In this article, we present you the viable talent and glyph choices for your Destruction Warlock (WoW MoP 5.2). We detail what each of the talents and glyphs do and in which situations they should be taken.

The other articles of our Destruction Warlock guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

This guide has been reviewed and approved by Gahddo, one of the most prominent Warlock theorycrafters, who maintains the Warlock profiles and rotations in Simulation Craft.

1. Talent Choices↑top

• Performance-enhancing
• Survival
• Crowd Control
• Movement
• Utility
• Situational

There is no longer such a thing as a default build. Most of the talents are now viable. They can easily be changed, thanks to Dust of Disappearance (and Tomes of the Clear Mind from level 86 to 90). You will frequently find yourself changing talents and glyphs between encounters, in order to adapt your play style to different mechanics. Therefore, it is important to understand what each of your talents does and how they affect your play style.

2. Tier 1 Talents↑top

Tier 1 talents give you the choice between self-healing talents.

• Dark Regeneration restores some of your life and increases healing received for 12 seconds. It also restores some of your pet's life. It has a 2-minute cooldown.
• Soul Leech is a passive ability that causes your important offensive abilities to grant you a shield for 15 seconds. The shield's strength depends on the damage you deal with your abilities, but it cannot exceed 100% of your maximum health.
• Harvest Life is an improvement over Drain Life, which it replaces. It deals AoE damage and regenerates between 3% and 4.5% maximum health per second for each enemy it hits. The effect is limited to 20 enemies.

You can consider Soul Leech to be the default talent of this tier. If an encounter requires you to heal yourself at specific times, then you will want to choose Dark Regeneration.

Harvest Life is not really useful for raiding.

3. Tier 2 Talents↑top

Tier 2 talents give you the choice between several crowd control abilities.

• Howl of Terror causes 5 enemies within 10 yards to run in fear for 20 seconds. Damage done on an afflicted target cancels the damage. It has a 40-second cooldown.
• Mortal Coil is both a crowd control and a survival ability. It causes the target to run in fear for 3 seconds and restores 15% of your maximum health. It has a 45-second cooldown.
• Shadowfury stuns all enemies within 8 yards for 3 seconds.

Mortal Coil will be the default choice as it also grants a bit of healing. If you need AoE crowd control, then you will go for Howl of Terror or Shadowfury depending on what your raid will require.

4. Tier 3 Talents↑top

Tier 3 talents offer damage reduction mechanics. You have the choice between the following talents.

• Soul Link causes the damage (and healing) you and your demon take (receive) to be shared. However, your demon's health is reduced by 50%. Soul Link has no duration, but enabling/disabling it triggers a 10-second cooldown. Fall damage is not shared with your demon. If you choose Grimoire of Sacrifice as your Tier 5 talent, then Soul Link passively increases your maximum health by 20%.
• Sacrificial Pact causes your demon to sacrifice 25% of its current health to give you a 10-second shield that absorbs up to 400% of the sacrificed health. If you do not have a demon out, 25% of your health is sacrificed instead. Sacrificial Pact is on a 1-minute cooldown.
• Dark Bargain prevents all damage (except fall damage) for 8 seconds. After the 8 seconds are up, 50% of the damage prevented is dealt over 8 seconds. It has a 3-minute cooldown.

Dark Bargain is obviously a strong talent. On a 3-minute cooldown, it enables you to bypass encounter mechanics or to significantly reduce the damage you take during periods of high raid damage. That said, it is mostly interesting on encounters with high damage-spikes or when you want to soften the damage that you take at critical times, so that your healers can focus on other raid members.

Sacrificial Pact is very interesting if you choose Grimoire of Sacrifice because your health is sacrificed (instead of that of your demon) and this results in a shield that is twice as large. Also, the cooldown of Sacrificial Pact is only 1 minute, so you can use it a lot more often than Dark Bargain.

Soul Link basically grants you +25% maximum health (the health of your pet is 50% of your health), which can be useful for surviving large hits that come too often for Sacrificial Pact or Dark Bargain.

5. Tier 4 Talents↑top

Tier 4 talents offer crowd control and utility abilities that cost health to use.

• Blood Horror causes enemies to run in horror for up to 4 seconds, if they melee you while Blood Horror is active. Activating Blood Horror costs 5% of your maximum health. Once activated, Blood Horror lasts 1 minute.
• Burning Rush is an ability that you can toggle on and off without restriction. While it is active, your movement speed is increased by 50% but you lose 4% of your maximum health every second. During Burning Rush, movement-impairing effects cannot reduce your movement speed below 100% (your regular running speed).
• Unbound Will removes all magic and movement-impairing effects, as well as effects that cause loss of control of your character. It has a 1-minute cooldown and costs 20% of your maximum health.

We believe that Unbound Will will be the default choice as it can be useful in raids to remove harmful debuffs, movement-impairing effects, and all effects that cause you to lose control of your character. Note that if you are a Human Warlock, then you already have Every Man for Himself, which does almost the same thing, just that it does not remove harmful debuffs.

Burning Rush might have occasional uses and Blood Horror is useless in PvE (although it can be very good for solo content).

6. Tier 5 Talents↑top

Tier 5 talents provide various modifications to your demons.

• Grimoire of Supremacy replaces your minions with more powerful demons that deal 20% more damage. See the Demons section of our rotation page for more information.
• Grimoire of Service grants you new abilities that share a 2-minute cooldown and allow you to instantly summon a second demon for 20 seconds. The abilities are Grimoire: Felguard (Demonology-only), Grimoire: Felhunter, Grimoire: Imp, Grimoire: Succubus, and Grimoire: Voidwalker. The temporary demon cannot be controlled and will attack your current target. It is possible that the temporary demon you summon be the same as your currently summoned demon. In this case, you will temporarily have two instances of the same demon fighting for you.
• Grimoire of Sacrifice sacrifices your demon to increase spell damage by 15% to 30% (depending on the specialisation) and to regenerate 2% of maximum health every 5 seconds. Resummoning a demon cancels the effect. If you have chosen Soul Link as your Tier 3 talent, you will be passively granted +20% maximum health when you sacrifice your demon. Finally, you gain one of your demon's abilities:
  • Imp: Singe Magic;
  • Felguard: Pursuit (Demonology-only);
  • Felhunter: Spell Lock;
  • Voidwalker: Shadow Bulwark;
  • Succubus: Whiplash.

Currently, the talents are tuned in such a way that Grimoire of Supremacy is the best Tier 5 talent for single-target DPS and sustainable AoE. For non-AoE multiple-target fights, Grimoire of Sacrifice is advised.

7. Tier 6 Talents↑top

Tier 6 talents provide situational DPS increases.

• Archimonde's Vengeance causes your target to suffer 25% of all the damage you take for 8 seconds. It has a 2-minute cooldown. When the ability is off cooldown, enemies who attack you suffer 5% of all the damage they deal to you.
• Kil'jaeden's Cunning allows you to cast and channel while moving, but each cast reduces your movement speed by 15% for 6 seconds (stacking up to 2 times).
• Mannoroth's Fury increases the area of your AoE spells by 500%. The wording of the tooltip is rather poor. What this talent really does is increase the radius of your AoE spells by roughly 125% (so the radius is multiplied by 2.25), which causes the area affected by your AoE spells to become 5 times bigger (source).

All of these talents have situational use. Kil'jaeden's Cunning will be the right choice in any fight with movement. Mannoroth's Fury will be nigh-mandatory in AoE-heavy fights where enemies are loosely stacked. Archimonde's Vengeance should be the default choice, but almost every fight has either movement or AoE in it, making the other two choices almost always better. That said, Archimonde's Vengeance can be used when you will regularly take a large amount of unavoidable damage (if Soul Link is active, the damage done to your pet will also be dealt back to the enemies).

8. Major Glyphs↑top

The potentially useful major glyphs are listed below.

• Glyph of Conflagrate enables you to snare targets with Conflagrate even when the target is not afflicted by Immolate.
• Glyph of Demonic Circle reduces the cooldown of Demonic Circle: Teleport, which can be useful if you need to often use your Demonic Circle.
• Glyph of Ember Tap> is useful if you take a bit of sustained damage during an encounter.
• Glyph of Healthstone causes your Healthstone to restore twice more health, but it does so over 10 seconds (as opposed to instantly, without the glyph). This is a very strong glyph, as it essentially gives you an additional defensive cooldown.
• Glyph of Siphon Life causes the ticks of your Immolate to heal you for 20% of the damage they deal.
• Glyph of Soulstone causes your Soulstone target to return to life with full health.

9. Minor Glyphs↑top

Minor Glyphs are cosmetic and none of them will improve your performance while raiding. Two of them will be useful while leveling or questing and might have very occasional uses in dungeons or raids.

• Glyph of Nightmares grants you the ability to cross water while mounting your Felsteed and Dreadsteed. Doing so will leave a trail of flames, which is a cosmetic effect.
• Glyph of Unending Breath causes targets affected by your Unending Breath to swim 20% faster.

10. Changelog↑top

• 07 Mar. 2013: Patch 5.2 update.
  • Soul Leech now provides a shield instead of healing, which makes it a lot more interesting for raiding.
  • Blood Horror, which replaces the old Blood Fear, is useless for raiding.
  • The increased damage from Grimoire of Sacrifice has been reduced.
  • Kil'jaeden's Cunning no longer has an active component.
  • Improved advice for choosing Tier 5 talent.
  • Glyph of Burning Embers is now baseline.
  • Removed Glyph of Dark Soul from the list of advised glyphs, as it is never a DPS gain.
  • Added a mention to insist on the importance of Glyph of Healthstone for survivability.