WoW Classic Melee Warlock Guide

Melee Warlock Handbook:

Tips and Considerations

By DSAP

Version 2.1

Foreword

Melee Warlock, a suboptimal, raid unviable playstyle. This type of character leans heavily on damage over time spells, pets, and the firestone to do the bulk of it’s damage.

It’s fun to play in 5 Mans and even 10 man content.

Disclaimer: Melee Warlock is a meme, and I strongly encourage you to look at Melee Hunter, Melee Mage or Melee Balance Druid for a similar, better experience. However, I spent a lot of time into figuring out this playstyle. If you, like me, want to challenge the norm and do something different, you may enjoy this guide.

Notes on Raid Viability: The melee warlock is not Raid Viable for multiple reasons.

• Nearly all of your damage will come from pets, and DoTs. Neither of these 2 things are compatible with the current raid meta.
• The builds included in this guide do not use the primary spell of the class, Shadowbolt, and produces substandard dps.
• Lastly the earlier tiers of raid (where lower dps is more acceptable) are immune to fire, which is a large source of your potential damage.

This build becomes MAYBE Borderline Viable after Zul’Gurub is released, When the Zulian Slicer is available. You can use this playstyle in ZG, AQ20, UBRS and dungeons. There may be some value in PvP use, against other casters, but this guide is for PvE.

On private servers, with a spell scaling firestone, pre-raid BiS, consumables, without raid buffs or world buffs, 200 to 250 dps was achievable, the potential is higher using the Classic Drain Life method listed below. Without access to DoTs and debuffs, and on WoW classic where firestone does not scale, you are looking at 150 dps maybe combined from you and your pet. In raid situations where the pet dies often, you’re looking at barely 100 dps.

How does it work?

Warlocks are the master of the Damage over Time (DoT) spell, a type of spell that does smaller, multiple ticks of damage over a period of several seconds to minutes. But after casting all of your DoTs, what is the Warlock meant to do? Whilst leveling, the answer is to Auto Attack with an equipped wand. Around midway through your leveling however, you will encounter a peculiar spell called Firestone. This spell allows your melee auto attacks to randomly deal and additional burst of fire damage. Because of this spell it has long been asked, are Warlocks meant to melee?

Hence, this guide focuses on a playstyle and a mentality. Race, Talents, spells and overall how to weave your melee, spells, pets, and channeled spells together.

Races

Neither side gains a distinct advantage here. The Warlock’s reliance on Firestone or Spell Damage scaling Oils (such as Shadow Oil) means that it cannot benefit from Windfury Totem. Blessing of Might is a huge buff, however it is available to Horde through Mind Control buffs.

Summary: Gnome is better than Human until Zul Gurub, and Orcs are best period.

Alliance

• Gnomes
  • Gnomes have a boost to Intelligence. As you get better gear, you will notice a significant increase in Mana and Spell Crit available to gnome warlocks. For general casting and flexibility as a Warlock, Gnome is a good choice.
• Humans
  • Humans get a bonus to swords, and some Spirit. Spirit isn’t a very useful stat for us. Picking Human gives you better stats for melee than going Gnome, but many of the best “Warlock Melee” weapons are Daggers. The weapon absolutely best suited for Melee Warlock is a sword from Zul’ Gurub. The +5 skill makes hitting things easier.

Horde

• Orcs
  • Orcs get Bloodfury and Pet Damage. Bloodfury is a boost to your melee damage and the bonus Pet Damage going to your Imp/Succubus is a nice boost no other race has. Since Pets are a big chunk of your damage, this is a very solid bonus. The stun resistance is nice too.
• Forsaken
  • Undead have Will of the Forsaken, which is a great racial in general, but otherwise have no boost to damage. Statistically they have better starting stats than an Orc Warlock, for our purposes orc is the better of the two. Underwater Breathing and Shadow Resistance are wasted on us.

Spells

Corruption

Your primary damage comes from Corruption, a spell that deals a large amount of shadow damage over 18 seconds. With a very high spell coefficient, it has the potential for being the most damaging DoT in classic.Gained at level 4, this will have a short cast time until you can talent it to become instant. These talents are mandatory for any build in melee, you need the instant cast to weave.

Firestone

The most exotic part of the build is the often overlooked Firestone.Moderate to low PPM, no scaling from spell damage, taking up an equipment slot in your offhand, requiring a soul shard to use and completely useless in entry level raiding.

The firestone is usually ridiculed, maligned, and ignored, (rightly so!)

At higher gear levels this thing will be eventually outpaced by the humble shadow oil. The good news is that it’s fun, different, and has a talent.

Shadowburn

A talent gained from the Destruction tree, Shadowburn is a burst of damage and one of the only “instant cast” damage spells available to Warlock. It’s damage is high, and it deals shadow damage which is good, but the price (one soul shard per use) and 10 roughly useless talents to get there make this spell a bit of a hard sell. Still, with proper use it can give you the burst that a “melee” combatant needs. At the very least, it gives you an “Execute” that you can smash at the end of a pull.

Drain Life

You can sneak in a couple of Drain Life ticks in between slower weapon swings. While the amount of health gained is small it will help with Life Tapping, and for Affliction specialized Warlocks with the Nightfall talent this can lead to many Instant cast Shadowbolts. It is also used as a spell damage scaling filler after your DoTs have been cast.

Curses

Summary: Curse of Agony/Doom for damage, Curse of Recklessness for runners.

Curse of Agony (For Solo Play)

Naturally your best damage dealer in the curse category, while leveling or in dungeons most mobs don’t live long enough to take full advantage of this spell. Still your best curse generally.

Curse of Recklessness (For Melee Groups)

Your second most often used curse, this has a lot of benefits. Your pets auto attack will do more damage, so will you with your auto attacks, so will the tank, rogues, hunters etc. It has the added effect of preventing targets from running away.

If you are in a dungeon, you will probably be putting this on at the end of a mob’s lifespan, before Drain Soul. This means Curse of Agony will often be cut off prematurely.

Curse of the Elements (For Mages)

This curse is gained halfway through the Warlock’s life, and is useful for improving the damage of any Mage you party with. This is a support choice. At least your Firestone procs still benefit from this, as will Dragonbreath chili, fiery weapon, Heart of Wyrmthalak and Imp’s firebolt.

Curse of Shadow (For Raiding)

Curse of Shadow isn’t going to produce more damage for you than Curse of Agony, but you can still take advantage of it, if it is made available by another warlock for instance. It will improve your Corruption damage, Succubus Lash of Pain, and Curse of Agony or Siphon Life if you use it. If you are the one using Curse of Shadow, be certain that both you and the other warlock are gaining advantage over simply using Curse of Agony twice, since you do not benefit as much.

Curse of Doom 

At the end of the game, you get access to Curse of Doom. Curse of Doom is easier for a melee warlock to maintain than Curse of Agony, and without talents in affliction will deal roughly equal damage for less mana. If you are using a slow weapon, are not spec’d into Improved Curse of Agony and don’t have Amplify Curse, then consider throwing this on a boss.

Talents and Builds

Melee Warlock finds itself in a weird place. The only talents that directly improve it’s melee damage is through Demonology. The idea of a Warlock fighting on the frontlines with a demonic pet to aid in the carnage is an idea that is actually explored in later expansions, but for Vanilla it’s half-baked. Here are your options for Melee Warlock specialization.

The Demonic Sacrifice Ruin Compromise

7/23/21

This build attempts to compromise between key “Melee Warlock” talents and maintaining a “Raiding Build.” This build acquires Improved Corruption, Ruin, and Demonic Sacrifice, but also allows you to spec into Improved Firestone for moonlighting as a melee warlock.

When raiding, sacrifice Succubus, throw Shadowbolts. Typical. No one will suspect anything.

When not raiding, use your improved Firestone and rely on the Imp.

Tweaked Shadow Mastery Ruin

30/0/21

Yes I know, SM Ruin is a common raiding spec, but for your purposes it’s still a very good build. It has Shadowburn, Nightfall, Siphon Life, Shadow Mastery and Ruin.

 The Siphon Succubus

21/30/0

This build uses an active Succubus while maintaining 3 damage over time spells on the target. This build is best at fishing for Nightfall with a slow weapon and Drain Life. Master Demonologist works out better for you here than Shadow Mastery because Master Demonologist will improve our Melee damage and our Pet’s damage.

The Flexible Demonologist

5/31/15

This build takes Improved Imp, Improved Succubus, and Improved Voidwalker. This allows you to use any Demon you like for any situation. Master Summoner also allows you to quickly swap between Demons if you need to. It also gets Improved Lash of Pain and Improved Firebolt from Destruction, to improve the damage of either pet you need to use. Because this build contains Soul Link, it improves your personal Tankiness substantially.

Important Talents in Affliction

Talents in the following sections are rated 1 to 5 stars for applicability to the melee warlock playstyle specifically. Some talents are great Warlock talents but not for our purposes.

Important talents from Destruction

Important talents for Demonology

Stats

First it must be understood that you will likely not be casting spamming Shadowbolt, and that Warlocks have an innate 60% chance to Glancing Blow. The only way to overcome this systemic weakness would be to have a combined hit + crit chance of 100%, which even melee classes struggle with. Strength is actually easier to obtain on questing cloth, but is practically impossible to acquire on Suffix 60 Cloth Greens.

Caster Stats

Summary: Spell Damage > Spell Hit > Spell Crit > Intelligence > Spirit

Melee Stats

Summary: Melee To Hit > Attack Power > Stamina > Strength > Critical Hit Chance > Agility

OVERALL

Spell Damage > Spell To Hit > Melee To Hit > Attack Power (without Ruin) > Spell Crit > Attack Power (With Ruin) > Stamina > Intelligence

Spell Damage is going to boost your primary damage, Corruption. Spell to Hit will make sure that it won’t be resisted. Since it can’t crit, we prioritize Melee To Hit to make sure we are proc’ing Firestone as often as possible. From here, Spell Crit will help our Shadowburn damage. Stamina because it improves survivability AND mana pool. Lastly Intelligence because it improves mana pool and crit.

Weapons and Items

Like most melee characters, your weapon is quite important. In general, All of the gear I list here is pre raid. (with the exception of the Zulian Slicer, to explain best possible BiS)

Weapon Speed

The “optimal” weapon speed for Melee Warlock is a weapon of 1.5 speed or faster. This allows your auto attack swings to line up with the Global Cooldown caused by your spells, commonly referred to in this handbook as Spell Weaving. Weaving is more difficult for any weapon above 1.5 speed, but based on the weapon it can still work. A faster weapon can also take advantage of a slow wand, to fill in the gaps of rotation. After 1.8 speed it becomes too long to weave, and you will end up just wanting to cast Corruption > Curse back to back.

The advantage of a slower weapon is that you can mix Channeled spells in between weapon swings. For those with the Nightfall talent, or using a Zulian Slicer, this can be decent.

Firestone Procs

Firestone has been found to be PPM based. This means to assure you get big spicy procs, a slower weapon will proc “more often,” meaning that whatever weapon speed you use you will still get the same return out of firestone over a long fight.

A note about alternating Offhands, Firestone Twisting

The buff from Firestone will persist for 9 seconds, refreshing every 5 seconds. While wearing the Firestone, you won’t notice this debuff fall off because of this.

However, if you unequip the weapon, you’ll note it’ll retain the current firestone duration in your bag until it falls off. This means that after the reapplication of the buff, you have roughly 5 seconds to switch to a different offhand without wasting firestone uptime. Since your firestone grants no additional shadow damage, you can use an offhand that does when applying or re-applying your Damage over Time spells.

You can time your switch to line up with the global cooldown of your spells, removing the dps loss of the swing reset.

A note about Staves

A staff can be used in the case that a mob is immune to fire damage. A strong staff enchanted with Shadow Oil will do. Staves have the weakness that they cannot use Firestones and they are slower overall, leading to delayed or impossible spell weaving. The fastest staves available in Vanilla are 2.10 speed, (which is faster than the Zulian Slicer). Staves can’t be used with Spell Weave but they can use a Channeled Rotation or a Wand Rotation.

Lord Valthalak’s Staff of Command – is fast and good, but difficult to obtain, otherwise ideal

Rod of the Ogre Magi – is a little slower than a 1hander but otherwise strong

Argent Crusader – big dps, 3.0 speed makes for good Drain Life rotation

Weapon Highlights

Other Pre-raid Swords:

Hanzo Sword – 1.5, bleed damage proc

Blazing Rapier – 1.7, fire damage proc, damage over time

Thrash Blade – 2.7, can proc Firestone multiple times.

Other Pre-raid Daggers:

Alcor’s Sunrazor – 1.30, very fast, fire damage proc

Shadowblade – 1.40, good speed, shadow damage proc

Darrowspike – 1.5, cold damage proc

There are plenty of weapons that are statistically powerful without procs and easy to get, such as the Blade of Necromancy (with perfect speed for weave) Mindcarver (with perfect speed for Channeled rotation) or the Sageblade.

“Rotation”

“Rotation” for Melee Warlock ranges from simple to complex. Rotation is in quotes here because the active rotating takes place after your prioritized spells are already cast or on cooldown. Your rotation is going to be based on talents and weapon speed. For fast weapons we want to use a slow wand for wand rotating. For slow weapons we want to use Drain Life and other channeled spells in between spell casts.

A note about Wand rotating

Casting “Shoot Wand” resets your melee swing timer when cast. There are two points to be observed when it comes to Wand Rotation.

Firstly, You can rotate your wand on classic live servers if you are using a wand that is slower than your melee weapon because the amount of time in between slow wand shots is enough to squeak in a melee attack for fast weapons. You rotate this by cancelling the wand auto attack with a /startattack or just the attack command on your hotbar. The slowest wands in the game are 2.0 speed, with 1.9 being the pre-raid slowest.

Secondly, If you shoot your wand attack right after landing a melee attack, (regardless of speed of the weapon or wand) it will reset your swing timer, but the shot animation is actually quite fast. Meaning you can /startattack immediately following the wand animation for only a minor loss in overall melee uptime. This may be effective for middle-of-the-road speed weapons.

A note about Channeled Spell rotating (Thanks to Gideon AI and Spinnerthing)

You can use channeled spells in between your weapon swings when you are otherwise waiting for DoTs to tick. This helps slow weapons especially, that would otherwise be waiting. In order to do this effectively, you must create a /stopcasting macro. Paraphrased:

Since Drain Life lasts 5 seconds, for maximize mana efficiency you use Drain Life as normal but push the macro right as soon as the last tick of damage checks in so that you prevent the spell cast from “finishing” and resetting your swing timer again

(channeled spells reset your swing timer at the start of the cast and again at the end of the cast, so interrupting it in the middle prevents the 2nd reset)

However, if you want to maximize total damage output, then you wait until the next tick breakpoint. For a 2.0 speed weapon you push the macro after the 2nd tick of damage, for a 3.0 speed weapon you push it after the third tick of damage) and it’ll recast the spell immediately but you’ll get your melee in

Because of this mana-inefficiency in exchange for higher damage, slower weapons leaning towards 3.0 or 4.0 speed work better

Ideally your weapon speed is a non-decimal number like 2.0 or 3.0 or 4.0 speed for maximum damage + mana efficiency.

“Rotations” (Continued…)

Wherein [AA] stands for an auto attack, [LT] is Life Tap, and X is either Shadowburn, or Siphon Life, if you are talented for it. [WR] is for wand rotating and [DL] is for Drain Life rotation. “…” means to repeat until Soul Drain [SD] is possible or until your DoT’s expire and need to be refreshed. At any time, a Nightfall proc Shadowbolt is worthwhile.

For a slower rotation, note that beginning the fight with a spell damage offhand can lead to better damage over time spells. Firestone Twisting later in the fight to reapply debuffs. This is the quick solution.

This is a standard rotation for a fast weapon and a slow wand.

It’s important to use Curse of Agony as early as possible in the rotation to give it time to rev up to full damage. Life Tap is good to use as filler to make sure that the life restore from Siphon Life isn’t wasted.

Rotating and Weaving are very difficult with a slow speed weapon. It’s better for your DPS to front load as many of your DoTs as you can before diving into a Drain Life Rotation.

Important Buffs/ Consumables

Blessing of Might vs Kings or Wisdom

Blessing of Might will increase your melee damage dramatically. One of the biggest weaknesses of your build is low attack power, and the large raw increase of AP is a drastic improvement in your melee damage. You cannot get enough strength to make Kings more viable, Kings improves your spell crit for damage only, and Wisdom, while nice, is unnecessary for a Warlock who can Life Tap freely between weapon swings. For Damage only, use Might.

Dragonbreath Chili

Random fire damage dealt whenever you deal weapon damage. This is basically a consumable firestone. A great reason to level cooking.

Sayge’s Dark Fortune of Damage

When the Dark Moon Faire is available, this is a 10% Damage increase to your DoT’s AND Melee damage.

Fengus’ Ferocity / Slip’kik’s Savvy

200 Attack Power Increase, great for the same reasons Blessing of Might is great. Spell crit isn’t entirely wasted on you if you have Shadowburn.

Songflower Serenade

Is great for improving multiple attributes, since we are multi-attribute dependant.

Juju Flurry

Juju Flurry has the unique trait of improving weapon attack speed. This can actually help push a 1.6 speed weapon or 2.1 speed weapon down into a more preferable speed.

Juju Might/ Winterfall Firewater

These don’t stack and Juju Might is statistically superior (+5 AP more) but one may be easier for you to obtain than the other.

Flask of Supreme Power

If you want to use a Flask, use Supreme Power to improve your spell damage.

Swiftness of Zanza

Improving your movement speed is a warlock rarity. You don’t need to get to targets quickly because your DoTs are long range, but you can’t proc firestone from long range!

Elixir of the Mongoose + Greater Arcane Elixir + Elixir of Shadow Power

All of these stack and I suggest using all of them.

Version History

• 1.0 Created
• 1.2 Added Wand rotation
• 1.5 Added Channeled Spell Rotation
• 2.0 Sprucing, color changes, images
• 2.1 Clarification about channeling, wands, and rotations