My complaints about playing demonology

Classes Warlock
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before i get started. my credibility is ive played demo since mop. thats it. nothing special. just been playing this as my main for to long.
here’s my complaints.

Having to move = losing dps.
This boils down to shadowbolt being demonology main generator, a easy fix would be making doom baseline so at the very least we can get something. it feels like i am a turret just trying to survive until demonic core comes so i can move. which sometimes feels like it never comes. leading to my next complaint

demonic core: feast or famine.
nothing is more painful than imploding 10 ish imps only to receive zero demonic cores. yet sometimes i get so many demonic cores that i cant spend enough of them, which leads me to my next complaint

MAX 4 DEMONIC CORES???
why? why is this a thing? why cant it be 8. why cant it be 10? i can only wonder how many wasted demonic cores ( which means wasted Grim fel cd’s ) have i wasted being capped eternally inbetween mobs.

Fel-gaurd
The felgaurd is something i personally have mixed feelings over. its a key component of demo’s rotation and spec yet at the same time it is the most delicate little sunflower in the world. i’m not saying the felgaurd dies constantly yet its noticeable and that Fel domination is the only saving grace to a quick resummon. which leads to my next complaint

fel domination/4.4 second summon time.
with the cd ( fel domination ) i can resummon. no problem. YET WHEN ITS DOWN, HOW CAN I EVER RECOVER? 4.4 sec cast time. yet as per complaint number 1, when movement happens. we suffer. nothing feels worse then attempting to summon a felgaurd without fel domination only for the cast time to be completely wasted because the boss is putting fire under neath you. give us a option to soulburn summon for a 2 shard for 1 quick resummon.

Guillotine.
Just make it hit the target we are currently targeting. the ground effect gets stuck in trees. gets stuck in random air effects ( halls of infusion ice lady ). for a end tree talent this thing is so janky. ontop of that the tanks always move out of it anyway.

Soul stone. MAKE IT INSTANT CAST
everyone is faster than us brezzing. let us have soulburn effect soulstone as a 2 for 1 instant b-rez.

Wild imps.
back in wod/legion ish time period the wild imps would spawn next to the adds so we could use demonic wrath ( a channeled aoe ). i want that imp spawn on target to return because i can visibly watch my imps be stuck in a cast cycle of trying to cast, being out of range, moving forward, casting again at max range, only for the tank to move forward, creating the circle all over again.

general complaints

umbral blaze : why 15%? cant it be 100%?

Pact of the imp mother : dear lord i can only wonder what we did to that imp mother for her to hate us so much. rarely ever comes into play. let us summon an imp mother every 2 mins or something that vomits imps. the current pact of the imp mother being so far down the talent tree is insanity as it currently is.

bring back thalkiel consumption : the artifact ability thalkiel consumption was strictly speaking a cherry ontop of the rotation.

green fire : whats the point as a demo lock with green fire? wheres our green fire love? back in mop we had atleast something with fel infused metamorphisis but now? nothing. solution. dreadstalkers turn into those ghost fire demon skeleton dogs. imps are lil fel elementals. Fel gaurd into fel lord. idk. just ideas.

Sacrificed souls : make it baseline. just a end tree talent not being picked ever

thats it. hope something heppens for demo next expansion.

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Allow me to be the one that says…

Until implosion is your damage, demo will be scuffed.

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i thought i posted this in the druid section cause of you xD

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Having Shadow Bolt castable whilst moving would help, especially given that Shadow Bolt adds so little to our damage profile.

I’ve never had a problem keeping the Felguard alive except sometimes at the beginning of a new expansion or if he gets ganked by mobs or when some A***hole trains a pack of mobs onto him.

Preaching to the choir with this one. The baseline summon should be halved to 2.2.
4.4 seconds is bad for all Warlocks, but for Demo it’s crippling.

It’s the same problem with Bilescourge Bombers, having a glyph that casts them on your target would fix this problem.

This is a tank problem,not a Blizzard problem.

More likely, as suggested by Kalamzi, using Soulburn to make Soulstone instant cast would be the ideal solution.

I’m not sure what the problem is here as it seems more like a problem with your positioning rather than game mechanics.

Green fire you can get from a quest, though a purplish shadow flame better suits Demo, IMO. I’m really just waiting on the ehanced/flashy version for the Felguard/Wrathguard, like the other demons got.

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mythic + often kills it.
halls of infusion last boss, first boss, and third boss felgaurd dies.
first boss with the orbs.
third boss with the general circle damage
final boss with the tank not going into melee, pet getting whacked instead.
other examples i cant think of but thats the one that kinda spawned that complaint.

and as a master summoner what world would a master summoner take equal time to summon compared to another seperate master.

cant blame the tanks cause they gotta move. blizzard problem.

regardless of positioning. its insanity that imps are stuck in that cycle of moving forward to cast only for the cast to be canceled.
chaos bolt dosnt do that.

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They can make our imp shoot out green fire bolts and replace the purple part of demon bolt with green so it shoots out a red-green bolt.

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id take anything over nothing tbh.

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This is part of being a caster. Positioning and pre-planning is part of the skill expression and making Shadowbolt insta-cast would take away from that considering the demonic core economy is still relatively high. I do however think Soul Strike should be more accessible instead of competing directly with Vilefiend.

Demonic cores are reliable still and Shadow Bolt fills the gaps well. Again, the shard generation for Demonology is not a glaring issue with the spec.

This is another skill expression aspect that you are pointing to as a problem. Using or pooling cores depending on Dreadstalker expiration and imp procs while weaving in Power Siphon is the only engagement the spec has outside of Tyrant cycles and doubling the cap would break the importance of those decisions in rotation.

I rarely experience the Felguard dying in dungeons or open world so I don’t understand this sentiment. There were some issues early in the season in a couple of the dungeons like the halls of infusion orbs targeting them, but those were resolved. Needing to re-summon because of transitions is an issue but Fel domination resolves that fairly easily.

I dislike ground target effects in general, especially damage over time, so I do agree with this. Any ability that requires a macro to reduces the number of actions to use it is bad design, imo (blizzard, Rof, earthquake, guillotine etc).

Soulstone has dual function as it can be applied to a living target, so i don’t really think it needs changing. Adding instant cast or reduced cast to soulburn would be ok i guess.

I don’t find this to be an issue as the imps are getting sent with implosion very often in dungeons. This may be a problem is when the group is steamrolling and the tank is sprinting through the dungeon, but that’s not what casters or their casting pets are balanced around.

The ability is just a passive damage increase with some window dressing. Id rather it just be replaced with something interesting along with a number of other zero-interest nodes in the tree. Making it 100% doesn’t make it more exciting as a talent as the damage would just be nerfed into the ground to compensate for the uptime.

How would this fit into anything that the demo rotation is currently built around? It doesn’t generate or consume any shards, create cores, summon a demon, etc. Seems like a relatively uninteresting option to add to the tree. Consuming a bit of the demon’s life has no connection to the tree or spec as a whole other than a bit of flavor.

If it had some interaction with other skills or nodes, i would be all for a 30-45 second agility to change up the rotation a bit between tyrants. Decimating Bolt offered nice synergy with Power Siphon and other nodes and would be a more interesting option in my opinion.

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feels more like its a demo specific problem compared to all other casters who generate and use resources.
i cant think of a single spec/class that dosnt have a dot or a instant cast ability that generates there rescource when in a movement impactful situation besides demo.

the core generation requires hog or dreadstalkers casts. which both require shadowbolt casts. the generation becomes problematic when the high movement encounter comes into play.
the famine comes in when the implosion yeilds nothing, have you experienced this before? maybe im not imploding at the correct amount of imps yet at 10-12 imps ive seen a goose egg situation.

if thats the only engagement, boost it up a bit to 6.
after nether portal its easily over capped at the 4 limitation.

braken hide, on the way to the treemouth.
halls of infusion. 1st boss, 3rd boss, last boss.
legacy of tyr stone golems, 3rd boss.
neltharions lair, before the worm boss trash packs.
Freehold. aoe from the monkies. big stomp from the ettens.

what macro are you using?

theres a curse i seem to be running across where i put it on the tank/healer. they both dont die at all throughout the dungeon. yet everyone else besides them dies. needing my brez.

imhtgo these imps cannot be considered pets. they gotta be considered resource consuming main damage spells just like chaos bolt. range should never truly be a issue for something so key for our spec.

im into it. maybe even melded baseline into hog completely. its a meteor after all.

previously, demonic tyrant talent reign of tyranny consumed hp of the demons to impower its damage. now its a bit different.
the way it plays into the rotation would be with nether portal. after a meaty NP a thalkiel consumption would power punch a bosses face. outside of NP would be the vile fiend, felgaurd, demonic tyrant on a meaty imp army.
im into the idea of it consuming shards aswell. something that powerful would be reasonably consume something.

was that the one we used in wod during meta to consume demonic energy? memory is hazy.

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I just don’t feel hindered by movement in Demo because of how abundant cores are. I think Shadow Bolt needs more built in interactions in the tree in general, but i don’t necessarily agree that it needs to be instant. If that were the route, they should just make Soul Strike a direct replacement for it and remove the cooldown. Soul Strike at least synergizes with some of the felguard talents.

I am just sharing my experience that I haven’t had these issues with the pet dying. Maybe i am just subconsciously not noticing it since Fel Dom exists. I could also be on the lighter side of mythic+ participation though as i just grab KSH and then fill groups as the guild needs.

I use an @cursor macro for any ground target ability. It bypasses the need to click the location where you want the ability to drop and is a huge QoL for spammy abilitie like rain of fire.

Im not saying that the dual function is a guaranteed benefit in all scenarios, but it is a unique bonus to our res that others don’t have. I quite enjoy not being the res bot in raid too, simply because others have an easier time getting it off.

Fair enough. They could also just make their bolts instant and increase their GCD to keep the timings the same. I just don’t see it as a pressing issue.

The health scaling of Demonic Consumption was problematic for a lot of reasons. Reign of Tyranny basically solved those. Having another ability that functioned like decon is highly unlikely. If Thalkiel were to be something that functions like how Tyrant works with Reign of Tyranny, that would be interesting but we already have a ton of damage packed into tyrant windows.

Decimating Bolt was the covenant ability from necrolords in Shadowlands. It beefed up your next three demonbolts and forced them to crit which synergized extremely well with Sac Souls and Power Siphon, and gave a mini burst window between 1.5 minute tyrants. The ability wasn’t perfect but it added some interest outside tyrant, which i think is what the spec massively needs right now.

It also fed into Fel Covenant/Balespiders burning core, but that has since been removed based on majority community reception. I think it just needed to be reworked into something better that helped Shadow Bolt feel more relevant in the tree, but it is what it is.

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that cov ability does sound pretty cool.
i was NF like everyone else dancing with haste from that fairy.

kiljadens cunning i think should be baseline across all three specs. with the penalty of movement being 50 ish percent instead of the 20 it once was.

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Personally, I knew the writing was on the wall for me with Demo the minute the new talents came out and so many of them buffing the Felguard (ie: boring passives). Then with the rework, even more boring passive talents were implemented. That, and the complete ignoring of Nether Portal as the main culprit to Demo’s issues, I gave up on it ages ago.

Between the Demo changes, Destro this tier being reliant on C:DF (which further punishes a spec already punished by movement, feels awkward in the rotation conflicting with keeping up the Madness talent, and was only ever a fun talent when paired with Cataclysm), I’ve opted to go Affliction …

… but honestly might be too old to keep up with all the DoT refreshing and may just relegate the lock back to an alt and main the mage again next season.

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glad to see more affy

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Yeah in keys I’m having a ball with it (or did … kind of parked the Lock for the season cause he’s hit max ilvl). In raids though I’m finding grandpa (I’m 50 lol) might be too old for the constant DoT refreshing.

Still having more fun with Aff than either of the other two specs … which is unfortunate because at the end of SL/Start of DF I was happy playing all 3.

Also really concerned for Demo once the trinket combos go away as that seems to be where all the big damage is coming from. At least if C:DF goes away after this season Destro might be an option again.

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