PvE Destruction 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 most useful addons & macros to be the best Warlock you can be!

Addons

General

The subsequent 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.

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 Destruction Warlock we mostly want to keep track of our diverse short duration cooldowns and proc effect. On top of that there is also the usual stuff that we want to keep track off such as our damage over time abilities and normal cooldowns or buffs.

We want to ideally keep track of all the possible buffs we get that increase our damage, as such that we can proc our buff cooldowns in turn to increase the overall damage gained. Stuff like Glyphs of Life Tap, Potion of Wild Magic, spell power trinket, Blood Fury, Embroidery, etc. or buffs gained from external sources such as Trick of the Trades, focus Magic, Bloodlust, etc…

Other important Destruction-specific cooldowns to keep track of are Conflagrate, Chaos Bolt, and Shadowfury. 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. There are also buffs that we gain most importantly Backdraft, Empowered Imp and Pyroclasm (possible Backlash).

Aside from keeping track of all these relevant cooldowns and buffst, it is also great to keep track of our damage-over-time abilities to efficiently anticipate when we need to refresh a debuff that is about to fall off. This would include things like our curses, Immolate, Conflag, Curse of Agony / Curse of Doom.

Macros

Essential

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

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 main rotation spells we can mostly negate this issue. Simply replace [SPELL NAME], with the spells of your liking.

[@pettarget] can be left out, this causes the macro only to work if your imp is already fighting and prevents them from changing target.

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)

Firestone

#showtooltip
/cast Create Firestone
/use Grand Firestone
/use 16
/click StaticPopup1Button1

This macro allows us to use a single keybind for creating and applying our Firestone.

 

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.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Scroll to Top