Destruction Warlock Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

Hellcaller Rotation:

1. Maintain Wither, try to re-apply it during the pandemic window. Never let it fall off.
2. Cast Summon Infernal
3. Cast Malevolence, cast as many Soul Shard spenders during Malevolence as possible
4. Cast Shadowburn with Fiendish Cruelty or to avoid overcapping Soul Shards in execute
5. Cast Chaos Bolt to avoid overcapping Soul Shards
6. Cast Soulfire, preferably with Backdraft
7. Cast Conflagrate to avoid sitting on 2 charges
8. Cast Incinerate

In AoE as Hellcaller you cast Rain Of Fire as your preferred spender when you would otherwise overcap on Soul Shards.

Diabolist Rotation:

1. Cast Chaos Bolt to spend Demonic Art procs and to restart your Diabolic Ritual
2. Maintain Immolate, try to re-apply it during the pandemic window
3. Cast Summon Infernal
4. Cast Shadowburn with Fiendish Cruelty or to avoid overcapping Soul Shards in execute
5. Cast Chaos Bolt to avoid overcapping Soul Shards
6. Cast Soulfire, preferably with Backdraft
7. Cast Conflagrate to avoid sitting on 2 charges
8. Cast Incinerate

In AoE as Diabolist you should not consider casting Rain Of Fire until 8+ targets. Even then it may be more efficient to keep Chaos Bolting for priority damage.

Openers

You can replace the first step in the openers below with casting 2x Incinerate into Wither or Immolate, for situations where you do not have Soulfire talented.

Hellcaller Opener:

1. Pre-cast Soulfire at 4 seconds on the pull timer
2. Cast Summon Infernal
3. Cast Conflagrate
4. Cast Malevolence + Trinket + Potion + Racial (if relevant)
5. Resume the Hellcaller Rotation

Diabolist Opener:

1. Pre-cast Soulfire at 4 seconds on the pull timer
2. Cast Summon Infernal + Trinket + Potion + Racial (if relevant)
3. Cast Conflagrate
4. Resume the Diabolist Rotation

General Playstyle

Destruction is a simple builder/spender spec that excels in two target cleave thanks to Havoc and Mayhem, but does not have significant burst. This means our highest priority is uptime, and we should aim to never overcap on resources.

Pooling

Pooling refers to saving as many resources as possible for a specific moment, but specifically for Destruction Warlock it refers to pooling Soul Shards and Conflagrate casts. Pooling and spending those resources at specific moments is very important when trying to get the most out of Destruction, especially when you’re preparing to go into a Havoc or Mayhem window.

Planning Ahead

Destruction’s most noticeable loss of damage is due to losing uptime, which is almost always related to poor movement and poor positional awareness. You should always be thinking about where you are standing during an encounter, where you’re trying to move towards, key places to drop Demonic Circle to utilize Demonic Circle: Teleport as much as possible, and knowing when you can use your own Demonic Gateway selfishly.

Additionally, you should be planning ahead on any encounter to know what mobs are spawning or if a damage amp is coming. Knowing this, you can better plan for Havoc windows to cast Havoc as soon as a second target spawns with maximum resources, and in some circumstances you can even save Malevolence for significant spread cleave, but do not let Malevolence sit off cooldown for too long.

Lastly, you can opt to save your Fiendish Cruelty procs and Conflagrate casts to use while you’re moving, to ensure you’re always casting and doing damage.

Cooldowns

Summon Infernal is our main offensive cooldown and a 2 minute cooldown baseline, though thanks to the talent Inferno and how often we take it, our Summon Infernal cooldown is 90 seconds. Unfortunately, Summon Infernal is not a substantial bursty cooldown, and the power of Summon Infernal comes in the form of generating more Soul Shards and granting empowered Chaos Bolts via the Crashing Chaos talent.

Ruination - Specific to Diabolist, Ruination is an extremely powerful spell. While we should not be sitting on this proc and risking it falling off, there are times Ruination can be lined up with many adds spawning, providing an enormous amount of damage in one spell cast as long as the adds are grouped together.

Soulfire - While seemingly small, Soulfire is a deceptively powerful spell in our toolkit that should be cast as often as possible and always cast with Backdraft buffing our cast. While having Havoc or Mayhem active, we’re capable of generating twice the amount of soulshards due to the duplicate cast. Additionally, this allows us to maintain Immolate or Wither if Hellcaller, though not 100% uptime on its own. When talented into Avatar Of Destruction, we also gain the benefit of having our Soul Shard generation improved.

Malevolence - This cooldown is specific to Hellcaller that grants haste and empowers all of our active Withers. Additionally, it increases the stack count of Wither for each Soul Shard spending ability cast. This does not line up with Summon Infernal, though a vast majority of the time Malevolence should just be cast on cooldown.

Defensives

Warlocks are generally considered tanky due to how many passive defensive abilities we have. We have Demonic Embrace which increases our stamina by 10%, Soul Leech that can grant an absorption shield up to 20% of our maximum health, Soul Link which redirects 10% of our damage taken to our pet, and Fel Armor which provides a 3% DR and spreads out 10% of the damage absorbed by Soul Leech over 5 seconds.

Despite having all of these passive effects, which is more than some classes have as passives and active abilities, we still have a significant amount of low-cooldown defensive abilities we can actively press:

Demonic Healthstone - You should always talent into Pact Of Gluttony, which transforms our Healthstone into Demonic Healthstone that can be used in-combat with a 1 minute cooldown. As mentioned previously in this guide, when combined with Soulburn this is an incredibly powerful self-heal that also increases your maximum hp for 12 seconds. Demonic Healthstone is one of the abilities you should always be seeking to use first.

Dark Pact - When talented with Frequent Donor, the cooldown of Dark Pact goes down to 45 seconds. It sacrifices 20% of our current health to generate an absorption shield based off of the amount sacrificed, specifically 200% more than what was sacrificed. You should always use Dark Pact when you have high health and anticipate damage incoming.

Unending Resolve - One of our most versatile defensives. While not strong on its own, the power of Unending Resolve comes from Dark Accord or Strength Of Will to fit an encounter’s requirements, but also making you immune to silence and spell pushback effects. Generally, Unending Resolve is used when anticipating large spikes of damage taken.

Mortal Coil - Mortal Coil is not strong enough to be its own defensive but still provides emergency healing while moving. Mortal Coil shines when used during spread-out damage that isn’t all at once and when Demonic Healthstone is not off cooldown.

Drain Life - Similarly, Drain Life is not strong enough to be considered its own defensive and needs to be paired with Soulburn to grant the additional healing effects to feel noticeable. However, since Drain Life has no cooldown it is nice on demand self-healing that is spammable with the caveat of being required to stand in place. Do not be afraid to simply spam Drain Life to stay alive in early progression or if you have healers dead during a raid encounter.