WoD Beta Demonology Discussion

[Novx]

It wasn't a blue post, but a tweet from Celestalon. I can't post links yet, but this is one of his recent tweets regarding demo damage:




On a side note not directed to anyone specifically:

It must be pretty frustrating for the developers during beta with all of this "sky is falling" stuff coming from the community. They explicitly stated that nerfs are not a bad thing and they are tuning and changing things quite often. It's not like this is a final set in stone live build where warlocks are awful until next patch (or a hotfix). Maybe the playstyle won't be what we are hoping for, but the good news is that there are 3 warlocks specs and even different classes that we can choose from if we're not having fun with one spec or class.

I agree it does suck if you've been playing a warlock for a long time and all of a sudden it feels like your class is under performing or not fun, but have some faith in the developers - they play the game too. The devs are trying their best to make changes in order to balance every class so please have some patience. It's called beta testing for a reason! I know WoW is going to continue to be my favorite game next expansion regardless of the state of my favorite class. I'll find a way to have fun and compete to top damage meters in mythic while doing it. WoW has come a long way since vanilla and IMO it's still getting better.

This is why for years the community has asked Blizzard to release how they tune classes because at times it seems there is no method to their madness. I'm sure in the end everything will be fine but what bothers me is that if they over-nerf us they are going to be compelled to compensate for it by over-buffing, then over-nerfing, and its just a never-ending cycle.

[Vulcanasm]

This is why for years the community has asked Blizzard to release how they tune classes because at times it seems there is no method to their madness. I'm sure in the end everything will be fine but what bothers me is that if they over-nerf us they are going to be compelled to compensate for it by over-buffing, then over-nerfing, and its just a never-ending cycle.

Well, I can give you my perspective, but it's all from my own skewed perceptions (and some real-life friends in game design).

• They've never released their "simcraft" methodology to the public but Ghostcrawler and others hinted that it works like the downloadable executables. This means a simplistic Monte-Carlo simulation where movement and standstill happen at quasi-random times. That is to say simcraft has no connection to reality. Moreover the last time I bothered to sneer at simcraft's source code, it only handled Patchwerk-style fights, which basically means target dummies. A huge number of things perform well at SimTargetDummy but poorly in reality because simcraft fails to properly account for movement, timing, and especially target swaps.
• The latter (target swaps) are why Affliction has been nerfed to BC levels of functionality (making it another "mongo mode" spec: hard cast DoTs, channel Drain Soul). Affliction was extremely good at those.
• Class imbalance strongly reflects what the two most notorious developers play:
  ---Furor ("Dudebrosiabi" or w/e on Twitter) is probably responsible for Warriors chronic overperformance. I could link you to his old Everquest rants about "faggot hybrids", particularly Paladins (which got him the job at Blizzard), but I get banned for "linking to obscenity" whenever I do that. Just Google, takes about 2 minutes; check internet archives for the Fires of Heaven forums.
  ---Kalgan plays a Frost Mage and an Arms Warrior alt. Notice Mages get more mobility in WOD and more raid utility, while every other caster gets less of each. Kalgan's terrible ideas and recalcitrance about them are legendary in game design circles -- he was lead developer for the Ultima Online "Age of Shadows" expansion, which yielded the most precipitous subscriber drop of any MMO expansion in genre history (>30% in a 6 month period). I'm sure this has nothing to do with why Frost Mage has been brokenly overpowered since Catalcysm.

[Novx]

Well, I can give you my perspective, but it's all from my own skewed perceptions (and some real-life friends in game design).

• They've never released their "simcraft" methodology to the public but Ghostcrawler and others hinted that it works like the downloadable executables. This means a simplistic Monte-Carlo simulation where movement and standstill happen at quasi-random times. That is to say simcraft has no connection to reality. Moreover the last time I bothered to sneer at simcraft's source code, it only handled Patchwerk-style fights, which basically means target dummies. A huge number of things perform well at SimTargetDummy but poorly in reality because simcraft fails to properly account for movement, timing, and especially target swaps.
• The latter (target swaps) are why Affliction has been nerfed to BC levels of functionality (making it another "mongo mode" spec: hard cast DoTs, channel Drain Soul). Affliction was extremely good at those.
• Class imbalance strongly reflects what the two most notorious developers play:
  ---Furor ("Dudebrosiabi" or w/e on Twitter) is probably responsible for Warriors chronic overperformance. I could link you to his old Everquest rants about "faggot hybrids", particularly Paladins (which got him the job at Blizzard), but I get banned for "linking to obscenity" whenever I do that. Just Google, takes about 2 minutes; check internet archives for the Fires of Heaven forums.
  ---Kalgan plays a Frost Mage and an Arms Warrior alt. Notice Mages get more mobility in WOD and more raid utility, while every other caster gets less of each. Kalgan's terrible ideas and recalcitrance about them are legendary in game design circles -- he was lead developer for the Ultima Online "Age of Shadows" expansion, which yielded the most precipitous subscriber drop of any MMO expansion in genre history (>30% in a 6 month period). I'm sure this has nothing to do with why Frost Mage has been brokenly overpowered since Catalcysm.

In regards to that first point: I phrased my sentence poorly, what I meant to say is that it would be nice if they allowed the public to see their internal numbers so we can give our feedback as well as truly see where they have each class performing at.

[Deleted]

I have a little dream - that they replace Grimoire of Synergy with a Grimoire that makes Meta permanent in some way. That would be awesome. I mean, we already have permanent Infernals and Doomguards, so why not permanent Meta for Demonology ?

[Deleted]

I have a little dream - that they replace Grimoire of Synergy with a Grimoire that makes Meta permanent in some way. That would be awesome. I mean, we already have permanent Infernals and Doomguards, so why not permanent Meta for Demonology ?

Chaotic Ressources for Meta would be way more fun than Demonbolt.

Grimoire is fine for the most part I'd assume.

[frangeek]

Guys, considering most of the changes of the class and the apparent intention to make Drain Life go up in the priority list. Have you considered some changes in the rotation in order to include DL? I'm kinda curious to see if this changes anything in a positive way.

I'm just starting to do it, but it's too early to make a statement about it yet.

[Avikur]

no, DL isn't meant to be part of our rotation, the tuning is all over the place, we're waiting for a new build that will try to address this. The rotation should stay the same as MoP but with the lvl 100 talent added in

[Deleted]

Chaotic Ressources for Meta would be way more fun than Demonbolt.

Grimoire is fine for the most part I'd assume.

Synergy is OK, yes, but it's simply not as exciting as the other two Grimoires.

[Deleted]

Synergy is OK, yes, but it's simply not as exciting as the other two Grimoires.

To be honest Supremancy isn't great either from a gameplay perspective. It's just a skin change and numbers buff. GoSy is a number buff on a proc.

GoSac and GoSe both fulfill the same kinda gameplay niché. You have your pet ability twice. Big difference is really only how you use the Voidwalker between both. In one variation you taunt/disarm. In the other you disarm/buff your HP.

GoSac is a favorite of many because it isn't just the flat number boost, but allows some interesting plays as well. Which is nice. GoSe does the same, but is better for PvE than PvP. With GoSac gone from Demo, GoSe now is the same niché, while the number boosts between GoSu and GoSy still need evaluation before we can say more on both PvE and PvP.

I'll miss GoSac, because it gave me a valuable Tank CD in LFR/Flex & Heroic Dungeons for Demotank :/

[Deleted]

Has anyone tried the Proving Grounds on the current beta build? Gold and below was a breeze in premade gear and Affliction spec, but I started to struggle hard and had to plan ahead thoroughly already at Silver with Demonology. Doesn't seem right if the Proving Grounds are supposed to be benchmark for HC dungeons where I assume every spec is intended to be viable.

[Crisius]

Has anyone tried the Proving Grounds on the current beta build? Gold and below was a breeze in premade gear and Affliction spec, but I started to struggle hard and had to plan ahead thoroughly already at Silver with Demonology. Doesn't seem right if the Proving Grounds are supposed to be benchmark for HC dungeons where I assume every spec is intended to be viable.

I'll be surprised if demonology doesn't get a 30% buff before Warlords hits live.

[Deleted]

I'll be surprised if demonology doesn't get a 30% buff before Warlords hits live.

I feel the same. The difference was striking when you compared your ability to dish out damage to multiple targets in the different specs under a longer time period.

[Baconeggcheese]

I'll be surprised if demonology doesn't get a 30% buff before Warlords hits live.

That'd put it back where it was, and it needed a slight nerf.

I'm curious how they'll move the damage around otherwise there won't be a pressing reason to play aff or dest if it goes back like it was.

[Deleted]

That'd put it back where it was, and it needed a slight nerf.

I'm curious how they'll move the damage around otherwise there won't be a pressing reason to play aff or dest if it goes back like it was.

It received a 30% nerf (ish?). A 30% buff on top of that would give a 9% nerf from the original.

[Crisius]

Not to mention it was overperforming because of bugs and because of people being silly enough to do the mythic testing with gear that skewers results.

In the 700-ilvl sim, which showcases pretty clearly how specs are scaling, demonology is at 25200 DPS at the moment, 8-10k behind the middle pack. Add 30% on top of it; 25200*1.30=32760dps. Directly on par with affliction and slightly in front of destruction - while still behind the majority.

[Baconeggcheese]

It received a 30% nerf (ish?). A 30% buff on top of that would give a 9% nerf from the original.

tuché

Not to mention it was overperforming because of bugs and because of people being silly enough to do the mythic testing with gear that skewers results.

In the 700-ilvl sim, which showcases pretty clearly how specs are scaling, demonology is at 25200 DPS at the moment, 8-10k behind the middle pack. Add 30% on top of it; 25200*1.30=32760dps. Directly on par with affliction and slightly in front of destruction - while still behind the majority.

Even without the overperforming bugs, if its on par with our other specs... the spec does movement, multi-dot, aoe, burst all at the same time. If it were brought back up to be on par with the other 2 specs, they'd need to do something with the ratios so that it gets put back in a niche somewhere, because right now it covers everything.

[Crisius]

If things are tuned the way they are intended (SF), demonology can't do movement without it being a DPS loss, which balances it out. The multi-dotting potential isn't as good as affliction, and demonology aoe is lackluster to say the least. Not a lot of encounters actually allow you to be in melee range regularly. If anything, I'd say affliction has its niché with semi-movement and multi-dotting, while destruction has.. well, fire and brimstone. Demonology is somewhere inbetween.

As a personal opinion, I feel like they overdid it with the movement reduction, and being able to play demonology and still be competitive goes a long way for a compromise.

[Baconeggcheese]

Movement would still be better than the other specs as is, the specs still doing dmg with 3 dots, imps, pet, ToC during movement. It hardly loses anything for having to move until they hopefully significantly bring up SF as they've said they would.

Affs multi-dot is a shadow of its former self right now, they baked damage back into MG for some reason beyond me, which made the dots dmg weaker again... which... sigh...
Between corruption, doom, hog, imps demos doing pretty damn well in the situations that used to be go to aff. With affs ramp up having to hard cast all its dots, it doesn't even remotely feel like the king of multi-dot that it did. They really want it to be a single target spec or something.

Felstorm + hog (or CW) + cataclysm tend to be more than enough for any aoe situations I've come across in testing. Passive cleaving that doesn't come at the cost of single target is more conducive to progression than sustained aoe a lot of the time. They'd at the very least need to do something with hog, especially considering the new 2p if it stays that way. You don't even need hellfire to aoe well as demo for most applicable situations.

Pretty much the only time the spec gets flat out beat from my experience on the beta is when there's heavy sustained aoe and we don't have to move much if at all at which point lol aoe-chaosberts.

It's totally possible they could get it to some in-between land, but they need to do some work for it to be there and even then... being able to do everything well isn't really a niche unless its not competitive.

[Jessicka]

Should just plan to sit near melee, use Hellfire for movement in caster. Between that, our menagerie and dots, we shouldn't suffer excessively.

[Crisius]

Affliction multi-dot might be a shadow of its former overpow..*cough* self, but it still performs decently, and with a ton of instant casts on a fight like Iron Maidens, has plenty of things to cast in comparison to, say, destruction which not only has a weaker multi-dot component, but is locked to long casts which are tricky to say the least to get out on a fight with lots of stutter-movement.

I'd say on a fight like that, affliction and demonology, with aforementioned hypothetical buff, would be fairly equal, while destruction would fall far behind.

Next up I'd like to say that felstorm is doing too much damage on the beta right now, because of the bugged pet scaling. I do agree with you though, for quick aoe burst it's fairly good. However, it falls short on sustained aoe, as demonology always has. Cataclysm is a bad example since all three specs can use it.

Demonology is far from doing everything well, although its base mechanics does leave the playstyle a bit on the strong side.