[BETA] Demonology Warlock Discussion

[pvw1075]

I like this change but I still want one of our spells to have no cast or at least put more fantasy into demo's talents i see lack of fantasy :c

please tell me your idea of fantasy?

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Dunno if I'm just biased to games like FF when it comes to summoners, but this doesn't feel "oozing" to me. It feels fairly underwhelming, and the mechanics are extremely simple.

FF?
Summon something and then dot FFARR? Or FF game summon an huge monster one round and hope it dies?

The whole time We're summoning things over and over, this is like Diablo 2 Necromancer, which makes me soooo happy.

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Also, does anyone know the name of the dagger main hand we're getting? Or is it really just a place holder?

[Deleted]

Also, does anyone know the name of the dagger main hand we're getting? Or is it really just a place holder?

afaik its called spine of thal'kien

[Deleted]

When you think about how demons have been interesting tools for us over the years, we've had excellent practical uses in PvP and PvE with their utilities, we've had excellent class fantasy with how summoning Doomguards used to work (totally impractical but extremely cool and of its time), and with the enslaved pit lord against Kanrethad we were given something amazing to play with. As time has gone on, demons have become more and more about just being a passive X% of your damage and less about mechanics or service. I was hoping with a redesigned spec all about demons we'd have some fun mechanics made relevant again.

But the demons involved in the new spec do not play into class fantasy in anything other than visuals. Call Dreadstalkers is a 12 second DoT with a cast time - you literally cast your spell and the enemy you cast it on takes X amount of damage over 12 seconds. Wild Imps from Hand of Gul'dan are essentially a 12 second DoT with a cast time (and a small aoe on cast); the imps spawned from talenting Doom are just a 12 second DoT that begins at the end of your 16 second DoT. Inquisitor is a 21 second DoT on everything you've put another DoT on.

Or put even more simply: "X number of things you can't control that do X damage for X amount of time" - every demon's tooltip.

I'm not a game designer or a theorycrafter and I couldn't tell you how the spec should be changed to be more interesting, but if you ask me right now how they could add more fantasy to the spec, a broad answer I could give you is: make the summoning of demons have drawbacks. Have it take something out of the warlock - in pure gameplay purposes, they should make us question whether in a particular situation it is correct to press this button. (And by drawback I mean more than the obvious unoptimal rotation)

[bio347]

Thinking about it a bit, the major difference between Demonology and the other two specs is that Demo doesn't have any proc reactions. Both UA and CB are things that you can hold onto somewhat, and use at appropriate times. Demo doesn't have that - you use Dreadstalkers when it's up, and you hit HoG when it doesn't interfere with anything.

[Fearsom1992]

please tell me your idea of fantasy?

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FF?
Summon something and then dot FFARR? Or FF game summon an huge monster one round and hope it dies?

The whole time We're summoning things over and over, this is like Diablo 2 Necromancer, which makes me soooo happy.

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Also, does anyone know the name of the dagger main hand we're getting? Or is it really just a place holder?

Lets see we got a talent that gives us soul shards in the same row for every spec on a 2min cd idk if they are going with class fantasy or spec fantasy , enslave demon is a dead spell that hasn't been used since Green Fire so why not turn it into a talent or cd to enslave a eredar or pit lord, you have 1 row of grimiores one increasing pet dmg by 20% but the other increases your pet or your dmg on rng chance, a cool idea for a grimiore is " 1.5min cd Grimiore of Doom, gives your Demonic Empower demons a 10% chance on each melee hit to turn their dmg into shadow dmg making their attacks trigger doom faster. Sounds like a fun aoe talent and might sound insane but you know its an idea to help Hand of Doom in aoe situations :]

I want to add in also how slowww demo is right now omg

[Toroc]

I'm worried about the spec in general. As cool as it is, I feel like it's still missing a lot. This might sound crazy but I feel you can almost tell demo can't compete against the other specs by looking at the talents alone. To me- demo may be too weak or so passively OP that it gets nerfed/ never balance correctly like MW.

I REALLY want this to be something we can raid competitively with but I just can't see how.

[Fearsom1992]

OMG! LOL do Eye of Ashzara literallyyyyyy blizzard hates range this expac demo is going to have such a hard time -.-

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I'm worried about the spec in general. As cool as it is, I feel like it's still missing a lot. This might sound crazy but I feel you can almost tell demo can't compete against the other specs by looking at the talents alone. To me- demo may be too weak or so passively OP that it gets nerfed/ never balance correctly like MW.

I REALLY want this to be something we can raid competitively with but I just can't see how.

I agree it feels slow, underwhelming, and a lot of fights in dungeons got knockbacks or stuns or silence or in eye a push back mechanic like omg

[Baconeggcheese]

FF?
Summon something and then dot FFARR? Or FF game summon an huge monster one round and hope it dies?

The whole time We're summoning things over and over, this is like Diablo 2 Necromancer, which makes me soooo happy.?

I more think of the latter... or a mix of both. Or even something like FFT.

I'd much rather have my own full on rotations worth of casts and then have summons be this more infrequent thing I do to bring the pain and maybe have different utility or situational bits as my primary spenders. As opposed to just spamming negligible minions constantly and just hitting with a wet noodle bolt purely to gain soul shards. It doesn't feel impactful, it just comes off as me being such a weak warlock that I need to summon a small army of trivial demons to do my heavy lifting for me.

D2 necro was my bread and butter for years, I'm not really seeing how the two are reminiscent of each other. The fantasies are completely different.

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Thinking about it a bit, the major difference between Demonology and the other two specs is that Demo doesn't have any proc reactions. Both UA and CB are things that you can hold onto somewhat, and use at appropriate times. Demo doesn't have that - you use Dreadstalkers when it's up, and you hit HoG when it doesn't interfere with anything.

Yes, there's no reactionary gameplay. It's just fire+buff and forget until the CD comes back up.

[Deleted]

I'm only just now checking out the changes to Demonology, seems they could have done a lot more interesting stuff if they want to make Demonology a summoner type of spec. In the current iteration your summons seems more like glorified dots. Why not let us spend Soul Shards or something to summon big ass demons with actual skills for a short while? No shortage of cool models in the game, so that's not an issue. Instead we get imps and felhunters? Come on now.

[Avikur]

I think for me i'd of rather they did away with mana, kept the fury bar and soul shards, spend soul shards summoning the smaller demons and build the fury bar up to 100 at which point you can summon something really cool, mana just seems like a restriction rather than a resource, you don't worry about going OOM, you just have to life tap every now and then, hardly exciting, just boring and inconvenient

[Deleted]

I think for me i'd of rather they did away with mana, kept the fury bar and soul shards, spend soul shards summoning the smaller demons and build the fury bar up to 100 at which point you can summon something really cool, mana just seems like a restriction rather than a resource, you don't worry about going OOM, you just have to life tap every now and then, hardly exciting, just boring and inconvenient

And / or perhaps Demonic Empowerment becomes a toggle that drains your fury? Would certainly make the existence of that spell more interesting.

Completely agree that mana is nothing more than a hindrance. It doesn't play enough into gameplay that you have to think about it or about life tap - it's just a global (and some life) you have to waste every now and again.

Though I'm not sure there's any chance they'll give a spec two unique resources designed around the same build / spend idea. At the very least, the use of mana as a resource doesn't work in the same way as the use of soul shards as a resource.

[Deleted]

am i the only 1 that thinks it could be cool if demonic sevitude would turn into a 2-10 minute cd where you sacrifice all your current pets(excluding felguard but you need atleast 5 pets out to cast it) to randomly summon weaker/smaller versions of big demons like magtheridon, mannoroth, azgalor, brutallus or prince malchazzar for like 20-30 secs to function as bit of an extra ST/aoe burst ability. i think it could be extremely cool and fitting to the flavor of demo plus who doesnt like to summon big ass demons and we'll finally get that pit lord we wanted lol.

[Fearsom1992]

am i the only 1 that thinks it could be cool if demonic sevitude would turn into a 2-10 minute cd where you sacrifice all your current pets(excluding felguard but you need atleast 5 pets out to cast it) to randomly summon weaker/smaller versions of big demons like magtheridon, mannoroth, azgalor, brutallus or prince malchazzar for like 20-30 secs to function as bit of an extra ST/aoe burst ability. i think it could be extremely cool and fitting to the flavor of demo plus who doesnt like to summon big ass demons and we'll finally get that pit lord we wanted lol.

This made me get the picture of Yu-Gi-Oh in my head xD

[Deleted]

also i feel they should add something to impending doom that allows you to get a wild imp if your target dies with doom on it like "if a target with doom on it dies, you summon 1 wild imp" that way there is a compensation to use it on burst aoe fights.

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This made me get the picture of Yu-Gi-Oh in my head xD

winged dragon of ra inc lol.

[Coffeh]

Is Demo aoe playing decently in alpha? By the looks of it, it seems incredibly weak. There's pretty much just Demonwrath, right? As far as base abilities. And Demonwrath does really bad damage from what I've seen in videos. Tab dotting multiple targets with Doom seems very inefficient. Even the talent that makes Hand of Guldan spread Doom to its targets isn't impressive. Waiting 16-20 seconds for 'ok' damage is hardly good for aoe. So that leaves talents. There's the imp implosion, which is cool. But that's one implosion, then you have no more imps and have to summon a bunch again before you can cast it again. Then there's the inquisitor. I guess that has nice synergy with the HoG talent spreading Doom. Still, Demo aoe seems a little bit clunky. Hard to tell just from watching videos though.

The way I picture it is casting a bunch of one-shard HoGs to spread doom, since an 8 yard radius isn't great for getting all potential aoe targets, especially if they're spread around. Then summon inquisitor and spam demonwrath, which will do small damage but generate more shards. Just kind of wish those shards could be put to better use. With the 15 sec cooldown on dreadstalkers, you can really only use them on HoG...which apparently needed a damage nerf

[Deleted]

Is Demo aoe playing decently in alpha? By the looks of it, it seems incredibly weak. There's pretty much just Demonwrath, right? As far as base abilities. And Demonwrath does really bad damage from what I've seen in videos. Tab dotting multiple targets with Doom seems very inefficient. Even the talent that makes Hand of Guldan spread Doom to its targets isn't impressive. Waiting 16-20 seconds for 'ok' damage is hardly good for aoe. So that leaves talents. There's the imp implosion, which is cool. But that's one implosion, then you have no more imps and have to summon a bunch again before you can cast it again. Then there's the inquisitor. I guess that has nice synergy with the HoG talent spreading Doom. Still, Demo aoe seems a little bit clunky. Hard to tell just from watching videos though.

The way I picture it is casting a bunch of one-shard HoGs to spread doom, since an 8 yard radius isn't great for getting all potential aoe targets, especially if they're spread around. Then summon inquisitor and spam demonwrath, which will do small damage but generate more shards. Just kind of wish those shards could be put to better use. With the 15 sec cooldown on dreadstalkers, you can really only use them on HoG...which apparently needed a damage nerf

Not sold myself in the aoe potential but it could be decent for sustained.

HoG to spread doom
Inquisitor
Felstorm
Service felstorm
Demo wrath to build shares (very quick depending on targets)
HoG implosion weave

[nerdzrool]

Is Demo aoe playing decently in alpha? By the looks of it, it seems incredibly weak. There's pretty much just Demonwrath, right? As far as base abilities. And Demonwrath does really bad damage from what I've seen in videos. Tab dotting multiple targets with Doom seems very inefficient. Even the talent that makes Hand of Guldan spread Doom to its targets isn't impressive. Waiting 16-20 seconds for 'ok' damage is hardly good for aoe. So that leaves talents. There's the imp implosion, which is cool. But that's one implosion, then you have no more imps and have to summon a bunch again before you can cast it again. Then there's the inquisitor. I guess that has nice synergy with the HoG talent spreading Doom. Still, Demo aoe seems a little bit clunky. Hard to tell just from watching videos though.

The way I picture it is casting a bunch of one-shard HoGs to spread doom, since an 8 yard radius isn't great for getting all potential aoe targets, especially if they're spread around. Then summon inquisitor and spam demonwrath, which will do small damage but generate more shards. Just kind of wish those shards could be put to better use. With the 15 sec cooldown on dreadstalkers, you can really only use them on HoG...which apparently needed a damage nerf

Demonwrath isn't the primary AoE damage, its just for building shards for additional HoGs and does so very quickly with 3+ targets. Your main damage is coming from empowered Inquisitor and Felstorm (x2 from service). Remember you don't have power trip in this scenario so the only pets affected by empowerment will be inquisitor, felguard, and service felguard or 1 dreadstalker. The rotation looks more or less like inquisitor -> HoG -> empower -> demonwrath/felstorm -> hog -> demonwrath -> HoG -> repeat. It may be worthwhile to keep dreadstalkers on cooldown as well but if they aren't getting empowered anyways it may not be worth it. I honestly haven't played much with implosion either because tracking the amount of imps you have is basically impossible atm.

[Deleted]

I would like to know what Implosion is intended to do.
Obviously it is an AoE ability but the general assumption so far seems to be that when they explode they die.

The tooltip doesn't state they explode and die just that they "Violently Explode" which, i do admit, sounds like they should be dead.
Would be interesting to know for sure if it is just a bug that they do not die (class hall target dummies) or if it is indeed intended.


Also Infernal is stronger than both Felguard and DG on 3 targets but unsure how it would fare when considering Inquisitor.

[warzerotwo]

am i the only 1 that thinks it could be cool if demonic sevitude would turn into a 2-10 minute cd where you sacrifice all your current pets(excluding felguard but you need atleast 5 pets out to cast it) to randomly summon weaker/smaller versions of big demons like magtheridon, mannoroth, azgalor, brutallus or prince malchazzar for like 20-30 secs to function as bit of an extra ST/aoe burst ability. i think it could be extremely cool and fitting to the flavor of demo plus who doesnt like to summon big ass demons and we'll finally get that pit lord we wanted lol.

No. I want permanent minions, not another DPS cooldown to babysit.

[Deleted]

No. I want permanent minions, not another DPS cooldown to babysit.

in what way dont you have permanent minions? demonic servitude has to be the most useless talent we have as demo.