Originally Posted by
Xelnath
Since we're past the point where anyone else would ask... Demonology started out as an experiment into a god-of-war style AoE melee class while in demon form and a ranged nuker in human form. It turned out that sucked because once you were in melee and ran out of Demon Juice, the monsters you were AoE'ing obliterated you without AoE Cleave abilities.
After that didn't pan out, I tried out Demonology as a true tank spec. That turned out to be a lot of fun, but other designers (correctly!) protested against the total removal of the demonology DPS style. So I tabled the tank spec, as it was clear that couldn't be fleshed out until Demonology-as-DPS was solved.
The next iteration was Demonology-as-a-summoner, where every Demonology ability was done by proxy via a summoned demon. This was very *cool*, but felt sluggish and I kept asking, "why are my pets more awesome than I am?" as I spammed Shadow Bolt fillers between summoning Imps and such. This lead to the next iteration of Demonology Warlock - master of indirect magic.
Rather than summon creatures, Demonology started using objects. I repurposed Hand of Gul'dan as a frequent nuke rather than location-based buff. Carrion Swarm reintroduced the bats. Finally, Ion Hazzikostas (Watcher) had the brilliant idea to make *all* of your basic nukes get upgraded while in Demon Form. I loved this idea and it felt like it clicked.
It had a lot of overlap with Druid Eclipse, so I did my best to give it one differentiating point - that your trinket choice differentiated how you played the spec. Reactively, with proc trinkets, or in a planned way with on-click trinkets.
Once that was done, I looked back on everything I did and asked what I wanted to keep. The tanky-lock was the only thing I missed, so I put that on a glyph and shipped it. Turned out my understanding of how much dodge and parry had fallen behind the times since WotLK - so the 75% damage reduction from Dark Apotheosis broke the game.
Thankfully, Jimmythenumbers and Big Bear were able to talk me down off my high-horse and it got sufficiently nerfed before it went live.
Did that help?