What is demonology ideology and class fantasy

Demo was ruined in Legion, people was deceived by alluring puppeteer gameplay. At some part demonology really became this puppeteer - a demon master who summons army of demons to the battlefield and command them. But did it worked in class fantasy and gameplay ways?

Blizzard replaced quality of demons with quantity, not thinking about problems that puppeteer will experience in this game engine.

We are really summoned army of demons in battlefield, but it was simple imps and dreadstalkers - the lowest demons.
We could get big army of imps, but we didn’t commanded/controlled them, they just attacked target that was hitted by HoG, and of that target died, then well we could force them to any desirable target that we wanted to attack.

On top of that, we summoned weak demons that was needed to be empowered by us. So we basically played a demonic battery?

The problem with Legion/BFA demonology is that you don’t feel that it is you are hero of the action. It was you who casted that sweet soulfire into your targetm it was you who transformed into demon and crushed your foes, it was you that scary boogeyman who was in the middle of the action. And what we have right now, you play some sort of portal manager who stays behing, weak and not interesting.

Demonology never was about quantity it was about quality of you and your demons.
Even in TBC and WotLK when demo gameplay was not so good as in Cata or MoP it was still about improvements of you and your personal demon.
Your talents emphasized that ideology.
Few brief examples:

Demonic Empowerment - Grants the Warlock’s summoned demon Empowerment.

  • Imp - Increases the Imp’s spell critical strike chance by 20% for 30 seconds…
  • Voidwalker - Increases the Voidwalker’s health by 20%, and its threat generated from spells and attacks by 20% for 20 seconds…
  • Succubus - Instantly vanishes, causing the Succubus to go into an improved Invisibility state. The vanish effect removes all stuns, snares and movement impairing effects from the Succubus.
  • Felhunter - Dispels all magical effects from the Felhunter.
  • Felguard - Increases the Felguard’s attack speed by 20% and breaks all stun, snare and movement impairing effects and makes your Felguard immune to them for 15 seconds

Master Demonologist - Grants both the Warlock and the summoned demon an effect as long as that demon is active.

  • Imp - Increases your Fire damage by 5%, and increases the critical effect chance of your Fire spells by 5%.

  • Voidwalker - Reduces Physical damage taken by 10%.

  • Succubus - Increases your Shadow damage by 5%, and increases the critical effect chance of your Shadow spells by 5%.

  • Felhunter - Reduces all spell damage taken by 10%.

  • Felguard - Increases all damage done by 5%, and reduces all damage taken by 5%.

As you can see, warlock ideology was about quality of you and your demon. Maybe not all demons was equally useful in battle, but this talents emphasized class fantasy and lore behind your demons.

Even in WoTLK when blizzard introduced Metamorphosis to demonology, it was logical development of the spec.
In the MoP, in “Green fire quest” we can learn that teqnique of Metamorphosis is already well known for warlocks and they use it.

Jubeka’s Journal day 36:
Remarkable! My first attempt to summon a higher order member of the legion failed as spectacularly as planned. The shivarra broke free almost instantly after Kanrethad completed the ritual.

I expected the frail human to be struck down while I banished the creature. Instead, in the instant that the shivarra’s razor-sharp blades sliced through the air, Kanrethad’s form shifted and the blades bounced as if striking stone.

Unlike the typical form of metamorphosis, he did not complete the demonic transformation… perhaps his research has been more successful than I expected.

So lore arguments about Metamorphosis and warlocks could be closed.

MoP Demonology gameplay was intense and rewarding, it was your fight and your experience. Your victory was achieved through your and your personal demon’s work.
To be fair you could summon additional demons to the fight, it was wild imps that was summoned by your Wild Imps passive or Imp swarm glyph. But they was situational and not permanent.

Demo was not so immobile like now, sure you needed to stay and cast spells to gain fury, but then your gameplay drasticaly changed while you used Metamoprhosis - it was brief but good change of phase, from immobile caster to agressive and mobile demon.
Now, you stay and summon more demons to…stay and summon ever more demons. There is no dynamic in that gameplay. If we forgot for a minute that we summon demons to deal damage, and look at our actions from the side, it would look like we play like vanila-WotLK warlocks, we are immobile and slow.
Blizzard didn’t improved or evolved our gameplay! From pure gameplay perspective it is degradation of what was in MoP/WoD.

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Tumbs up /10 char

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dude this legit depresses me lol I’ve been avoiding lock forums for a while now because it’s mostly people whining about dps and not caring about class fantasy which is so much more important in an RPG and then I see this… I’ve never even noticed that line thanks for bringing it up I’m even more pissed at blizzard now, god it always happens

I start playing again hoping to ignore all of the **** they’ve done and try to enjoy the game for what it is and then after a while all I could think of is how much better warlocks were a few years ago and how much they ruined such an amazing spec :frowning: god I hate this company so much

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I agree, demonology as it is right now is very far removed from what it was back in the day. Blizzard wanted to make demon hunters a thing, and as a result they basically took the demonology spec and turned it into a demon hunter spec. I suppose it was easier for them this way. Maybe they really did think that this new demonology spec would be fun and interesting.

I do know some people that really like it. I personally haven’t touched it much, it’s not for me. I guess I kind of like the ability to summon a lot of imps. But in reality I’m mostly just sad that demonology is no longer about the demonic powers that you wield, and demonology now indeed kind of feels like a summoning turret.

I used to love being able to actually feel like a powerful warlock, tapping into demonic powers that are generally deemed dangerous, occasionally being able to absorb those demonic powers into yourself to transform into a creature half humanoid, half demonic.

The loss of Metamorphosis will always make me grumble at the Demon Hunters who’ve stolen this ability from us. Moreover, I used to have high hopes for Dark Apotheosis, and demonology warlocks perhaps ever being able to perform certain tanking roles, be it off-tanking or semi-tanking, anything that breaks away from the stagnance of the holy trinity.

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I disagree about that part because DH neither plays or looks anything like MoP/WoD Demonology which makes the loss of it so disgustingly retarded.

god I used to have so much fun with that in MoP you could tank A LOT with Drain Life healing and Dark Apotheosis if you had the gear (you had to be more than the required gear for the content to really be effective at tanking, but it was insanely fun anyways) it was so unique. Sad thing is you couldn’t queue as a tank in random dungeons so you could only tank there if you got a tank friend to queue tank for you :smiley: AoE tanking was also fun. God I miss MoP so much… :frowning: and now I believe Demon Huntards have Immolation Aura instead of us… time to gtfo from this game forever once and for all soon I guess

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Agreed. But it’s the class fantasy thing that they’ve stolen though. Turning into a demon and stuff.

They do, and it’s insulting

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Metamorphosis of MoP/WoD demonology was a solid class mechanic, with resource management and game changing abilities.
The moment you activated Metamorphosis your gameplay changed…mostly.

Demon hunters in the other hand, remain their core gameplay even when they used Meta. For them, meta is just DPS cooldown spell, with fancy animation - yes few spells changes during meta, but their mechanics remains the same.

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True, I meant class fantasy wise

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i honestly think they need to change demonology to be a master of DEMONS, not a master of felguards… i hate how demonology is pretty much locked to using just 1 specific minion…

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From Vanila till BFA, Demonology could play with all demons without any issues.
Fun fact, even in TBC when blizz introduced felguard as high level demonology talent, all other demons was really viable with right talents.
During MoP/WoD i personaly played with Shivarra, and i didn’t felt that something was wrong without felguard on my side.

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It’s funny how Blizzard fixes this issue with one of their specs and reintroduces it in another. Destruction warlocks were unhappy in Legion because they were forced to play with imp only. Now in BFA Destro can play with any pet they like. Didn’t they realise this is not just a destro problem?

oh yeah, back in the day when grimoire of sacrifice was actually viable. Those were the days

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Yeah, I miss the old unique resource system, Backdraft baseline, old Fire & Brimstone, old Havoc with stacks, old not random Mastery for Destruction, old rain of fire, old Shadowburn, Soulswap, Soulburn and the unique choices soulburn gave, 10 min cooldown Doomguard/Infernal, Demonbolt, old Grimoires, Howl of Terror, old Shadowfury, Chaoswave, aftermath, Chaotic energy, Dark Intent, Darksoul as an actuall baseline cooldown, Decimation, Demonic leap, Demonic Slash, Demonic Tatics, Devastation, Ember tap, Flames of Xoroth, Metamorphosis, Nightfall baseline, Demonic Circle baseline, Soulshatter, Achimonde’s Darkness, Blood Horror, Charred Remains, Dark Bargin, Dark Regenration, Harvest life, Kil’Jaedenæs Cunning Manaroth’s Fury, Searing flames, Unbound will

Just to remind you all about everything they took away from warlocks going into Legion and beond.

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They tok away so much that made me make this warlock in the first place. I remember using Voidwalker because he had disarm. I could also use shadow bulwark to give me more hp and then sac him, if I wanted to burst or use dark pact. Soul link also being a talent, and when you saved a demon you gained even more HP.

Some things that really bothers me are some of the small things, that doesn’t really make a big change but is a really good quality of life. Remember being able to resummon your demon without cast time when it died? Why was things like that removed in the first place.

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That instant resummon demon was tied to the old resource system…
Guess they just forgot about all these things.

Instant resummon was scrapped because it was instant. And blizzard mindset just can’t accept any more of instant spells in warlock toolkit.

Look if they was interested in such resummon capabilities for warlock, they would just reworked these spells resource requirements…and blizz was not interested in that.

One thing that i really dislike about the spec is that I can summon like 204123 different demons, but I don’t really care about almost any of them. They are just nukes with somewhat unique looks. And some feel anti-thematic or definetely contradict the previous lore.

For example, take implosion and the idea of throwing exploding imps to the enemies: I just finished the green fire warlock quest, and my imp literally told me to ignore Akama’s pleas and just rob everything. Which seems adequate to the personality of Imps: malicious, mouthy, disrespectful, a bit cowardly when the things go bad, etc. Much like Impsy laughing when Niby summons “El Pollo Grande”. Instead of that I got idiots that jump to their death as suicide bombers.

In addition, the spec that is supposed to be about demons is the one that uses the basic demons the less, with literally every talent that affects your main demon being fel guard only.

I mean, personally, i understand Blizzard taking things like metamorphosis, immolation aura, etc, from us. It was a demonhunter thing to begin with (warcraft 3). But the current system is extremely unappealing, and plagued with bugs (like not being able to change the demons’ target properly).

A quote from Jubeka’s journal - green fire quest

Jubeka’s Journal day 36:
Remarkable! My first attempt to summon a higher order member of the legion failed as spectacularly as planned. The shivarra broke free almost instantly after Kanrethad completed the ritual.

I expected the frail human to be struck down while I banished the creature. Instead, in the instant that the shivarra’s razor-sharp blades sliced through the air, Kanrethad’s form shifted and the blades bounced as if striking stone.

Unlike the typical form of metamorphosis, he did not complete the demonic transformation… perhaps his research has been more successful than I expected.

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Like that Gul’dan littarly metamorphosises during the final fight in the nighthoold…

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Do you realize this doesn’t prove anything nor takes anything away from the argument you quoted? It was just another story created to add flavor to the green fire quest chain, nothing more. It’s not some immutable law of nature or anything, lore changed a lot.