Demo Changes!

[Grevmak]

Non-tuning related feedback:

- The movement talent row (30) just doesn't feel good. DS is inconsistent, PS may be consistent but costing 2 imps and having a 30second cd just to be able to do something while moving doesn't feel good at all when classes like mages get shimmer on all 3 specs, and Doom...Jeez, what happened to Doom? Make it spawn a random demon on expiration or something, right now it's straight up garbage in both mechanics and feel. Soul Strike from the 60 row helps a tad with movement, but that's all it is: A little.

- Having no on-the-move or quick Burst damage spender feels bad. Your spender in MoP was going into Demoform and thus getting a bunch of bonuses, right now we have 2 spenders, one of which can only inconsistently be used on movement. Right now, if you spend shards, you create demons...Which is cool and all, but only if the enemy lives for the whole duration. Playing a class that has no way of doing quick damage to a target whatsoever in certain situations isn't fun, it isn't creating "Class fantasy", it just feels bad.

- Very small niche IMO - No need for them to be kings at movement or killing small things fast, but give us something at all here. Right now it seems that Demo will only be good at low movement single target or medium to big AoE fights that allow cleave damage...That's it.


I really enjoy the core gameplay loop of the class, and summoning a ton of dudes and then extending them with our Demonic Tyrant feels great, but I don't see Demo being all that great in terms of what it can do when compared to Destro and especially Affliction, which right now can be sustained or burst, cleave, ST or AoE focused, while also having few issues with movement. You can also kill small targets without it feeling completly shitty with Haunt+Seeds, so there's that, too.

[Deleted]

Right now, if you spend shards, you create demons...Which is cool and all, but only if the enemy lives for the whole duration.

I'm not sure quite what you mean with this. They're essentially dots but better; imps will cast 4 times before despawning so if an enemy only lasts for one hit its not like the other 3 will be wasted, they'll cast on something else. They'll stay up for a while if you don't have a target for a few seconds as well.

[whywhatwhowhenhow]

There needs to be a way to track demons and their durations. They used to be on the totem frame but not anymore. Makes it harder to maximise tyrant usage and just feels bad not being able to track my demon army.

If anyone knows a way to do this with an addon or whatever (not weak auras) then I'd be more happy with the spec.

[kaid]

There needs to be a way to track demons and their durations. They used to be on the totem frame but not anymore. Makes it harder to maximise tyrant usage and just feels bad not being able to track my demon army.

If anyone knows a way to do this with an addon or whatever (not weak auras) then I'd be more happy with the spec.

I fully agree with this there needs to be a better default interface way of seeing how many pets you have up. You should not need to use a mod to see basic information like that simply put them in your buff panel with a picture of the pet and the current count.

[xuros]

People in Legion didn't like the way Demo played but it was strong in EN and if you knew how to play it correctly it was good though most of NH until they started to lower the damage of the imps and they supercharged Affliction. I guess its good that demo is undertuned this time around at the start so maybe we will see some "meaningful" buffs before the raid tier hits.

Keeping fingers crossed!

[darkenrahl]

People in Legion didn't like the way Demo played but it was strong in EN and if you knew how to play it correctly it was good though most of NH until they started to lower the damage of the imps and they supercharged Affliction. I guess its good that demo is undertuned this time around at the start so maybe we will see some "meaningful" buffs before the raid tier hits.

Keeping fingers crossed!

yeah well.. no..
demo was good so far that you had CONTROLLED movement and you had to move seldomly..
As soon as you started moving a lot, damage for demo plummeted..
hence a LOT of NH mythic encounters were REALLY shitty for demo..
and that's when a lot of people just said "bye bye" to demo, because affliction got supercharged in parallel..

demo in bfa so far looks the same immovable stick..
what can you cast while moving? you have no dots, and your generators needs to be hardcasted, same for your spender, and your "proc"[core] depends on both spender and consumer to actually get some core..
so yeah for normal and maybe hc it will be fine.. but where you will need execution and flexibility you just won't raid as demo, unless your damage warrants the raid leader cutting you some slack about moving around to do mechanics..

it's such a pity..
for me pandaria SoT demo was very good, just like WoD foundry lock was also incredible both gameplay wise (damage, possibility to burst, cleave potential, and movement via demonic leap) and lore wise (you meddled so much with demons that you became capable of wielding demonic-like aspect)..
legion demonology fit the lore as a imp massive summoner, but the clunkiness of the roation made it problematic along with lack of movement option, lest there were two+ targets and you could spam demonwrath while moving..
bfa demonology so far seems even worse of, with forgettable damage, though lore wise it's even more fitting than legion as a demon commander rather than an imp spammer..

time will tell, but so far, i'm less than impressed

[xuros]

yeah well.. no..
demo was good so far that you had CONTROLLED movement and you had to move seldomly..
As soon as you started moving a lot, damage for demo plummeted..
hence a LOT of NH mythic encounters were REALLY shitty for demo..
and that's when a lot of people just said "bye bye" to demo, because affliction got supercharged in parallel..

demo in bfa so far looks the same immovable stick..
what can you cast while moving? you have no dots, and your generators needs to be hardcasted, same for your spender, and your "proc"[core] depends on both spender and consumer to actually get some core..
so yeah for normal and maybe hc it will be fine.. but where you will need execution and flexibility you just won't raid as demo, unless your damage warrants the raid leader cutting you some slack about moving around to do mechanics..

it's such a pity..
for me pandaria SoT demo was very good, just like WoD foundry lock was also incredible both gameplay wise (damage, possibility to burst, cleave potential, and movement via demonic leap) and lore wise (you meddled so much with demons that you became capable of wielding demonic-like aspect)..
legion demonology fit the lore as a imp massive summoner, but the clunkiness of the roation made it problematic along with lack of movement option, lest there were two+ targets and you could spam demonwrath while moving..
bfa demonology so far seems even worse of, with forgettable damage, though lore wise it's even more fitting than legion as a demon commander rather than an imp spammer..

time will tell, but so far, i'm less than impressed

Yeah well...no. Another one of these 'clunky" mechanics people (lol). Nobody ever said it was perfect nor did I say anywhere in that post the spec wasn't a turret. The numbers were great in Mythic EN and early into NH. Where the good players and the bads differed was the good ones knew where they could pop a CD and stand in bad then take one step out of it when needed or set up their gateways/portals ahead of time and the bads just ran around bitching they had to move too much. The spec had some issue but with our damage mit CDs/soul link there wasn't a whole lot that we needed to run from other than one shot mechanics. Before the "blah blah your healers blah blah"... they nev er bitched about it because there wasnt anything to bitch about.

Yeah later on in mythic NH it took way too much to play the spec to get subpar numbers once aff got its buffs but demo was playable early on in EN with popping CDs and it did very well in Trial, Sadly in NH and Tomb the movement was just too much for it.

Also that MoP demo people love to bring up depended on if oyu were able to get your hands on a Lei Shin(Shen?) trinket for the random as fuck proc. No thanks, I hope to never have a spec that relies on a trinket procing at the right time to go max damage ever again. Did you forget them having to nerf the fuck out of it in SoO to force us to stop using it?

[BiggestNoob]

There are a number of talents that needs to be reworked and the spec should have some more consistent mobility. If one of the more garbage talents could be replaced with one that say makes your HoG cast shorter based on how many shards you spend with it (say 1 shard = full time, 2 shards = half, 3 shards = instant) you could use HoG for movement. I think that's probably the only major change I'd want to see, the rest of the spec feels alright. Hopefully Ion doesn't pull another "We'd rather you not play demonology" and actually buffs it this time, because it's quite garbage right now.

[Gaidax]

In-between Power Siphon or Soul Strike options and ability to hoard up to 4 charges of DB, I think Demo is fine enough for movement.

That's definitely not enough to run around like headless chicken, but will be enough for majority of raid mechanics. As usual - people will need to be movement aware and not just aimlessly run around when it's not even needed.

IMO, overall mobility-wise only Destruction is truly screwed. Demo is not some mobility champ, but at least it has quite a few options.

As a whole, I am not so sure why specs should have this "consistent mobility", IMO it's fine that mobility is a concern and a weakness, as long as it's not way too hardcore balls to the wall immobile object case, which it's not for demo.

[Shandalar]

Demonology gameplay is ok. Basically now the imps are good dots, instead bad dots like in legion. We have more mobility, tools and have lost those damned life tap and DE.

What is not ok is the dps, absolutely awful. If the situation remains like this when the mythics and raids will open demon will be just unplayable.

[Mokrengar]

They always do. They do some tuning for the pre patch so things are not super unbalanced and then tuning again for the new end game. It shouldn't be a shock to any unless this is someones first expansion.

rhorle is correct. For those of us that recall the WoD pre-patch transition (which resulted in a version of Demonology that also had excellent mechanics), this is a familiar cycle. Expect an adjustment to damage output (i.e. an increase) to occur some time after BfA launch.

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Note: quotes selected for general theme, but snipped to improve readability of responses.

Grevmak, it seems your observations may be boiled down to:

Non-tuning related feedback:

- Jeez, what happened to Doom?

- Having no on-the-move or quick Burst damage spender feels bad.

- Very small niche IMO - Right now it seems that Demo will only be good at low movement single target or medium to big AoE fights that allow cleave damage...That's it.

The lack of an applied DoT does feel quite strange as a warlock, but perhaps I could get used to it.

The second two points highlight the need for an additional on-the-move spell, and in particular, that a shard cap of 5 is very small, thereby limiting the player's options for how to carry out dynamic optimization in response to stochastic dungeon/raid mechanics (i.e. dodging randomly targeted fire, which is a perennial, beloved feature of WoW). Essentially, something is needed to make Demonology a more robust specialization. I would propose that Hand of Gul'dan once again be made an instant-cast spell (or castable on the move), as this solves the issue of what to do when movement is required and one is capped on shards. The alternative solution is to increase the shard cap, which presently allows the player to move for only 2 GCDs (assuming 2 charges of Demonic Core, and start movement at 0-1 shards); however, a larger shard cap introduces additional complexity to the specialization, which, from a game development perspective may be undesirable (e.g. damage tuning and playstyle adjustments become more complex). In contrast to the added complexities (e.g. damage tuning, specialization difficulty) related to an increased shard cap, implementation of instant-cast (or castable on the move) Hand of Gul'dan would simply result in a moderate damage increase on encounters with movement and, importantly, the Demonology playstyle would remain essentially the same as it currently is.

My conclusion is that the aforementioned change to Hand of Gul'dan would make Demonology a robust specialization (as it should be - though, of course, I am biased as I have always had a love for Demonology) and that this is an elegant way to achieve this end. The key feature of the proposed change is that its effects do not propagate, thereby causing issues to other aspects of the Demonology playstyle. An additional aspect that I would like the reader to consider is as follows: it is aesthetically pleasing throw a Hand of Gul'dan at one's enemy while charging (i.e. while moving) into battle, and I think many players would agree with this.



To my readers: The foolishness of proposing game design changes as merely a player of a game is acknowledged by the author, as game developers are likely to dismiss such efforts as wishful thinking, and fellow players are never in agreement on any issue. In spite of this, I urge my fellow players to consider this proposal carefully; perhaps they will read this and buoy up the notion of an instant-cast or castable-while-moving Hand of Gul'dan.

[Deleted]

I remain hopeful. Demo IS fun and mechanically sound. They just gutted the dmg.

[BiggestNoob]

I really don't think Demo needs a huge amount of baseline movement, SS does grant some decent movement if timed right, but it's still going to have issues on some raid encounters (not quite as much as Destro, but that's a whole different issue). Having a talent row include an option that increases damage output and one of the options being movement with relatively little gain otherwise (like 3shard HoGs = instant) would be pretty good at providing a versatility option for cases where higher mobility is needed.

We'll see if Blizzard does anything to change things, I'm not a fan of the scumbag-for-good-dps being a requirement of being competitive with other classes, though.

[Deleted]

You cant legitimate duel 1v1 as a demo warlock, that's like healing with first aid.

[Deleted]

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Yeah I agree Hand of Gul'dan should be an instant cast.

It historically has been and there is no reason why it should have a cast time now, however short it may be.

[Shandalar]

People like @Gaidax should be very happy. He and a couple more were all the beta complaining about the opness of Demon and the needed of a big nerf. Now Demon is absolutely unplayable and probably it will be the same during all BFA so congratulations guys.

[Gaidax]

I gave proper feedback where it mattered and others did as well, that, coupled with Blizzard design resulted in a much better Demo than you had before.

Spec has good mechanics and is very well playable fine, while numbers tuning will happen in a blink of an eye with aura or otherwise.

Yes, it got nerfed because it was, in fact, OP, just as Destruction was - it will end up being buffed back just fine, there is no need to be a fucking baby about this - this happened 500 times in past and it will be all the same in BfA where we will have many tuning passes first month before actual progression begins.

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If you want to give actual honest feedback and not be the usual retard - give feedback about Nether Portal - that one indeed is full of issues. I gave one in Beta using official channels. You?

[JustaWarlock]

it will end up being buffed back just fine

I agree, everyone should just chill. <insert milestone here> will fix it.

[Shandalar]

I am in Europe, and feedback in EU forums is absolutely useless. BTW Nether Portal will never be changed during BFA, we have to live with it.

They have guttered Demon into the oblivion with nerfs nerfs and more nerfs, its pretty obvious than they know they overnerferd Demon. They just want it to be unplayable.

[Gaidax]

I am also in EU and it did not prevent me from posting feedback for both Demo and Destruction.

You, on the other hand, are just full of shit. Bitching and never submitting even one line of actual decent feedback.

http://www.darklegacycomics.com/631