First Thoughts:
Demo has always played best from a pve perspective when it has huge peaks and valleys and the focus of the gameplay is correctly piloting your character so that you make the most of your “peak”. Tyrant returning back to this type of gameplay (while streamlining the rest of our gameplay) is a huge win for people that look to play this in pve again.
Secondly, tying up some of the loose ends with demo having awkward utility through the return of grimoire (inspiration from mop and wod) is also a big win for people looking to inject demo with some new life in mythic+.
Lastly, I think moving implosion to a cooldown has given a lot of breathing room to the aoe rotation while hyper-focusing the player on those “peaks and valleys” of our tyrant cycle, and giving us something worthwhile to press in the meantime. This spell as a cooldown will live and die through tuning. If this feels meh to press (small damage that isn’t up to par for a 30s large scale aoe button) then it will fail as an experiment though). I understand why people think this is needlessly reducing the complexity of something that has been integral to our aoe kit for almost a decade, but new players have largely been misled or confused with how to use this ability (regardless of how easy it is to understand, multi-tasking and combat comprehension is hard in this game tbh – coming from somebody that has played bleeding edge prog for like 13 years now).
Some more focused feedback on tyrant in particular
Tyrant Changes
I’m happy that the tyrant skill cap is returning. HOWEVER, this design lives and dies on the frustration factor.
First off, from a theory crafting perspective, The player is always able to fit at least 11 imps into a tyrant cycle (without locked hand of gul’dan at 3 shards) and at 0% haste. There will always be a “goal” of how many imps a player will want to have in their tyrant windows if you design tyrant the way it is now, and how it was in the past. If you were to stand at a dummy, or stand still for 12s prior to casting tyrant, this is always the case, no exceptions. This will change with locked hand of gul’dan though, which might shift it to 12 (unlikely) but might be 9 (TBD).
If you want the player to focus on peaks and valleys once again, it must be always possible to reach that peak. To make an analogy out of this, it can be difficult to reach the top, but I should always get some sort of “payoff” of hitting that peak, and not be close to the top and slide all the way to the bottom of the valley. Previous feedback has pointed this out as “ramp cycles” or “ramping damage” but that skill cap should always persist; the real crux of the issue is whether I am able to empower my tyrant (as in cast it) after my ramping cycle. If I do my ramp, but then am unable to cast my tyrant because of a situation out of my control (poor fight timings, or ability timings in m+) then I should not be extremely punished. This has nothing to do with “planning” my movement, when abilities like this affect us in bleeding-edge content.
There is a pretty obvious way to solve this problem:
- Make tyrant instant cast in pve (or master summoner makes it instant cast and we can choose to alleviate this issue).
This would just allow us to focus the difficulty and skill cap on the “ramp” rather than whether I can hit my tyrant based on external factors.
TLDR: I’d rather have a terrible ramp cycle with some payoff (tyrant at the end), then a fantastic ramp cycle and getting walled from casting tyrant by an external factor that forces me to move (no tyrant cast).
Some feedback on the Dominion of Argus (apex talent rework)
Apex talent
Kind of a weird talent. It’s contradictory with the rest of what the spec expects the player to do:
- We use all of our demonic core procs to do our tyrant ramp
- We have less resources and cooldowns to facilitate an “after/post” ramp once our tyrant is cast.
- It hyper focuses on us hitting at least 2 greater demon summons to feel good. That would mean with all apex talents talent, that at the bare minimum 1/4 of our globals are hand of gul’dan (6 hand of gul’dans) in 25 seconds. This seems completely unreasonable when accounting for haste values and having a 3 shard hard cap on hand of gul’dan
It doesn’t feel particularly cool to have an apex talent be such a high skill cap talent when our tyrant is already super high skill cap. It makes our rotation super stressful, for nearly 30s (our pre ramp for tyrant, then our “post” ramp for dominion of argus, when the stress should be focused on us building our Tyrant solely.
Couples solutions
- Reduce the amount of hand of gul’dan’s needed to summon greater demons
- Make it summon 2 greater demons baseline passively as a huge payoff for summoning tyrant
- Try to make the apex talent more conducive to a huge payoff for tyrant and refocus the design elsewhere.