Has anyone done a rigorous analysis of Shadow Fiend mechanics?

If so, can someone point me in the general direction?

If not..........

Known:
(1) Pet does shadow dmg and is enhanced by shadow target debuffs
(2) Pet returns mana at 2.5x dmg done

Easy to figure out:
(1) How many "swings" per pet lifetime

Hard to figure out:
(1) How does pet dmg scale on target mobs from 68 thru 73?
(2) What percentage of player shadow damage benefits the pet?
(3) What is the crit pct?

The 5min cooldown on the spell makes it very difficult to exhaustively test by yourself.

Is there any interest out there in a group effort?

If we share enough data points (target level, min/max crit/non-crit, player +shadow) we should be able to figure it out.....

I'd be happy to help out, as I'm curious myself. One clarification: the cooldown is 6 minutes. There's one thing that really annoys me about Shadowfiend: it seems to spend a significant amount of time moving when cast on a really big mob (Gruul). It seems to appear near the middle of Gruul's model, then move to the outside before it starts attacking. That's probably 500-800 mana lost while it moves.

Excellent. (And thanks for cooldown catch.)

And yeah..... it is quite painful watching the fiend slither around.... Get to work already!

I guess we need a little more info:

Target Level
Target Debuffs: CoS, SW stack, Misery
Num Attacks
Num Crits
Min/Max for both Non-Crit and Crit
Player Shadow +Dmg

Am I missing anything?

Actually, the cooldown is 5 minutes.

This is a shameless bump to see if any other mechanics have been discovered about this elusive beast.

As stated, it is commonly known that the fiend is most effective against a debuffed mob, while an 'on use' trinket is active.

Anecdotally, I can get a full mana bar (9kish) back from my fiend if I pop Icon and have the mob fully debuffed ... But only if I stay outside the 5sr ... if I keep casting, I lose out about 1k mana in addition to the mana I spend immediately it is restored.

I believe that the fiend gains +hit from your spell hit, as I have not seen a reduction in the amount of mana regained from hitting on (say) vashj compared to a debuffed heroic boss ... given a warlock is present of course.

All anecdotal ... fishing for something more concrete.

I have a random assortment of Shadow Fiend tricks, although none of the hard numbers you are looking for.

A) The fiend's damage is shadow aligned physical damage. This means it benefits both from curse of recklessness AND curse of shadows style effects. Wait to have all the goodies up before using him.

B) Because he does melee attacks, it's crucial that he is behind the the target. This prevents both parries (a minor loss in mana) and cleaves (a major loss in mana). Most of the time someone says, "I use my shadow fiend and he just died", they released him to the front and he got cleaved.

C) The other easy way to kill your shadow fiend is to release him right before some AoE damage. Watch boss timers and only use him when he'll have 15 seconds of safe time.

D) You shadow fiend loves bloodlust! But only if he was out BEFORE the shaman uses bloodlust. Ask your shaman to give you a 5 second warning on bloodlust. Having a bloodlust give you 30% extra mana back, which is generally enough to go from a completely empty mana bar to completely full.

Basically the difference between a successful and failed shadow fiend is huge, so take some time to make sure everything is just right before using him.

I actually remember an Al'ar where my shadowfiend tanked him in phase one due to a tanking mishap, and it kept the raid alive long enough that a tank was able to get back in position and continue the fight. I really have no idea why sometime he seems invincible and other times he gets one shotted.

In reguards to a shadow fiends tanking ability, as it has been mentioned here that the fiend can tank for a short period of time. What stat's are present on the shadow fiend when the little blighter comes out?

I say this, as a rogue, I occasionaly see a shadow priest pop out there little pet when I am dualing waiting for raid to get to the instance. Now, sometimes i can whack the little bugger into a pulp within 2-3 hits, other times i seem to struggle to damage the thing with dodged attacks. Unlucky ? or varations in the stats of the fiends?

Therefore does the stat's of the priest also effect the stat's of the feind in ways which are similar to a hunter and there pet ? Meaning the Shadow fiend recives a % of the preists armour etc. Or is it the case that the feind is really bog standard and varys very little from one priest to another.

In terms of stat's i relate to defence/dodge/health, And if some of these stats are shared with the preist, how much of a % does the shadow fiend inherit from there Priest master ?

Not exactly what the Opening post was requesting to be investigated, but if a thread is to be made relation to the mechanics of the Shadow Fiend, then a fully comprehensive list of all things fiend related might be useful.

The fiend has an extremely high dodge rate (maybe 75%) and a lot of shadow resistance. It might have other resists as well such as fire, which explains how it might tank Al'ar phase 1 for a while.

I'm pretty sure Priests don't get the "Your armour increases your pet's armour by X" or whatever on their character panes while the Shadowfriend is out, at least.

Everyone does seem to get a strong sense right away that it has a high dodge rate. I've had it tank a 70 mob for the full 15s without it getting hit once.

I've heard 40% of +damage and a 2:1 mana returned:damage done ratio, but hearsay is likely to get us nowhere. Who's done some proper testing?

Tanking Al'ar phase 1 is in reference to being in melee range and dodging the attacks so Al'ar doesn't Flame Buffet.

From what I've seen:

1. 10 attacks total
2. 2.5 mana returned per 1 point of damage done
3. 65% coefficient on the fiend (ie +1000 damage is 650 more damage done, or 65 more per attack, and results in an extra 1625 mana returned). This information comes from Nightshroud's testing, if I recall correctly.
4. High avoidance rate for both physical and magical attacks.

My main issue is getting it to spawn behind the boss and/or not having it spawn in something like a cave-in (Hello Gruul).

Have any Holy Priests figured out how to make this little bugger be as effective for us as for shadow priests?

They scale with +dmg ... but not with +heal. I watch the shadow priests in our guild use their fiends, and they go from 2000 to 10000 mana. I use mine, and I go from 2000 to 4500. Just annoys me.

And watching the fiend spawn, then run around for 4 seconds before it starts hitting something is equally as annoying. It should just start attacking instantly, and depend on you to recall it and reposition it if necessary. It's on far too long a cooldown to run around stupidly.

In a similar vein, I've noticed that no matter what side of the mob it spawns on, the first attack very often seems to hit for far less than the rest. I'm talking about 50% of the usual hit.

Could this be related to the hunter pet problem where pets take a second or two to gain stats/etc.. from their master on summoning?

Quite often I loose a few seconds (too much) with targeting and releasing my shadowfiend. I usually have a friendly target as target. Does anyone have a nice macro so it attacks the target of your friendly target?

I'm also wondering; would equiping a damage staff just before releasing your shadowfiend be negligible or maybe worth it? Was thinking of using it in a macro as well. I would be using [Crystalheart Pulse-Staff] and [Terokk's Shadowstaff], both properly enchanted ofc. You loose a few seconds switching weapons. Not sure if it can all be done in the same macro without too much delay.

Help/feedback much appriciated!

2 addons that might help you with statistics & analasys

FuBar_VampwatchFu
Vampwatch for FuBar, provides stats for Vampiric Embrace, Vampiric Touch and Shadowfiend.
(Jayrox)

Shadowfiend
This Addon allows you to see the total damage done by your Shadowfiend, and the total amount of mana returned (also counts the hits and miss)

I use the later...

My experience is as a pet class, but not a shadow priest. I think it would be safe to use normal pet mechanics for back-of-the-envelope calculations until proven to work differently.

First, do you have a pet pane available when shadowfiend is out? This is an additional tab under your character/rep/skill window, default hotkey shift-P. It lists fun things like base stats, AP, default DPS, resistances, etc. It's actually a toss-up whether you might have one; warlocks don't have one for enslaved demons, and I have no idea about frost mages. If you do, screenshot it.

While the spell damage -> pet AP function is well known for warlock pets, and constant across pets, each pet tends to have its own AP -> dps calculation, much to my chagrin. The voidwalker is like 28:1, half the dps increase of a PC, whereas the sexybus is more like 10:1. Basically this means you would be better off sampling pet damage at different +dmg levels rather than trying to calculate, unless you have a) mouseover of your spell damage of dmg->AP and b) pet pane mouseover of pet's AP listing AP->dps.

If it is a shadow-based melee attack, I would assume it follows elemental rules, which says that dodge parry miss crit glance and resist apply, block and ac do not. If it's being mitigated by AC, then it's very specially coded, and I must wonder if that means it bypasses normal resists (ie, it's mitigated as if physical, and the only effect the Shadow has is multiplicative effects like CoS/SW).

Pets tend to have normal mob combat resolution tables, that is 5% miss/crit/block/dodge/parry against even-level mobs, slightly modified by base stats, and with normal player mechanics for glancing blows. AFAIK they do not gain spell crit or hit on their melee attacks. They gain a small amount of spell crit from int gained from the owner's int, but the shadowfiend's appears to be a melee attack so I doubt it will have any effect. Pets do usually obtain a portion of their owner's AC, although on cloth classes this tends to be minimal compared to their base AC. Even my imp has something like 2k base, and only gets about 400 (35%?).


There used to be a mod to get you a pet pane window even on an enslaved demon, but I have no idea if it was pulling real stats or if it was entirely hueristic. Also, I think it got broked even before 2.0 so there's no guarantee that the information is still available. However, it does give hope that such information as pet stats might be obtainable via a UI mod, even on non-standard pets. If you don't have a pet pane you might consider writing a UI mod that could attempt to recreate one.

I've noticed when playing my Shadow Priest that if my shadowfiend has a strength of earth totem and catches a battle Shout after he's summoned he hits significantly harder. I had both and trueshot aura once and he was critting for almost 700.

Okay. So, while reading this raid during downtime, I decided to have an impromptu test.

I had the shaman in my group drop SoE and with the usual wrath of air. I was getting an additiona 100-200 more mana than I normally got. And with a crititical hit + having Improved Shadowbolt Debuff my shadowfiend actually returned 1800 mana on a single hit!

Going to run somewhat more formal test with battleshout now. Granted, this will take some time because of the 5 minute cooldown.

Edit:

Just an update. Tested about 6 shadowfiends with a warrior battleshouting. I did all tests with the same gear, I think the only relevent stat worth mention is I had 192 spell damage via spirit.

Conclusion? Having battleshout up was about an extra 100 mana return per a hit, with a variation of roughly 20.

I am having some other priest friends/guildies do some tests and tomorrow I hope to corner a shaman and run some tests with Strength of Earth. Once I get more data, perhaps I'll be able to find an equation.

Hmm. I think, if I can find a true-shot aura hunter, I can use TS, BS and TS + BS to find an equation. (four points, better than just two).

Perhaps slightly OT for which i apologise but the below macro will do what you request ie attack your MT's target while you keep healing.

#showtooltip Shadowfiend
/cast [nopet,harm][nopet,target=targettarget,harm] Shadowfiend
/petattack [harm][target=targettarget,harm]

Swapping a staff in combat causes a 1.5 global cooldown. However you can overlap this with the cooldown from spells. For example you should be able to do:

/cast Shadowfiend
/use Terokk's Shadowstaff

And the staff should equip after the fiend is launched, causing an overlapping cooldown. However, I do not know if the fiend's attack strength is scaled based on your spell damage when you cast it, or in real-time, so it may not be effective.

According to the numbers in this thread you can expect 338* extra mana given no crits or misses and the fiend spending the full duration alive and on target. Not exactly earth-shattering, but the opportunity cost there is also pretty low.

*i'm assuming you did not blow soulfrost on an offspec piece, add 16 if you did.

I think one of the reasons that group AP buffs are so beneficial is that they hit both the priest and the shadowfiend, so not only does he get them, but he gets some percentage (40%?) of the AP the priest gets. Similarly, if you were a hunter/warlock and someone did mark of the wild or fort, not only would the master and pet get the buff, but the pet would scale off the increased stats the buff provided, for extra benefit. This isn't to say that a priest would be running around wearing strength gear obviously, but they seem to share the same sort of scaling mechanisms of hunter and warlock pets.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the shadow fiend hits for relatively little damage, so raw AP provides a greater relative boost than crit, etc. If your shadowfiend had 700 extra AP from group buffs, that's 50 extra dps (or 750 extra mana) that is further multiplied by debuffs such as misery, shadow weaving, curse of shadows, and improved shadow bolt.

Edit: I was doing a slum Karazhan last night and someone's alt shadow priest killed themself with SWD during an enfeeble towards the end of P2. We got them back up with a battle res and they popped their shadowfiend right before I hit heroism. Good times.