the Stamina and Intellect of your Imp, Voidwalker, Succubus, Felhunter and Felguard by 15% and increases your maximum health and mana by 3%.
You Imp having more health increases his survivability, along with the extra mana extending his mana pool increasing his DPS potentially on longer fights. The same benefits hold true for the caster himself (although less significant).
- Increases the effectiveness of your Demon Armor and Fel Armor spells by 30%.
Fel Armor provides us with additional spell power both from the inherent spell power of the spell and through the conversion of spirit. This talent boosts both, it should be noted that Destruction doesn’t always run Glyph of Life Tap, which would make us not focus or prioritize spirit on our gear as much as other specializations, making this talent a (really) little bit less valuable. Put simply in the first couple of phases when you are running Glyph of Life Tap this talent is one of the better ones to increase your throughput, however once we swap in Glyph of Immolate odds are other optional Offensive Talents might become better (as always you should sim your personal case).
- Reduces the casting time of your Shadow Bolt. Chaos Bolt and Immolate spells by 0.5 sec and your Soul Fire spell by 2 sec.
Whilst we don’t cast a lot of Shadow Bolts and Soul Fires, we do cast Immolate whenever it’s not up on the target, as well as Chaos Bolt whenever it comes off cooldown. Additionally, we don’t spec into Improved Shadow Bolt as we don’t cast Shadow Bolt as stated before, and we need 5 points into this tier to move up to the next one.
- Increases the periodic damage done by your Immolate by 6%, and your Conflagrate has a 100% chance to daze the target for 5 sec.
Immolate is one of our core damage over time abilities additionally, the more damage our immolate causes, the more damage the resulting conflagrate will do as it scales off immolate. Talking about conflagrate this talent also adds a daze effect to the spell, increasing the use case as a source of minor crowd control, used smartly in raids this can be a life safer on occasions.
- Reduces the Mana cost of your Destruction spells by 10%.
This talent causes us to save mana, which in turn saves Life Taps, even if not for a single fight, it is more than likely to occur over the entire duration of the raid.
- Reduces the cooldown of your Succubus’ Lash of Pain spell by 6 sec. and reduces the casting time of your Imp’s Firebolt spell by 0.5 sec.
One of the talents to truly give the Machine un Imp its nickname. The faster our Imp casts don’t only increase the DPS it deals, but also slightly increases the uptime Empowered Imp has. The more casts = the more crits = the more crits for us.
- Increases the critical strike damage bonus of your Destruction spells and your Imp‘s Firebolt spell by 100%.
Destruction Warlocks crits a LOT, especially with talents such as Devastation, Fire and Brimstone, Empowered Imp. On top of that the biggest share of our damage comes from spells which can crit, Immolate, Incinerate, Conflag and Chaos bolt. Ruin is mandatory for most Warlock Specializations, but Destruction arguably benefits the most from it.
- Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting or channeling any Destruction spell by 70%.
Intensity is incredibly useful as 2/2 allows us to achieve pushback immunity in combination with a paladin Concentration Aura. Not only that but we need the talent points to go up to the next tier of talents, making this essentially free while other specializations need to make sacrifices to get this.
- Increases the range of your Destruction spells by 20% and reduces threat caused by Destruction spells by 20%.
Most other specializations also need Grim reach to fully benefit from the additional range Destructive Reach provides, because they still got to maintain corruption as well on the target which would otherwise require you to move back in. Destruction doesn’t make use of Corruption, meaning they only have to move in for their curse, which depending on the curse duty they have frees them up most of the time to stand free casting at the additional distance Destructive Reach provides. And before I forget it, who can say no to reductions in threat?
- Increases the damage done by your Immolate spell by 30%.
Immolate is a core spell of Destruction, it deals direct damage which can crit, provides a powerful debuff, boosts the base damage from Incinerate, and enables us to use conflagrate, in other words a beast of a debuff we want up at all times. Conflagrate doesn’t only require immolate to be up on the target, but also scales with the damage the debuff provides, dealing 40% upfront and 60% over the duration of the spell. In other words, the stronger our immolate, the stronger our conflagrate.
- Increases the critical strike chance of your Destruction spells by 5%.
Devastation is one of the many talent options Destruction Warlocks have to increase their crit chance. Furthermore, who doesn’t like free crit?
- Increases the damage done by your Fire spells by 15% and reduces the cast time of your Incinerate spell by 0.25 sec.
Almost all of Destruction’s damage is fire, with the exceptions being our curse and Shadowfury (or Seed of Corruption during pure AOE). So increasing that damage by a massive amount is a no-brainer, the same goes for reducing the cast time of our filler spell which is cast the most of all the spells we use.
- Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 60% of your Immolate or Shadowflame, and causes an additional 40% damage over 6 sec.
Conflagrate consumes Immolate unless we use Glyph of Conflagrate. Using Glyph of Conflagrate we don’t have to reapply our Immolate every time we use it (before It ends) and this in turn saves us a bunch of casts, resulting in a significant DPS gain. Whenever conflagrate deals critical damage it also procs Pyroclams, a buff which increases the damage we deal. With talents such as Devastation, Empowered Imp, and Fire and Brimstone we can expect relatively high uptimes for Pyroclasm.
- Gives your Shadow Bolt, Shadowburn, Chaos Bolt, Soul Fire, Incinerate, Searing Pain and Conflagrate spells a 30% chance to return health equal to 20% of the damage caused.
Some additional self-healing is always welcome, but healing is the healers job and we don’t want to steal their parses (What healer parses are worth is another discussion…), the real reason we max out this talent is to unlock Improved Soul Leech, more about this in the Improved Soul Leech section.
- When you critically strike with Searing Pain or Conflagrate, your Fire and Shadow spell damage is increased by 6% for 10 sec.
When Searing Pain (which we hardly use) and more importantly Conflagrate critically hit they can proc Pyroclasm. This buff lasts 10 seconds (the same duration as the cooldown on conflagrate) and increases our damage dealt by 6% when maxed out. It should also be noted that thanks to the plenty of crit-related talents conflag will crit more often than not.
- Your Shadow Bolt, Shadowburn, Chaos Bolt and Incinerate spells gain an additional 20% of your bonus spell damage effects.
This talent doesn’t increase the total damage of these spells by a flat percentage but rather increases the amount of damage they gain from spell power.
- Your Soul Leech effect also restores mana to you and your summoned demon equal to 2% of maximum mana, and has a 100% chance to grant up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 1% of maximum mana per 5 sec. Lasts for 15 sec.
Improved Soul Leech is one of the main reasons Destruction Warlocks are brought to raids when they are. This provides the raid with Replenishment, other classes that can do this are Retribution Paladins (Judgement of the Wise), Shadow Priests (Vampiric Touch), Survival Hunters (hunting party), and Frost Mage (Enduring Winter). We only need to put a single point into this talent to provide replenishment to the raid, we can put a secondary point to increase the amount of mana we gain and increase the uptime of the buff for the raid (though less compared to the initial one point).
- When you cast Conflagrate, the cast time and global cooldown of your next three Destruction spells is reduced by 30%. Lasts 15 sec.
Whenever we cast Conflagrate (ideally as much as possible) the next three casts will be cast 30% faster. This effect stacks with other cast speed-increasing buffs such as Bloodlust (do note that the 1 seconds hard global cooldown cap still applies and Incinerate will hit it when combined with other effects).
- Shadowfury is unleashed, causing 968 to 1152 Shadow damage and stunning all enemies within 8 yds for 3 sec.
The next ability we get from our talents is Shadowfury. This spell is a fast-casted AOE damage and stun ability which also tends to have a short cooldown of 20-seconds. All the things one can wish for essentially. Traditionally this talent is only thought of as a PVP talent however, it has great use in PVE as well. It provides solid DPS for the short cast time, as well as another tool to be used to manage adds in a raid, which in turn can save the skin of you or one of your raiding buddies.
- Increases the damage done by your Imp by 30%, and all critical hits done by your Imp have a 100% chance to increase your spell critical hit chance for your next spell by 100%. This effect lasts 8 sec.
Even here far down the talent tree we find buffs for our little friend “The Machinegun” Imp. This talent further increases how hard Firebolts hit the enemies in their faces. On top of that it also provides us with a 100% crit chance whenever our Imp also lands a critical hit, so to cut it short: The Crit chance from the Imp is now our Crit chance*.
* it should be noted that it isn’t a true 1 on one conversion as there is an ICD, etc.
- Increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt spells to targets afflicted by your Immolate by 10%, and the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate spell is increased by 25%.
Talk about a great second-to-last option for talents! Boosting the importance of Immolate even further by increasing the damage our Incinerate (filler spell good for x % of our damage) and Chaos Bolt. Along with increasing the crit chance of our conflagrate by a whopping 25%, which in turn increases the uptime on Pyroclasm.
- Sends a bolt of chaotic fire at the enemy, dealing 1429 to 1813 Fire damage. Chaos Bolt cannot be resisted, and pierces through all absorption effects.
The most iconic Wrath of the Lich King Destruction spell, as all the previous castable abilities we gained in this three were already available in the previous expansion, this one is all new and shiny. Chaos Bolt functions as a slightly better / stronger filler spell, we use it whenever it comes off cooldown instead of Incinerate for that reason.
Glyphs
With talents out of the way, it is time to go over our Glyphs. Glyphs are a new addition to the class build mechanic introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. Glyphs can be crafted by the new profession Inscription.
Recommended Glyphs
About the Author
Is it possible to remove/change those red marks on the talent trees? It makes it nearly impossible to see the numbers for each individual talent … seems like the person that designed that never looked at it to realize that it blocked the numbers! Thx in advance
Those marks on the talent tree indicate their use case. There is a link at the bottom of the pictures to a full build where you can exactly see the points spent. In my next iterations of these pictures, I’ll make sure to make an outcut that shows the number. Thanks for your feedback.
you recommend glyph of Siphon Life as an utility glyph, however, the build does not have Siphon Life so it would do nothing
Ah yes, an oopsie from copying that a part of that section from the affliction guide. Fixed, thanks for the catch!
Any consideration to Glyph for Chaos bolt?
Decent but not perfect it put 2 points in shadowbolt rather then imp for that extra dmg prock when u have you chaosbolt window also make chaos bolt glyph viable since it enables you to cast more chaos bolts during long fights and you dont need soul leach since its the healers job to keep you alive wasted points same with imp you keep it for the buff nothing more you are the dmg dealer not the pet in WOTLK unlike other expansions
Soul Leech isn’t taken for the mana but rather the mana regeneration, it on its own is a DPS gain for the warlock (and the raid). Choasbolt has rather poor DPCT only slightly higher compared to incinerate, making glyph of Choas Bolt having poor value compared to the like of Life Tap, Conflagrate, Imp and Incinerate.
Also Improved Shadow Bolt doesn’t get triggered by Choasbolt and you use Incinerate as a filler spell, not Shadow Bolt.
You can play around with your proposed build on https://wowsims.github.io/wotlk/warlock/# if you want to see numbers in action.