jokingly Because we’d rather you didn’t play demonology - let me elaborate now!
So, we’re not actually terrible at math, we weren’t, just, you know, intending to nerf them a little bit and we are really bad at numbers and overshot the mark a lot. We have some concerns about how Demonology plays as a spec mechanically in terms of the amount of debuff juggling that comes into it and what’s required to play the spec properly and well, it’s not super intuitive, you often need a number of UI mods to help you do it well, if you go get a guide like Icy-veins it’s an incredibly complicated priority hierarchy, and that’s GREAT, but what we saw is that because Demonology was the best all around spec performance wise. Over the course of the expansion we saw Warlocks who would really prefer to play Affliction or Destro gravitating towards Demonology.
In the first weeks of Highmaul, you saw plenty of Affliction 'locks, plenty of Demo 'locks, plenty of Destro 'locks, and looking at stats, month after month, we’ve seen that pie increasingly gravitating towards basically all Demonology Warlocks at the highest levels, and we weren’t happy with that spec in particular being what players felt like they were forced to play. And for a lot of people, it was a trap, where, you know, it’s a complicated spec to play, probably the most complex out of the three Warlock specs, but they would see and read, “Oh, this is the best spec”, and, you know, go look up how to do it correctly. If, you know, they went to Icy-veins, there was a wall of text, if they went to a site like Noxxic they were probably being misled and getting misinformation from that, and that could just lead them completely astray.
We have plans to pretty significantly overhaul the Demonology Warlock as a spec going forward, that’s not happening in the 6.2 scope, because we don’t wanna make that massive type of change in a patch. Uh… Demo is still viable, it’s probably not the best spec, I would probably not expect to see tons of them in Method’s raid or Paragon’s raid or what have you, um, and Affliction, Destro are doing great, we’ve seen Warlocks putting up great parses, putting up great numbers on PTR, Warlocks as a whole are in a good place, for those of you who love Demo and it’s your favorite spec, I apologize, like, iiiiit’s, you know, it’s viable, but it’s not the best, there’s certainly an ebb and flow of specs, the, you know, taking turns being the best, being the worst over time, for now, it’s Demonology’s turn to be the worst Warlock spec.
Sorry.
This all sounds well and good until you look at Demon Hunters and see they gave all of old Demo’s kit to them. That of that was smoke, and I willing to bet they were working on Demon Hunters and felt those spells would work better with that class. Turned Demo into the master of lesser demons.