I have tried and tried to get back into Warlock. I used to love Demonology, especially the old meta form with leap and chaos waves slamming into people. It felt so GOOD. Now it just feels…wrong.
I don’t see any demonology warlocks ever playing, probably because Demo sims so low and because the gameplay isn’t fun enough to main spec. So why can’t we get a 4th spec or a rework to demonology? I don’t know about everyone else, but this version is NOT fun.
Make a 4th spec, or bring back the old one and replace current demonology…heck just name the new one Metamorphology lol I don’t even care. Name it Fish Sticks for all I care. But bring back the old demo that you stripped naked because you wanted to put clothes on the 1 dimensional trash demon hunters. (They’re cool design, but so boring that I’d rather…nevermind. I won’t go there).
Its not the same spec it used to be. By any stretch.
But i still enjoy it.
right now im torn between maining my usual DK or my fresh Demolock(havent played warlock since MoP)
Im leaning towards the Demolock.
Implosion feels a little counterintuitive to being a demon army summoner, but aside from that i dont have any complaints thus far.
I do miss meta, Chaos waves, imp swarm, and fel flame, but it is what it is.
I think implosion has never worked for me. Not in Diablo, WoW, or any game where I summon something just to send it to suicide. It feels wrong and it bothers me because it reminds me of Kamakaze and literal suicide bombing. It’s alarming. I hate it. I absolutely hate it.
I wish Hand of Guldan was more AOE focused and perhaps gave Demolocks the Open Portal of Demons spell thing baseline.
There is so much wrong with this spec it sincerely bothers me.
I enjoy commanding small armies of demons. We need more variety of superior demons but otherwise I enjoy playing the spec. I’m probably going to main my unholy DK for Shadowlands but demons my second choice.
Implosion also bothers me because its kinda unreliable(or maybe im just doing it wrong) Sometimes i notice all my imps dont implode and there will be 1 left over for some reason.
Idk if it really matters but it annoys me.
I disagree with the gameplay not being fun, I love the current demonology design, its not perfect, but I feel like im actually a summoner class. I love having tons of imps out, the sound and feel of hand of guldan smashing down, bile scourge bombers. Its so satisfying having vision of perfection proc and having multiple tyrants out. Be nice to have choices of glyphs to change how imps look. Maybe one that makes them look like demonic cats.
I agree with the implode mechanic sucking, having to send your summons to suicide for aoe is not fun for me. Should be a choice, for example make it a talent on the aoe row, people can choose to implode for aoe or do something else. Ive also been running without explosive potential, and its weird how weaker I am without it, I know balancing is hard, and don’t expect my choice to be the best, but how hard can it be to acknowledge the problem when the vast majority of demonology locks follow one cookie cutter build, not top CE players who follow the meta, but pretty much every demo lock ive ran into never picks nether portal or non explosive potential traits.
But I feel my damage is abysmal, definitely needs some tuning either with numbers, or just with the flow of things, cast times are too slow, you can’'t have a class that only starts working once you get enough stats at top level.
We probably aren’t getting Meta back to Demonology. I do think they could combine both the old meta playstyle and the new summoning playstyle though. Right now you kind of just summon demons with no overarching goal. You get a goal if you take Demonic Consumption but outside of that you just endlessly summon demons that don’t interact with one another and don’t offer any synergy to your other abilities. This is where the old meta playstyle can come in. For old Demonology, you would build up your resources until you could transform, where you’d receive a huge payoff for the comparatively boring building phase you just went through.
Current Demonology warlock used to have a payoff in Legion with Thal’kiel’s Consumption, but that got removed in BFA. So the actual problem with Demonology is that it’s a class that only has a build phase. All they have to do to fix this is to make your summoned demons contribute to a gauge when they disappear, and then essentially copy and paste old meta but put it on your Demonic Tyrant instead. That way DT suddenly becomes more interesting than being a DoT on a 1.5 minute cooldown, there’s resource management that can make dungeons far more interesting and maximizing the demons you summon feels far more rewarding. This isn’t a precise or well thought out suggestion, it’s just an easy way to bring back the old meta design while keeping the new summoner feel and gameplay intact.
But in all seriousness, Demo has so much potential. I think the gameplay is a ton of fun but for some unknown reason, it’s always undertuned. Why can’t they just add spell modifiers to catch it up?
They also suffer from ramp up time. If they could solve that, it’d feel amazing. I believe they can – affliction had the same problem and they solved it. I’d love to see some more permanent pets added to Demo, like BM. It’d be cool if the demonic tyrant was permanent, but you could empower it occasionally instead of summoning him in.
I actually love the idea of having an extra pet or 2 out permanently. I think that sounds SO cool! I’ve always loved the 2 pet talent for hunters, and I feel as if something similar would be amazing for Demonology.
My thoughts and fantasy would be to have a primary demon summoned (Felguard) and then the Succubus, Felhound, Imp, and Voidwalker would all be options as your 2nd pet. That would be some COOL STUFF RIGHT THUR!
At the current state Demo is ok. Once we get covenants and Lego’s established, Demo lock will transform into something more dynamic and enjoyable. Prepatch classes will change going forward into SL… just need to wait a bit.
Demo damage is abysmal right now. Before prepatch I was sitting top 3 of my raid even without corruptions vs corrupted people. Now I’m usually in the bottom 3, rarely in top 3. Usually we got 9 DPS in the raid. I looked at SL beta parses and demo doesn’t look promising. It’s sad because demo is way more complex and fun to play than aff/destro, just no pay off for playing it right vs playing an easier spec.
I feel like I lost a bit of haste in the prepatch, I’m just not able to keep as much imps as I used to. However, not sacrificing your imps entirely when you summon the tyrant allows for stacking imps higher than in bfa.
As someone that really enjoys playing a demo lock I do hope that Blizz uses the extension to give the spec a once over. At least some tuning, but my suggestion would be to make the Inner Demons talent baseline and put a new talent in that spot. The talent makes the most sense as a master summoner class to grant at a higher level as just a baseline ability. We still need AoE that isn’t going to cripple our single target damage as implosion removes a huge chunk and bombers costs shards which means less single target demons getting summoned.
I totally agree. For me the new Demonology is a dead spec. I don’t find it enjoyable at all. I’ve hated it since the beginning of Legion and I’ll probably hate it until they change it back. I keep testing it out every major change and it’s just as disappointing as it was during the first change. I wish they would add a talent to give us back metamorphosis and all the cool abilities. (I miss dropping a huge chaos wave on a huge pack of mobs.) That way the people who say they like the spec as is can play the spec without the talent like normal and eventually take the new talent point because Lock-Meta is way funner to play. Literally the warlock metamorphosis and the DH metamorphosis is completely different (including the animation). They could even call it something else if people want to get weird about it.
Demo has the best AoE, however lacking in single target damage. Imp explosion needs the damage buffed in a major way! The same goes for the Fel guard damage. It’s nothing compared to a hunter’s beast master pet’s damage.
Demonology is by far the worst spec in the game. They need to give Demolocks a renamed metamorphosis as a talent so people show Blizzard that Demon form is better than building an army of imps. Why can’t a warlock get possessed by a demon and not be one like a DH. Warlock and DH meta is 100% different. They tried to force this horrible spec on us since they butchered it in WoD. According to raider io, Demonology spec has been the least played spec for end game content out of every spec for two expansions. People are going to blame that axe toss couldn’t interrupt but I’ve done dungeons with Destolocks using an imp dispel magic effects. The idea of controlling demons is cool but clunky, especially with GCDs. If they don’t add a demon form then Demolocks will be the worst spec again for a third expansion. There’s way too much ramp up for mythics and there’s not a lot of bosses that don’t have a burst window with little to low mobility. Even if the damage was OP half the warlocks wouldn’t play demo. We’d just play Aff or destro because it’s easier and managing a bunch of demons isn’t as fun as people think while doing mechanics. This is how bad Demolock is. Think about pushing any raid boss since the beginning of Legion and think about what spec you would play? 99 out of 100 would not say Demonology. Meanwhile, my first Heroic Garrosh kill in MoP was with Demo and I was top dps when Destro was super OP. I did it cause it was super fun to play.
One of the biggest issues and imo the reason that Blizzard won’t change the spec back are the players. Every time a post comes out there always people who say or argue that Demolocks is so much fun but you look at their raiderio and they don’t have any mythic+ done with their demolock or they post on a Demolock with bad gear. They don’t understand the struggle. Every time you watch a YouTube video on Demolocks it’s “Demonology has insane damage” then when you see them streaming content they never play Demonology. There are people who actually play Demolocks for endgame content and I salute you. However, most people would say it’s a poorly designed spec once they try to do a raid. Demolocks should’ve never been changed.