A pleasure to have a council member respond! I appreciate the link, but to be more specific, I’m taking direct aim at the developer notes from the Demo Alpha Blue Post. I want an explanation for why they want to fundamentaly change this spec in opposition of players, not their goals. Post in question:
“Over the course of Dragonflight, we’ve wanted to and tried to reduce the number of Demonic Cores available to Demonology warlocks to rein in their mobility, resource generation, and reduce the amount of rotational time spent going back and forth between Hand of Gul’dan and Demonbolt only. In addition, we want Demonbolt to return to being a moment rather than be your primary rotational button.”
While they didn’t directly say it, they have in the past: the devs without a doubt want demonology to have less demons and more Shadowbolts. If Demon Bolt & HoG aren’t your primary rotation, what’s that leave? This is backed up by the talent changes going out of their way to buff this absolutely awful feeling spell
“In this alpha build of The War Within, you’ll see that Nether Portal has been removed. While we love the fantasy that Nether Portal provides and that it created a moment that felt different rotationally, its gameplay and performance proved difficult to optimize. Too many major cooldowns can increase the number of peaks and valleys Demonology’s output can experience and how much effect the duration of an encounter can have on its performance.”
Highlighting the important part here which is, yet again, the philosophy. We don’t want Demo having big cool downs (this change leaves us with only one)
There isn’t much room for speculation here. The devs want:
-Less sustain damage from summoning imps
-No big cooldowns causing “peaks” like that’s a weird MMO feature
-Added a bunch of white bread talents to increase direct damage of Shadowbolt. These are boring btw because SB is boring, it’s a filler nobody wants to cast.
To summarize my point, I’m not questioning what the goal is, I’m questioning why. They even left out mentioning how cool SB is this time because they got smoked for it in DF. The spirit of these changes are in direct opposition with everyone who plays the spec.
I think we deserve some kind of reasoning behind the attempt to reduce Demo summons. I’d even be okay if they just announced a rework and that Demo is now just gonna be Shadow Destro with a Felguard. Or if they said they can’t figure out a way to even things out without HoG. Literally anything besides making these awful core gameplay changes then going silent.
