WotLK Classic Destruction Warlock Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities

If you have not already, please read the Spell Summary page. Knowing how each spell and ability works in detail will greatly increase your understanding of the topics discussed on this page.

Destruction Warlock's rotation is one of the most fun and engaging rotations in the game. It is easy to play, but also has enough nuances in it to keep you engaged the entire time, largely thanks to the synergy between Conflagrate and Backdraft.

Your opener as Destruction matters a lot in terms of damage.

1. Pre-Pot a potion — I suggest a Potion of Wild Magic for your prepop, largely because most guilds Bloodlust at the start of encounters and if you were to instead use a Potion of Speed there is a chance with your Backdraft charges that you will be casting under the global cooldown. If your guild is not lusting at the start and you do not have this issue, then feel free to use a Potion of Speed.
2. Precast Soul Fire so that it lands on the boss right as the pull timer hits zero. A good way to calculate this is to look at the tooltip of Soul Fire and add a half a second, then start casting when the pull timer hits that number.

After your opener, your rotation/priority is listed below.

3. Make sure your Summon Imp has started attacking.
4. Cast Curse of Doom and keep this on the target at all time. If the boss will die before Curse of Doom can get off, then use Curse of Agony instead.
5. Cast Immolate and keep this on the target at all times.
6. Conflagrate and keep it on cooldown. This will give you three stacks of Backdraft.
7. Cast Chaos Bolt and keep it on cooldown.
8. Cast Incinerate as your filler.
9. Only cast Corruption when you have to move. It is a damage loss to keep Corruption up fulltime.

• Cast Seed of Corruption.
• Cast Shadowfury on cooldown.
• Use your Inferno as much as you can.
• Can use Shadowflame if you are in range, but do not run into range to do it.
• Make sure to utilize your Global Thermal Sapper Charge and Saronite Bombs if you have Engineering.
• Use Soulshatter to eliminate any threat issues.

Unfortunately Destruction has only one cooldown outside of the trinkets, and that is Inferno. You should be looking to use this on any AoE packs or boss encounters with cleave.