How dearly I have missed meta and dark apotheosis. I hate demonic tyrant, it has a long delay and is an all or nothing build up rather than a build up and dump of demonic power and cool downs. Pandaria demo was the absolute best. I want that + Demonwrath.
4 Likes
And by extension, Falling Meteor.
Devs in class forums? Bahahahaha oh to be young and naive
1 Like
If meta does come back then I really hope its not as the best option for Demo, or its a pvp talent only.
My biggest hope for Dragonflight is it brings a new philosophy where Demo can get up and running reasonably quickly without such long cast times.
Demo feels like it was designed by raid devs who only see the game through the lens of standing in the same spot and free casting for a period of at least several minutes. Otherwise, players don’t really get to even experience the core fantasy of summoning a demon pet army. Try running a leveling dungeon. Everything will be dead before the demo lock even has their pets up and settled into their rotation.
I wish devs looked at temporary pet summons as more like dots because they’re both a delayed pay off in damage over time. The difference is DoTs are generally instant or very short cast and there’s not usually even more layers of ramp up on top of them.
Pet army specs are usually a popular archetype in RPGs. I love playing Witch Doctor and Necro in D3 and summoner classes in Path of Exile. Difference is in those games the pet armies are functional in just a few quick clicks.
Since Legion the two overhauled specs, Demo and Survival, have consistently been the least two popular specs for the last 6 years. That to me speaks to how turned off players are of the unnecessary layers of ramp up, immobility and long casts of the Demo playstyle.
3 Likes
This is the single biggest issue with the specs that have a lot of ramp up damage. The devs seems to forget that raiding is only a very small part of the game and the vast majority of players spend the vast majority of their time not raiding. If you’re just out world questing, a paladin, hunter, mage, etc would have already killed the mob and moved on in the time it takes a warlock to finish setting up.
2 Likes
This was the major problem with Demo at the start of Legion where we started without any shards at all, its the reason we now start with 3. Still, the lack of mobility is what I believe the real problem is. If we could move whilst casting SB then I think that would improve things dramatically.
Likewise, if instead of Health Funnel we summoned a floating demon that drained our health whilst healing our Felguard at the same rate Health Funnel did thus allowing us to continue casting, that would be a huge QoL change.
While i understand your sentiment regarding ramp up time, and i hate it too, im gonna have to hard disagree with this part of the take. Demo and Survival are part of pure DPS classes - which means if someone isnt playing demo, theyre potentially playing destro or aff instead. if theyre not playing surv, theres a chance theyre playing marks or BM in order to stay ranged (mostly its so they can stay ranged). Demo has been the most popular spec this whole xpac for warlock, followed by destro. Surv is huge now due to its 4p and insane damage in M+ and in aoe/cleave, but its also got 2 range specs to compete with.
added: i do not think open world content is really something that can ever be used as a balancing metric - it’d be great if that game angle is taken into account so the feedback is valid (ramp up is too long) - but usually one of the 3 pillars is used as a balancing arena, and unfortunately open world doesn’t fall under those 3 and I think feeling powerful in a 10 second encounter is important but also is tricky to balance against encounters that last multiple minutes (raid/M+/PVP)
The Bizzard Team seem to not understand the core problem with our cries for Meta to return:
It was the singular, viscerally awesome, spec defining, balls deep incredible ability that turned Demo into this rare thing of joy, power, fun and aesthetic beauty
And then WITHOUT A WORD ripped it away from us and the explanation was “we literally do not care what you want or that we have eviscerated your spec; DH get this TOTALLY UNASKED FOR talent because WE COULDN’T THINK OF ANYTHING and you get to shut up about it”.
Which is utterly terrible community engagement. Hell the parallel as a parent would be You Are A Terrible Parent that crushed your kids love of life just cos.
Thats poor form enough, but the real coup de grace is that we could have been given something equally shiny to take away the bitter disappoint and anger because IMAGINATION - but instead we got imps resource to manage. WTF.
I am still ropable at the lack of care and forethought, poor decision making and dismissive callow community response.
Heck, even let us turn into SPIDER DEMON!!
Anyway, I’ll go clean up the tears of fruitless desire from my desk.
5 Likes
Which is a shame, because it represents the majority of content for many people . Blizz has a lot of years now trying to convince everyone that hardcore raiding and mythic+ and such are the true endgame, while forgetting that those “lazy casuals” who do nothing more strenuous than world quests, Timeless Isle v6.0, farming old content for transmogs, etc, actually make up the majority of players. Pretending they don’t exist when balancing is just negligent.
This right here. They didn’t just take away our favorite toys. They took our toys and made us watch as they gave them to someone else. That people are still made about this six years later should tell you something. If only the devs would actually listen.
4 Likes
Which meta
Cataclysm for me.
thats actually quite a fair argument - while we dont know what the majority of players do, and only bliz does, its probably safe to assume open world goof-arounders are likely a large population. however the question for me remains, how the heck do you actually apply balance to an open world system like that while maintaining it for instanced content. im not saying it SHOULDNT be, i just have no idea how it could be since world content really doesnt have like a set archetype, or logs, or any really actionable data that i can think of (and thats before we talk about external zone power systems applying as well).
I don’t have all the answers either but I think step 1 is: Less focus on long setup to do big burst. Specs where the damage profile is based around semi-infrequent burst phases feel really bad in situations like the open world or dungeon trash where you don’t have time to do the whole song and dance. I want a CD that makes me feel like a god when it’s active, not like crap when it isn’t.
Step 2 is to shrink the item level spread dramatically. The difference between the bottom and top level gear right now is 70 ilevels. The game has so many individual tiers of content difficulty (normal/h/m/+ dungeons, LFR/normal/H/M raids, questionably scaling Torghast layers, etc), each designed around a set level of gear, but that means the minute you step outside your niche you’re noticeably over or undergeared for most other types of content. So now we’re stuck in a world where mythic raiders can mow down Zereth Mortis elite packs and million HP rares like they’re nothing while casuals entering the zone for the first time at ilevel 220 or so get completely destroyed. That would be a much lesser issue if the item level difference between the top and bottom was only 20 or 30.
2 Likes
i agree that backended/windup burst sucks, it turned me off demo completely except it happened to be hilariously OP so i had to play it for progression. but i dont like the gameplay one bit.
i mean if youre comparing a fully geared Mythic main to a character thats 30 illvl lower than the zone is in general, IMO they should be that far apart. If I have had jailer on farm and my character is BiS, then yeah i wanna be a walking apocalypse to anything in that zone because i have effectively beat the game. i think lowering that gap just diminishes that tangible impact. I cant tell if your issue with the situation is fully geared mains are killing rares too fast or the new zone is too high ilvl for brand new characters
so the fans of wrath meta can piss off because you like cata?
mop meta fans don’t have a leg to stand on?
i get you like it. i like it. i liked em all, but meta never is or was one thing. people are already pissed it went away. bring it back and in wrath form and they get happy and you and everyone else is either still pissed or more pissed because they’ll feel mocked by the choice of which meta to resurrect.
thats one of the huge points that everyone misses in this argument. people talk like it was a cohesive thing but it wasn’t and it’s become utterly toxic from a business standpoint to even consider. sure folks want it back now but it’s just a low simmering anger. bring back one form to the exclusion of others and it can (and likely will) boil over and that doesn’t serve any purpose.
much as i love it, wait til the classic. and that’s not even considering the new resource management of warlock shards that simply don’t fit into meta anymore, mandating overhaul of the ability or the class.
the most elegant solution is just to reskin Tyrant as Meta but let’s be honest, that’s a bs answer since it’s pure visual and doesn’t bring back anything anyone ever liked about the ability besides the cool look.
2 Likes
Don’t get me wrong. I agree that there should be a meaningful power gains and that people in mythic BIS should be noticeably stronger than those who don’t raid at all. My issue is that the difference is SO big that it makes the game impossible to balance as a whole. Each individual piece of content is only balanced against itself, rather than the game in general.
So I’m not up on a soapbox waving a Cata Meta flag and starting riots.
I’m saying everyone loved Meta. I enjoyed all of it. Cata was just my personal sweetspot.
I just am gobsmacked and flabbergasted that Blizzard can’t work out a fix. At all. At any level.
Have us turn into the Tyrant instead of Summon it. Or even turn into SPIDER DEMON!! Add some flavour from Wrath/Cata//MoP to the in and out of Meta forms. There’s a squillion things that could be added to the new talent trees to potentially facilitate ALL THREE xpac versions. But Blizzard delivering nothing and being chuffed is just garbage.
If i gave you a dev team and a million dollars would you come up with literally nothing? They have. That’s my issue.
4 Likes
I could write another detailed post explaining why it’s a pointless fight but I don’t think you are even listening. You just want what you want and reality of our situation be damned.
As for me I’ll enjoy all the iterations of demo meta in their classic and hopefully enjoy them refining the most stable format of the spec in retail. Of course this all depends on them actually iterating on it in Df.
Contemporary demo has strong bones but it has been unchanging since bfa launch which also isn’t productive or helpful.
2 Likes