It was hard to master but once you mastered it, then it felt amazing and super rewarding. I had some of the most fun Iâve ever had in wow doing WoD challenge modes as Demo.
At first it was hard but once you learned the spec then you naturally just went in and out of meta as needed based on rotation and situation. it was also not ideal to try to prolong meta at the cost of the flow of the rotation.
I donât recall the nerfs specific to the mechanic but in the later half of WoD blizz nerfed Demo super hard because they didnât want people to play it because they wanted to make room for demon hunters and the new (greatly inferior IMO) demo.
I firmly believe if they brought Pandaria/WoD Demo back without any changes at all it would fit in fine and even be one of the best feeling specs in the game. They never will though and that greatly saddens me.
Honestly it was amazing. The way it worked was that all the spells that would build up Demonic Fury would turn into Demonic fury spenders once you enter Meta.
I had my mouse wheel click configured to enter Meta or exit Meta, with all my spells macroâd on the 1 2 3 4 5 keys with control (context: I am a lefthanded mouse user but use wasd1234 for my rotation and movement with my right hand, idk donât ask).
It was great because you can just build up and spend at the intervals you wanted. Say you were in a raid coming up on a need for burst at 20% health of the boss and youâre currently at say 24%, youâd let yourself hover between 60-80% max Demonic Fury, stance dancing back and forth, that way you have ample fury to just burn through once you truly need that burst.
At the same time back in the day some fights needed a LOT of movement, so youâd take advantage of when you were staying still to build up fury.
So you had Shadowbolt that became Touch of Chaos in Meta, Hand of Gulâdan that became Chaos Wave in Meta, Corruption that became Doom in Meta, and you had Demonic Leap that let you jump to melee range (for Hellfire) and also jump out of melee range.
Also back then youâd have Molten Core procs from imp damage and also continuous reduced cast Soul Fires below 20%.
So from the start youâd have to cast Corruption, stance dance into Meta to cast Doom, stance dance back into caster to cast shadow bolts and Hand of Gulâdan, build up fury, all the while stance dancing back and forth to keep up your Corruption and Doom, and because you remember you never actually want to max out Demonic Fury because thatâs a DPS loss (or at least not for more than a second) you shift back into Meta and spend it all on Touch or Chaos Wave, also remembering that your Molten Core procs empower and reduce the cast time of Soul Fire that is only a caster form ability and they donât stack past 4 so you want to make sure you spend them.
It was amazing, glorious, powerful, majestic, you could just casually walk around in your superior Demon Form at will for a while.
The crap Demon Hunters have now sucks compared to what we had.
Edit: the Preach WoD Demo guide is the best demonstration/explanation
Stance dancing didnât affect GCD if I remember correctly, so you could literally just constantly be dancing back and forth in order to manage your fury at your discretion. Not to mention while in Meta you still had Corruption going which was a DF generator. But the key for me was stance dancing out, getting two quick Molten Core Soul Fires, stance dancing back in.
This depended on how you choose to spend DF. If you chose to cast Soul Fire or specâd into Demon Bolt talent, both would destroy your entire bar in a few casts, but depending on your patch that âmaximizedâ your DPS (changed over the xpac). How long exactly I have no idea, I suppose if you have 1000 Demonic Fury, 6 per second decrease while in Meta, Touch of Chaos costs 40, Corruption is 4 DF per tick, your pet also generated Demonic Fury if I recall correctly, and I believe Doom also when it ticked, you could be in it for a long while, even more if you exclude the stance dancing to get a Molten Core Soul Fire cast (50% + haste modification, thus usually just one 1 second in caster form for another 30 DF).
thank you so much Iâm so grateful. you were of the utmost help.
The reason Iâm asking about this is because i was hoping Blizz would implement similar (if not identical) mechanics to shadow priests voidform because they have fundamentally the same core mechanic.
what do you think you have more experience with the mechanic?
Oh yeah once Legion launched and we got Meta taken away and somehow they split Demo Meta into two, half for the SPriests and half for the Demon Hunters, all of us here in Warlock Land were alternating between sobs and cackles. Made not a LICK of sense.
I actually have a âmain altâ Shadow Priest. I think the problems are the following:
The haste stacking increase makes it so that the mechanics force you to leave Voidform early because from a dev standpoint its necessary to tie the Resource Decay with the Haste increase. I think a solution here is to make Voidform a flat haste increase parallel to how Meta was a flat spellpower increase. That way from a dev standpoint, the Resource Decay can be flat like ours was.
Hell, maybe parallel to how Meta also buffed our armor, yâall can get increased movement speed.
I think lore-mechanics wise SPriests were cornered. Instead of tying Shadow Priests to Cult of Forgotten Shadow and having it be Shadow Ascendant Form or something, they decided to tie it to Void Old Gods and thus Insanity. Thus from the ground up itâs forcibly implied thereâs a â~~kRaZy ~~~ burstâ dyanmic going on. IMHO Shadowform/Voidform is a cool concept but should be rooted in the capacity to control the void, not go insane and sprout tentacles like some Lovecraftian amateur in over his head. Mind you yes the tentacles are cool BUT.
I think having spells change inbetween the two forms thus giving you a REASON to shift in and out of the shadows (thus from a lore perspective, using the void at your discretion, not âgiving into itâ like a noob) as we used to have would breathe new life into the spec. Keep stuff that is AOE AOE and keep stuff that is Single Target Single Target; say Mind Sear within Voidform/Shadowform would remain a channel yes but maybe instead opens a void portal until the target that makes tentacles pop up that does something depending on the dots you have on the targets.
Oh my god, one after my own heart. you need an Alpha key or a dev hotline. your suggestion is so perfect I would literally burst in bliss if blizz implemented it and it is so much easier to balance.
YOU NEED AN ALPHA KEY ASAP!!!
EDIT: I hope you donât mind me linking it to the priest forums the guys need to see it.
It was a fine mechanic with a lot of split decision making involved in addition to some strategical planning on how to best line up damage with procs.
It was a builder spender with the spending taking longer than average. I mostly just used it for AOE, Movement damage and lining up Cooldowns or tricket procs with the Molten Core buff to use soulfire. Also i think i needed to cast it at the start to apply Doom.
There wasnât anything really wrong with it, i did kinda wish that soulfire did more damage inside meta though so it had a bit more of a pop.
Mechanically it would work fine, but the theme was given up to create Demon hunters.
Eh not really. As a Spriest you are fighting to stay in void form for as long as possible. as WoD demo you are building up a slow build up resource and using it when you can get the most out of it and you can cancel it when you no longer need it. Example i need to move, so i will pop meta, get a few instant casts off and pop out so i can continue to save demonic fury for a better occasion.
With that said, they could absolutely turn insanity into a slow build up and void form into a toggle ability. That would give Spriests a lot more control rather than just being on a wild roller coaster whenever they go into void form.
A âmain altâ? See this is what I mean. Give that trash back to Warlocks and Druids. As for lore mechanics, Shadow Priest should of been tied to Dark Naaru and Shadow magic aand the Ethereals. Instead they gave that in a half-way sense to Void Elves (a more tacked on and concession ridden race there has never been.) This is sort of casual neglect is also what many are angry as hell about.
That being that Shadow Priest isnât worth being a main. Period.
You guys need to start to separate lore and mechanics. lore is something and mechanics is another. You can dress up mechanics into different lores by renameing stuff and reskinning the spells.
EX: Boomkin (AstralPower) and Ele/Enh shammys (Maelstrom)
both builder-spender mechanic that is adjusted to fit with the lore/theme of the class.
Didnât play Demo much so it didnât hit me as hard as other Warlocks, but personally I never understood why DH demon form and Demonology demon form couldnât coexist.
Being a Demonology Warlock and able to turn into a Demon makes perfect sense. Okay, you want Demon Hunters to do it. Cool. Demonology still exists though.
On paper I liked the thought of a demon summoning zerg spec, but it felt way too maintenance-y when I got my hands on it. So, I dislike it more than I did previously. I know there are Warlocks out there that enjoy it and thatâs fine.
For whatever reason Demon Hunters seem to get everything handed to them too. They are getting a Mortal Strike passive as an option in PVP. They were already given mana burn, when it was taken away from every other class previously. They were given a group buff in the form of a 5% magic damage increase, where other classes still donât have the buffs they have in MoP. In general they are loaded up with utility that other classes lack now.
I donât know all the internal details, or whether those who work on the DH class have a passion that the Warlock class devs donât, but I canât think of anything other than a lack of passion when I see changes like all Warlock specs getting Corruption (with a cast time if you are not Affliction) and not things like the ability to transform into a demon or abilities like Soul Swap back.
Errr, didnât mean it like that lmao, this was my first toon in 2010 and I am a âdiehardâ warlock. My first alt was a Shadow Priest because I liked the lore a lot.
Agreed on the lore-cornering though; the whole âLovecraftian Amateur In Over His Headâ schtick really is the underlying reason for the crap design imho.
IMHO the problem is as far as The Devs are concerned, all the mechanics/spells/design are rooted in a certain lore/imagination for the class. If that concept isnât Good, and something that resonates with the consensus of players, the design will be Bad/taken badly.
