WOW: Blood Pact: leveling a warlock, 10 to 40

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Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you byDominic Hobbs.Haha! You're doing very well for yourself, young warlock. Given time, infernals and dreadlords will bow before you! But until that time comes, you must still rely on weapons forged by the hands of the mortal races."

So, you want to level a warlock, huh? Well, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. No sir! If you've come here thinking that Blood Pact is going to give you a step-by-step plan of what you should do to get your warlock from level 10 to 40 -- some kind of list of quests, zones, instances and mobs -- then you're deluded mister; we don't do that here. What you need is a generic leveling guide of the sort you can find all over the internet. Seriously, don't pay for one though; you can get plenty of decent guides for free. Personally I use Tour Guild and Carbonite. They work really well together and make the whole process much faster. There are other tools, but I know these are good.

What Blood Pact is going to do is talk about what warlocks going through these levels are all about. It's not going to be hugely detailed at any one level because, frankly, you won't be at any level for long. We'll look at the new spells you will gain and how you can apply them, we'll have a gander at these talent things you can now play with, and we'll talk about the gear you will be wearing and wielding on the way. So send the imp off to make a fresh brew and settle in for some lock leveling.

So, I'm assuming you have created your warlock and progressed through the starting zone. If not then you're reading the wrong guide, you want the brith of a warlock article we did last month. We ended that one with your shadow-caster bumbling about near their home city and probably getting told that it's about time they learned to summon a voidwalker. Again, I'm not going to talk too much about that as I have already covered it in articles fot the control of the minipns

Talents

The stock answer for what talent tree to use when leveling a lock is "Affliction till 50 then demonology till 80". This is a fair guide and you'll not go far wrong with it. It's quite possibly the fastest and/or easiest way to go. The problem I have with it is that there is so much variety in the warlock talents that being this formulaic is missing out on a lot. Also, leveling through the early stages is so quick and easy these days that it's a perfect opportunity to experiment. So if you want to dump points into anything that takes your fancy then go for it, I say. You can always pay to change them later.

That said, some of you are sat there shouting "To hell with fun, I want my lock to be 80 NOW! Tell me the quick way." So I shall. Destruction can get some very quick kills but leaves you kinda drained after each one. Demonology gives some solid minions but doesn't pack that much of a punch. Affliction has decent damage output with excellent resource regeneration; this makes it highly efficient over the long haul.

Gear

Historically any cloth gear with stamina and intellect was considered warlock loot. This is still true to some degree as we do get more out of stamina than other casters (bigger health pool means bigger mana pool). With the introduction and the changes to make Life Tap work off spirit, this is now also a stat worth having. More on warlock glyphs inSpell power is highly desirable as a green stat. Look out for those randomly enchanted items: ...of the Eagle, ...of Spell Power and even ...of Healing are all good (healing bonus was converted to spell power a while back). There are a few items that stand out during leveling but they are too many to mention here. I didn't replace for quite a while. It might be worth reading the comments for further suggestions.