State of demonology

Classes Warlock
1

After playing demo exclusively on my warlock in all forms of content since my return to the game in season 2 of bfa after nearly 2 years off the game. I don’t understand how we aren’t receiving any meaningful changes in shadowlands.

The current iteration is littered with issues. As much as I miss meta form I would be fine with it being gone if what we have become was not such an abomination. If we can’t get a complete revamp the very least we could get would be some meaningful changes to have the rotation feel more rewarding and flow better in pve and pvp.

There should be more bang than just tyrant. Imps are fine, but the entire spec shouldn’t revolve around them no matter what build you pick (3 minute portal talent is unplayably bad). The damage is very inconsistent having to move out of a mechanic or getting interrupted can completely ruin your ramp. At the very least hand and tyrant should not have a cast time when we literally have nothing else and the pet AI is already awfully stupid.

I won’t go into every issue, but seriously how is this fine.

32 Likes
2

I think its because they honestly have no idea what they are doing with the spec.

Mop was a unique almost flawless beast… WoD Demo was different but had its moments as a mix between demon and burst with the last version of meta… even Legions non meta design was enjoyed by a lot of Demos with thak burst… but now its… tyrant or bust unless your running some odd PTP EU build etc.

I enjoy current demo depending on my comp or enemies comp… etc… it has its moments… it has a lot of issues but I fear that since they have no idea what they are doing it would only end poorly.

Or… they could just return it to MoP style play… and I think the entire Demo community would turn a blind eye and say all the new abilities are fresh and innovative.

Edit; Another suggestion for the spec is to make zoo build a actual thing by increasing damage by Dreadstalkers and Vilefiend or allowing pets to actually proc things. The fact Vilefiend is fire line is insanely useful… except the fact his damage is negligible.

24 Likes
3

I have a more favorable opinion of Demonology, but I also believe it has a few problems:

First the core aspects that I believe are problematic.

Doom: Even with the talent, Doom becomes a weaker version if compared to the BFA version, it does not generate a soul shard, it gets overwritten by Venthyr Convenant ability, it deals very little damage and now, if the Doomguard exist (I still haven’t seen proof of it) it can just kill your party members as it’s a not enslaved Doomguard.

Corruption: This is very much in the opposite direction of the current Demonology identity, it does not have any form of interaction with the rest of the kit and has a slow castime of 2 seconds, breaking the flow of Soul Shards/ Summoning of Demons.

06 Seconds to summon a demon: This is a huge problem and the class as a whole should push for this to not see the light of the day, it will kill M+, it will kill PvP and it will make leveling a terrible experience.

Then the Talents:

Power Siphon: I am a firm believer we should have talents that allow the Warlock to gain power by sacrificing demons, this spell is a good exemple of it but its weaker if compared to the passiveness of DCalling, I believe baking Shadow’s Byte effect on it would not only increase the power of the Warlock itself but allow some early burst.

From the Shadows: This spell follow the same idea of demons empowering the warlock, but its poorly implemented, affecting only 2 spells (Hand of Guldan and Demon Bolt) and not enough to be worth of use, this talent has no salvation in my opinion, it`s a boring talent, a weak talent and the slot should be used for something better (maybe something that sacrifices imps to empower the warlock too?)

Vile Fiend: I like this talent, it allows diversity in the types of demons you summon, sadly it’s a very weak demon, I believe it’s a demon balanced around being extended by demonic Tyrant, making the talent itself very weak outside of Tyrant windows.

My suggestions for it: Either increase the CD and power of it, or remove it from the Tyrant duration extending effect (similar to how Tyrants wont extend other tyrants) and lower the Vile find Cooldown.

Inner Demons: This talent is very interesting, but suffer from a poorly scalling of haste, allowing imps and random demons spawn to scale with haste would make it on par with Soul Conduit and Felguard.

Sacrificial Souls: This spell shouldn’t have been nerfed on BFA, and the damage bonus of it should be reverted, but I think it’s a important talent on the design of “Talents that empower the warlock x Talents that allow more demons x Talents that empower existing demons”.

Nether Portal: I don’t like this spell very much, but I know who love it and I know it deals a lot of damage (even on BFA the diference of it and DeCon is not all that high) I wish it could be easier of use, and punish less the warlock for having to move due to mechanics of for being interrupted.

7 Likes
4

Yeah I think they’re actually clueless as for what to do with the spec. And the changes they do implement either just remain irrelevant (I.e. doom talent in shadowlands) or aren’t enough

1 Like
5

Keep demo as the pet summoning thing. You start off with imps, but you sacrifice them to empower yourself, slowing becoming more and more demonic. You start summoning more and more powerful demons, sacrificing them to empower yourself and then BOOM YOU HIT META AND YOUR THE DEMON

Rinse and repeat
I view this as like you can play around with different “phases” and prolong one or ramp into big burst, etc.

Its just an idea. The main part of the gameplay is already there. Just get rid of tyrant as the CD, make it building up “chaos” like old demo and hit a nice big cd where you start firing off chaos wave and such. The current iteration of “CD” based demo has no room for error. The gameplay is super unforgiving.

6 Likes
6

I’m kind of with the others when they say they don’t quite know what the deal with demo is.

Like… I get destro and affliction. Their niche is 1 or 2 person burst and spreading dots/weird burst respectively.

But demo is… what exactly? Its not really pet management as bar exploding imps most of that is just part of the rotation. It’s not pet choice because wow… there is only a single pet you can use. I… guess it’s cleave damage but… there’s. a lot of classes who do it better without heavy ramp up.

6 Likes
7

Blizzard wants demo to be a master summoner spec but they only give us a few demons to summon, and most of them don’t do anything special, they’re just damage.

They can probably do things like add some sort of empowerment for summoning specific demons, not just generic damage dealing, but some utility. Example would be like summon vilefiend can grant the caster increase movement speed for X seconds, Summon dreadstalker can apply a bleed on a target, add a summon jailer spell can like root or slow a target for a few seconds.

What I would like to see is a more smoother transition between ramp up and burst. Demo just has a long ramp up and the window to get your burst out is small because you gotta get your tyrant out before the imps lose energy. One way I think is to not make tyrant the centerpiece burst of the spec but instead make demonbolt the demo’s nuke. Possibly give it a short cd like 10 seconds. So imagine a demo lock just summoning a streamline of demons then nuking you with a demonbolt, the more you let the demo freecast the more powerful demonbolts your gonna eat. That way a free casting demo can acutally pump out respectable damage during burst cd downtime.Then demo’s burst, can be something like cd that increases the damage of your demonbolt and imp swarm.

And also thinking they could rework demo’s mastery to something like Increase the damage you do by X% per demon you have summoned, instead of the plain and boring increase the damage of your demons by X%

7 Likes
8

I don’t think there is a problem only having a few demons. The problem is none of them are very good. They are only good for the one utility ability they have. I mean Implosion trait have termed imps into disposable oddities. I actually think the spec is in a good place, and is fun. I also don’t think from a game play stand point the spec makes much sense.

They should look at other games that have really done the “summoner” class well. Mages in Everquest, and Summoners in Final Fantasy XI. The pets need to be made more powerful, and actually “summoning” them in combat should be a main feature of the spec.

The Demonology Warlock should lose individual power, and his strength should be 65/35 in favor of the pet. With the lock casting spells that augment and boost the pet’s power and damage.

Right now Felguard is the only pet worth summoning. The rest of the pets are a massive dps decrease but their utility isn’t powerful enough to really justify summoning. If you are going to run Mythic you are better off forming a group around the Demo in such a way that they are not needed for interrupts than to have them summon felpuppy.

You would think the Azerite traits would have worked in a way to allow pet diversity. That simply didn’t happen…

9

What they need to do is give some sort of synergy between the pets and us the caster, it should not be just a bunch of washed out dots, they should do something to the master when they are casted. Currently we only have our cd and the dreadstalkers which just gives us 2 charges after they dissapear, that’s it.

They also need to remove this whole turret caster mentality that everything needs a cast. Our spells don’t do that much damage for every one of them to be a cast. I’m not sure how that can be balanced out but I’m sure someone who’s being paid to do this should be able to figure something out.

Even most of our covenants are casted. Not even sure why we are still stuck at starting at 3 sou lshards.

Doom servers no purpose currently even the talent version of it is pointless, same goes for corruption. And adding abilities in Torghast that effect those pointless abilities does not fix that issue either.

Could just give us vilefiend baseline with an istant cast and then maybe i start feeling like my specc is actually on it way to becoming some portion of what a combat summoner is.

The way the spec mechanics work seems clunky at the least. And like some have said just no clear direction of what they wanna do with it when it comes to how it functions. Adding corruption with a cast and doom the way it currently is which might as well be a blank spot on the talent tree, is all pretty telling of that.

1 Like
10

This sounds like exactly the ideas they should be having for most of our spells.

11

I definitely agree with you about far to many spells to cast. Dreadstalkers should really be instant cast, and the pvp talent should just be baseline to the spec. It cost shards, they only last 12secs, and has a rather beefy cast time? I am cool with hand having a cast time but considering none of the specs spells really do much damage on their own I don’t see why this spell needs a cast time.

6 Likes
12

Demo needs its ramp up time cut in half… to many long casts that are just there so you can get enough shards to cast something longer so you can start your rotation… and then its all dead or the raid target switch’s and you have to start over.

Dreads should be instant all the time, Demo needs a silence not tied to a pet… well all warlock specs needs that but its real big deal for demo as so much is tied to the felguard. We need a base line instant cast damage spell that’s cool down reliant not soul shard reliant. Just for qol out in the world to tap targets.

Thing is with the new Torgast coming in shadowlands the ramp up time will make demo one of the least welcomed. Every thing I’ve seen points to Demo not being able to keep up with pull after pull… at least unholy DK’s look good

8 Likes
13

The succubus, shadow bolt build felt good imo.

The ability to use a different demon and feel pressured to get a lot of demons out to shove big shadow bolts into them

14

Part of the problem is the warlock cool down (all of them). Having a major CD as a guardian, while being thematic, can feel really frustrating sometime. Having it be our heaviest hitting minion when specced (30%-40% of my dmg done depending on fight) and tying minion extension to him is weird. Its a pet that wants me to kill off my minions to make him stronger, and extend them at the same time. As a guardian we cant really redirect him. As a cool down, he takes so long to build into (build 5, hog, buid 5 and dreadstalkers, build 5 and implosion for buff, build 5, hog, SS, hog, wait a sec and tyrant for a full haste buff tyrant with at least 2 sets of 3 imps and extending dogs). Have to move or get a mechanic and my dps drops bad.

ok time to hate me with my dream of demonform again.
It is a bit vexing how unflexiable he is. I would like to see him either replaced with something that lets us control our power better or converted into something more flexible. Take the demon extension off of him and give it to us as a separate ability (just an aura with a CD that prevents time/energy decay for our demons) and take off the talent for tyrant. I understand what we were going for, but it feels so weird to set up.

Further more I remain kind of bitter that we have not gotten a true new demon for a long time (i guess you can count dogs and tyrant?) We are supposed to be some of the most powerful mortal warlocks, and i just throw handfuls of imps at GODS. Give me stronger demons. 5% on hog to also summon X,Y, or Z demon like in the guldan fight. It just feels like we have so much to work with and we utilize nothing, not even the aspect that we are a MASTER of portals. just open a portal and let a big demon fist punch them.

Sorry for the ramble, demo since '04. I have feelings.

9 Likes
15

I’d like a talent that gives you a second all the time demon similar to the BM talent, maybe to replace the imps, vilefiend would be fine. I’d also like implosion replaced with demonwrath and the whole imp dynamic removed. hand of guldan could empower your demons instead of making imps, and when the stacks dropped you’d have your demonic core casts. some talent changes would be nice too, grimoire of Supremacy replacing felguard with something bigger would be awesome. that’s all I really don’t like about demo, the imps and lack of permanent or bigger demons.

1 Like
16

I find that the main issue with me with Warlocks in general, your damage is tied to your long CD and you feel like trash without it. They have felt pretty bad for me in dungeons too so I just dropped the class and went with a melee for all of BFA.

1 Like
17

Ok, so today I raided as Demo in mythic Nylotha because Destro just bores the crap out of me…

My problem is we really to heavily on essences and traits, we need a lot of skills baked in to even make the spec viable…

I just can’t see the direction they have in mind currently for Demo in Shadowlands, we are a huge ramp spec, remove the ramp??, what are we? I feel aswell call dreadstalkers proc to be instant cast shouldn’t be a talent, it should be baseline.

I’m honestly worried for Shadowlands for Warlock as a hole.

Edit: my biggest wish is taking Warlocks back to MoP, but honestly I have better odds dating a super model then that ever happening :cry:

I’ve always said Demo should be the BM version of hunter, give us 2 Felguards, the can be tied to the same skill, soul strike sends the both at the target… you really don’t feel like the master of demons currently…

6 Likes
18

It feels like they are afraid for us to have fun. It honestly does. I am weary about 2 pets. Id love it, but i dislike guardians enough as it is. I honestly think they should give US more command, like being a skill to keep pets around instead of the tyrant. We are very trait heavy and also very CD required, can you imagine using tyrant without the shard refund? Thats how alpha is atm.

4 Likes
19

So much this… =/

20

Implosion and Baleful invocation definetly need to be baked into the spec, 100%, theirs literally no arguement against this…

I still cannot see why Blizzard themselves with internal testing havnt seen how reliant we are in these two traits…

I really do question that any of the devs actually play warlock on a competitive level, doing high end raiding, M+.