Demo Dead Talents

Classes Warlock
1

Are these talents placeholders because they are super bad.

1.) Hounds of War - definitely not worth 2 talent points and just feels weird to play.
2.) Stolen Power - Just No. It’s that bad.
3.) Pact of the Imp Mother - Would be good with our 4 set. Problem is our 4 set feels like this talent, Bad. This talent has such a bad proc rate. Even when it was a legendary it sucked.
4.) Guillotine - Good idea poor execution. The damage on this ability is not even noticeable.
5.) Doom/Kazaak’s - very awkward to play. Another great idea that was poorly implemented.

Honestly are these forums even noticed by the devs. I hate to come hear just to hear other players complaining to each other with no real hope for change.

3 Likes
2

how funny is stolen power lol its gotta be one of the worst capstone talents in the game

1 Like
3

Imp Gang Boss needs some help. It’s only good on council fights. I though it was good for keys, but I’m doing more overall dmg with Sacrificed Souls. IGB is theoretically worth 30% more Implosion dmg, but it never lives up to the napkin math.

4

not a bad idea, it was brought back from legion, used to be sick back then because hand of guldan would passively apply doom.

5

I find this topic such an annoying one, specially when i suspect most people don’ even know the value of each individual talent or seems to hate when they buff some talent they don’t like because “now you need to pick it”.

Now, let me being frank, Demonology have more or less 52 total talent points to be placed in it’s spec tree, but you only have 30 talent points avaliable.

There will be always “Dead talents” who are not picked, because you simply need to make choices of what to pick and what not to pick.

Be it because you don’t enjoy it or it don’t give enough value at something or its just a worse version of something else you already have.

Yes, some are very, very, very poor value like is the case of Stolen Power and those need to be changed, others are generally disliked like it’s the case of Doom and they need to be changed, some have a lot of value but in something that demonology already have enough like bloodbound imps and then you have things like Pact of Imp Mother who is just slightly worse than talents you use point 29 and point 30 with.

but you will always have talents you don’t pick, it’s basic math, you can’t fill 52 “talent slots” with only 30 points.

Buff Pact of Imp Mother from 5/10% to 8/15% who is both single target and aoe? ok, remove 1/2 points from the current build, place at it, and now those 1/2 removed talents are dead talents.

Buff Hounds of War from 3/5% to 4/8% and while its still a RNG mess, it becomes one of the strongest talents in the tree due to all the nuts synergy with dreadstalkers, and the 2 points removed to accomodate it are now dead talents.

Buff Imp Gang Boss, who is already one of the most popular talents in m+, used in all the builds saved at https://mplus.subcreation.net/demonology-warlock.html and now you not only NEVER pick fel covenant/sacrificed souls (making 2 more dead talents) but you now also always pick Imp Gang Boss for pure single target encounters.

2 Likes
6

While i can see a sacrificed souls angle in some low density m+ dungeons that don’t mean Imp Gang Boss is bad.

Is, in fact, one of the most amazing m+ talents to go for good single target (but not as high as fel covenant) while having a lot more AOE.

Its no surprise that its picked by pretty much every log in subcreation https://mplus.subcreation.net/demonology-warlock.html

Maybe you are not maximizing your implosion value.

7

Maybe. I think I’m falling into the “oh, i got a bunch of free imps, so i’ll just implosion more often” trap instead of stickign with the normal rotation and treating the imps as extras.

8

Think of implosion like this, maximize the number of imps you implode in each implosion, minimize number of implosions.

did you just get refunded a bunch of wild imps from IGB? they won’t instant despawn, try to push a few more wild imps, after that implode.

nowadays i use an weak aura for me to only implode imps when there is one or more near their last cast, meaning i minimize number of wild imps imploded, remove risk of them vanishing before implosion and maximize number of imps.

9

Dead talents shouldn’t be a thing. Talents should excel in specific scenarios or they shouldn’t exist in the tree. There are 5+ nodes in the demo tree that should be completely reworked.

1 Like
10

This sucks for new warlock players. Being unable to maximize a spec without an addon is a major problem with the game.

1 Like
11

I think hounds of war and pack of imp mother in theory are good talents they are just under tuned. Sadly though if they buff them to much they will be broken beyond imagination.

12

they will always be a thing, its just a reality of a talent tree, there are things you can do to reduce the number of them, but they will always be a thing, it’s math.

If i have 40 talents, and 30 points to allocate, 10 of those will not be picked.

They can reduce those by making talents who have niches, ones who are good in single target, ones who are good in aoe, ones who are swiss army knifes so you pick some in pure single target, others in pure aoe and others when you want mixed value.

but even then, you can have situations where people just ignore the pure’s one in favor of the mixed because “its not that much better”

Or, you still have a limitation around how many talents you can go that way, eventually you will have a situation like “those two talents are good in single target, but you can only pick one of those” boom, one of those will be dead.

You can reduce the number of talents, fuse talents, reduce their costs or even increase the talent points.

but at some point you will end up either A) not having a talent tree anymore as you now have acess to everything, B) having a talent row system like mop-slands or C) having very streamlined “pick this for X”, “pick this for y” and “pick this for z” paths.

13

Right now imp mother would probably be a pretty ok but not broken talent that made its way into the m+ build if it was 1 point for 10%. If they buffed or reworked guillotine to actually be taken then imp mother would still be useless though.

14

Ok, something i need to say something that i am still investingating but…welp.

Pact of Imp Mother values might be bugged and are not 5%/10% like on sims they might be 2,5%/5% due to some bug of somekind.

still investigating, need a bigger sample size, probably like 1000 hog casts with 1 point and 1000 hog casts with 2 points.

15

This line of reasoning doesn’t make much sense to me. If you create a tree purposely with dead talents you are pretty much forcing cookie cutter builds. The whole point of talent trees IMHO should be to bring meaningful choice where all choices are equally relevant in different game environments. The talents that I listed are weak and unused in their perceived designated game environment. You listed some good points from a pve pov but as I don’t pve I can’t comment. Other commentators who do pve exclusively have also determined that those talents are useless and need to be reworked.

16

It’s not that the dev will go and say “this talent here? it will be dead” its just that as long as you have a limited amount of points and talents who offer similar stuff, you will have talents who aren’t picked

and the bigger the talent tree is, the higher is the chance for talents who do the same “thing” while being placed in a situation where you can only choose one or the other.

there just isn’t a way to fill 52 talents when you only have 30 points, and as such, by nature 22 talent “slots” will be left unfilled.

this watercooler by ghostcrawler in particular is very interesting in that regard, i do wonder how riot mmo will end up being consider he is now in it.

17

Similarity is the issue though. The talents should offer unique options for specific situations. Just look at the dstr and bsb node. There is no world in which bsb will ever be taken unless it surpasses the dps of dstr. Even then, it has no synergy with the rest of the tree. It shouldn’t exist in its current form. Stolen Power is just non-sensical in its positioning and the doom line is lying in the central position of our tree when it’s only value exists in pvp.

Why should we accept that there will just be numerous dead nodes? Improvements are needed to a number of nodes to make them attractive in the right scenarios.

1 Like