I decided to level a demo lock in the MoP Remix event partly because I wanted the felguard to do all the heavy lifting and also because I wanted a Man’ari warlock. Although I’ve played warlock as my main alt since Vanilla I’ve always been destro so this was my first real foray into playing demo. Well I quickly realized the spec was a bit of a bloated mess of cooldowns (like pretty much every spec atm, lol) and that the Demonic Core empowered Demonbolt into Hand of Gul’dan is about the only fun part of the spec. I also decided to take Nether Portal even though it’s not optimal just because the ultimate warlock class fantasy has always been summoning greater demons, like Pit Lords and Eredar, which the Nether Portal does albeit in a very clunky and roundabout way.
So I looked at the TWW changes to see if they’ve ironed out some of the kinks and what do I find instead? They’ve completely IMP-loaded the entire tree (pun intended)! How could they possible look at Demonic Core and go “ah see this here, it’s no good, we gotta axe it and make them hard cast Shadow Bolt instead” it’s crazy! If anything it’s Shadow Bolt they should have gotten rid of and replaced it with Demonbolt that would have the same (or shorter) cast time and Soul Shard generation as Shadow Bolt without the Demonic Core proc.
All I can say is, I am glad the reworked destro tree looks much better. With the Diabolist hero tree, which is basically a much better Nether Portal, available to destro come TWW I don’t see myself ever playing demo. The entire spec is completely bereft of any identity aside from the felguard. The demonic army thing just doesn’t work very well in practice and the metamorphosis fantasy was completely stripped from demo and given to DHs.
Yeah, they keep saying it makes it more “special” whatever that means. Probably the same mentality as the obnoxious cooldowns on various toys. Idk about them but if I like an ability I want to use it more often not less.
I’ve been playing cataclysm classic and my destro lock feels so fun to play. They have no major CDs but the spells feel impactful when you cast them. Even the fillers, they hit hard and feel good to cast.
Idk why Blizz is equating scarcity to fun but it’s not a design that I’m a fan of
I understand their reasons to limit Demonic Core procs, I just don’t agree with their method.
Adding an RNG element to dogs as well as the RNG already on imps is a bad way to go, rather they should just lower the return from imps and leave dogs at 100% proc.
I disagree. Nether Portal in it’s current form was awful. It was a 3 min CD that was super burst oriented and for someone that wants mobility having to plant and do a wonky rotation for NP was far from being mobile. One mechanic thrown at you at the wrong time and your DPS would tank if you scuffed a NP. As for the Demonic Core procs, I haven’t played yet but from what I’ve seen from content creators it really doesn’t look like it’s going to be that jarring. You still have Power Siphon and a talent to lower it’s CD and Grim:Felguard has a talent that gives a core after too. RNG always kinda blows but looks like that’s the way they’re heading with a lot of classes really is having reaction to RNG rather than a set in stone “rotation” kinda gameplay. My bigger concern is all the talents that have interaction with Demonic Cores and making sure they get adjusted to the new core economy.
If they want demonbolt instant to feel special/less often than it should do more than just give back resources.
Make the core proc fel corrupt the felguard and empowered him into a double weapon wielding fel lord for a few secs which cause all his abilities to hit for more and be imbued with fel fire or shadowflame or causes the felguard to rush 3 different targets and puts some sort of weakness debuff idk.
Make it that when you have casted at least 2 demon bolts the next one is double in size and has the damage of 2 plus core with some crit damage modifier on it. Make it have a chance to grant instant hand of guldan.
The longer the distance it travels the greater it is empowered. Or conditions based on the demons that are out like the new dogs, when the shadow / fire is out is or tyrant cause it to change during the tyrant duration. It seems they tried with that one talent in the bottom of the tree for felguard but it’s just another random low damage proc. I know pretty basic stuff that I said now but they gotta do something to the spell conditionals if they want the community to be more accepting of this less often/special.
I’m sure a few of us who have done some DND can come up with ways to make a spell that not cast often be more special but just generating 2 shards isn’t it. Plenty of specs have generator abilities that have additional conditions tied to them.
I don’t know something, they should be able to come up with where the word special makes sense. Is not special if it’s doing the exact same thing it’s been doing this entire time.
Also blizz please change the shadow bolt spell design to be more impactful this weird swirly cloud doesn’t do it. I don’t know what it is but whenever I got to cast it is just a feeling of not wanting to cast that awful looking thing. You might actually get more a positive feel from the community if it look much better than what it is currently. Though I think this is probably their engine graphics they went with since some of the spells look like their missing some sort of spell bloom lighting effect to them. They look pasty.
I think we all agree it was clunky in its current iteration but outright removing it instead of fixing it is a “choice” lol. I know they said they’re looking to rework it and add it back in again at some point but I’ve been playing this game long enough to know what that really means.
That’s the big worry, yeah. But also just the fact that they thought Demonic Core and by extension Demonbolt needed to be nerfed is a major red flag for me. That was literally the best part of the spec. As I said in my original post, if anything Demonbolt needs to replace Shadow Bolt, not the other way around.
Yeah I got my tinhat on that there’s still something in the coming months for that whole shadow bolt / demonbolt issue for demo.
It was never a problem but it seems it is to w.e ideas they have in mind for it to it’s final phase. Just make shadowbolt be casted instant on some rng chance.
Like rune of shadows (less cast time for shadowbolt and more damage) is in the tree just cause of the issue they created.
They’ve had 3 expansions to give NP a proper rework (and adding a Pit Lord on top does not count). I guess either someone on the dev team is willing to die on this hill for it or they really couldn’t think of a better solution in the last 5+ years NP has existed.
Right, which is why I don’t buy the whole “we’re gonna work on it and bring it back” line. They’ve had so long to fix it already and nothing has materialized to date.
Yeah it was very strange that they couldn’t figure out how to make it work for 5 yrs. At least by the end of the 1st expansion where it saw barely any use they should have tried something.
But they just chose to die on that hill.
Interesting enough rune of power for mages has something similar where you had to stay in place and cast to try to most out of it. And that was baked into something else and then removed I think just due to the feedback from mages hating it.
It wasn’t. They just gave us a flat buff to the class damage aura. It helped but it didn’t make up for the loss of burst, especially for Arcane which sadly relies on cooldown stacking. Still, we’re better off without it though. I suspect much the same will be true with NP, especially since we still get the Pit Lord via Diabolist.
Remember alpha to beta to release can change pretty drastically.
Do we all remember what the warlock class tree look like in beta DF and all the sudden more than half of the last row gets remove/change to some of the most boring/undetune talents. And we get told that locks cant have any throuput talents in the class tree.
And it’s why I’m choosing to hold off on my excitement till release and then I’ll purchase TWW expansion. Too many times I’ve seen the specs close to releasing which should have been ironed up by then to then have the team just removed completely change mechanics right on the expansion releases.
The strangest thing about this dev team though is they spend so much resources/time on improving/fixes issues to only scrap them outright in the few years to come, and then 360° all over again. Never understood that.
I am new to the spec but I’m loving it so far. TWW base rotation feels really good with the faster shadow bolt casts, especially with decent haste.
Demon Bolt doesn’t feel exciting to press on live or Alpha. The shard generation is nice but it doesn’t flow with the rotation. I would love for them to spice it up a bit. Make you really excited to press that button. Maybe keep it instant cast but have it empower your demons for a short time. Make them bigger, set them on fire, give them a big haste boost…something cool.
I wholeheartedly agree that we have way too many active abilities/cooldowns though. Worse, some are them are really hard to skip. In TWW you have three 30s, two 45s (or 30 but who isn’t going to pick one of the super vilefiends?), two 1m and one 2m. They need to combine some of these, delete a couple or at least adjust the timers.
It’s really funny how they clearly see this as a problem and flag it as a major pain point for some specs but are seemingly fine with others having a dozen rotational cooldowns. Imo, there should be one major DPS cooldown and maybe 1-2 minor ones with everything else situational.
But of course that’s not how it works out in practice because the insensitive to stack cooldowns is always there. And then when one little thing goes wrong during an encounter and you miss a step or misalign your cooldowns (even further than they’re already misaligned to begin with) your DPS tanks.
The worst part is that they see this micromanagement of cooldowns as an “expression of skill” when most of the time it comes down to sheer dumb luck and whether or not you’re able to stay in place and turret the boss or get targeted by a mechanic and have to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. Sure, some of that can be predicted if you run a bunch of timer addons and if you have a good general knowledge of the boss encounter but most of the time it’s totally RNG.