Demonology Changes

Classes Warlock
1

My list of changes to the class

  • Bilescourage is now baseline, has no cool down and costs two shards.
    • In its place on the talent tree is a talent that adds an increase its radius by 12 yards, and grants it a 20% chance to instantly reset its cool down and be free. lasts 8 seconds.
  • FelStalkers is now instant, and its cool down is reduced to 8 seconds.
  • Demonic strength replaced with “Imp Mastery”
  • Imp Mastery increases imp duration increased by 8 seconds.
  • Hand of Guldan now summons 3 imps, and costs 2 shards.
  • Doom now triggers its damage after 8 seconds and no longer summons a felguard.
  • Soul strike replaces Legion Strike, dealing its damage to all near by enemies and generates 3 demon cores.
  • Vile-fiend is now instant cast, and summons 2 vile-fiends.
  • Neither Portal now lasts 30 seconds and pets will now spawn near the warlocks location.
  • Sacrificed souls : When a pet expires, you gain 4% Shadow flame damage for 15 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.

PvP talents

  • Single Magic, Call Fellhunter, and Pleasure through pain have had their effects added to the pets respectively, and have been removed.
  • Demon armor added to pvp talents.
  • New talent added “Demonic mastery”: Increases the damage of pets by 30%

Fixes

  • Implosion is removed.
  • Tyrant can now be summoned at a target location and is now instant cast.
  • Observer and Fel Lord now have a 30 second cool down and felord will now stun for 5 seconds.
  • Impending doom (new talent). If doom is cleansed it will deal 200% of its damage instantly.

Azerite

  • [Shadow’s Bite] now triggers bonus damage on cast of felstalkers, instead of expiration.
3 Likes
2

Just no. I’m not going to even go through your list to put down what is bad about it…just going to say no to these suggestions. Good lord.

3 Likes
3

These are good changes.

Removing the cool down on the above helps make the damage more consistent, and make shard choices have more value, but also improves the value of some talents, for example the bonus for shadow flame for shards.

Bilescourge is a good potential aoe ability for demo, and since implosion just does not really and damage and it comes at a massive cost (losing imps and their damage) bile really has potential to fill aoe pad for demo, however, whats really important about this is the mechanical operation of bile. The low radius, low cd makes it potentially useless in many situations, and really only favors it for pve. Faster damage, at much quicker rate helps it have value not only in consistently doing aoe, but also in potential aoe applications.

In conjunction demos dps is low so its pet output being out at a time with an internal limit applied to each pet summon (for example in these changes dread, and vile will both be capped at 2) means that you really keep up consistency, not really buff the damage persay. This means the demo’s damage is much more stable and has a much more controlled effect on its damage for future changes to the class’s balance.

Demonstrength is really useless to be honest. Imp duration such as an our right + second value, and some damage is a good move. IT may be better to see something like "+5 seconds and +1 % damage per every imp (or every 2 imps) out.

the more consistent imps are out the more we invalidate the overpowering of siphon-imp spawn build, bringing its balance down to being equal to other options.

In addition longer duration on the imps helps support 100 Tier buffs to tyrant

Felguard mechanic seems silly, and doom itself is not really that good for pve, a faster ticking damage effect helps this become useful in pve, and pvp.

This has more value if the ability is applied to all pets, or if it is converted to an attack done by the lock. If the latter, then the ability should do twice its current damage and not be effected by gcd and casted while casting.

Alternatively, it can do its current damage, generate 3 shards, and two demon cores and have a 10-20 second cool down.

This was done to fix the wonky use of the concept, though another option is simply expanding the duration of the portal significantly (30 seconds?).

This was to bring the ability up to par with other shard spending options, like that of dread.

this was suggested to help the pad potential of demo in rbgs.

These talents really dont seem needed for the spec and is really just clutter. The pets should already offer their full benefits naturally.

something to help the demo lock out a bit.

4

as far as i know implosion damage is based on imp energy and deals roughly the same value as if the imp was allowed to full cast. we dont implode on single target without EP because it would be a waste of globals. the only imps that will do more damage are ones summoned during tyrant because their energy freezes. also does pretty solid damage in AOE as the splash damage to all targets except primary from imps is treated as if the imp was at full energy

1 Like
5

Yeah implosion does loads of dmg when used right. Most of these ideas are broken OP and do little to resolve the problems we actually face.

Demo needs Call Felhunter, BSB, Demonic Circle, and Soul Strike to be baseline and the rest of our kit to rebalanced with that in mind and suddenly we have an interrupt, non-spec driven mobility, and can curtail the ramp up time of aoe dramatically. Most things besides that are fairly minor for demo.

1 Like
6

I can tell you in pvp, its almost always a waste of time to use the global on implosion, specifically because of the explosion radius. Its hard to judge if the over all damage would be worth it if the radius and respectively the consistent damage was better.

First of all, why?

I think if soul strike was reworked to be a warlock specific ability that generates shards and cores it would fit so very well with the other talents on the tree.

I do not believe we need recall baseline this is silly.

7

gotcha, if this is mainly PVP based then i would recommend tossing that into the intro paragraph, because you mention both PVP and PVE aspects which fogs up the point a teeny bit

however soul strike and Dstrength effecting all pets wouldnt be an awful thing, would make pet twisting ever so slightly more appealing

8

Its a both topic, but i mainly pvp so my perspective is largely pvp based.

Im not sure what you mean by all the imp explosion stuff, this seems to be a mechanic i am not aware of, can you explain this damage based on energy thing in detail?

9

“Implosion is not described very well in game so the mechanics and basic use will be outlined here. Implosion deals damage to the primary target roughly equal to the remaining damage of each imp based on current energy, while secondary (cleave) targets will always take damage equal to a 100 imp energy implosion (e.g. if each imp Firebolt deals 100 damage, an immediate 1-imp implosion will deal 500 damage, and an implosion after 1 cast will deal 400 damage). Implosion can crit and scales with mastery, but is not affected by From the Shadows or the Tyrant empowerment. On single target, Implosion is only used to maintain Explosive Potential and in order to maintain the buff you will want to implode whenever the buff is close to expiring after the opener.”

hope this helps

10

This is good to know, but it is insanely bad design, imo. This mechanic needs to be changed to provide more consistent damage (always doing 300 damage on implosion for example with a radius double of what it is now). Its because of the bad imp damage in pvp (Even in maps that have lots of people close together) that i dislike using the ability and rarely cast it.

I think most of this issue is due to the above mechanic of demising damage, as well as the really bad radius implosion (and bats) have.

11

IMO you could fix bats by having it be target based instead of ground based.

i cant speak to demo pvp overall though. I think someone like epicburn might be able to provide a bit more of a knowledgeable opinion there

12

Like an applied dot? I dont think i like that as an aoe. For pve and pvp making it cost 2-3 shards, and have no cd would be perfect, i would settle with more damage (double) or more damage (50% + 10 yard radius) though.

The above changes fix all of demo’s pvp related issues, as i explained.

13

as in the splash damage is based around the target and not the ground, think of it like you chuck a beacon at your target, then the bats from the portal always hit the target and splash around it

14

A damage version of beacon, that is interesting concept, though that early in the talent tree may be a bit op.

To be honest at the end of the day if i just had a pvp talent that made guldan instant cast, and one that extended imp duration by 5-10 seconds i’d be very happy with demo and sure it would be much better then it is now.

15

So similar to Demonwrath only a dot instead of a channel?

16

Updated the suggestions

17

its still bombers, it just guarantees the tank cant move the mobs out of the f***ing circle.

18

I like the idea. Especially if its baseline instead of talented. Implosion is great dont get me wrong but demanding ramp up for ST and AoE both is just really bad design.

Blending DW/Beacon and BSB makes a lot of sense gameplaywise and flavourwise and i think enhances what demo is. Doubly so if we retain implosion in some form and tune everything together.

Count me on board for this idea being the core of demo aoe in Shadowlands

19

I had considered the idea of instead of dealing damage it generates cores, or some sort of stat buff for demo , we can rename is “sacrifice”

Oh oh, a heal could be amazing!

21

I still stand by my initial assessment of no to these changes.

Are you seriously implying that imp damage is useless when you implode them? Really? I’d suggest looking up how the mechanic works…because there is zero damage loss other than the loss of one gcd.

Getting rid of demonic strength? Just no. How many times do you see a tank move a boss or mobs out of your bombers range? DS moves with the tanked mob… DS also sims higher for a lot of people now. I’d suggest simming yourself to see the difference.

There’s so much more wrong but I do not feel like going through it one by one. Feel free to join the warlock discord and start asking questions there to learn about playing a demo warlock. That’s my best advice.