What are you even going on about?
Ah, I see I get to be the bearer of bad news today. TWW alpha build removed Nether Portal, any talents that grant you more demonic cores, and gave us some brand new talents to really buff up Shadowbolt (our favorite spell) and felguard crit chance <3
Dev notes were essentially “We don’t want you to have cool down or move, we want you to cast Shadowbolt. You’re playing this spec wrong”
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The current builds generate more demonic cores simply by producing more wild imps.
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This is legitimately good news, but I’d still argue these talent changes are totally in opposition of Demo’s playstyle. Can we agree that 60% of the tree buffing Shadowbolt and HoG is a misfire? It doesn’t support the rest of the rotation
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Oh, there aren’t any changes they can make that’ll make demo better. I only see it being worse.
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There’s been a post in the TWW Alpha forums about two weeks ago. They did make a post about their development goals for the next expansion. I’m unsure if you’ve seen that. Here it is just in case.
I know some of the alpha feedback is supposed to be given there, but there’s a fair amount in the warlock class forums as well.
However, given that’s where they’ve posted some of their goals, that might be something to keep an eye on for updates and feedback.
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I guess you’re talking about demo? The armies of demons are gross and annoying.
I miss Xelnath
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From what I’ve read/seen, Nether Portal got sent to the Rework Dimension and the only talent related to generating Demonic Cores that got deleted was the 10% chance when casting Hand of Gul’dan.
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.
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Ah, so Demon Hunters are going to be getting more of Demo’s spells. 
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I am definitely aware of the hate shadowbolt has gotten. I haven’t played much demo this expansion but I have played it a decent amount before and try to see both sides.
From a player’s perspective, they would obviously want more instant cast spells that are stronger and give more shards than their filler. It’s ideal if you can cast shadowbolt as little as possible. More resources, more mobility, more damage.
From the dev’s side, if players are getting off way more free demonbolts than shadowbolts except during a few unlucky spots where they run out of demonic core charges or at the start of a fight, what’s the point of even having shadowbolt? To me, that sounds like an ability that needs to be reworked.
Even if the changes translated into a bit of a dps increase due to shadowbolt changes, a lot of people are going to be unhappy about the decrease in mobility and instant cast spells. Perhaps they are trying to make demonic core have a role similar to conflagrate where it’s part of your rotation, but you try to have a charge in case you need to move rather than just spamming it all the time.
Obviously that’s all speculation on my part. My guess is they plan on boosting shadow bolt to the point that it’s a viable damage source and demonic cores are going to be used as more of a mobility function or for some limited burst. That might make it easier for them to tune around? But I can also see how that might be too much like shadow destro with felguard.
If you had to chose between a few of those things, like keeping more bursty cool downs, generating lots of demonic core charges, etc, how would you order them as far as priority?
This also goes for any other warlocks who play demonology. What is the priority order of the things you would want to keep about current demo in regards to the changes you’ve been seeing?
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atm all warlock specs have way too much cast time. demo for example is being pushed into shadow bolt spam which we dont want. instant pet procs are happening way too little. sometimes go a 5 min fight with maybe 2 procs
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then dont play demo lock…?
I just want more demons, and the ability to have more than just my main pet + imps permanently summoned
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great response… troll
I hope they’re paying you homie, what a well thought out response. Sincerely appreciate you. There is something I want to clarify though: this sincerely isn’t about Demonic Cores. If you’ll hear me out for just one more post I’ll answer this a little more succinctly.
Take one more step back from here. I’m not looking at this from an instant cast, mobility, or utility perspective. I wouldn’t be happy if Demon Bolt was my main cast either. The problem here is the spec having it’s own personality.
Let’s say the Demonic Core/Nether Portal changes go through. Imagine these are the other changes instead:
-Hand has a 3 second CD, but can now be cast with no soul shards to summon 1 imp
-Duration of Felhounds/Stalker is increased by 5 seconds
-Imps now have a chance to cast Greater Fireball
Obv not a game developer, and these would have to be tuned. The point here though is that these changes reduce mobility, lower burst, and make you hard cast while giving demonology demons. That is philosophy issue that we’re trying to fight against. We’re want our active rotation to be summoning things.
The point is, people are more mad at the Shadowbolt spam than they are at the Core nerfs. Of course there’s gonna be complaints about lower DPS, but the big issue here is that Demo is the only summoner spec in WoW. You could give me the flashiest new hard cast in the game and it’ll feel bad because my DPS is coming from a character spell and my summons.
Change the damage profile, reduce our mobility, whatever, but don’t turn Demo into a spec that relies on hard casting powerful spells for most of our damage. There are plenty of other specs in the game that do that, let us be summoners
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That’s fair and a good way to put it. Even if shadowbolt becomes incredibly strong, that’s not what gives demonology its feel. It’s the horde of demons that you’re summoning that gives it the flavor.
Obviously there needs to be some type of filler spell to fall back on when you’ve got nothing else, but ideally you want most of your time spent summoning and supporting your army. Is that what you’re getting at?
There’s been some push back here and there on destruction and how chaos bolt factors into our rotation. It used to be a significant portion of our damage profile and in larger chunks. It’s still a decent amount of our overall damage, but it doesn’t hit quite the same. We can get more casts and it can increase the amount of damage a target takes, but each individual chaos bolt has less oomph. To some, those big chaos bolt nukes were a large part of the identity.
So more hard casts of spells means it takes longer to get to the fun bit where you’ve got a ton of demons running around. Whatever changes happen, try to keep the focus and majority of your time getting those into play?
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Wait… Warlocks got a dev after Xelnath and Blizz Burned their bridges with eachother? Figure Warlock stuff has been a mixture of throwing darts and dirt at the wall to see what sticks and what-knots since WoD…
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Relax Karen. Its just a game…