[MoP] 5.4 Demonology PvE Guide

[Kilydan]

Demo guide:

i have noticed that a lot of players do think Demonology isn't working or just really bad. i've to admit that demonology is one of the more buggy specs to play as warlock, but not mechanical wise. its only a few synergizing problems like with the 100% crit change trinket which would be godlike if Doom worked correctly. i will cover the normal and pandashan way on play demo lock so you will still be able to do great dps!

i personally like Demonology over the Destruction spec (gosh i realy hate destruction tbh) the last time i played destruction and compared to Demonology there wasnt even a big diffirence, maybe a 5-10k dps lower on some fights but also higher on other fights, so they are equally the same on dps if you manage demonology correctly (and the good thing is is that demonology can only get stronger due to a few bugs!) 

***this is a very long guide so ill cut everthing in parts with spoilers so you just click on a subject you want to visit rather then 1 big post***

destruction guide: http://community.pandashan.com/index.php?/topic/41204-destruction-54-pve-guide/
affliction guide: http://community.pandashan.com/index.php?/topic/40013-affliction-warlock-pve-guide/#entry220634
demonology guide: (you are looking at it)

i will cover the next things in my guide:
1.1: Stat Priority
1.2: haste breakpoints
2: gear and addons
3: snapshotting
4: talent choices
5: and a small rotation guide
6: useful links

1.1: Stat Priority.

intellect > hit(15%) > Haste (breakpoint) > Mastery => crit 
you can pretty much ignore crit currently, and after the doom fix you should only ignore is whenever you have the 100% crit trinket to synergize with your doom.

haste to around 3036 as lowest breakpoint for your first doom breakpoint to gain a additional tick on doom (or somewhere in the 8k but don't worry about this breakpoint till end game gear! (i'll go more in depth about this in the next section)

currently there is a bug with haste breakpoints which counts for all classes if i'm not mistaking, a bug where you need 1.5% haste EXTRA to benefit from your breakpoint. so in our case the 3036 haste will go up to 3686 (total of 650 haste is needed extra because of this bug)

Mastery does benefit your overall damage and especially in metamorphosis!

 

1.2 Haste Breakpoints

i basically already mentioned this in the section above, but i will go a little more in depth about it in here. about further breakpoints as well! 

your first and general haste breakpoint is at 3686 for the first doom.  i found a guide online which did exactly feature which breakpoints are available and which one to take.
a general rule for demonology and affliction spec is to always go for the highest possible breakpoint you can go for. a breakpoint for us is the same as upgrading a weapon for a warrior because it will increase our dmg output etc by so much that it cannot be compared to mastery anymore, it will be way better!

here is the breakpoint list i mentioned (first number is retail, second number between the brackets [] are the numbers you need here on pandashan:

i will already mention here that a "imp" breakpoint means that you will be able to get a extra imp swarm from the imps warm glyph in and reduce the cooldown drastically, i'm not 100% sure how breakpoints on this ability work but im pretty sure it comes from a good source
however the demonic calling buff will be disabled while impswarm is on cooldown
6072 [6722] imp breakpoint
8097 [8747] doom / shadowflame breakpoint
13153 [13803] doom breakpoint (not yet worth going for even on BiS ToT gear, same goes for anything below this point)
14166 [14816] doom breakpoint
14873 [15523] imp breakpoint

 

2: Gear and Addons

with gear you basicly just wanna go for the what i call "basic" warlock gear setup, which just involves ALOT of mastery and haste to gain your breakpoints and such, a site you can easily follow to gear up as BiS list is: http://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/1433-52-warlock-t15-set-bonus-bis-list/?p=15802

also aim for the http://www.wowhead.com/item=94524/unerring-vision-of-lei-shentrinket because of the 100% doom i was talking about earlier and will talk about later how to properly use it

3. Snapshotting

snapshotting is a quite complex system that will benefit you as a Demonology warlock VERY VERY much, and the idea as a Demonology warlock is to make as much out of this system as possible.
what it basically comes down to, is making your dots strong and keep them strong.

what is snapshotting exactly?

snapshotting is a moment of time when you press your ability where the game tracks down your stats and provide that stat to your ability, and this is really useful for demonology warlocks especially if you are going to play with the http://www.wowhead.com/item=94524/unerring-vision-of-lei-shen trinket, this trinket is extremely powerful in combination with Doom because you can have a 100% crit chance on your doom for 2 minutes!!!
small example:

whenever your 100% crit trinket procs, you only have a 4 second window to do your stuff, in our case it is going into metamorphosis form, and cast doom TWICE in a row, so it will last 2 minutes instead of 1. your doom will not crit 100% of the time and spawn a wild imp whenever your doom crits. (still good to practice this, but sadly this part is broken and WONT correctly spawn a imp whenever you crit with doom. this is indeed a big problem for demonology warlocks and i want to see it fixed asap, but i cannot promise anything!)

 

4: talent choices

its really simple, i want to keep it short from here on so i wont cover that much on what is not needed to affect your damage!  the first 4 talent choices are quite optional on what you like and prefer to have and play with, however the last 2 talents are going to affect your dps in raid and stuff. the level 75 talent will be Grimoire of Supremacy and then summon your shivarra pet. shivarra pet is probably the best single target pet the is and will give you the best damage boost. grimoire of service doesn't give that much of a dps boost to you (still slightly a boost but not a big one)  and grimoire of sacrifice will barely do anything for you at all, unless you are playing with the 100% crit chance trinket, but sadly do the imps not scale with that buff and therefore is this talent also quite useless for us. (i will keep you guys updated here whenever it is possible to use it because of a fix)

the level 90 talent is quite important and will affect your dps significantly! whatever talent we choose, it doenst matter and long as it isnt mannoroth's fury because its just bad for us, whatever reason you might thing of, don't do think about it forget the idea and look at the other 2 talents...

archimonde's darkness will help you a lot on single target fights and on long lasting fights, it is however a really bad talent if you need to move alot.

kil'jeadan's cunning is the best talent for heavy movement fights (especial y single target oriented) or in some cases aoe fights but not much.

 

5. rotation guide

rotation is quite simple yet so complex, especially if you are going to play with the 100% crit trinket which your should whenever you can use it properly (the trinket does work, just the synergy doesn't)

for single target its quite simple but also quite hard because you need to manage our trinket procs correctly! the openers are quite hectic to begin with because you need to manage all your trinket procs and rotation perfectly, you can basically make no mistake or it will result in a hug damage loss!

as of the opener i pre-pot with a burst potion so it will go on a cooldown so you can use it a second time in the fight then pre-cast a shadowbolt so it will hit the target whenever the boss is pulled and follow that by a hand of gul'dan. at this point some/most of your trinkets might have already been procced so its a good moment now to cast a corruption on the target followed by a shadow bolt (you can change the order of corruption and shadowbolt if your trinkets didn't proc yet, so you can try to get a trinket proc now) then cast your second charge from hand of gul'dan. the reason i didnt cast it directly twice in a row is because the shadowflame dot will have its moment to do damage and right before it ends you cast another hand of guldan to refresh the total duration from shadowflame and bringing it to 2 stacks. there is a hard/time managing problem now here because you want to press your burst macro b4 you cast the second hand of gul'dan. after you did cast your hand of gul'dan you want to step in metamorphosis form immediately. the reason why you want to do this is because your hand of gul'dan will start to calculate its damage whenever it hits the target, that exact moment is the moment it will snapshot all your stats and because you are in metamorphosis form before the hand of gul'dan did hit the target it will benefit from that metamorphosis damage boost. this results that your second stack of your shadowflame will do insane and crazy damage!. then in demo form you want to do use doom twice in a row so it will last 2 minutes so you dont need to worry about it. if you are playing with the 100% crit trinket you are hoping to have the trinket procced by now. if it didn't proc you can still use it but make sure to safe some demonic fury for whenever the trinket procs. if the trinket procs really early you have to react to it immediately and swap into metamorphosis form to cast doom twice. 

this was basicly your hectic opener and i will write it down in short now:
pre-pot > pre-cast shadow bolt > hand of gul'dan > corruption/shadow bolt (in the correct order regarding trinket procs) > burst macro > 2nd hand of gul'dan > metamorphosis > 2x Doom > dump your fury 

after your dumped your fury with touch of chaos / soul fire (only use soul fire with the molten core procs) you are just going back to normal rotation which basically is just spamming shadow bolt and keep your corruption up. only try to use hand of gul'dan/corruption combined with trinket procs otherwise these 2 dots will barely deal any damage! if you have good trinket procs, have enough fury and dont have just refreshed your corruption/hand of gul'dan you can go into metamorphosis form to make the best use of your trinket procs combined with the damage modifier from metamorphosis form. which in my case is nearly 70%! 

 

for AoE fights (like Council of Elders 4+ targets for most of the fight)

AoE fights can be split into 2 sections actually, long lasting AoE and short lasting AoE. I will start with short lasting because its slightly easier to explain.

Short Lasting AoE:

if there are a couple of mobs with a lower health value you can apply this tactic to help clearing them, for example the snakes near the brige after jin'rokh and before horridon. those are dying quite fast but still counts as AoE because there are 5-6 snakes.

what you want to do is cast a hand of gul'dan or twice if you have the time. then go into metamorphosis form and use a immolation aura. if you are using your wrathguard pet which is highly recommended in Demonology AoE let him use his wrathstorm by using command demon. If the targets are still alive and you have enough demonic fury to spend use it on void ray in Metamorphosis, if you don't have enough demonic fury to sustain yourself use the normal version of immolation aura (they can stack and will deal a lot of AoE damage together!) that's basically what you need to maintain in short AoE fights.

Long Lasting AoE:

Long lasting AoE fights are a bit more complex and are basically the same as single target fights you will still be able to cleave but not as much as other targets, your main goal on those fights is to prioritize on the main target while also keeping pressure on the other targets. How you can do this is quite simple:

You basically start the same as the Single target Opener because hand of gul'dan does insane damage in the opener, so imagine that on 4 targets or more! for the rest of the encounter you want to have doom and corruption up on all of your targets at all times. In case you are playing with the 100% crit trinket you want to apply the same as on single target, but then a bit different because you do not have time to use doom twice on every targets (lets take council of elders fight for example with 4 targets) you want to use it once on every target if possible, but this will be a bit hard because you have 4 seconds to react to this procs and a global cooldown usually takes 1 second, if you are fast enough you can make it but it will not always be possible. Sadly the synergy of this trinket doesn't work as i described earlier but if it works it will pay of REALLY good which i can show you in a video after the rest of the explanation. if you are not using the 100% crit trinket (which you shouldn't in the current state of the demonology warlock) you can still use other good trinkets like breath of the hydra for example. you still want to try to have a good and strong uptime on your corruption and doom because the damage output of those dots will still help you in your dps alot because of how snapshotting works. if your corruption is VERY strong on all 4 targets you can try to maintain them abit by using touch of choas on each target and rotate that so your corruption wont fall of and you are extending its duration now so they don't fall of immediately. besides that is it really strong

in this case you want to use a wrathguard over the shivarra pet (counts for anyfight where you can cleave on 2 or more targets) because the wrathguard is just alot stronger on cleaving fights especialy with his wrathguard spin to win ability.

a video i prommised where you can see how strong demonology can be on aoe fight if doom did synergize correctly with our 100% crit trinket: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFqCnF4aFBs

6: Useful Links.

i didn't cover the gear and BiS (Best in Slot - many people don't know this shortcut while it is commonly used in PvE!) slots but thanks to some sites it will help you decide what is the best for you to get!

here is a few sites you can use to gear up:
(works basicly the same for demonology aswell, you can easily follow this list)
http://www.mop-veins.tk/affliction-warlock-pve-dps-gear-loot-best-in-slot

his weapon choice is indeed really strong and provides a double socket bonus (1x main hand and 1x offhand) which will in the end be abit stronger the the staff from twin consorts, this staff is a good weapon to use and provides our 2 best secondary stats (haste and mastery) and this is a great (one of the best) 2 handers you can get until you get the main hand and offhand weapon combination or something with a higher item level ofcourse

a site and a person i learned affliction trough is sparkuggz and Fragnance (both top tier warlocks from method) Fragnance doesn't have a active youtube channel as sparkuggs does. Fragnance doesn't main his warlock anymore, but he did main his warlock in SoO and on his stream he did often help you when you asked for some warlock help!

here is a link to sparkuggz own site and youtube channel where you can look up alot of things for the warlock class in general and ofcourse affliction aswell!:
http://sparkuggz.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/Sparkuggz

 

I really hope i could inspire people to play Demonology and try it out over the destruction spec over and over again which doesn't require as much knowledge of the game/class as Demonology/Affliction do. Demonology is a harder spec to play but it pays off doing it correctly!

if you have anything to add or you still have questions, don't hesitate to ask them on this topic or send me a PM!

despite all the bugs we still have to affect our dps negativly with our wild imps is this spec still as vailable in pve as Destruction/affliction is. i personally pull abit more dps in demonology if i play it correctly, but you will be punished on the meters if you dont do it correctly!

Edited October 3, 2015 by Kilydan

[Kilydan]

sry if the list is kinda bad, i have to get used to the new forum, so the "reveal hidden contents" are abit buggy for me and rly hard to adjust since i cannot reach the source code of this... i'll try to fix it whenever i figured out how!

[Seykwaleibay]

Does the imp swarn glyph take the snapshot of procs ?

Is it better to use  the soul fire while we have trinket or dark soul procs ?

when are you going in métamorphosis ?

^^

Edited October 29, 2015 by Seykwaleibay

[Kilydan]

Currently imps do not snap shot at all if im right.

And yes its better to use soulfire when you have a proc or other form of damage boost.

Wnd when to go into metamorphosis?

Thats actually abit harder to plan, since you wanna go into metamorphosis when you have near max demonic fury and when you have trinket procs. Ofc as you can imagine is it very rare that those conditions happen at the same time, what you can do is get a addon like TellMeWhen where you can track down the internal cooldown of the trinket and plan around that, build up fury until you have the specific trinket procs you want ready to be used in metamorphosis form.

[wraegoth]

Does the glyph of demon hunting works? 

[Kilydan]

12 hours ago, wraegoth said:

Does the glyph of demon hunting works? 

Currently not. but it wont be a big diffirence neither

[wraegoth]

23 hours ago, Kilydan said:

Currently not. but it wont be a big diffirence neither

 

i think there is  a difference if you do stuff like this

[Kilydan]

that must have been a very old fight because that fight doesnt even come close to how it is right now... besides that do ive absolutely no clue what i should look it...