I’m a returning WoW player who once mained a warlock in WoD.
Affliction and destruction are awesome and very streamlined. I love to test them out in PvP when I hit level 80.
However, demonology seems ultra complex with too many unstreamed abilities. It has changed so much from WoD and had demonform taken away. Right now, I’m concerned with both PvP and PvE.
Demonology seems to require a lot of hard casts and summons. I can’t get my rotations right.
It also doesn’t seem to have many instant cast spells for PvP, and takes too much time to ramp up. It is also trickier in using Implode for AoE damage.
Am I missing or over-complicating things? Are there streamlined heuristics that I can follow for PvP and PvE to reduce demonology’s vast complexity? I keep having to have my eyes on the action bar to monitor procs and various abilities and have been totally overwhelmed.
Demonology was more complicated in WoD, at least if you want to play it well. This is coming from a Demonology lock of 10+ years. Considering you barely saw any Demonology locks in WoD through the expansion, except at the very end with tier and warlock trinket synergy. Where Hellfire was on farm for many. Even then you still didn’t see crazy amounts of Demonology warlocks running around, since its WoD we’re talking about.
Also if you wanted to play demonology well, you needed to know when to cycle in and out of demon form. Especially if you were deciding to multi- dot or varies of other situations, along with other cd’s. When Legion came out, it made they made Demonology rotation overly convoluted and redundant as hell. You summon a demon, you empower it. Rinse and repeat for every demon. It wasn’t well like either, it had a few neat talents. Like imps riding dreadstalkers into combat lol.
BFA is complete rework of Demonology and essentially similar to what it is today. Only main difference aside from hero talents, is they took away reduced the abundance of demonic cores Demonology got. Which made it flow so well in Dragonflight. Which Blizzard believed in their infinite wisdom, to make our abilities more “meaningful” and other non-sense reasoning.
Demonology is definitely is not a simple spec to play for those faint of heart. Sure its definitely a lot more streamline and more new player friendly. But it requires some getting used to. Considering it requires set-up or ramp up for you to perform optimally, whether for summon as many demon’s within their windows so you can get them within your Tyrant summon. Or set up for a typical aoe rotation, for implosions. Sure Diabolist adds slightly more complexity. Where depending on your ritual summon you get a different proc. Soul Harvest is probably the easiest and essentially improves on what you already have.
The person making the post can refer to Kalamazi YouTube videos about getting rotation more efficiently. There also plenty of add-ons that Kalamazi refers to, to better track abilities which will affect overall performance.
He is correct that there’s a lot of casting in the rotation of the current demo.
It’s as “complicated” as it was before with G:FG swapped out for Vilefiend/Charhound.
Although lesser Demonbolt procs might throw you off, it’s really not that hard a rotation to get into.
You don’t wait until vilefind/dogs have about 5 seconds left on their duration before casting nether ward/tyrant to extend them? Am I making it too complicated? New to lock, played solo shuffle to around 2300 at the end of last season.
Ain’t that the case with all classes? Given some easier than others. But the point was is they haven’t played since WoD. So I was comparing it to what they remember from about 10 years ago to today.
I think demo was much harder back than what it was is now. Especially if you wanted to play well. The spec was so complicated that most warlock players didn’t touch it unless on specific occasions. Like specific synergies from gear that made it go crazy.
Other than that, the person hasn’t played a class from 10 years ago. So of course a class with a full major redesigns is going to be crazy to someone who hasn’t played in awhile and understand the mechanics of things of have changed a lot. Considering a full caster summoner wasn’t really a thing back then. After all Blizzard wanted to given something unique to demo locks, with the class/spec identity.
Power siphon, demonbolt, hog, I like to stagger Gloomhound and Tyrant. Try fishing for demon cores with implosion so you can Demonbolt over Shadowbolt. But always follow your Demonbolts with HoG Soul Shards 3+.
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