Ghoul: +?% DPSFollow

at 71-72 i was frost with permapet, and i was hovering 1000-1050 dps in instances (for comparsion, an average dps'er of any class in the 70-72 range tends to output 800-850)

i find having imp rune tap is one of the best leveling abilitys, regardless if your blood or not, since it eliminates any need to eat... and any need to death strike (which is weak as hell compared to other FU abilitys)

the ghoul can be killed which is a BIG hamper of dps, but other then that sidespeccing for it while you level isnt that bad

you hafta be actively controlling it for chain pulls and things of the like though to get the full benefit (so set a keybind to his gnaw, since that isnt autocast and itll make him attack whatever you told it to gnaw)

side note, at 70, you have enough points to throw together a *decent* dual wield build... which i ran at 72 and was hovering around 900 dps, so if your planning that route... just noting


TLDR: the ghoul, if you keep it alive, is a decent/good investment for leveling

I'm sitting here fiddling with the talent calculator, and I notice that really, the talents towards the beginning of both Blood and Unholy trees are the ones that effect general overall DPS. The only thing I miss by staying so shallow in either tree is Dancing Runic Weapon, which is really nice, and Blood Gorged, which is also a decent boost. That's why I'm here now, I'm wondering if a full-time ghoul is more DPS than +10% damage if you're above 75% HP and +100% damage for ~10 seconds every 3 minutes.

Although, to get up to Master of Ghouls, I picked up several fairly strong general DPS buffs.

As already stated, the ghoul is very handy for leveling, and I'm going unholy (with Master of Ghouls) until 80. I love my little rotting minion (big fan of pet classes).

Spending some gold on respecs and thwacking the dummies in Ebon Hold, I got about 10 more DPS with the ghoul out (per recount), but with Blood Spec the DPS was very close (4 or 5 DPS diff) and the frost spec was about the same. Mind you, this was at level 71 with mostly quest gear.

The down side to the ghoul is when you hit an instance, it does not have any where near the survivability of a hunter pet or warlock pet. It will not survive most AoE's, and if it pulls just a bit too much aggro it'll die pretty quick.

I use recount and had to go into the options to get the pet data to show, but it does a hell of a lot more than 10dps. At 72, the ghoul was doing around ~200 and the gargoyle was doing around ~325 and I was doing around ~850 with or without the pets. I can only imagine what they'd do at 80.

I only really respecced unholy for one raid, and I didn't have proper glyphs and everything, but my ghoul was still only doing 280 orso.

When Raid buffed (10man) my ghoul does around 400dps when I'm doing around 2800dps total (On Patchwork where he lives and I dont have to move much other than jumping in the ooze). On the training dummy I do about 2600dps on a 3min fight using my gargoyle once, where he does 1200dps for the 60seconds and the ghoul only does around 250. So buffed he can do about 10-15% of the damage, definately worth having up as long as possible.

Also, I have a little macro that casts Death coil with an alt modifier to heal the ghoul. With the new patch and increased healing on the Ghoul it should be easier to keep him alive too.

Heres my armory
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Aerie+Peak&n=Doomspire