It’s a good practice to fill your bags with shards the night before.
You can summon stragglers (ideally off the edge of Blackrock Mountain to help teach them the virtue of punctuality)… and use the remnants making healthstones for whoever wants one, rather than just a select few VIPs
Basically, like the old line about guns or condoms, with soul shards it’s better to have one and not need it, than need one and not have it. You can always just delete excess shards if absolutely necessary.
The actual farming of them is massively overblown, however… You can spend 5 minutes in an AV and fill your bags just drain soul sniping whatever the deathball raid zerg is currently attacking, and once you know what you’re doing in pvp, even places like WSG I can end up with more shards at the end of a game than I had going in, just by being diligent with drain soul-ing targets right before they die. It becomes second nature over time.
There are 2-4 warlock pve specs.
- Demo Sac/ Ruin is the top pve build and atrocious for pvp.
- SM/Ruin is the #2 build, but it is OUTSTANDINGLY good for pvp
The remaining two builds are niche…
3. Master Demonologist/ Ruin… This is the build you run when your tank is atrocious, you are a tier or more better geared than your tank, or your guild was super insistent that one of the warlocks get the 3/3 imp talent for bigger bloodpact… This build is always a substantial dps loss, but incredibly threat forgiving (since you get 20% threat reduction and also lost 10% shadow damage reduction) This build is also kind of terrible in pvp… but not useless like DS/Ruin
- Soul Link… You may be asked to run this build if and only if your guild is using you to tank twin emps in AQ40.
As for pvp builds:
-
Nightfall/Conflag
More nuke centric version of SM/Ruin… You could also use this in pve, but it’s a 10% loss vs SM/Ruin (a difference that could potentially be mitigated by the different gearing strategies for NF/Conflag favoring crit% vs SM/Ruin favoring flat +shadow… and then you’d basically be more or less helping to keep the improved shadow bolt debuff up for your raid a bit better… That being said, SM/Ruin could also stack crit% if it wanted and would still have the +10% shadow from Shadow Mastery talent. -
SM/Ruin
This is one the single most well rounded builds in the game… It can 100-0 people with nukes, it can 100-0 people with dots, and gets both range talents and shadowburn… It also has more utility with CoEx and can somewhat “drain tank” (at least better than most specs) -
Shadow Mastery/Demo Sac
Sell out hard to stack +% shadow modifiers (with succubus sac) or basically turn into an unlimited health/mana factory (VW sac)… You play entirely reliant on dots/drains to do your thing but it’s a hell of a solo farming build, and a hell of an annoying pvp build once it gets the gear it needs (it’s INCREDIBLY gear dependent but incredibly powerful scaling) -
Soul Link/Shadowburn
This is like a training wheels warlock… You play like a short range version of SM/Ruin, but are incredibly tough to kill and basically will only lose a 1v1 to classes that understand how to utilize their longer reach to keep you at bay. Most people aren’t that talented. -
Soul Link/Affliction
This is the build of warlock you run when, rather than winning, you just want the other person to hate their life enough to quit the game in disgust… It’s basically a dueling spec, and kind of immune to people 1v1… The downside is that it’s also so horrifically inept at dealing damage, that it’s kind of like playing a tank spec in pvp and you basically have to tickle people to death or drain their mana AND tickle them to death. -
Deeper destruction…
It’s not bad, and arguably only a tiny bit worse than the above builds, but once you understand the intricacies of using the extra 6 yards of range for your spells, you start favoring Destro builds that at least get the range talent in affliction (which is SM/Ruin and NF/Conflag)