Thanks for the response. I think that stasiscl is accurate when it comes to showing buff uptime. When I look at other guilds raids the Demonic Pact buff can show an uptime of 2-3 minutes but only 2 applications. Meaning the buff was applied twice and fell off twice, but the total uptime is still almost 3 minutes because the buff was renewed many times during that time. For me it says it was applied 4 times and the total uptime was 46 seconds (which makes sense 4x12=46). But it also says my pet crit 26 times, which must mean that something is wrong.

There's a bug right now where if you have Divine Spirit (improved or unimproved it looks. our priest only has unimproved) Demonic Pact is not being applied to anyone.

Click off spirit, Demonic Pact gets applied fine.

Farkuw, I went through my first complete Naxx as Meta/Ruin. Definitely found it quite fun, but I find myself still debating whether to keep it or switch to FG/ES which seems to put out DPS just slightly below it. My favorite part of this spec is its ability to put out DPS during execute range that's comparable to the Drain Soul output our Aff lock uses.

However, I feel like my DPS overall is really low. I only had 4.1k on Patch, even though I found myself hitting 5k easily on fights (lusting to bring down the meteor guy during the 4H fight). I was wondering if I did anything wrong. What did you do on Patch to bring your DPS up so high?

Probable reason is that Demonic Pact +dmg is added directly to your total spell damage in N2, while it should not since it does not stack with raid buffs like Totem of Wrath (not to mention potential bug, not stacking with weaker Divine Spirit).

Since present lock gear and Pact uptime rarely result in more effect than Totem of Wrath, easiest way to get proper numbers is to set Demonic Pact D19=0, and keep Totem of Wrath turned on for both FG/Ember and Meta/Ruin specs when comparing.

Doing what Nenad said above gave me these numbers from Leulier:

(0/55/16)noDPonlywrath= 5903 DPS
(0/41/30)noDPonlywrath= 5965 DPS
(55/0/16)noDPonlywrath= 6059 DPS

But taking away wrath and using DP on the meta/ruin build gave me 5997 dps. So from this I would conclude that DP should give me 94 more dps then wrath gives me(at my current gear lvl).

I would like to add that I don't know if these numbers are calculated with the bug that demonic pact has atm(probably not). My fel armor gives somewhere around 300 Spelldmg from spirit (at 3331 SP on the spreadsheet). This would "live" mean that DP will give around 30 less spelldmg then it is on the spreadsheet.

Please correct me if there are falacies in my logic.

Looking at the latest version of Leulier, the FG implementation seems extremely naive. The melee damage field consists of "=(597+fg_ap/7)". Where does 597 come from? Why isn't armor taken into account? What about Demonic Frenzy? Unholy Power? Raid buffs? Target debuffs?

If anyone's interested, my testing shows all pets now have a base average melee ("weapon") damage of 412.5. There's a hidden 5% damage boost to succubus and felguard melee attacks (multiplicative with talents, etc) and a hidden 20% damage reduction for felhunter melee attacks.

Simulationcraft has since 3.0.8 operated with slightly outdated melee pet scaling/damage mechanics, and has tended to model the felguard in particular as doing significantly less DPS than in reality. This is now fixed, and should be in the next release.

I see the "armor factor" field, but where is this taken into account?
I see the frenzy charges, but I don't see how it affects AP.
I see the buffs/debuffs fields, but I don't see how they're taken into account either.

Really, I'm not trying to be rude here, and I may be missing something obvious, so please explain.

As for the 597 value, it's just not that simple, because both Demonic Power and the hidden 5% boost affect the value you see in the DPS tooltip in the pet pane.

DP also does not stack (in addition to Totem of Wrath) with Divine Spirit, and FocusMagic. So you should check that you have both of those removed too if you tested using DP.

As for actual value of DP, with well geared fully buffed lock it should be higher than 280 from Wrath. But it also has potentially less than 100% uptime, and potential stacking problem with lower buffs (like Improved Divine Spirit as someone posted).

- armor factor cell name is "Armor", and it is used in E41 and E42 cells (damage of swing and cleave), by reducing those. Formula for armor reduction is taken from wiki and checked on tank threads. Armor for bosses is taken from same sources.

- frenzy charges (B43) influence total pet AP (B44) by *(1+B43*(0.05+demo_brut*0.01))

- buffs/debuffs influence lot of cells, but too long to explain - go to post #206 in XLS thread and you can see it explained there

Thanks for the detail - I spotted my obvious mistake: I only saw the first line of each field

It's been ages since I worked with Excel, pretty sure there was no such thing as multi-line cell definitions back then. I do apologize for wasting your time.

Hopefully I can make a contribution to make up for my mistake:
It's not that simple - the DPS tooltip is affected by Unholy Power as well as the hidden 5% boost to felguard melee damage. So if X is the tooltip DPS and Y is the DPS bonus from AP, you need to calculate (X/1.26 - Y) * 2.

I observed the following correlations between AP and "weapon" DPS for my Felguard:
And the following correlations for my Succubus:
This looks very similar - in fact, these two pets start off at the same AP and DPS values and scale at the same rate. But hold on, aren't they supposed to get 1 DPS per 14 AP? Let's do the math:

Felguard:
Succubus:
So it looks like they both get 1 DPS per 11.11 AP, not 14! Unless Blizzard has decided to implement entirely different melee mechanics for our pets than for the rest of their world, this means the DPS from the tooltip is affected by some percentage-based boost - 26%, to be exact (14 / 11.11 = 1.26). Unholy Power is an obvious culprit, but that's only 20%, so where do those extra 6% come from?

It turns out that if you spec 0/0/0 and redo the math for the Succubus, you find that her tooltip DPS is affected by a hidden 5% boost. It stacks multiplicatively with Unholy Power for a total of 26% as observed when talented (1.2 * 1.05 = 1.26).

Similar math for the felhunter shows he's affected by a hidden 20% *reduction*.

So the weapon damage for the Felguard is given by the following equation:
And you can solve for BaseDmg easily by using any of the correlation points above:
It turns out this base damage is universal for all our melee pets - or at least for the three I've tested: Felguard, Succubus, and Felhunter.

And while the "hidden" modifiers to melee pet DPS may sound weird initially, it makes a sort of sense. This was probably the best way they could find to balance the damage of the various pets against each other, without ending up with a situation that was going to be slowly but surely skewed by gear inflation.

ok, i tested those, but unfortunatelly since right now I'm afflic I do not have FG. But numbers that I got are as follows:

FH = (412.5+ AP/7)* 0.80
VW= (412.5+ AP/7)* 0.86
Succ= (412.5+ AP/7)* 1.05

While I tested those as afflic specced, it seems that you have point about some multipliers being present, but it seems that those are different for different pets, and that for FH and VW they even reduce value of AP and total damage.

Can you check what coeficients you get fro VW or FH?

I get 0.80 for Felhunter and 1.05 for Succubus and Felguard, a mentioned in my post. I'll test VW when I get a chance, but I can only assume you have the right value for him since you nailed it for the others.

I can confirm and clarify that the whole raid gets the DP buff even if they all have Divine Spirit. Only the warlock that supplies DP needs to click off Divine Spirit for it to work.

Really? I see in my guild's Wow Web Stats everyone getting the DP buff, albeit only once in this parse. I do find it a little hard to believe it procced only once though.

We had one Priest in raid with imp Divine Spirit and no elemental Shaman

You can see how often it was refreshed like this: Wow Web Stats

It looks as if you got buffed before the fight Wow Web Stats

The warlock can have Divine Spirit and their pet would still proc DP, but if the PET has divine spirit it will not proc DP so the warlock would have to dismiss their pet so it doesn't receive Divine Spirit.

No actually look at WWS. DP is up constantly. The whole raid has DS including my pet.

What's the best way to maximize the effectiveness of Meta in instances? Specifically, if I'm using it on packs (to maximize the effect of Immolation Aura), what's the best other spell to cast? RoF, SoCorruption, Hellfire...? I've been getting really good results with Meta/Immolation Aura/Hellfire, but it's a bit fragile because of the channeling. What do you guys use?

Also, is the damage boost from Meta only in effect for spells you cast while in Meta, or does it affect existing DoT effects (and stop affecting DoTs when you leave Meta)?

Thanks!

I believe Meta only affects spells cast while IN Meta. Like with trinkets and such that have procs or on use increases in damage. So if you put DoTs up while Meta was up then they get the extra damage but DoTs that were already up when you popped Meta don't. DoTs that keep ticking after Meta wears off will retain the extra damage through out (in fact if you try to refresh them they'll say "a stronger spell is already in effect" and won't let you.

So, on a boss fight you want to cast Meta when it's almost time to refresh your DoTs, and refresh them all again just before it ends, yes?

Of course, in a raid, you're going to be timing Meta around Heroism, so micro-managing Meta timing around DoT refreshes probably isn't practical. Good to know that it's necessary to avoid clipping post-meta, though.

Thanks!