Latest PTR build just came out a short time ago. Not exactly a surprise. Can’t post links yet, but it was up on WoWhead.
Explosive Potential - When your Implosion consumes 3 or more Imps, gain 14292 Haste for 15 sec.
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A link, for those looking for one (change found under ‘General Azerite Powers’):
And a quote from Pyre on the Lock Discord for those who worry about where that makes EP sit:
Is demo dead in 8.1.5 with the EP nerf?
Demo will still be good, EP will still be your best trait.
I think most people saw this coming? Personally I’m just glad it wasn’t a buff duration reduction.
EP is still the best trait for Demo. About an 8% nerf depending on the content.
Edit:
So this is a little worse than the patch notes suggest. They also fixed the the Demonic Consumption/Implosion bug so we won’t get an auto 100% EP uptime on a buffed Tyrant. That hurts and also makes the rotation feel less smooth.
They are also fixing the Felguards energy as I guess it was gaining too much energy allowing it to do its attacks too often.
Anticipation is that demo falls to middle of the pack and once again well below Aff/Destro. Sucks.
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Can’t say I didn’t see it coming. It still is above and beyond the best trait though despite the incoming nerfs.
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They also fixed the implosion bug. Not a big dps loss, but an additional minor one.
The demonic consumption explosive bug? Will DC still be tops?
Fast question: how high should your DC (imp energy) percentage (viewable via weakaura) or Imp count be before you cast that Tyrant?
This may have actually been the best case scenario, not a big nerf by any means.
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They also fixed the felguard haste bug. This, combined with the fix for the demonic consumption implosion bug and explosive potential nerf, is going to be a huge blow to the spec.
Warlock discord is saying it will land them middle of the pack.
Therefore, demo will no longer be remotely desirable in mythic plus, due to lack of an interrupt. Damage was the only thing it was bringing to the table
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Let me give you my reasons why even a 1% nerf pisses me off enough to set my car on fire
- Demo has been a turret crap spec ever since Demon Huntard came on the scene and took our Metamorphosis away. Before the EP buff anyone who played Demo got laughed at as they did negative dps while moving. You got your stupid Illidan fanboys to jump onto the DHT bandwagon, and now at lv120 DHT is 5th most common class while monks still last place, so for fanboy reasons and to entice more people back into wow, you gave DHT metamorph and took it away from us. Anyone who played demo at a high level in Cata/mop/wod will know fury bar dumping while moving and building fury while standing still added unique gameplay you’re not going to find here. Now we have stupid molten core procs that we can’t use if we have too many shards. Eye beams and Chaos waves, that was golden era Demo. Explosive potential demo right now is just subpar silver lining and you’re already ruining it.
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Spriests, boomkins, eleshamans. What is up with this infestation of hybrid dps doing obscene damage and being invited over warlocks not only for raids but also M+. Now you have hybrid spec taxing now you don’t. Which is it? Rogues doing obscene dmg while getting into both groups while mages get shafted in raids and warlocks get shafted in M+. It’s fine for hybrids to do good damage, but not WAY MORE DAMAGE than pure dps, on MANY fights (spriest) and also not ok for boomkins to have enough utility to crowd everything else out of the picture. Felguard stun is real cute. Bag of crap utility vs silence beam, knockback, roots, and offheals.
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Difficulty of play. I have 36/36 mage towers from Legion, I have not gone deep into every dps spec in BFA, but I cannot imagine any being much harder or equal to Demo in terms of upkeep. After doing demo in raid for 2 weeks, when I went back to destruction spec I felt like I was playing slow casting brain dead spec where the biggest brainpower was “durr can I hold onto 4 shards instead of 0 for havoc burst DURR ME CAN DO IT!” It’s very clear demo is miles harder than the other two specs, and should be rewarded appropriately with higher dps. True powerful burst AOE requires holding onto both shards and imps while upkeeping EP buff in the 10-20 seconds leading up to the AOE moment. Destruction AOE burst requires scratching your rear hard enough to Cataclysm then dumping rain of fire. Doing opulence mythic progression as Demo was hell. Trying it as destruction put me to sleep and feel disabled.
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PS - some of us still hate losing Kiljaeden Cunning let alone Metamorph, and other old golden mechanics like Soulswap, old Havoced Shadowburns, and AOE chaosbolt.
PPS - Personally Uldir Affliction was also a little stupid - tying up that much dmg into your Darkglare cooldown and doing crap all ST otherwise.
PPPS - Bring back Xelnath or someone who will put Demo Metamorph back in the game, you got your money from the Legion DHT players, put it back where it came from. “Somewhere we lost the fantasy of a demo warlock and made it turn into a demon instead of summoning demons.” Oh sure, you rode that train for 3 expacs then removed it for DHT Legion cash.
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What’s the felguard haste bug? Do you mean the scaling fix that was applied in 8.1? And do you have a link to testing on the consumption/implosion bug being fixed (I’m not surprised but I haven’t heard about it yet).
Perhaps going back to NP over consumption depending on how it all shakes out.
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Honestly, it’s kinda of stupid that a spec has to rely on bugs to do competitive damage. Felguard energy bug. DCon implosion “bug”.
Felguard haste bug is where haste (say you had 5% haste) caused felguard energy to replenish moreso than the 5% haste should have allowed.
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With all the changes coming, it has now been estimated by the lock discord that demo’s getting about a 15-25% reduction in overall damage.
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Yeah fel guard was still benefiting from haste to energy gain, It was ninja fixed on ptr and some locks were also on PTR and couldn’t implode with tyrant
You can make the argument that Demo should be compensated but to flat out say a Trait shouldn’t be nerfed when they came out and said that they do not like when one trait is so far ahead of the other is just wrong and misinformed. I noticed you mentioned Spriest and didn’t mention that Demo is currently outperforming them(more than 1% as of posting this) and actually are currently the highest performing spec in the game atm. Furthermore, Shadow Already got trait nerfs to Searing Dialogue and Chorus of Insanity well before they even touched your EP. Everything about the EP nerf makes sense and should have been expected considering what everyone knows about how the Devs feel about azerite traits.
lol what… biggest hyperbole of the day.
Through playtesting on the PTR one of the members found their damage to be ~15% lower than it had been before, with 25% (likely) being due to bad RNG.
Its not even that much of a gain, they are just overreacting to the nerf. In order for it to be a 15%-25% nerf they would have to completely remove the trait instead of nerfing it . What they were likely talking about is the trait itself got nerfed by 15%-25%.
I mean you can go to onestoplockshop and see how big of a gap between EP and everything else is and understand completely from there why it was nerfed, 1 and a half of the trait was better then any other trait stacked to 3 times.
It’s not only EP that got nerfed. There was a bug that caused the felguard to gain more energy than you had haste. They changed that, which will significantly reduce the damage that our felguard is able to output. That’s why the number’s super high. That on top of dcon and implosion no longer working together.
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In that case you would just revert back to my first post:
But in that regard we would have to see the sims to see the real difference.
You didn’t really think they were going to let demo stay on top did you? It was repeatedly, randomly nerfed in Legion even when Affliction was significantly better and then they took a massive dump on it at the start of the xpac.
I still think there was some dev who got TKC/implosion one shot in arena early in Legion and they’ve held a grudge ever since.
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