PvE Demonology Warlock Addons & Macros

world of warcraft macro screen

Beyond directly making your character stronger through talents, equipment, enchants, etc, there are two more things you can use to improve your performance as a player: addons & macros. It cannot be understated how much of an impact they can have on your gameplay — increasing your DPS or healing by a large percentage, preventing you from dying, etc. You will need the best addons & macros to be the best Warlock you can be!

Addons

General

The following addons are relevant for every player, independent of your function inside raids:

  • DeadlyBossMods – This allows you to track boss abilities. A must-have for raiding.
  • BigWigs – Functions the same as DBM but is slightly more lightweight.
  • Details – Shows you how much damage, healing, etc everyone in your raid is doing. Flex on your friends!

Warlock-specific addons that can help us or are convenient quality of life tools.

  • SoulSort – Soulshard management can be a relative pain, especially when Drain soul is our finisher, this largely takes care of that by deleting soul shards at a set amount.
  • Cast Bar – This is also related to Drain Soul, we want to be able to keep track of exactly when the damage will tick. The reason for this is those are the moments you want to break the channel if you got to refresh a debuff or snapshot some spell

WeakAuras

WeakAuras is a versatile addon with almost limitless possibilities. It allows you to install mini-addons created by other players, which are confusingly also called “WeakAuras”, to perform specific tasks, such as tracking the cooldown of a spell, having a visual or audio notification when something procs, giving you a warning when a boss uses an ability, etc. You can find WeakAuras that suit your needs on wago.io. It’s strongly recommended that you use WeakAuras; they’re a huge quality of life boost.

As a Demonology Warlock, we have a lot of things that we want to potentially track to maximize the spell power that Demonic Pact provides. On top of that, we want to keep up to date with normal cooldowns and internal cooldowns where applicable. Once more good WeakAuras are available I will post them here. 

For Demonic Pact it is important we keep track of our current spell power (Glyphs of Life Tap, Potion of Wild Magic, spell power trinket, Blood Fury, Embroidery), how much spell power the current Demonic Pact provides, the remaining duration and the internal cooldown before it can proc again. In the same vein, pet management is incredibly important, you want to keep track of whether your pet is currently attacking, at odds of proccing Demonic Pact, or is standing ready, waiting to strike.

Other important Demonology-specific cooldowns to keep track of are Metamorphosis, Molten Core, Decimation, and Demonic Empowerment, Each of these has an impact on our gameplay when they pop up or come off cooldown. You can find more information about all this in the Rotation section of this guide.

Aside from keeping track of all these relevant cooldowns and our spell power amount, it is also great to keep track of our damage-over-time abilities and normal cooldowns to efficiently anticipate when we can pop a cooldown or need to refresh a debuff that is about to fall off. This would include things like our curses, Corruption, Immolate, Conflag (incase of the Hybrid Spec), teleport (whether we are in range or not), etc…

Macros

Essential

These macros will help you significantly, potentially increasing your DPS by a modest amount.

Shadowcleave Instant Cast

#showtooltip Shadowflame
/cast Shadowflame
/cast Shadow Cleave(Demon)

Shadow cleave can be combined with instant cast abilities, this gives us a tad bit extra damage essentially free of cost. Note that this only applies to instant cast spells (such as Shadowflame, Corruption, Curses,…) as channeled/ spells with a cast time won’t allow for the instant queue.

Metamorphosis, Immolation Aura and Cleave

#showtooltip Metamorphosis
/use [mod:shift] Potion of Wild Magic
/use [mod:shift] 13
/use [mod:shift] 14
/cast !Metamorphosis
/cast Immolation Aura(Demon)
/cast Shadow Cleave(Demon)
/cast [mod:shift] cqs

All of these can be combined into a single button and will all activate at once, setting you up for a great time in your demon form. Note that you need to be already in position once you use this, or else you will be losing out on precious Immolation Aura time. It can be beneficial to use Immolation Aura separately from this macro to give yourself more control when to use it, for example when a AOE pack is about to show up a bit later, or on pull if you want to get your DOTs up first to give the tank some more time to get threat.

You can also consider adding your Potion use or trinket into this macro, with or without a modifier key as to give you more options. Most often if we use Metamorphosis it is a good idea to make use of our other cooldowns as well in order to enjoy the multiplicative benefit of having multiple cooldowns going at once.

The ¨!¨ before Metamorphosis makes it so that if you double press this macro it won’t cancel your precious Metamorphosis.

Fel Domination Summon Combo

#showtooltip
/cast Fel Domination
/cast Summon Felguard
/cqs

Allows you to instantly summon the demon of your choice with a single push of the button, you can substitute “Felguard” for any of your pets. If Fel Domination is on cooldown you will simply normal summon your pet.

Demonic Empowerment Filler Combo

#showtooltip [SPELL NAME]
/cast [@pettarget,exists]Demonic Empowerment
/cast [SPELL NAME]

We want to use Demonic Empowerment as frequently as possible. A good method to do so is by binding it to our filler spells, as such we will never forget about it and we don’t need to really keep track of it ourselves. Simple replace [SPELL NAME], with either Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, or Soul Fire.

Imp Spell Queuing

#showtooltip [SPELL NAME]
/cast [@pettarget]Firebolt
/cast [SPELL NAME]

Ever since Classic first came out, the Imp always has had the need for a bit of extra attention if we want him to chain cast Firebolt. The reason for this is that the imp waits for confirmation from the game server that he finished his previous cast before casting the next one. This delay can result in a significant amount of downtime along the way, this will be most noticeable for the Hybrid Demonology spec which plays with a buffed and pimped-out machine gun imp. By including Firebolt in our filler spells we can mostly negate this issue. Simple replace [SPELL NAME], with either Shadow Bolt, Incinerate, or Soul Fire.

Focus & Mouseover Spells

#showtooltip Curse of Agony
/cast [@focus,mod:alt][@mouseover,mod:ctrl][@target] Curse of Agony

When multi-dotting, cleaving or moving it can be of great importance to quickly switch between targets. This macro allows you to do so without having to strive away from your main target. If you hold down the CTRL key you will cast the spell on whatever target is under your cursor. If you hold down ALT, it will instead be cast on the focus target that you have set up. When you don’t hold down any modifier it will be cast on your current target.

This macro can be adjusted to fit any of your spells, simply change the name of the spell.

Spammable Channeled Spells

#showtooltip Drain Life
/cast [nochanneling:Drain Life] Drain Life

This makes it so that channeled spells can be spammed without recasting them. This prevents unnecessary refreshing / mana wasting. This works for any channeled spell be it Drain Life, Drain Soul, Hellfire.

Cancel Queue Spell & Potion Combination

/use Mana Potion
/cast Shadow Bolt
/cqs

Cqs cancels the queued spell. Which instead of the spell casting asap, it casts when you press the macro AFTER the gcd / previous spell finishes resolving. The purpose of cqs is to force us into that state and allow for non-gcd items and abilities to be popped without being locked in a queued spell state for multiple casts.

Without cqs, you’d be hard-pressed to have the mana potion resolve while spamming the macro. This is because spell queueing will “lock in” the first spell pressed 0.4s before the next available cast, effectively skipping the mana potion. Do not use /cqs without [mod] in your normal filler or it introduces this space into EVERY cast of the filler.

Utility

Soulstone

/castsequence reset=600 Create Soulstone, soulstone, soulstone
/use Demonic Soulstone

This makes it so that we can use one single keybind for the creation and use of soulstones. Just make sure to replace the name of the /use by your max rank soulstone.

Enslave Marker

/run  m = 1; t = "target"; if GetRaidTargetIndex(t) == nil then SetRaidTarget(t,m) end;
/cast Enslave Demon

This macro marks the target you are about to enslave based on the number provided. If the target is already marked with another mark (because someone else is about to Enslave them, also using this macro) you will get a warning, knowing you don’t need to finish your Enslave cast.

Change m = 1 to your assigned raid marker (1-8)

 

About the Author

Zephan

I am a Classic Warlock enthusiast and in general like theorycrafting. I am the owner and admin of the best community in the whole wide world, being the Classic Warlock Discord. This is the home of some of the best Warlocks in this game and the basis for theorycrafting and figuring out the optimal plays for us warlocks. My aim is to make sure this up-to-date information is out there everywhere to be found and to give back to the community.
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