A Powerful Warlock Build Uncovered Ahead of Castle Nathria Raid in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands
A broken Warlock build has been discovered just hours before the much-anticipated release of Castle Nathria, the first raid of the Shadowlands expansion in the popular game World of Warcraft.
Well-known Twitch streamer and content creator, Kalamazi, has recently come across a unique build that he refers to as his “sandbag” build. This build utilizes the Affliction and Destruction talent Grimoire of Sacrifice, along with the baseline spell Ritual of Doom.
Instead of opting for Haunt for Affliction and Roaring Blaze for Destruction, Kalamazi decided to experiment with Grimoire of Sacrifice, a spell that is usually considered much weaker since it involves sacrificing your demon pet for additional power. This grants you its demon ability and causes your spells to occasionally deal extra shadow damage. On its own, this spell leads to a clear decrease in DPS. However, when combined with Ritual of Doom, Kalamazi discovered that it was an entirely different story.
Ritual of Doom is a Warlock spell that was reintroduced with the Shadowlands expansion. It initiates a ritual that sacrifices a random participant to summon a powerful Doomguard. This ritual requires five players to complete and has a one-hour cooldown. However, the hostile Doomguard can then be tamed using Subjugate Demon.
Regardless of whether this combination is intentional on Blizzard’s part, the Grimoire of Sacrifice and the Doomguard stack, resulting in a significant increase in single-target damage. During testing, Kalamazi’s DPS skyrocketed, with his Doomguard alone contributing to 21 percent of his total damage.
Kalamazi claims that this combination of abilities potentially makes the Warlock class the highest DPS in Castle Nathria.
The only drawback of this build is the one-hour cooldown on Ritual of Doom. After wiping on a boss, the build becomes unusable. However, Kalamazi has found a workaround for this issue. The final boss of the End Time dungeon, located in the Caverns of Time, possesses an hourglass that resets all abilities’ cooldowns, including Ritual of Doom. This means that players will have to travel back and forth to the Caverns of Time after each wipe, but with a few Warlocks ready to summon, the effort could be well worth it.
It remains uncertain if Blizzard will intervene and nerf this build before the release of the mythic version of Castle Nathria next week. So, for now, Kalamazi’s sandbag build is available for players to take advantage of.