Demonic Pact (also known as DP) is a talent in the Demonology tree. It’s one of the most important buffs for casters and healers in the raid.

It procs from your warlock pet’s critical hits, lasts 45 seconds, and has a 20-second internal cooldown (meaning that after the buff is first applied, even if your pet crits again, it can’t be refreshed earlier than 20 seconds).

The strength of DP depends on the warlock’s spell power at the moment the buff is applied. This means that trinket procs and any effects that increase spell power directly affect the strength of DP. The raid is interested in DP having the highest possible uptime and being as strong as possible.

How to achieve a strong and stable DP

We’ll assume a warlock with Phylactery of the Nameless Lich, Charred Twilight Scale and Tailoring as their profession.

Since DP has a 20-second internal cooldown, you can’t just send your pet in “at random.” The optimal way is to send it in when you have as many buffs procced as possible (trinkets, cloak enchant, ICC rep ring, Glyph of Life Tap buff, Orc racial, Wild Magic potion).

In a real fight, you won’t always be able to line up all the procs at the same time. For example, the Scale or the ring might take a long time to proc. In that case, you shouldn’t delay your pet too much — that will be a significant loss of burst, especially in encounters where Bloodlust is used right on the pull.

Important: the raid needs DP from the very first second of the fight. To achieve this, there are ways to force trinket procs and other effects before the pull without dealing damage to the boss.

Methods to force procs before the pull

Hellfire — very likely to proc Phylactery of the Nameless Lich (or the Dislodged Foreign Object trinket if you’re using that instead of Charred Twilight Scale), the cloak enchant, and the ring. But you must not have any shields on you (for example, from a Discipline priest). To guarantee you don’t have a shield, you use a macro (see below).

To proc the Charred Twilight Scale, you can use Sulfuron Slammer (it applies a drunken effect, so be careful!) or a Scorpid Surprise (food that sometimes applies a weak poison).

Pre-pull sequence

Use Life Tap → get the buff from the glyph.

About 4–5 seconds before the pull, drink Sulfuron Slammer and use the use Scorpid Surprise while casting Hellfire via the macro.

1–2 seconds before the pull, drink a Wild Magic potion, pop your Orc racial and Metamorphosis, and start casting Shadow Bolt.

At the same time, send your pet in.

This way you can ramp DP up to around 600–750 spell power in BiS gear, depending on which procs you get and whether you used a potion.

Macro to remove a priest shield before Hellfire

(spam it, since you don’t know when the priest will put a shield on you):

#showtooltip
/cancelaura Power Word: Shield
/cast [nochanneling] Hellfire

How to extend a strong first DP

DP lasts 45 seconds, but if your pet keeps attacking, it will refresh it after 20–25 seconds, and the old strong buff will be overwritten. To preserve its strength, you can stop your pet about 25 seconds before the buff expires and send it in again near the end of its duration. This is a loss of personal DPS, but a gain for the raid.

You can also resummon a new pet: the old DP internal cooldown doesn’t apply to it, so it can refresh the buff at the end of your procs.
How to enter the fight with DP up from the very first second.

The problem is that even if you do everything perfectly, your pet still has to crit the boss to apply DP. That can take a few seconds.

For the raid to get DP right away, you can send your pet to kill some bug/spider mob in the instance before the pull. Because of the level difference, your pet will almost certainly crit. It’s important to turn off your pet’s Charge, since Charge damage can’t proc DP.

This way, after killing the mob, the raid will get the standard ~450 spell power buff right from the pull. The key is to pull the boss once DP’s internal cooldown has reset (i.e., when the buff has ≤25 seconds left), so you can quickly refresh it with a stronger one.

Pull Icy Touch + Plague Strike

Burst

Mind Freeze focus

Icy Touch

Related articles

ICC shaman totems guide

Managing a Demonology warlock’s Demonic Pact

Automatic Raid Logging

General macros