My Ideal Demonology Warlock 3.0

Classes Warlock
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Good day, with the announcement of no gameplay changes to demo whatsoever and time of planning out how to apply different approach to demo, Im once again coming with My ideal demonology warlock.

This post is dedicated to all the people on the forum who have offered constructive criticism to Blizzard over the state of Warlock, and there have been quite a few of these people, thank you and let’s not give up yet.

First of all this time I will try to make one without meta , however sooner or later I will come back to my old theme of “Demonic corruption” and meta will indeed play a part.

So first of all lets set some things straight

  1. I am speaking for myself here, I am trying to come up with an alternative however I will not claim this post to represent will of other warlocks
  2. I am giving a take without Meta, just coming here to entertain how Demonology could possibly look with the current core being maintained
  3. I am mostly PvP player so thats my angle
  4. This is purely for fun, Im not claiming any absolute authority over how Demo should look like

As for the goals

  1. Improve demonology spec, making it more interesting and maybe more usable.
  2. Moving focus away from imps. While I personally think imps have place in demonology toolkit, as the “lesser minion”, who is there just for turret, they should definetly not be more than that. Imps have been moved away just to a passively generated pet, who, while having its uses to improve the flow of the spec, they longer serve as the core.
  3. Partial return to “what works”, while maintaining some semblance of today’s system.
    4.Increased choice of pet and by extension increased diversity of related playstyle.

1. Core spells

Resource : Soul shards

I.I. Builders :

  • Shadow bolt

Works very much the same way as live. Deal small ammount of shadow damage generating a soul shard.

  • Hand of Gul’dan

Works the pre-Legion way. Two charges, some shadow damage and now each hit generates one shard.
Applies “ Shadowflame ” DoT on the target.

  • Doom

A spell that is now shared by all warlocks as of beggining of Shadowlands. For Demonology this spell shall also have a chance to generate a shard it will also deal substantial ammount of damage over its long duration, with a chance to summon Doomguard. Doom works in the pre-legion way, being DoT that ticks for a long time and deals big damage.

I.II. Spenders:

  • Chaos wave

Costs 2 shards. Instant ability that fires of our beloved chaos wave, dealing substantial chaos damage and “making doom tick faster” (Basically takes second or so from the doom ticking time, that would be a matter of balance, which is not the concern of my project right now). About like 4 second cooldown.

  • Fel Infusion

Costs 2 shards. Instant. Infuses your main demon with Fel energy for x seconds (No, dont worry this is not Demonic Empowerment). Increasing the damage by x% and empowering the abilties of your active Demon.

Felguard-
Turns into Wrathguard
Legion strike reduces healing by additional x%,
Axe toss replaced by “Fel Strike”, which immidately causes stun that lasts for x seconds (The difference is that this stun does not have any travel time and lasts for longer, visually think Demon hunter stun)

Succubus
Turns into Shivarra
Seduction increases the damage dealt to the seduced target. (This is nothing great but I can’t do much with seduction, however Succubus also needs to benefit from the effects as she will be a large part of this spec as well.

Imp
Turns into Fel Imp
Singe magic now works as AoE purge of a sorts. Might not be the best solution, in case we can work something better out of that but again imp needs to be represented too, for the reasons of my own.

  • Summon Pit Lord

3 Soul shards. Instant. Summons a Pit Lord into designated area, Pit Lord shall go on to attack nearby targets. (Works similar to Fel Lord and especially Abomination.

  • Nether Portal

3 Shards. Instant. Opens a portal into twisting Nether for x seconds. During this time Demonic forces shall emerge from this portal to attack all targets.

I.III. Summary
G- generates, S- “Shard”, C-cast, I - instant, -CG - charges, X - chance, CD - cooldown
Builders - Shadowbolt (G:1S,C) . HoG (G:1,I,2CG), Doom (G:X,I)

Spenders: Chaos Wave (2S,I,3sCD), Fel Infusion (2S,I,CD), Pit Lord (3S,I,CD), Portal (3S,I,CD)

I.IV Passives
Demonology shall maintain its current passive effects such as soul link. soul leech, etc… Same goes for mastery.

  • Wild imps

Your damaging abilities have a chance to summon a wild imp, who shall follow you around and shoot bolts until running out of energy.

Demonic core

Whenever an imp dissapears, his demonic energy has a chance to be absorbed by the warlock, granting one charge of Hand of Gul’dan (for smoother shard generation.)

Unstable power

Each Wild imp bolt has a 50% chance to reduce the cooldown of Nether Portal by 1 sec.

Other abilities: Baseline Mortal Coil, yes I know everyone outside warlock circles is gonna hate me for this but I absolutely need this out to be able to design my talents more flexibly.

2.Playstyle
1.Keep doom up on your targets
2.Use shadow bolt and HoG to generate shards
3.Imps shall passively generate, giving you chance to recieve more HoGs.
4.If you need to burst, use Fel Infusion, Pit Lord as well.
5.Get shards back up and use chaos waves to deal your sustained damage and speed up doom ticks

3. Talents
Talents for demonolgy will be designed with main demons in mind. To this end several abilities will either favor certain demon or have different effects for each Demon.

Tier 1

Power Siphon

Sacrifices 2 Wild imps to empower Hand of Gul’dan, granting you two charges and increasing the damage by X%

Soul Scythe

Your Felguard’s legion strike deals (part of his damage) to all nearby targets afflicted with Shadowflame (Kinda cleav-y talent, not particulary usefull but consider it filler)

Bilescourge Bomers

Workers about the same as now, 2 shards, 30 sec cooldown, Shadow damage with AoE.

Tier 2
This is where the geat divide begins

Pleasure Through pain

Increases Warlock’s shadow damage when Succubus is summoned as the active pet.

Fel Commander

Increases the damage and rate of spawning of imps when Imp is an active minion. Turns imp into Imp commander, to make it all cooler. I’d imagine for PvE players this will be the single target option.

Legion Commando

Summons Fel legionaire (smth similar to Felguard) as your second minion while Felguard is active. He does not use Axe toss or anything and may or may not use felstorm, that again depends.

Tier 3
The classics

Demon Skin

About the same as it works now.

Burning Rush

Sounds fine and seems PvEers use it according to graph, so no problem there.

Dark pact

Dark pact will take your or your demon’s health (I am not sure which is better for ballancing) and give you shield you for x% of your maximum health, to unnerf it slightly. I am getting bit confused here because I am not sure which is better right now.

Tier 4

Pain Through Pleasure

Your Shadowflame also increases the shadow damage you deal to the primary target by x% and to your secondary targets by cca x/2%. Now this might sound bit boring but I have chosen shadowflame, as it on its own is really short DoT so it basically mimics how “From the Shadows” works now, while I have also decided to use Sf because while this talent is obviously meant to combine with Succubus, it would also be useful with Soul scythe which requires Felguard to improve cleave.

Soul Strike

Works same as now, generates shards and requires Felguard.

Sweet, sweet Fel

While your imp is active, Demonic core also heals you for x%. This is obviously meant to give some advantage to picking imp through imp-related ability. This also synergizes well with Power siphon.

Tier 5
Darkfury is removed because its complete trash, even with what Blizzard has done. Demonic circle as well as Coil now, are baseline, so we are left with a row of oppurtunities.

Dark Regeneration (yes)

Restores 20% of you and your demon’s max health over 10 seconds. The healing buff may or may not be included based on ballance.

Harvest Life

Increases the damage and healing of Drain life substantially. Here you can basically heal for much more than with Dark regeneration if you can maintain the drain. However this is ballanced out by the fact that this may not always be the case.

Dark Bargain

Gives you absorb shield for x second, however deals x% (prolly 50) of the absorbed damage back you you over the period of x seconds after the effect ends. I am not sure about placing it here, but I think for soaking certain mechanics for PvE players this could be useful alternative to healing. I am not sure, I am trying to experiment, but cant be sure since this talent wasn’t at the same row as the two others originally.

Tier 6
Some extra utility, I do not think I am going to lock this to particular demon.

Call Doomguard

Calls a powerful Doomguard to the battlefield. Doomguard will cast chain Doombolt on all targets afflicted by doom for x seconds.

Call Jailer

Calls a demonic jailer to imprison the target for x seconds. Serves as replacement for griomire Felguard. But instead uses the Imprison effect.

Call Mo’arg

Calls a Mo’arg Engineer, the Engineer shall construct a cannon and throw in wild imps who have depleted their energy as amunition, to then shoot and deal x damage.
Okay I know this one was wacky but I thought this would be wacky enouhg to be interesting.

Tier 7

The Reign of Chaos

Chaos wave deals additional 2% SHADOW damage for every lesser demon (Imps, Nether portal demons and even Pit Lord and any other non-permanent demons). This is obviously meant to synergize with succubus.

We are the Legion

Increases the duration of Nether portal, instead of summoning wild imps, your attacks now have chance to summon demons from the portal.

Undending war

Pit Lord’s duration is increased (probably by 05-1s) for every Imp that runs out of energy and dissapears during his duration. This should synergize well with imp and could be picked with Felguard too

Thank you for reading this, this is all, I could expand on honor talents and thousand other things but I most importantly was happy to write this. It took long time and I enjoyed it and I am looking forward to everyone’s feedback.

5 Likes
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This is insane, i would prefer this demonology over the current one obiously, and pit lord…YES PLEASE, but there are always drawbacks when re-designing a spec, especially demonology, but i see you are taking alot of your inspiration from MoP, which…we all are…Now the problem with this is that it will feel like a scuffed MoP version of demo, would way rather just bring back demonology mop style and make alittle bit of changes to that, but overall keep the core of the spec, (WITH METAMORPHOSIS!), doesn’t have to make you into a demon, because of DH’s, but could give you black wings/claws/horns, much like how 100% stored fury used to make you look in mop. or something similar!

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This is awesome. I love the whole thing and I think would love to play this spec. My only thought is call jailer could perhaps be a pet, add something new. Maybe he slows and does aoe damage of some sort. I just love the idea of some pet diversity! The succubus talent is fun, though.

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Absolutely dissagre on that part, leave our demons alone. Simple empowerment would be enough.
Besides there is zero lore explanation how succubus will turn into shivarra or felguard into wrathguard…Felguard is mutated version of mo’arg race, while Wrathguard is transformed Eredar.

Better idea for empowered seduction instead of

Seduction increases the damage dealt to the seduced target. (This is nothing great but I can’t do much with seduction, however Succubus also needs to benefit from the effects as she will be a large part of this spec as well.

Seduction should be changed into mindcontrol.

In the lore, no warlock single handedly could summon AND control a pit lord. We even can’t summon and control eredars, pitlords is a whole another level.

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Absolutely dissagre on that part, leave our demons alone. Simple empowerment would be enough.
Besides there is zero lore explanation how succubus will turn into shivarra or felguard into wrathguard…Felguard is mutated version of mo’arg race, while Wrathguard is transformed Eredar.

Yeah thats fair, the idea I was going on was something in the fashion of dark transformation and I thought that just bigger felguard and succubus would be bit underwhleming but yeah, I get what you mean since this would also kinda hinder the glyphs.

In the lore, no warlock single handedly could summon AND control a pit lord. We even can’t summon and control eredars, pitlords is a whole another level.

Well I mean it would be bit smaller Pit lord to begin with and din’t Kanrethad actually do it? Anyway Pit lord like Mannaroth or the one in the Burning steppes ql is probably too powerful for control, I was thinking of a smaller one but I would be fine with replacing it with anything else, it’s just that I did not want to use Fel lord (as it is an honor talent already) nor Doomguard because I personally see them as boring but yeah any big demon would do I guess.

Thanks for the feeback.

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But do we care about the lore at this point?

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For me Sacrificed souls would become baseline, a new talent replacing it. Then I’d redesign nether portal to be a kind of proc based thing; your spells having a chance to open nether portals much like the scepter of sargeras ones which summon different demons based on the portal each time you spend soulshards whilst they’re up. This would act as a way of encouraging people who like the demon army style of play because nether portal would no longer be a really long, hard cooldown which takes extreme luck to pull off and you’d actually be empowered for having a lot of demons active at once unlike our current playstyle which is all about blowing up imps and sacrificing them to empower our tyrant.

Then I’d give each demon a passive like Succubus’ pleasure through pain, rehash the demonic command and soul strike abilities to work with other demons as well and then add a level 100 talent where sacrificed souls used to be which would either be like animal companion for bm hunters but this time it’s grimoire of service allowing you to choose a second, independent demon to have out and reap their passives alongside your primary demons. This would round off the spec by making it so that you can either stick to the sacrificial playstyle, commit to a zoo lock playstyle or focus on your main demons instead.

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I would really LOVE if they added interupt for Demo with felguard, have customizable pet spells so you could switch it for the stun perhaps for sake of balance or something… I love the spec i love the rotation i love the fantasy, but it just kills it for me in M+ which is where i spend my time outside of the raiding. This has been my problem since the start of BFA.

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Kanrethad was greatly empowered by fel magic and went nuts. We as a accountable Warlocks will never tap that amount of fel endergy… well at least Blizzard describes alliance and horde warlocks in this way.

Legion warlocks or just some neutral warlocks sure can tap so much power and went crazy.

If we won’t care about lore, who else will?

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Kanrethad was greatly empowered by fel magic and went nuts. We as a accountable Warlocks will never tap that amount of fel endergy… well at least Blizzard describes alliance and horde warlocks in this way.

Yeah I mean we aren’t supposed to be on par with lore characters or anything for sure thats fair. I just thouhgtg Pit lord would fit the role I want for the demon visually but I understand it’s probably not the best idea.

But do we care about the lore at this point?

Well I guess we should maintain some integrity because I think Blizzard doesn’t care about us at all either.

I would really LOVE if they added interupt for Demo with felguard

Yeah that’s fair, call felhunter should be moved from honor talents to our spellbook, this would both give us interrupt as well as free one “mandatory” honor talent slot so I agree with this. I am generally dissatisfied with warlock toolkit, I just prefer to look at Demo as whole because personally I think the spec isn’t the best it has ever been right now at all.

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I would prefer it if we could interrupt with curse of tongues putting the spell on a 24s (or 30s) CD.
WL could really need a bit more utility, they don’t shine with slows or speed, except Affli movement really hurts and their AoE stun is one of the weakest ingame, so an extra interrupt not from the pet would make them more intetesting without necessarily making them suddenly top choice everywhere

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Could you take a look on my ideas for Affi spec?

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I would love if our shard spending spells were instant casts instead of hard casts. Even with the silly 5 shard resource system this would be a step in the right direction.

I also agree with the problem that literally EVERYTHING we do requires a build-up. Both ST and AoE, let alone our “cleave/council” rotation (Doom.)

An idea that I had was to keep the current tyrant mechanics but make Nether Portal replace tyrant. If it were instant, generated 5 shards, and summoned demons whoms power increased by the amount of shards used to summon it, it would become an ability with more burst and target switching potential.
Heck, they could even make it so that all (basic) summoning spells would be empowered. E.g. Instead of 3 imps you would summon an Inquisitor from the portal, and instead of dreadstalkers we would summon a vilefiend/doglike demon.
This still feels like it doesn’t change our rotation in any meaningfull way though, as we are casting Dreadstalkers and HoG asap anyways. Which continually brings me back to a point I make in almost every post… bring back our Demonic Fury resource pool. I don’t care if it is renamed as long as it is functionally the same. It would allow us to do and be so much more, both in gameplay and talent design (or any other auxiliary system like Legion artifacts/heart of Azeroth/azerite traits.)

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