We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Destruction Warlock in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Destruction Warlock!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Warlock Tier Set
Why You Should Play Destruction Warlock in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Destruction Warlock has been a popular choice for a lot of the time during the last many expansions. The class and spec identity of playing a Destruction warlock has remained more or less the same for all that time. Warlocks are the tanky caster, and Destruction is that Warlock spec that loads up big casts to deal big damage hits. For progressions raiding, we have been the spec that would do very good priority target damage on-demand because of how we’re able to store up soul shards and then cast Chaos Bolt.
Looking at the later stages of season 1 Destruction has also been a very strong performing spec in the raiding scene. We have received a few buffs across the board, this includes an aura buff to the core Destruction spells as well as a minor rework on some of the class tree talents. The result of these changes is that Destruction is one of the top performing specs, even on single target, which is something we have historically been bad at. This is certainly an interesting time to consider playing a Destruction Warlock.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Destruction Warlock in Dragonflight Season 2
Destruction Warlock Utility in Dragonflight
Warlock has for a long time been a source of utility for raids as well as groups. This is also the case for Dragonflight, and maybe more than ever:
- Create Soulwell – First off, this is more often than not enough to justify having a Warlock in your raid. Being able to always add this healing cooldown to everyone in your group is a massive plus.
- Demonic Gateway – Historically there have been many fights where entire strategies build around having Demonic Gateway available. Some of the first ones that come to mind are Raszageth and Painsmith Raznal.
- Soulstone – Working as a combat ress that can also be applied to a target before dying. This type of ress can be super useful in multiple types of content.
- Curse of Weakness – Especially in very difficult content, using a Curse of Weakness to make life a little bit easier for your tanks is a great way to help out your group.
- Ritual of Summoning – Being able to quickly and efficiently gather your group is just such a good thing to bring to your group.
In a progression raiding situation Soulstone is such a huge timesaver. Allowing one of your healers to ress up the group straight after a wipe is going to make your raid much more efficient. Soulstone can also be cast on a player prior to their death allowing them to instantly ress back up. This can be useful when sacrificing a player on a mechanic, or if you know someone is going to die and you want them back up as quickly as possible.
Utilizing Demonic Gateway to optimize a strategy on a boss is something we have seen more or less every raid since the introduction of the ability. Having this tool at your disposal is very useful, even just for speeding up the movement of something.
Warlocks also bring a variety of crowd-control options:
Some of these are talents, but it goes to show how Destruction can be of great use to a group for dungeons or PvP especially. Many of these abilities can be further empowered by additional talent points, allowing for a very useful low cooldown crowd control.
Destruction’s Blasts from the Past
Looking at the Dragonflight talent tree for Destruction, we run into a few blasts from the past. Some of these are:
- Rolling Havoc – And old Azerite trait making Havoc usage even more important.
- Backlash – The option to get a free Incinerate cast is very strong, mostly for PvP.
- Flashpoint – Another old Azerite trait giving you incentive to apply Immolate onto high-health enemies for a hast buff.
- Diabolic Embers – Legion set bonus turned Shadowlands legendary and now Dragonflight talent. Good addition to the Destruction gameplay.
- Madness of the Azj’Aqir – Legion set bonus turned Shadowlands legendary and now Dragonflight talent as well, but in an even more interesting form now also including a buff to Rain of Fire.
- Dimensional Rift – Legion artifact ability that honestly isn’t very interesting, but it’s cool to see a spell that feels good to press return.
Most of these are little buffs that make Destruction do slightly more damage through secondary stats. The most impactful one of these is Madness of the Azj’Aqir changing the playstyle from a very bursty profile into a more steady damage flow where your objective is to chain as many shard spenders into each other as you can.
A Very Versatile Damage Profile
Destruction Warlock has notoriously been great at cleave and AoE, but very bad at Single-target. This is not necessarily the case anymore. With the introduction of the Dragonflight talent setup, we have received numerous talents that, when combined, turn Destruction into a very strong single-target spec:
- Soul Fire – Which is basically a glorified Immolate that casts slowly, deals damage and generates a soul shard. This can be empowered through Decimation reducing the cooldown on targets below 50% hp.
- Diabolic Embers – More shards = more damage.
- Madness of the Azj’Aqir – Making for a playstyle that rewards the player big-time for managing shards, movement and buff uptime well.
- Burn to Ashes – More damage for Incinerate making this a hard hitter.
There are more talents that increase the damage of various abilities, but having the option to specialize in single-target is awesome for Destruction, as this has always been the weak point of the spec.
If another damage profile is required, then you’re also able to pick up other talents like Rain of Fire -> Inferno for an AoE spec, or Havoc/Mayhem -> Pandemonium/Cry Havoc -> Rolling Havoc making the cleave profile of Destruction insanely strong.
The take-away from this is, there’s basically nothing you can’t specialize in when spending your talent points in the Destruction tree.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Destruction Warlock in Dragonflight Season 2
The problem with Havoc
Havoc has always been one of the abilities that have had the most impact on the Destruction Warlock damage, especially on two-target cleave. There is two sides to this coin though, and in reality Havoc is also the reason Destruction has always, and probably will always, be at the risk of receiving a flat-out damage % aura nerf. This will be done in order to limit the Destruction potential on two-target cleave. If Destruction is the strongest single-target spec, then it will a lot of the time also be the strongest two-target spec, where it may be intended for other specs to perform the best. This hasn’t been the case as much ever since Havoc started dealing 60% damage instead of 100% damage, but Havoc still has the potential to cause the spec to suffer in all but 1 damage profile.
Power Infusion
As a final note, I thought I’d mention how Power Infusion affects the viability of Destruction. Destruction is one of the better scaling specs, meaning it benefits greatly from Power Infusion during our cooldown burst. This is even more true on cleave, meaning your damage will be much lower if you do not get Power Infusion, and there are many contestants to receive this. The problem with casting Power Infusion on a Destruction warlock is the fact our talent setup revolves around Summon Infernal, which is a 3 minute cooldown. There are a few solutions to this however.
- Have the Power Infusion delayed by 1 minute – This is if the kill-time is below 4m 20s. This is also potentially going to be super annoying for the people playing with you.
- Get Power Infusion on 2 minutes and delay your 2nd Summon Infernal to 3m 50s, then get Power Infusion on 4m with 20s left on Summon Infernal.
- Accept someone else is going to get it.
How does the Season 1 Destruction Warlock Tier compare to the Season 2 tier?
The Dragonflight season 1 tier set bonuses for Destruction were very basic flat damage buffs:
These bonuses revolved around granting more critical strike chance, as well as increasing the damage of crits. This is a bonus that played well into the hands of Destruction as a lot of our damage already came from guaranteed critical strikes ie. Chaos Bolt. Generator abilities that crit also generate extra soul shards, meaning the playstyle would be sped-up.
The Dragonflight season 2 tier set bonuses for Destruction are a bit more interactive:
- (2) Set Bonus – Warlock Destruction 10.1 Class Set 2pc: Channel Demonfire bolts, Immolate, and Incinerate have a chance to fire an additional Demonfire bolt. These bolts deal 50% increased damage to their main target.
- (4) Set Bonus – Warlock Destruction 10.1 Class Set 4pc: Demonfire bolts increase your Fire damage by 1% for 13 sec, stacking up to 8 times. Gaining a stack does not refresh the duration. Casting Channel Demonfire resets this effect.
As these bonuses revolve around Channel Demonfire, this is likely going to be a talent we want to pick up in season 2. Having this as a button just allows us to gain that much more from this, as well as allowing us to control when we’ll want this buff. During bloodlust, you’re going to have very high up-time on the 4-set bonus. You’re also able to cast a Channel Demonfire stacking this up to 8 stacks, and then do a Havoc rotation benefitting from the full 4-set buff.
Verdict on comparison
It’s very clear to see how the season 2 bonus is more interactive, and therefore more fun in my opinion. Strength-wise it’s going to depend on tuning, and it’s not guaranteed the interactive bonus is even going to be a bigger percentage damage increase, but it’s certainly more interesting to play with.
For that reason, the season 1 bonus is less interesting, but fits the Destruction secondary stat layout well, where the season 2 bonus is more interesting, but potentially not as big of a gain as it’s changing the setups we play, potentially limiting Destructions ability to specialize so well in various damage profiles.
About the Author
This guide is written and maintained by Loozy who plays a Warlock in the guild FatSharkYes on Kazzak EU. I began playing Warlock during Siege of Orgrimmar and have been raiding actively ever since. I became involved in guide writing during Legion where I took part in starting the website Lock One Stop Shop a website by Warlocks for Warlocks (currently outdated). You can catch me on my Twitter @LoozyWoW or on my Stream below:
Watch live video from Loozy on www.twitch.tv
For more information on playing Destruction Warlock, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Destruction Warlock Guide
