Demonology warlock "rework" suggestions and feedback

Classes Warlock
1

A few quick ideas to improve current demonology and reasoning behind them.

Gameplay issues:

  • very high ramp up time
  • most movement and interrupts/CCs cause great damage loss (especially in PVP)
  • pet AI
  • can be easily countered by ranged classes who just hide behind walls
  • no way to chase (or move from/to) enemies yet moving is very punishing
  • weird damage profile: lack of on-demand high burst damage (compared to for example Fire Mages), lack of high consistent damage (compared to for example warriors), it is mostly “high periodic damage” that is easily counterable (this affects mostly pvp)
  • depending on build only 2 pets (felguard, succubus) are viable while the rest is ignoreable
  • Demon bolt being basically Shadow bolt that you cast when you have stacks (maybe could be baked into a single spell that behaves differently based on stacks?)
  • High base cast times
  • A few talents that are kinda dead
  • Boring mastery that is a flat damage increase

Fantasy issues:

  • Not really feeling like a master of demons but more like an imp mother (standing in place while summoning tons of imps, and not that varied possible demons)

Proposed solutions:

  • new mastery: “Every time you cast Hand of Gul’dan you have an X % chance to command 1-2 demons of the nether to fight for you for 15 seconds” (X modified by mastery)
  • alternatively Inner Demons could be turned into mastery (more points of mastery would reduce the time it takes to summon next demon)

this plays more into the “master summoner” fantasy, provides potential additional targets for Tyrant

  • if inner demons is not made a mastery then it should be made baseline

Imps are one of our resources, having 2 of them running around at all times helps always in maintaining targets for Power Siphon

  • Demonic Strength, Soul Strike, Felguard conduit should affect all pets in slightly different ways (succubus could deal more damage with her leash as she is squishy but that could give her additional usages, voidwalker could have damage reduction)

This idea enables usage of other pets in some niche situations (tank dies during raid and no CR available? quickly summon voidwalker and use demonic strength to reduce damage it takes so it can tank for a little bit; adds on denathrius aren’t reachable on melee? summon imp pet to have some additional ranged damage).

Complementarily, Fel Domination should have 2 stacks and make the next pet summon instant to allow for more comfortable switching of pets during battle.

  • Doom, Bilescourge Bombers, Soul Conduit, Nether Portal should be either buffed and placed in different talent rows or removed.

Doom has extremely small damage that is dispellable and on a very long dot that generates 1 SS - it competes on its row with basically 2 better SS generators: Power Siphon and Demonic Calling, to be useful it would have to summon some kind of strong demon or deal way more damage and be unavoidable.

Bilescourge is competing with 2 superior (and free) aoe abilities, to be useful it should either deal way more damage and be free/spammable or should be replaced with another AOE talent.

Soul Conduit breaks the flow of the spec, it is often hard to notice it proced without constantly looking at your SS count - without the talent we can simply count the number of shadow bolts cast to know how many SS we have. Maybe it should switch places with Doom.

Nether Portal should honestly last longer, spawn a demon per soul shard spent and have it duration extended by tyrant to become a strong CD and a nice addition to the toolkit. Alternatively casting Nether Portal should allow warlock to cast while moving for the duration (to not punish people with movement).

  • Shadow bolt should have its cast time reduced by 0.5 sec (if you ever used succubus PVP talent - thats what it does, and it makes SB feel way better to play and by extension the whole spec less clunky)

  • Sacrificed Souls should be slightly nerfed (1-2 %) and made baseline), I think the talent as a whole offers potentially interesting incentive to spam more demons to increase the base damage the warlock is doing - but due to low base damage of all spells it isn’t really worth taking right now. I believe having it baseline would be beneficial to the spec and have further synergy with Nether Portal rework idea above.

  • new talent, row 6: Summon: Imp Mother - become able to permanently summon imp mother, a ranged pet with following abilities: Taunt, Imp Swarm (summon 3 imps periodically), Seduce, Felflame bolt (simple ranged bolt attack)

A new pet that would offer both resource generation in the form of imps, strong ranged attack and seduction as CC. Would find usage in both PVP and PvE without making Grimoire: Felguard obsolete (as stun and strong demon could still find their usage)

  • new talent, row 7: Metamorphosis - Consume life from all your demons sacrificing them to empower yourself and transforming into a demonic form for 25 seconds. While transformed imps from Hand of Gul’dan will immediately implode on the target. You gain:
  • 5 % increased armor per every demon consumed.
  • 5 % increased damage done by shadow bolt and demon bolt per every wild imp consumed, 7.5 % per every other temporary demon.
  • 10 % increased damage done and haste per permanent demon consumed.

While transformed this ability becomes Demonic Charge (charge to target enemy, same thing as in Wrath of the lich king).

The idea is to have a talent competing with Demonic Consumption that offers flavour for people who loved old metamorphosis. Ideal situation to use this is after you spawned every demon imagineable and buffed their duration with tyrant, and a few extra hands of gul’dan. Consuming your demons kills them moving their power to the warlock. Consumed imps can still grant stacks of Demonic Core. This in theory helps with damage profile for demonology, as after tyrant window of increased damage you would also have another window of high damage output. Demonic charge would also help chasing enemies which currently is pretty much impossible to do, increased haste and reduced SB cast time from above points also reduces the punishment demonology receives from movement or interruption.

  • new talent, row 2 replaces Doom: Horned Nightmare - every 3rd Hand of Gul’dan casts twice

  • new talent, row 6 replaces Soul Conduit: Doombolt - damaging an enemy with demon bolt leaves a DOT on the target that deals damage equal to X % of the demonbolt’s damage after 7 seconds. Stacking accumulates damage and refreshes the duration.

Moving more damage from pets to the caster.

  • Demonic Core stacks should stack up to 10 and last 40 seconds.
    This change allows to quickly recover from intermission phases (like the dance in castle nathria) and makes movement slightly less punishing as you can keep doing some kind of damage and generating SS with demon bolts but at the same time this is only if you planned ahead.

  • Soul Strike and Dreadstalkers (and Demonic strength, maybe it already is but I forgot) should be castable regardless of the caster’s line of sight but based on the pet’s line of sight, if your pet is attacking someone behind a wall it should still be able to smash them with soul strike - currently it is not the case.

  • Demonic Calling should reset the cooldown of Call Dreadstalkers when it procs or at least lower it by a few seconds, right now it feels bad when it procs unless you hold off casting your dreadstalkers until it procs - but it also isn’t a good idea in the long run.

Summary:
I proposed changes that in my opinion would make demonology more viable. I believe I achieved:

  • smaller punishment for movement and faster recovery from interrupts
  • more flavourful spells/talents and talents that can actually compete with each other on various rows
  • adding further depth and mastery to spec with some of the proposed spell reworks, mastery rework, baseline sacrified souls
  • better pvp performance in the form of new permanent pet, ability to chase opponents if talented, some abilities being castable regardless of caster’s LoS, more mobility
  • better flow of the spec with reduced shadow bolt cast time
  • more synergy between talents thanks to new proposed talents

Some numbers that I proposed are of course subject to balance and are more of an idea of what it could be.

If you read the whole thing - thank you, you are amazing. Looking forward to your feedback on this.

11 Likes
2

Lets just check the “Demology rework checklist”

Level 10 alt… check
Wall of text … check
Usual level of forum garbage… check

Everything checks out boys… nothing to see here.

3 Likes
3

I concur. Honestly only change id make rn to demo would be a faster cast time on VF and Tyrant haha but that might make the a little too strong…

1 Like
4

Here we go again.

Ish must have a new account.

5

He also thought we wouldn’t see the meta tossed in there. I were not fooled by the wall of text.

1 Like
6

They think they are slick but its not a demonology rework wall of “Fun” if I can’t Ctrl+F and find multiple mentions of Meta.

Fresh… and new.

2 Likes
7

Meta was just one of the talents and changes, if you don’t consider it class fantasy or don’t like it overall its fine - though I would appreciate feedback regarding other talents/adjustments as well

1 Like
8

My feedback is let it die… we have seen these wall of txt demo posts since forever…

Let the post die.
No one will care as much as you did when you made this.

9

Plus demo, while not perfect, has strong strong bones.

It does not need a rework, you want a rework.
And that’s fine, you can want one but let’s all be adults and admit that wanting and needing are not synonymous.

I do appreciate that you seem to care about demo. But the spec as it exists today has strong bones and yes it needs some help, it needs modification. It doesn’t need those bones ripped out and replaced in a vanity project. That’s literally exactly what got us here. Demo has little identity because blizzard keeps ripping us apart and rebuilding from the ground up.
This is the 2nd(and a half since you can still see legion if you squint hard) expansion we’ve had this basic premise and that’s outright aged in demonology terms. Our only hope is to fix what we have. Starting over again just …well starts over again. Brand new set of good and brand new set of bollocks and nothing gained. We have some momentum here. Allow it to flourish or better yet, help it flourish.

Put forth ideas that iterate on current demo instead of negating it entirely if you still care. If you don’t care about demo and just care about the magical perfect demo that exists in your head than frankly nobody here wants to hear it because we already have I don’t even know how many times.

Good feedback?

2 Likes
10

Yes that’s good feedback thank you.

Though I called it a rework it is essentially changing a few talents and building on the things that are already there to negate some of the downsides and offer richer gameplay, meta is just one talent that potentially offers some interesting gameplay.

So while I get what you are saying - I feel like I’m doing just that - helping the current flourish and smooth out rough edges that don’t really work while building on the established fantasy and mechanics.

11

You are altering most things about the spec including shoehorning meta back in for no discernable reason, changing the mastery, fundamentally changing how the spec works.

Don’t get me wrong. Most of the ideas are fine in isolation and you have at least a vague concept of the problems we face but that’s part of the issue. Your changes are too wide ranging. You take each problem try to solve it and move on to the next. This approach ends up building a Frankenstein s monster of what we have.

Refine what you have here. Try to solve a single problem with as small and targeted a change as you can. For instance we do have problems with ramp. Make all summons above hand instant. This helps with ramp immediately without changing what demo is. We can also say that change helps with mobility in pve and pvp and it makes our rotation less punishing.
Then take a step back. See what the new form looks like and what issues still remain, attack another with another small targeted change. If the change can resolve more than 1 issue, allow it to.

Broad strokes sweeping changes are not required here. A delicate hand.

1 Like
12

lol

/10char

13

I’m trying not to just dismiss op out of hand lol. I don’t want more bitter “ish” type posters.

Probably all in vain but I got to try

14

Lost… you have to recognize the pattern… if they take time to make one of these… they are not going to see it any other way then the warped way they set out.

All these posts ever end up being is “Tell me my ideas are good” as feedback.

2 Likes
15

I figure that is 98%
2% is just people that got too excited and caught up in their own ideas.
Got to hold out some level of hope, right?

1 Like
16

You still have hope…bold.

17

I have to intentionally hold on to it brother lol. I’d woulda slipped away years ago otherwise.

18

Bring back the Terrorguard and Abyssal upgraded demons

19

If Blizzard can’t get it right in 17 years then they will never ever get it right. And not to be rude, but elitist here love the boring playstyle of warlocks at this present time. Anything more and the class will be listed as severely OP…especially in the eyes of crybaby melee.

2 Likes
20

As if to prove epic’s points. Cheers animal

1 Like