when did i say that demonology doesnt work in PvE, it does, its a very good spec overall for dungeons and does some insane damage if you can set it up right, its also very competitive in raids, but people generally play destro because its a bit easier.
The irony is despite not agreeing with op completely on the pve v pvp concept I do agree with one thing- demomology design is just bad. I main demo though mop to end of legion. Each expansion it got worse and was given more I candy with less actual focus on a good game play.
Legion I feel was way better and my reason is simple- even though the majority of your damage was pets - your BIG plays like burst was using your demons as fuel to your personal spells, consumption was amazing and by far the best design we could of dreamed for to complete the summon design we had. You ate a portion of all your demons hp and threw it as a death bolt at a target which both encouraged you to summon large numbers and time your burst which was engaging and guess what, it was playable in pvp even when it wasn’t meta it was viable above 2.2k .
Bfa took away most of the more interesting tools to add more eye candy ai, the largest issue the Spec suffers from is ai with minions (which effects pve too but we have implosion to fix that there )
Demo has been awful since bfa started not due to numbers but because its design is flawed on the most core level that its damage is just everywhere. Hell the specs iconic defense strategy its sold to play to with soul link and damage mitigation is even pointless since blizzard gave destruction demon armour but decided demo shouldn’t have that too
My suggestion is just dont play demo, I know that sucks to hear but blizzard made it awful and you missed the time when it was actually good op sorry you missed it, it WAS for me at least, the most fun warlock pvp spec one time now it’s just trash
thats purely subjective. based on my experience with the spec BFA is better than it was in legion, the demonic empowerment mechanic was terrible and just didnt work, and i was never a fan of the MoP demo.
Subjective maybe but demonic empowerment got better with artifact abilities which basically made it a replacement shadow bolt in some builds (all minions sending a bolt to enemies). Also that’s one element of demo in legion out of many changes, I never minded demonic empowerment but then I’m spamming demon bolt in the exact same manner as I did in legion with DE so I dont really see the difference
Look maybe you like the current demo great for you, but to me bfa demo plays like turd, you never feel like your doing anything and theres no wow factor to it, the artifact ability in legion was without doubt way better than tyrant is now. It felt WAAAAY more satisfying to ramp up into a burst with it, hell even the doom build felt fluid for raw imp spawning army’s
And maybe you wasn’t a fan of MoP demo, I still personally feel that was the best design demo ever had.
It may be subjective but there is one thing which isn’t subjective- mop AND legion demo was more viable in a variety of wow content than bfa demo is. Bfa demo can do good M+ , legion demo could do any content well if played right . MoP/WoD demo could do any content well
So in my opinion- bfa demo is a failed project and they are still trying to polish a turd, its damage is all over the place theres lots of abilities that dont feel fluid or like they even belong (felbat swarms that basically is rain of fire on CD ) and abilities that might fail due to pet ai pathing or being too dumb with means of commanding your army- blunt truth
3 Likes
and thats exactly what i mean about it being completley subjective, its impossible for blizz to make the correct decision because it will be different for each person. so if they keep it as is some people will be annoyed, it they revert it other people will be annoyed. they cant make a correct decision. only way to make sense would be to add a 4th spec which is the old version of demo from mop to allow people to play that and keep the current
I don’t against a puppeteer design of demo, i’m against this current iteration because it sucks on technical level.
I’m mad because the game developers - the class design team - the people who knows how their game works on every desing and techical level, from simple or not so simple lines of code, to network details on client and server end. And yet they designed demo in such way, that their tech that fuels their game engine is not able to produce good gameplay experience for the players.
Good game designer when have some idea or feature for the game thinks about several things:
- Can i add this feature using tools that i have
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- Pro-Software
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- Skills as game developer
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- Game engine
- Will it run smoothly on my game engine?
- Will it fit my game
- Will it be fun to play
For example Bethesda when was in process of making FO4 declined the idea of land vehicles, because of streaming problems of their engine, so they cut this feature very early during production. You can think whatever you want about Bethesda game studios, but this was the right decision.
Here in Warcraft we have a developers who knew about problems that Pets/minions have in their game, they knew hat they won’t be improve it. Yet they still designed demo around that part of their game/engine that is highly unreliable. This is what is wrong about current demo/current developers.
generally the pet stuff for demo is fine. for the most part at least, there are the odd issues here and there but that just happens, it doesnt mean they have to completely redesign the spec, it means they need to fix the pet issues,
you have literally just stated yourself that the class isnt your problem its the pet issues.
Navmesh is broken, there is a ~0.5 to ~1.5 seconds delay between your command and action of the demon, AI attack pattern are broken.
AI they can fix, delay - depends on their network team, navmesh - 90% that they won’t fix it. Because of navmesh you can see problem with navigation of your demon, for example your demons don’t know that they can jump over the fences, it is also an AI bug because you need to teach your AI such thing and you need to teach your AI to jump over small obstacles.
Because these issues exist, and these issues won’t be fixed on the game engine level, demo should be redesigned to something that won’t suffer from that, because quality of demons represent the quality of demonology gameplay.
Demons are the main feature of demo and they should work flawlessly anything lesser then that will compromise the experience of the player.
i have never seen any issues with my pet not being able to jump over a fence, considering that normally when it enters combat it charges it still reaches it target without any issues, the same as a warrior that uses charge,
i think we are just coming at this from a different approach honestly, are you trying to get demo to be something in PvP or are you a PvE player i have lost track of it in this thread at this point.
because i couldnt care less about PvP and even then as i have stated previously not every spec needs to be good in PvP considering how balance works in general not every spec will be good, so im talking purely from a PvE standpoint, and demo is fine, and has been mechanically for a while, i never got on with previous iterations of the demo spec, but from an overall standpoint now it works fine.
Barry your living in denial if you think the pet system works fine for demo. I’m sorry to break it to you, but the MAJORITY of players don’t think it works well. the majority of the most competitive demo players right now, rely on cheesing the system for its bugs with pet pathing to make large tyrants to make it work at high keys. don’t believe me?? go watch some videos of high key players and look how they play.
the reality is - the MASS summoner is not ideal for wow itself. sure summoning a few minions with meaningful abilitys I’d be cool with on cooldowns id be down for that, but as a bread and butter spec its the least played warlock spec because most people THINK ITS TRASH. the representation of demo lock v the other specs says people don’t like it, its one of the least played specs in the game because of it.
so… your subjective view is the minority - most people would rather it be something else be it PvE, PvP or anything else. lets make imp swarm a Cooldown, our main demons be felstalkers on a longer CD, give us some nice big ones but take the action away from just repeated summoning and give the demo lock some actual personal damage and I promise you the design would be much more enjoyable for most players.
3 Likes
i never said it works fine, im just saying its not as bad as everyone is making it out to be, it ends up not being a huge issue for demo because for the most part you are not overly reliant on the pets,
they are also fixing the LoS issues in SL by changing how demonic consumption works, so thats a mute point now.
if you dont like the idea of a mass summoner you are more than welcome to try and play any of the other 35 specs in the game, you dont need to try and remove the playstyle of the spec from people that enjoy it.
you couldnt possibly know what is the minority of the majority, you can only base it off of people that go to forums and discords and other such things to complain about things or talk about what they do and dont like, there are hundreds of thousands of players that most likely never even touch the forums so you would never be able to know how they feel about it.
claiming a majority of minority is just idle conjecture.
[quote=“Barry-the-shatar, post:32, topic:173696, full:true”]
i never said it works fine, im just saying its not as bad as everyone is making it out to be, it ends up not being a huge issue for demo because for the most part you are not overly reliant on the pets, [/quote]
You mean the all the various demons that we summon as demo… the ones that did 63.14% of my damage my last ny’lotha farm night? Not sure what percentage of damage you would call overly reliant then.
I thought the whole point of the mass summoner spec is that you are very reliant on your summoned demons for your damage output.
Not sure that would get around the issue expressed here - if pathing is the issue then that has an impact every time you summon a demon (as the issue is - as I understand it - them getting to the target in the first place) which is why I prefer a summon and refresh approach to our additional demons (they only have to get to the target once then stick to it, which they tend to do quite well).
what i mean by not being overly reliant is that we dont have a huge amount of pet AI that goes into our damage, for the most part in ny’alotha we dont have many places to LoS imps so that doesnt affect us, the only thing we really worry about is wether or not our felguard is dead or bugging out, so no we are not overly reliant on pet AI for raiding currently. i stand by that
that has already been resolved on beta/ptr by changing how demonic consumption works so its no longer a problem. the majority of the problems with pathing are solved because most pets just have a dash or charge or what ever when they are summoned,
the LoS issue was with imps and how it impacted demonic consumption, but that has been solved by it not killing imps and instead taking 15% of the health of all pets
Actually we can call out on if or if not demo is liked by the majority- statistics show it has one of the worse representations in M+ in raid and pvp, pvp I will ignore due to destro being a thing but the point Is, demo is hugely the least played spec and has very low representation v the other two - that means a lot of players simply dont want to play it. It’s been low since wod ended and bfa pushed it down more than legion did. So the player base has voted with there game time choices that its not a good spec to play and its representation is testament to that.
Honestly legion was with flaws included a better system for summoning spec design than bfa, not because it was full proof but because some of the flaws could be overcome with the fact warlock did much more personal damage - it didn’t rely on tyrant to burst and most minions were more of a energy resource than core damage - the only issue I could see with legion is people didn’t like demonic empowerment, which was one element to that design but otherwise it actually played a lot better, was capable in all content not just m+ and genuinely had a full feeling tool kit to overcome some of its flaws.
I agree with you on that, pathing isn’t really an issue that affects us in pve. (You missed AI out of the post I was replying to so I read it as us not overly relying on demons for our damage… rather than pet AI/pathing for our damage)
However in pvp it’s an entirly different matter, hiding behind the scenery is a thing and pathing issues are going to hit you much harder in that environment.
I’ve not seen anything in this post that indicated Demonic Consumption as the issue. As I understand it the issue is demons getting LoS to attack a target that is behind an obstacle of some description.
i have repeatedly mentioned throughout this thread that im not talking about pvp i dont play PvP so i cant speak to that.
people have repeatedly complained about the LoS issues with imps, and the only reason the imp LoS stuff happens is because of demonic consumption
We complain about LoS issues because LoS exploits Imp behavior in PvP.
The fact that you are ok with current desing is good for you, i as PvP player have a lots of issues apart from Los:
- Lack of pet controls (non main demons)
- Pet unreliable abilities
- Poor synergy with warlock him/her self
- Low damage of main demon
- Lack of improvements upon pet oriented abilities
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- Health funnel
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- soul link
- Lack of abilities that will help demons with crowd control
- Bad design that flavor Felguard towards the other demons
- Delays between actions of the demons
- Bad desing of PvP demons (fel lord and observer)
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- low HP
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- Strict damage that is not affected by mastery or versatilty
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- Damage is not affected by Tyrant
And many-many more.
- Damage is not affected by Tyrant
Like i said before, i’m a pvp player, and i face a crap load of problem with current demo. No, i don’t wanna change my spec, i play demo since TBC, i belive that I as a demo player deserve better itteration of my spec. And if puppeteer gameplay can’t be flawlesly implemented in current engine, then we should revert demo to more reliable version or ditch the current one and pray that next one will be better.
but realistically you are seeing a spec that is not designed for a particular thing in game and still deciding to play it, which is a personal choice of you, it would be like a DK seeing something in game that requires a lot of mobility, actively choosing to play a DK and then complaning that they should rework DKs to fit what they want. its not how it works
Pre Legion we didn’t had any problem with PvE or PvP content as demo, we didn’t asked for this rework, we didn’t asked for these problems. They took something that didn’t needed to be touched and made it worse for one type of content. This is not the way of reworking things.
WoW has a motto - bring player not class. But in PvP demo is heavily flawed.
Old desing was build to avoid issues that we have today, and i want it back or different desing that will not have problems and restrictions of current demo.
The fact that spec has issues in one game mode or another indicates that some people in dev team made a extremely bad job, and probably don’t deserve the spot in the team.
that whole bring the player not the class thing works in general, but there is still situations that it doesnt like needing 4 warlocks on g’huun or stacking dot classses in the 2 boss raid. or stacking multiple mages in ny’alotha, or even stacking arcane on ST at the end of WoD. rogue on zul, there is endless things that show that its not bring the player not the class,. because thats how the game is designed