If there’s one spec in particular that feels like learning to play two, depending on whether you’re up against a single enemy or a pack of them, it’s Demonology Warlock. It’s so much fun, though, and with this guide, I’ll walk you through how to spin your basic rotation in both cases.
It’s important to note that this is a basic guide, and I won’t be going into some specific cases and situations that advanced players get themselves into. This will be your starting point, and from there, you wanna learn more about the spec and look for additional resources to make it work.
Demonology Single Target Rotation
We’ll start off with the single target rotation, and this is the one you’ll use with the set of talents you can see here:
You don’t need any particular Legendaries for it, but having a Fel Commando conduit to go along with it is what you should do.
You’ll start off with Demonbolt, and you wanna pre-cast it 4 seconds before the pull, assuming you’re in a raid or any boss environment. Then, you wanna cast your covenant ability, for example if you’re Night Fae, that would be Soul Rot, if you’re Kyrian, that’s your Scouring, and you typically want to refresh this on every cooldown.
Then, cast your Grimoire: Felguard, followed by your Summon Vilefiend. If you don’t have any Soul Shards after that, you’ll use your Shadow Bolts to generate Soul Shards, but assuming you’re at the beginning of combat, that may not be necessary just yet. Think of it as your filler spell and one of your two main Shard generators.
What you need your Shards for is the Call Dreadstalkers, and you’ll spam the Hand of Gul’dan right after that to empty your shards.
After this, you’ll cast Summon Demonic Tyrant into another set of imps with Shadow Bolt and Hand of Gul’Dan, followed by Demonic Strength, and that’s pretty much your single target opener.
When it comes to keeping this up, you want to hold your Tyrant cooldown for whenever there’s a Grimoire: Felguard available. Those two will always go together. If for some reason that’s not possible or not optimal, get your Tyrant up when you’ve got 6 Wild Imps, the Dreadstalkers, and the Vilefiend, and this is something you should be able to do easily. Generally, you’ll summon your Vilefiend on every cooldown, as well as the Dreadstalkers. Apart from that, your main priority is to generate shards with Shadow Bolt and Demon Bolt, and spend them on Hand of Gul’dan and the occasional cooldowns.
Demonology Multi Target Rotation
As per the multi-target rotation, I’ll show you a different build, as you’ll pretty much be doing the same stuff as in the single-target one if you’re talented that way.
With a Mythic+ dog build you see up here, you’ll do things differently. This build is very interesting because it works well with a particular legendary, the Wilfred’s Superior Summoning, and it revolves around getting as many Imps and Dreadstalkers out as possible, followed by imploding your little creatures for a crazy amount of damage. This is what I personally use for Mythic+ and according to many players right now, it works a lot better than the generic build. Also, if you’re going for this one, replace the Fel Commando conduit for Carnivorous Dreadstalkers, and if you have Wilfred’s legendary, you can talent yourself into Grimoire: Felguard as well. If you don’t, but still want to play this, just go for the Shard generation and pick the Soul Conduit.
Your main task when facing a multi-target environment is to maximize the damage from your Implosion, with 2-3 waves of imps depending on your Demonic Core procks, by imploding your imps before they expire. If you fail to do that, you won’t be dealing damage, so try to do it.
You’ll start off with Demon Bolt, just like you would on a single target to build shards. You’re also gonna want to cast your covenant ability and refresh it on every cooldown, which in my case is Soul Rot. If you have the Wilfred’s legendary, you should be talented into Grimoire: Felguard, and you wanna cast it next, and you can fill your Shards up with Shadow Bolt to go with Dreadstalkers next, assuming you don’t have a free proc. After the dogs, you wanna Implode here regardless of how many Imps you’ve got, so go ahead and do that, and then spend your Shards on Hand of Gul’dan. Here, it’s a good idea to Summon Demonic Tyrant to buff your demons. Assuming you’re out of Shards by now, fill them up with Shadow bolt or Demon Bolt with a proc, and then quickly cast another Hand of Gul’dan while your Tyrant is still active. You should have some nice sets of Imps there and you want to go with Implosion, while From The Shadows debuff is still active. And that’s pretty much it. Summon dogs on every cooldown, align Felguard and Tyrant cooldowns whenever you can, grind the shards for Hand of Gul’dan and Implode when you’ve got a couple of Imp sets, and just spin that forever basically.
And that’s it when it comes to single target and multi target rotation. It sounds a bit complicated at first, but it’s super easy to get into the flow and track the things you need to track so you can do more damage and play better. If you’ve got any tips or suggestions of your own, leave them in the comments, and if you’re more of a visual type, and you don’t mind getting easy wins in WoW, you can check out all of this in my video – and subscribe for more awesome WoW stuff!
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