I've probably just mangled the above half-expression (for one thing, I think that part's supposed to come first,) but in my quest for Green Fire, and the quest to acquire sufficient gear to stand a chance at it, I took Morcanis through the entirety of "upper tier 14" today, getting a whopping four pieces of gear, including tier shoulders and helmet (I actually disconnected during Sha of Fear, but was able to restart my computer and log in post-kill to both the token and a second one for my bonus roll - guess I can start gearing up his off-spec... oh wait.)
Anyway, we all usually think of the endless weeks of zero gear, over and over, but sometimes you get one of these days where your average gear level jumps half a tier. I remember the one time I took Tarbhad into ICC (this was back before LFR, but everyone was well geared in Wrath, and PuGs of ICC could actually get decently far) and walked away with about five pieces of gear, including a fist weapon.
I'm enjoying Demonology these days (always was my favorite warlock spec) but it is a little odd to go from mostly melee classes that are all about the big next strike to a class that is mostly concerned with making sure their DoTs are ticking for as much as possible. Sure, they've made it less of a pain than it used to, but Demon Form is often less about blowing targets away with gigantic spell blasts than it is about keeping Doom on the target and refreshing that Corruption you cast several minutes ago while Dark Soul was up.
One of the oddities of Demo is that in AoE situations, things are a lot simpler in your normal form than in Demon form. Multi-dotting is generally what you want to do in smaller groups, like your typical dungeon trash pull, and then you can use Void Ray in Demon form to keep those ticking, but in gigantic packs, it's basically Hellfire and your Wrathguard (or Felguard, I guess) and Felstorm. But when you use Metamorphosis, the Hellfire equivalent becomes a passive that you only need to refresh (and usually don't have enough Fury to keep going too long) but since on such large packs, applying Corruption on all those targets is not really practical, there's kind of a question of what to do. I'm sure Icy Veins has the answer, but what I've pretty much been doing is Immolation Aura, Carrion Swarm (glyphed so the tank doesn't want to kill me) and Void Ray, DoTs be damned.
I've also taken to simply hitting Hand of Gul'dan twice in a row, or with just a single Shadowbolt/Soul Fire between them. While I'm sure it's ideal to hit it right as Shadowflame is about to drop off the target, there's a little delay before the meteor hits and Shadowflame is so quick that you'll probably get more damage out of it this way as there's less risk you'll just do two single stacks of the DoT in a row. It's amazing how much of your damage comes from Shadowflame, though where it really shines is of course in AoE situations.
In terms of gearing, I haven't quite started a constant AskMrRobot check with every new piece of gear, but my general impression is that Mastery must be good for Demo because it literally just increases the damage we do, and that bonus is multiplied by three in Demon form (currently about 60% for me.)
The Warlock revamp seems to really have done the trick. I see far more locks out there than I did during Cataclysm. Frankly, the alternate resources and new gameplay mechanics make it feel a lot more like one of the newer classes than one of the old. Paladins obviously got a big revamp in Cataclysm, which I think made them a lot more engaging (as much as I hate Inquisition-type effects.) I think something like this for a class that is falling behind would not be a bad policy for Blizzard. Rogues obviously seem to be the ones most desperately in need of such a revamp.
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