I’m with everyone else in saying that these changes are awful and the whole thing should be scrapped. The changes are completely out of touch with what people enjoy about demo and make little sense. However I fear that these changes will make it to live in some form, so I think it’s important to give feedback on them so we have something usable in the end.
We’re working to reduce the peaks and valleys of Demonology’s throughput by depowering Call Dreadstalkers.
It’s hard to give feedback on this because it just doesn’t make sense, the peaks and valleys that people talk about in demo are caused by the combining tyrant with other cooldowns and externals like PI. Dreadstalkers are up the majority of the time and do consistent damage. If you think that the ‘peaks’ of dreadstalkers is too much, then surely the simpler alternative is just increase their duration and reduce their damage to compensate?
Demonic Core economy has been too generous in Dragonflight. We want to return Demonology to a place where Shadow Bolt is frequently cast
With how demo currently works this sounds awful but I can see a scenario where this is actually good, but it absolutely requires making shadowbolt interesting to cast. Right now it’s the pinnacle of boring filler. It’s slow to cast, slow to generate shards and doesn’t interact with our kit at all apart from one awkward, boring talent (Fel Cov) that no one wants to play.
I think two things need to happen to make this palatable:
- Reduce the cast time of shadowbolt. If we’re going to be a turret, at least make us a fast firing one. The cast time could even be switched with HoG to compensate, it would make sense for our filler to be fast while our spender requires a longer cast commitment.
- Introduce talents that make shadowbolt interact with our kit. Give it it’s own benefits and reasons to use it so that’s a valid alternative to demonbolt, and not just a weaker version of it. Maybe casting shadowbolt can give a stacking buff that empowers our next HoG? Or a stacking buff to our active imps, so we could have phases of building up an imp army quickly using demonbolt/HoG, and then empowering it with shadowbolt?
Fel and Steel has been redesigned – Your primary Felguard’s Legion Strike damage is increased by 10%. Your primary Felguard’s Felstorm damage is increased by 5%.
New Talent: Heavy Handed – Increases your primary Felguard’s critical strike chance by 10%.
New Talent: Cavitation – Your primary Felguard’s damaging critical strikes deal 10/20% increased damage.
New Talent: Shadowflame Acolyte – Shadow Bolt deals 15% increased damage and Demonbolt deals 10% increased damage.
New Talent: Imp-erator – Increases the critical strike chance of your Wild Imp’s Fel Firebolt by 5/10%.
New Talent: Dirty Hands – Hand of Gul’dan deals 8/15% increased damage and the critical strike chance of Hand of Gul’dan is increased by 8/15%.
These are exactly the sort of bland, classic era passive talents that Blizzard specifically wanted to avoid in these new talent trees. Why are we ripping out talents that give interesting gameplay changes in return for this?
The rest of the changes don’t need much comment. Reducing two point nodes to one node in scenarios where people only ever took 1 point is good. FelCov being 1 point is good, although I would prefer if the talent was reworked entirely. Dread Calling being 2 points now is a little lame but it’s not a big deal.
I sincerely hope Blizzard is looking out for feedback and listening to it. Demo is one of the most well designed specs in this game and these changes only tarnish that.