I've seen it mentioned a couple of times that it would be a good idea to create a discussion on pets to get solid numbers and get the facts straight, and I figured I would get the ball rolling here.

I'll combine some of the information found in other threads on here so far from what has been established, or guidelines people have developed for usage of pets in their specific roles (i.e. when to use AotD)

Army of the Dead

Facts

• AotD can be used on raid bosses, it appears that any mob marked as a raid boss is not tauntable by AotD, this applies to both 10 and 25 man versions of bosses
• AotD will still taunt non-boss mobs even in a boss scenario, such as lava adds or whelps on Sartharion
• It does not appear that Night of the Dead reduces AoE damage taken by AotD from the 3.0.8 patch, but further testing is needed (credit Mooncrow)
• AotD does not appear to receive raid buffs, such as LotP or Heroism (credit Mooncrow)
• From testing, it appears that AotD does benefit from UP, which would be beneficial to switch to before using it if using AotD before a boss pull (such as on Patchwerk or Thaddius). DPS loss vs gain switching to UP during combat would probably be negligible. (Credit to Fugazor)
• If you have a perma-ghoul out, it appears you can have some level of control over AotD. The pet follow command seems to cause them to come to you, and if ghoul leap is turned on, they should leap with him. This is not a certainty though, as this seems inconsistent at best. (Credit to AmeroGER)

When to Use it

Bosses in Naxx:

Arachnid Quarters
Anub'rekhan - Can be tricky to use here with the adds and impales going around the raid. I'd recommend just after the first 2 adds go down, pop army and swap over to Anub. This should put them on him and give a good chunk of burn time.

Faerelina - Definitely not a good idea to use pre-pull, with the adds and all, but it can easily be used during P2 when it's just a burn on her.

Maexxna - Use this right after a webspin, and army should go right to the boss. Be careful if you haven't killed off all the adds before you get spun though, as they might start attacking them instead.

Construct Wing
Patchwerk - Two good times to use it on this boss. The time I prefer is pre-pull, doing the method described below, where you swap to unholy presence, use a speed pot, and then just pull them out. The second would be well after the pull when you need a little bit of extra dps towards the end, just don't use it too late.

Grobbulus - Very tough to use it here, lots of poison and adds constantly through the fight. This fight might not be the best bet to use it on, and could probably be saved for Gluth since he comes up quite quickly afterwards

Gluth - Best to use this right after the tanks have established agro and pulled it to the door. This can be a tricky thing with the adds coming out, but if you have people kiting them properly, you shouldn't ever see any "food" near Gluth. I'd probably give this about 30-40 sec into the fight to use it, but certainly try it earlier if you feel comfortable doing so.

Thaddius - Definitely use this right after you kill the adds and go into P2

Plague Wing
Noth the Plaguebringer - Use this pre-pull as your best time. Can also be used later in after he comes back from a teleport, but it might be trickier with possible adds up.

Heigan the Unclean - Tricky to get this used well with the dance, might be best to save for Loatheb. If anything, this is again a good time to use pre-pull.

Loatheb - Good boss as it's a straight tank and spank. If you're using a group system to pick up the spores, probably a good idea to use this just after your group has picked one up.

Military Quarters
Instructor Razuvious - Very tricky to use with the adds up, but once this gets underway if all adds are being properly CC'd, this might be a decent place to use it about 30 sec into the fight. Missed MC could be problematic the further you go into the fight, and it might just be better to hold off till Gothik anyways.

Gothik the Harvester - Those on dead side can easily use this as soon as he comes into that side of the room, especially if you have a mod indicating when he's going to port in. Live side might be trickier, but you can still get a good dps increase if you use this as soon as he ports in (or again, before he comes if you can predict it).

Four Horsemen - Definitely a good fight pre-pull. Also very handy to use if you're trying to blowup one of the horsemen with all dps stacked on one side.

Sapphiron - Probably the only fight I wouldn't recommend army on. The constant raid aoe just murders these guys. Save it for KT.

KT - Use this during P2, after the tank has some solid agro and all adds are down. A bad void zone could ruin the dps here, but that's just luck. Very tough to use near P3 when the adds come out, so the earlier you use it in P2, the better.

Bosses in Ulduar:

Flame Levithan - can't be used

Razorscale - Really tricky to use properly here, though you could probably pop it as he's coming down for the 50% when he's permagrounded. Just make sure the adds are killed first. Can probably be used during either of the transitions during P1 as well, assuming all adds are killed when he comes down. To max dps, I'd recommend doing it after 50% though.

XT - 002 Deconstructor - Used pre-pull is perfect or while waiting for the 1st heart might be a really good idea, especially if you are trying to activate hardmode and need to squeeze out the dps. Just gotta be careful of the adds, which is why I'd recommend pre-pull or 1st heart.

Ignis - The adds come out almost as soon as he hits the tank, and based on the strat our guild uses, we set the tank into position and use a hunter to misdirect, so your mileage may vary. Pre-pull would be your best bet, but it can be done at the later stages if you've got some downtime between adds.

Assembly of Iron - No adds, and this is kinda a dps race, so as long as you can trust your tanks to pull their add correctly, this is a good fight to use it on. If trying hard mode, definitely a good time to use it just as you start in on Steelbreaker.

Kologarn - Adds only come after the arm is destroyed, and burning his right arm down is the strat we used, so army worked well on the pre-pull here.

Auriaya - Probably not a good idea to use these pre-pull, if you want your tanks to pickup the initial adds properly, but they could easily be used during the fight. A lot of aoe damage, fears, and positional requirements might make this tricky to use at a good time, but just after a fear would probably be best to use this.

Freya - Adds come during all of P1, but P2 is just a burn phase. After the last add drops, go ahead and pull them out.

Hodir - This should be fine to use them on prepull. Usually I'm selfish here and will ask the tank to give a 6 sec countdown before he pulls, then immediately attack Hodir to put them on him (and then swap to iceblocks once they are set).

Thorim - P2 is perfect for this. If you get the adds in the arena done quickly before he jumps down, you should have a good chunk of time where you can't dps anyways. Definitely wouldn't recommend doing this during P1, unless you are having issues picking the adds up off the healers in P1.

Mimiron - This fight has a lot of opportunities to use it on since you get a solid pause between each phase. I found it best to use on the 4th phase, since 1-3 don't really require a dps race, where as 4 is just a nightmare you want to end quickly.

General Vezax (+) - You get a good amount of time before Vezax does anything special and it doesn't really matter anyways as the whole of our group was stacked on top of him for the strat we used. Army was good every time as a pre-pull. I wouldn't recommend this during hardmode, so that the OT can get some good threat, however I know that neither Vezax or the Animus can be taunted, so this might require further research.

Yogg-Saron - An excellent fight to use AotD on. The best time is during P2 when Crushers are out, because they interrupt the debuff on the raid without requiring a tank to lance it. In addition, they do a good chunk of dps on burning the crushers down. Just make sure you burn this well before P3, so it doesn't interfere with tanking the adds.

Algalon - Can easily be used pre-pull due to Algalon not being aggressive at the start of each attempt. Only word of caution I'd give on this fight would be if you have a tank pulling constellations into black holes as they are tauntable and could cause grief for a tank, so make sure to use this early on.

Bosses in Trial of the Crusader

Northrend Beasts - The best time to use this seems to be on Gormok as a pre-pull. The Jormunger are up for only a short time and have a knock-back, and there's a similar issue for Icehowl.

Lord Jaraxxus - Hard to use army effectively in this encounter. At any given time, there is usually a set of adds up that the OT needs to keep under control, and army easily taunts these adds, spinning them out of control. Pre-pull would be the only place I could see using this, but it again depends on how your guild deals with the adds. Mistress would be the easiest to deal with if you want to let the ghouls just tank them her for a second and annoy your OT.

Faction Champions - Another pre-pull setup, but this one depends on the mode you're in and the initial pull strat you use. In hard mode none of the adds can be taunted making it very easy to use army, but in normal they can be taunted, and you might want to avoid it if doing crowd control. The other option is depending on raid composition, you might have 2 dk's setup to chain pull your initial burn target. If this is the case, then army is very successful at remaining on that specific mob and can greatly help burn the target down.

Twin Val'kyr - Again, pre-pull setup. This is tank and spank for the most part, really nothing else to say. As of yet I haven't seen any information on how empowered light might affect them, but it should have none.

Anub'arak - Best time I've found to use army here is during the burn phase at 30%. We use a strat for his adds where we burn the first set, then leave the second set alone till he burrows (or hits his 30%) and usually hold off on taking him under until the first set of adds after his re-emergence is taken down. Once that set of adds is gone, we let the OT pick them up but just let them submerge if they choose to, which is fine for the army. You can use these pre-pull, but the first set of adds seem to be really troublesome for the OT to keep on the ice while they were out.

As a final note on when to use AotD, it should always be used if the fight allows for it, even during combat. The dps boost from AotD will far outweigh any personal dps loss during the the 6 second time period it takes to channel them. Check the guidelines above on when best to use AotD from my own recommendation, but also use your own judgment if you feel comfortable in a particular encounter.

Gargoyle

Facts

• Gargoyle does benefit from Heroism, cast it after heroism is in effect.
• Gargoyle takes a snap-shot of your stats when he gets summoned, so use it when trinkets/effects have procced to squeeze out the highest dps for it that you can.
• Gargoyle appears to have AoE mitigation as of patch 3.0.8, 35% for each point in NotD. This is both physical (effects like cleave and whirlwind) and magical (dragon breath attacks)
• Gargoyle lasts for 30 seconds, costing 60 runic power in total. It no longer

When to Use it

As stated above, gargoyle is best used when all of your procs/trinkets have gone off. If you need to activate trinkets, do so just before you summon gargoyle.

Ghoul

Facts

Credit to Kurokaze on the Haste information and Oke for the AP/Str information.

• Ghouls work like most permanent pets, receiving a portion of your stats and can be buffed
• At level 80, the ghoul has a base AP of 1167 and a base Str of 331
• Ghoul Str = (DKStr * (.7 * RavDead)). If you have the [Glyph of the Ghoul] then add + (DKStr * .4) to the formula.
• Ghoul Ap = Strength - Base_Str + Base_AP
• Ghouls receive 100% of your haste; this is recent data from live.
• Ghouls appear to have AoE mitigation as of patch 3.0.8, 35% for each point in NotD. This is both physical (effects like cleave and whirlwind) and magical (dragon breath attacks)
• Ghouls benefit from pet snacks (such as kibblers bits)
• Ghoul hit rating rounds down, always. So if you have 7.99% hit rating, the ghoul will have 7% hit rating
• Ghoul Frenzy – This talent should only be taken if you have trouble keeping your Ghoul alive. If you do, it becomes invaluable, as a dead Ghoul is a large portion of your dps down the drain (due to 30 seconds of absolutely zero Ghoul damage, followed by your Ghoul doing reduced damage for the remainder of the fight from missing buffs). If you don’t have issues with your Ghoul going down, then skip this talent. In nearly every case it will be a dps loss. (Credit to Consider from the Unholy dps thread)
• Ghouls gain expertise based on your hit rating. So if you had 131 hit (4%), the pet gains 13 expertise. 263 hit (8%), the pet gains 26 expertise. The Draenei hit aura does not give expertise to the pet. (Credit to Consider from the Unholy dps thread)

When to Use it

Always! It should go without saying, but maximizing keeping your ghoul alive is a huge dps boost, doing quite a bit of damage for the time it's out. This is what makes NotD such an attractive talent, because you're pretty much guaranteed to have the Ghoul out at all times.

Dancing Rune Weapon

Facts

• DRW will gain buffs you have before casting it, but will not get things used after, i.e. Hysteria, potions, etc. Heart Strikes from DRW also are affected by its diseases, and the diseases will stay even after DRW has expired. For this reason it is proper to cast DRW before refreshing your diseases.

When to Use it

Your DRW checklist looks something like this, in order of importance.

* 4 Death Runes
* On use trinkets
* Bloodlust
* Hysteria
* Empowered Rune Weapon
* Potion of Speed


Hitting all of those criteria will maximize your DRWs DPS, very important to maximizing your own DPS.

Obviously you can't always meet every criteria, as some are out of your control. You always want to wait for Hysteria if you think the fight will last long enough to do so, and you especially have to make sure your diseases are up and death runes are ready. If you have on use trinkets, you want to be sure to use them before popping DRW as well. Rarely will you be able to use Empowered Rune Weapon twice in one fight.

I'm not a huge fan of waiting on trinket procs, like Greatness or Grim Toll/Mjolnir. I tend to take the approach that if they are up, awesome but if they are not I don't wait for them. If you "feel" like you are due for a proc, it might be worth waiting 1 or 2 CGDs, but I don't know that I would go much beyond that. This is especially true due to the fact that often times your DRW is part of a coordinated burst, like XT heart phase, and you dont want to be lagging behind waiting for a proc.

That being said, if it is a long fairly straighforward fight like Ignis with no real burst phase requirement, I would probably wait to try to maximize my DPS. (All credit to SoilantGreen64)

This list is pretty thin at the moment, so if there's information I missed (and I'm sure there is) please post it in here and I'll try and update the main post as soon as I can. Also, please correct me on any misinformation posted here as well. Thank you!

Something I'd like to know for modeling purposes, that I haven't been able to test due to business and lack of motivation to respec, and I haven't seen discussed anywhere, is whether non-permanent ghouls get the same (or any) scaling from gear as perma-ghouls.

I'd also like critrate data for all pets and damage date for AotD if anyone has that.

I believe that ghouls have a 0.7% STR modifier to begin, and receive glyph and talent bonuses additively, for a total of 1.5% (1.7% postpatch). Note that ghouls get 1 AP per STR. I don't remember when I tested this; it might be from beta.

Ghouls receive 100% of your haste; this is recent data from live. I just looked at character sheet speed, so there may potentially be a display bug involved.

From this testing, I also noticed an interesting bug with ghouls and Improved Icy Talons: they receive haste benefit both from your personal haste and from the buff applying to them, as expected, however, when the buff fades, only one of these fades and they keep the other haste effect until their haste is refreshed in some other way, such as reapplying IT or swapping some gear. Again, this was just tested on the character sheet; it has a decent probability of being a simple display bug.

Thanks kurokaze, I've updated the thread to reflect your data.

On AotD and Thaddius,

I've found that the time between when Feugen/Stalagg die to when Thaddius spawns to be a decent time to channel AotD. Nothing else to do while he spawns at any rate.

They do tend to all die within 1-3 chain lightnings though.

Ghoul Ap = Strength - Base_Str + Base_AP, as posted here

Also Ravenous Dead and Glyph of Rasie Dead are figured seperately then added together. Ghoul Str = (DKStr * (.7 * RavDead)) + (DKStr * .2)

Appreciate the input, I've been updating as you guys post.

From your info Oke, I'm trying to derive a total AP for the ghoul, since that's what it boils down to. Just so I'm correct, I'm assuming the Base Str = 331, Base Ap = 1167 are always the same? Thanks again.

is not it better to use before the pull?

Ohh, that explains a lot.

I was soloing AQ20 this morning, and on Buru I have my ghoul run around and wear down eggs. I pull out my gargoyle, he starts of on Buru which was where I wanted him, and then I notice he's flown off after my ghoul to break eggs. Which got me killed. Dumb flying bastard.

I control my ghoul through macro commands (/petattack in this case) so I'm not sure if this happens if you use the ghoul's actual petbar. Regardless it explains why sometimes my garg will follow the first target I sic him on and sometimes he'll assist me as I change targets.

Yea, at lvl80 anyways which im guessing is all your concerned with

Should have also clarified that the "+ (DKStr * .2)" part is only if your glyphed for the ghoul "+ (DKStr * .4)" after patch.

A few major questions that might be worth asking for general DPS purpose.

1. Does army of the dead benefit from the player's haste? And does it benefit from self-buffs like trinkets and haste potions ?

2. Is it worth it switching to unholy presence when you summon the gargoyle (and if 1 is true before AotD), you're sacrificing 2 runes (blood + unholy) and 2 GCD by doing this, but get 15% extra haste on your pet.

3. What is the best time to use Army of the Dead ?
A lot of people swear by using it before the pull saying it wont cost them dps time, however that means army of the dead isn't fully utilized either, other people swear by using it halfway in the fight, however they lose 6 seconds of dpsing while gaining full benefit from AotD.
A great deal of this depends on the answer to question 1 as well I think.

These are probably not the easiest questions, but knowing the answer to some of them will give us a better insight in how and when to use these pets to their full potential.

Here are some PTR tests.

Gargoyle (used without any procs, selfbuffed):
Blood Presence - 13 hits (1550 avg. dmg)
- 12 hits (1563 avg dmg)
Unholy Presence - 14 hits (1625 avg. dmg)
- 15 hits (1527 avg. dmg)
Conclusions:
- Blood Presence does not work for Garg
- Unholy Presence most likely does work for Garg
- switching to UP to summon Garg is most likely not worth it as you gain 1-2 hits from Garg and one IT but loose one BS and one SS

AotD (again no procs, self buffed):
Blood Presence - 159 melee (32,5k dmg), 81 claw (25k)
Unholy Presence - 181 melee (37k dmg), 74 claw (24k)
Conclusion:
- Blood Presence does not work for AotD
- Unholy Presence most likely does work for AotD (claw looks random)

There is also question about Bloodlust. If BL works like haste then it will increase damage of Gargoyle and AotD for most likely full duration when you spawn both after BL. This can be actually easily tested on dummy as long as you have some friendly shaman around - check number of Garg hits and AotD melee hits and mystery will be solved once and for all

I'd also like to add to the topic regarding Gargoyles. I did some testing regarding it receiving our passive haste and came to the conclusion that it does on Page 38 of the Unholy DPS thread. I was using [Meteorite Whetstone] at the time and using a [Potion of Speed] to consistently get 32-33 Gargoyle Strikes per use. I would have to check again after the maintenance today to see if that still holds true, but I believe our pets receiving our passive and active haste to be something that was added when pet scaling was revamped in Patch 3.0/Beta.


Even though there are modifiers listed, I've observed other stats affecting our pets as well. While Expertise is only listed under the Hunter Pet Scaling, doing two trials on the boss dummy (One at 26 Expertise, and another naked) leads me to believe that our ghoul scales with that stat as well.

Edit: These might be a little small.

Without Haste:
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

With Haste:
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4

Great info, thanks for the PTR tests.

Focusing on the question of gargoyle, and whether it is beneficial to swap to unholy first and then cast or not, I guess it comes down to what you're really losing.

By using blood tap, you are losing in total 2 blood runes (assuming blood tap to "cover" the unholy rune), which for the most damage would be used on BS.

I'm going to be generous in a calculation on it and assume the DK is using a [Betrayer of Humanity] to give an average damage of 758.

Blood strike would do 758/2 = 379, 379 + 191 + (95.5 * 3) = 855 hit or a 1710 crit. Again, being generous and making it easy on myself, assuming a 50% crit rate would mean an average of 1283 damage per BS. More likely the damage would be lower because I'm assuming some higher value base damage and a pretty high crit rate, but I think those are some decent rough figures.

So you lose out on 2566 damage vs the gargoyle gain. In the ptr tests from Fugazor, there's a 1 hit difference and a 3 hit difference on gargoyle, and per hit damage is around 1566. If more tests showed the gargoyle does average to around 2 extra hits, you'd gain 3132 extra damage for a gain of about 566 damage.

If you went very broad to cover a more realistic scenario the gains look to be a minor damage loss of a couple hundred to a gain of a couple thousand at most, so I'd have to agree that while using UP might be a gain, it would be slight at most.

Doesn't sound like it's worth it indeed.

Even if you could get a small dps gain out of it, the hassle around it, the using of a blood tap and the loss of GCDs might actually make it too annoying to be useful.

Still need to get some solid evidence whether heroism/bloodlust is applied to the gargoyle itself, and thus you have to get it out before it is cast.
Or whether it just gets a part of your haste, and you have a much broader window to use it.

I unfortunately don't have a pocket shaman to test with at the moment.
And to get some good readings you'd probably have to do 2-3 tries on each of the 3 cases (without bl / before summoning / after summoning) to iron out the most severe inconsistencies.

Thanks for setting up this thread leprechaun, an unclear forum has always been one of my pet hates (pun intended).

Nice math as well, but don't forget that 2H builds arent the only builds that use the goyle. DW builds also use them and are affected to a lesser extent by the loss of a Blood and Unholy rune. the second Unholy rune is typically near useless for 32/39 and 20/51. Blood runes also don't do much dmg through BS or PT, but you do lose a Deathrune conversion (can be solved by abusing blood tap).

Maybe a nice idea to look into would be to start the fight in Unholy presence. This at the very least solves the AotD issue and ,if you are rich enough to have the greatness card, also gives you a very solid chance to just fire your goyle with at least 2 procs up within the first 15 sec of the fight anyway. You lose some dmg from being in Unholy presence for a while, but save one extra U rune. Alternatively you can burn your ERW for the presencedance. For speccs that have little to no free GCD's (most DW builds, Blood 2H) it hardly matters when you use ERW anyway. This may be different for 2H unholy, with its low amount of casts.

One thing I am still interested in is the effect seen in earlier gargoyl tests where the gargoyle DPS would go up a lot if you boost its haste by a lot, but strangely causes a dps decrease when you only use a small haste effect on it. Also the way the goyle works with BL (I'm thinking it does not matter either way. It uses your haste or can get buffed with BL. same effect either way around) and if it benefits from the double IIT haste bug like the ghoul. Since the goyle looks at your haste (plus your IIT) and gets buffed with its own IIT, I would again assume it does get buffed. Point of interest here is that this effect may cause IIT to be better then the shaman haste totem. I have no idea if pets (im assuming hunter pets also double dip from haste) can also double dip the totem buff or not, it may work differently as an aura effect.

Just as a note, regarding Instructor Razuvious. He actually has a shout which owns pets pretty hard. It has killed both my ghoul and gargoyle on numerous occasions. This should be a lot better in 3.0.8 with ghoul avoidance regarding the ghoul itself. AOTD is therefore not very effective for this fight, plus it definitely has the possibility of taunting an add.

Do we have any proof about gargoyle being affected (or not) by NoTD in terms of avoidance?

All pets are ignored in that regard. But they probably still get hit by the void zone and the aoe frostbolt.

-----

Just as an update, i checked my gargoyle during a heroic today and from what i saw it does NOT get the bloodlust buff. It could just be a bug or something, so might want more people to test it. But if thats true it would seem that summoning gargoyle WHILE bloodlust is up is better than summoning it BEFORE bloodlust goes up.

This would make my and that of a lot of DK i assume a lot easier.

This is what I have seen also - garg does not get the buff if he is out before BL is cast, you need to cast him while you have the buff.

Pets don't get targetted by frost blast(tomb). They often die to void zones however. A lot of targetted abiliies do not target pets on purpose, to avoid trying to trivilize some elements of a fight by stacking pet classes/pet summonning items like it could be done in the past.

Another thing I'm wondering, the patchnotes say that NotD is giving 70% passive area SPELL avoidance. Does that mean just spell AoE or also physical abilities like whirlwind.

It says only spell, but I'd find it rather "lame" if they didnt add protection like abilities as whirlwind or physical effects.

The shout that Razuvious uses for example is not an area spell, if I remember correctly its a physical effect.

The talent in game says "reduces the damage your pet takes from area of effect attacks". This includes cleaves, in my experience today.

Night of the Dead definitely includes all AE, even physicals. Tonight in Naxx25 my ghoul lived from the start to the finish without a single death, even during 3 packs of trash at a time on Death Knight Wing. I'm fairly sure it's working on Gargoyle as well, since on Saphiron my Gargoyle almost lasted the full 30 seconds before dying.