Are there DE changes incoming?

I have been reading about specks trying to improve DPS on PVE because I am not happy with the DPS I am doing, normaly I am the best lock (depend if i can use my pet or not without problems).
At the moment I am using 2/51/18
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

I haven't found any one talking about this build I would like same opinions if possible.

Not Quite. On live Demonic Empathy only affects the next 3 spells & abilities within 15s but on PTR it works on all spells & abilities for 15 seconds. It still does not proc off white attacks though.

Sorry your right still not a very good talent though imo.

Kroko,

If you are married to taking meta as a viable PVE spec I would suggest you use something like this:
Meta/Ruin i use

The two points you have in the affliction tree could be better spent elsewhere. I chose mana feed and demonic resilience. Demonic resilience is important to help you keep your felguard alive during fights in which he is taking damage. My choice of two points in mana feed is purely personal preference; with two points I can worry less about the state of my pet's mana when hes tanking things during soloing or in a pinch in a heroic.

I max Demonic Tactics because 2% of my spell power is a considerable amount and it will only increase as my gear gets better. If you still want to take cataclysm for the hit, I would suggest you drop demonic resilience 2 points and mana feed 1 point (using my posted build). That would leave you with 1 point in mana feed and 1 in demonic resilience. I'm suggesting this over 2 in mana feed, which I feel is just as important as demonic resilience, because you are only using 1 point in your current build and may find that acceptable.

If you find you have any other questions kroko feel free to PM me. I am a big proponent of meta/ruin and I'm working on collecting a lot of raid data through WWS for help and advice raiding as meta/ruin.

I have a question for veterans of the forum as well: would it be more appropriate to post WWS links in this thread or the WWS help/analysis thread?

EDIT in response to demonic empathy speculation in the other posts:

Talent points can easily be spent other places in that tree or in another one entirely and provide you with a much better result. I am of the opinion that Demonic Empathy procs with such infrequency and yields such a small damage increase that you would be better off using those three points almost anywhere else.

I guess it depends on the purpose of posting the wws, Nagoska.

If you want general help on how to improve your dps, or want help analyzing a wws, that probably belongs in the wws thread.

If you are posting (for example) two parses to compare a particular demonology talent or build, then this would be an appropriate place for that. For example if you wanted to demonstrate how often (or not often) demonic empathy procs to back your assertion that is was a crappy talent, this would be a good place to do that.

Tuturin,

I appreciate the information, I would prefer to remain an active user of this forum without violating any of the posted forum rules. I will be doing KT tomorrow so I will get a WWS parse of my fight in 10 man and post it here to compare against kroko's contrary opinion to mine regarding the meta/ruin spec I suggested.

Kroko, if you would be able to gather a parse of any raids you do as meta/ruin, I would be extremely curious to see how we compare in a 10 man environment (I'm limited to nax 10 because of my raid time availability) since this spec seems to be a seldom/rarely used or performance documented.

Regarding your assertion that your pet doesn't have trouble with survivability in fights other than KT and sapphiron, I would gladly show you in my WWS for my KT fight tomorrow that I dont have any problems with his survivability because I am specced into demonic resilience.

On a side note Kroko, do you feel you are able to sufficiently stack less hit to warrant a DPS increase by taking 3/3 cataclysm? Also, can anyone else comment on his 2 points in imporved corruption? I'm not sure that would be a wise choice considering what I have already said about demonic pact, demonic resil, and mana feed.

I suppose this leaves us to gather and compare data from WWS.

As your damage increases you can even keep the Felguard alive through these 2 fights. I have done it. For Heigan he just stays with the Melee for phase 1 and since our tank is great at getting to the right spots my felguard following Heigan does just fine with it for the most part. If he lags a bit my damage heals him back up. I pull him to me for Phase 2 and he follows me through the dance then just fine. For Saphiron as long as I am careful pulling him out of blizzards and staying out of them myself then I am able to keep him alive by using the time when we are standing behind the ice blocks unable to dps healing him. I heal him up, my healers heal me up and back to dpsing we go. The place I find hardest to keep him alive is Sartharion with 2-3 drakes up. If the tank is not positioning well when the lava walls come then he gets hit and dies if I am not paying enough attention to pull him to me in time. Most other fights my damage has now overcome the splash damage he receives and I am able to keep him alive without any points in demonic resilience. Walking into Naxx fresh 80 keeping the pet alive through Saphiron was impossible, now its rare if he dies.

This is the spec I use: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

Rozzenwyn,

It would be extremely useful if you could post some WWS here so we may compare them against eachother, or send me a link in a PM. Depending on how they change demonic empathy, I was toying with the idea of taking a point or two out of demo resil and mana feed for it. Thoughts, concerns, questions?

I know the community here has pretty much discounted the Succubus use for PVE, but i was wondering if anyone did some simcraft or testing with a shadow build using the Succy. Something like a 0/31/40 with a focus on shadow instead of Fire.

This would take advantage of SB having a better spell power coeficient, but the build feels like it wastes a few points in the destro tree gettin there.

How much dps should a raidbuffed felguard be doing? about 1k i guess? If so, mine is doing a terrible work.

hbalsack,

That spec looks very... scattered. If you tried it and put up some WWS it might prove surprising, but at frist glace it looks like it wouldn't be specialized enough to do any one thing well and I wouldn't recommend it. If you wanted to try the idea out I would do something like shadow/succy/destro. At first glance the spec doesn't look strong in any way though so... good luck, let us know if it works.

source
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> A clarification on Warlock buffs.

I will stay deep demo. Now it is for the raid buff, later I hope to be somewhat competitive in DPS too

For some reason it hasn't been mentioned yet, but ever since PTR hit, the base dmg for FG, Succubus and FH has significantly improved, VW dmg has slightly improved (it's dmg comes mostly from attk power scaling). The base dmg for these pets has almost doubled. I'm on a break at work currently so I can't give accurate numbers, but my FG had around 800-1k as base dmg on the PTR with PvE gear, Succubus had around the same and FH had a dmg range around 700.

I mentioned it in this post. More specifically, felguard went from 130 to 412 weapon damage, felhunter went from 71 to 312.5, and succubus from 121 to 440. Doomguard went from 1400 to 1690 and now also scales like the other pets.

Keep in mind this is the base damage, that is, *before* scaling. So the improvement isn't as dramatic as it sounds.

If you want to see the impact of the changes, the latest Simulationcraft release already reflects the new numbers.

Of course, the only scaling improved by this change is DT+IDT being more valuable, and D Empathy being slightly more valuable (basically % based dmg modifiers) other than that, the 20% attk power glyph will have a much greater effect on FG dmg scaling.

This is only true for the imp, melee attack != firebolt dmg. Firebolt is an ability, thus the imps melee DPS is irrelevant, although the pet stats show imp melee dps, the imp does not melee at all. The only accurate measure of firebolt dmg is firebolt tooltip dmg + scaling spell power modifier.

While i didnt do spec for spec test with the felguard on the ptr on live my felguard melee attack was 511-550 and on the ptr it 711-921 give or take however on the ptr my felguard was still avg around 550 melee dmg which is a little higher then on live. his attacks did not double. ill do more testing tonight.

I tested FG extensively, and I can confirm as a fact on both live and PTR that tooltip DPS for all melee pets is accurate with the actual hits, the only variable that would affect this is armor. Even then, testing on low lvl training dummies should minimize the effect armor has on actual melee dmg.

Like it has been mentioned, it's a buff to base dmg, so it won't have a significant effect on scaling outside of straight % modifiers (ie, a FG with a full stack of demonic frenzy will not have it's dmg doubled).

Their base weapon damage much more than doubled, but their actual damage output (after taking into account their scaling from our gear) obviously nowhere near doubled. What is displayed in the melee damage tooltip is accurate both on live and on the PTR. The discrepancy you're seeing is due to armor mitigation.

The weapon damage Zak refers to is part of the simplified equation below:

Damage = Weapon_Damage + Weapon_Speed * Attack_Power / 14

There are amplifying and dampening affects that modify both portions of the equation, but only the Attack_Power portion scales with gear.

Did a pet-test on the ?? doll in orgrimmar yesterday with these results:

Felhunter 90 dps //Aff/ruin
Imp 120 dps //Aff/ruin
Felguard 350dps // 0/41/30

My SP was ~1700 with Aff and ~1800 with FG.