This guide is simply intended to provide a general overview of the class. For a more in-depth and highly detailed resource on this class, check out this guide here.

Click here for the Warlock Class Guide, also check out this page for more world of warcraft leveling tips & tricks.

Index:
1.0 - Introduction
2.0 - Talents
3.0 - Gear & Progression

Warlocks are one of the greatest powerhouse classes of the game, they have high damage, high survivability, a pet to support through damage, tanking, crowd control, etc and above all, efficiency.  A well played warlock past the level of 20 or 30 will likely never run out of mana, due to a combination of life-tap and various talents.

Warlocks are yet another fun class to play as well.  You have the ability to solo quests that normally require groups, fear, death coil, soul stones for a self resurrection should you die out in the wilderness while questing –
All of these contribute to making the class a great choice for anyone.

Read on and find out how to keep your warlock on the path to maximum efficiency as one of the games fastest levelers.

2.0 – Talents

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The primary intent of this build is to secure all the talents necessary to maximize the key to warlock mana efficiency, meaning initial low mana cost yet highly rewarding DoT’s, as well as the extremely high stacking of stamina.

Stamina, and by connection health, allows a warlock to, with the benefit of a few talents such as improved life tap and dark pact, gain large amounts of mana without directly endangering themselves.
 
Additionally, when combined with frequent usage of life drain, you can actually drain enough life from a single life-drain to restore all the life lost from converting it into mana, and yet use only perhaps 10-15% of the actual mana gained, leading to a net-gain of mana *and* life.

Using this strategy allows you to continue killing with absolute impunity to rest breaks or actually becoming endangered at any time as you should likely have 80% or higher life and mana after every fight.

The initial talents of the tree include improved corruption, an immensely useful talent for giving you yet another instant DoT and making applying the numerous DoT’s used at higher levels, just that much easier.

Improved soul drain represents your first real mana efficiency talent, always a help at the low levels given that the strategy outlined above for unlimited mana has yet to kick in at this point.  Soul Siphon, improved lifetap, both help with regularly used abilities and serve as moderate improvements.

Fel concentration is the advent of the drain-tanking phenomenon that defines an affliction warlock grinding build.  By picking this up you suddenly unlock the ability to quite easily drop mob after mob with relative impunity, here’s how – Find your target, apply DoT’s, Lifetap to regain used mana, and life-drain the target to death along with the aid of the still ticking DoT damage.

By simply using life-drain after every lifetap you allow yourself to regain all the expended health as well as damage the target enemy, basically a win-win battle situation and the defining backbone to warlock grinding.

Next up, grim reach, nightfall, and finishing improved lifetap, well grim reach is really the best of this bunch, giving you even more time to DoT up a target before proceeding to life-drain them to death, the others are rather self-explanatory in benefit.

Siphon life is yet another DoT, something that never hurts, especially since this one actually drains life for you and thusly enhances the whole drain-tanking strategy even more.  Amplify curse and empowered corruption go relatively unused/unnoticed until much higher level.

Shadow mastery at last provides a much needed and quite useful damage *and* life drain increase, simply making your standard rotation of attack spells that much more effective and it adds up quite a bit.

Finally at 40, we reach dark pact, the greatest single talent point in the affliction tree, at least for leveling.  This allows you to bring along a succubus, or imp if you prefer, and essentially use them as a mana-battery to further your own already nigh unending mana pool.

Unstable affliction and its pre-requisites are only icing on the cake, you’ve already achieved everything required to efficiently and quickly kill almost anything you encounter, enjoy it.

10 – 14 Improved Corruption
15 – 16 Improved Soul Drain
17 – 18 Soul Siphon
19 – Improved Life Tap 1/2
20 – 24 Fel Concentration
25 – 26 Grim Reach
27 – 28 Nightfall
29 – Improved Life Tap 2/2
30 – Siphon Life
31 – Amplify Curse
32 – 34 Empowered Corruption
35 – 39 Shadow Mastery
40 – Dark Pact
41 – 45 Contagion
46 – 47 Improved Howl of Terror
48 – Shadow Embrace 1/5
49 – Curse of Exhaustion
50 – Unstable Affliction
51+ - At this point you can branch out as you wish, either following the build I provided or simply choosing what you see as best.

3.0 – Gear & Progression

Gear wise you should fine it quite simple, the stats that warlocks need are firstly, stamina, in massive amounts, stamina is far more important than intelligence as it increases survivability as well as providing mana due to lifetap.

Secondly, having achieved massive amounts of stamina, +shadow damage becomes important.  Although spell damage in general works fine as well, shadow damage consists of practically 95% of your DPS, therefore adding +shadow works just fine as well.

Spell hit and crit matter little to a leveling warlock, spell penetration as well, overall you’ll have it quite easy as you need stack up on only two statistics whatsoever and still kill with the best of them.