Demonic Pack. What exzactly does it buff?

[Humungo]

Looki here, I am a full time Demo lock for about a year now. It is my favorite spec. The elitist jerks have it right, it adds 10% of THE LOCKS current SP when the effect procs to the entire raid. I give from 350-500 sp during a fight depending on my Dying curse and living flame proc/use. Alot of people are clueless to DP and it's effects and I am glad this thread was made he he.

[harky]

didnt say it was bad...im saying that there are people who are liek wtf demo lololol because they have been misinformed and still believe it is useless. and id love to see your raid set up via wow meter online if your ontop some thign is very very wrong

It was a joke about Gunship. It's virtually all AOE. I seed the rifleman, then seed the marines, then immolation aura, and so on and so on. It's the same reason I hold my precious #1 spot on trash and our DKs will have to pry from my cold dead fingers (which often happens when I die and lay on the floor :P). I also have a permanent 1-4 spot on HM Anub for similar reasons. Either way it was a joke, don't read much into it.

[Simca]

No one's really 'stuck in a rut' about Demo.

Maybe not any of the top guilds/players are, but many people on these forums, in trade chat, random heroics, basically all over in-game are 'struck in a rut' and think that Affliction/Destruction are the only good dps specs and think demonology is half of the dps of Affliction/Destruction or something.

Yes, most of these players are bads, but some of the higher dps warlocks on my server didn't even have a clue about how good Demonic Pact was for raid DPS/healing.

There is a definite stigma around the spec imo. It's kind of like ret's "if you're ret you have horrible dps, why the hell did you roll a paladin to dps" stigma. The only difference is rets broke that conception with a HUGE BANG when 3.0 came out and they facerolled everyone into the ground. Now even after repeated nerfs and low arena representation, ret still has the misconception of being overpowered.

[Gahouf!]

Demonic Pact, quite exactly, does what the tooltip says. SHOCKING, IS IT NOT?

[harky]

Maybe not any of the top guilds/players are, but many people on these forums, in trade chat, random heroics, basically all over in-game are 'struck in a rut' and think that Affliction/Destruction are the only good dps specs and think demonology is half of the dps of Affliction/Destruction or something.

Demo doesn't matter if you're not in a top guild. Seems like a non-issue.

[Lucetia]

I love demo locks when I'm setting up raid. 13% magic damage 5% spell crit and the best in game spell power buff is really nice when wrapped into one spec.

All 3 Warlocks spec can provide 13% magic damage -- Curse of Elements
All 3 specs can also spec into the 5% crit on Shadowbolt, which I believe most take in the cookie cutter builds. Destruction might be the one excluded from this. Improved Shadow Bolt

So really you could take any spec of warlock and still get what you want, for the most part.

Now for Demonic Pact. Any class that is affected by spell power will gain 10% of the Warlocks spell power, but does not stack with Totem of Wrath. If you have an elemental shaman then your Demonology Warlock needs to have at least 2810 spell power so you'll gain 281 when they buff you. If the lock has 3254 spellpower then the people who gain the buff will gain 325 Spellpower. Demonic Pact use to be only 10 players, but they might've changed it since I last played Demonology.

As for the classes who are affected:
Priests, Mages, Warlocks -- All Specs
Druids -- Boomkin/Resto unless your Feral is healing for some reason
Elemental Shamans (If 10% SP from you > Totem), Enhancement Shamans
Paladins -- All Specs

As far as I know those are the only ones. Rogues have an AP coefficient that factors into Poisons while DK's have AP coefficients that factor into their spells. Hunters some argue that it affects their Serpent Sting, Explosive Shot, etc, but I don't think there's ever been anything to back that up since the changes in Vanilla.

[Príckenöveri]

Man whats up with all weird spell topics today :P

[Simca]

Demo doesn't matter if you're not in a top guild. Seems like a non-issue.

False. It still produces superior raid dps in pug 25s and even many pug 10s. Although I admit most of those pugs are riddled with bad players anyway and I end up topping or near top of the meters as Demonology, but saying Demo doesn't matter unless you're in a top guild is just stupid.

[harky]

The worth of DP is greatly diminished when running with poor quality players. If people are putting out 70% or less of their potential, then the worth of your buff is going to be 70% as well. 70% is expecting a lot of guilds that aren't performing well in ICC and it's expecting a hell of a lot from pugs. Also it's more likely in struggling guilds and pugs to have a suboptimal group anyway, which while actually lower scale factors. In 10 mans you need to look at the group and see if it's worth it even with everyone at 100% efficiency on a full tank and spank fight. If you have a no Shaman, or a non-Ele Shaman and are over-stocked on casters then you might want to stay Demo. If you have an Ele Shaman there's pretty much no way for Demo to be optimal.

That's the thing, you're counting on the quality of players to make Demo functional. High quality players understand the worth of Demo. The players who don't understand why Demo is good are usually not going to be able to take advantage of the extra SP anyway. So, where's the problem?

[Dimerock]

DP easily surpasses the shaman totem if your in 232ilvl + gear

[Grinch]

I have a rogue in my guild to go slap. Lol

It isn't taken entirely out of the blue. It used to be spellpower that scaled poisons, but since that is the same thing as poisons not scaling at all, it got changed to being based on AP instead.

[scandore8472]

No one's really 'stuck in a rut' about Demo. Watch any of the world first videos, or any of the PTR videos from ICC. Metamorphosis is hard to miss in them. At this point SP is so high that not having it in 25s is silly. It's maybe 10% behind Afflic, but without counting its impact on our healers my DP is acounting for ~2500 DPS spread across the raid. I'm usually behind on DPS by much, much less than that. Gunship doesn't count or I could say I'm top DPS on some fights. :P

Demo is EXTREMELY under-rated. The real world DPS difference between demo and other specs is minuscule and skill is more of a factor in DPS then what spec you are. I've said before, my DPS as demo is consistently on par or better then the other locks in my guilds. I was second on damage done with 8k dps in my guilds 25 death whisper this week. Number 1 was our destro lock, with 8200dps.

It really shines on add fights, sure you may only be able to get 1 or 2 shadow bolts off on the add before it dies, but there is a really good chance that, that you'll trigger decimation to proc. Therefore, you get 10 seconds of free soul fires outside of execute phase. Also, I've found that if you start casting decimation before it expires, and it expires mid-cast, you still get the hasted cast, but it costs a shard. This is a great little trick if an add triggers decimation, and youre back on the boss and it's about to fall off. On ToGC hard mode, all I did was chain cast decimation on the snobolds for the first phase of beasts.


Edit: I quoted the wrong person.

[Warlocomotif]

DP easily surpasses the shaman totem if your in 232ilvl + gear

Err I didn't check his particular gezr, but gear averaging ilvl 232 is much more than enough for demonic pact to beat the crap out of totem of wrath. The only reason it didn't become sort of fotm until TotC was simply because the spellpower difference became too big to ignore.

[harky]

No. The reason for Demo's recent boom in usage is because previously the DPS gap between Demo and Destro was enormous. People were finding that the SP buff's rDPS buff was substantially smaller than the gain in personal DPS when switching to Destro. Demo was 20%+ behind Destro. Demo is now ~10% behind Afflic, which is ~2% above Destro. If Demo right now was 20% behind Afflic, it would still vary in use quite a bit. I'm bringing a ~2.5k DPS buff, while being ~1.5k DPS behind what I can pull as Afflic. If Demo was where it was pre-3.3 then I'd barely be breaking even on DPS. Demo shined a little bit on Anub due to Immolation bridging the gap and Destro AOE being horrible, so it saw some use. In general though it was often a DPS loss.

Right now, in 3.3, Demo becomes viable in 219-226 gear in 25s with a good composition. It becomes good 232 gear and in 245+ gear it's a no brainer for 25s. It's still not a no-brainer for 10 mans. In my 10 man group me being Demo costs us roughly 1200 DPS overall, it's just not worthwhile when we only have myself and a Shadow Priest for casters. The only time I go Demo is for Gunship in 10s. There are a couple comps where Demo works better, but you start having such a caster bias group that some encounters are much more difficult anyway.

[Simca]

No. The reason for Demo's recent boom in usage is because previously the DPS gap between Demo and Destro was enormous. People were finding that the SP buff's rDPS buff was substantially smaller than the gain in personal DPS when switching to Destro. Demo was 20%+ behind Destro. Demo is now ~10% behind Afflic, which is ~2% above Destro. If Demo right now was 20% behind Afflic, it would still vary in use quite a bit. I'm bringing a ~2.5k DPS buff, while being ~1.5k DPS behind what I can pull as Afflic. If Demo was where it was pre-3.3 then I'd barely be breaking even on DPS. Demo shined a little bit on Anub due to Immolation bridging the gap and Destro AOE being horrible, so it saw some use. In general though it was often a DPS loss.

Right now, in 3.3, Demo becomes viable in 219-226 gear in 25s with a good composition. It becomes good 232 gear and in 245+ gear it's a no brainer for 25s. It's still not a no-brainer for 10 mans. In my 10 man group me being Demo costs us roughly 1200 DPS overall, it's just not worthwhile when we only have myself and a Shadow Priest for casters. The only time I go Demo is for Gunship in 10s. There are a couple comps where Demo works better, but you start having such a caster bias group that some encounters are much more difficult anyway.

You're forgetting that shaman can drop their dps fire totems, netting them anywhere from 500-1000 dps.
And the buff to the healers in 10-man if you don't have a shaman at all is very worthwhile.
Other than that, a reasonable analysis.

It goes:
Naxx 10s (patch 3.0): Hell no.
Naxx 25s (patch 3.0, even BiS gear): No.
Ulduar 10s (patch 3.1): No.
Ulduar 25s (patch 3.1): Yes, it finally outweighs the cost of demo, but only by a little
ToC 10 (patch 3.2): Not really
ToC 25 (patch 3.2): Yes, a moderate raid increase
ICC 10 (patch 3.3): Sometimes, depends on composition
ICC 25 (patch 3.3): REQUIRED

[Warlocomotif]

No. The reason for Demo's recent boom in usage is because previously the DPS gap between Demo and Destro was enormous. People were finding that the SP buff's rDPS buff was substantially smaller than the gain in personal DPS when switching to Destro. Demo was 20%+ behind Destro. Demo is now ~10% behind Afflic, which is ~2% above Destro. If Demo right now was 20% behind Afflic, it would still vary in use quite a bit. I'm bringing a ~2.5k DPS buff, while being ~1.5k DPS behind what I can pull as Afflic. If Demo was where it was pre-3.3 then I'd barely be breaking even on DPS. Demo shined a little bit on Anub due to Immolation bridging the gap and Destro AOE being horrible, so it saw some use. In general though it was often a DPS loss.

Right now, in 3.3, Demo becomes viable in 219-226 gear in 25s with a good composition. It becomes good 232 gear and in 245+ gear it's a no brainer for 25s. It's still not a no-brainer for 10 mans. In my 10 man group me being Demo costs us roughly 1200 DPS overall, it's just not worthwhile when we only have myself and a Shadow Priest for casters. The only time I go Demo is for Gunship in 10s. There are a couple comps where Demo works better, but you start having such a caster bias group that some encounters are much more difficult anyway.

You're talking about the recent boom, I'm talking about 3.2. The recent Boom comes from players who want to provide a big raid buff but want to lose no DPS in doing so. Before that in 3.2 almost all top guilds had already started using a demonic pact Warlock. In terms of rDPS vs pDPS, it became worth while roughly half way through Ulduar, which is when you saw a limited few top guilds with demonic pact locks (If I recall correctly, premonition was using demonic pact warlocks in most of their PTR 3.2 patchwerk dps tests).

And indeed, as the poster above pointed out. The elemental shaman gains anywhere between 500 to 1k dps (more then that when using the fire elemental with adds around).

In short, Demonic pact became worth while before ilvl 232 gear before the buffs to demonology- right now ilvl 232 gear is much more than enough to destroy a totem of wrath in terms of raid DPS.

[Lark]

Demo is EXTREMELY under-rated. The real world DPS difference between demo and other specs is minuscule and skill is more of a factor in DPS then what spec you are. I've said before, my DPS as demo is consistently on par or better then the other locks in my guilds. I was second on damage done with 8k dps in my guilds 25 death whisper this week. Number 1 was our destro lock, with 8200dps.

A) how is it under rated? demo is the worst dps spec available. If your number #1 dps is 8200 with you that close behind you're an amazing demo lock in a horrible guild. On a patchwork style fight you would lag terribly behind true caster dps specs.

B) the buff is amazing on any fight where it actually matters. Even if the rdps is about the same with the buff, your healers become so much more powerful with you in the raid.

C) Can not agree more about add fights. More corruption for more molten cores, midfight decimation procs AND possible bonus damage out of immolation aura. Demo is actually very, very close on several fights, especially with the seed buff.