Finishing the Affliction Leveling 40-70

By know you should be pretty familiar with how to play as an Affliction Warlock and don't need me to baby you with spell rotations and how to drain tank or when to use which pet. You just want to know what talent points are important to finish it up till lvl 70. So I am going to speed things up and finish the leveling guide of an Affliction Lock.

Your first priority is probably to get Unstable Affliction. This will require you to spend 10 more points into Affliction. You have to put 5/5 into Contagion. The other 5 can be used in Improved Howl Terror (very nice for solo leveling or PVP) and maybe a few more in Shadow Embrace. Or you may want to pick up Amplify Curse and Curse of Exhaustion (CoEx), if you haven't already. I personally do not like kiting as a Warlock - there are so many other, better, tactics that a Warlock can use, so I do not recommend CoEx. You could also put points into Grim Reach as the extra distance can be helpful. Since we are mostly drain-tanking, I skipped Grim Reach for now and went with Shadow Embrace to lessen the amount of damage I take. You can now grab Unstable Affliction.

At lvl 50 you should now have a build that is similar to this: 41/0/0

At this point, you can go several different ways to supplement your Affliction talents. You could go Destruction to increase your DPS or Demonology to increase your survivability. Or you could split points between the two. You can also respec and go full Demonology, but that's for a different post. Assuming you are staying Affliction, here is what I would recommend.

Demonology Route

5/5 in Demonic Embrace
3/3 in Fel Intellect

These increase your stamina and intellect respectively, which are very nice things to increase.

3/3 in Improved Imp

I would now abandon the succubus and use the Imp as your pet of choice to simply act as a mana battery and buff your health. Most of your DPS is coming from you anyway and you should be very effective at drain-tanking that there is very little need for the succubus. If you feel comfortable, you can start using the Imp earlier - results will vary - but at this point I definitely can say from experience that it is easy to level with the Imp.

3/3 Demonic Aegis
3/3 Fel Stamina

These buff your HP and Fel Armor, which as a result buffs your drain life ability.

Remaining points in Grim Reach or Shadow Embrace or whatever.

You are now lvl 70 and should have a build similar to this 45/16/0

The beauty of this build is that you have buffed your stamina and HP in a number of different ways and buffed your ability to drain life that you should be able to outlast just about anything. You have many DoTs at your disposal. You have tricks like instant Howl of Terror to use when you get into trouble. With this build you can easily take on and survive a group of mobs by just dotting them all up and drain tanking till they are dead.

A typically you can toss Siphon Life, COA, and Corruption on each mob. Then drain tank the last mob if you are sure the DOTs are enough to kill the mob. Otherwise drain tank the first mob to finish it off and cycle down each one. Keep using Dark Pact to keep your mana up. You can take on multiple mobs at the same time and pull new ones before current ones are completely dead and keep doing it for quite a while usually.

It's very fast and effective fighting. I once was farming Motes of Fire, which as you may know, typically involves racing 10 other farms to be the first to pull a mob and get credit for it. I would try to pull any and every mob I could and worry about actually surviving it later. I noticed that I would be able to kill 5x or more as many mobs as everyone else I was fighting with. In particular, I noticed a Paladin. I kid you not, I was able to kill 10-12 mobs in the time it took him to get one down. And I didn't even have to sit down to eat/drink afterwords. It's quite powerful.

Destruction Route

5/5 Improved Shadowbolt
5/5 Bane

These two talents make your shadowbolts better by decreasing their casting time and allowing them to add a debuff to the mob if they crit. This debuff will increase shadow damage by 20% which can be a lot of damage if you have a bunch of DOTs up and begin to drain-tank. These talents are absolutely essential to raiding as a Warlock. Thus if you plan to raid, you may wish to start getting used to using Shadowbolt more often.

You can now get 5/5 in Devastation or put some points into Demonology. Shadowburn is an option, as is Destructive Reach and Intensity.

At 70 your build might look something like this 41/0/20


Alternatives

Alternatively you can choose to lose Unstable Affliction (or skip it altogether) and go after Ruin. The thought here is that since mobs are dying so fast that you don't even need to use all your DOTs on a single mob, why bother having the extra DOTs in the first place? Instead you can open your attack with a couple Shadowbolts and then Drain-tank to finish. Or Fear and DOT and use SBolt to pull another mob and repeat.

Affliction w/Ruin 40/0/21

You can also, of course, split points evenly amongst all 3 talent trees. I don't particularly find this to result in anything especially effective or interesting, but maybe you will. Some people might find a way to put points into Improved Voidwalker and use a tank-and-spank strategy. I find this to be dull, not actually as good or easy as you would think, and just overall less powerful.

Of these Affliction builds, I would say 45/16/0 is the best for leveling. But be forewarned, this is NOT an acceptable, or even effective, raid spec. Don't get used to it if you plan to raid and then ignorantly stick with it as you move into raiding. Use it to get to 70 and begin preparing for end game raiding, but do not actually use it for raiding.