Felguard and the raiding environment (multiple threads merged)

[omegaxan2]

*** Multiple 'Felguard and Raiding' threads merged. Please be aware of the dates of some of the replies. See end pages for most up to date assistance. ***

Howdy!

I've really been throwing the idea around of possibly respeccing to a build not dependant on a pet. Some of the fights like hydross and morogrim I can go nuts with my felguard out but fights like Void Reaver and Lurker, he gets owned by AOE.

Any thoughts on this? I've been looking at other fights in The Eye like Al'ar which sounds like my pet would get spanked hard in phase one...I'm at a loss.

So my main question is...Will it become more and more common that my pet will be dying from boss AOE as we progress to the end of SSC, The Eye, etc.?

[Saobuks]

First off, by putting 41 points into demonology, you potentially lose a lot of more useful talents in other trees. Ruin especially will hurt you considering your dps will rely a lot on crit.

However, it would be interesting to try a FG spec in raids, especially if you're able to get 2/5 T5, which can help heal your pet in extremely healing intensive fights such as Vashj. Even then, a sudden entangle + poison = dead felguard in 3 seconds.

The main problem is that your pet becomes a liability; if it dies, you lose a lot of dps from resummoning, unless your Fel Domination is up, but even then you'll only be able to use it once per fight. Unlike hunters who can heal their pet and dps at the same time, you'll lose a TON of dps stopping to heal your pet.

[Lazyslothboy]

On fights that are not melee friendly, demonology loses to other builds. Spout was pretty devastating, in those few fights you end up doing around 15-20% less or so than your destruction brothers.

On fights that are melee friendly then again and aoe isn't that nasty, like void reaver pounding it was really easy to have my pet up and do some nasty damage.

- Dependant on Shadow Priest, but so are many other builds in longer fights.

- Hard, definitely hardest build to sustain damage from what I played, but that what makes it a lot more interesting as well. Remember this was first try without best gear I could have.

- Remember keep cleave off when we have poly targets, broke few polys last night with auto-cleave on.

- Keep pet on passive, always

- Damage overall is same as other builds, ranging from bit lower on anti-melee fights and doing a lot better on fights where pet don't get one shotted.

- On trash damage was devastating (I guess cause Thooghun the idiot don't miss and glance that much).

- Pet damage was around 250-300 on bosses that favored this build. My lack of shadow and flame / ruin was easily compensated by passive damage I get from my int / sta and my pets int / sta through Demonic Knowledge.

- Each time my pet died, it was because of elemental damage. So have to hope that void star talisman will drop as soon as possible, since it's crucial for this build. Some fights like naj'entus will be very hard without that.

- Pet has around 8,2k hp and same about in armor, it can take 9,64k hit.

- I need more high stamina items (trash ring from BT, tier parts) to get my pet more stamina (and stats give me more damage as well ) for my pet to be able to take up to 10k AoE attack, if I wish to keep playing with this. Passive 15% reduction to damage helps a lot and allows shadow priest to heal more.

- If pet didn't get one shotted, Deface healed it up very fast with VE.

- Some specialties like being able to stun when necessary is nice bonus and pet can be targeted by some nasty abilities that could kill a raid member, but on the other hand I have to be ready to dismiss pet if it's something that I have to react, like Solarians Srath at Solarian....

- I started paying horribly when we were in TK partly because of UI problems and getting nervous over that (also cause I changed all spell buttons to stopcasting macros. Had many new stuff to handle well at start), thank god I got it sorted later. Most of the time I played mediocre and there's a LOT of optimizing to be done. Fights I actually played well were Hydross and Solarian.

- Pet control is very hard if you want to get best out of it, also gear set is bit more stamina based to make pet able to take up to 10k hits and survive, shadow priest will do the rest.

(Nyarlathotep wrote all this in the this link http://www.wowmb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=13262&page=5)

Basically, a FG raiding stresses micromanagement. He will get one-two shotted if he pulls aggro or gets hit by a boss cleave,etc. , but if he doesn't he is a DoT that doesn't need to be refreshed. This is no doubt the hardest build to use in a raid, but potentially quite entertaining as well.

[NewfieDave]

How does your DPS compare to the other Locks in your guild? I don't think my guild would allow a Felguard Lock to raid with us.

[omegaxan2]

#1 in 10 man and top 3 in all 25 mans ... usually #1 in gruul and once I come off cc duty in mag I usually finish around third or fourth

usually sustain around 1000 dps on average

[doogless]

While raiding as Felguard build, the only time I've not come in #1 on the damage meters was against Void Reaver when my pet died 4 times. #1 was a combat/daggers Rogue using Gladiator weapons, and I was only behind by 10k damage.

Your Felguard does about as much damage as a tanking warrior - when you add that to your own it's significant. There's no way the DPS increasing talents in other trees can make up for the 250 DPS your pet is putting out.

[Ghraark]

What sort of gear should a Demo FG raiding/instance warlock aim for? Anything that buffs Stamina and Spelldmg?

I've recently levelled up to 70 and this is my current gear:

http://armory.wow-europe.com/charact...am&n=Thaurglin

Disregard the spec atm I'm just toying around but personally I'm a big fan of the Felguard...

Any help is much appreciated.

[doogless]

The gear you want is the same as any other caster - spell damage, spell hit, and spell crit. You get more benefit from stam and int than other Warlock builds (because of DK), but it doesn't make those stats better than raw damage stats, it just makes the heavy stam and int on our tier sets less useless.

[Cyphyllis]

stolen from http://elitistjerks.com/showthread.php?t=11799 its long btw

the warlocks build http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=NV0oZbxczIizzestxx0z 6/44/11

I raided last night in "harder instance" as demonology, we did The Eye and completed some of Serpentshrine Cavern, forgot to screenshot Lurker and Leotheras I was tanking.

I was on whole night doing CoR, except on mobs melee can't touch.

Al'Ar: Recount errors were bugging me, but I have to say, it's not melee friendly fight. I was paying too much attention on my pet anyway, which lowered my normal damage for quite a bit. I did get "decent damage", pet ended up dieing 6 times, so it wasn't best possible fight or performance with my pet. However when I didn't get errors & freezes from recount, I actually managed to keep my pet alive for very long time, always dodge phoenix spawn explosions and not get my pet bathed in fire. Was always fire damage that killed my pet there.



Void Reaver: Well still was not very comfy with my build, but got lot better results. Pet was being nurtured by shadow priests VE, and result was a lot better. If I had CoD on, I think I actually would have done more damage than any earlier attempts. Was very happy with the result.

I was too focused on new stopcasting macros and staring at my pets healt bar that I got hit 4-5 times with silence, which surely didn't help damage. Pet also got few hits from Arcane Bombs cause hitbox of the boss is so big, had to petdismiss/resummon once there.



High Astromancer Solarian: I started to get better handle on my pet at this point and stopped worrying about it dieing all the time and focused more on my own play (partly cause we had 200 AR on, which my pet got portion of). I expected a lot since it's very low armor boss and damage done was just very very nice.



Kael'Thas Sunstrider: I was sure I will be in a lot of troubles here with my pet, but with careful moving him around and placing him dpssing some stable targets (like Sanguinar) this fight actually was pretty sweet.

Just moving pet and tanks doing well with Phoenixes actually ended up having not so much to do. When you flow, put pet on follow (will be below you). Both you and pet will link, so you have to think yourself as "a tower" and keep like 20y distance between you and pet and same for everyone near you and the pet. Keeping pet on boss isn't smart, tried and died (my pet that is :p)



Hydross the Unstable: I waited out bit more damage, but I was doing really fine overall. Pet didn't die once and was full HP/Manan pretty much all the time thanks to Deface (our shadow priest).



Lurker from Below: Pet got proper face washed during spout so I swapped to sacrificed Succubus and ended up doing fine. Less than shadow and flame+ruin on top of course, but still quite decent. Those spinning things he did didn't affect my pet. Damage was easily outhealed by a shadow priest. I think I was top 5, rogues topping two first spots by far. Not ideal fight for demonology.

<< Forgot to screenshot >>

Leotheras: Tanking duty, no jobs for Thooghun the Idiot there.

<< No screenshot was tanking >>

Reached nice spelldamage spike (without destruction potion) 1937 shadow damage.



---

Conclusions:

On fights that are not melee friendly, demonology loses to other builds. Spout was pretty devastating, in those few fights you end up doing around 15-20% less or so than your destruction brothers.

On fights that are melee friendly then again and aoe isn't that nasty, like void reaver pounding it was really easy to have my pet up and do some nasty damage.

- Dependant on Shadow Priest, but so are many other builds in longer fights.

- Hard, definitely hardest build to sustain damage from what I played, but that what makes it a lot more interesting as well. Remember this was first try without best gear I could have.

- Remember keep cleave off when we have poly targets, broke few polys last night with auto-cleave on.

- Keep pet on passive, always

- Damage overall is same as other builds, ranging from bit lower on anti-melee fights and doing a lot better on fights where pet don't get one shotted.

- On trash damage was devastating (I guess cause Thooghun the idiot don't miss and glance that much).

- Pet damage was around 250-300 on bosses that favored this build. My lack of shadow and flame / ruin was easily compensated by passive damage I get from my int / sta and my pets int / sta through Demonic Knowledge.

- Each time my pet died, it was because of elemental damage. So have to hope that void star talisman will drop as soon as possible, since it's crucial for this build. Some fights like naj'entus will be very hard without that.

- Pet has around 8,2k hp and same about in armor, it can take 9,64k hit.

- I need more high stamina items (trash ring from BT, tier parts) to get my pet more stamina (and stats give me more damage as well ) for my pet to be able to take up to 10k AoE attack, if I wish to keep playing with this. Passive 15% reduction to damage helps a lot and allows shadow priest to heal more.

- If pet didn't get one shotted, Deface healed it up very fast with VE.

- Some specialties like being able to stun when necessary is nice bonus and pet can be targeted by some nasty abilities that could kill a raid member, but on the other hand I have to be ready to dismiss pet if it's something that I have to react, like Solarians Srath at Solarian....

- I started paying horribly when we were in TK partly because of UI problems and getting nervous over that (also cause I changed all spell buttons to stopcasting macros. Had many new stuff to handle well at start), thank god I got it sorted later. Most of the time I played mediocre and there's a LOT of optimizing to be done. Fights I actually played well were Hydross and Solarian.

- Pet control is very hard if you want to get best out of it, also gear set is bit more stamina based to make pet able to take up to 10k hits and survive, shadow priest will do the rest.

---

One thing that's sure, there's lot to improve on game play. There's first time for everything and next time everything will be a lot smoother and damage more optimized.

I will post more when we do BT / Hyjal farm boss clear.

You have to remember that I don't have best possible gear setup to test the build, also i'm lacking void star talisman that's very much needed on some fights to keep your terminator up. Some fights you can swap on all out damage trinkets, but to be able to play everywhere with this build you really want to get that trinket.

edit: one last thing I might add is that, damage overall so far was lower than with my destruction, but it's probably like that because one warlock is on vacation and I'm on CoR instead of CoD for example.

[omegaxan2]

Wow, I really appreciate all the info. you guys rock!!

Keep it coming...I'm gonna go another week with 6/44/11 before I decide to respec to 40/0/21 or some variation of that.