Bind Demon Feedback, please consider this

I’ve done some testing on PTR and want to talk about bind demon skill. Demon is difficult to bind but that is ok. It is also very squishy if not bound with full demon tree hard point investment. That also is ok. It should not be immortal tank and its fine.

But going full summoner build, investing all of those points, and then finding specific super unique can take for hours, even days if you want to do it in TZ to get higher level demon. Once he is dead, whole build is broken, you have to stop doing what you’re doing and go find another demon with specific affixes/auras. No other class is punished this hard for death/mistake.

Some will say “but necro also loses item when iron golem dies”. That is correct but necro have summon army of 50-100 minions, iron golem is rarely focused by so much enemies while summoner warlock’s demon is main DPS and main TANK and ALWAYS in middle of greatest trouble. So he WILL die. What i propose are not buffs, just introduce new NPC in each town who can resurrect last bound demon for a price, just like mercenary. If you dont want do the work of introducing new NPC just add resurrect demon feature to mercenary traders who already do the same for our mercs. If that is too much simply make it so every time we create new game, last bound demon is respawned, even if he died in last session.

if you like this concept of having to stop and go looking for another demon maybe introduce something like this:
When bound demon dies he drops soul shard. You can pick it up and then you need to find another demon of same type and use that soul shard on that demon to restore affixes/auras of the one stored in the soul shard memory. That way you still have to stop what you’re doing, go find certain type of demon, same as the one who was defeated, and restore it.
Maybe there could be a cube recipee using droped soul shard and some runeword to spawn it.
You could even accumulate different shards for different purposes and then use the demon you want for specific task, but this is not mandatory, just restoring the old demon would be amazing.

If you dont want to do any of this please consider at least letting us use engorge when there are no corpses, maybe at the cost of percentage of warlock’s own health. Something, because as of now, when you lose your demon it is devastating, like losing hardcore character. It makes you want to exit the game and rest for a week. Please consider this, thank you.

P.S. if you still want to argue that necro is punished even harder for lets say losing Infinity Iron Golem, i agree. Let necro as well have mechanic to get it back. Lets say when you summon Iron Golem you can open his interface similar how you open altar in ACT2 before Duriel fight in Tomb of Tal Rasha, and you can insert item in, like Infinity for Conviction aura for example. Then when Iron Golem dies you can click its corpse and take item from it into your inventory but the item is broken now so you have to repair it for half million gold or something.

3 Likes

“Demon is difficult to bind but that is ok.”

“It is also very squishy. That also is ok.”

Both can’t be OK at the same time and have a fun mechanic… hopefully you understand why there should be one or the other but not both

Right now the skill is not worth the points.

6 Likes

Of course I understand, that’s why I suggested a new mechanic to keep your demon even if it dies. I can go hunt for a specific demon sometimes, but not all the time, especially if they are going to die as often as mercenaries. If there is no respawn mechanic, then let us use Engorge to heal it even when there are no corpses around, but increase the mana cost or add a health cost so it cannot be mindlessly spammed.

The comment was that it’s “if not bound with full demon tree hard point investment”.

I agree that it’s OK to not have a god-like immortal summon for no point investment. Not every build needs a bound demon. If you want one, spend the points.

  • Demon Warlocks get stronger demons than Eldritch Warlocks.
  • Summon Druids have stronger summons that Fire Druids.
  • Fire Sorcs have stronger Hydras than Cold Sorcs.
  • Warcry Barbs have stronger warcries than Frenzy Barbs.

I don’t see how that is controversial.

1 Like

They should just make bind-demon work on corpses.

Kill the guy, and everything around. channel for ~10 seconds on the corpse, and the demon is raised from hell.. back into its original body..

If he dies.. re-bind the same corpse

If you die? At this point i would say tough luck if you cant retrieve his corpse.. and have to save/exit you are stuck finding a new one to bind.

Other things I would suggest:

At level 30 he should get stone skin.

If bind demon drops below level 35; the cursed affix should be removed entirely.

At level 40 he should get cursed added automatically

3 Likes

It’s not controversial, you just aren’t understanding how useless bind demon is even if you max it and every demon supporting skill.

4 Likes

IMO if binding a demon is hard and it’s squishy then the ONLY solution is you create a copy of the demon you bound so you can re-summon it like a valkyrie or clay golem.

That being said bind demon sucks in its current state. The 24 frame channeling, low bind chance, and HP driven bind mechanic makes it nearly impossible to bind a demon without getting murdered yourself or without accidentally killing it. Then it dies easily and that feels horrible.

There’s a middle ground to be had between what we had and what’s in the PTR (and this is coming from someone who thinks warlock deserved its nerfs).

I also think the chosen auras they disabled is super random. I do think conviction and fanaticism are super op auras, as well as cursed spamming amp damage. There’s many paths they can take here but one thing I don’t think they should allow is auras we can get from A2 mercs, those are the ones that should be replaced with another aura so that binding a demon doesn’t overlap with an A2 merc (if you play in a party you’ll understand what I mean)