So, Demonology, quite lacking in runes.
Now I know this means a BIG spellpower nerf to Warlocks (make up for it through other things) but wouldn’t Demonic Knowledge have been better if it transferred your spell power over to your demons as both SP and AP (for autoattack purposes)?
You know demons get AP for the spellpower already. I think the ratio is 10SP on the warlock comes out as 6AP for the pet.
No idea about spellpower Transfer ratio to the imp.
/10chars
57% of Warlocks SP is turned into pets AP, 15% of locks SP is turned into pets SP. 14 AP equals 1 DPS (so +2 to pet auto attack damage). This is before modifiers like imroved imp, unholy power and master demonologist.
So 100 SP from your gear will give your pet 8.14auto attack damage or 4,07 DPS. So 1 SP increase your pets DPS by 0.04 (actually less vs armor) and your Corruption DPS by 0.05 for comparison - in other words Warlocks pet damage scales worse with his gear than any of his dots!
Only notable exception currently is imp who gets 15% SP from lock and his firebolt has SP coeficient of 0.571 which results in 0.855 damage per 1 SP, however imp can be improved with talents to cast fire bolt every second instead of every two seconds and improved imp increases his firebolt damage by 30% with 3 talent points instead of 20% with 5 talent points as is the case with the other pet auto attacks. On top of it demonic pact increases both yours and your imps spell power by 10% of yours which effectively improves his scaling by 66%. So in the end you can squeeze 0,185 DPS per SP from your imp (or more with crit, curse of elements etc) as long as he has mana to cast.
Siphon Life is worse. By far. Even with all possible modifiers active
Yes, but siphon life is technically both damage and heal and 1 talent point in affli tree that focuses on shadow damage and dots in general while entire demo tree focuses and pet and lock tankiness (mostly disabled in tanking meta form though). Dont get me wrong, siphon life is probably a waste of CD (330 damage + 50% SP over 30 seconds at level 50) as far as DPS is concerned and probably should be buffed by 100% to be comparable to other dots which generally do 100% SP over theri duration.
The only way siphon life can be buffed is through a mana cost reduction. Buffing its damage buffs its healing which causes collateral damage towards balance elsewhere
500 damage if you have 340 spellpower.
But with modifiers (shadow mastery +10%, haunt +20%, shadow and flame +10%, an pandemic with 15% spellcrit +15%) it turns out as a small win compared to casting half a shadowbolt