Audience

This guide should be helpful for anyone looking for a very brief introductory guide to raiding with a Destruction spec. Hopefully those that are experienced with the spec will still be able to find something interesting or insightful here, even though they will most likely already be familiar with at least the bulk of what is included.

Guide

Talents

Suppression can be a very strong talent if you are lacking hit. Keep in mind that your goal is to have a total of 17% hit once you take all raid buffs and debuffs into account. Assuming you have a typical raid comp, this means you will want to have 14% hit from your gear and talents. If your gear is closer to the 11% mark, a Suppression build is probably your best bet. If you have closer to 14% hit from just gear alone, then you can choose one of the alternatives.

You will probably also notice that this build has 1 talent point leftover. I left that blank because it is really personal preference where it gets spent. Some prefer to spend it on Shadow Fury and some prefer Soul Link. Those are probably the most common talents to get with it, although you could really pick whatever you'd like.

The Improved Soul Leech build is nice because it brings Replenishment to your raid and cuts down on how much Life Tapping you need to do.

The final build is what I personally choose to use. I give up 1 point in Backlash for Soul Link. I find that losing 1% crit is rather minimal in exchange for the extra survivability and the safety cushion provided by Soul Link.

Typical Suppression Spec
Standard Improved Soul Leech Build
My Raiding Build

Glyphs

• Incinerate
• Conflagrate
• Life Tap.

If, for whatever reason, you find that your spirit is very low or that you struggle to maintain the buff from Glyph of Life Tap (which you should essentially refresh as it falls off), your best option for an alternative is to use Glyph of Immolate.

Destruction 101

With the preliminaries out of the way, it's time to talk about what you should actually be doing to properly dps bosses.

It seems that Blizzard is looking for ways to shy away from rotations and instead push our casts toward a priority system. This makes things more dynamic and more challenging.

If you don't have a debuff equivalent to Curse of Elements (13% increased magic damage taken) in your raid, you should be using Curse of Elements. Assuming that you do, you will want to be using Curse of Doom.

The spell priority that you should follow is essentially:

Curse of Doom > Immolate > Conflagrate > Chaos Bolt > Incinerate.

While learning the spec, you can treat this as a very good guideline. If the boss is expected to die in less than a minute, you should not refresh Curse of Doom. Instead, just follow the above priorities ignoring Curse of Doom. If you have to move, you can use that as an opportunity to cast instants, such as Corruption or Curse of Agony.

If Curse of Doom isn't on cooldown, you should cast it. If Immolate is not on the boss, refresh it. If Conflagrate isn't on cooldown, cast it. Same for Chaos Bolt. Incinerate is merely your filler that is cast when Immolate does not need to be refreshed and everything else is on cooldown. Should you have multiple abilities available, then you want to go in descending order on the priority list.

As you get more comfortable with the spec, you can find ways to change this order around slightly to sneak in a little bit more dps. I'll address some of that later. For those new to the spec, just focus on watching your cooldowns and getting used to casting your highest priority spells as much as possible.

For example, a very easy way to begin a boss fight is to put up Curse of Doom and then cast Immolate, Chaos Bolt, Conflagrate, and then Incinerate until your cooldowns come up.

The reason for following your first Immolate with a spell other than Conflagrate is because there is a slight delay from the time your Immolate cast finishes until the server recognizes the debuff as being applied. Due to this, it is a slight gain to begin another cast and then use Conflagrate after that cast rather than idling while you wait for the server to register the Immolate. This same situation will apply anytime that Conflagrate comes off cooldown as you are refreshing your Immolate; you will be best served by immediately starting another cast as the Immolate cast finishes and then using Conflagrate after that 2nd cast is completed.

One very important note is that YOU WANT TO AVOID CLIPPING YOUR IMMOLATE DOT. Ideally, Immolate will be cast such that it gets refreshed right after falling off. If you refresh it too early, you will lose the last tick of the previous Immolate's dot and lose dps as a result.

Variations

Once you are comfortable with the basic feel of the spec, you can begin to deviate a little bit from the idea of having a strict priority list. The main reason that doing this can be beneficial is due to the Pyroclasm talent ("When you critically strike with Searing Pain or Conflagrate, your Fire and Shadow spell damage is increased by 6% for 10 seconds"). You will rarely, if ever, be casting Searing Pain, so these procs will come almost entirely from your Conflagrates.

Because of this talent, however, the cast order can be altered slightly at times. For example, I feel that it is best to begin a boss fight by casting Immolate --> Chaos Bolt --> Conflagrate before putting up Curse of Doom.

The benefits of this are twofold: first, you have a chance to proc Pyroclasm and gain a boost to your Curse of Doom. Second, this will also put your Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt on cooldown sooner. Doing so will mean that your Curse of Doom goes on cooldown slightly later, but with it having a 1 minute time window already, it's highly unlikely that this will be the difference between squeezing in an extra Curse of Doom.

The short cooldowns on Conflagrate and Chaos Bolt make it much more likely that doing this will allow you to fit an extra cast of one or both of these spells into the encounter.

You should understand that opening in such a manner can cause a high amount of burst damage, and thus a very high amount of threat. If you have any concerns about pulling aggro from your tank (who is trying to pick up the boss at this point), you should not do something like this.

As you get more and more comfortable with the spec, you'll find yourself picking up on little things that make it easier for you to play the spec and little quirks that will help you maximize your own dps.

Another helpful hint is that if you have an Immolate that's about to fall off (around 1 second left) but can squeeze in a Conflagrate before it falls, you should do this instead of refreshing the Immolate first. If you get a Pyroclasm proc, you will get a healthy boost to the next Immolate, which will also boost your next Conflagrate as a result.

Summary

In closing, I would just like to leave a few more pointers.

First of all, the tips given above for maximizing your dps should be viewed as sort of "advanced Destruction raiding" ideas. They will result in relatively minor dps gains at best, and are given only as things to try once you feel you have mastered the basics.

Another great thing to work on as you play (and this applies to any spec) is to maximize your "active time" during the encounter. The less down time you have, the more dps you will do. Try to get in the habit of always casting something, even while moving. If you have to move to avoid whatever "fire-on-the-ground" mechanic is involved in your encounter, try to throw up Corruption or Life Tap while moving (I like to have a separate keybind for rank 1 Life Tap so that I can refresh my Glyph even when I don't need mana or when I can't afford to take a large health spike).

Doing things like this will allow you to spend more time on your higher dps nukes while standing still. Practicing this can be viewed as a good intermediate step to help bridge the gap from the basics to the more advanced techniques listed above.

My hope is that this brief "guide" (and I only use that word because nothing better comes to mind right now) will be helpful to Warlocks that might lack raid experience with the spec, raiders looking for some help learning another class or learning how to play their alt better, and possibly even spark some experienced raiding Warlocks to try something a little bit different.

Keep in mind that things are always changing, and a new patch is in the works! We'll see what changes when it is released!