Demonology - The spec is officially on the life support mode.
I know that the title of the topic kinda feels like a click bait but it actually isn’t.
For the last three expansions, the demo didn’t received any meaningful changes for its core mechanics. All changes were very minor, that involved only a talent or two or spell or two. Ok let’s take a look at poor old fella - Tyrant, almost all our changes over the years revolted around him and his Demonic consumption talent. For those who are new to the Demo and haven’t been around BFA, Demonic consumption used to absorb the energy of the wild imps in order to buff the Tyrant… and DC also killed all imps in the process. Back then it was very tedious and frustrating to deal with, because for once default game UI didn’t provide us any information about current energy level of the wild imps, and yes Wild Imps use an energy system, but more about that later. So we had to use addons like weak aura to track that value.
In Shadowlands, blizz decided to change the Demonic consumption and rework how it empowers our Tyrant. So instead of killing imps and using their energy for the calculation of the buff, they made it so that Tyrant started to absorb living energy (HP) of all our current active demons in order to empower himself. And on the first glance it was a small reverence to the “consumption of Thal’Kiel” , our spell from the demonology artifact from the Legion, but even here they haven’t put any thought into that - you see, wild imps cost from 1 to3 soul shards and provide small amount of HP for the tyrant, while Felguard from the “grimoire: felguard” and “vilefiend” talents had same amount of HP that your own Felguard had, and both talent only cost 1 Soul shard, which made them de facto talents for “Demonic Consumption”. Felguard(talent) and (vilefiend) was too valuable to pick other talents.
In BFA and SL, demonic consumption was the only valuable talent in the end row - Sacrificed Souls and Nether Portals was just undertuned for the most of situations. The only saving grace for Sacrificed souls in SL was the necrolord covenant with its Decimating bolt spell and legendary - Shards of Annihilation that made Sacrificial souls viable.
And here on the verge of stepping into Dragonflight we still have problems that are five or six years old. Sacrificial souls and Nether portal are still bad, not to mention that the demo won’t get anything from Shadowlands, unlike any other class/spec apart from Destro. And their spec and its talent tree really falls apart if you start to look at it without thinking about the damage as an end goal.
The only big change that demo got was replacement of Demonic consumption talent with Reign of Tyranny - that brought a new mechanic of ramping up Tyrant’s damage.
Other than that, spec remains the same…
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Same push of the Felguard being de facto main/prime demon.
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Same problems with wild imps and dreadstalkers.
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Same lack of synergy between normal talents and PvP talents.
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Same issues with Nether portal and Sacrificial souls.
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Same old Doom - the old and useless.
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Same lack of polish of the spec.
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Same lack of attention from the Blizz - we got only one iteration in Beta, unlike hunters or Shadow priests.
And As you see, the only thing that has changed over the course of the last five or six years was Tyrant related talents. Blizz only ramps up our damage when we fall behind in the ratings of M+ or Mythic raids, and doesn’t solve the core issue - the design of the spec itself.
And here I would love to point out the similarity between some games that has been put on the live support and demonology as a spec.
We can look for example for the heroes of the storm - Blizzard has abandoned this game and does rare maintenance and bug fixes, without providing any content updates for the game, because Blizzard has redirected their resources on the other projects.
And here we have a demo - that haven’t been been updated in the major way in the last six years, we only get some rare bug fixes or number changes, while our issues that lies on the surface are ignored in favor of providing content for more popular classes And If you wanna say that demo is popular and alot of players plays it - I would want to counter it. In the last two seasons we have witnessed not the actual demonology community that started to play that spec, but rather DPS gypsies that have jumped on demo when Spec has been buffed number wise.