Demonology Warlock PvP Open Discussion

Hello fellow Warlock players !

A little introduction - I’ve played warlock and mostly demo since the days of SL till LK, then stopped and re started in Legion, just mostly bantering around, hitting 2.4+ as demo in 3s and chillin’. In BfA I’ve gone up to 2.6xp, but I’m mostly sleepin’ and waiting for changes.
(Yeah I know I missed the glorious MoP/WoD Meta ownage, but then again I can be more non biased so… a good thing I guess !)

I’m here to discuss what possible changes people would want to see in the future, PvP wise and just chat a bit, waiting for the next season.
I would like to see more of high rated people joining the discussion, but of course everyone is free to drop their bit after all we are just chattin’ and everyone is free to have an opinion ! So without further nonsense, here’s my take on what works and what doesn’t.

Known issues with Demo currently and in the past:

  • Metamorphosis - Obviously I haven’t experienced it(except the first version of it), but for blizzard to try to change it over the years so much they didn’t like it so I doubt it would come back around, even if everyone is basically rioting about it so I won’t speak much about it.

  • The lack of instant meaningful from the WARLOCK directly(!) casts:
    1.In the past for instance we used to have Shadowflame, a point and click instant that does some dmg,leaves a dot and generates 1 soul shard.
    While in current version of the game we do have Soul Strike, it’s still a bad design for it’s purpose, yes it’s good to kill totems, stop drinks and use it as second pseudo gap closer for your main pet. But for the purpose of shard gen it’s kinda on the down side and buggy.

  1. Doom
    Doom … Oh, doom what have they done to you. Many of you might say it’s pretty much the same spell, but the thing that made Doom strong was the fact that you could apply it from Hand Of Gul’dan, so you could basically get shards back by spending them and hitting multiple pets and spreading dooms, so compared to Legion, BfA version is nothing more than just sharing the same name.

  2. Tyrant - your main source of intended (!) damage in this expansion, a clunky and far too slow AI that can be stopped in multiple ways and still not doing enough damage to be reliable.
    I’ve said intended, because thats the way devs wanted for the spec to play, viability wise Db succubus spec is way more viable at higher cr.

I get the whole idea of the master pet summoner and all, but that has huge flaws when we are talking about competitive and I’ll expand more on those thoughts down below.

  • What I would wish to see in future demonology builds:
  1. Remember when I talked about instant damage generators? Yes, while we are supposed to be hard casting killing machine (which don’t get me wrong I don’t want to turn us into fire mages or anything) I would want to see some more reliable gen’s. Be it making doom back baseline and adding a similar talent on that row to make Hand apply it. Or Shadowflame/Felflame/Whatever you want.

  2. Dreadstalkers. Make them instant B A S E L I N E.
    Yes, in Legion having a honor talent for that made a lot of sense with how everything worked around Demonic Emp. and TK, but not in current demo kit so having them baseline is just what has to be the next step.

  3. Kick, please for the love of god we are the only spec with a kick in our honor talents, pretty sure that would help PvE Demo fellas too.

  4. Demonwrath or anything similar, moving channeling gen is something many of us miss I wouldn’t die not having it, but it was nice while it lasted.

  5. Make a spell or bake it into our current kit, if we are keeping the tons of pets and master or summon gamestyle - a spell that makes ALL our pet’s attack the target we want. Heck if you want just put it in our Felguard (or main pet) Attack button. We need to be able to hard swap at will.

  6. Overhaul of the pet AI in general, but thats just an optimistic idea, I realize how difficult that would be with current engine… It’s just a wishful thinking.

  7. While Tyrant on first glance is cool and all and I have no problem with having him, personally. It’s way too clunky. The whole idea of having a big badass demon empowered by sacrificing your lesser demons is cool and everything, but holy moly is it clunky. Tyrant with current WoW engine would never work flawlessly and reliably when it comes to PvP and thats a big no no, cause reliability is key in competitive.

I would like to see our main source of burst(!) not dps, burst damage a reliable cooldown that comes from the warlock itself. And I can’t say TK or Thalkiel’s Consumption if you want did not perfectly fit that criteria.
In fact I would personally love to see them expanding on it, when the azerite traits are gone in Shadowlands and Tyrant doesn’t do big damage, maybe make Tyrant to fullfill the role of demonic emp. buffing the duration of your demons and letting you setup more and more to do a big TK. It wouldn’t be toxic for the game either since demonic emp. is gone so the % hp increase is gone too and numbers could always be tuned easily. And it would be far easier and healthier to learn from the perspective of a new demo player, not as steep and mechanical as in Legion. Still has counterplay since the main setup pieces would be casted (Tyrant and TK) and you still need the time to properly setup the imps and everything.

In fact it makes great sense and in my mind completes the master pet summoner idea.

You summon horde of demons, empower them with a commander (their duration) and then the warlock sacrifices a portion of their life to blast the foe with it. And in the downtime you still strike your enemy with fel magic and throw demons at them.

Thats my 2 cents on improving the spec, I’ll be glad to hear your guys opinions and thoughts.

Have a nice day !

3 Likes

just play destro 4Head

2 Likes

Hello Kystier!

I agree with the majority of what you said, except maybe for the interrupt unironically. Demo is the only warlock spec to get a single target stun, and it has the ability to also get the interrupt by picking the talent. I think it’s already a trade in favour of the demonology warlock.

Speaking of the stun, I would really really like for Axe Toss to be impossible to parry / dodge. Yes it’s pretty cool when a Rogue uses Evasion to dodge it, but the fact that we don’t control perfectly our pet makes it pretty unfair when you throw out your stun on a melee to be able to breath a little bit and it failed randomly.

I would also like to be able to pick Demon Armor, seeing how mastery is scaling for Destruction, I feel like Soul Link is becoming worse and worse plus Demo is the Lock spec that needs to cast the most.

Have a nice day too!

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I again agree with a lot that is being said here.

What I don’t agree on is the “build up to burst”. Mainly due to two reasons:

  1. It makes us slow and cumbersome both at the start of fights, as well as during every 1.5m for the burst period. Meaning that the slightest hit of movement reduces our damage by more than is reasonable. Being able to instantly redirect our pets attention wouldn’t help with this problem as it would only alleviate the after effects of our burst. It is also quite noob unfriendly as a single misstep or miscast reduces our damage immensely. On the same note, toning down the burst and increasing our rotational damage only results in our strongest moment to become boring and even ineffective as it would allow passive builds to do the same/more with less effort.
  2. We arguably already have this style of gameplay in affliction (at least on single target fights.) Except demo has a 1.5m timer instead of a 3m one.
    Destruction does have a build up period for their shards. But they have their “fire in the hole” moment AFTER pressing their big cooldown.

For some other specific points:
Doom would work a lot better in pvp if it gave a shard when it’s dispelled. Or spawn an imp. Anything would be better than it’s current form.

Now I wouldn’t mind this so much if Blizzard actually reacted to threads like these, but the complete radio silence does not give me any hope for the foreseeable future.

2 Likes

I’m glad to see some other feedback on the topic and very happy to see stuff i’ve missed being improved on !

The Axe Toss random parry/dodge that was pointed out by Xenocrates is actually something I completely missed and is very important.
About Demon Armor and Soul Link, in current BfA… SL is very, very underperforming, but having both will make us a bit over the top so I guess that’s the reason blizzard is not taking the step to add in armor to demo. What I would be happy with is even % buff on SL.

As for what Demodan said.
I’ve and probably a lot of people have seen demo as the build up and blast you up tanky lock spec. But having some dmg outside the burst windows to not be completely ignored would be cool too. The main reason I wanted the burst to come from the lock (think TK or chaos wave or so on) is reliability.

The Doom part having any dispel protection is actually amazing idea and I really really like it !

Cheers, may more demo’s flow the topic !

Can’t say anything else tbh everything as been said, our spec just doesn’t work in pvp.

Building burst takes forever, if you got los/kick/stun etc… During the building you have to start it completely(might take quit some times especially in 3s when having to deal with multiple micro cc/interrupt).

People can cc/kick/line pet easily and for 1m30 you are useless cause there is absolutely no dmg at all after tyrant (tyrant dmg is not even scary tbh).

And yes, saying demo lock is super tanky because of soul link is a lie. Even with a ton of versa you got shredded by every mêlée cleave, aff/destro does survive better than us and our pet die through everything (cleave / dot / random pve gear proc) and ofc takes so much time to get a new one and usually you got every kick/stun/knock on it.

We don’t have any mobility and we are snare every game 24/7.

We have pretty much nothing to do dmg/build shards except hardcasting shadowbolt which also takes forever compared to others specs.

This is my feeling and for most of demo lock playing this spec in arena.

Edit: I forgot, we got our ms nerf to 10% while blizzard gives it to pretty much every mêlée with 25%… Like come on we were the only one to get it in the past with warriors

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Regarding Soul Link: perhaps we should have it as either an active ability that increases the damage shared with our demon, or allow us to (pvp)talent into Chain Souls: Reduces the amount of damage transferred by soul link, but links all summoned demons to you. Decreasing damage taken by x% per active demon.
This would allow demolocks to be extremely tanky outside of his burst window. It also makes him vulnerable once the burst is happening, as all demons get sacrificed in a BI build.
If one does not use a BI build, then demolocks become all about “outlasting” opponents in pvp.

And I agree with my fellow warlock above me still, building our burst simply takes too long for a result that we have too little control over, even with Power Siphon it takes at bare minimum 7.5 seconds of freecasting before our burst even starts! And THEN our burst is either CCed or LoSed, causing us to lose 60+% of said burst.
The only time we get to even remotely bursting someone down is in BGs where the other team is busy dealing with the frontline and sniping healers.

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