Warlock only have access to 5 pet archetypes
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Voidwalker - Melee tank.
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Imp - Range damage dealer, support.
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Succubus - Melee damage dealer, controller
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Felhunter - Melee damage dealer, anti magic specialist
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Felguard (demo only) - Melee damage dealer, AoE specialist.
All demons have a very limited amount of abilities yet they are designed to fulfill a specific role.
But with current design, none of none-demonology demons feels important and special, especially after the removal of spell lock from felhunter.
And I agree that INTERRUPT should be a baseline spell, not tied to a specific demon, but it creates a situation, where Felhunter would only have Devour Magic and Shadow Bite as spells.
Situation like this already happen to an Imp. This poor little fella only has Firebolt, Flee and Singe Magic as an active spells.
Felhunter must receive something in return. Spell lock was one of the key features of the demonic doggie and since good design revolves around balance - balance should be restored. Felhunter must receive a new spell for its toolkit. Because with only two spells in its disposal he cannot compete with other demons.
Since warlock demons unlike hunter pets don’t have family specializations like and family abilities that are shared across the family, it renders demons less useful and being just a source of damage and nothing more.
In the recent alpha notes about Dragonflight changes, blizz stated this.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/704412498589253743/1006704326871363686/unknown.png
“With this change, we are aiming to allow for more pet diversity.” The phrase does not bring pet diversity, it does the very reverse, it only homogenized demons across the board.
The very reason why in the classic Xpacs demons worked so well, is because:
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The design of their abilities worked on par with the desing of the overall game.
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Warlock had access to the talents that could customize the demon of your liking in order to further personalize your gameplay and build.
Red - Imp talents.
Purple - Void.
Pink - Sayaad.
In the upcoming Dragonflight talent changes, we have a talent “Teachings of the Black Harvest”
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/704412498589253743/1008864522557198386/unknown.png
By the basic idea it is not a bad talent. But id doesn’t bring anything good on the table. Since all bonuses are extremely lackluster.
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Imp’s singe magic effect would be useless at any difficulty higher than normal, not to mention that in PvP with DF design of the warlocks we won’t feel these 4%.
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Voidwalker is good for solo content, but with the current difficulty of the game I doubt that we will see the need to reduce the CD of the shadow Bulwark by 30 sec.
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Felhunter’s trait is only useful for PvP scenario, but with Felhunter only having 2 spells in its disposal, poor dogie won’t be competitive with Succubus and her toolkit or Imp that can dispel things from friendly targets and deal damage from the distance.
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Sayaad’s effect is kinda nice, but yet again it doesn’t have a good synergy with the current design of the game, apart from PvP we rarely have a situation where players need to CC some target like that, in the Raids and M+ packs of mobs are just being nuked and Hard CCed by stuns.
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Felguard alone has some decent buff but it is because Blizz tries to make him an ultimate Demo-demon which is an issue on its own, but more about that later.
My idea is to change that talent and instead of modifying the existing spells, is to add additional spells to the demons.
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Imp - Blood pact - Increase the stamina of the party members by 5% (Straight out the classic area).
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Voidwalker - Disarm.
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- Since Voidwalker is the tank, he is de facto less useful in PvE scenario, he is nearly perfect for Solo runs, but the area where he is completely useless is PvP, Disarm would give him some good utility in PvP.
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Felhunter - Spell reflect.
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- We have Spell reflect as PvP talent, but since we warlocks in DL would be pick Demon Skin talent and Dark Pact talent some actual utility for Felhunter could be good, alternatively Spell reflect of felhunter and Spell reflect from PvP talents could have a shared CD. So this talent could free one PvP talent slot if Warlock would decide to play with Felhunter.
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Sayaad - Switch teleport - Sayaad will switch places with Warlock - 2min CD.
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- The basic idea of this spell is to give Sayaad more utility than questionable seduction and slow in PvE and PvP scenarios. And since the core idea of the new talent system is to give players more choices and agency over their builds, this talent and Sayaad would allow warlocks to ignore Demonic circle or Gateways in the talents and build their character differently.
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- Additionally such a thing would allow sayaad not to overlap with the core warlock spells like fear and Curse of Exhaustion, since Seduction shares the diminishing with Fear, and Whiplash applies the same slow effect as curse of exhaustion.
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Felguard - At this moment, I think that original talent idea is not bad for Felguard.
And at the end, let’s talk about Felguard.
With the structure of Demonology talents in DF and that good portion of talents revolving around Felguard it creates a situation where the term “Diversity” is not compatible with Demonology. Felguard is designed to be a supreme demon for demonology that renders all other demons useless, because of his basic HP/Damage numbers and all other upgrades that Felguard can receive via talents. But it goes against the actual idea of demonology and the warlock toolkit that has four other demons. Current design of the demonology traps demo-warlock to play with Felguard and adapt to his toolkit and play style, while other classes are not limited so artificially.
If you need rough yet good example, immagine warrior that has 6-8 talents that work only if you have one-handed maces in your left hand, and those talents won’t work even if you’ll transmogrify your sword into mace, game would demand from you to have a one-handed mace in your left hand.
You will be able to build your character avoiding these 6-7 talents, yet you still would feel that such design is off and in some way unfair, because you as a warrior can use a lot more types of weapons.
Same here with Demons, Sure Felguard is our exclusive demon, but he is not the only one. No one forces BM hunters to play with one type of exotic pet and no one builds specific talents to work only with spectral tigers or wolves.