A Warlock is quite an easy character to level. With a Demon Pet at his side and a wide array of damage, fear and AoE spells a Warlock can be capable to level up really fast. Mana brakes is not a word you can should find in a Warlock’s dictionary because you should use Life Tap to convert health into mana and then use Drain Life to fill it up, if necessary, because most of the times your health will restore gradually while your pets are taking the hits or you are fearing the mobs.
Two great abilities that you should use all the time are the Create Healthstone and Create Soulstone abilities. Consuming a Healthstone will save your life many times and when you do die you have your Soulstone on you so you can resurrect on the spot.
As a Warlock you should stay Affliction until you reach level 70.
Warlock Leveling Build 1-70 Affliction
With the Affliction talent build you will increase all your DoT spells and will also gain a few great spells. It starts off nice with Improved Curse of Agony. Suppression and Improved Drain Soul will give you less mana problems. Soul Siphon and Improved Life Tap will also help you to maintain your health and mana.
Then you got Amplify Curse and Fel Concentration that will help you cast better and faster. Then you increase your range and some damage of some spells. Curse of Exhaustion is an option, handy for PvP realms. Siphon Life and Shadow Mastery are extremely good.
Two other great spells you will learn are Unstable Affliction and Haunt. Both are great damage spells. Improving your Felhunter goes well with Dark Pact.
Once you enter Northrend you should switch your build to a Demonology - Affliction build.
Warlock Leveling Build 70-80 Demonology - Affliction
So basically this build is about having a Felguard and Siphon Life. While boosting your Demon Pets you can still do good damage with the DoT’s the Warlock has. The Affliction tree offers a lot of health gains which you can of course convert to mana so basically a lock with this talent build will have no down time.
The Demonology is to mana consuming to be an effective leveling build. The Affliction tree is great though to preserve mana and deal a lot of damage. With an Affliction talent build however you should place all your dots on several mobs so the leveling speeds up a bit. You will have a lot of survivability through the Affliction tree and Demonology tree at later levels. The Felguards are also really nice and do add up to the damage. They can affectively tank a few mobs with their Cleave for a bit while you start placing the DoTs.
