Warlock Tips and Tricks

Over my time playing a warlock and analyzing the class’ play style, I’ve acquired some handy tricks to help me along the way. These aren’t generally combat-related, but tend to help when questing and grinding in PvE.

Life Tap and First Aid

Most inventive warlocks figure this one out early on. Thanks to the Life Tap ability, anything that restores health can be used to indirectly restore mana as well. This makes First Aid an absolute gem of a profession to pick up, especially if you’re not a tailor. Make sure you’re in a safe area, spam your Life Tap, then bandage yourself. So long as you have a steady supply of cloth, you’ll never need food or water, not to mention the benefits to grinding efficiency.

It’s worth noting that you can never kill yourself through Life Tap alone, so don’t be concerned about hitting the button one too many times. The worst that will happen is the ability won’t work with an indication that, “You don’t have enough health.” Of course, you can easily be killed by a small amount of damage for a short period of time, so make sure you’re not going to get hit by anything before doing this.

“The Warlock’s Way Down”

I figured this one out when sneaking into Thousand Needles from the Barrens. If you need to get to the bottom of a steep fall, just make sure to have your Soulstone up. It’s not as good as the mage’s Slow Fall, but it gets the job done. Just jump, die, and pop yourself back up with the Soulstone. Sure, you’ll take some equipment damage, but at least you’re not stuck at the top any more.

Camp-running with a Voidwalker

Many quests in the game require you to pick up an item out of a densely-populated camp of mobs. Thankfully, warlocks have an easy way to manage this without needing a party to kill them all. Just send your voidwalker in to aggro the whole camp. While it’s distracting everything, run in behind it and grab the item you need. When it’s about to die or you’ve got the item, sacrifice it and run away. Chances are good that you’ll take no damage, and you’ll only be out one soul shard for the convenience.

Imp Parking

I didn’t become aware of this tactic until I ran Molten Core for the first time. In a large-scale raid, warlocks are often grouped with tanks so the tanks can benefit from Blood Pact. Of course, it is often necessary for casters and other ranged or low-health characters to stand back from large bosses, rendering this benefit useless to the up-close-and-personal tanks.

Essentially, you put your imp on passive, activate its Phase Shift ability, go to the location where your tank is planning on doing his or her thing, and then use the Stay command. Congratulations, you’ve just turned your imp into a persistent stamina totem. You can engage the boss from a safe distance while still letting the tank enjoy the benefits of Blood Pact.