I’m mainly a destru player, but my points about the pet macroes are very relevant for all specs.
Your void walker isn’t sh!tty in holding aggro, at least not if you care about its abilities yourself, which sadly you should do.
If you haven’t already noticed it, pet AI is quite bad. Like…really bad. Demonology locks should know best.
Autocast abilities don’t get used every GCD, but every second GCD. This is quite bad, and leaves a lot of your pet’s energy bar wasted.
This concerns especially Shadow Bite of your Fel Hunter, and Consuming Shadows for your Void walker.
I highly recommend to use a macro together with your most used filler spell to get more out of your pets. I notice the damage boost for the fel hunter especially.
#showtooltip
/use Incinerate
/petattack
/use Shadow Bite
/use Consuming Shadows
This is how I set mine up. Helps with pet control immensely, together with having pet follow and all the other positioning abilities keybound as well.
Second, you really need to keybind the taunt ability of the void walker, since autocast also doesn’t do the trick.
I’m able to solo every single 600k hp rare in the Maw except those that are immune to taunt or have a lot of adds.
I can fully DPS without my VW losing its aggro.
Proof here, please don’t kill me for my UI. I know these days everyone is all about that simplistic UI to the max, I’m the opposite. Yay autism.
Next, some things concerning destro specifically. Havoc and Channel Demonfire are 2 very strangely coded abilities that seem to defy all the consistent game logic most other spells have.
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Havoc does not aggro any mobs, nor does it put you in combat. This is useful in some situations.
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Havoc does have a range in order to apply it, but it’s effect range FAR exceeds the 40yds listed in the tooltip. I don’t have a range addon installed, but I know that it exceeds 100yds easily. This means you can actually attack people from ridiculous ranges if you managed to mark them with Havoc.
- And now for the most useful tip of all: Havoc can be applied while channeling Channel Demonfire, without cancelling the channel. This saves you a GCD, and is quite useful to know for AoE.
- Channel Demonfire is the only channel I know that immediately cancels it’s effect once the target exceeds 40yds, and the only channel that doesn’t go through LoS. It makes sense if you read and understand the tooltip exactly, but it’s still a bit odd.
That’s most of what I have to share right now. More pro tips are welcome, but I thought these are the really not so well known one, especially the interaction between CDF and Havoc.
Havoc exceeding range should be known to any destro main.
Lastly, some things changed in BfA that should be of note, and are mostly relevant for PvP:
- Nether Ward (Spell Reflect) used to be able to prevent a DH’s kick from kicking you, exactly like mind freeze from DKs. But this is no longer true, so be cautious of this.
- Spell Reflect and Smoke Bomb’s interaction with AoE was changed, concerning Cataclysm. It used to be that you could just Cataclysm into a Spell Reflect or smoke bomb and apply immolate just fine. This is no longer the case. Immolate will get reflected, and will not be applied to a target inside smoke bomb.
- Memes with GoSac are back. If you play with Grimoire of Sacrifice, which is necessary against any melee that cleaves, so arms, frost DK and WW to an extent, you can have 2 spell locks back to back again. Fel Dom summon another Felhunter after having used your first kick to immediately interrupt again.
Especially clutch against Disc priests who bank on their 2 schools to heal.