Redesigning Demonology: How would you do it?

[Hellfury]

Only thing I can stand going is

Doom removed, effect backed into Corruption both damage and imp procing
Remove Imp glyph
Remove Meta Cooldown but going into meta costs Demonic Fury
Shadowolt becomes SoulFire in Meta.

Demonic leap, renamed and is now available to all warlocks.


Anything else and its stripping demo warlocks.

[kaib]

I' quit 3 or 4 months ago, and after Ion's answer to warlocks, I'm SO glad I did.

For Demo I'd keep Felguard as the main dude, nevermind the Doomguard, it's boring.
Metamorphosis on CD, kept for spamming them Soul Fire stacks.
Shadow bolt to go to affliction, and Demonbolt talent gone, but used as a filler instead of SB.
Hand of Gul'Dan as a 15-20 sec aoe cooldown.
Dots: Doom + a new dot, not Immolate, not Corruption (if they wanna keep going this way and make the 3 specs use totally different spells, which imo is a bad idea)

And... remove the damn resources from all classes really. Holy Power, Shards, Demonic Fury... what ever happened to Mana ? Soon they will remove HP, and add 3 bars as lives...

Resources are possibly the worst thing that came to WoW. 3 lines FULLY charged? Click this shiny button to release OMEGA AWESOME ABILITY. No more lines? Spam filler.

actually, mana is the worst thing that came to WoW. and it's correctly being faded out from most classes. hopefully healers will get a resource base system too at some point.

[Tya]

I'd like to see a focus put on summoning instead of just being another "<random element>bolt" spamming caster.

[Murlocbait]

Not sure this is what I would do, but it's what i expect based on recent pruning and his comments:

Metamorphosis changed to "Assume a demonic form increasing Mastery by 15% and your pet deals 25% increased damage for 20 seconds. 3-minute cooldown."
At level 10, Corruption is replaced by Doom.
Chaos Wave removed.
Immolation Aura removed; Hellfire no longer requires channeling.
Charges removed from Hand of Gul'dan, cooldown set at 15 seconds. Hand of Gul'dan no longer applies a DoT, instead it applies a debuff increasing damage your pets deal to the target by X% for 10 seconds.
Molten Core proc now makes Shadowbolt turn into Soulfire. Soulfire has short cast time by default (since it's only useable on proc), always crits, crit chance increases damage.
Wild Imps remains as a passive, glyph removed.
Demonic Fury now increases by a set amount when your pet attacks, only goes from 1-100.
Touch of Chaos completely reworked: costs 20 Demonic Fury per cast, 3 second cast, no cooldown. Deals X damage and increases your pet's damage by 10% for 30 seconds; this buff stacks up to 5 times.

Demonic Leap made available to all warlocks, no longer turns you into a demon, just adds temporary wing effect during leap - glyph available to all warlocks.

So the basic idea is to put more damage into the pet, and give the Demo 'lock tools to do that. Doom is basic DoT, always keep it up, use HoG on cooldown or when you can fit it into a high-damage phase. Use Shadowbolt as filler, when Molten Core procs, then you cast Soulfire instead. As your pet generates Fury for you, you use Touch of Chaos for damage and to get your pet up to 5 stacks of the buff. Basic, simple rotation, more damage going into the pet, Meta becomes a generic CD instead of the binary gameplay it gives you now. I hope they keep Meta how it is, but i really don't see that happening.

[demonik]

I know people would probably hate this idea but, I'd keep the focus of metamorphosis and the demon abilities we get the as the main theme or gameplay, and we delve deeper into that.Maybe like a moonkin were we are always in demon form during the fights.Also like other people have stated I'd get rid of the 2 dot mechanic we have and probably get rid of corruption and keep doom. Other than little things like that I really can't see what else I'd change to make it less complex and more user friendly.

lol one thing i'd definitely do is bring back fel flame and maybe carrion swarm but, then that'd just make the spec too complex again I guess.

[Roujeaux]

i like how most ppl's solutions for demo actually makes it more difficult to play, ppl forget that they want the spec to be streamlined, easy and intuitive to play, most of the things here are anything but easy and intuitive to play.

Seriously.

And now for my 2 cents:

Change Dark Soul's name to Cursed Soul (because it's been a Curse effect since mid MoP) then merge Metamorphosis into Cursed Soul for Cursed Soul: Metamorphosis, transforming you into Meta form for 20 sec with the current 30% Mastery buff. No more ability morphing, no more Demonic Fury. Take Meta back to its DPS cooldown roots.

Remove Hand of Gul'dan and Chaos Wave. Bring back Carrion Swarm minus the knockback, with a 12 sec cd, 2 charges, and Chaos Wave's Chaos spell school, range, and spell coefficient. Hellfire now works similar to Arcane Explosion, but requires either a self target or enemy target and only does its full damage on 3+ targets. I like Demo's current multitarget cleave/burst aoe niche and think it should be preserved.

Replace Corruption with Shadowflame, a "new" single target spell that does instant cast Shadowflame damage over time. Doom now ticks every 10 sec instead of 15. That cuts Demo's dot maintenance from 3 to 2. Cut Shadow Bolt to a 2.25 sec cast time, Soul Fire to a 3 sec cast time (give it a damage boost), and Molten Core's mana/cost reduction to 33%. Bring back the old Mana Feed talent for Demo pets only. Return Fel Flame to Aff and Destro, but Demo instead gets Touch of Chaos, which fills a similar role but does Chaos damage instead.

Merge Demonic Leap with its glyph, and make it the warlock Left Lvl 60 talent. Replace the Imp's/Fel Imp's Flee with Blood Horror.

When learned, Summon Felguard now replaces Summon Voidwalker. In addition to its current toolkit the Felguard now inherits the Voidwalker's armor scaling, taunt, and also inherits Shadow Shield's damage mitigation baked into Threatening Presence (now called Imposing Presence for the Felguard). Demonic Calling and Doom crits should be reworked to be more like Demo's T18 pet summoning bonus, giving it a chance to summon a select variety of different demons. Increasing the frequency of Demonic Calling procs should probably be added to Demo's Mastery.

[alabaster jones]

Would remove meta/or give it a long cooldown and build the spec around demons/summons again.

[Prada]

Basically this is the way I think it should be:

No matter what spec the warlock is, certain spells must be allowed to maintain the niche that is the warlock class, Shadow and Fire magic and Chaos for advanced spells, DoT spells, Drain spells and demonic minions are a must. As demonology, the focus should be on demons and the means of controlling and manipulating them to do our biding.

- Hand of guldan is a good, unique dot for demonology and one of my favourite spells. It is sufficient for aoe as well imo.
- Health funnel was nicer for demo locks when we had the talent choices to allow the demon to receive less damage while the spell was being channeled.
- Being able to summon more powerful demons is part of the key identity of the demo lock. That lvl 100 talent allows all specs to do this and it makes my insides sour x_x
- I believe that imp swarm is a move in the right direction for what demo should be. Summoning a plethora of various, little, temporary minions that aid in combat and empower the warlock's secondary resource is a very attractive style of play to me. The T18 set bonus will also be working along this playstyle. Hopefully it gets worked in to the warlock's spellbook in the future.
- In the early days demo felt like a buff to minions but a handicap to the warlock himself, casting slower and wet-noodle spells lol. Demonbolt is a nice addition to the spellbook and gives opportunity for great burst damage. Soulfire should be the base filler spell with moltencore buffing it to 100% crit and multistrike chance.
- Metamorphosis has become an iconic demolock spell for the past few expansions, it would be terrible to remove it. Instead it should be dubbed a partial-metamorphosis such that we do not become a demon but rather tap into latent demonic energies to temporarily cast more powerful spells at increased potency and empower our minions' attacks. The true metamorphosis spell should be reserved for demon hunters when they are eventually added into the game.
- A feature that I would like to see added is something that allows the warlock to make enslaved demons permanent, such that we can essentially customize the look of our felguards/succubii/felhounds/infernals and so on. The will all employ the same abilities and do the same damage but have unique looks/animations/emotes.

These are the main ideas i have that would be better for the spec while not changing it too much.

[Crushima]

I'd like a more stance-dance version of Metamorphasis instead of a resource dump. Right now it's kind of a stance dance AND a resource dump, it should be one or the other. Only having to pay attention to Molten Core procs instead of MC and Demonic fury would simplify it a bit. Being able to apply doom and chaos wave without a restriction would be nice, but give everything in demon-form a sort of Demonbolt effect where the more you cast it in demon-form, the more mana it costs until you let it reset. Instead of having HoG/CW charges, they just cost more and more mana that after the 2nd or 3rd cast it costs more than your mana pool. You can even have casting the spells in humanoid form reduce the cooldown on the debuffs, so moving in and out of demon form as fast as you can has a skill curve.


I want the demons to be more even, right now as Demo you only ever use Felguard/Wrathguard or Terrorguard/Doomguard based on your talents. I want to be able to use the Felhunter or Observer more often as Demonology if I so choose. I don't know if the way to do that is to get parity in their damage or give them more interesting attacks.

If it's a more overhaul-redesign sort of way I'd like to see Demo locks be more like a necromancer/witchdoctor type class with the demons. Instead of the one pet and multiple imps that spawn automatically/with imp swarm, It'd be cool to be able to summon 2-3 demons that mix and match buffs or abilities, so like having a voidwalker out will make you tankier, but move slower. Succubus will have you increase spell power, but also take more damage. Felhunter will make you move faster, but cast slower, so choosing your buffs/debuffs you get from your demons would be a cool little meta-game depending on the fight, and it's more about demon control than casting soulfire/shadowbolt.

Stance dancing is reserved for Warriors in Vanilla, TBC, Wrath and Cata.

Warlocks are shitty harry potter style clothies, and do not have stances.

[Sevyvia]

We're going to see fewer DF spenders. Right now we have ToC, SF, CW, and immo. Two of those are going to get cut. Quite possibly we will see demonbolt as the baseline playstyle.
Probably also going to see HoG stacking die.

In return, I expect to get a Kill Command type spell -- where you press the button, but the damage comes from your pet.

Seems pretty realistic to me. I don't see much wrong with Demonology now, but if they're going to reduce complexity, it would probably be along these lines. Maybe not all of it, since they can continue to claim that there's complexity in it then, but whatever.

[Baconeggcheese]

Off the top of my head?

I'd turn meta into some kind of cooldown if it exists at all, and I'd remove touch of chaos along with hog stacks.

Probably make it so certain spells are only castable during the meta cooldown and basically replace parallel spells, shadow bolt becomes soul fire but still generates the same fury so its just a cosmetic change to the spell that does more damage, and make it so there might be a few procs that let you cast a meta spell while in caster. Molten core would just turn one shadowbolt into a soul fire etc.

Hog and CW would act similarly, where CW just overlaps hog when its active and is always the priority. Also tune accordingly so that you don't want to use hog or CW single target since they should be aoe spells.

Obviously would change the mastery accordingly.

The goal is to take the guess work out of *should I use this charge on this spell or that spell and should I use this spell in this situation or that situation* and just make it so that certain spells are just badassier versions of other spells and always take priority over their weaker counterpart.

[Leyl]

There is only one solution, which I loved from the 4p T18, and think should be baseline: We proc pets OR have different pet summons based upon how much fury we have.

Think about it. Demons. Demonology. What's missing? Fuck the spells; they are there sure. Adjust them a bit or tweak them, yeah. This should be about Demonic Fantasy on the whole. Therefore, proccing pets is a thing that should be considered. Or, how about summoning pets with Demonic Fury instead of a Meta cooldown? Get to 1000 fury, you could choose to summon a few guardians: an Eredar, a Pit Lord, or a myriad of other pets based on the boss. Give each pet some different abilities; maybe one with some burst AOE, and some others with some stun potential, and some more with good ST potential.

A massive kit of Demons and picking which one is right for the moment should be Demonology's bread and butter.

It'd be like guitar hero with demons; pick the right batch and fucking Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield should come out swinging in concert.

Change Life Tap to Fel Sacrifice; tap for 20% of your HP and you get Mana, a portion of fury, and heal your pets by 10%.

3s channel spell: Dark Ritual. And some huge fucking Demon comes out to play. 2 Min cooldown. He swings like Dolph Lundgren on steroids.

[Sasu]

Wow, a lot of these "redesigns" completely miss the boat on addressing the goal: to simplify the demonology playstyle. This isn't about improving the RP aspect, this is mechanics. Here are what I consider the biggest playstyle problems with demonology and how I'd address them:

1) It's confusing what abilities turn into other abilities in demon form. I'd make this really straightforward and intuitive. Caster form abilities all spend mana and build fury, while demon form abilities spend fury. Fel Flame (yes, re-add it, it makes a lot of sense here) turns into Touch of Chaos. Corruption --> Doom. Shadow Bolt --> Soul Fire. Hand of Guldan --> Chaos Wave. That's just 4 abilities in caster --> 4 abilities in demon form to do the entire basic dps rotation. If you REALLY want to neuter the complexity, remove Fel Flame and Touch of Chaos.

2) Soul Fire procs are unintuitive. Casting Soul Fire without a proc is NEVER a good idea (ignoring on pull), so it is a classic trap ability. I'd simply remove Soul Fire procs and bake the proc into the baseline. Keep in mind that Soul Fire is now only castable in demon form, and it's already consuming a resource (fury). We've already got 2x resources. Soul Fire procs are basically a 3rd resource, which is cumbersome and poor design. The downside here is we don't have any execute range dps increase. Perhaps make a passive that increases damage done by Soul Fire when target is <25% hp.

3) Immolation Aura and Hellfire are never used. Demonology's AoE has become burst with Cataclysm + Chaos Waves or spread dots + HoG. This is plenty of AoE, so these two abilities could easily be removed.

4) The cooldown of shifting into demon form is an unnecessary restriction. This should be removed and you can freely shift in/out of the form. If you're worried about some kind of gaming, maybe make it 2-3 seconds. I frequently want to shift into demon just for a couple dots or something and find the 10s cooldown way too long.

That's all you need to do. It still won't be an EASY spec (at least, compared to aff/destro), but now there are no easy traps. The Demo single target priority becomes quite simple:
A) Keep Corruption and Doom up.
B) HoG double stacking.
C) Shadow Bolt while building fury --> Soul Fire when burst is needed or consuming fury.
D) Fel Flame or Touch of Chaos when moving.

[Soulzar]

When I think about the less intuitive aspects of Demo the main two I see is HoG vs CW usage.. and Caster MC vs Meta MC usage

- Remove Melee range AoE Hellfire and replace it with Ranged AoE Shadowbolt Volley, lowered base cast time. Shadowbolt gone as filler

- Address Molten Core in caster vs Molten core in Meta. Remove Molten Core. Soulfire primary filler/spender, unless talented Demonbolt

- Rework Hand of Gul'dan. No Charges. Applies AoE DoT Shadowflame which lasts 15-30s. Chaos Wave gone. Shadowflame increases Soulfire and Shadowbolt Volley Damage to target.

Touch of Chaos could arguably be removed, but I feel mobility is a niche Demo should retain.

[infernity]

The mobility will probably be the thing to go, in my opinion. For as soon as the specs are reasonably balanced, we'll play demo if it retains the mobility it has now.

Touch of chaos may go, as will soul fire in caster from, consolidating shadowbolt and soul fire into one. Demon form could end up on a cd, potentially linked to demon soul.

I wouldn't actually be surprised to see the removal of different spells based on whether we're in or out of form tbh, that's the part that makes demo awkward, having to know two priority lists, and how they merge together, and at what point you're supposed to use which bit of which list.

[Bullettime]

There is only one solution, which I loved from the 4p T18, and think should be baseline: We proc pets OR have different pet summons based upon how much fury we have.

Think about it. Demons. Demonology. What's missing? Fuck the spells; they are there sure. Adjust them a bit or tweak them, yeah. This should be about Demonic Fantasy on the whole. Therefore, proccing pets is a thing that should be considered. Or, how about summoning pets with Demonic Fury instead of a Meta cooldown? Get to 1000 fury, you could choose to summon a few guardians: an Eredar, a Pit Lord, or a myriad of other pets based on the boss. Give each pet some different abilities; maybe one with some burst AOE, and some others with some stun potential, and some more with good ST potential.

A massive kit of Demons and picking which one is right for the moment should be Demonology's bread and butter.

It'd be like guitar hero with demons; pick the right batch and fucking Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield should come out swinging in concert.

Change Life Tap to Fel Sacrifice; tap for 20% of your HP and you get Mana, a portion of fury, and heal your pets by 10%.

3s channel spell: Dark Ritual. And some huge fucking Demon comes out to play. 2 Min cooldown. He swings like Dolph Lundgren on steroids.

Pretty much. The demon within approach is also fine but they need to stick to it. Demo right now is kind of a mess where it tries to play up to some of the Demon Hunter fantasy while also trying to be the master demon summoner and it's just..what?

If they want it to stay with the demon within approach, then some damage needs to shift out of pets and beef up the Meta skills more. Demo right now, due to the heavy split between pets and the master, makes you feel average for popping Meta and weak when in caster form, contradicting the intended "awesome" factor.

But if they want to play up to the master summoner approach, then personally feel that Meta is out of place and should be replaced by a resource (or a rework of Fury) that allows more demonic summons to make you feel like a fucking commander ala D2 Necromancer.

If they keep to the current model, I'm expecting a total rework of Molten Core as it's pretty much this awkward (from a newcomer's PoV) tertiary resource, along with a streamlining of Hand of Gul'dan to remove the clipping aspect, a rework of Touch of Chaos, and probably a removal of Meta only skills except maybe just powered up spells with fancy animations (no HoG vs Chaos Wave debate anymore.)

[Leyl]

Pretty much. The demon within approach is also fine but they need to stick to it. Demo right now is kind of a mess where it tries to play up to some of the Demon Hunter fantasy while also trying to be the master demon summoner and it's just..what?

If they want it to stay with the demon within approach, then some damage needs to shift out of pets and beef up the Meta skills more. Demo right now, due to the heavy split between pets and the master, makes you feel average for popping Meta and weak when in caster form, contradicting the intended "awesome" factor.

But if they want to play up to the master summoner approach, then personally feel that Meta is out of place and should be replaced by a resource (or a rework of Fury) that allows more demonic summons to make you feel like a fucking commander ala D2 Necromancer.

If they keep to the current model, I'm expecting a total rework of Molten Core as it's pretty much this awkward (from a newcomer's PoV) tertiary resource, along with a streamlining of Hand of Gul'dan to remove the clipping aspect, a rework of Touch of Chaos, and probably a removal of Meta only skills except maybe just powered up spells with fancy animations (no HoG vs Chaos Wave debate anymore.)

Your point about the D2 Necromancer with demons kind of rings true really; every class that has that same kind of "dark sorcerer" kit has the ability to do that in Blizzard games. I think that this would be great. Hell, even in Hearthstone we see Gul'dan having the capacity to summon tons of Demons to overwhelm his foes.

[bio347]

If you wanted to keep the current Demonic Fury/Meta-as-stance gameplay, a way to do it might be... Meta is a big damage increase, like right now, but instead of spell morphs and fury costs it simply drains fury really fast while active. Maybe you shift some of the damage boost into a haste boost so that if feels more impactful to be in Meta (since you're just using normal spells). Maybe you just turn SB into MC-SF in Meta because when you change MC you've gotta do something with the two spells.

Or you could do something similar, but make Meta itself do something cool instead of being just "you do more damage". The ele shaman mastery tells us they have the tech now to make you independently fire things while casting other stuff, so you could make Meta continually claw the target with ToCs while you're shifted (like the original MoP idea) or throw shadowflame bolts or something. Maybe you base it on on you casting things or damaging things, and each meta-attack consumes Fury.

Maybe you make being in Meta cause things to spawn imps or small, non-obtrusive bitey demons of some sort. Maybe you combine all the ideas. I dunno!

[Orloth]

A huge simplification would be to remove choice from Metamorphosis. You automatically transform when you reach 1000 fury, and automatically leave when you deplete. Makes it a bit more like the old Moonkin. All the Meta enhanced spells can then stay, because they would simply be what you had to work with. Makes Archimonde's Darkness near mandatory to link with Meta as well. Not my first option, but it would work.

[Munemasa]

if i had control over the overhaul i'd prolly go this way
Meta becomes one of our demon talent selections, so the choice is powerful single demon, multiple lesser demons or Ima demon...you no longer summon demons but take on their aspect so for those that wish it no pet and stance/seal dancing for them... so imp bumps spell haste seriously for target swaping or gives you charges of SB and a teleport out, voidy bumps survival, succy higher damage at a shorter range, pup interupts movement speed increase, guardy melee Cleaves and a charge to get close(making hellfire relevent by having a reason to be in close)

still getting the command demon uses the demons utility skill, Slink buffs health by 20% for all pets except voidy who gives 30%, HF becomes a life steal dot

DF charges on its own, used in pet control or in meta, reworked so down to 100, MC stacks can be used to block regen or SF

Remove pet control from other specs, pets just get taped onto the lock so no more random disappearances

Kill command equivalent, plus an overhaul of the pets and our interaction with them... thinking along the lines of MC stacks generated by pet crits or some such, health funnel giving pets a damage boost buff or a survival buff for the voidy(aside from healing them), command demon stays how it is only instead of being a damaging thing its a utility, Imp teleports him charges him mana, Voidy AoE taunts and shields him up, succy CCs, pup munchs magic and heals it, guard raises pet crits/haste

basically pet Auto attacks, KC uses a damaging attack, DC uses utility, HF buffs and heals, SLink maintains shares your health with pet and maintains the HF buff for you

point being to make it so pet choice has a purpose no more one pet fills all holes situation so pet health and damage would need raising.

so demo locks would have the choice controllable pets that do 70% of their damage or they themselves do the damage

no more HoG stacking, maintain corruption, Doom and life steal dot(if meta), SB or DL as filler and SF on Proc/execute

return carrion swarm so there is a rotation for AoE