Warlock Shadowlands Leveling Guide From 1 to 60

Table of Contents

• 1. Leveling in Shadowlands
• 2. Best leveling spec for Warlocks in Shadowlands
• 3. Ability Unlocks for Warlock Leveling in Shadowlands
• 4. Best Heirloom Items for Warlock Leveling in Shadowlands
• 5. Changelog

Welcome to our Warlock leveling guide. Here you will find all you need to know to level up your Warlock efficiently. Leveling received a lot of changes in Shadowlands, which we have documented in our Shadowlands Leveling Changes page. In addition, we now have a revamped Leveling guide, complete with detailed information on XP, mounts, addons, consumables, tips, and more. We encourage to read it to increase your leveling speed even more.

Warlocks historically has proven to be one of the safest and quickest leveling classes, both in groups where they can take advantage of multidotting and their AoE capabilities, and in solo where their sustain combined with various crowd control and pets tanking most of the damage enable the Warlock to generally pull more than other classes.

Depending on the style of leveling and pulling mobs and the number of players in the party Demonology or Affliction offer the quickest and safest leveling experience. Affliction being the most versatile, especially in group play, makes it the preferred choice.

Destruction is far from ill equipped and its biggest limitations are the longer casts and the fact your pet will struggle keeping aggro when you start chaining Chaos Bolts.

• Level 1 — Shadow Bolt is the only available spell
• Level 2 — Corruption becomes available, but with a 2-second cast time. Moderately useful for tagging multiple target.
• Level 3 — you unlock your first pet, Summon Imp, which increases noticeably your damage at this point.
• Unending Resolve is unlocked at level 4 and is your main damage reduction cooldown
• Level 5 — Fear becomes available, which is a better way to mitigate damage than Unending Resolve at low levels.
• Level 6 — Curse of Weakness is yet another tool to reduce auto attack damage taken by either the caster and/or the pet.
• Level 7 — Create Healthstone offers increased survivability, which in turn means less downtime between fights.
• Level 8 — Health Funnel becomes available but is only useful later on to increase the Voidwalker's resistance while tanking multiple targets.
• Level 9 — Drain Life offers an additional mean to sustain the caster.
• Level 10 — Summon Voidwalker becomes finally available. By far, this is the most important solo leveling pet, finding uses even in Demonology.
• Level 12 — Curse of Exhaustion offers a mean to kite targets more easily, if Voidwalker tanking is not enough.
• Level 18 — Unending Breath's benefit is mostly the increased mobility underwater.
• Level 19 — Summon Succubus offers a melee option mostly for aesthetics and dungeons.
• Level 21 — Subjugate Demon offers a situational tool to take control of sometimes more powerful demons as pets
• Level 22 — Fel Domination allows to summon a pet almost instantly on a 3-minute cooldown and without any shard cost. Generally useful to resummon Voidwalker if a pull is too greedy or to save wipes in dungeons
• Level 23 — Summon Felhunter offers the only pet with an interrupt.
• Level 24 — The Soul Leech passive is unlocked, improving substantially the caster's sustain.
• Level 29 — Command Demons enable the use of your pets' special abilities, unlocking additional utility.
• Level 31 — Ritual of Doom becomes available, but unless in a party it is unusable.
• Level 32 — Soulstone enable Warlocks to resurrect allies in combat or to play more aggressively while safeguarding your death during more reckless actions such as jumping over a cliff or pulling mobs beyond capabilities.
• Level 33 — Ritual of Summoning enables you to summon players from your party.
• Level 34 — Curse of Tongues offers the unique ability to slow the target casting, which can be extremely useful when running out of interrupts.
• Level 38 — Shadowfury offers a relatively low cooldown AoE stun, which is extremely valuable during mass AoE pulls.
• Level 41 — Demonic Circle offers some degree of mobility, especially during situations where the player is forced to go to and fro.
• Level 46 — Banish offers yet another form of crowd control, albeit limited to elementals, demons and aberrations.
• Level 47 — Create Soulwell becomes available, making Healthstones easier to share to the party group.
• Level 49 — Demonic Gateway is yet another form of mobility when forced to move back and forth between two points, or to skip some otherwise twisted paths.

While the most important aspect of Heirloom is the bonus Experience, to get most out of their stats allocation, you want to prioritise Intellect, then Haste then Critical Strike. The reason behind is that Haste generally offers a smoother combat experience while increasing your DPS in a homogeneous way, unlike Critical Strike which is still important but less consistent by nature.

Being able to cast faster offers the advantage of tagging mobs quicker, and overall has a nicer feeling when most of the actions complete quicker.

• 12 Oct. 2020: Revamped page for Shadowlands, with subpages for each spec.
• 05 Jul. 2019: Updated Affliction PvP talents.
• 25 Jun. 2019: Updated for Patch 8.2.
• 12 Mar. 2019: Reviewed Affliction and added Demonology and Destruction specializations.
• 10 Dec. 2018: This page has been reviewed for Patch 8.1 and no changes are necessary.
• 12 Aug. 2018: Revamped leveling page for BfA.