How To Improve As Destruction Warlock — Shadowlands Pre-Patch 9.0.1

Rain of Fire is a large Soul Shard investment and shifts your damage profile, from focused burst to distributed AoE. The AoE from Rain of Fire is quite significant, provided that targets will stay within the reticle for most of its duration. Remember that at 5+ targets you should use Rain of Fire rather than a Havoc-empowered Chaos Bolt.

After the opener, your Dark Soul: Instability is unlikely to align with any of your other main cooldowns until the 6-minute mark. Dark Soul should be used roughly on cooldown, although you should delay it for a short time if you will be able to cleave during the duration. If you are playing with Grimoire of Supremacy, you should cast Dark Soul after using Summon Infernal and a few Soul Shard generators.

When playing with Internal Combustion, many players fail to properly manage their Immolate. You should always keep track of your Immolate, as dumping multiple Chaos Bolts will quickly eat up the duration. Try to refresh Immolate when there are 5 seconds or less remaining.

Properly anticipating cleave and putting Havoc to the best possible use can add a lot of damage to your parse. Be sure to lead into Havoc with Soul Shards at the ready. Unless you need to refresh Immolate on the main target, you should apply Immolate before Havoc on the second target. Get right into dumping Chaos Bolts, using Conflagrate charges for quick Soul Shard regeneration.

Cataclysm applies Immolate, and should be used to apply or refresh that debuff whenever possible. It is common for many players to refresh Immolate out of habit, only to cast Cataclysm moments later and refresh again. While this is not a huge optimization, it definitely pays to remember. Remember Cataclysm cast on cooldown offers almost 50% Immolate uptime.