by Hald Twinpack

May 13, 2024

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide

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Welcome to our Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE guide. This comprehensive article covers everything you need to know about talents, glyphs, gearing, and other essential aspects of WoW. 

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Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Abbreviations

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Talents

Destruction

Demonology

Affliction

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Glyphs

Prime Glyphs

• Glyph of Immolate
• Glyph of Conflagrate
• Glyph of Imp

Major Glyphs

• Individual’s Choice
• Individual’s Choice
• Individual’s Choice

Recommendations

• Glyph of Soul Link – 5% increased damage reduction through Soul Link.
• Glyph of Soulstone – Since the change to Soulstone, making it a Battle Rez, this glyph will resurrect the targets of your soulstone with a total of 70% HP.
• Glyph of Life Tap – Useful for fights where AoE is used heavily and Mana is an issue.

Minor Glyphs

• Individual’s Choice
• Individual’s Choice
• Individual’s Choice

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Stats and Gearing

Stats

Intellect:

Hit Rating:

A 102.45 hit rating increases your chance of being hit with spells by 1% until Hit Cap (17% or 1742 Rating). Once the cap has been reached, Hit becomes useless.

Haste Rating:

New.Cast.Time = Normal.Cast.Time / ((1 + (Haste.Rating / 12805)) * 5%.Aura * Dark.Intent)

New.Cast.Time = 2.5 / ((1 + (950 / 12805)) * 1.05 * 1.03) = 2.152 sec

Due to the changes to DoTs and the way specific DoTs interact with particular talents and abilities (like Conflagrate), haste has become a much more advanced stat. See the Mechanics: Haste section for more information.

Critical Strike Rating:

179.28 crit rating gives 1% to crit. With a Burning Shadowspirit Diamond, crits will do 2.06 times the damage of normal hits. Due to changes made to DoTs, all DoTs can now crit innately.

Mastery Rating:

179.28 mastery provides a 1.35% increase to all fire damage. As 90%+ % of Destruction’s damage comes from fire spells, mastery is not a bad stat. However, the rise per point is low enough that mastery will not be prioritized over crit or haste until much higher gear levels.

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Stat Priorities

You should download the Simulationcraft tool and base your decisions around your character. However, the below order should be correct in most situations.

Item Level 359 – 378:

Int>SP>>Hit (to cap)>Haste>Crit>Mastery

Item Level 391 – 397:

Int > SP > Hit (to cap) > Haste > Mastery = Crit

Item Level 403 – 416:

Int=Hit (to cap)>SP>Haste (2681 Rating)>Mastery>Crit>Haste

2681 Haste rating (2527 rating for Goblins) with full raid buffs provides Immolate with an additional 4 ticks (9 total) under the effect of Heroism/Bloodlust.

Reforging

Reforging allows you to exchange 40% of a combat rating already on an item and convert it into a combat rating not already on an item. Example: If an item has Crit, you cannot add more Crit. If it has no Crit, you could reforge 40% of another rating (Haste, Hit, or Mastery) into Crit. An item with 100 Hit and no Crit could be reforged to 60 Hit and 40 Crit.

Reforging is essentially following the stat priority rules above to reach specific caps and maximize the benefit we receive from secondary stats. For example, for the stat priorities in iLvl 401 – 416 gear, we do the following (in order):

It is important to note that optimizing your reforging may involve reforging away from haste or hit on gear to get as close as possible to the cap (without going under). It is recommended you use a tool such as WoWReforge to assist you.

Gemming

When to Ignore the Socket Bonus

Generally, if the socket bonus is less than 20 Int or 30 of any rating stat, it would be better to ignore the bonus and gem Brilliant Inferno Ruby/Brilliant Queen’s Garnet. However, to be more accurate, you would need to find the relevant scale factors for your gear setup (Using Simulationcraft) and multiply those scale factors by the stats you would gain with either gem.

Set Bonuses

• 2pc – The 2-piece bonus is a ~2% DPS increase, depending on fight time.
• 4pc – The 4-piece bonus is a ~2.5% DPS increase if used on CD.

Best in Slot

Normal BiS without Legendary

Normal BiS with Legendary

Heroic BiS without Legendary

Heroic BiS with Legendary

Enchants

**Which you use will depend on how close you are to a haste threshold for an additional tick of Immolate.

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Professions

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Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Consumables

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Races

Alliance

Worgen

• Viciousness – Passive 1% crit.
• Darkflight – 40% speed sprint for 10 seconds. 2 minute cooldown.

Gnome

• Expansive Mind – Increase mana pool by 5%.
• Escape Artist – Escape the effects of any immobilization or movement speed reduction effect. 1.5 minute cooldown.

Human

• Every Man for Himself – Removes all movement impairing effects and all effect which cause loss of control of your character. 2 minute cooldown.

Dwarf

• Stoneform – Removes all poison, disease and bleed effects and reduces all damage taken by 10% for 8 seconds. 2 minute cooldown.

Horde

Orc

• Blood Fury – Increases spellpower by 584. Lasts 15 seconds. 2 minute cooldown.
• Command – Damage done by pets increased by 5%.
• Hardiness – Reduces duration of stun effects by 15%.

Goblin

• Time is Money – Passive 1% spell haste.
• Rocket Jump – Activates your rocket belt to jump forward. 2 minute cooldown. Shares cooldown with Rocket Barrage.
• Rocket Barrage – Launches your belt rockets at an enemy. 2 minute cooldown. Shares cooldown with Rocket Jump.

Troll

• Berserking – Increases your casting speed by 20% for 10 seconds. 3 minute cooldown.
• Da Voodoo Shuffle – Reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15%.

Blood Elf

• Arcane Torrent – Silence all enemies within 8 yards for 2 seconds and restores 6% mana. 2 minute cooldown.

Forsaken

• Will of the Forsaken – Removes any Charm, Fear and Sleep effect. 2 minute cooldown.

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Spell Rotations

Spell Priority

Basic

Explained

Your primary concern will be to get Improved Soul Fire up. You should keep this buff up as much as possible, including through hardcasting. If you have the T13 set bonus, Soulburn should be cast on cooldown, along with Soul Fire, to replenish the shard. Demon Soul should be used on cooldown, together with “On-Use” trinkets.

Immolate and Corruption should have as close to 100% uptime as possible. This is also true for Bane of Doom; however, this should only be cast if the target is going to live for more than 15 seconds.

Conflagrate should be used on cooldown. Chaos Bolt has a DPET equal to that of Incinerate, but is still worth casting on cooldown to proc Soul Leech. It is recommended that Chaos Bolt is not used under haste effects such as Heroism/Bloodlust or trinkets that will bring it below a 1 second cast time.

In practice, Empowered Imp procs should generally be used as soon as possible in order to prevent a secondary proc from overwriting it, however, this situation will be rare, and delaying the use of these procs to maximize Improved Soul Fire uptime would result in more DPS. Ultimately, the difference will be minimal, and both cases are acceptable and will net different results on a per-fight basis.

If safe, Shadowflame should be used on cooldown while in melee range. However, it is not worth running a long distance into melee range. When the boss reaches 20% HP, begin to use Shadowburn on cooldown.

If all of the above is done, revert to Incinerate until a higher priority option becomes available.

Cooldowns

Demon Soul

Demon Soul: Imp increases the critical strike chance of your cast time Destruction spells by 30% for 20 sec. This spell should generally be used on cooldown and lined up with “On-Use” trinkets, trinket procs, Bloodlust/Heroism, and potions as often as possible.

Demon Soul: Imp only affects Destruction spells with a cast time. Therefore, Conflagrate is not affected. Soul Fires cast through Empowered Imp and Soulburn still count as having a cast time and are affected.

Doomguard

Summon Doomguard summons a Doomguard (guardian pet) to fight alongside you for 45 seconds on a 10-minute cooldown (75 seconds on a 6-minute cooldown with 2pc T13).

The Doomguard scales with some of your stats: spellpower, hit, and crit. Therefore, timing your Doomguard summon with trinket procs, enchant procs, and potions is essential for maximizing DPS. In most cases, the best way to achieve this is to simply summon your Doomguard ~10-12 seconds into the fight, as all procs are off cooldown and available before the pull.

The Doomguard does not scale with percentage-based damage increases, haste, or Destruction’s mastery.

Improved Soul Fire

The change to Improved Soul Fire has yet to make a difference to its place in the spell priority list, and keeping as close to 100% uptime on this buff is still very important. However, the most notable change is the removal of its internal cooldown.

This change doesn’t significantly affect the handling of ISF. The best way to handle this talent is still to line up your Soul Fire to land on the target just as the old ISF ends. This change just allows more room for error if it’s cast early. The most significant difference, however, is that Empowered Imp procs can be used immediately to refresh ISF.

In addition to the above, ISF should be kept up during Bloodlust/Heroism.

Dark Intent

First and foremost, you should gauge the needs of your group. They should always come first when learning raid fights or playing with undergeared healers. You should consider applying it to DPS classes when you hit enrage timers or wipe because the boss has a burn phase you didn’t complete. I’ll leave this up to you.

Healer Rankings

DPS Rankings

Personal Rankings

Bane of Havoc

This section will detail how Bane of Havoc can be used in current and past content to provide a useful (not simply padding meters) increase to personal DPS.

Tier 12

Tier 11

1. Blackwing Decent:

2. Bastion of Twilight:

Fel Flame

There is a common misconception within the warlock community that Fel Flame should be used to refresh Immolate. As a basic rule of thumb, there are only 2 reasons ever to cast Fel Flame, these are:

• During unavoidable movement, and only when Conflag is on CD, Corruption does not require refreshing, the boss is out of range of Shadowflame (or it’s on CD), and you do not require mana from Life Tap.
• When the T11 4pc bonus procs.

Outside of these 2 reasons, there isn’t any other situation in which Fel Flame should be used. Using Fel Flame to refresh the duration of Immolate will result in a DPS loss due to the number of GCDs required to increase the DoTs duration to its original duration. If we compare this to the time needed to simply re-apply the DoT over a 5-minute (300-second) fight:

• Assuming a 1-second GCD over a 300-second fight, we will cast Immolate 20 times (20 GCDs). Achieving the same result will require 3 Fel Flames every 15 seconds. This is a total of 60 GCDs used throughout the fight, wasting 40 seconds during the battle to keep a 100% uptime on Immolate. This is almost 27 Incinerates worth of time spent refreshing Immolate using our lowest DPET spell.

AoE and Multiple Targets

In significant AoE situations with 5 or more targets, Shadowflame (on CD), Rain of Fire, and Summon Infernal should all provide an acceptable amount of damage.

For more controlled multiple-target damage, generally, with less than 5 targets, tab targeting non-cc’d mobs with Immolate and Corruption and then proceeding with a single target rotation on each mob until it is dead will be the most optimal way of dealing damage. It is also recommended Bane of Havoc be placed on the mob that is expected to live the longest.

For fights with only 2 targets, Bane of Havoc should be placed on 1 target while you proceed with a single target rotation on the non-baned target. In addition, it is recommended that Immolate and Corruption be used for both targets. It is important to note that your Imp must be placed on the non-baned target.

Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE Guide: Mechanics

Haste and DoTs

In addition to all DoTs benefiting from haste innately, haste now reduces the time between ticks. Haste only reduces the DoTs duration until an extra tick is received.

This is important for us as we now have haste “thresholds” that we should try to achieve to gain extra ticks on our DoTs. This becomes even more important to Destruction Warlocks because of how Conflagrate interacts with the overall damage Immolate does.

This applies to all of our DoTs except BoD. However, the haste required to achieve this extra tick will differ between DoTs. To calculate the required haste to accomplish an additional tick, we need to calculate the time between ticks, specific to 3 decimal places.

Tick.Speed.Required = (Base.Frequency * Base.Tick.Speed) / (No.of.Ticks – 0.5)

Where No.Of.Ticks is the number of ticks you would like to achieve. For example, if we wanted to apply this to Immolate (5 sec Base Frequency, 3 sec Base Tick Speed), wishing to gain 2 additional ticks (7), we would do the following:

Tick.Speed.Required = (5 * 3) / (7 – 0.5) = 2.307 seconds

From here, we can calculate the percentage of haste required to achieve this tick speed using the following formula:

Haste.Percent = (Base.Tick.Speed / (Tick.Speed.Required + 0.00049999)) – 1

Therefore:

Haste.Percent = (3 / (2.307 + 0.00049999)) – 1 = 0.30010835

So what haste rating does that translate into? Immolate gains extra ticks at 9.99908%, 30.00108%, 49.9625%, etc. So, to determine the haste required in a raid situation with all raid buffs, including Dark Intent, we will use this formula:

Haste.Rating = ((Haste.Percent / 5%.Aura / Dark.Intent) – 1) * 12805.716

For example, the haste required to gain 2 additional ticks (30% haste) is as follows:

Haste.Rating = ((1.300108 / 1.05 / 1.03) – 1) * 12805.716 = 2589

Therefore, the haste thresholds for Immolate are (raid buffed):

Our other DoTs also benefit from gaining extra ticks. The haste thresholds for our other DoTs are below:

Corruption:

Shadowflame:

Other DoT Mechanics

DoTs, Buff and Debuffs

The basic rules for DoT behavior have changed. When a DoT is applied, the following rules are applied:

• All player stats are “snapshotted,” including all bonuses received through buffs and procs and any losses to stats from debuffs. This means the DoT will not benefit from any procs unless recast.
• The DoTs damage will update with boss debuffs on a per tick basis. For example, if a DoT was applied to a boss before the 8% Spell Damage debuff was used, and the 8% Spell Damage debuff was applied between the 2nd and 3rd tick, the 3rd tick will benefit from the debuff immediately.

The only known case where the above is not true is with the 5% Crit Debuff (Shadow and Flame/Critical Mass). This debuff follows rules similar to those of player buffs.

As a general rule of thumb, it is not recommended you recast a DoT early (i.e., clipping, except the information provided in the ‘DoT Refreshing’ section of this thread), even when you have additional procs that weren’t present on the original cast. This will effectively lower that DoTs overall DPET for that encounter despite the extra damage done due to the proc.

DoT Refreshing

Another change to DoTs is how DoTs behave when reapplied or refreshed. If a DoT is refreshed between the 2nd last and last tick, the DoTs duration will be extended to include the last tick. For example:

Immolate (unaffected by haste) has a 15-second duration, dealing damage every 3 seconds (5 ticks). If you refresh Immolate at 13 seconds (2 seconds till the last tick), the new Immolate applied to the target will have a duration of 20 seconds and tick 6 times.

This means you can ‘clip’ a DoT without losing the last tick of that DoT (and the damage that last tick provides), making it much easier to have a 100% uptime on all DoTs. One thing to note is that if a DoT is refreshed using this method, then the last tick inherits the stats of the new DoT (See ‘DoTs, Buffs and Debuffs’).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is There a Haste Cap?

Technically, there are multiple. See the Mechanics: Haste section of this guide for more information.

Should I Use the Infernal or Doomguard?

Doomguard for Single Target, Infernal for AoE.

I Changed My Spec, and My New Spec Gives Me More Dps on a Training Dummy!

What you do on a training dummy is irrelevant; not only is your sample data far too small to rule out RNG, but you’re also missing lots of buffs/target debuffs that will change how specific talents perform.

Conclusion

We hope our Cataclysm Classic Destruction Warlock PvE guide has given you the necessary insights to play this class effectively in Cataclysm Classic. If you have found this article helpful during your journey in Azeroth, please do let us know by dropping a comment below. 

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