Races
From Basin Wiki
Looks aside, the races have inherent traits; some of which are more useful than others as a warlock. Planning for the Horde pvp server the races available for warlock are:
Orc
Blood Fury: Activate to increase Strength
Hardiness: Increase resistance to stun & knockout effects
Command: Pet melee damage increased
Axe Specialization: Increase to Axe skill
Undead
Will of the Forsaken: Activate to become immune to fear, sleep, and charm effects
Cannibalize: Increase health regeneration while consuming a corpse
Underwater Breathing: Underwater breath increased
Shadow Resistance: Increase Shadow Resistance
Axe Specialization and Blood Fury are wasted on orc warlocks, while Underwater Breathing and Shadow Resistance have little to no application to the class. Command is a slightly better skill than Cannibalize, but usually the difference isn't really noticeable. This leaves us with Hardiness and Will of the Forsaken; both of them are extremely useful in PvP, so it can be hard to choose one. WotF makes you immune to a variety of PvP CC, and is a great help overall. An often overlooked Hardiness provides a whopping 25% resistance bonus to stun and disorient effects - what does this mean? Very often, an orc warlock will resist skills like warrior intercepts and feral charges, allowing the warlock to stay mobile in PvP. Combined with Curse of Exhaustion from the affliction tree, you can effectively DoT kite melee classes most of the time.
Overall, both races are fairly equal in terms of usefulness. Pick a race you like - you're going to have some useful racials either way.
From an Alliance standpoint, the races for warlock are humans and gnomes.
Humans
Perception: Activate to increase stealth detection radius
The Human Spirit: Increase Spirit
Diplomacy: Bonus to faction point gain
Sword Specialization: Increased Sword skills
Mace Specialization: Increased MAce skills
Gnomes
Escape Artist: Activate to break out of a Root or Snare effect
Expansive Mind: Increase Intelligence
Arcane Resistance: Increase Arcane Resistance
Engineering Specialist: Increase skill bonus to Engineering
Out of these it is really no contest, the gnome wins hands down with EVERY racial trait being a useful one. The only human trait really applicable to a warlock at all is the increased sword skill, if you train swords and find one worth equipping. The stealth bonus is redundant as warlocks get both an invisibilty detect spell and a stealth detection bonus from the Felhunter. Spirit is not needed for a warlock so thats wasted and mace is not a warlock weapon. Faction is not used heavily in the game yet but it may be more useful sometime. Meanwhile, gnome is the best alliance race trait wise.
