Hello everyone, I’ll be leveling a warlock as a main in Shadowlands, specifically demonology one, and was wondering what stats should be prioritized both in PvP and PvE, as to make my decision on a soulbinds dilemma.
I’ve been looking in Covenants and soulbinds and so far decided that for my playstyle, Kyrian for the potion and the constant DoT (or +5 shards) would be the way, along with Pelagos’ soulbinds to increase versatility and mastery.
On the other hand, I found Necrolord to be quite interesting too - offering defense in place of the previous Phial with Fleshcraft, and a nice damage boost on the shadow bolts, in addition to Emeni’s soulbinds which increases haste and primary stats.
So other than playstyle, and personal choices to be made between these two cases, I’d like to know which one prevails when it comes to stat choices for demonology - meaning whether (constant 5%) haste + (10 secs 20%) primary stats is more or less valuable than (constant 5%) versatility + (20 sec 5% mastery).
Demonology has a single, enormous stat need: HASTE.
You need at least a bit of haste for the rotation to “flow”; basically, since Daemonic Tyrant has a cast time, you need at least a tiny bit of haste to fit double Hand of Gul’dan and Dogs before you can Tyrant. Once you have enough haste (and enough luck for soul shard refund procs) you can fit more Hands of Gul’dan before the Tyrant, making the Tyrant bigger.
Also, since shadowbolt hits like a literal wet noodle, you need as much haste as possible to pass LESS time casting shadowbolt and more time using core procs to throw daemonbolts.
In SL consumption will use health pool of your demons as a resource for Tyrant’s buff. So you will need not the max amount of imps, but the healthiest demons.
For example, on PTR.
My imps have 3.2k health
Full hand of Gul’Dan will summon 3 imps with 9.6k health pool at the cost of 3 soul shards.
Dreadstalkers have roughly 8k health each.
Call dreadstalkers will summon 2 demons with 16k health pool at the cost of 2 soul shards.
Vilefiend and Felguard each have 16k health each.
Summon vilefiend (talent) will summon demon with 16k HP at the cost of 1 soulshard.
Grimoire: Felguard will summon demon with 16k HP at the cost of 1 soulshard.
This combo will take 4 soulshards at minimum, roughly 6.5 seconds to perform.
This combo is much safer to perform, because vilefiend and felguard will live for 18 seconds each, dreadstalkers 12 seconds, if we recieve any interrupt during this combo, we still will have time to continue and summon thick tyrant.
If you start this rotation with vilefiend, and it will be interrupted, the enemy will lock you from fire magic and you will be able to summon dreadstalkers and then felguard without any issues.
on top of that, felguard will stun target after being summoned, wich give you nice window to finish the rotation with ease.