OK, so I recently swapped to my warlock full time due to our elemental shaman converting to a healer. My first night raiding on him was Wednesday night (which also happened to be our first Sinestra kill), and what a difference. I was a top 10 ranked enhancement shaman on almost every fight out, and the best I could do on Sin was ~29k. With some blues and a 356 ilvl, I did 37k on beerdots. Yay locks!

Enough set up - my question comes from that fight:
World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

I cast 20 soul fires during execute phases, but I'm very curious why Soul Fire is hitting for so much less than my shadow bolt and incinerate averages for the fight. We're talking 11622 ave SF hits vs. 14576 for SB and 15298 for incinerate.

I immediately thought about low meta/DS time popped under 25%. But the issue there is most of my meta time is consumed aoeing on the fight, so the actual hard cast shadow bolt time would be averaged out between meta and non-meta, so that number shouldn't be so heavily inflated over SF, even if SF received very little meta benefit. And really, I'm quite sure I had some meta time left under 25% and after the second whelp sets died in which I got at least a few of those SFs off.

So I'm really stumped as to why my SF was so measly here. SF has the highest coefficient and it almost always averages higher on other fights for me. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Other Sinestra notes/questions: I actually did not run glyph of FG because I was juggling pets. I kept FG out for P1 (better DS and we aoe two whelp packs at the transition). When I ported/ran over to the egg, I OOR the FG so that's a great time for me to pop to the single target-minded FH. I swap back to the FG for the AOE phases, and then after we're done aoeing I pull out the FH again in the final 15%.

Regarding the essence of the red interaction - If I continue to do that, and swap pets after essence of the red is cast, do my pets lose out on any potential "double dipping" of the haste buff? Or do summoned pets just draw upon their owner's own essence of the red buff to determine haste?

Also, since I have my FH out under 15%, I'm trying to keep shadowflame as high uptime as possible on sin for the stronger bite. Discounting that, does shadowflame have a place in the sub 25% rotation, even with FG or some other pet out? Also, do MC procs or 4pc FF (which I do not have yet), for that matter?

Thank you so much for fielding my questions!
Beer

Have you stopped to consider that Soul Fire's cast time is much lower than that of Shadow Bolt and Incinerate when your under Decimation?

According to the SimCraft Demonology action list, yes.

Of course, but does adding haste/reducing the cast time effect your coefficient? If so, then why does Decimation/SF hit harder than SB in other circumstances? (Also, Incinerate is only cast when MC is up, which would still make it a slightly faster cast than a Decimation SF.)

Well, I didn't talk about these fights for a reason ! On these encounters, the AoE phases are really short, and in the end, your felguard's legion strike shouldn't have done that much damage (since in most cases, you swap him out).

I don't really know, soul fire should have around the same damage output as shadow bolt ... You must have got quite unlucky on your procs (or as you said, no meta on the entire decimation phase). You should check on other fights if you can (for instance, on your WoL, on the chimaeron fight - the only one other I checked - they are much more closer).

Well, that pet rotation is quite obvious (I wonder why most locks stick with the felguard for the entire fight ...), except for the part where you keep the felguard for the first phase ... That is useless, you should switch him out with your felhunter after the DS and switch him back in at transition, you can win back the shards on the phase 2 drakes. Concerning the glyphs, the glyph of corruption is of course useless here (because of the essence of the red), and I said before that I was using on this fight the glyph of felguard because, due to the repeted AoE phases, it should give more than the glyph of incinerate. Looking at your WoL, we can see 443k incinerate damage and 759k legion strike damage, which proves it, in your case at least.

There is only one thing you change under 25%, that is casting soul fires instead of shadow bolts. Everything else keeps priority over soul fire. Shadowflame is a must do on cd, all the more when you have the felhunter out. You should, every time it's possible, stay at melee range.

Looking at World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis you can see that you didnt have Meta up during decimate phase.

Q: I start with Felguard after meta and felstorm to which demon I swap to, felhunter or scubbus?
Q: At the execute phase should I have to swap back to felguard?

Since the imp is benefiting twice from the glyph and orc racial has there been any testing with the imp and demonology? I like the imp DS effect and wonder how much dps using the imp would be compared to felpup

> At the execute phase should I have to swap back to felguard? Most likely, yes.
Why that ? just because of DS:FH not giving any benefit to soulfire?
i'm quite surprised the 20 second "upgraded" soulfire-spam would compensate the increased FH dps over 2 mins

Felhunter in most cases, I would advise glyphed succubus on ascendant council and atramedes.

Where did you get that idea from ? You gain nothing swapping back to felguard, the DS isn't even worth it.

The imp (glyphed, and I'm an orc) doesn't even stand up to the succubus, how can it compare to the felhunter ?

edit

Well, seeing as the said numbers didn't magically appear, allow me to provide some for you ! I was quite interested in your post, so I took some time to compute that :

Firstly, seeing as how the previous message was edited/erased, I will sum it up. The post contained two main points :
1)Would it be beneficial to gather a mastery focused gear in order to get a boosted Metamorphosis pre-pull (switching to the original gear before the pull)?
2)Given the mastery proc, is a finely used Theralion's mirror good?

1)Given that you have a fairly good idea of when your tank is going to pull, we can assume that you can Meta with your mastery gear 2 seconds ahead and then switch back before the pull. Hence, you lose 2 of the 36 seconds of meta. Now begins the real discussion ; you should be able to easily gather a 2k8 mastery gear, not so easily a 3k one and with some work, you can get to 3k2. Let's consider a 2800 mastery focused gear and search at what mastery rating on your original gear the dps gain is 0. Let's also consider that your dps is constant. Firstly, the damage you lose over the first 36 seconds of the encounter is (X being the original gear's mastery rating) :
(((X / 179.28) * 2) + 36) * DPS * 2, representing the 2 seconds of lost meta.
Now, let's consider the damage you gain over the first 36 seconds of the encounter :
(((2800 - X) / 179.28) * 2) * DPS * 34, representing the boost of the first 34 seconds of meta.
Now for the dps gain to be 0, these needs to be equal. Thus, we get X = 2465.2 mastery rating. Hence, if your actual gear is at or under 2465 mastery rating, this switching gear method will boost your dps.
All the assumptions I made were in disfavor of the gear switching method (2800 mastery gear while you can get easily more, constant DPS while it should be significantly higher at the start of the fight thus inscreasing the effect of the boosted meta) hence this rating is the worst case scenario and should be accurate. However, since your gear should have the 1993 haste cap and strive to get the hit cap, your mastery shouldn't be that high, way under this cap.

2)This proc, if used on a meta is indeed really strong, but has one really big problem : it's ICD (100 s) is too short. You may be able to get a 100 second meta sometimes, but most of the time, that won't be the case and you won't be able to meta on the proc (or you'll have to wait 1 min or more to do it and it won't be a dps gain). All the more, if you use the said gear switching method, you will even miss the first. I pray everyday for an on-use mastery trinket but this trinket should not be used by a demonology warlock.

Edit : Adding some BIS mastery profiles (not including trinkets) :

BIS pre-raid mastery gear (3002 rating) : chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm
BIS 359 mastery gear (3104 rating) : chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm
BIS 372-379 mastery gear (3359 rating) : chardev 8 - WoW Cataclysm

The 372-379 BIS gear is pretty irrelevant in this tier (since if you manage to get it, you should be way in this tier farming point), I take it as what you should try to get before the 4.2, as a pre-4.2 BIS list.