Demo should be a top dps spec in pve every tier. The whole idea behind demo is to be overpowered and have the ability to feel like a boss in a raid setting. The devs have ignored demo for too long and it’s time for them to show us some respect.
Right now we feel like a wet noddle that occasionally uses drain life to help the healers out.
Im enjoying Demo right now could it use buffs and QOL changes sure but i don’t want them to over tune us to a point where next balance pass we get nerfed to the ground. I prefer to be in the middle and be competitive instead of being very top and then get the nerf bat to the face.
This!
I’d rather they just give Demonology maybe slight rework on skills and tuning, perhaps 10-15% aura buff keep us middle of the pack.
I don’t want to be ridiculously OP, I just want to be a viable choice in high end content, without feeling I’m letting people down not going Affliction/Night Fae or be exiled from content as not playing the best pick.
I feel like Demo only needs a few tweaks here and there. I hope whatever they do they keep the core gameplay because it’s the most fun spec in the game.
I… i mean i want to do competative DPS, so i guess i agree with what you’re saying but the way you’re saying it just makes me cringe.
I don’t want to be OP, you don’t want to be OP- because then everybody and their dog is going to re-roll to my spec and we’re going to (when we eventually get tuned) get over-nerfed.
Honestly if i could only get one change to the spec, i would want imp energy to gtfo and for imps to function basically like UH ghouls, they have a fixed duration lifespan and cast faster based on my haste (with or without snapshotting i could live with either). Tyrant would function the same as it does now in relation to extending imp duration and consumption. I don’t care if they want to nerf the damage a bit but… just knowing in the back of my mind that getting haste- my best stat- also sorta passivel reduces the duration of my imps (even if it levels out to the same 6-8 imps out at a time on average) sorta chafes me.
While I understand the perspective here, I actually personally prefer the energy mechanic and just wish they would change the resource from energy to some kind of ammunition. Energy implies it regenerates, but without the energy imps become worse in pvp because you can just hide until they despawn and you lose the QoL in pve of being able to roll your imps over from pull to pull.
Changes I would make to demo would be…
Inevitable demise baseline for all lock specs. Demo builds stacks with primary demon damage so VW and felguard can build multiple stacks per swing on AoE. In addition to it’s other effects drain life generates 1 soul shard over it’s duration per 10 ID stacks consumed.
Hounds made instant cast with a 10-12ish% chance on either primary demon attacks or shadowbolt (not sure which. Don’t want to pack too much into shadowbolt) to reset their cooldown. Talent for instant dogs chance to increase the reset chance. Also toyed with the idea of having hounds generate shards instead of spending them kind of like blade of justice but didn’t want to turn demo lock into caster-ret.
Hand of gul’dan damage changed from up to X damage to X damage per soul shard spent. Probably make this instant.
Doom talent and functionality changed. It becomes a passive effect applied by shadowbolt. It has no duration, instead your primary demon’s basic attacks buuld stacks of doom, at 5 stacks doom detonates dealing damage and increasing the damage of the warlock and all demons by a small amount. Alternatively swap so the demon applies and shadowbolt and demonbolt build the stacks.
A talent row dedicated entirely to demon commander summons. This could mean a few different things. My favorite (and probably more controversial) version of this idea would be making the row Tyrant, fel-lord, and abyssal, Tyrant would be the strongest single target demon commander, Abyssal would be AoE, and fel-lord would be a mix. This version is mainly to save keybind space.
The other version I like would be scrapping making them talents and just have Tyrant and either abyssal or fel-lord both being baseline but sharing cooldowns.
As for our defensives and utility on the other hand.
Demonic circle:teleport renamed demonic recall. Sends you to whichever gateway is furthest from you. Cooldown reduced. I recognize that this could have a negitive impact instead of a positive one and is mostly just to reduce the amount of “pre-fight setup” warlocks need to do.
Resolve cooldown reduced substantially or casting circle made baseline.
Baseline interrupt.
My fix for Demonology.
The pvp vers bonus doesn’t affect pets at the moment, it’s a huge Dps loss
Absolutely. We only need some minor tweaking, the spec feels awesomely smooth with Wilfreds as well. Maybe some cooldown adjustment.
Checking the rankings in CN today are a completely different story than what Wowhead posted. Demo has such a small representation (78) at the time of posting that article that it’s difficult to really see where it stands.
Its middle of the pack as of today on Warcraft logs. Will be interesting to see where it ends up with higher ilvl.
Part of the big problem with people marrying themselves to logs for checked how the specs are doing.
Using this season as example, all the people in the first batch of logs will run Aff because they are pushing hard and need all that raw numbers. The idiot crew follows blindly proclaiming that because the world first are all using Aff and nothing else on wf runs that demo and destro can’t do anything So nobody really plays demo or destro and their numbers drop further in logs and that becomes more “reasons” that the specs ‘suck’. It’s a big circle of bloody stupid.
I play demo and it does kinda suck. The only time I feel like I really do anything is in torghast, after a few powerups
I’m not saying it’s not underperforming. Just that it’s dumb to point to the overall logs all the time without accounting for the social aspect a which majorly impact those logs. Demo doesn’t put out enough to make it highly competitive in high end content at any area of wow pve or pvp.
Neither is it a lost cause though. There isn’t many people playing it in a lot of situations so it ends up looking worse than it is, same as destro and neither are fantastic to start with. And Aff ends up looking better than it is and it’s already good. But if 1/3 of the warlock population played each spec with roughly the same spread of skill levels in each spec we’d probably see those numbers much closer to each other.
But that won’t happen because monkey see monkey do.
True. Sorry, misunderstood
I hope torghast is a playground for devs to see the powers that people pick up to help drive ideas for the spec.
More health for me and my demon
Hand of guldan costing health
High based health regeneration
Multiple tyrants
All numbers can be tweaked but I would like to see stuff cost health, and for us to have a high base health pool and base regen.
Warlocks to me are about getting as much power as possible even with the sacrifice; in this instance health.
Tyrant needs to be instant cast also.
It’s been fun in Torghast so far
I hope they use it to learn some stuff.
My first hope for a demo/destro buff is make corruption instant cast. It’s pointless with a cast.
Tyrant really should be instant.
To make us the single target focus the bigger change I’d push is make Doom baseline and only one target at a time with a damage boost. Give Hand a spread corruption talent in it’s place.
All of these wouldn’t break the current covenant utilities or legendaries. Wouldn’t be crazy broken damage either.
I do like the idea of having some spells cost health.
I like the specific idea of soul shard consuming spells being able to sub in health for missing soul shards if you don’t have enough. That kind of high risk, self-destructive gameplay seems very thematic to warlock and it would be fun to be able to go “I don’t have the shards, but I need to chaos bolt now” and burn 2-3% max health per missing shard instead. Just enough cost to be mostly safe to sneak in one or two here or there but dangerous to push too hard.
Could also have the interesting effect of changing the perception of warlocks being a combo point class, to one where their big spells cost health and they build and spend soul shards to mitigate the health loss.
That would actually be amazing. It would make for a much more interesting gameplay than the current build/spent for both demo and destro.
Just saw a ilvl 200 shadow priest beat a 212 demo lock on a boss.
More than just a tweak is needed.