First all what i’m about to say is more directed towards PvP content, from my stand point this is ideal enviroment to test game play mechanics, and if they aren’t good enough in PvP, then this is straightly bad design and requires fixing or total rework.
In the other hand, if game mecanics are good in PvP then in PvE scenatio shoudn’t be any problems. So let’s get started.
Demonology in Legion and BFA… i hate it, not because it took away from me my beloved metamorphosis gameplay, but also, because in this Xpacs demo faced problems that no game designer will ever manage to fix - game engine limitations and game play limitations.
Little digression from main theme blizzard for many years already, tries to implement some features from Diablo in World of Warcraft gameplay, from spells and effects - Paladins for exaple recieved several ideas from Crusader’s toolkit from D3. And when Legion was on the development horizon, blizzard decided to remove metamorphosis gameplay from warlocks, and made them like witch doctor and necromancer from D3. They did not consider one thing, paladins recieved some spells that reflected Crusader gameplay, while they maintained core gameplay intact, but warlocks was forced into whole new direction.
And in Legion, Demonology warlocks faced revamp of their toolkit, and it was bad.
Not only demonology was really underpowered in PvP, and it was broken in technical aspect of the game…no, we faced much worse problem from the side of the developers - we was slowed down in the game, that increasingly ramped up speed of gameplay flow with introduction of Demon hunters and major revamp of melee classes.
While almost all classes recieved evolution of their ideas, we was pushed back to the origin, we played like our design was took from vanila - absolutely immobile caster. And this was only the part of the problem - Whole game engine is not capable to provide good gameplay for puppeteer/zoomaster.
Whan i say that game can’t handle good puppeteer/zoomaster i ment not only game engine limitations, i ment core WoW gameplay.
In game such as D3, it will play natural and great:
Because game design, gameplay, and engine was created to support this kind of character as necromancer of witch doctor.
WoW in the other hand can’t do such thing. Even in vanila when blizz tried to create warlock gameplay, they thought about puppeteer but rejected that idea, and instead of quantity of demons they focused on quality of them.
Back in Classic/TBC/WotLK devs understood that they had technical limitations that prevent them for doing puppeteer/zoomaster. And despite WoW evolution in technical standpoint over the years, some things like NPC AI can’t work efficently for puppeteer/zoomaster class.
To be honest, you can hardcore program all demons - AI/spells ETC, but such hardcore gamecode will have it own set of problems.
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This will tax performance of servers if pet AI will be advanced and game will need to run such calculation for wast numbers of demons that warlock summon.
In Diablo all such calculations runs on your computer by you CPU, and game session doesn’t runs with hundreds of necromancers and his/her undead on the screen. -
Such hardcore code will likely will voulnerable for bugs and glitches that may be caused by ever changing game code in every patch
In Classic/TBC/WotLK/Cata and MoP/WoD demonology was less complicated spec from technical standpoint but not from gameplay standpoint.
If devs so wanted this puppeteer/zoomaster class in game, why not to make unholy DK like necromancer from Diablo, or made first new caster class in game - necromancer, people has been craving this for years.
Instead devs ruined Metamorphosis demonology specialisation, that was well established in lore and gameplay for this.
Blizzard if you have some wild ideas about specs, don’t change existent specs do a new class or 4th specialisation, you did this for Druids, i think that rest of classes deserve simmilar treatment.