This is a follow up from my other May 14th thread about the Alpha 5 Demo changes. Overall I think they’re very positive, but one thing is for certain:
Demon Bolt is not going back to how it is in DF.
Now they’ve added a lot of good changes to Vilefiend and cores should flow pretty nicely if your main concern is your “medium” demons. However, the Soul Shard economy is definitely going to be down. That means that Felguard and Stalker/Fiend builds will be fine, leaving only one group out to dry: HoG/imp builds
If the rapid DB dies, Hand of Guldan also does by proxy. This means for the players who mathed out their shards perfectly to get an army of imps and massive implosions are going to have an impossible time making this build work going forward. This is unfortunate, as I know for some of you that’s the best part of Demo.
Since we’re holding ground on Cores, I propose a different route: Rework HoG to be a viable build without cores.
This is my idea:
-Have HoG itself on a 8-ish second cooldown, summons one imp (maybe 1-2), andcosts no SS.
-Talent node: HoG now costs 2 soul shards, but summons an Empowered Imp in addition to a guaranteed 2 regular ones
-Talent node: On death, Empowered imps will split into two regular imps
-Talent node: On death, regular imps have a 60% chance to refund a Soul Shard.
-Talent node: Empowered Imps attacks have a chance to decrease the CD of HoG by 1 second
Obviously, not a game designer and these are all spitballs, but overall idea being that HoG is a CD, non-resource consuming move that players can now talent into to create an imp army without having demonic cores be spammable.
What are your guys thoughts on this? How would we best preserve HoG going into our new low-core economy?