Does the Succubus' Lash of Pain qualify as a 'basic attack' and as such provide the warlock with mana via Mana Feed?

Yes, Lash of Pain is the Succubus' Basic Attack and yes it does return mana by Mana Feed. Given that LoP is instant and has no cooldown it wildly outperforms the Felguard's depressingly low Mana Feed supply (his Basic Attack is Legion Strike).

You'll notice that in the new simcraft outputs the mana return from Mana Feed is huge and almost removes the need for Life Tap entirely, the pre-raid warlock only gains 66k from Life tap (i.e. about 3 casts in a five minute fight).

I found it bizarre enough that the non-Felguard pets made such better use of the demo utility talents, now that the Succubus is also doing more damage I can't imagine Blizzard will leave things as they are.

The only issue I have with the Succubus has been the lack of single target fights, where the FG's AoE was frowned upon. The only person in the raid beating my FG on most AoE is myself thanks to immolation and Meta'd Hellfire. Every other fight, the AoE/cleave of the FG has more than made up for his 'loss' of single target DPS.

Felguard has been best for me through testing. (The succubus does more single target dps, but my personal dps drops quite a bit due to the weaker Demon Soul, making her not nearly as good.)

~dy

I've tried that but found out that adding it more to Life Tap and Demonic Empowerment rather then Shadow Bolt give you more control over the AoE part.

Then why would we spec into Dark Arts? This talent gives no bonus to a Succubus. Wouldnt those points be better used in a talent that would at least increase our DPS by a small amount, or something that would help us in CC situations like Aura of Foreboding?

With haste being about best stat we can get, doesn't Enchant Boots - Haste would provide better DPS boost than Lavawalker ? or is the run speed improvement so good that you prefer +35 mastery over +50 haste ??

I agree. Unfortunately there aren't too many great talents, but especially Aura of Foreboding helps in fights like Magmaw. The other point I just put into the Master Summoner in case the succubus dies, you get an instant revive with 50% mana off. Now it is on to wait what changes will be made to Imp. SF and if the succubus remains as strong as she is. For now she clocks in at about 25-30% of my damage on single target fights.

According to my recount, my Felguard is doing around 30% of my OVERALL Damage.

This of course is subject to change on specific boss fights, but 30% is pretty significant. Significant to reconsider Mastery as a viable stat. Especially as an Orc Warlock.


Any thoughts/more solid #'s on Mastery?

The less perfect your rotation is capable of being either through lag, movement, sloppy play, the more your pet will do in relation to you, and the more value mastery will have for demon warlocks. This is also true if fight mechanics allow you to take advantage of demon form like maloriak where you get +100% damage debuff every 2 minutes.

It also might be beneficial to have high mastery in a fight like Chimaeron where the burn phase isn't that long, and DPS matters a lot. So even though it might be less dps overall, its more dps when it matters the most.

Generally speaking its impractical to have radically different gear sets, and/or reforge/regem every fight so you want to go with a best fit approach unless you are a top 200 guild.

I was wondering about something I cannot work out how to test using Simcraft: specifically using the Felguard whenever Demon Soul is available and then swapping back to the Succubus afterwards.

So assuming that we're starting the encounter with Meta and Demon Soul you'd want to start the encounter with the Felguard out (popping Felstorm as well of course). If we pre-combat Soulburn and Soul Harvest then Soulburn will come off cooldown at about the same time Metamorphosis falls off, where we can use Soulburn to instant out the Succubus for ~2 minutes of her (much higher) dps.

When (or just before) Demon Soul comes off cooldown we can Soulburn out the Felguard, pop the cooldowns (Felstorm included) for a huge damage spike and you can then either leave out the 'guard or Soulburn the Succubus back out again after the cooldown is up depending on how many shards you've got left and the duration of the encounter.

This is obviously only for single-target fights.

This strategy means that we use up our Soul Shards demon swapping instead of being able to use them for instant Soul Fires (not a big worry for me really) and waste some casting or GCD time summoning a demon or two, but makes very good use of the Felstorm and Felguard's Demon Soul effect while still getting the benefit of the Succubus's better long-term dps most of the rest of the time. It also allows us to line up even more explosive cooldowns for extra damage burn phases.

Can anyone spot any obvious flaws with this idea?

Edit: This strategy would also work for Affliction, replacing the Felguard with the Felhound for its significant Demon Soul ability. I doubt it would be worth doing for Destruction.

As has been mentioned in the other forums, the change in ISF is going to hurt both Affliction and Demo locks alot, whereas the change to Mastery might move this stat up from last place to ahead of Crit, and I'm saying might here as I'm waiting on a Simcraft to confirm this.