Warlock in Forever

The three specs:

• Affliction layers Corruption, Bane of Agony, Wrack and Siphon Life onto a target and lets them run, filling any spare globals with Shadow Bolt.
• Demonology casts Corruption and Soul Fire around its pet, with talents that shape which demon you summon and what it does for you.
• Destruction keeps Immolate up so Conflagrate and Incinerate have something to consume, finishing low-health targets with Shadowburn.

Troll Warlock is one of Blizzard’s six confirmed new race and class pairs, giving the Horde a Warlock option it never had in 1.12. Warlock is not open to Skyborne at all — the race isn’t paired with this class on either faction.

Warlock got the deepest talent rework of any class shown at BlizzCon: one outlet’s tally of the demo trees counted 23 new talents, 26 changed, and only 3 left untouched, the largest overhaul by a wide margin. Trees still keep the familiar seven rows and 51 points, with a fourth one-point “gold medal” talent added at the 16-point mark alongside the existing ones at 11, 21, and 31. The headline structural change splits Curses and Banes into two separate spell slots instead of one shared category, which lets a single target carry both debuffs at once instead of forcing a choice — Curse of Agony is renamed to Bane of Agony, and the old Curse of Doom is now called Bane of Doom. Enslave Demon picked up a new name, Subjugate Demon, and the Succubus gets a companion pet: Incubus is its own summon with a dedicated spell rather than just a cosmetic reskin, and four talents in the Demonology tree call it out by name. Pandemic, in Affliction, gives a big damage boost to critical hits from Corruption, both Banes, and the drain spells, while a new channelled spell called Drain Hope strengthens whatever other Shadow damage-over-time spells are already ticking on that same target. Malevolence is the bigger shift underneath all of it: damage-over-time spells simply could not crit before, and now they can.

The beta only runs to level 30, so none of this has been tested at the level and raid content Warlocks will actually play at launch — see each spec guide’s Overview for what’s confirmed versus projected. The Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction guides below cover talent priorities, rotation, stats, and gear for each tree.