The Demonology Warlock Update Sprint Review:
Product Manager: Alright guys, what do we have next in our PI planning for this upcoming Sprint?
Product Owner: Up next we have the big demonology user stories that the team has been working on!
Product Manager: Fantastic, what have you all been cooking up for the demonology community? I know they’ve been eagerly waiting for new changes.
Product Owner: After receiving feedback from the warlock community, listening to the complaints of our player base, and having beta testers submit valuable information for an extensive period of time before the launch, we came to the conclusion that demonology needs to have their summoned pets slightly modified, talents slightly changed, and we also forgot to turn on a few things from Dragonflight. No big deal.
Product Manager: What do you mean by, “we also forgot to turn on a few things from Dragonflight?”
Product Owner: Well, in the process of us working really hard to make the Paladin class even better than the update we did back in season 2 of Dragonflight, we may have gotten carried away, and forgot to update the demonology warlock talents in The War Within, damage wise of course.
Product Manager: What are you saying specifically?
Product Owner: We launched The War Within without updating the damage for the summoned imps from Hand of Gul’dan, Call Dreadstalkers, Grimoire: Felguard, Doom, Demonic Tyrant, basically all the damaging spells except Shadow Bolt.
Product Manager: How in the hell did only Shadow Bolt get updated?
Product Owner: It slipped in with the affliction tunning. Turns out demonology warlocks cast Shadow Bolts too. Who knew? Just an oversite of an oversite really.
Product Manager: Surely this is only affecting PvP and not PvE, right?
Product Owner: Not really, demonology is sitting pretty low with Augmentation Evokers, but if we revert the changes to Shadow Bolt that were meant for affliction only, Demonology might be the lowest performing damage dealer.
Product Manager: That’s terrible. You mentioned a lot of spells weren’t adjusted, can you elaborate?
Product Owner: If you consider that a set of imps shoot for roughly 11k a shot, times 3 imps, for 5 shots each, that comes out to 165,000 damage.
Product Manager: How is that bad?
Product Owner: That’s about 2.36% of a player’s health pool that has 7,000,000 hit points.
Product Manager: Oh, that is bad. What about the rest of their damage profile?
Product Owner: Call Dreadstalkers comes out to about 25,000 a hit, 8 hits in total per Dreadstalker over 12 seconds, which is 400,000 damage.
Product Manager: There ya go, that’s a bit better than the imps.
Product Owner: Not really, it ends up being roughly 5.71% of a player’s health using 7,000,000 hit points over 12 seconds.
Product Manager: How about Grimoire: Felguard? That has always been demonology’s second largest damage dealing cooldown over the last decade.
Product Owner: Not for this expansion. As a matter of fact we actually reduced the damage that Grimoire: Felguard did so hard from previous expansions that it’s pretty much not being picked by the demonology community at all. We even added a 10% damage increase underneath it in the talent tree to incentivize players, but the demonology players still won’t pick it up and play it.
Product Manager: Wow, I don’t even know what to say to that.
Product Owner: I might as well come clean about Doom right now too.
Product Manager: What’s wrong with Doom?
Product Owner: We may have very intentionally tied doom to Demonbolt, and not Hand of Gul’dan.
Product Manager: You didn’t! This is the third expansion we have had this user story in the backlog.
Product Owner: We did, but for good reason. Hand of Gul’dan is an AOE, and we can’t have AOE spells applying damage over time effects to mobs.
Product Manager: You do know that is exactly how Serpent Sting works for hunters right? Or Blade Storm applying Mortal Wounds to what ever they hit, Ignite with mages, etc…
Product Owner: Precisely! We’re trying to make demonology unique. Oh also we didn’t update Doom for PvP. It’s only doing 50% of what the tooltip says in PvP and doesn’t spawn an imp unless they spec for it.
Product Manager: I am starting to think that the demonology community might not be thrilled with us, but at least demonology has a really good burst damage with Summon Demonic Tyrant.
Product Owner: About that, the tyrant currently hits players like a wet soggy noodle on a hot summer day. If a player uses the new hero talent “Abyssal Dominion” from the new Diabolist Hero Talents, has 2 Dreadstalkers, 1 Charhound, and 6 or more imps, it hits for about 345,000 a shot. This comes out to roughly 4.9% of a players health pool if the player has 7,000,000 hit points.
Product Manager: Are you saying that a super buffed Demonic Tyrant, which has 10 or more Reign of Tyranny stacks, and the new hero talent that buffs its damage by 70%, is only hitting for 345,000 a shot in PvP?
Product Owner: Ya, but again it’s no big deal, the players can line of sight the damage, crowd control the Demonic Tyrant with AOE spells, kick it, or in most melee cases, just kill it.
Product Manager: That doesn’t really sound like its working well at all. Most players just have to hit a button and boom, their big cooldown is active.
Product Owner: Oh, no worries about that. We reduced Demonic Core Procs significantly in this expansion which makes demonology actually have to hard cast its damage. The only way for demonology warlocks to really get to a Demonic Tyrant that does damage is by having 5 soul shards, hard cast the Charhound, get back to five soul shards, have 2 Demonic Core procs, hard cast Dreadstalkers, then Demonbolt with 1 Demonic Core, Hand of Gul’dan, Demonbolt with a 2nd Demonic Core, Hand of Gul’dan, and then cast Summon Demonic Tyrant.
Product Manager: Are you seriously ok with that design?
Product Owner: Ya, of course. This is really balanced game design. If a player wants to interrupt the lock from getting a Demonic Tyrant, all they have to do is interrupt any one of those spells, hit the warlock with a crowd control during the rotation, or, and this is my personal favorite, CC the Demonic Tyrant after its been summoned. This is also assuming the AI doesn’t bug out and the Demonic Tyrant doesn’t just run towards an enemy player and try to hug them without doing damage.
Product Manager: That doesn’t really sit too well with me.
Product Owner: And since we’re on the subject of things left behind, Antoran Armaments is also nerfed by 50% in PVP, and “Bilescourge Bombers” the spell, not the effect, is still doing Shadowlands numbers.
Product Manager: Did you just say Shadowlands, two expansions ago Shadowlands?
Product Owner: Ya, the tool tip for Bilescourge Bombers is currently showing 29,000 damage a tick over 6 seconds. This ends up being about 450,000 damage in six seconds, which comes out to 6.4% of a player’s hit points if they had 7,000,000 hit points.
Product Manager: How did we let their damage get so low with the talent trees in place?
Product Owner: Do you like gambling?
Product Manager: Sorry, what?
Product Owner: This is something the team has been particularly proud about. Instead of adding damage into the talent trees to make damage tuning easy, we actually added talents with chance.
Product Manager: I don’t understand what you mean by that.
Product Owner: Instead of us putting in flat damage increases or guaranteed procs/buffs, we made everything a roll of the dice.
Product Manager: How many talents are impacted by this, “roll of the dice?”
Product Owner: Well there is Imp Gang Boss, Spiteful Reconstitution, Carnivorous Stalkers, Shadow Invocation, Umbral Blaze, Pact of the Imp Mother, and Pact of the Ered’ruin. Not to mention in the warlock tree there is Soul Conduit which we have been using as a place holder for a capstone talent over the past 5 years, give or take.
Product Manager: You’re telling me that they have 7 critical talents that have a “chance” to proc, instead of guaranteed proccing?
Product Owner: Ya, isn’t it great? It really gives you the gambler’s feeling of never knowing what’s going to happen in a fight.
Product Manager: I am amazed by this conversation. Before we start discussing the user stories to untangle this web, is there anything else with demonology you want to bring up?
Product Owner: If we have the capacity for it, we may want to take a look at Immutable Hatred doing 29,000 damage a hit, which comes out to .41% of a player’s hit points. Also the Diabolist Demons are still hitting random targets such as pets and totems, the Diabolist buff is still not being consumed by any other spell other than Hand of Gul’dan, and sometimes doesn’t get consumed by Hand of Gul’dan at all. Also for some reason the char hound is still showing up as a shadow ability, not fire. Demonic Tyrant does shadowflame damage but doesn’t gain the benefit of Wicked Maw’s 20% damage increase, and I am sure there is more in the backlog. We can address all those if the capacity isn’t maxed out for this Sprint.
Product Manager: When did we even change the Vilefiend from being fire to shadow? Who’s call was that, and how did everyone miss that the “Charhound,” which does fire damage, got put on the shadow tree?
Product Owner: That’s a great question, and I will have to go back and find the user story for that one.
Product Manager (TLDR): Ok, to sum up this conversation thus far you’re saying that the class we have designated as the master summoner is summoning a bunch of small demons that don’t really move an enemy health bars up and down, their talents are very random, and that the only damaging demonology spell up-to-date in The War Within was by mistake because a different specialization uses the same spell?
Product Owner: It sounds a lot worst when you put it that way.
Product Manager: Luckily we can turn this around pretty easily.
Product Owner: How so?
Product Manager: We can first address the demonology talent tree and strip the word, “chance,” out of the tree and make each node a guaranteed proc which will add stability to the damage profile.
Product Owner: No more gambling?
Product Manager: No more gambling. Next we will need to add user stories to tune the demons to have a comparable damage profile to the other classes based on the data we have collected over the last few weeks of raid logs being out. These numbers can help the output in both PVE and PVP.
Product Owner: If we make demonology decent though, many players may start complaining about the spec being too good again, and we don’t have a spell lock to take away from them this time.
Product Manager: The biggest complaint I have seen about demonology is that it spams the player’s interface with health bars. I know we added a feature in The War Within to remove the minion health bars, but we could make the default setting to have the bars turned off. This would eliminate the screen clutter, while giving the player the option to turn it back on. Also similar to the change we made to Windwalker Monks, the demons that are summoned should be immune to crowd control.
Product Owner: I don’t think the rest of the community would like that.
Product Manager: True, but we did this for “Earth, Wind, and Fire,” and now the majority of players are selecting that talent in PvP for Windwalkers. Besides there are Deathknights running around having Anti Magic Shell up for over 40% of a match, rogues having the ability to immune all incoming damage, evoker’s being able to maneuver their flame breath while being immune to cc, and warriors being able to use abilities while immune to crowd control in Bladestorm. I think its time to bring demonology up to par in The War Within.
Product Owner: Ok, I will start working on these features, and I will write the user stories.
Product Manager: Let’s try to prioritize these changes before the paladin’s this time.