Season of Discovery Demonology Warlock Tank Talents and Runes

While you can tank as a Warlock as any of the three specs, tanking with a majority of your points into Destruction is the best for damage and threat, since your threat is based upon how much damage you deal. Simply put the more damage you deal, the more threat you will have. This build will go largely down the Destruction tree to pickup all the Fire Damage from Emberstorm and some help on your main threat generator Searing Pain with Improved Searing Pain. The remaining points will be put into the both Affliction for Improved Corruption and then Demonology for Demonic Embrace for Stamina and Improved Imp to make your Imp hit harder.

Once the phase launches and more sims and information get out, I'll make sure to add a build for each of the specs in terms of tanking. For right now I'm just including the Destruction Meta tanking one.

For the damage/threat build you will have most of your points in the Destruction tree. While there are some flex points, this will be the general build to deal as much threat as you can. Start by putting five points into either Improved Shadow Bolt or Cataclysm. Both of these talents aren't amazing. Cataclysm will give you a little bit of mana back, while Improved Shadow Bolt will allow your Shadow Cleave crits to apply the Improved Shadow Bolt debuff, buffing yours and your raids Shadow Damage to the target. This is nice since you do cast a couple Shadow spells with Corruption and Drain Life. Your next five points will go into Bane as this will reduce the cast time of your main DoT Immolate. Aftermath is only a chance at dazing and not worth it. You're next five points go into Devastation to give you 5% more crit. After that put two points into Improved Firebolt to make your Imp cast faster. The next five points go into Improved Searing Pain. This increases your chance to crit with Searing Pain and that's really nice since you will be using this spell more than all of your other ones since this is your main threat generator. If it crits, it deals more damage, thus causing more threat.

The Next put five points into Improved Immolate to increase the initial damage of your Immolate and then put five points into Emberstorm for the 10% increased Fire damage. After that put one point into Ruin to increase the damage of your critical strikes by 100%. After that go into the Demonology tree and place your last three points into Improved Imp. Imp does a ton of damage and is your main demon. This makes him deal 30% more damage, while also buffing his Fire shield and Blood Pact. Put 3 points into Demonic Embrace for some extra Stamina, then put your remaining five points into Improved Corruption for your instant cast Corruption, which will supply you with some great damage and threat and your last points go into Suppression for some help with hit on your Affliction spells.

• Head — Pandemic
• Bracers — Immolation Aura
• Gloves — Metamorphosis
• Pants — Demonic Grace or Demonic Pact
• Chest — Master Channeler
• Belt — Shadow and Flame
• Boot — Dance of the Wicked or Mark of Chaos
• Cloak — Infernal Armor
• Ring 1 — Fire Specialization
• Ring 2 — Shadow Specialization

While there are many options of Runes this phase, the ones above do the most damage, thus causing the most threat. Demonic Grace got a nice rework and is no longer on the Global Cooldown and also now increases your crit by 30%, on top of the 30% dodge.

Master Channeler is the best rune for your chest as this does pretty good damage as well as heals you for a decent amount. .

Metamorphosis is the only option for Rune choice here. You can't tank unless in your Demon form.

With the recent Demonic Knowledge nerf, it's no longer the best option for your boot rune. Instead, you can use Dance of the Wicked. Mark of Chaos is a nice option if you're the only Lock in there and want to support more.

Grimoire of Synergy was also recently nerfed and now Shadow and Flame is the best option for the consistant 10% damage.

Immolation Aura is still the best pick of the log for your Bracer rune. This does damage every second, so long as you're getting hit with a melee ability and this also reduces all magical damage you take by 10%, which is obviously really nice as a tank.

Pandemic is the only option really to pick for the Head slot rune. This allows ALL of your DoT's to crit. The more you crit, the more damage you do as well as more procs of Dance of the Wicked

For your ring runes Fire Specialization and Defense Specialization are the new ring runes and both of these should be used at all times.

More Engravings are likely to come out as we reach higher level caps, so make sure to checkout our general Runes guide to get a better understanding of what all tools you have available to your Paladin.