Through 5 years of playing a ‘lock, and playing the game in general, I have to say that the course of things is steady improvement interspersed with miscalculated hiccups, and on balance I’m happy to ride through the hiccups because the steady improvement wins out in the end. If the game lasts another 5 years I see no reason to expect that general curve of improvement to change – it’s exactly the result to expect from following a policy of iterative tweaking over an extended period of time. While we can act like Verucca Salt and stamp our feet demanding Blizzard switch to a policy of giving perfection on a plate and giving it NOW! I don’t imagine anyone who’s calmed down and had a cup of tea will genuinely acknowledge that as a realistic proposal, and the current problems are a good demonstration as to why…

There’s good reason to see Cataclysm’s implementation as the biggest change to WoW we’ve yet had. Many have described it as a “reboot” of the game. By the end of WotLK iterative change had polished the playstyles of many of the classes and in general things felt like a very smooth experience over some deeply broken core mechanics. The most obvious and severe of these was that years of polishing complex and intertwined abilities made balancing near impossible. There was no clear knob to twiddle to adjust the output of one spec that didn’t impact other specs. For Warlocks the shard mechanic was an outdated pain, but other than that all three specs were playing very nicely indeed after many years of struggle to get there. Other classes and specs had similar “legacy” mechanic problems (hunter mana, boomkin eclipse, etc) as well as a dominance of all kinds of AoE that was unbalancing the degree of challenge and interest that most encounters could provide.

So the situation was a broken core, but with the polish on top thats the expected outcome of years of tuning. Cata is an attempt to rebuild what was bust in the core, and it doesn’t have the years of tuning to polish the jagged edges that those kind of deep rooted changes make. Even if a particular mastery is crappy now, the details can be changed. The fact that mastery is in place at all is the important bit, as now there’s a knob to twiddle to allow spec balance to be tweaked without affecting other specs – the answer to the monster pre-cata problem. The details of shards aren’t polished yet, but the details can be tweaked and tuned – the core model is far superior to the pre-cata one.

Looking back to the BC to WotLK transition, the Meta spec that those of us who played it through later tiers got to love was pretty broken for tier 7, to the extent where most demo warlocks were running a FG/Emberstorm or Imp/Conflag build. It takes time for the kinks to be worked out after any change, and Cata is much more change at a much deeper level than either of the previous expansions. For me the surprise doesn’t lie with the fact that there are problems, but with how few problems there are. Folks are naturally comparing the post-cata builds with the end results of the WotLK iteration process, but comparing how a spec like Demo is going into this expansion compared to how we went into the last is much more informative. In my opinion the degree to which we have problems, when comparing a t7 meta build to a t11 meta build, for example, is much less despite the bigger changes. I think a lot of that is a testament to how well the core mechanic changes have worked, as the issues with balance are minor now. However, I do think there’s a reason for the degree to which people are getting upset…

When the meta build had problems at the start of WotLK, players experimented and switched to the FG/Ember or Imp/Conflag builds. They had much greater leeway in coming up with ways to deal with their own problems. Today, however, the talent trees are locked down to the extent where that is not possible. That gives nowhere for us to go but back to the developers. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll ride out the hiccup as I’m convinced that with some iterative polish the changes to the core mechanics are going to make the game better than ever, but I also get the reason for so much QQ as players are powerless to experiment and change things for themselves. The first things that needs some iteration are the current talent trees.

I’ve been meaning to do a bunch of edits to both the Demo and pre-raid gear guides, but once the trickles of patch 4.0.6 info started I’ve been holding off. My intention now is to playtest demo for a while after the patch and then do a major edit of the guide. As for whether I continue with Demo, I’ll have to wait and see – while I think the changes will actually make the spec stronger overall, I’ve got big concerns about how the complexity and challenge has been stripped away. I just don’t yet know whether I’m going to find it fun in its new (or “old made easier”) form.

The big change for play mechanics is the removal of Improved Soul Fire. It’s getting shifted out of our reach, meaning we’ll talent to max out tier1 of destro, and Emberstorm from tier2. Maintaining the ISF buff and working round the collisions with trying to refresh Immolate with Hand of Gul’dan has been our key mechanic so far this tier. It’s needed a degree of foresight, judgement and dexterity to pull it off well, and put a real challenge right at the heart of the spec. I’ve found myself having to focus so hard on this that when the mechanic dissappears during Bloodlust it feels like 30 seconds of holiday, letting me mindlessly bash out some EZ-mode dps until Bloodlust fades and the need for ISF kicks in again.

I can’t say I’m thrilled with the prospect of nothing but the EZ-mode. I’ve been enjoying having a mechanic that I’ve found testing. With this change the hardest thing for Demo will be squeezing in the HoG refresh for Immolate into that tight timer… well, actually no: there’s a change being made to the Inferno talent to extend Immolate’s duration by 6 seconds. So what challenge could be found in that has also been taken away.

What does this leave? The skill and judgement involved in refreshing DoTs optimally went away with the new Cata “no-clip” mechanics. The 15 second window for refreshing BoD couldn’t provide a challenge if you tried to do it with your nose, while blindfolded. Similarly the implementation of command queueing has made timing all casts a wide open goal, with no more keyspamming or other techniques needed. The toughest part of the Demo rotation is now refreshing Corruption in a 2 second or so window. How do I motivate myself to spend hours trying to get better at that exactly?

Other changes are pretty warranted. The Felstorm 20% nerf will be made back up by the very welcome 33% buff to Mastery and the reductions to Immolation Aura and Hellfire (via the removal of the range extension previously given by the Inferno talent) still leave us ahead of the pack as far as AoE goes. The Mastery buff will go a long way towards replacing the missing ISF haste in dps terms, but more importantly improves our long-term scaling, which had been looking decidedly lacklustre.

In terms of balance, the outcome of this patch will align the three warlock specs even more tightly for single target fights, with Demo no longer trailing behind. It will also stop us getting quite so far ahead in the multi target fights, though we will still be one of the best specs in the game for those. Those are the welcome changes in terms of balance.

On the other hand, there’s the other kind of balance that Blizzard talked so much about in the run up to Cataclysm’s release, and that’s the balance between success and failure, and between skill and facerolling. Meta spec Demo has always been one of the most demanding specs, rewarding skillful play and punishing failure much more extremely than most other specs. This patch will change all of that though. In effect it takes both Demo and Affliction back to (more-or-less) the same basic rotations as used though WotLK but having brought in command queueing and the dot clip mechanic removed the parts of that playstyle that relied most on individual judgement or technique as the previously tight timing windows are now so much easier and more forgiving to hit.

There are three parts to getting top dps: ability, gear and luck. The nature of the game brings the last two to the table – it’s a gear chase with RNG – while the player brings the first. By significantly lowering the hurdles that serve to differentiate player ability, that curve is getting squashed flatter than it’s ever been for Meta/Demo. It will be much harder to fail, but impossible to excel, while the roles for gear and luck will have increased weight. Easy to play specs show little variation in their numbers beyond how gear and RNG determine the difference, and while many players will happily spam a single button if it gets them the results in terms of numbers that’s not been true of Demo players in the last couple of years. Historically Destro has had that honour.

Obviously with millions of players there has to be room for multiple playstyles, some appealing to the “one button’s enough, all I care about is dps” crowd while some appeal to folks who want more of a challenge to keep their interest levels up. Ironically the most challenging warlock spec post patch looks to be the one most associated with the easy dps crowd – destro is perhaps more challenging to play than it’s ever been – while demo is taking the opposite journey. Is this a deliberate attempt to shake up players who have settled into their specs for too long?

You increase your spell haste by 15% for 15 sec after you deal damage with Soul Fire. This effect has a 15 sec cooldown.

This is, of course, causing vast amounts of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in Warlock forums the world over (I’ve come to the belief that the sun rising in the morning would do the same these days), with many folks demanding it be raised in the Destro tree so Demo and Affliction can’t spec it, and the more extreme threatening to /nerdquit over it’s existence.

Me, I like it. Quite a lot.

Once we hit 85, the changes to combat ratings are going to be extremely severe. It will take just over 128 haste rating for 1% of haste. For Demo, that’s significant as we need our haste to be within certain ranges if we’re to refresh Immolate with Hand of Gul’dan successfully and consistently (the addition of Fel Flame does give us more options, but in terms of hitting peak dps, we will still be chasing the HoG refresh mechanic). For some time initially we will be chasing hit on our gear as well as gemming for it. In pre-raid gear it’s not possible to get hit capped from ratings on gear alone, so getting to the 1742 hit cap will be top priority. As gear has 2 secondary stats, and we can reforge from crit and mastery to haste (on gear that doesn’t already have it) my expectation is that we should be able to start raiding with the 1742 hit cap met, and around 1200-1500 haste rating after gemming, enchanting and reforging (with minimal amounts of crit and mastery).

This much haste will put us quite tightly around 15 seconds for 6 Immolate ticks (c. 15.2 seconds @ 1200, 14.9 @ 1500) if we just factor in the 3% haste from Dark Intent and the 5% raid buff. That makes me nervous about my ability to refresh consistently, as I much prefer a more relaxed window for casting HoG (I particularly don’t like pausing, ever, and would rather cast another nuke and then cast HoG than wait for a moment if HoG is ‘nearly’ off GCD – gaps in casting can never be optimal dps). Even worst, the more we stack haste, the worse our casting window becomes. To get to the 30% haste threshold at which the casting window expands (and Immolate gets it’s 7th tick) needs 2588 haste rating and we won’t have a chance of hitting those levels until much later tiers. We’d have a poor choice of stacking haste (a good stat for us) and losing the ability to HoG refresh Immolate (a bad thing for our dps) or increasing other (less effective) stats in preference to haste in order to remain able to use the HoG refresh mechanic.

A 15% haste buff makes things look very different. At 1200 haste our Immolate duration is 15.44, and at 1500 it’s 15.11 and both of these are over a much reduced 30% cap (so have 7 ticks) of just 580 haste rating (interestingly the threshold for 50% with Improved Soul Fire and raid buffs is 2639 rating – not far off that needed for 30% with no ISF). Those are much more comfortable numbers to start raiding with, and as we gain better gear the tightening timings before the 50% threshold are less severe than those before the 30% one, and the ‘external’ multiplier acts to lower the relative value of haste to the other secondary stats making it have less impact if we avoid the problem area before the threshold and balance our crit and mastery ratings instead.

Now, all I’ve done so far is give an argument why Demo is in need of a haste multiplier, and demonstrated why 15% suits us very nicely. I don’t think many of those folks arguing against ISF are arguing against getting the buff – they just want it provided by a different mechanism.

Should it be active or passive? The easiest-to-play option would be to make it a passive buff attached to something in the Demo tree. I can understand why some players would prefer this, as it removes any skill requirement and acts to reduce the difference between good players and bad ones. Everyone would like to top the meters and baking massive, passive dps boosts into out-of-combat choices favours those who struggle with their in-combat ones. As an option, making the buff passive removes the ability to screw it up.

This can’t be a simple right or wrong answer then. Some folks are always going to want everything to be made easier, while others look forward to the opportunity to be challenged and given the tools to be able to differentiate themselves as good players. What I am sensing, however, is a move on Blizzard’s part to push things towards the second of these options, maybe as a response to the complaints of WotLK being ‘faceroll’ or the rise of Gearscore as the prime method of differentiating between players. By allowing the difference between the dps of the highest and lowest percentiles to increase, the relative importance of player skill is raised. Maybe they’ve just remembered that the “G” in MMORPG stands for Game and not Grind.

I prefer that the buff should be active, that it becomes another mechanism that rewards me for playing well, even if that means I look obviously mediocre when I screw it up. Given that I want to be doing something active to address our haste issues, the idea of tying the buff to Soul Fire is a solution I like.

Firstly, it’s an ability that’s already well used, and therefore (if you’re a binder) keybound. We have a lot of buttons already and don’t need another.

Secondly it’s an ability that used to be crucial and has seen it’s usefulness decline – with Decimation now just 25% instead of 35%, and the increased effectiveness of Incinerate to the point where MC procs make Incin take priority over SF during Decimate, it sees far fewer casts than before, and I’m a sucker for the idea of rehabilitation. I guess I don’t see the point of keeping a once-critical ability on our keybinds for old time’s sake and the role of 2nd priority, last 25% nuke is like some kind of doddering senescence for a once-great spell – either put it out of it’s misery or give it something else worth doing! The Soul Burn effect has done a small measure of renewal, which Improved Soul Fire should complete.

Thirdly, that very same Soul Burn ability to make it an instant cast gives some nice synergy and strategy to the casting. Trying to sneak the 4th Soul Burn effect is a fun activity for starting fights, which will get the buff up nice and quickly. We’d also be using the rest of the shards on Soul Fires through a fight, and now have the consideration of when best to use them to maintain the buff rather than just cast on cooldown/during Meta. Demo is the spec for folks who like to think about when to use certain abilities – it’s the strategy of the spec that’s got me hooked, and more strategy is absolutely a good thing.

Fourth, and lastly, I think there’s room for something new to be brought in to our rotation between 80 and 85. While both Affliction and Destruction will be gaining a powerful CD in Demon Soul that they’ll have to consider, the best use for Demo is chaining it to Meta owing to the greater benefits of stacking multipliers (to the extent where I’ll probably macro them together as a castsequence). Dark Intent is entirely passive and Fel Flame, while greatly changing what we cast while moving, doesn’t have a role in our ‘optimal’ (i.e. static/tank+spank) rotation. The big difference between Demo at 80 and Demo at 85 will be… Soul Fire (the return).

Well, that’s why I think Improved Soul Fire is a good talent for Demo, and why I’m looking forward to getting and using it. Not that I care about the other specs much, but from what I can see it’s a pretty interesting change to Destro, which is probably a bad thing as in my view Destro should be the spec for those who don’t want much in the way of interesting – the natural destro players have never been happier than when they’ve got a simple and straightforward rotation (whether that’s SB spam or 5 button whack-a-cooldown). As for Affliction, it seems sadly clunky, but will also decline in importance with increasing gear values, as base haste ratings from gear rise and GCD capping becomes a possibility, though even this won’t address PvP issues. I think affli players have a legitimate grievance but the problems may be temporary, certainly fixable with a Glyph of Eradication (either by extending the current Eradication mechanics to be comparable while making Imp SF incompatible, or simply adding a similar effect to Haunt – I’m sure there are other ways too).

When making the list, my initial aim is to the 17% hit cap. This means that even though reforging gives us far more freedom than ever before in customising our stat balance, where items are equivalent I’m prioritising the ones with hit. It’s become very obvious to me that the balancing of combat ratings at level 85 are, compared to what we’ve become used to, incredibly severe. If at a glance you feel I’m overdoing the hit, for example, take a closer look and you’ll see that it might not be possible to reach the hit cap from gear alone – some amount of gemming, enchanting or reforging will be needed. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that many people start raiding with some amount of miss chance still on the table.

For info, the level 85 combat ratings I’ve used are as follows:

Spell Hit: 102.446
Haste: 128.057
Crit: 179.280
Mastery 179.28

The hit rating required for cap is 1742.

First I’ll give an overview of what’s available from the different channels for loot, then I’ll run through recommendations on a slot by slot basis, and finally give two sample pre-raid gear sets showing best-available and all-fallback gear, and do a quick analysis of the combat ratings.

Questing: You should aim to have replaced most quest rewards by the time you start raiding (most of the best stuff lacks gem slots), but you could probably get away with using a couple of these as filler, and all of this stuff will see you right in heroic dungeons (NB most of these are normal mode dungeon quest rewards).

Staff – Very Manly Staff
Chest – Overly Intelligent Robes
Legs – Bastion-Clearing Leggings
Shoulder – Blight-Lifter’s Mantle
Waist – Belt of Mystical Betrayal
Feet – Sandals of the Courier
Trinket – World-Queller Focus
Wrist – True Archaeologist’s Bracers
Off-hand – Air Raid Beacon
Wand – Shackle-Shatter Wand

Faction: There’s some excellent gear available from factions, particularly the epic items available at exalted. Getting Revered with Hyjal and Exalted with Deepholm for most people will be important as these are the vendors for the head and shoulder enchants.

Head Enchant – Arcanum of Hyjal – Hyjal
Hands – Aessina-Blessed Gloves – Hyjal
Hands – Flamebloom Gloves – Earthen Ring
Back – Cloak of Ancient Wisdom – Earthen Ring
Head – Helm of Temperance – Earthen Ring
Feet – Desert Walker Sandals – Ramkahen
Chest – Robes of Orsis – Ramkahen
Staff – Insidious Staff – Hellscream’s Reach
Trinket – Stump of Time – Hellscream’s Reach
Neck – Yellow Smoke Pendant – Dragonmaw Clan
Finger – Band of Lamentation – Dragonmaw Clan
Hands – Bone Fever Gloves – Dragonmaw Clan
Shoulder Enchant – Greater Inscription of Charged Lodestone – Deepholme
Finger – Diamant’s Ring of Temperance – Deepholme

Crafted: There’s a lot of useful gear to level with available from crafters, but this is the pick of the lot, and should be useful for getting into a first raid.

Breeches of Mended Nightmares – Tailoring Legs
Dreamless Belt – Tailoring Waist
Powerful Enchanted Spellthread – Tailoring Leg Enchant
Dungeoneering Guide – Inscription Off-hand
Eye of Many Deaths – Jewelcrafting Neck
Ring of Warring Elements – Jewelcrafting Finger
Elementium Spellblade – Blacksmithing Main Hand
Darkmoon Card: Volcano – Inscription Trinket

Badge: The following is all Justice point loot. Most Valor loot, while obviously extremely good, won’t be readily available until you’re already raiding.

Chest – Robes of Embalmed Darkness
Head – Cowl of Pleasant Gloom
Hands – Gloves of the Painless Midnight
Legs – Pensive Legwraps
Waist – Incense Infused Cumberbund
Shoulder – Meadow Mantle
Neck – String of Beaded Bubbles
Off-hand – Hermit’s Lamp

Dungeon: Pick up gear from normal dungeons to get into heroics, then use this stuff to start raiding with.

Chest – Inquisition Robes – Blackrock Caverns
Chest – Corsair’s Overshirt – Deadmines
Chest – Robes of Arugal – Shadowfang Keep
Chest – Robes of Rampant Growth – Halls of Origination
Legs – Legwraps of Astral Rain – Halls of Origination
Waist – Stratosphere Belt – Vortex Pinnacle
Shoulder – Mantle of the Eastern Lords – Shadowfang Keep
Shoulder – Mantle of Master Cho – Lost City
Head – Helm of the Typhonic Beast – Halls of Origination
Head – Blinders of the Follower – Shadowfang Keep
Head – Crown of Enfeebled Bodies – Grim Batol
Trinket – Anhuur’s Hymnal – Halls of Origination
Trinket – Sorrowsong – Lost City
Trinket – Tendrils of Burrowing Dark – Stonecore
Finger – Lavishly Jeweled Ring – Deadmines
Finger – Anthia’s Ring – Throne of Tides
Finger – Band of Rays – Halls of Origination
Finger – Spirit Creeper Ring – Lost City
Back – Periwinkle Cloak – Throne of Tides
Wrist – Armbands of Exiled Architects – Deadmines
Wrist – Sand Silk Wristband – Lost City
Neck – Pendant of the Keep – Shadowfang Keep
Neck – Pipefish Cord – Throne of Tides
Hands – Mnemiopsis Gloves – Throne of Tides
Staff – Cerith Spire Staff – Throne of the Tides
Staff – Emberstone Staff – Deadmines
Staff – Staff of Siphoned Essences – Grim Batol
Dagger – Modgud’s Blade – Grim Batol
Dagger – Biting Wind – Vortex Pinnacle
Sword – Blade of the Burning Sun – Halls of Origination
Wand – Corla’s Baton – Blackrock Caverns
Wand – Cookie’s Stirring Rod – Deadmines

Archaeology: I’m giving this a separate section as it’s very much an unknown quantity. While I’m looking forward to it (and hope to be a Professor one day) I doubt I’ll have much time for it while I try and get myself raid ready. There’s some very good gear available though, so I’ll list it here, but I’m expecting this to take a significant investment of time to obtain. It’s interesting that they are bind to account.

Finger – Ring of the Boy Emperor
Staff – Staff of Sorceror-Thane Thaurissan

Putting that together to make recommendations on a slot-by-slot basis:

Head: You get a good hat from Earthen Ring at Honored which will be a good fallback, and there’s a good selection that drop from heroic instances. .

Best: either…
Helm of the Typhonic Beast
Cowl of Pleasant Gloom

Fallback: Helm of Temperance

Other options:
Blinders of the Follower
Crown of Enfeebled Bodies

Neck: There’s a very good neck available from jewelcrafters – as it’s the only one with a gem slot, I’m rating it as the best available.

Best: Eye of Many Deaths

Other options:
Yellow Smoke Pendant
Pendant of the Keep
String of Beaded Bubbles
Pipefish Cord

Shoulder: There’s a fallback available from the Lost City dungeon quest, and a couple of heroic drops, but this seems like a safe bet as a good place to spend justice points.

Best: Mantle of the Eastern Lords

Fallback: Blight-Lifter’s Mantle

Other options:
Mantle of Master Cho
Meadow Mantle

Back: Only 2 options, a heroic drop or Earthen Ring vendor at revered which probably counts as both best and fallback.

Best: Cloak of Ancient Wisdom

Other option: Periwinkle Cloak

Chest: There’s a plethora of robes available, but as you pretty much have to work on Ramkahen rep to get decent footwear, you’ll have their blue quality robe available which gives some much appreciated hit making it one of the best choices for the slot.

Best: Robes of Orsis

Other options:
Inquisition Robes
Robes of Embalmed Darkness
Corsair’s Overshirt
Robes of Arugal
Robes of Rampant Growth

Wrist: Not much choice here. Get the Halls of Origination dungeon quest done for the fallback, and see if you get lucky in heroics.

Best: Sand Silk Wristband

Fallback: True Archaeologist’s Bracers

Other option: Armbands of Exiled Architects

Hands: As you pretty much need the cloak from Earthen Ring revered, it’s well worth getting exalted for the best gloves. As a fallback I’ve picked the Hyjal revered ones (even though the socket bonus is useless) as that rep is needed for our head enchant, and pretty much essential.

Best: Flamebloom Gloves

Fallback: Aessina-Blessed Gloves

Other options:
Gloves of the Painless Midnight
Mnemiopsis Gloves

Waist: The epic tailored belt is the best option. Theres just one drop from heroics, so the justice vendor sells the best fallback option.

Best: Dreamless Belt

Fallback: Incense Infused Cumberbund

Other option: Stratosphere Belt

Legs: Save your pennies and buy the tailoring epics. Because of the haste on them, Demo should go for the Breeches of Mended Nightmares. Next best are the justice vendor legs.

Best: Breeches of Mended Nightmares

Fallback: Pensive Legwraps

Other option:
Legwraps of Astral Rain

Feet: No choice at all, really. Get the Sandals of the Courier from a normal dungeon quest early on, then work on Ramkahen rep to get the very nice epics.

Best: Desert Walker Sandals

Fallback: Sandals of the Courier

Finger: A good jewelcrafting one should be easy to get. For the other, the Twilight Highlands faction rep is good if you’re unlucky with drops in heroics.

Best 1: Ring of Warring Elements

Best 2: Lavishly Jeweled Ring

Fallback: Band of Lamentation

Other options:
Anthia’s Ring
Band of Rays
Spirit Creeper Ring

Trinket: There are some interesting trinkets available, and I hope to do another article concentrating on the best trinkets for Demo. The new Darkmoon card is looking excellent. For the stats alone I’m including the exalted Tol Barad rep option as a ‘best’ option, though this may be tough to do in a hurry. As ever with trinkets, fallbacks are whatever you can get your hands on.

Best 1: Darkmoon Card: Volcano

Best 2: Stump of Time

Other options:
Anhuur’s Hymnal
Sorrowsong
Tendrils of Burrowing Dark

Weapon: An early fallback to pick up is the staff reward for the new gladiator-pit quests, though this should be simple to better via the blacksmithing dagger and the justice point or inscription offhands, or a staff rep reward for Tol Barad. There are plenty of other sidegrade heroic drops. Because of stats, I’m going with a hit/haste staff as overall best, and an ‘easily’ available MH/OH combo as best fallback.

Best overall weapon: Cerith Spire Staff

Fallback 2-Hands:
Insidious Staff
Very Manly Staff

Other 2-Hands:
Emberstone Staff
Staff of Siphoned Essences

Best Main Hand: Elementium Spellblade

Best Off Hand: Hermit’s Lamp

Other Main Hands:
Modgud’s Blade
Blade of the Burning Sun
Biting Wind

Other Off Hands:
Dungeoneering Guide
Air Raid Beacon

Wand: There’s a fallback green quest reward from Twilight Highlands, upgradeable by 2 heroic drops.

Best: Corla’s Baton

Fallback: Shackle-Shatter Wand

Other option: Cookie’s Stirring Rod

This is the stat breakdown and combat ratings for the ‘best’ gear. You can see that despite the heavy concentration on hit, and it being the largest secondary stat, we’re still 274 short which can be made up with gems or reforging. The base figures of around 9% haste, 11% crit and 7 points of mastery illustrate my point about the brutality of the new combat ratings pretty well.

Int: 2956
Hit: 1468 (14.32%)
Haste: 1134 (8.855%, or 35.38% with raid buffs + ISF)
Crit: 873 (4.87%, + 1.7% base crit, plus 4.55% from int = 11.12%)
Mastery: 1202 (6.7 points)
Spellpower: 1732
# gem sockets: 10 + meta

And the same done for the Fallback option gear, using the preferred MH/OH combo but missing trinkets:

Int: 2746
Hit: 869 (8.48%)
Haste: 1011 (7.89%, 34.19% with buffs and ISF)
Crit: 1037 (5.78%, with base 1.7% plus int 4.23% total is 11.71%)
Mastery: 764 (4.26 points)
Spellpower: 1729
# gem sockets: 8 + meta

This gear set has real problems, massively below the hit cap. Even with a huge effort at gemming and reforging for hit, it’s unlikely to reach the cap. I’ll conclude that we can get away with having a few of the fallback pieces in our pre-raid set, but not many. We should also grab anything we can with hit on it, as reaching 17% is a pretty high hurdle at these ratings.

As for the “quite pleased” reference in the title, after checking the logs for the fight I found I’d placed 11th in the World of Logs rankings, and, er… I’m quite pleased!

…and more than a little surprised, considering my performance has more holes in it than I can count – poor dot uptimes, mistimed guardian cast, not making full use of Soul Burn, etc. The nature of the fight though is all about keeping your head and not doing anything daft, rather than squeezing out every bit of dps.

Phase 1 was the most troublesome to us. We’d started off being very scared of the enrages after our experience of them in 25-HC, but prioritising these was a struggle. Once we let the priority slide on enrages, having found that our Horror tank could manage pretty well with stuns and cooldowns, that allowed for more focus for the other aspects of the phase and we started getting better progression. The other aspect that caused problems was getting the right balance (and the right luck) of number of ghouls on the OT to get the disease to kill both Horrors in time to grab Raging Spirits. If the Horrors died on time, the first transition was straightforward.

Phase 2 didn’t give us any particular problems. I kept Axe Toss in reserve during Valk spawns but didn’t need it often and everyone dealt with defile well. The number of Ice spheres in the second transition was overwhelming our assigned dps, so we split the job between 2. This meant dragging a healthier Raging Spirit out of transition than we’d have liked, but with the tanks managing positioning well, we could deal with it after coming out of the first Frostmourne room.

Phase 3 was just fun. We probably had just 4 or 5 attempts get this far. Hellfire inside Frotsmourne is great, and takes out a lot of spirits, while Seed of Corruption was still my preferred AoE outside. For the spirits we had our Unholy DK spread diseases onto them and me AoEing down as many as I could, with the OT taking as many as he could of the ones that got through.

Here’s hoping we can repeat the performance in 25-HC in three resets!

http://www.worldoflogs.com/rankings/players/Icecrown_Citadel/The_Lich_King/10H/Demonology_Warlock/

UPDATE: Thursday 2nd December, added sections for pet management and cooldown stacking…

Starting a ‘lock?

If you’re thinking of starting a warlock, congratulations! We’ve had our ups and downs more than many but have never not been fun to play. From our beginnings as a utility class in vanilla, there to give out Soulstones, Healthstones and free HKs to others, through TBC where SL/SL made us unkillable gods of PvP and Demo-Sacrifice/Ruin gave us a way to top meters by spamming one button (arcane mages are years behind the curve), to WotLK where we’ve become a model of good design with three well differentiated and excellently balanced specs. Cata is looking good, giving us incremental improvements to polish three very fun playstyles and the potential to do excellently in all aspects of the game.

Why Demonology?

For endgame PvE Demo gives the potential for very competitive dps and the challenge to make doing so both demanding and rewarding. It uses a large number of spells, demands high awareness of multiple procs that result in changes to rotation, and rewards strategic thinking about the timing of long cooldowns and range changes when maximising the close-quarters potential of your demon form. Add in issues of DoT timers and pet management and it should be obvious that you’ll have plenty to think about as a Demo lock.

More obvious benefits include the ability to do a great Illidan impression, an awesomely good pet, several of the game’s best buffs, the ability to pump out ridiculously high levels of AoE damage, and the fun of an execute phase.

Table of Contents

1. Levelling as Demo.
2. Extreme Soloing.
3. The endgame as Demo.
4. The raiding talent spec.
5. Many eyes needed (things to monitor).
6. Optimal raid DPS combat start sequence.
7. Basic raid DPS priority flowchart.
8. Metamorphosis.
9. Cooldowns = Cool (on the benefits of stacking)
10. AoE.
11. Pet Control.
12. Click or Keybind? (all about control)
13.Stats for Demo.
14. Useful Macros.

For a pre-raid gear list of things to aim for in cata before starting tier11 raiding, take a look at this post.

1. Levelling as Demo.

From starting with your Imp and getting used to warlock staples like Shadow Bolt and Corruption, getting the Felguard at level 10 will change your world entirely. Think of it as having your own personal warrior (without the usual warrior limitation of having to choose between arms and prot). For solo/quest play you will be sending in your Felguard to gain aggro while you hang back and choose how you’ll kill this particular unfortunate.

Tip for levelling – You get Soul Harvest at level 12. It’s an awesome self heal, use it ALL the time.

Here’s a suggested talent path for levelling a Demo lock (and please bear in mind I’ve yet to do this myself – I did level as Demo as it happens, but in the old-skool clunky way. Ah, the days of jumper cabling my sacrificed succubus back to life!)

Tier 1 (levels 10-17).

2/2 Fel Synergy. While you’ll be able to act as healer to your Felguard’s tank from level 12 via Health Funnel, you’ll still need to do damage to mobs to claim a kill (you can’t let fluffy do ALL the work). This talent lets you be healer to your pocket tank by doing dps! Cool eh? Early in the Demo tree a lot of your ability to kill things will depend on your pet, so keeping it alive is incredibly important, and this is an awesome talent for doing just that.

3/3 Dark Arts. “Kill them faster, minion!”

Tier 2 (levels 19-27). A boring, boring tier. Take comfort in the fact that while you won’t notice much difference right now, it will all count later.

2/2 Mana Feed. A downtime reduction, this will make you need to life tap less and stop you having to wait for fluffy to get his mana back.

3/3 Demonic Embrace. Time to get that stam boost, if only because your stats affect fluffy’s and this will beef him up a bit.

Glyphs! Around now you get your first round of glyphs. Here’s my recommendations:

Prime: Glyph of Felguard. More dps, more aggro on pet.
Major: Glyph of Fear. Makes your main CC ability safer to use.
Minor: Unending Breath. Meh, why not. You’ll probably need to swim at some point.

Tier 3 (levels 29-37).

1/1 Demonic Empowerment. You’ll spec out of this at endgame, but while levelling there’s plenty of mobs that can snare fluffy. Not no more! Let fluffy be free!

3/3 Impending Doom. This will proc more of those cute little Ebon Imps. Time to say “Woot” in a tired, disaffected ‘whatever’ tone of voice. Another one banked for later – once you have Meta, this talent will be awesome.

1/2 Improved Health Funnel. This will help you take on some pretty fierce critters. Part of the fun of Demo lies in it’s excellence at extreme soloing. Laugh in the face of elite mobs higher level than you! Then probably die. But this will help a lot.

Tier 4 (levels 39-47). Thank you for your patience. After three tiers of utter boredom and feeling significantly less capable than your supposed minion, you get a good dps ability. You also get tantalized by the fantastic Molten Core talent which remains utterly useless until you get Incinerate at level 64 (talent trees are currently NOT designed for levelling).

1/1 Hand of Gul’dan. Oh yeah.

2/2 Aura of Foreboding. Be mean with snares and stuns.

2/2 Improved Health Funnel. Take on even badder things.

1/2 Demonic Aegis. A small boost to armor, but it will get more useful once you get Fel Armor with it’s self heal later.

Glyphs! Round two. More recommendations:

Prime: Glyph of Immolate
Major: Fairly open choice with nothing special standing out. If you do a lot of instance runs, Shadow Bolt is probably the way to go. Shadowflame if you BG/PvP a lot.
Minor: Ritual of Souls. Probably.

Tier 5 (levels 49-57).

1/1 Inferno. Run around with Hellfire up. This is fun.

2/2 Decimation. This won’t make a whole lot of difference to damage until much later when you get Emberstorm, but at least you get to do something different every so often.

2/3 Molten Core. Go ahead and grind your teeth in frustration, proccing a boost to a spell you can’t learn yet! Then calm down by looking at it as investing for a brighter future.

Tier 6 (levels 59-67).

1/1 Demonic Pact. A great buff.

2/2 Cremation. More damage from Hellfire, more utility for HoG.

3/3 Molten Core. You finally learned Incinerate last level, so now put it to good use.

2/2 Demonic Aegis. Now you’ve got Fel Armor, this gives a nifty boost to the self-healing.

Tier 7 (level 69).

1/1 Metamorphosis. Congratulations, you’re a proper Demo ‘lock now. This is the biggest game-changer since getting the Felguard. Use it as often as possible.

Destro tier 1 (levels 71-79).

3/3 Bane. A significant dps boost for your Shadow Bolt.

Glyphs! Last round. Get Glyph of Metamorphosis as your Prime. Whatever you like for the others.

2/3 Shadow and Flame. More boost for nukes. The Improved Immolate talent is a very viable alternative should you prefer it.

Destro tier 2 (levels 81-85). Until now we’ve been getting a point every other level, now it’s a point every level.

2/2 Emberstorm. This will greatly boost your execute damage from Decimation

2/2 Improved Soul Fire.

Then respec to your endgame spec.

2. Extreme Soloing

Demo is one of those specs (like BM hunters, feral druids and prot pallies) that can take on some very challenging circumstances with no other help and win. This can be dealing with packs of higher level enemies, taking on elites that would usually require a group, or heading into older dungeon or raid instances by yourself.

A lot of talents are very helpful, most of which should be found in all Demo specs (Fel Synergy, Demonic Embrace, Mana Feed, Demonic Aegis) but the key talent for extreme soloing is Improved Health Funnel. You’ll be casting HF a lot, so the efficiency gain is welcome, but the real value is in the 30% damage reduction to your Demon. This is like getting a major tanking cooldown and heal combined and on demand with no cooldown. The other talent that doesn’t appear in standard PvE specs but is very helpful here is Demonic Empowerment.

The basic idea is to have your pet tank the target(s) while you focus on keeping it healed and staying under it’s threat. Typically most of the damage you do to targets will be via DoTs Drain Life or AoE auras. The spell you’ll be casting most is Health Funnel (if it isn’t, then whatever you’re doing doesn’t count as extreme).

Your pet of choice against a single target will usually be the Voidwalker as it can take a beating better than the Felguard. Use the Glyph of Voidwalker to give it 20% extra stamina and remember that Demonic Empowerment gives it a tanking cooldown (20% extra health plus threat boost) on a 1 minute CD.

The only things that can limit what you’re able to take on are the following:

Incoming Damage. This is the main one – as long as you can outheal the damage being done to your pet it you should be able to get the kill (though it might take a while). Health Funnel depletes your own health, so you’ll need some way of regaining it (Healthstone, Potion, Drain Life, even speccing your off-tree to affli to get Siphon Life, Demonic Aegis, bandage, etc) and enough time to do so (remember the Demonic Empowerment CD every minute if things are tight).

Unhittable target. If you’re trying to take down targets of much higher level you can run up against the wall of unhitability. Unfortunately even auras like Immo Aura can miss now so I’m struggling to see a way around this one.

Mechanics. Some encounters may involve awkward mechanics that break the standard pattern. This is where more creative solutions are needed. Demonic Circle is a powerful tool if mobility or positioning is an issue, particularly if there are terrain features that can help. CC options can help tie up adds, and stuns can often be used to interrupt.

Here’s a taster:

3. The endgame as Demo.

Most of the following is based on what I know from post 4.0.1 at 80, but to try and make it relevant to 85 I’ve included the relevant new spells, a level 85 talent build and any changes from level 80 priorities are based on napkin maths to work out DPET values, etc. It might be the case that when I hit 85 I’ll find stuff to change, but I’m expecting this to be pretty accurate.

The Demo playstyle – what you can expect.

Demo is in a peculiar situation of being a ranged caster spec with enhanced melee-range caster abilities. When you’re your usual, dress-wearing self, you want to be safely far away from potential danger, but the moment you change into demon form, you become much more potent close up to the target. Demonology shares some of affliction’s focus on dots and debuffs yet often feels more like destro owing to the emphasis on 4 different nukes.

Like all warlocks it has excellent CC options with Fear (which can now be glyphed to root targets to the spot – no more feared runners pulling adds), Banish (bring on the Elementals!), Enslave Demon (which I doubt will see much use in the coming expansion), a range of stuns (Demon Leap, Summon Infernal, Axe Toss and Aura of Foreboding), plus the ability to pet tank in anything but the highest levels of content.

The recent changes have done much to boost the burst capabilities of both affliction and demo as well as removed demo’s appalling inefficiency issues, and my overriding feeling now is of a very strong caster spec with no apparent weaknesses. While a reliance on long-cast nukes certainly makes the spec far stronger as a static “turret” there are now more options than ever in terms of instants to cast on the move, and even a moving, channelled aoe. Mobility used to be a weakness for demo, but mechanics changes and the availability at 81 of Fel Flame now make demo highly dangerous when mobile.

Most of all though, Demo remains a cooldown class. For all the power promised by Demon Soul, and the ability to bring an Infernal or Doomguard into the fight, the king of demo cooldowns remains Metamorphosis and as Mastery becomes more prevalent the power of Meta will only increase. The Demon form is insanely good, and particularly post 4.0.1 is great fun to play with.

4. The raiding talent spec.

http://wowtal.com/#k=-twvkwNCA.a7t.warlock.-mdnPQ

I’ll explain in terms of talents NOT taken – I find 2/3 Demonic Embrace more than enough (at 80 it’s putting me around 52k raid buffed health, which is around the top end of the range for dps), Health Funnel is unessecary as the pet doesn’t tank raids. Aura of Foreboding is a flat out liability in a raid enironment – a snared mob will attack the nearest enemy, not the one with highest threat, so all this talent does is annoy tanks by snaring mobs they might want to move, and kill melee by making the snared mobs switch targets. I’ve seen a lot of Demo locks use or recommend AoF in a raiding spec and happen to think they’re all fools.

Improved Immolate is an excellent talent, with the potential to add 3-4% to your dps. There are 2 circumstances where taking it in preference to another Destro talent is a good idea. First, if someone else in the raid is providing the +5% spell crit debuff (such as an affliction ‘lock or fire mage), in which case drop S&F. Second is if the 15% haste bonus from Improved Soul Fire takes you to just under one of the Immolate tick points (making a HoG refresh of Immolate hard or impossible, as explained below) and this can’t be fixed by gearing/reforging, in which case drop Imp-SF.

As for glyphs, primes should be Metamorphosis and Immolate, with a choice of either Incinerate or Felguard as the third. I’m seeing good results with Felguard at the moment, and it also syncs nicely with my Orcish 5% pet damage bonus, but others perfer Incinerate. Get Shadow Bolt as a major, and your pick of remaining majors and minors.

5. Many eyes needed.

There’s a lot of things to watch for as Demo. I happen to use TellMeWhen as it does all of it, but others prefer mixtures of DotTimer, Forte, Power Auras etc. Go with your personal preference, but make sure it monitors the following:

Metamorphosis – Available, duration remaining, cooldown remaining
Hand of Gul’dan – Available, cooldown remaining
Immolate – Duration remaining
Bane of Doom – Duration remaining
Corruption – Duration remaining
Curses (Elements, Weakness, Tongues, including curses and equivalent debuffs cast by others, if possible) – Duration remaining
Molten Core – Available, duration remaining, charges remaining
Decimate – Available, duration remaining
Improved Soul Fire – Duration remaining
Shadow Mastery (and equivalent +5% crit debuffs cast by others if possible) – Duration remaining
Soul Burn – Available
Summon Guardian – Available, cooldown remaining
Demon Soul – Available, cooldown remaining
Demonic Rebirth – Available, duration remaining
Shadowflame – Available
Immolation Aura – Available
Axe Toss – Available

I also configure TMW to show specific boss debuffs, (ie. Instability, Combustion, etc.) and relevant trinket/tier procs (ie. DFO’s Surging Power, t10 4-pc Devious Minds).

6. Optimal raid DPS combat start sequence.

Pre-combat…

Flask, Food, Fel Armor, Soul Link, Dark Intent, Pet food, Pet scroll, 3 Soul Shards, all CDs available.

5 seconds to combat…

-> Soul Burn (starts a 10 second buff)
-> Soul Harvest to regain the shard
-> Pre-potion
COMBAT STARTS
-> Curse
-> Bane of Doom
-> Soul Fire (instant, consuming the Soul Burn buff, procs Imp-SF buff)

The above trick sneaks in the equivalent of a 4th Soul Shard. Sneaky warlock is sneaky.

7. Basic raid DPS priority flowchart

The following is as basic as it gets. It’s assuming a single target, Patchwerk style fight and doesn’t get into use of Meta or other long CDs at all. This represents the core pattern around which a lot of cool stuff gets woven.

Is +5% crit debuff present? -> NO -> Cast Shadow Bolt
|
YES
|
Is Immolate on the target? -> NO -> Cast Immolate
|
YES
|
Is Hand of Gul’dan off cooldown? -> YES -> Cast Hand of Gul’Dan
|
NO
|
Does Bane of Doom have more than 2 seconds left on the target? -> NO -> Cast Bane of Doom
|
YES
|
Is Improved Soul Fire buff up? -> NO -> Cast Soul Fire (using Soul Burn to make instant if available)
|
YES
|
Does Corruption have more than 2 seconds left on the target? -> NO -> Cast Corruption
|
YES
|
Is Decimate up? -> YES -> Cast Soul Fire
|
NO
|
Is Molten Core up -> YES -> Cast Incinerate
|
NO
|
Is Mana less than 50% and Health greater than 70%? -> YES -> Cast Life Tap
|
NO
|
Cast Shadow Bolt

Few fights are like Patchwerk (pretty much just Patchwerk) so while the above priority list gives a general idea of how to maximise dps, most of the time I keep in mind a different kind of priority queue, based on how badly something can screw up dps.

1. No hesitancy. Nothing screws up your dps like hesitancy. Making the wrong decision and still casting something is better than making no decision and casting nothing. The new queueing system is doing away with the necessity to key spam to the same extent, but you still need to get the next cast queued with zero delay. 90% of folks who aren’t maximising their dps are just not getting enough casts off (that statistic is 100% invented, though probably true).

2. HoG on cooldown. Maintaining as close to 100% immolate uptime as possible without recasting it gives a whopping boost to dps over having it fall off and need recasting. If you’re in a place where you can stand and cast and it comes off cooldown, this is the top priority.

3. Make the most of movement. Most fights have moments when you have to move around. Get used to strafing as this can often keep dps opportunities open where turning and running can’t, as well as potentially allowing you to move faster. Use these times of movement to cast all the instants you can – Soul Burned Soul Fire, refreshing Corruption and BoD, Fel Flame (once available), Life Tap, Meta, Shadowflame, etc. Even Hellfire, if it suits the circumstances. With the new no-clip mechanics for DoTs I favour recasting Corruption and BoD early if moving – this is a good use of GCDs that may otherwise be hard to take advantage of, and means more CGDs of standing still are available for casting nukes.

4. Just use Meta. Unless you have a definite reason for holding back, cast this a.s.a.p. once it’s available. If you can get in melee range (with the approval of your raid leader), do it.

5. When switching to short-lived adds (e.g Blood Beasts, Valks) cast Immolate first, then just nuke. Remember Axe Toss is available, and off your GCD – it’s often a very useful ability on this type of add.

8. Metamorphosis.

Meta has been subject to one of the more subtle but far-reaching of the recent changes, brought about by the Impending Doom talent, as well as “nerfs” to Decimate.

Pre 4.0.1 Meta was a strong dps cooldown on a fixed timer, but by far the biggest talent for Demo was Decimate, which saw as much damage being done in the execute phase as done in the rest of the entire fight. This meant Meta was used strategically to tie into (ideally) an early Bloodlust, and again during the Decimate execute phase. Now, with Decimate being less OP (to the extent that without the Emberstorm talent at 80, it’s dps gain is barely noticeable), Meta made much stronger through the effect of Mastery, and it’s cooldown reduceable through the effect of Impending Doom, the strategy has changed.

Now it should be cast on cooldown without a reason to hold on to it (imminent Bloodlust, air-phase, spawning of something that needs killing quick etc) and the strategy is in how to maximise it’s increased power, which mostly invovles trying to get into melee range. Between casts spamming as many Shadow Bolts as possible to proc Impending Doom will shorted the cooldown dramatically – Meta is available far more often these days, and I’m often finding fights where I can spend 30% of my time in demon form.

Its still worth knowing when to expect the big cooldowns though. Holding Meta at the start of a fight if you know that Bloodlust is coming, or waiting until Demon Soul becomes available should both be worthwhile – see “Cooldowns = Cool” below for some rambling nonsense about stacking.

If you’re forced to stay at range for reasons of strategy, you should continue with the basic priority list. You’ll still be doing a minimum of 20% more damage during Meta, depending on your Mastery score. If you’re able to close with the target, however, you can push this much higher.

Things to do in Meta.

One of the reworked meta abilities is Demon Leap, which replaces the old Demonic Charge. Unlike it’s previous incarnation though, this one is worth using as it does a decent amount of AoE damage and a 2 second stun (5 yards). Unlike a charge, it doesn’t take you to a target, but instead jumps directly forwards around 20 yards (with a cool animation). Where before demo locks would run in while casting instants, this is now the better way to close distance if the fight allows it.

Immolation Aura is the main reason for wanting to get in close. It has one of the highest DPET values in the game and well maintained use should add 5% or more to a ‘lock’s total damage for a single target fight. It’s available on a 30 second cooldown, which means that as Glyph of Metamorphosis adds 6 seconds to Meta, this should optimally be cast as soon as meta is popped, and again after 30 seconds to catch the last 6 seconds worth of meta.

Shadowflame also does excellent damage in a short range, with a DPET better than any of the nukes even on a single target. It’s on a 25 second cooldown so can be used twice during each meta. In fact, if it’s possible to stay within 10 yards of the target for the whole fight, this should be cast on CD whether in meta or not (slotting into the priority list between Corruption and Decimate-boosted Soul Fire) as it’s capable of doing around 7% of the ‘lock’s total damage.

Use other cooldowns. The 20%+ damage bonus from Meta will affect your guardians, so make sure to only summon these when Meta is up. As stacking CDs multiplies their value, if you have any triggered CDs (like Orcish Blood Fury) or trinkets, macro them to Meta to make it an outrageous boost to dps. Try to make sure that Meta and Demon Soul coincide.

Of slightly less practical value, but fun nonetheless…

Speak demonic. Everything you /say in Meta form comes out as Demonic, including DBM warnings!

Fly. Well sadly not really fly, but if you get Levitated by a priest, you’ll hover in the air, flapping your wings.

When not to use Meta

While the general rule is to use Meta as often as you can, there are some circumstances where you might want to wait.

Waiting to stack big cooldowns. If you’re seconds away from Bloodlust being cast, or Demon Soul or Summon Guardian coming off cooldown, it’s worth waiting.

Waiting for a boss CC effect. If a boss is capable of taking someone out of the action (Mind Control, Unchained Magic, getting chased by gas, silenced, stunned or otherwise rendered useless) it will happen to you during meta. If you know one of these kind of events is imminent, wait until it picks on someone else before doing the demon thing. A rare exception to this is if you actually want to be taken out – it’s a great way to ensure that you get picked up by valks during the LK fight (and by freeing everyone else to dps the LK while you do the portal thing you gain way more advantage to the raid than you would by having someone else picked up and saving your meta).

A last point about Meta, durations of stuns and snares on you are halved, you’re uncrittable, and your armor is boosted by 600%. If this last fact is ever important (i.e. you’re trying to take a pounding) make sure to switch to Demon Armor as this gives you a generous armor bonus (as well as boosting any heals you get by up to 40%), further modified by the Demonic Aegis talent – you should be able to approach tank-ish levels of armor that way (but still feel kind of squishy if it’s Fel Armor that’s up). Despite this defensive utility, never think of Meta as a defensive CD while raiding (depending on who you group with for 5 mans, you may want to there).

9. Cooldowns = Cool

Here’s a quick illustration of the value of stacking cooldowns. Please bear with my ludicrous example…

Imagine a gnome, on account of it’s diminutive stature, does 1dps, and gets into a fight lasting 50 seconds. Whoa, 50 damage (not bad for a gnome).

Now let’s split that fight into 5 seperate 10 second chunks. Not only that, but our particular gnome (being a marvel of it’s species) has 5 different cooldowns to use, each of which boosts it’s puny damage by 20% for 10 seconds.

Being a gnome (low to the ground) it likes to spread things out flat, and naturally casts one cooldown for each 10 second chunk.

Chunk 1: 10 * 1.2 = 12
Chunk 2: 10 * 1.2 = 12
Chunk 3: 10 * 1.2 = 12
Chunk 4: 10 * 1.2 = 12
Chunk 5: 10 * 1.2 = 12

Total: 5 * 12 = 60

Awesome! That’s 1.2 dps, from a gnome! A whopping 20% increase, which is just what you’d expect from a load of 20% boosting cooldowns, right?

Not if you’re an Orc. Orcs tower over the mortal world like… Orcs! (you’ve heard of folks seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants? Well take a look at the size of Orcs’ shoulders!) Anyway, imagine our gnome standing on the shoulders of an Orc, and doing what it’s told… it would look something like this…

Chunk 1: 10 = 10
Chunk 2: 10 = 10
Chunk 3: 10 = 10
Chunk 4: 10 = 10
Chunk 5: 10 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 * 1.2 = 24.8832

Total: 4 * 10 + 24.8832 = 64.8832

OMG! That’s 1.3 dps! A 30% increase? All from being lazy and distracted for 40 seconds, then rushing stuff at the end?

Indeed, and that’s the beauty of stacking cooldowns. And the more cooldowns you have available to stack, the more beautiful it all becomes. Actually, the beauty comes from stacking multipliers, even the ones that last all the way through the fight, but right now we’ve got pretty much the best multiplying cooldown in the game (mastery boosted Metamorphosis) and at 85 we’ll have one of the next best (Demon Soul). On the way we’re picking up not one but 2 more multipliers from Dark Intent (a 3% haste boost and c. 9% periodic damage boost), and it all stacks with the lovely raid buff multipliers that make our damage so much bigger in groups. Last but not least, Emberstorm will give us a 25% boost to Soul Fire’s DPET to raise the underlying damage of our Decimate phase.

And if there’s one thing that lots of stacked multipliers love, it’s a LOT of base damage. That’s why it pays to blow all your other type of cooldowns – things like Blood Fury (you ARE an Orc, aren’t you?), trinkets, potions, flame caps, soul burn, the kitchen sink – all while you’ve got your multipliers stacked.

Here’s a quick run through of the various multipliers available at 85, assuming we stack absolutely everything into one 20 second chunk. I’m going to cheat a bit by counting them all as equivalent (ignoring possible issues like haste caps, the fact that +crit isn’t completely equivalent to +damage, but it’s just a kind of illustration. Maybe I’ll work the proper numbers out someday). Guess in advance what the percentage multiplier will be by the end (remembering our shoulder-gnome hit a whopping 30% with it’s 5 cooldowns).

5% raid crit buff (1.05)
5% target crit debuff (1.05)
3% raid damage buff (1.03)
5% raid haste buff (1.05)
3% Focus Magic crit buff (1.03)
2% Demo Pact damage buff (1.02)
8% spell damage debuff (1.08)
10% Demo Pact spellpower buff (1.1)
15% Imp Soul Fire haste buff (1.15)
3% Dark Intent haste buff (1.03)
9% Dark Intent stack (1.09)
15% Demon Soul haste buff (1.15)
10% Demon Soul damage buff (1.1)
20% Metamorphosis damage buff (1.2)
12% Mastery adjustment to Meta (1.12)
30% Bloodlust haste buff (1.3)
20% Power Infusion haste buff (1.2)

That’s just the multipliers, and some of them are a bit squeezed in, and we’ve blown well past the haste cap to get GCD locked, but it’s all just to make a point… what multiplier for the increase did you come up with? Was it around 455% by any chance? That’s with no points in mastery on gear. Stacking mastery ramps it all up nicely. Just 8 points (not rating) in gear based mastery rounds the increase to over 500%, that’s 5x damage, kind of a Woot! number.

Now as I’ve pointed out, we have some blocks in the way of actually multiplying our damage by 5, but it should be enough to demonstrate the value of stacking cooldowns.

On a more realistic level, stacking just Metamorphosis (no mastery on gear) and Demon Soul gives a 70% all by itself…

1.15 * 1.1 * 1.2 * 1.12 = 1.7

(that’s 15% DS haste, 10% DS damage, 20% meta, 12% base mastery – we’re in demon form)

Practical applications.

On fights shorter than 3 minutes, you’re only going to get one DS cast in, so hold it to time with Meta, and preferably find out when Bloodlust will be used and stack them both on that, whether it’s the start or the end.

On fights longer than 3minutes, stack both at the start so they’ll both be up for Decimate. As you approach the last 3 minutes of a fight, hold on to Demon Soul, and as you reach the last 2.5 minutes think about holding Meta if it comes off CD, then burn both (and the kitchen sink) during Decimate.

Implications.

Decimate will be relevant again, as we’ll be looking to leverage any increase to our base damage.

Mastery is worth more than stat weightings calculated from a simple priority list system will give credit for, as it scales extremely well as a pure damage multiplier when using a stacking strategy.

10. AoE.

Demo probably has more options for AoE than any other spec in the game. but which to use?

AoE Auras:

We have two ‘aura’ style AoE abilities, Immolation Aura (only during Meta) and Hellfire. We are free to move during both, but have to keep channelling Hellfire – with Immo Aura we can fire and forget, just cast the instant then keep casting other spells. The radius of Immolation Aura is 8 yards, so you need to stay pretty close to the target. For Hellfire (with the Cremation talent) it’s 13 yards, which is further than the graphic shows (be aware of this or you might be surprised by pulling adds that you thought you’d miss).

Because Immo Aura is fire and forget, it should be cast as much as possible as long as you can spend time in range of the target, even on single target fights as it just adds to your usual single target rotation.

Assuming circumstances where all targets are in range, Hellfire is Demo’s most powerful AoE. It has the potential drawback of damaging the warlock’s own health, so shouldn’t be used when low on health (unless you want to die/wipe, as dying to Hellfire doesn not cause durability loss). With decent levels of health (which Demo should have) the self-damage should rarely be a problem.

Immo Aura and Hellfire stack, which leads to ridiculous amounts of damage, threat and fun.

Also, Hellfire lets us easily get past locked doors – just Life Tap quicky down to very low health, then Hellfire until dead. Corpse run and res on the other side of the door. No need to get nekkid, as there’s no durability loss. Rogues pick the lock, Blacksmiths use keys, Engineers use explosives, and Warlocks burn themselves to death in the flames of Hell. Cool eh?

Cast on target AoE:

Seed of Corruption is a 2 second cast direct to your current target (40 yard range) that places a DoT effect. Once the target takes the full DoT worth of damage, either from the DoT completing it’s 18 second duration or from any other source the seed will explode, instantly damaging all enemies within 15 yards of the target. While the dps isn’t quite as high as Hellfire for Demo these days, it’s close, making this the best AoE to use on targets at range.

The thing to be careful of is that recasting SoC on the same target will just refresh the DoT and delay the explosion. If your target is taking significant amounts of damage (i.e. the main target for the raid), then seeds will explode before you complete the next cast, and it can be safely spammed on one target. If the target is not being focus-fired a seed is less likely to explode before your next cast, so you should select (or tab target) fresh targets with each cast. It’s very easy for a Warlock to spam SoC like crazy and end up doing almost no damage because of this DoT refreshing mechanic, so it pays to be careful and switch targets if there’s any doubt.

Cast on ground AoE:

We still have Rain of Fire available, though it’s rarely used. It gives a targetting reticule on the ground and will damage everything in that area. It does the weakest damage of all our AoE spells, but in certain circumstances it’s worth casting.

The limited area of the reticule/graphic effect is it’s saving grace. If you have a static tank in a spread-out bunch of enemies including some casters, it can easily happen that while the tank is building aggro on the melee mobs, there’s very little on the casters. SoC can easily risk pulling aggro on those caster mobs, as they are in your AoE blast radius but not the tank’s threat radius. To avoid aggro you can cast RoF and only hit the ones that the tank has generated high threat on. The 8 yard radius is the same as that of Consecrate and Death and Decay, so you can feel free to drop RoF directly over those effects.

Of course, this advice should only be of value to folks who find themselves in groups with novice tanks. This doesn’t happen in Nephilim raids, except on the trash before LDW, and sometimes the trash between LDW and Gunship, and occasionally the entrance hall trash, or at the valks in the middle when folks don’t group up enough, and possibly the groups at the door to Plague wing when everything gets pulled at once, which can also happen on the trash to Vali..

Pet AoE:

We have two AoE capable pets, and both can be out at the same time. The Felguard has his nifty, figure skating inspired Felstorm move on a 45 second cooldown, and the Infernal (on a 10 minute CD) pulses with it’s own Immolation Aura. Both do some pretty capable AoE damage. The Felguard will Felstorm everything in melee range of it’s currently assigned target, while the Infernal will attack whatever you’ve currently got Bane of Doom on.

To maximise AoE then, should you be crazy enough to want to try, you should ideally be in Meta form and melee range, with the Hand of Gul’dan debuff on the target, channelling Hellfire with Immolation Aura up, your Felguard Felstorming and your Infernal pulsing away. I think it’s fair to say that the limiting factor for Demo’s AoE damage is threat. There’s always a way to push it further, until you’re dead. If anyone beats you on the meters on an AoE pull, it’s because you’re holding something back.

11. Pet Control.

Minions are important for us, and being in control of your felguard should be a point of pride (as well as a prerequisite for good dps) for anyone calling themselves a demonologist.

All minions have three modes; aggressive, defensive and passive. You can toggle between these on the pet action bar, or macro them to keybinds.

Aggressive mode.

This is the most rarely used mode, but still has it’s place. The demon will attack anything flagged as an enemy within it’s aggro radius. Used inappropriately, this can lead to fluffy heading off on an aggro rampage as he charges away to find new things to annoy until finally reaching his range limit from you and disappearing, to leave you facing a multitude of irate mobs. Another risk, and personal speciality, is boss pulling (hello ICC plague wing). The message from this is to always remember to take aggressive mode off once you’re done with it – most of the time the screw ups happen when this is forgotten.

Don’t let fear stop you using it though – here’s some examples where I’ve found it handy. Camping a spawn while levelling: You know when crowds gather inside some grotty hovel to ‘take turns’ tagging the whoosit so you can collect a macguffin, so everyone stands around all twitchy hoping they have the fastest reactions? Well, fluffy has the fastest reactions – he has a nose for spawns before they even show on your screen and will typically start swinging away at empty air, tagging the whoosit for you as it appears. Smacking pesky stealthers in PvP is a bit like this. If you’re defending a flag (well done, you weirdo – it’s a lonely path you’re on but at least you’ll have plenty of spare time to /facepalm everyone else as they fight on the road) you’ll typically want to be as alert as possible, so set fluffy to be alert too (just be sure to control his wandering tendencies once folks catch on). Lastly, there are times when stuff is just too much work, so you might as well let your minion do the menial stuff. I do this in the corridor leading to Professor Putricide, when all the bugs start swarming in (did I mention pet-pulling plague wing bosses is a personal speciality? Do remember to switch it off).

Defensive mode.

This is a bit safer. 80% of the time I’ll have this on. The minion will only attack when either an enemy damages the minion or me, or I tag an enemy (note that this isn’t when I start casting at an enemy, or when the enemy takes damage but when a spell lands). This is really the lazy-mode, as it saves you having to micromanage the pet by giving it a moderately sane ruleset to follow. Be careful though as this simple bit of automation may not always be what you want – it likely will be for most levelling and questing, and a surprising amount of PvE, but it’s pretty lousy in PvP and you should never believe that it means you don’t have to pay attention to what your pet is up to.

Passive mode.

The pet won’t take any initiative at all, and will only do exactly what you command. It’s good to remember that this doesn’t mean the pet will be passive – it will still attack what you tell it to, it just means it only does what you tell it to. The passive just refers to the automation of decision making. When you want to take more control of your pet, this is the mode to use. It’s the best choice for PvP, and any encounter where you need to take particular care. Using the /petpassive command while a pet in passive (or any) mode is attacking something will stop it attacking and return it to your side (or to the selected “move to” location if that is set).

Using the controls.

My personal preference is to use my mouse scroll wheel for pet control. I like having my camera default to max distance and rarely zoom (the default mouse wheel function) so am happy to use my PageUp and PageDown keys for camera zooms when I need to. On the other hand, I use pet commands all the time, so having them right on the mouse is important. Wheel forward is set to /petattack, wheel backward is set to /petpassive and wheel middle click is set to /petdefensive. I use aggressive mode so rarely that I’m happy to just click on the pet action bar. Unless pet control is set up to be used in a simple and accessible way (doesn’t have to be the mouse wheel approach, but it must be just as easy) then you probably won’t learn to master your pet.

Follow and Move To.

The old “stay” command has been replaced by “Move to” and is now wonderful. Having your pet follow you is the default, and very familiar, but now you can select Move To and place the small reticule wherever (with some sensible restrictions) you like and your minion will jog on over and wait there for further instructions. Being given a move-to command with an invisible pet with a knockback is a gift to anyone who enjoys the view from the Arathi Lumber Mill. You can use this to gather mobs with your pet and then move them around (out of the way of a patrol, for example), or have your pet always return to a spawn point on leaving combat. Its one of those great little tools that gives a ton of flexibility, and it’s just fun to play with it and see what you can do.

Special Abilities.

All pets have special abilities. Right-clicking on them on the pet action bar will toggle whether the pet uses them automatically or not (some, like Felstorm or Axe Toss, can’t be automated). All the pets have at least one ability that you’ll want to take direct control of. For my Felguard I leave Legion Strike on automatic, have Axe Toss keybound so I cast it manually, and macro Felstorm to my Hand of Gul’dan key (the macro for that can be found later in the guide). Because HoG is a long cast spell, tapping it and stopping casting (or tapping it while moving) can be used to trigger Felstorm with no requirement to complete the HoG cast, and I’ve found this useful on occasion. The main reason the two are macro’d together is because I’ve run out of keys/fingers.

Renaming Pets.

Now we can visit a demon trainer and for 50g they will destroy your old minion and provide a new, identical one with a different random name. Don’t do it, it’s like lottery scratchcards and one-armed bandits – you’ll just get addicted to seeing if the next name is better than the rubbish one you currently have, but (particularly for Felguards) there are no good names. It’s an endless money sink. Just a friendly warning from someone who’s flushed 8,000g down that particular toilet.

12. Click or Keybind?

A lot of talk about this is rubbish, and suggests that there are just two ways of doing things, that everyone is in one or other camp, and that folks in each camp do things in the same way as everyone else in that camp. Ignore everything you read that talks as if that were true.

In reality players are on a spectrum, the ends of which are keyboard only and mouse only (if anyone actually populates these end points they are rare and unusual individuals – both are doable, but who would want to?). Between these end points is a fuzzy cloud of folks doing different things with either device, working out their preferred ways of spreading the load. It’s pretty fair, however, to generalise that keybinders favour using the keyboard (and their keyboard hand does the lion’s share of the work) while clickers prefer using the mouse (and that hand will be their busiest). It’s also pretty fair to generalise that just using the mouse to click on spells carries some pretty stiff penalties that will make it tough to match the performance you could get if you cast at least some spells from the keyboard. I’ll point out the reasons for this below.

Being able to make choices relies on one important thing, and it’s this that probably lies at the heart of the stale old clicker v keybinder debate, and that’s learning how to use the Keybind Menu. Until you get familiar with this, you’re not making choices, you’re just operating under limiting constraints. Once you do learn how to use it, you can still do most of your stuff with the mouse if you prefer, but you’ll have expanded the options available regarding how you choose to control the game.

The Keybind Menu

It’s pretty simple really – one list with three columns. The first column contains all the available actions, and the other columns let you specify up to two ways of triggering that action (you don’t need two, one is fine). The triggers can be keys, mouse buttons, or either of these modified by another key being held down (typically shift, ctrl or alt). All of the available actions will be set to their default values, if any, the first time you open this menu. To add or change a binding, find the action you want to change in the list, click on either the primary or secondary button (you’ll see the text in the bottom of the window change to request you enter the key to bind the action to), then press your chosen key or click your chosen mouse button, exit the menu and that action will now be bound to whatever you chose.

But why would you do this?

It usually starts with action bars. Action bar 1 (the bottom left in the default UI) is assigned default keybinds to the number keys along the top of the keyboard. When you start a new character your action bar will show your first ability (Shadow Bolt, natch) in the first box of your action bar, and also keybind it to the “1″ key. Some folks will choose to click this to cast it, others will tap “1″ instead.

But warlocks have a LOT of spells, and this action bar fills pretty quick. If you’ve been getting used to casting spells with the number keys, you might think it would be handy to get the “R” key doing something useful. Just drop the useful ability into another action bar, open the keybind menu and scroll down to find the action bar section (each action bar has an entry for each button on it, 1 to 12) and set that action bar button to the “R” key.

Another common thing to do is swapping the “turn” keys, A and D, for “strafe” keys and freeing up the Q and E keys (default bound to strafe) for some lovely spells. While I’m fairly “anything goes, whatever’s good with your” about preference for keyboard or mouse, using the keyboard to turn is bad, bad, bad! Using keys to strafe, however, is good, good good! All of which ties in to looking at how the different elements of the game can be controlled.

There’s three main control functions; movement, target selection and triggering actions.

Movement.

Like a lot of games, we’ve actually got two things to move – our toons and the camera. Most of the time, the camera will happily do it’s following along behind thing, and we don’t have to worry about manually controlling it, but in combat awareness of your environment is crucial, and the more active you are in terms of controlling the camera, the better your awareness can be. If you tend not to look around much you’ll find some busy fights particularly nightmarish and yourself becoming a liability – Blood Prince Council is a good example, where being oblivious to Kinetic Bombs spawning can cause a wipe. Good players look around a lot.

Holding down mouse button 1 and moving the mouse is the default control for moving the camera. This doesn’t change the way your toon is facing. You can look all around and still cast abilities at your target. Of course, you can’t click on abilities if you’re holding the mouse button down. This is the first of the reasons why I’d recommend setting up at least your main rotation spells on keybinds, and using the keyboard to cast. If you stick to clicking to activate your main dps rotation, you have to stop dps to look around.

Holding down mouse button 2 and moving the mouse will cause your toon to turn and the camera to automatically follow. This lets you turn near-instantly (quick enough to jump shot – while running forward, jump, turn 180 degrees, cast an instant nuke, turn another 180 degrees, land and keep running. Very useful, and easy with practice). By default keys A and D also turn you, but sooo… s…l…o…w…l…y… In combat movement will often require quick reactions and sudden changes of direction. The words “quick” and “sudden” cannot be applied to turning with the keyboard. Good players don’t keyboard-turn.

Holding down both mouse buttons will make you run forwards, and moving the mouse will turn you just as it does when only mouse button 2 is held.

Strafing is where you stay looking forward, but run to the side at a right angle to the way you’re facing. The good news is you strafe just as fast as you can run, and you can cast instants while you strafe (at 81 we can maintain all our DoTs and keep up a steady stream of Fel Flame without interruption). You can also guide your direction by turning with the mouse, while still looking at the boss. All of this gives strafing clear advantages over turning and running when moving in the majority of boss fights. Left and right strafe keys are Q and E by default, but can be bound to whatever you like.

My recommendations are to use the mouse to look around and turn, and the keyboard to strafe. If you want to run forwards use either, if you want to move backwards turn 90 degrees and strafe instead – it’s much quicker. In a mouse v keyboard competition, the mouse wins this round.

Target Selection.

This can be done using the keyboard or mouse. The usual method with the keyboard is to use the Tab key to cycle through available targets until you find the one you want. With the mouse it’s just a case of clicking on your chosen target – something that is made considerably easier with target nameplates enabled (by default this is toggled with the V key). My personal preference is to use the mouse, but this depends on the circumstance. The advantage of the mouse is that in most cases it will let you lock on target more quickly, and fast target switching is one of the keys to good dps.

In the Lady Deathwhisper fight, for example, Deformed Fanatics can be dangerous, and ranged will often be asked to deal with them quickly. As they are large and obvious, I use a mouse to select them quickly and accurately, nuke them down, then use the mouse to switch back to the boss. I always have nameplates up, and use the mouse by default to pick my targets.

There’s a mess of trash leading to the Plague Quarter in ICC, however, where Plagued Scientists are the priority targets, but they are small and easily hidden by a mass of other trash. It can be hard to pick them out with the mouse, so I’ll hit the Tab key until I find one. Similarly in phase 3 of the Lich King fight if I need to take out Vile Spirits, I’ll Tab target through them to spam Seed of Corruption as I want a good view of the ground to see defiles, frost traps and the rest of the raid.

In general then the mouse wins again in the mouse v keyboard competition, but I recommend getting well practiced with both methods and use them as appropriate.

Triggering actions.

After two wins for the mouse it’s already pretty busy looking around, turning, selecting targets etc. It should be no surprise that as I’ve declared a preference for always looking around, I use my keyboard to cast spells and trigger other actions and don’t click at all. On the other hand I raid with a very skilled hunter who only binds his main 4 or 5 attacks and clicks everything else. This allows him anough leeway to have very good enviromental awareness (looking while carrying out a standard rotation) and movement without sufferring a handicap to dps while doing this, yet still being primarily a “clicker”. In my opinion the two of us represent the ends of the ideal spectrum – anything in between is fine. Beyond that though, and you may run into trouble.

Time for a quick confession – when I say I use the keyboard… I don’t. I only use it for chat. I started off my keybinding journey with the number keys along the top. I experimented for a while using the numeric keypad, cursor keys and various other keys on the right hand side of my keyboard (this actually worked ok for me, but I’ve got big hands). Then I got a keypad peripheral (the Belkin n52 Speedpad) which made a huge difference, and most recently a Razer Naga (a somewhat insane 17 button mouse). Finally I’ve got enough buttons! I’ve been lucky enough to get both of these as gifts (there’s still time to write to Santa), and particularly recommend the Speedpad (can be found for the price of a sparkle pony + pandaren pet but with a much greater likelihood of making a difference in game). However, even these wouldn’t satisfy my endless need for moar buttons without…

Modifiers and Macros.

If you take the keyboard-heavy route, and choose to bind a lot of abilities to keys, you’re going to run out of buttons. Using a modifier key can effectively double the number of buttons available (using 2 can triple them, etc). The standard Keybind menu recognises modified keys, so as long as you’re just after a binding for the ability by itself. This can be extended by the use of macros. You can create a macro in the Macro menu, drop it onto an action bar and bind it to a key in the usual manner. There’s a section of sample macros at the end of this guide which can give an idea of how macros can help make the most of a limited number of buttons.

13. Stats for Demo.

The new dot mechanics are currently making all stat weightings a little suspect right now, as the value of haste is far from linear. A general policy of balanced stats will serve excellently, as different stats shine in different kinds of fight (i.e. Mastery becomes better the more you can maximise damage during Meta, but if you have to stay at range, Crit is likely to be more valuable). There are two stats that benefit from planning though as in different ways they both have caps, of a kind.

Hit is the most valuable stat, up to the hard cap of 17% (1,742 rating at 85). Below this cap, reforge to hit, above this cap, reforge from hit.

Haste is odd, and more than a little complex, owing to how it affects the duration of Immolate. This is of particular importance to Demo as we want to have immolate automatically refreshed by Hand of Gul’dan to save us wasting time recasting it if it drops off. Unfortunately there’s little leeway between the 15 second duration of Immolate and the 12 second cooldown, plus 3 second cast time, plus 1 second travel time of HoG. Of these numbers, the HoG cooldown and travel time are unaffected by haste, but the cast time, and the duration of Immo, are affected.

Haste acts to reduce the duration between ticks and therefore the total duration. Immolate is made up of 5 ticks at 3 second intervals over 15 seconds. Assuming 9% haste, that makes 5 ticks at (3 / 1.09) 2.75 second intervals over 13.75 seconds. There’s just no way that HoG can refresh an immolate of 13.76 second duration when it takes 13 + 2.75 = 15.73 seconds minimum before it can land.

But durations don’t just get shorter indefinitely. At certain points they get extra ticks. In fact they can’t get less than half a tick below the unhasted duration before another tick is added.

Assuming 10% haste, Immolate would be made up of ticks at (3 / 1.1) 2.727 second intervals. Five such ticks would last 13.635 seconds – that’s 1.365 seconds (half a tick) under the unhasted 15 second duration. Woot, an extra tick is gained, and Immolate ticks six times at 2.727 second intervals for a 16.36 second duration. Now we’ve got some room to play with – Immolate’s 16.36 second duration gives time for HoG’s 13 + 2.727 = 15.727 second action to refresh it. That’s a over half a second to play with, minus any lag of course (you might have heard that the Demo rotation can be tight and unforgiving).

Any further haste over this point will act to start reducing the Immolate duration again until once more it drops to impossible levels, but further ticks are gained at 30% and 50% haste, making it manageable again, and each progressively easier as that long 3 second cast for HoG is reduced (to the extent where past 50% there are no more “problem” patches of impossible timings)

This makes it important to stack haste to match one of these windows of opportunity where HoG and Immolate synchronise. This haste will come from gear, the raidwide haste buff and the 15% haste bonus of Improved Soul Fire. It’s important to get to a level of haste where you can comfortably maintain immolate by refreshing with HoG, then stay within that comfort level as stacking haste further can risk making this important timing issue ever harder to pull off.

One side effect of having these thresholds is that you need to be wary of haste procs (e.g. Black Magic enchant). For the sake of (an extreme) example, someone with 400 constant haste plus the BM enchant would be taken to 650 haste when it procs – the effect of this would be to go from a tricky 15.28 second Immolate duration to an impossible 14.3 second duration. For this reason, I’d recommend taking great care when acquiring haste procs as opposed to constant haste values. Most of the time you’re likely to be fine, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

Thresholds at which Immolate gives extra ticks.

The thresholds occur at 10%, 30%, 50%, etc. Spell cast times can be calculated with the formula below, which assumes the +5% haste raid buff (if this isn’t present, ignore the 1.05 multiplier):

For level 80.

(standard cast time) / (( 1 + ( haste rating / 3279 )) * 1.05 )

With the +5% haste raid buff the corresponding haste ratings are (without 5% buff in parentheses):

10% – 157 (328)
30% – 781 (984)
50% – 1406 (1640)
70% – 2030 (2296)

For level 85.

Of course, once we get Improved Soul Fire we can count on a constant (as long as we maintain the buff) +15% haste. For level 85 that gives the following equation, assuming 3% haste from Dark Intent, the 5% raid haste buff, and 15% haste buff from Improved Soul Fire:

(standard cast time) / (( 1 + ( haste rating / 12806 )) * 1.05 * 1.15 * 1.03)

Note that at 85 it takes 128.06 points of haste rating to give 1% haste instead of the 32.79 points at 80. Working out the ratings needed for the thresholds then gives (figures in parentheses are without raid buff):

30% – 580 (1249)
50% – 2639 (3411)

As long as we can maintain the Imp Soul Fire buff, reaching the 30% threshold is fairly trivial, and the 50% well out of reach (at least for early tiers).

14. Useful Macros

Here are some sample macros that can be useful for Demo. I tend to make a lot of use of the Alt modifier, and most of my keys are dual use so that’s reflected here. That can always be stripped out though if you prefer.

A one-button Meta macro:

#showtooltip
/cast [mod:alt,form:2]Demon Leap
/cast [nomodifier,form:2]Immolation Aura
/cast [nomodifier,noform]Metamorphosis


Tap once to cast Meta, tapping it again while in Meta form will trigger Immolation Aura, tapping it with Alt held while in meta form will cast Demon Leap.

A handy Hellfire toggle:

#showtooltip [mod:alt] Summon Infernal; Hellfire
/cancelaura [channeling,nomodifier] Hellfire
/cast [nochanneling,nomodifier] Hellfire
/cast [mod:alt] Summon Infernal
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

Hellfire is hard to stop. Trying to cast something else doesn’t work (except Life Tap, for some odd reason), Escape doesn’t work… this does. Tap it to cast Hellfire, tap again to stop. And if you hold down Alt it summons an Infernal instead.

Felstorm macro:

#showtooltip [mod:alt] Immolate; Hand of Gul'dan
/cast [mod:alt] Immolate
/cast [nomodifier,@pettarget,exists] Felstorm
/cast [nomodifier] Hand of Gul'dan
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

The Felguard won’t autocast Felstorm, it must be cast manually. I’m not fussed about manually casting Felstorm so I macro it to my Hand of Gul’dan cast.

An invaluable tool if you’re ever struggling to get a macro to behave is Fitzcairn’s Macro Explain-o-matic. One of the best WoW related sites on the web!

Yep, that’s a 10 second snapshot of our raid dps being pwnd by a minion.

I can’t wait to stack mastery!

Mind you, at least I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with the new demo, and think there’s still a lot of room to push it further.

After experimenting with a 0/3 Bane 3/3 Shadow & Flame 2/2 Improved Immolate spec, running it with maximum haste (around 1589), around 14 mastery and 23% crit, I had another try at the 3/3 Bane, 2/3 S&F build. I was happy with the casting speed of Shadow Bolt, and very happy with the damage from Immolate, but felt that the penalty from the low crit was hampering the potential of the spec.

After capping hit, I got haste to a few points over the 1406 threshold at which Immolate gets an 8th tick and an extra second or so duration, reverted most of my mastery reforgings (down to around 9) and got crit up to around 29.5%.

I kept glyphs as Meta, Immo, Felguard (which I suspect is the best third choice for Orcs but no-one else).

At the post 1406 haste cap, the timings of Hand of Gul’dan are very comfortable and give enough leeway for short movement, other casts, etc. With haste no longer shortening dot durations to the extent it did pre-patch, Corruption is less intensive to maintain. The nuke ‘rotation’ is unchanged, and BoD has a very relaxed window in which to refresh it. In fact, now that the HoG refresh issue is dealt with I’d say that the basic priorities are a little easier than they used to be. Finding a comfortable window for haste to allow relaxed use of HoG seems to be the key. I’m sure that with more practice I could learn to operate within a tighter window, and once the combat ratings plummet with levelling I’m pretty sure I’ll have to!

I’m liking the Impending Doom proc a lot more. With 3/3 bane and 50% haste, thats a lot of chances to proc, and Meta seemed to be available a lot. Checking the logs shows that I was in demon form for 34.4% of the raid! The demo mastery doesn’t look so bad with figures like that.

AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHH!

It’s an unforgiving bastard of a rotation, borderline difficult while standing still beating up a dummy, so lord knows what it will be like under pressure. I’m really quite worried about tonight’s ICC25HM run.

The issue is using Hand of Gul’dan to refresh Immolate. Immo lasts 15 seconds, HoG has a 12 second CD, and 2 second cast time, and ALSO has a travel time of maybe quarter to half a second as it falls from the sky!

That leaves a not-so-generous 0.5 to 0.75 second window for casting (assuming zero lag). The dps penalty for Immo dropping and having to recast it is significant (a combination of lost immo ticks, lost chances of MC procs, loss of a filler shadow bolt dps, loss of that sb’s chance to proc impending doom – it all really builds up).

Get caught mid cast as HoG comes off CD? You’ve just screwed up. Get caught with a lag spike as HoG comes off CD? Bad luck. Movement will obviously screw things too, but that’s par for everyone’s course.

With such a tight margin, haste makes a huge difference. Going from around 1200 to 1500 after regemming/reforging shaves enough of a chunk from the HoG cast time to at least counteract some lag. Even so, I found myself having to watch the HoG cooldown timer tick down, stop casting as it got close, then spamming the HoG key. Given the undercity lag last night, this was far from consistently successful, but enough to make me think it might be doable in a lower-lag environment.

I’m going to be so dependent on lag that I can easily see myself getting all OCD about it – screaming at folks for having a vanity pet out and ranting at the gearscore users (I know who they are, Spamalyzer sees all!).

It will be worth it though. When the rotation all comes together the baseline damage is jawdropping – around the 9.5k mark self buffed with no consumables. It may still be low compared to some specs, but that’s baseline damage, without the big cooldowns and execute. Chuck meta, immo aura, decimate, an infernal, an instant soulfire, etc, into the mix and there’s huge potential.

Mind you, that’s the other issue at the moment. There are now so many extra mid to long cooldowns. I need more buttons, and I’m already using 30+ keybinds on a speedpad! Not only that, but tracking them is getting crazy – my TellMeWhen field is bloating to fill the centre of my screen monitoring about 20 different things to keep track of.

So anyway, overall first impressions are that it’s the most difficult spec I’ve ever seen in WoW. Much worse than the pre-extended-mangle feral cat spec (my previous contender for most difficult spec). There’s a huge amount to keep track of, a moderately large number of short-rotation abilities to juggle, including one with the most insanely unforgiving timing possible (to the extent where having a medium to high lag connection pretty much rules you out of playing the spec). BUT, it’s going to be a beast. I think the potential is there for some monster dps scores from the best players – the scope for stacking cooldowns and judging the fight timing is huge. It certainly feels like it will be a challenge to master.

Onto ICC tonight, where I’ll see how it stacks up against some familiar enemies.

Demonic Circle

Summons a Demonic Circle at the current location of your pet.

Soul Stone

Burn a shard to be able to use a Soul Stone to battle res a fallen party or raid member.

Bane of Doom

Give Bane of Doom a chance to proc an Ebon Imp every 3 seconds.

Shadow Ward

Shadow Ward Volley! Damage absorbed by Shadow Ward is reflected to all enemies within 20 yards.

Health Funnel

Gives the target minion a 100% attack speed and 100% attack power boost for the duration of the cast

Shadowflame

Afflicts targets with a horror effect while they are affected by the DoT component.

Rain of Fire

Has a 15% chance per tick to cast or refresh Immolate on each target

Shadow Bolt

Increases the range of Shadow Bolt by 50%

Metamorphosis

Grants the Demon Wings buff allowing the caster to fly at normal run speed. Taking damage or entering combat removes the buff.