Mana Efficiency? Damage Efficiency? Help!! (Leveling a Warlock 36-70)

[Thralock]

Leveling affliction was always a breeze.

SOLOING:
With basic draintanking:
Open with Unstable Affliction (1.5s cast) or Immolate if you don't have UA.
Curse of Agony (instant)
Corruption (instant)
Life Tap (ONLY IF FULL LIFE)
Drain Life
Drain Soul for mana return (not a effective since % of mana came into effect).
Dark pact
Life tap.

KEY thing is to NOT BE AFRAID OF HAVING health/mana 90% or below when moving from easy mob to mob. This is part of your efficiency. Removing the LT cooldown ultimately means more damage done and less damage taken.

I found the succubus best for leveling (does own dps and can CC if required - yes she was fragile, but you are the one tanking anyway).

I'm leveling in a group with a rogue and a paladin.

This is a key piece of information. If this is the case, mobs will die WAY too fast and dots are ineffective. Measure the amount of time that each mob stays alive on average. A rogue, pally have massive burst, your dots won't do anything - a mob will live <5seconds. Just Shadowbolt, or Drain Soul and top of with dark pact when require.... or just let them do the work =p

[Amanita]

Here's an alternative approach to Affliction leveling talents. The big problem is that most of the talents are useless at lower levels, so talent selection is a matter of making the best of a bad situation.



Some brief comments on the candidate talents (based on early LEVELLING value):

• Imp Curse of Agony: useful
• Supression: Helps you fight higher-level mobs by buffing +hit, but it's Affliction only - doesn't affect SB. Second-rate talent.
• Imp Corruption - Not great, especially at first, but it does buff your damage.
• Frailty - useless
• Imp Drain Soul: Very weak talent. It's relevant only if you can afford to Drain the mob, which happens when you're ok for mana and HP. Note that you have to take it later, for hard instances, due to the threat reduction.
• Imp Life Tap. Weak, but has some value.
• Soul Siphon. Weak, because you won't have a lot of effects on the mob early on. Some value
• Imp Fear - good.
• Fel Concentration - not worth much now that the mechanics of Spell Pushback have been changed. Note that it does not affect Fear. You can't DrainTank effectively until you have a lot of Spell Power - it will become relatively more useful later on
• Amp Curse - not great, but it's a pre-req for CoEx and it's handy sometimes
• Grim Reach - Doesn't affect SB. Ok for PvP, low value for leveling
• Nightfall - FUN and useful. Get the Glyph too.
• Emp Corruption - Good
• Shadow Embrace - weak - get 1 for the small buff to Soul Siphon
• Siphon Life - good, but uses a lot of mana, and it's only good if it runs for most of it's *30* sec duration. Use carefully.
• CoEx - good
• Imp Felhunter - I have no idea what Blizzard is doing with minions, nor why there's a minion buff in the middle of the Affliction tree. No comment on this talent.
• Shadow Mastery - good

After this you're at Dark Pact.

If you use this as guidance you'll find the tree is badly messed up and you have to get some rubbish talents anyway. Here's a possble path:

This will get you to the 4th level of the tree.
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

More rubbish to get you down two more levels:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

And done:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The selections among rubbish talents were kinda random - if you like the look of another one feel free to take it. I went for the threat reduction on Imp DS because it will come in useful now and again.
And remember - my comments are specific to your situation (L40ish, Afflock, leveling fast with friends). You have to completely re-spec when you get to endgame levels, and some talents I've written off here will be necessary then.

Some comments about Mana Efficiency:

Life Tap isn't so good if you are taking damage because then it's using up a very important resource - HP. You can get HP back with Drain Life and Soul Siphon, but if you're turning it back into mana, you'd better be getting more back than you spend! Drain Life uses a *lot* of mana. SL takes *30* seconds to deliver full value.

Check out the efficiency of those two spells by looking very carefully at your Battle Log. recheck every time you get a big gear upgrade. Also ask your Healer friend to check out how much HP they can give you for 1 point of mana. (and look at CoEx mana cost too

If you're not into analysis, here's a sequence where you will get reasonable value from SL. Try this on the mob you Fear:
Nuke, Fear, CoEx, (maybe run after mob ...), SL, Curse of Agony, Corr (depending on timing, I sometimes refresh CoEx, re-fear, then Curse of Agony)
Next mob (or the one a minon is holding for you): Everything except SL, because you'll try to kill this one fast.

For an Afflock, VW is nearly useless for holding a mob, but just after they get their next level of Suffering (x0 levels) they can tank ok for a couple of levels. Then you can send in VW, put an SL on, maybe more DoT(s), and either go for another mob, or wait till a good moment and Drain the one the VW has (CoEx it first because it will probably come for you).

Final comment: all these nubs claiming they have zero downtime leave out the fact that they stop to loot the downed mobs. Don't try to achieve a play style that's based on a nub lie.
Affliction is a *great* leveling spec, and you really don't have to stop a lot, but you won't be killing so effectively you'll need one of your friends following you full-time to loot the mobs for you
Even with good gear and iHoT, actively fighting more than 3 mobs isn't worth the effort. You won't be able to keep all of them in sight, so you'll waste time searching for lost ones to loot them. Every now and again a feared mob will bring back some angry friends, so you'll still get plenty of chances to see if you can handle yourself in a hard fight