Demonology Warlock- plea to Blizzard

Classes Warlock
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Hello, as by warlock tradition I have came here to complain, specifically about the state of Demonology warlock.

Now, this spec has fascinated me since I Cata, where 10-11 years old me first entered Azeroth on my fathers computer. Warlock was obvious choice for me, both back then and later when I got account of my own. Summoning demons was always exciting to me and I have always enjoyed the complexity of demo.

However with time, as 6.2 hit I still held firm to the spec I love and I would have stayed and continued to play it even with these nerfs, however then came Legion. Now despite the cool implosion spec at the begging (which is similar to how tyrant operates now) it could be kinda fun, but looking at it, the spec was very overpowered for what it was, that is not good. Anyway to the point, as the health bars grew, even that spec faded anyway (now one of my main points here, as I said I still played Demo in 6.2, despite the Nerfs, however with how warlock changed, this simply wasn’t fun enough anymore to stick to it). Overall demo in Legion was a mess and rightfully so, it was basically entirely new spec, and same could be said about new demo, so I understand why not everything is perfect but here I am. However I don’t want to betray spec I love for Destro or Affy because they are better either, so I come with my own wishlist.
I will also write and updated version of my ideal demonology warlock, however that one will ignore many things like current design philosophy and will be quite literaly idealized, whereas here I am looking at the bigger picture and keep my feet on the ground, considering all the things Blizzard said

And why I have come here is to raise concers, compare us to other specs, as well as to try to provide my solutions to the current problems. I will divide this into multiple sections and provide some backing for my claims, coming from my experiments.

Disclaimer, I am PvPer so this might not apply to PVE

1.On current demonology
now here I will briefly review what current demonology is and show some problems with the spec itself. I might also divide it into even more sub sections to provide as honest and accurate picture as I can .

So the general idea behind demo is summoning, and at first I want to mention this alternation is way better than the one we got in Legion.

So demo revolves around a simple idea. Your demons do your damage. This is the reality Blizzard wanted to reflect in the game, while still keeping the generating to you, reintrodrucing Soulfire (Demonbolt) which allows you to cast fun insta cast spell and some responsive playstile, while still keeping your demons center of the action. This also brings us to the first problem, tyrant burst. Now I will adress this in detail more later but generally the main problem with tyrant is, not that he can get kicked or anything, no that is the case with you and your direct burst as any other class, but the inability to switch targed as well as how rampy tyrant is and how he delivers his burst in multiple casts. Now I think with all this said, I can outline my major concers with this spec

1.Rampy, just below we are going to compare the specs and as you will be able to see from the numbers I am going to present to you, Destro can do better and do tons more damage at the same time, while also being able to keep far superior sustained damage.

2.Locked to a single target, demo is not just “single target spec”, no. When you attack target you literaly are locked to the person until you kill them, this is very big problems and almost nulifies your ability to adapt to new situations.

3.Can’t get the damage off. Now this basically mimics the 1st point but one thing I’d like to mention is, in Bg, with swarms of people fighing each other it is not only hard to put out same damage in same time as other people but to even land your damage, and we got no ability to solve this.

Alright I think I will get into this and explain the rest later.

2.Spec inequality
So this is the thing I want to adress first. There is no point in wanting to rule the sky above if you don’t even have firm ground below you.Now it is no secret Destruction is far superior to Demonology in every way, and Affliction has significant edge compared to us too. So let’s get into this, I will main use destro as comparison but the second, defensive section basically applies to affy too.

Dislcaimer at firs though: I do NOT wish for destro to be nerfed, nor for some of the abilities I am going to be mentionin here. I can see destro developement in BFA was given to someone who really loves this spec and only wishes it to be better. I am not asking you guys to ruin his work, what I am asking for is the same treatment for demo. As soon as possible please, I dont want to finish this expanison as either of the other specs.

2.1-Damage
Now damage is the most important thing in this game, along with gear itself. And as we can see, Destruction can do way more damage in the same time as demo, while affliction can spread its damage to many targets, which easily makes them control the situation, something demonology cannot do.

So let’s start with destruction
I like the idea of destro being based around really strong chaos bolts, however demonology deserves chance too.

Now lets finally get to numbers for destro and demo. I understand the rampy nature of Demo makes it different spec entirely but some of the things I am going to point out are simply ridiculous to look at.

So first thing I did is, set up my “Ideal destro burst”, for this spec was easy, what I did was get to full shards, pop infernal for the grimoire and popped dark soul, then I started the clock to see how much damage I can get while shooting these bolts off. (for my full spec see my talent build, its fairly standard PvP build.)

Anyway take these numbers

So the ideal burst
While destruction relies on RGN I still only decided to do it once to save time, but I think what I put out is quite powerfull, so let’s look at it.

As destro with full shard chaos bolts and CDs I did around 4M damage in 22,28 sec. This is pretty stong as I see it and of course hardly reflects reality in arenas and BGs but it is good for rough comparison since it will still be able to show the measures between strenght of Demo and Destro

Now in those 22 seconds as demo,trying my best, I did laughable 500k, now I understand demo, especially with the consumption talent and tyrant cast time takes time to ramp up and that either way this is still pretty roguht comparison, to be fair I only did what demo would do to release his burst and as you will see with sustained damage comparison, destro will still outperfrom it.

Now for the sustained damage I mentioned earlier, what I tried to do, was not as much of a sustained damage, as trying to do demonology excuse for burst. However since it takes time and includes lot of sustained damage lemme look at it.

So this damage took 30s and yielded around 2,5-3M damage. Now I admit this might not be 100% honest since its difficult to say exactly what you need to do.
Anyway this will certainly equal itself out, because when I tried to maintain damage as destruction for these 30s to do reverse of what I did earlier I actually made few mistakes in my rotation, even for example pressing immolate thinking it was hand of guldan several times, however these mistakes still yielded me 3,5 million damage. So with few mistakes I did 500k-Million more damage, accounting for all the wasted time by pressing wrong abilities and also the RNG of the mastery

So lets do tl;dr conclusion to this

-Destruction burst does significantly more damage than demonology
-Destruction burst takes much less time for the big damage it does
-Destruction can also do more damage than demo even if they are given same, much longer time

Overall I think I don’t need to say who wins this round now, do I?

2.2-Defense

Demonology spec is famous for it’s soul link ability and in the time of legion this ability indeed distinguished it as the most defenseive spec, even if you didn’t do as much damage (but oh trust me you could, despite the horrifying rotation it took)

WELL NOW NOW, LETS LOOK AT DEMON ARMOR. Now I do not wish demon armor to go away neither is it my intent to cause sectarian war between warlocks but really it’s not like soul link was some ultra powerfull ability, so why can’t we get Demon armor too, and even if soul link was so powerfull. EVERYONE from other specs is using demon armor, this basically means that compared to other warlocks Demonology would still only have the same advantage above other locks as in Legion.

Demon armor in general is tricky, its really great and powerfull ability that almost feels mandatory while also being so strong it can’t be baseline either. I’d like Blizzard to adress it, and no not by nerfing or removing it, in some nice and smart way please.

So thats what I have to say, as demonology it simply often is hard to find the game, while destruction just basically snaps fingers and BOOM BOOM chaos bolt, target is dead. However that said my ideal solution for this is making demo powerfull in its own way, not hurting destro. We are all brothers afterall.

3.Burst
Now one of the most important problems with demonology is the burst. While I did not enjoy the Thalkiel burst in Legion, in BFA we burst thorugh an NPC and the problem is.

1.We have no control over the NPC and thus no control over the burst. We can’t stop, we can’t switch target. Nothing. And futhermore the AI is often soo stupid it is just gonna stand there and not do anything, it is quite sad in my view

2.Burst is delivered in multiple casts. Now come on, the idea of burst is usually executed through setting it up and when ready you press button and magic happens. As for demo, you too set up stuff (quite slowly too actually). But then what? You dont just fire an ability that destroys everything. No, you actually use ability that itself has cast time and even then it is only then when the tyrant ACTUALLY STARTS CASTING AND DOING DAMAGE. And guess what. Even after you set up abilities, so you can set up another ability that does burt for you, you still dont get to fire anything. Instead your tyrant starts using his demonfire, ONCE AGAIN WITH A CAST TIME AAHHHH GOD and not in one hit, nooo he has to land several shots to do any damage at all.

I am pretty sure I don’t have to explain anymore. Now I understand why they added tyrant, I know each spec having separate demon is now a thing, but come on, either make the burst separate from the tyrant or make him part of it, not it’s source.

3.Rampup
Now it is no secret you can’t oneshot people with imp firebolts but look. Demonology is in serious trouble. It’s fine if you dont perform as well as destro on start, but even in long run to me it seems destro just does more damage. You could argue this was situation where I statically fought an enemy, but then even more so, cast times and ramping only hurts in these situations, a lot.
I think we should give flat buff to our imps and even dreadstalkers. Yes it would make us insanely powerfull if we god oppurtunity to spam hand of Guldan but that is not the case 90% of the time. Most often your fights won’t last so long so why not make your demons more powerfull for this situation, I mean even if you claim that you’d be running around with powerfull armies and oneshoting everyone, it’s not like certain specs cough cough can’t do tremendous ammounts of damage with much less set up. So come on, make us stronger, please…

4.Defense
Explaining their class philosophy, Blizzard clearly stated Warlock is supposed to be a tanky caster, first thing that meant is that we for whatever reason can’t posses any movement abilities even though ACTUAL TANKS have some of their own. Not long after even our defense was nerfed.

Ok, we don’t need hundreds of baseline abilities and I think this is not happening this xpac either, most likely but please, the notion of demon skin being choice is ridiculous. Dark pact is good, however in my opinion demon skin should just be baked in as baseline ability and instead of passive x active defence dichotomy, we should aim for another one, in my opinion preferably shield x heal one. Yes thats right bring back dark regeneration.

Also yeat again please do something about giving us demon armor, it feels almost mandatory for locks.

5.Mobility
Ok, I touched on this bit before, warlocks deserve mobility. You want us to be tanky caster? So what? Last time I checked prot pally could use horses, warrior could use heroic leap, DK their sprint. Why not us.
What I would like to see is Demonic circle, baseline once again. This ability was never a problem. Why remove it. It is usefull both for me and PvE player alike.
What I always propose is ability that makes your demonic gate instant and makes it increase your movement speed after using it.

6.CC
First of all, Darkfury is garbage. This talent makes me so angry. All that devs did was take Shadowfury and give it longer cast time just so they can make this talent, which is not even best for the tier, please do not waste our time with such talent and decrease the cooldown baseline.
Also shadowfury should not have cast time that makes no sense.
Otherwise everything is ok for Demo, as far as I can tell. Maybe add in howl of terror but thats that yeah.

Ok so this was not as comprehensive as I wanted it to be but this should outline what I want and hopefully what my fellow demolocks want as well. Please Blizzard adress these issues, do not make me play spec I dont want to play whole expansion again, I really am diehard warlock and I will stick to this class, so at least make me enjoy it.

I’d also ugre everyone to really take the numbers with grain of salt I am not the best at maths and this is my first time really testing stuff so I am not too confident about these numbers, maybe I just wasnt trying hard enough. Anyway I am not gonna argue numbers here. Please help me expand this and to try to push Blizzard forward to do something for us.

Furthermore I think I am soon going to release my new version of my ideal demo lock, so if you prefer more outside the box approach where I ignore set class philosophy and limitations I will have that.

Whatever your opinions or intentions with this post are, thanks if you read it and please leave any suggestions you have and if I am wrong on something feel free to correct me.

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My main problem with puppeteer gameplay is it’s techical implementation.
WoW engine has it’s limits, and since Legion those limitations became more and more annoying for me as player.
Since vanila to WoD, we had only our main demon constantly on our side, yes we could summon Infernal, doomguard, wild imps (with or without glyph), demons from “grimoire of service”. But all those demons has limited lifespan and there was not many of them. Pre legion all pets, not only demons had some problems with navmesh or AI bugs, but since Main demon was the thing, and it’s damage was way higher then it is now, and rest of our demons was not always present on the battlegield you rarely noticed bugs and problems.
Now things are diffirent on many levels.
First, now we summon a lot more demons, and all problems with them are much more noticeable.
Second, because of our damage nature of current demo, all problems with demons directly impact our overal damage.
A short clip of pet AI delay in combat.
Look at dreadstalkers.

Right now, current demonology is dead spec, too many spec design problems ruins demo.

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I dont even play my lock anymore. Its just not viable

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A spec is ridiculous when a mages barrier can literally tank most of your damage. My current best suggestion is more spells or talents which take the focus off demons doing all of your damage and lend it once more to the idea of your demons being a means to an end ala thala’kiel and old demon bolt.

I’m currently working on a new demonic power system which I think is pretty cool where metamorphosis kind of returns in the form of dark apotheosis and this time around I feel it should be focused on your demons damage giving you demonic energy which allows you to empower your normal spells into burstier variants (e.g. hand of gul’dan becomes chaos wave).

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In the in game lore there is no problem that caould prevent warlocks to use metamorphosis. All arguments like this was demon-hunters spell is ridiciolus. Illidan gain Meta trough absorbing powers from skull of gul’dan, where rest of his fan base gain Meta trough rituals. Warlock’s meta was more close by idea to Illidan’s version, green fire quest is good example of it.

I would preffer if demo took a step back from puppeteer desing to something more like vanila-wod, where by the core it was empowering yourself and your main demon and Meta.

WoW can’t handle puppeteer spec, the nonsense that is happening now is a living testimony to this.

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You’re class is the king of raid dps. Can’t have it all.

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For fel sake numbers are not the pillar of the fun factor. I can do as much damage as i want, but if this isn’t fun/compedetive then class design is bad. I would be happy if my damage will be toned down, if i will recieve a fun game design.

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I do apologise. Not used to that sentiment on here. I admire that you apprieciate gameplay over numbers, wish more people did. I didn’t read the whole op as it was huuuge.

I remember that when 8.0 landed all the youtubers were saying demonology was loads of fun, what happened?

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They tested Demo in leveling or static encounters, without concideration of dynamic or PvP combat, they said “well, now demo gameplay is more fluid”, whole rotation became more natural and polished, but techical bugs, bad coding, whole AI mess is just kills Demo in any dynamic encounters. And this is only problems of core spells, not to mention bad talents, long ramp up time, bad healings/CC ETC.

Sadly but demo main purpose is to be eye candy for newcomers, demo was meant to be pretty but not working spec.

Sorry if my post was somewhat negative, it is hard for me as a PvP player remain my positivity in the light of whole warlock tragedy.

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They said the same thing about Legion demo, and we all know how that ended up.

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Topping raids is also irrelevant to pvp discussion, which i believe is what both the op and second posters talk about. Since Legion nowdays blizz has the tech to separately tune spells in pvp, so a buff in pvp doesnt make a class op in pve and vice versa. Its been done many times now, worries about raids are unnecessary.

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Indeed, and honsetly I don’t even need to be topping anything necessarily, as long as the class is viable or fun I am happy. The reason I brought up damage is rather to show how demo is lacking behind other specs which can pull out big nukes in short time, for half the effort. As I do not wish the other specs to be ruined, I thought it would be logical to increase base demo damage a bit, since it will take some time for demo to ramp up and in this time right now, we are barely doing any damage at all before we get enough demons out.

Absolutely true, I can’t stress this enough.

That is absolutely understandable. However my intent was never to make demo number one top DPS in everything, I only show damage to prove that other specs of Warlock are very unequal to demo and can pull double or more damage for much less effort in much shorter time.

I think this had more to do with Spriest playstile. But I think both could work, I mean we had the ability to change form and dps for long time, like 11 years, so let us keep it too. we can still be different than they are.

I absolutely agree.

Yes I too have been making my idealized demonology. I think it would be preferable to as you say get Meta back in some form, for me I imagine some kind of demonic corruption but whatever it is we should keep it. It was way more fun and actually worked awy better too.

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You see blizzard keep repackaging the same BS and feeding it to us. Demo’s old MoP style of play with meta form was epic and perhaps one of my favourite demo specs. but you cant have them in game with DH cos then they are more like twins. So seems like they made demo lock poo just to accommodate their new class.

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I know that very well, its true we are not getting Meta back because of DH and Spriest however that is why I tried to make this post as grounded as possible and only asked for at least some improvements. How my ideal demo would look like, thats whole entire different scenario.

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You know, never say never. Blizz has said in the past, that they won’t do “legacy servers”… or some crap like “you think you do, but you don’t”

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True, we just have to hope for the best. But sadly still, many people are being fed the idea of new Demo by Youtubers who show it off on static targets, so I think it might take time before people realise how bad this is and how much we need it, but yes I really hope Blizzard comes to understand that current demo isn’t all too good idea.

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Another big shame is how the demons no longer compete with each other. There was a point in WoD, especially in PVE, where you could seamlessly switch between demons whilst in metamorphosis and grimoire of service allowed you to bring out demons and use them for utility or burst.

I’d personally also like to see grimoire: felguard return as a skill which makes your felguard into a secondary demon which has its own demon command (axe toss) so that you can still also choose an imp, succubus, voidwalker or felhunter as your main demon. In doing so they could give each of the other demons their own versions of the demonic strength and soul strike abilities which add a level of uniqueness and choice to the class as you’re no longer limited to -just- choosing Felguard.

Hopefully 8.2 will help with the choice factor a bit if they’re bringing in a way of getting some of the PVP talents in PVE as they say as maybe the talent ‘Pleasure Through Pain’ will come to PVE and allow us to choose succubus in PVE as well as PVP.

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Yes, I’d personally love the pre-BFA grimoires and more utility-based demons. Though personally Im fine with my Wrathguard they could make the others worthwhile

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I can relate to some of what you write. For me the most annoying thing is that I only have 1-2 permanent pets that are any good. This is a problem :confused:

I love warlock, and more importantly, I love demonology. I will not switch spec even if they nerf us to eternity!

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