This list is in no particular order, and only about Demonology for now. I trust (tentatively) that Blizzard will have Destruction, Affliction, and class tree changes coming down the pipeline in the coming weeks, so I’m not going to stress about those.
I wholeheartedly believe that if I don’t have the ability to directly control a pet, like move it to a specific location, then it shouldn’t have aggro. Shouldn’t be able to pull extra mobs with proximity aggro. I would even meet in the middle and say this should apply only if I don’t have the ability to dismiss the pet, such as Wild Imps and Doomguards.
Bare minimum for Mythic+, Axe Toss needs to not stun the target, so we can be the ranged interrupt that lets the interrupted enemy walk towards the tank right after being interrupted. As it stands right now, after you Axe Toss interrupt a caster mob standing at range chain casting, it will be stunned, come out of stun and keep casting, never having moved an inch. Bonus points if the cooldown goes down to 24 seconds.
Having our 2 minute cooldown, Grimoire: Felguard, just be a copy of our main pet disappoints me. It seems boring and unimaginative, especially with how many demons and character models exist in the game. Ideally it would be a different demon with different skills and animations.
And if it was going to be our biggest cooldown, it should feel impactful. Grimoire: Felguard isn’t weak per se, but it doesn’t feel impactful enough to be 2 minutes. (its just my opinion about it not feeling impactful, not saying its factually weak)
About the addition of Master Summoner and how many people I’ve seen complaining that its a lackluster talent, weak, and probably not going to be picked. This may be a hot take, but I think a healthy talent tree needs to have dead talents. If there weren’t any talents that you didn’t care about/mind not taking, you would constantly feel like your build was missing something. Having enough talent points to get what you want is important, and having dead talents that aren’t very impactful is how you accomplish that.
This may be another hot take, but I think removing Reign of Tyranny and having the number of extended imps capped at 5 is a good change. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be sad at not having a huge imp army during Tyrant. I think it’s disappointing from a theme and visual standpoint, but purely looking at it mechanically and for quality of life, its a huge win. I hope it isn’t the final iteration of our cooldowns in general, or we get something visually and thematically appealing to make up it, but for now it’s a fantastic change in the right direction.
–Demonology’s ramp time was a bit ridiculous. 15-18 seconds, depending on build, and that’s just before your damage finally starts. This helps reduce that, by a lot.
–The current Tyrant setup doesn’t have any “skill” involved, it’s completely scripted. The only thing that will prevent you from having the perfect Tyrant every time are just external variables, such as random movement mechanics (swirlies), being selected by targeted mechanics at the wrong time, luck with refunds, luck with procs that give more imps (Pact of the Imp Mother), having Diabolic Ritual line up with Pit Lord, etc.
–So this change will let you have consistent Tyrants, with realistically the same level of “skill”, for all the people dooming about that.
Reducing the cooldown of Vilefiend by 5 seconds is a massive win.
Removing Guillotine is fine, it was kind of clunky anyway.
However, now that Immutable Hatred is the only capstone option on the right side of the tree we are limited to just a single target talent. So if someone wanted to have a build based around maximum Felguard empowerment, they are locked to just single target. Very lackluster single target as well.
My suggestion is to change Immutable Hatred from the weird single target only talent that triggers off you using Demonic Cores, which has proven to be buggy and hard to tune in the past, change the talent completely.
Have the talent be a flat aura buff for your Felguard, X%. Whatever reasonable number that would keep it close to the Doom talents, but still probably weaker overall. Most importantly though, have it make your Felguard/Wrathguard dual wield. I’ve seen a lot of people asking to bring back the glyph that let your pet dual wield, so this would solve that, plus also give you something visually appealing for what is a completely passive talent.
I think it could be a good idea to put Implosion on a choice node with an option that let your Wild Imp’s Fel Firebolts passively cleave. Right now there is an issue because Fel Firebolt has gotten buffed several times, but Implosion hasn’t. So now it’s only good to Implode at 4+ targets. That makes 2-3 targets very awkward, and could be solved by choosing to have Fel Firebolt passively cleave instead of taking Implosion, like if you had a council boss that had 3 targets, or even a boss that had small amounts of adds spawn.
–Taking Implosion would still be an option if you wanted to min/max pooling Imps and maximize your damage.
–It could help lower the barrier to entry for new players.
Thanks for reading! Hopefully there are at least a couple things in there people agree with!
I am so glad you brought up Grimoire Felguard being a carbon copy of our main pet. It is so underwhelming and looks stupid if you ask me, they should make it a duel-wielding Wrathguard or something, something other than a scaled up version of our pet.
There are pleanty of demons they could use. Maybe make it a thing where we open a portal to the nether and a random demon pops out and fights for us, could be a Wrathguard, Satyr, Shivarra, Dreadlord, Eredar, Terroguard, Infernal, Void Revenant, some type humanoid/biped demon, and have it do the same thing Grimoire Felguard does but with some flavor to it that appeals to the class fantasy. That would be really cool.
Your not wrong with a lot of your points few slight tweaks here and there but overall a good list
Yes yes yes and did i mention yes
If they could use the other warlock pets for something that would tie to this like something akin to Call of the wild from hunter… not have it be the same but something in that nature would be great… at least thematically
It needs to be a full copy of the PVP talent and not some “lite” version of it
Your not wrong here for the most part… 5 is not the correct number neither was 10… personally 6 would be perfect 2 FULL HoG to fill it would even work well with the 2pc for the s3 tier. but they need to compensate the loss of the 5 (or 4 with my suggestion) demons damage it just isn’t there… unless the whole point of the change was the move the damage profile in the tyrant window from the imps to the “big pets”
This could be a choice node, one side as it is now, the other removing the stun and having the interrupt work with a greater range.
I don’t think they really need to change Grimoire: Felguard, as such, just enhance them (say, make them a creation of purple and green felfire) so they look more powerful than our regular pet.
You’ll still have your army of imps, it’s just that Tyrant will now only empower 5 of them.
Giving the Felguard/Wrathguard the ability to dual wield would definitely be a better capstone than Immutable Hatred.
I’d love to see the randomly generated demons returned to Inner Demons.
Both of these things need to happen. Having those random demons summon from Inner demons again would be so awesome, especially if they aren’t going to rework Nether Portal. I’m a Demo Warlock, a Master Summoner, and you’re telling me all I can summon are Imps, Dreadtsalkers, a slightly bigger Felguard, Doomguards, Vilefiends, and one Eredar Brute? Let me summon Void Terrors, Satyr, Ur’zuls, Terroguards, Hellhounds, Dark Hounds, Demonic Oculi, Infernals, Abyssals, Void Revenants, freaking PRINCE MELCHEZAAR!!! Let me do it please!
Implosion is the number one thing that makes me not enjoy playing Demo.
In part because I don’t enjoying that little min max watching imp timers mini game. Another part class fantasy where I don’t enjoy getting rid of the imps I’ve summoned.
Most of your list is pretty good but this one is… confusing to say the least. If I understand this correctly, your argument is we should intentionally have garbage talents designed specifically to be garbage and never be taken for the sole purpose of showing us how good the talents we did take are? This makes no sense. It also lets the developers off the hook, something we should never, ever do.
In the last decade of Hazzikostian rule, the devs (and programmers) have gotten progressively lazier and been allowed to slide on far too much. The solution isn’t crappy illusory talents wasting space, it’s to make each talent (at the very least the capstones) interesting and force real choice. There are so many complaints from every class about cookie-cutter specs and this just reinforces that.
I should have phrased it better or elaborated more, that’s on me.
What I mean by “dead talent” is something that’s a little bit more niche and not universally taken 100% of the time, but I don’t mean they should be garbage talents designed to be throwaways.
Master Summoner will probably feel really good if you are low on Haste, but once you get more gear you can have the option to spec out of it without feeling punished for it. And if you want to keep using it, it would still be a little quality of life talent that you somewhat feel.
There’s a problem in the class tree and all the spec trees of having the majority of the talents be required, in every form of content.
For example, Shadow Invocation is a “dead talent” in single target, even in fights with random add spawns here and there, but in mythic plus its a great talent. I think that’s good, feels like we have some customization depending on the content and our character’s situation.
Whereas something like Fel Invocation, Rune of Shadows, Demonic Calling, and a bunch of others are taken in every single form of content, AND would feel terrible to not take.
I think it would suck if we didn’t have enough talent points to take some of the more impactful and fun talents because they made some random talent nodes that were just overtuned and we had to take no matter what.
So I guess the TL;DR is: Sorry for the phrasing, what I meant to say is I think it’s healthy to have talents that aren’t universally applicable and don’t need to be taken all the time. Lets you have the freedom for more customization in your build.
In that case, I agree 100%. “Not taken all the time” is perfectly acceptable, “dead” isn’t. I main arcane (demo alt) and just off the top of my head there are like 8-10 talents (arcane) that are just simply never taken in any situation whatsoever which is criminally bad design. I haven’t seen the changes on the ptr for demo yet, but the arcane ones are rather laughable and do nothing for those 8-10 “nevertakers.” I’ll look into demo tomorrow, hopefully it’s not the same situation.
So master summoner will only be useful as you level in its current iteration. In other words a dead talent when you hit max level and start acquiring haste. Master Summoner alone isn’t enough to warp our stat priorities either. It’s just a bad talent in leu of Reign of Tyranny and feels pointless when paired with the Vilefiend and Imp cap changes.
Having a talent only useful for leveling or early into an expansion like this doesn’t feel right.
I still don’t understand how a talent that reduces about 1 gcd = the removal of reign of tyranny.
Shouldn’t they have just made tyrant instant and kept reign of tyranny (with some new mechanic where when you summon tyrant he spawns an additional x number of imps and empowers them)
And casting times as skill expression is no longer a thing when more half the classes don’t need to worry about it before they pop their damage cds, you get a proc or potion hit your instant CD and go to town thats most of the current DPS specs. And us for some reason are being kept to this " but you have to have lots of casting for skill expression" to hit the same or less DPS numbers than say the instant button pushers currently.
I feel like those type of skills expressions work only when the entire games specs are created around that but in this current retail it feels like few specs are being kept to have some skill expression while like 80% you pop your CDs and blast away with no need for skill expression and hit you top DPS with 0 worries additionally it beats specs requiring skill expression.
Spot on. I used to think that arcane mage was an immobile turret (which it was until this expansion put more of our damage into barrage), but when I do keys on my demo lock, I feel like I’m stuck in molasses. If I’m interrupted during the opener of almost all hard casts, it’s a nightmare (“Oh good, the free dogs cast didn’t proc. Joy.”). And if the felguard dies with no charge of the not-quite-insta-summon, gg. Even with high haste everything just seems to take forever. I’d be thrilled with a “boring” instant-summon talent.
I’ve never really paid much attention to how much individual demons do, but seeing how weak Demonic Tyrant was quite a shock.
I was of the belief that the thinking/fantasy behind Demonic Tyrant was that the presence of the more powerful Tyrant inspired/drove the other demons into doing more damage. With that in mind, and given how little damage the Tyrant does, why would they respond to it’s presence at all?
Basically, Demonic Tyrant really needs a significant boost to its own damage output.
Adding a 4% Mastery passive onto Master Summoner, is this really what people wanted? So many people complaining about the lackluster talent, and now it’ll more than likely be a permanent talent pick in every form of content, and its a completely passive talent that you will barely feel. All of the complaints will still be valid, none of the problems people had with the talent changed at all, but now we have to take it because of a passive stat buff. But huge win, am I right guys?
Also, how have people lost sight of the point of the Tyrant changes so hard? The issues with Tyrant setup were ramp time and mobility issues. Even since beginning of Dragonflight people were complaining about how immobile we were during Tyrant and/or Nether Portal setup, and how every GCD and Soul Shard useage had to be precise.
Going down to 5 imps fixed both of those issues, in a very heavy handed way. Consistent cooldowns with some leeway for mechanics and whatnot. Now with changing it back to 10 imps will give us the same amount of ramp time as before. The difference between 10 and 15 imps is that you can always get 10 imps in 18 seconds even with no procs, but getting 15 imps in 18 seconds takes lucky procs and no movement. So now we won’t ever have to worry about bad luck costing us a 15 imp Tyrant, (yay I guess), but we’re right back to the same immobile Tyrant setup and same amount of ramp time.
Well I for one advocated for the return of the 10 cap because capping it at 5 imps basically destroyed the skill ceiling for Tyrant ramp. I think they’re better ways to fix Demo’s mobility issue, like say making Vilefiend an instant cast, without needing to destroy skill expression.
And yea the Master Summoner buff is kinda lackluster, but tbh the big win today was the talent swap and buffs to Umbral Blaze and Immutable Hatred.
Having weak single target talent options was another problem Demo had. I’m still not a fan of UB and IH conceptually but at least their valid picks now, and we have unrestricted access to Pact of the Imp Mother now too.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand the obsession with “skill expression” in general or specifically for Tyrant. Blizzard wrote in their patch notes:
We are increasing the number of Wild Imps empowered by Demonic Tyrant back to 10 as our initial swing left Demonic Tyrant feeling too easy to execute.
Are we fighting the enemy or our class? There are enough swirlies, conal attacks, run to X spot, interrupts/stops, etc. in the game that I’m not sure we really need to be thinking that hard about a margin of +/- 1 GCD determining whether are burst is functioning at full power or not.
Right now it feels like half the classes’ burst setup is two or three instant cast abilities that are essentially impossible to mess up. Think Ret Pally, though this applies to other classes, as well. Heck, in many cases, if I press a single button half of their kit goes off at once without me even having to think about it.
It just gives me the impression that there are 2-3 people responsible for class design who have VERY different visions.
I agree with you on the class fantasy front, but I think we have to be careful about asking for this, or we could easily end up in a situation where the class hits like a pool noodle outside of the cooldown. I’ve seen that before and it isn’t fun in a lot of content.
Too many people throw that phrase around without having any idea what it really means, especially with our Tyrant setup. Its possible they’re throwing it around because they’ve heard other people say it, or it sounds cool, when the reality is our Tyrant setup is a completely scripted and simple list of actions that we have to do in a specific order for 18 seconds.
No room for skill, no room for adaptation or reacting to certain situations, just following along the same scripted setup as every other demo warlock playing at an average level.
The only differences in the quality of Tyrant are because of outside variables, like getting selected by a mechanic, swirly, Dread Calling proc, Pact of the Imp Mother proc, Soul Conduit refund, but people don’t want to admit that because then they wouldn’t be able to feel cool talking about the “skill expression” of Tyrant setup.
