Blood Pact: Locked and loaded

Between Arenas, V'Ming spends his time as a lock laughing ominously in AV, tanking Olm with his own minions and pondering troll fashion from Zul'Aman.
Sweet 70! Time to rest on your shadowy laurels, or press on into "endgame"? Stripping it down, WoW endgame is raiding and PvP. You may have reputations to grind, heroic instances to run and daily quests to complete, but raiding is truly the only way to experience content you haven't seen before, at least from the perspective of a Warlock. Similarly, PvP - with unpredictable opponents, ever-changing scenarios and the thrill of competition - is another way to keep things fresh and challenging.

Most players engage in a little bit of everything, and the choice really lies with you. Since The Burning Crusade, PvP has become a good alternative means of progression, with rewards that rival those from PvE. Many raiders also dip into PvP as a reliable source of gear upgrades to improve their raid performance.

Regardless of what you choose to focus on, the game at 70 definitely involves more group work. If you have soloed all the way to 70, your lone wolf days are over, if you wish to progress further. Let's look at some of endgame expectations for warlocks.

Getting into a guild
Endgame is all about group work. A guild should ideally offer you like-minded individuals to play with, and thus progress with. Keep these in mind while looking for a guild:

• Is the guild's objective in line with yours? Are the guild member focusing on PvP or raids? Can you work your goals around them?
• What stage of progression is the guild at? If the guild is already working on The Eye, your fresh 70 toon would definitely be out of place. While a few established level 70s might help you out, can you really count on having nine such players consistently helping you with Karazhan?
• When does the guild play? Obviously you want a guild that is largely online when you play. At the same time, you also want to be able to consistently show up for raids. Many raids fall apart simply because of no-shows.
• Can you fit into the guild's culture? Are guildmates friends or more like colleagues?

As with any real life group situation, it's not only about the guild serving your needs. What do you have to offer the guild in return: contributing mats? Voluntarily helping other guildies? Or just simply showing up on time for scheduled events consistently?

Gear

Love it or hate it, gear is a large component of your PvP and PvE performance. Getting a good set of pre-Karazhan gear from PvE or crafting should be your immediate priority.Battlegrounds and Arenas are also good ways to get great gear for both PvP and raiding.

A PvE warlock's most important stats are: spell damage, spell hit, spell crit and spell haste. Spell hit is generally an easier way to increase DPS than spell crit, up till its cap of 202 for raid bosses (more doesn't help). Warlocks who have 5/5 Suppression need a spell hit rating of just 76 to maximize the chance of their DoTs landing on raid bosses, although they'll probably want more as Suppression does not affect shadow bolts and other destruction spells. Spell haste benefits Destruction warlocks the most, by shortening the cast time of their nukes. A spell haste of 15.7 improves your casting time by 1%, but obviously does nothing for instant spells.

As a pre-Karazhan Warlock, you should aim for a spell damage of about 700 (with Fel Armor), a crit chance in the early teens, and a 30-ish spell hit rating.

PvP warlocks focus on a different set of stats: stamina, resilience, and spell damage/crit. Since you're fighting targets of equal level (other players), you need a spell hit rating of just 38 to achieve the 3% needed to max out your hit chance at 99%. For affliction locks, just 2 points in Suppression (2% spell hit per talent point) will max out the hit chance for affliction spells.

Naturally, your choice of gems and enchantments should be focused on these respective stats. Some obvious gem choices are Veiled Noble Topaz and Runed Living Ruby. ConsiderSteady Talasite and Solid Star of Elune for your PvP gear. You may also want uncommonequivalents of these gems. Chaotic Skyfire Diamond is a good metagem choice for destruction and demonology locks, while Swift Starfire Diamond is great for afflliction locks.

Raid DPS

Your main job in a raid is to kill stuff. To have an idea of how you are performing, get a damage meter like SWStats. A DPSer playing without a damage meter is like a driver racing without a speedometer. A damage meter isn't meant to stroke your DPS epeen - it's a tool to show you where you are, with respect to other DPSers. It also highlights problems: if your total damage and DPS is significantly lower than other similarly geared DPSers, it means you're not fully exploiting what your class can do. 

Generally warlocks should be among the top five in the DPS charts. If you're not, look at other warlocks: how are they specced? How are they geared? What enchantments and gems do they have? Talk to them about their spell cycles.

A DPS discussion is never complete without talking about its evil twin - threat. The Warlock has one of the highest threat-to-damage ratios. In other words, for an equal amount of damage, the Warlock can generate more threat than other DPSers. An overzealous Warlock can pull aggro from the tank, leading to his or her demise at best, or at its worst, wiping the raid. Get a threat meter like Omen, and learn to use Soulshatter pro-actively to correct your threat level before bad things happen. Using soulshatter intelligently can also maximize your damage output.

Raid utility

As a Warlock, you offer more than DPS to the raid. Expect to do crowd control, whether it's seduce, banish, enslave, fear-kiting or even pet off-tanking. Be aware of your CC limitations and durations; you're generally expected to still deliver damage, even while you're CCing.

Some raid encounters will demand very specific abilities from warlocks - don't be caught not having a critical spell on your interface. Learn the encounters and have the appropriate pet summoned all the time - don't let the raid play the game for you.

Offer healthstones without being asked, particularly before a boss encounter. Soulstone a rezzer intelligently, keeping in mind that soulstones aren't only for wipe recovery, but for battle rezzing as well. In certain situations, the raid will benefit more with a soulstone on a Druid, on a squishier DPSer like a Mage, or even yourself!

Work out curse assignments among warlocks, especially debuffs like Curse of Elements, Shadow, Exhaustion, Weakness and Recklessness. A separate Warlock channel is great for this purpose. Remember that what benefits the raid benefits you as well - don't get DPS tunnel vision.

Lichborne: Death knight leveling 68-80

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's column for all things deathly, knightly, and death knightly.

So, death knight. You're through with Outland. You just dinged 68 in Nagrand and want to move on to whiter, snow covered pastures. Maybe those pastures are in Northrend. Maybe those pastures are in Alterac Valley. Either way, let's discuss getting through those final levels and pushing you through to the end game.

Gear

So if you've read our previous Death Knight leveling guide, you may have picked up an upgrade or two. Then again, you may have decided to keep your starting gear because it looks so awesome, which is cool. However, once you hit Northrend, that gear's going to start looking pretty weak. Luckily, you'll have a wealth of quest gear to grab. 

You can starting by checking out our Northrend Starting Zone Gear Guide from a while back. If you need a sum up of that, the basics are that Borean Tundra has a great blue 2-handed axe reward, so you should probably quest for that first. After that, Borean Tundra has more straight strength and critical strike rating on its gear, while Howling Fjord has more haste and armor penetration. You can probably level up in either pretty safely, though I went with Howling Fjord simply because I enjoyed the story lines there more. Haste turns out to be good for Unholy, and Armor Penetration for Blood, so the gear there is actually a bit better than it might first appear to the untrained eye.

Once you've kitted yourself out in the basic gear, you should be able to get to level 80 relatively easy, grabbing minor upgrades you go. We'd be here all day if I went over every zone, but there are a few things I can recommend you focus on: 

• First, do the Wrathgate quest line in Dragonblight. By the time it's over, you'll have a few new blue upgrades a nice trinket in addition to having experienced the best quest line in all of Warcraft.
• Secondly, do all of the Kalu'ak reputation quests in Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, and Dragonblight. Once you complete those and do a couple rounds of dailies, you'll be at revered, meaning you have a nice new breastplate or two waiting at 76 and a new 2-handed weapon waiting at 78.
• Thirdly, once you hit level 77, head to Krasus' Landing and take the free taxi to theArgent Tournament. The sooner you start on the dailies, the sooner you can start earning Champion's Seals, which should provide you with some nice weapon and armor upgrades once you hit 80.

Leveling the PvP Way

I thought I should make mention of PvP leveling possibilities since it is the new hotness. While the Patch 3.2.2 adjustments did cool down the gain a bit, you can still get 10-12k experience per a tower burning in Alterac Valley (before heirloom adjustments), so it's at least a good break from questing.

The main thing to remember about leveling as PvP is that unless you're twinked out, you're going to be sort of squishy from around levels 70-75. This means that if possible, you may want to find other ways of helping the offensive than charging headlong into the onrushing Horde. You can keep an eagle eye on flags and interrupt any Horde capturers until the more powerful members of your team can defeat them - one point of damage prevents a flag capture. Also, don't be afraid to use Chains of Ice, Strangulate, and other crowd control and interruption skills to help shut down casters. 

Also, you may want to review my PvP tips for death knights. While the specs mentioned are a little outdated, and the tips still refer primarily to level 80s, you should find something in there you can adapt to the situation.

Skill Check: Old Skills

As far as talent trees go, all three can be used successfully for leveling, but a Blood/Unholy build is probably going to be the quickest and easiest to level, with great damage and self-healing. That said, I leveled as Unholy and found the experience enjoyable, and even Frost should be able to muddle through.

Your best bet for leveling quickly is to get a good rotation down. Essentially, you want to get both your diseases up. Then, you want to hit your Frost/Unholy strike (Death Strike for Blood,Scourge Strike for Unholy, Obliterate for Frost), then hit a couple Blood Strikes (or Heart Strikes if you're Blood), followed by your runic power dump. Then, you can start over again. Always make sure your diseases are up, since they will increase the damage of your strikes, and if you use Death Runes in your build, use those to unleash your most powerful runic strike (Heart Strike for Blood, Obliterate for Frost. This used to be Scourge Strike for Unholy, but end game Unholy builds currently eschew Death Runes and just start the whole disease cycle over again).

If you're AEing, the basic idea should be to get down your diseases, use Pestilence to spread them, and then use the remaining three runes for a Death and Decay. This will change a bit depending on your spec and role (for example, if you're DPSing in a group, be careful not to pull aggro off the tank with that DnD), but this method should be fine for solo DPSing up to 80.

Both of the above are very much the basics of rotation, and in the raid and heroic game somethings will change, but these basic methods will get you to 80, at least. Now, let's check on some of the other skills you'll getting as you head toward 80.

New Skills

Rune Strike: While you technically get this at level 67, I feel it's important enough to point out -- you need this skill.

Anti-Magic Shell: This level 68 skill is often overlooked, but it can be very useful both for tanking and DPS. Not only does it take the brunt of magical damage, but it provides extra runic power. If you're fighting magic using enemies and you have the runic power, put this up just before they send a spell your way or cast an AoE that you'll get caught in. Not only will you take a lot less damage, but you'll find yourself with a bit of extra runic power. Good death knights learn to use this well.

Rune of the Fallen Crusader: This comes along at level 70. You should probably head straight back to Ebon Hold, learn it, and apply it to your weapon. It's the undisputed king of enchantments for Blood and Unholy DPS, and even Frost builds will generally use this on their main hand, with Razorice for the offhand. 

Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: This one's pretty simple. If you're tanking and having trouble hitting the defense cap, using this enchant (or the one-handed version coming with Patch 3.3). If not, the parry enchant will probably serve you better. 

Unholy Presence: If you're an Unholy Death Knight with low haste, you may find this presence useful for fitting in a proper rotation. It's also a easy way to get a quick burst of speed if, say, you're running deep into a dungeon after wiping. For the most part, though, Blood Presence will be the superior DPS presence.

Raise Ally: This is a nice little bonus if you're in the middle of a big battle, an ally has fallen, and the Druid's battle rez is on cooldown. That said, the Ghoul raised with this ability will probably be a bit weak. Still, it's better than nothing.

Empower Rune Weapon: This ability comes along at level 75. It will put all your runes off cooldown and grab you a chunk of runic power. In short, it's the perfect burst ability. In PvP or PvE, if something needs to go down fast, get off your first set of abilities, and while most of your runes are on cooldown and your runic power near depleted, hit this cooldown and lay into your target with a fresh set of strikes. Never underestimate this ability.

Army of the Dead: This level 80 ability can be both a help and hindrance. It's a great emergency button because it not only grants you extra protection while you summon, but the Ghouls taunt, peeling mobs off you and giving you time to bandage or Death Strike. They're also a surprisingly good amount of damage. Of course, they also have a downside. Since they taunt, they can peel off the tank if you're in a group. If a monster is tauntable and needs to be positioned a certain way (such as if he has a frontal cleave or cone AE spell), your ghouls can make life hell for the group, dragging the target all over the place. Take a little time to study your prey, though, and you should be able to determine if Army of the Dead is safe to cast.

Once You Hit 80

Once you hit 80, you know what time it is: Time to gear up again. Luckily, we already have a few good articles for you. 

• To get an idea of basic tank gear for heroic tanking, check out this article.
• To get an idea of basic tank gear to start in on Naxxramas, check out this article
• To get an idea of basic DPS gear to start in on Naxxramas, check out this article.
• Then understand that all three of the above articles were written before the advent of the 5-man coliseum, and read up on our Coliseum loot articles for tanks and DPS. Your best loot will always come out of the coliseum, at least until Patch 3.3 comes out.

Once you have some gear under your belt (and don't forget to enchant it!), a lot of different options will open up to you. You can choose a tradeskill if you haven't already, or decide on your dual specs. Then it's off to raid, PvP, run dungeons, and do all that other good stuff, and that's when it's time to start hitting the rest of the Lichborne articles. We'll see you at the end game!