This might be the first time since I started playing this game back in Vanilla that I’ve ever wrote on one of these posts, but I have to agree with the other demonology comments posted on here, reddit, and elsewhere – the proposed changes are lazy, add unnecessary uncertainty to a rather strict rotation, reduce the benefit of playing the spec skillfully, and overall make the spec less fun and rewarding to play well.
Playing demo well is all about managing a variety of timers (imp and imp gang boss tradeoff for implosion, demons and CDs to ‘snapshot’ with tyrant, spenders for nether portal, and dreadstalkers to have clarity into near-term core generation). This playstyle is actually very fun in my opinion and can be challenging and rewarding to play in stressful encounters.
First off, to put it plainly, if you have even glanced at logs you can clearly see that the ‘peaks’ and ‘valleys’ of demos damage do not come from a rotational ability that has 60% uptime (I’m talking about dreadstalkers aka ‘dogs’ here)… they come from the significant cooldown reliance that the spec has around Tyrant and Nether Portal. For color, in the first boss of Aberrus which is effectively a target dummy, my overall dps is around 88k (421ilvl), during Nether Portal that dps is >300k. In PVP being able to maintain your dreadstalkers on CD can be a material differentiator in damage between less apt players and decent players.
While a lot of the proposed changes I believe have issues, the proposed change to Ripped through the Portal is a glaring issue that I hope does not get implemented.
Reducing Ripped through the Portal from certainty to a 50% chance
- This change is simply terrible, I am not sure I’ve ever seen a change this unnecessary and counterproductive.
- Dreadstalkers are a very important part of your rotation and something that in both PVP and PVE is important to have the highest uptime possible with. Having a chance at 2 dogs vs 3 also creates material uncertainty around your tyrant – the random 50% chance for 3 fewer stacks of Reign of Tyranny can effectively be a 10-15% reduction in tyrant damage (not to mention extending 2 dogs instead of 3) and the only way to mitigate this is not through skillful play but instead to delay tyrant, vilefiend, and grimoire in the hopes that the next cast in 20sec yields 3 dogs… not very rewarding play and not worth it.
- If devs are concerned about dog damage, then it is materially better to keep the number dogs summoned consistent and instead just apply a flat damage nerf to them. To be fair, I do not see any remote evidence that their damage needs to be changed.
I also do not understand the intention of limiting instant casts and then instead buffing pure passive damage through your felguard… it is not like you have to cast your felguard’s damage anyways – at least the instant casts marginally make you manage your globals and demonic core resource.
I think some of the proposed changes are fine, namely the:
- removal of Demonic Knowledge
- This seems completely fine if the goal is to reduce the proc chance of demonic cores since this does not change the playstyle at all and actually removes some uncertainty with managing your cores.
- Change to Inner Demons
- There was always a material difference between the value of the first point in this talent and the second – reducing it to 1 talent point makes a lot of sense to me.
Not very material, but these following changes do not make much sense to me.
- Cavitation
- Seriously, what on earth is the point of this? This is entirely unnecessary, boring, lazy, etc.
- Dirty Hands/Shadowflame Acolyte/Umbral Blaze
- Hand of Gul’Dan damage itself is immaterial, why give a flat buff to the damage of the actual spell instead of your imps which scale off of mastery (even though as demo you prioritize haste, the spec itself is all about using resources to flood the battlefield with a demonic horde). Instead, why not apply something similar to Sacrificed Souls where the core of the spec still utilizes the mass of demons summoned?
I think the current iteration of demo is pretty dang good, but if you wanted to make the spec a little more fun, I think you could make a couple changes.
- Give pitlord a ranged ability.
- This would really only impact pvp content but going through a near 20 sec set up and committing all of your CDs to summon a pitlord feels very bad when nearly every spec has a short CD answer (such as a mass root, disengage, port, blink, etc.) to negate nearly its entire damage without any remote skill such as positioning. Given the setup and commitment required to summon the pitlord, enemy players have ample time to prepare, see the damage coming, and/or stop it.
- Add a Doomguard somewhere into the toolkit.
- This is such a cool demon and something that, at least for me, makes me feel more warlock-y. I think structuring this similar to how a shadow priest’s Idol of Yogg-Saron works could be fun and rewarding – you could track stacks until the summon and make an in-game decision on when to summon your other demons in order to snapshot the doomguard and your other demons with tyrant.
