5-45% Pet/Minion Damage Buff Revisited (Patreon)

A while back on youtube I published a dps increase method to do with "Fel Sludge". Fel sludge is a green liquid exclusively found in Tanaan jungle in Draenor. When you jump in it stacks tick every few seconds which increase your damage taken and dealt by 5% per stack, and also depletes your health, up to a maximum of 45%, as 10 stacks kills you outright.

The sludge also affects your pets. 

Like most similar buffs the sludge does not zone : when you leave Tanaan by any method the sludge buff vanishes. 

However, I found a way to keep the buff outside the zone. If you dismiss a pet or a minion while she (all wow pets/minions are "she" for coding purposes) is standing in the sludge as the sludge ticks, when you recall the pet the sludge will start ticking again, anywhere in the game. 

There was limited interest in this buff and Blizzard, unusually, never fixed it. Once there were many debuffs in the game you could put on your pet/minion - this is literally the last one I know of that remains.

The reason for this is probably that there is no way to stop the sludge ticking, so it automatically kills the pet after ten ticks. 

That said, I just discovered a way to preserve the buff indefinitely without killing the pet-simply dismiss the pet again and recall it. This resets the stacks on the fel sludge causing the countdown to begin again. 

This obviously has a cost in downtime. Death Knights benefit most from this approach as they can dismiss and resummon their pets only at the cost of a GCD and any latency of engagement (ie time taken to engage an enemy, usually minimal with a melee class). 

This approach is least practical for hunters with the long downtime associated with "dismiss pet", however the following approach works quite well for temporary pet dps: put the debuff on multiple pets, summon each of them, use the pet's "Heart Of The Phoenix" to revive the last one you summon. 

There are complex situational factors especially in pve here which prevent any easy set of guidelines as to when the use of a sludge-tainted pet is optimal. For example, in raid fights where some specific buff raises the dps of the raid for a temporary period then it is almost always desirable to use the sludge and sacrifice your pet temporarily.