Demonology: Whats the point of shadow bolt and soul fire being separate abilities?

[Deleted]

I like how people keep harping on this when back in the day affliction warlocks constantly bitched and moaned about having a 'destruction' spell as filler.

Times change.

[Xelnath]

But angst... that's eternal!

[warzerotwo]

Times change.

There's basically no difference between channeling Drain Soul now and occasionally (very occasionally) popping off a weak, untalented insta-Shadowbolt back in Cataclysm.

[Deleted]

There's basically no difference between channeling Drain Soul now and occasionally (very occasionally) popping off a weak, untalented insta-Shadowbolt back in Cataclysm.

Shadowbolt feels cooler.

Legion is supposed to be the class fantasy expansion, after all. So I'm not sure why 'the master of shadow magic' does not use Shadowbolt.

Hell Demonology now even gets to replace it with Demon Bolt and loses Soulfire.

[Gaidax]

Legion is supposed to be the class fantasy expansion, after all. So I'm not sure why 'the master of shadow magic' does not use Shadowbolt.

Because back then when Shadowbolt was a thing for affliction everyone and their mothers moaned how it was ridiculous that affliction used a destruction spell and how much better and fitting would be for affliction to have channeled spell instead, preferably drain life.

But then I guess we will be complaining about anything they do, because we bloody ourselves can not agree on what we want.

[Deleted]

Because back then when Shadowbolt was a thing for affliction everyone and their mothers moaned how it was ridiculous that affliction used a destruction spell and how much better and fitting would be for affliction to have channeled spell instead, preferably drain life.

But then I guess we will be complaining about anything they do, because we bloody ourselves can not agree on what we want.

well it's good you tell me this for the 2nd time but I wasn't one of the people complaining

[Jessicka]

Because back then when Shadowbolt was a thing for affliction everyone and their mothers moaned how it was ridiculous that affliction used a destruction spell and how much better and fitting would be for affliction to have channeled spell instead, preferably drain life.

But then I guess we will be complaining about anything they do, because we bloody ourselves can not agree on what we want.

I don't remember that ever happening. There was an occasional mention of it, but 'everyone and their mothers' is stretching it, a lot. Then when we got Drain Life as an option in Cataclysm it became a highly divisive issue; so no, it was never, ever a widespread 'complaint'.

[Locknrollen]

Why? shadow bolt and soul fire are too similar in my opinion. soul fire with a molten core proc is just a faster shadow bolt. currently my unbuffed soul fire's cast time is 3.63 and shadow bolt is 2.27. with molten core soul fire's cast time goes down to about 1.81. now if molten core affected shadow bolt, and reduced cast time by 20% instead of 50% the cast time would go down to 1.81! if molten core made shadowbolt always crit and allow crit to increase damage while it was activate then the only difference between live and my suggestion is that you save on a keybind.

They are not really similar at all. They are as similar as arcane blast is to mindspike.

As Jessica has said earlier, it adds flavour to the specc. Banking up soulfires for a dump with cds and managing your stacks to get the maximum out of the specc IS fun.

If you think that the game should play itself for you, maybe you're better off spending your time on twitch than ingame.
But since they're changing the best specc in the game, none of this really matters.

[Irian]

What are you talking about? As someone who has seriously raided with demonology for a good while now, Soul Fire is a really cool and subtle mechanic that has a lot of skill involved and one of the things I like most about demonology. A few things to consider with it...

1. It's a selective duration buff to Shadow Bolt. Molten Core lasts almost infinitely because it's intended to be used when you want or need burst. More interestingly, Soul Fire also generates more Demonic Fury.
This has led to times where Soul Fire has been used for Fury generation in normal form, or burst in demon form depending on gear/situations/talents. Isn't that interesting enough to justify not being a temporary buff and visual change to shadow bolt?

2. Theme. Demonology is currently a spec that is based around mixing fire and shadow. Demonology is almost evenly split in shadow and fire abilities for this reason.

3. It's just harder to use. Blizzard intentionally said that they made the new Demonology in MoP hard for the sake of keeping the spec's identity. Demonology has always been an extremely complex spec that juggles a ton of different resources at once, and I consider this as iconic to the spec as crazy burst is to shamans, or form shifting and versatility is to druids.