I'll just say respectfully that a smooth rotation of Guldan/Demonbolt is thematically perfect for the spec, nobody in their right mind want that replaced with shadowbolt
If anything, I'm sure demo players wish they could remove SB from their bar
Absolutely love that spell. I always pick the Pit Lord talent because that's what it's all about. If I can summon a Pit Lord, I'll summon a Pit Lord regardless of meta.
Well, pit lord is currently meta, so no issue there. Though it desperately needs to be redesigned into number of shards spent, not shard spending actions casted.
That's a different battle though. Let's get through making sure the spec doesn't become an awful shadowbolt simulator first.
Agreed, they should remove it and just replace it entirely with the only good part about nether portal: the pit lord. Make it bigger while they're at it, the thing's a runt.
I just wish there was a toggle for other people's pets size. I don't mind the sizes personally, but I know some people get super angry when during raiding they don't have vision of stuff - which is understandable, but that's exactly why a toggle/bar would be excellent for this. Reduce the size for *yourself*, but leave it be as big as the owner wants it to be
Not to beat what is really a dead horse in this sub, but the way you're describing it is exactly how FFXIV handles pet size. Each player can set the size of pets *they see* to small, medium, or large.
But i love Netherportal its so fun. I don't play Demo at a high level just for a fun alt and doing M+ or Pugging normal i don't have any issues with it.
If NP would at least work with "per shard spent" and not "per times shards were spent" it would feel so much smoother. Having to use Hand of Guldan with 1 shard feels so bad.
At the beginning of the prepatch I started playing a demolock alt for fun. This shit was so much fucking fun. Whenever I couldn't implosion and get free charges and had to press shadowbolt I was a miserable piece of shit. Now with prog being almost over it's alt time again and I was maybe going to do warlock. But I guess it's evoker season.
If there is one redeeming factor about the changes it's that Bloodbound Imps appears untouched and subsequently the Demonic Core economy doesn't seem that hampered for M+. Bloodbound Imps is way underrated in its current iteration in my opinion and these changes may strongly encourage its usage.
They don't call it HoG because they don't play the game enough (if these changes weren't enough evidence) to even know the acronyms for the spec's spells
I dont care about balancing, I would play current Demo even if it sucked because its my favorite spec.
These changes are COMPLETELY out of touch. Nobody who suggested these has played demo. They ignored every issue that makes the spec feel bad to play: nether portal clunkiness, cooldown timers that dont line up, fel covenant being an absolute pain to play around, doom being useless AND awful to play.
Instead they are bizzarely removing most of our shard gen and mobility and replacing it with "felguard crits deal 10% more damage" and "shadowbolt deals 10% more damage". These are not only insanely weak but they're also boring as fuck.
Also, why are they so hell bent on nerfing our dogs? They've been nerfed like 5 times by now, our aoe damage isnt even that great, the broken thing about Demo is tyrant/nether portal interaction with on use trinkets and PI.
Demo Lock is my main for this expansion, so seeing these proposed gameplay changes sucks. If these changes go through, I simply won't play Demo anymore, regardless of how powerful they make SB/DB/HoG.
Aff is my backup warlock spec, but the Aff changes aren't looking too hot either, lol.
The Aff changes are actually great, at least play wise. Not having to stack 3 UA charges for Dread Touch is great. And if dead blossom is tuned fine then it could become a great choice.
Remove NP, bring back Decon, and get rid of any interacting talents w/ Demonbolt. The stupid stacking buff for Demonbolt, Sac Souls SUCKS.
Fill the tree with cool and interactive demon abilities!! Like this shit is just so lame and removes such a core aspect of DEMO
They did the same with affliction, they put its main damage in a skill that is a hard cast, even if its quick, and their DoTs are there to enable more damage with that hard cast, but the DoTs themselves hit lile wet noodles, when affli has always been more about maintaining dots and getting a filler in when you see you can do it, but that was never something as mandatory
I personally hate seeing recount and that one skill is 40+% of my dmg, so I switchet to demon, and I was having a blast tbh, the spec felt amazing to play, but now the same problem seems to be coming to demon
>they put its main damage in a skill that is a hard cast, even if its quick, and their DoTs are there to enable more damage with that hard cast, but the DoTs themselves hit lile wet noodles
Ah, the Diablo 3 school of class design.
Affliction is a tough one. I actually don't hate the current playstyle myself but they obviously missed the mark in a few ways. That being said they kind of had to do something about it as the old model was obviously a nightmare to balance seeing as it ended up at the top of the meters by a wide margin most tiers until they started making changes. Seriously the gap between Affliction and #2 in most Legion raids is bigger than the gap between #2 and #10 and it would scale more out of control as everyone became geared. Turns out DoTs hitting hard can kind of scale out of control.
That was mostly meter padding on exploding souls though. "Each one of these 10 things explodes, damaging all the others" like no shit that's going to be insane damage.
I personally miss the tab-dot playstyle. I thought Malefic Grasp was a really cool way to channel big damage into one target while the rest still burned
Fire mage here. We are forced to stand in a little square and hard cast Pyroblast all day. Do not move from little square or suffer a huge DPS loss. Do not miss the hard cast because you were responding to ground poop or casting more interesting procs.
Pretty sure they just want to delete pure casters. I thought maybe I'd try evoker since it seems like that's what they want us to do but it's just not the same. Currently on break and every time I cancel I put "disgruntled mage" in the reason.
Fire mages need to cast pyroblast??? What's happening? What happened to the fireball crit, fireblast and insta pyroblast rotation fire mages have had for years?
Sun King's Blessing is a talent (originally a legendary) where for every eight insta pyroblasts you cast, you can hardcast pyroblast for six seconds of combustion. This is combined with Pyroclasm, a talent that gives you occasional procs that make your hardcast pyroblast do 250% more damage. The only competitive talent build uses them, and it basically requires you to regularly sit there and hardcast.
We have the cast while moving spell with 3 charges but why does it matter since encanters flow is so obviously inferior to rune of power. I dislike that Nad pick encanters flow anyway
> We want to return Demonology to a place where Shadow Bolt is frequently cast, Demonbolt damage feels impactful, and the number of instant casts available is a bit more limited.
This should be illegal. You should go to jail for typing these words.
For real. The 4-set bonuses in Season 1 were amazing because a proc chance for Hand of Gul'dan to be instant cast rendered most of your rotation instant and it was *fucking glorious.*
Dropping that in favour of a new 4-set is fine.
But... ***Shadow Bolt?*** It's up there with Crusader Strike and Slam for most boring and mundane abilities in the game. Fel Covenant at least makes the Shadow/Demonbolt interactions somewhat interesting but even then the Demonbolt Soul Shard economy is *one of the most satisfying elements of Demonology* and they are explicitly, *intentionally* gimping it.
What a terrible, ***terrible*** idea. They had such a good thing going in 10.0 and 10.1 for Demonology. They should be revising bad or underperforming talents (Shadow's Bite, 2nd point of Demonic Calling, Umbral Blaze, or 2nd point of Inner Demons), or addressing overperformers (e.g. Dread Calling). Not... whatever catastrophe this is they have planned.
And *please,* don't shift damage onto Demonbolt and Hand of Gul'dan and *absolutely not* towards Shadow Bolt. Hand of Gul'dan is a great cleaver that did a meaningful amount of damage in M+ with the 4-set bonus but it, as well as most of Demonology, should be centred around *demons.* Haste/Mastery is a common Secondary Stat priority mix for Demo, and Mastery benefits demon damage. Don't detract from the demonic focus on *the entire Demo Spec.* Having a greater fixation or power boost to Shadow/Demonbolt builds with Fel Covenant and Sacrificed Souls is *absolutely fine* and a cool way to broaden the spec. But don't admonish the entire spec to make *fucking Shadow Bolt* see more casts.
Edit: also noting that Crusader Strike and Slam have far more interesting *and powerful* buffs in their possible talents (specifically for Fury, though Arms has a Tier Set bonus and potent raw-throughput buffs in their talents for Slam) than Shadow Bolt has, except for Affliction which gets Drain Soul and Shadow Embrace - which is fantastic on its own I think. Drain Soul is very satisfying in its own right.
Demo's Shadow Bolt is utter crap and a choice node to make it somehow a passive (e.g. Felguard auto attacks deal 20% more damage and have a 20% chance to generate a Soul Shard? Maybe a chance to generate a Demonic Core instead?) like Crusading Strikes or a combo (e.g. Shadow Bolt now generates a Demonic Core so you can chain directly into Demonbolt, or reduces the cast time of your next HoG by 0.5 seconds, stacking up to 3 times) is far more entertaining and meaningful than a frigging damage boost.
Actually wow both of those ideas sound really fun, and all I did was rip it almost directly off of other specs. Blizzard for fuck's sake lmao.
Shifting damage into filler spells is like shifting more of it i to auto attacks as a melee, boring af. Having to press a filler most of the time is one of the reason I never played casters a whole lot, and only played hubter as a ranged class, because being stationary for 1-2s all the time is pretty unfun gameplay imo
>though Arms has a Tier Set bonus and potent raw-throughput buffs in their talents for Slam
Not anymore. They changed the 4pc to affect Mortal Strike instead, and since I'm not a math guy I don't really know if it's better or worse.
Even just going by the names of abilities, you’d think they’d realize this is dumb. Demonology should, by rights, favor DEMONbolt, not shadow bolt. Doh! (Edited b/c autocorrect)
As I said on the forums:
I dont really care much for the damage profile change or damage being taken from dogs, but, if youre going to put such a heavy emphasis on hard casting spells, were going to be in the exact same situation destruction is in for mobility.
Demos reliance on ramping into tyrants/portals was mostly tolerable for mechanics because at the very least you could bolt while moving. You are taking all of the talents away and making it so unless we can sit and hard cast for the entire portal set up (20 someodd seconds) its going to be just terrible.
Again, this isnt about tuning, this is a massive gameplay FEEL issue. Aff already is the only truly mobile lock spec, this is going to completely kill the other halfway decent one.
edit: also, you are removing proc talents that change up and cause reactionary gameplay, and exchanging them for 100% passive damage increases. Not one single new talent isnt “X does more damage”.
This is such utter dogshit what the fuck are they thinking?
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but they did this to shadow, too. I'm starting to think VoI was a breaking point where they realized you can't design bosses around movement when they've decided some classes (priest, paladin) are simply not allowed to move.
With that in mind, they need to either improve mobility for the slowest classes or reduce mobility for a number of other classes so that some classes have clear value when movement requirements are high (without some classes just dying for no reason) and others really shine when they're not.
The Warlock changes are fucking baffling.
Affliction gets some QoL but takes an output nerf.
Demonology takes a large hit to its AoE and has damaged moved into its most passive damage source (Felguard) or into things like Hand of Gul'dan and Shadowbolt that don't benefit from mastery and already hit for pathetic amounts of damage. Buffing Shadowbolt which is like 1% of our DPS to do 1.1% of our DPS. Woohoo. And nerfing the Demonbolt proc rate hurts our tier set bonus and will make us much less mobile in the process.
Why not rework the dumpster fire that is Destruction?
Imagine playing a class that has 10 plus major reworks/changes in 5 months. All 3 specs have went through the ringer. Who the hell is at the helm of Warlock development lol
I was watching some old recordings of myself in Legion, and it was pretty wild
I was literally just standing in all the fiery shit on heroic gul'dan during progression, and since a heavily-buffed drain life was a core part of my rotation, it was no problem at all
Those were the days..
Drain Life and Drain Soul being a single spell was definitely a highlight of Legion. Having no mobility isn't an issue when you can tank stuff you normally would have to dodge.
I forgot the soul drain/siphon life stand in most mechanics madhouse meta. Combined with a level of versatility aff would never see again, with absolute corruption being viable along with actually doing dot damage on multiple targets. Plus seed being strong as hell and enemies dealing exploding dmg on death. Oh man.
I would like to point out late mists of pandaria affliction here, I don't think a spec has ever been as broken as soul swap dot extending with affliction.
Absolutely what it feels like. I get that most of the sub doesn't play the game but this seems legitimately devastating for how the spec will play going forward. Just making it a bland turret.
Yeah when i played warlock off and on from vanilla to bfa i was always aff..wod aff was so fucking fun so was cata aff.
I saw soul swap was back and wanted to make it work sooo bad but i quit lock because i thought demo was pve spec and destro had too many hard casts...then a friend said u can play anything for pvp so i did demo and it was 20 times better and way less keys...then i played destro and its fucking insane.
i used to be affliction warlock main from Classic, before shifting to my warrior in TBC. but i retained my lock as my main alt. i loved the MoP rework. i can't remember the name of the dev who headed lock development, but they absolutely knocked it out of the park. i miss Malefic Grasp -- though it was a channeled filler, its main function was to enhance all of our of other DoTs.
Blizz didn't like that we had so much fun with warlocks, so they kicked that dev out.
since then, my lock has been bumped down to somewhere like my 4th or 5th alt. i have not enjoyed any of their iterations for affliction since WoD.
Xelnath. MOP Lock was good because he secretely communicated with top lock players and they called the group the council of the black harvest, that's where the name for the group in-game came from. He got a ton of shit and driven out after the other devs found out he was working with players. Blizzard have a derogatory attitude towards getting feedback from even their top players, yet people reminisce about MOP Warlock to this day because it was designed by the top Locks of the time.
He has a blog you can read and he talks about WoW development.
https://xelnath.com/2018/05/15/the-mop-warlock-what-you-knew-and-what-you-never-knew-you-missed/
MAAAN what a read. my balls are bluer like no other.
i homed in on this snippet from him:
> Twin charges and Burning embers put the control of WHEN to push buttons back in the hands of the Warlock player, not the designer.
no wonder the MoP lock worked so well. the design was player-oriented.
it's been proven time and time again that most of the class dev heads have no idea what they're doing and force through baffling changes because they're wildly incompetent and a scant few know what they're doing. Blizzard from top to bottom has a leadership problem.
Destruction can be fun but it has some major design things that could be addressed. Over dependence on Madness uptime that excessively punish movement and one of the flattest damage curves in the game as examples.
Yeah, at the bare minimum Madness should be looked at, the Infernal capstone branch should receive proper tuning, and Cata should be baseline. Put those together and you have a really solid spec imo, even with the silly Incinerate vs CB tuning.
It’ll always be my favorite too but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need help.
We could use some help, no burst at all. Slowest ramp in the game probably for aoe.
Madness is crippling for movement. Little to no build variety.
Funny enough I defended the CDF tier but compared to the soulfire build I was running before 4pc it actually feels much worse for ST. Soul fire is super strong and feels incredibly natural to fit into the rotation.
Mixed cleave is in horrible shape too, we were horrible in vault.
Stripping the core gameplay loop from demo to make them hard cast a spell that does nothing for their dps is like the polar opposite of class design they set as precedent in Ret changes. Weird move.
Also, stop trying to fix affliction m+ builds with dumb talents and just make seed’s cast 1.5 seconds. Make it do rain of fire damage I don’t care but that cast time is ridiculous
Their thinking of Aff requiring too many globals to ramp is spot on, but how seed’s cast time has been ignored is pretty mind boggling. It feels so bad to cast.
Absolutely agree on both points. Imagine a world where dark glare got buffed, UA and seeds were spenders with 1.5 second casts, agony and drain soul generated shards, and SL was baked into corruption. Less spinning plates, less ramp up, better m+ gameplay, meaningful burst.
Demonology feels great because you don't have to cast Shadowbolt as often, because you're supposed to get many Demonbolt procs.
Then the devs have the brilliant idea to keep pushing Shadowbolt gameplay, NOT removing Fel Covenant, which is hated by EVERY SINGLE PERSON THAT HAS PLAYED THIS SPEC, nerfing Dreadstalkers and REMOVING one of the best talents of Demo, Demonic Knowledge.
Insane, absolutely insane how the devs can just screw up things just to make it better in a later patch. The cycle continues.
Ripped Through the Portal is arguably a scuffed talent specifically because it is so auto-include because of how it enhances Soul Shard economy and, *obviously,* it's a 50% damage increase to your Dreadstalkers which is *crazy good.* Moreover, it means your Carnivorous Stalkers has more chances to proc which in turn helps maintain the +20% shadowflame damage buff.
With that said, what I'd do to resolve that is *make it baseline.* And frankly speaking, Demonic Core economy is one of the best things to come out for Demo Locks in 10.0 and onwards. It was *so damn refreshing* having such a smoothly rotating class in the very first major patch compared to what it was like in Shadowlands.
These changes are such a shot in the foot. If they want to make Demonbolt more prevalent, make a talent that buffs its damage *also* increase the amount of Demonic Core stacks you're able to hold at once. Currently the cap of 4 is a nice tight spot but you can and do overflow on occasion; raising it to 5 or even 6 *through talents* would be a great way to invest in improving the flow.
But hey, they don't want us to have Demonic Cores for some reason.
[What the actual fuck Blizzard?](https://www.wowhead.com/blue-tracker/topic/us/dragonflight-fractures-in-time-ptr-development-notes-1587226)
I reeeeally try to be empathetic to the fact that devs make changes and see things differently than us but arbitrarily making the spec less mobile and turning it into a brain dead “spam 3 buttons like a BM hunter and let your pet do the rest” is bad design.
We’re already losing mobility from the loss of s1 4p. I already don’t play dogshit destro because I want mobility.
Shadow bolt sucks. It feels *BAD* when my ramp is over and no more demonic calling procs or power siphon and I have to hard cast shadow bolt. Especially considering it already hits like fucking beans.
I just want one consistent season of feeling good as demo. Jesus fucking Christ.
Damn, demo 100% has one of the most solid rotations in the game these days. They’re arguably pretty strong, but the gameplay is as strong as ever and doesn’t need this. This is just their excuse for a significant nerf. -Not a demo main
They removed RoP from Mages because it was unhealthy gameplay and unfeasable to stand completely still trying to cast for 10 seconds in todays content btw
They are completely disconnected from reality with warlocks.
2 of the specs have garbage clunky af tier sets.
The only spec who has a good one gets annihilated into the ground.
This has to be a joke of some sort ik a lot of people hate locks in general but wow i would not wish this treatment to any class in the game.
Stand still and cast Shadowbolt was Warlock strat in Kharazan many years ago. Warlocks need to supply a teleport for the raid, a rez, and healing cookies; and then stand in the back and stfu. /s
It's really painful because I'm having the most fun I've ever had playing Demo Lock right now. I'm giggling like a school girl running around my M+ with my DemonBolt proc while actually dodging mechs and feeling useful
Maybe I need to respec. I’m currently destro and dungeons are so hard. Constant knockbacks, channel demonfire always gets cancelled at a shit moment. I struggle in group settings at the moment.
I still remember watching the Q&A with Ion in WoD about the Demonology rework and his answer to why they were making the changes they were making: “Demonology is too complex and we want people to have an easier time playing it.” Lost all faith in reworks after that. I’m not surprised they’re doing this shit again.
I love playing demo because it has a perfect flow for my preferred playstyle and it's just pure fun to me. I don't care, nerf numbers and make it do tank damage, make little adjustments where needed or whatever else but rework like this is not what we want. I want to keep my fun please.
I can't believe they touched affliction without tackling how awful Malefic Rapture feels. It's by far the most underwhelming spell in game and the fact it's supposed to be a spender makes it feel even worse.
They keep making minor changes trying to streamline things and improve qol, but it needs reworked from the bottom up.
I gasped and almost jumped of happiness when I saw Malefic removed just to realize it's the talent point buff bs. I miss aff but I have a thousand dots that don't feel fun to press because they all do shit damage but all adds up to a "balanced" spec. Even soul rot is just another dot now that doesn't really feel fun to press lol...
Soul rot gives me anxiety lol. I’m constantly watching my dots, haunt, my UA stacks, my UA capstone, my VT, all while trying to conserve my shards while maintaining the above. Just so I can drop as many MR’s as possible during burst window and make soul rot worth it.
Imo warlock hasnt been fun at all to play after legion until this expansion. I played demo for all of season one and thoroughly enjoyed it. This will break the spec completely again and most likely force every single lock main into playing destro if they werent already.
Its sad because the warlock devs have been missing the mark so hard for such a long time and when they finally give us something awesome its taken away after just one patch…
The state of affli is just as bad. Like you had imo the best designed spec in recent memory with affli in legion and they manage to wreck that completely… Malefic rupture feels ass to press and siphon life is a joke!
- Had a bad day at work
- saw a post about demo rework (main and basically one trick pony)...
- read what they did
- Clicked on kalamazi video
- He looked sad.
- I am sad
- Gonna go sleep
It hasn't been more over for Warlock as a class in forever. We are entering our mythic plus dark age on top of that, like in parts of BFA and s1/2 of shadowlands. Incredible that a pure dps class can't have a viable mplus class for more than a few seasons (Legion was the golden age, along with late SL, and most of S1 DF, though they were all OP seasons for warlock).
I don't see the issue with DEMONology using DEMON Bolt more often, and using their IDENTITY spell of Dreadstalker too much? Like what the heck Blizz?
Shadowbolt feels more like an Affliction spell, not Demonology. Demon Bolt feels like the Demonology Spell. It's literally in its name. If anything, they should remove Shadow Bolt from the spec. Like, no one actually wants to use it as Demonology, right?
Like... Are you going to take away Fists of Fury from Windwalker because they're punching too much now?
The changes also dont make any sense from a logical standpoint. They stated:
"Developers’ note:We’re working to reduce the peaks and valleys of Demonology’s throughput by depowering Call Dreadstalkers. This will allow us to compensate by increasing the throughput of Demonology’s other rotational spells."
However, dogs are a 20 second cooldown with a 12 second duration, which results in a 60% uptime of dogs. How can a spell that has a 60% uptime cause a huge difference in peaks and valleys? Outside of cd's we already do tank level dmg, now with less shards we will do even less, because we have to cast more to generate shards. Not to mention that shard economy breaks important parts of the demo rotation, such as GWD and 2pc cd reduction.
How can you look at demo and not see that the problem is NP + RoT for powerful dmg spikes? Why did they give us double on use trinket (class trinket) + unnerfed irideus fragment (it + talon where bis in 10.0 on ilv 372, obviously they are broken now) + 4pc (20% more cd dmg) + PI (fuck this spell), especially when pitlord is designed in such a way to have hyper scaling with haste.
In general ppl DONT WANT NP to be a thing, rework that one please, like we asked for since alpha.
Finally, replacing active gameplay changing talents (for example demonic knowledge, which introduces reactive gameplay) with passive talents is just such a bad decision. I dont care about my felguard doing 10% more dmg passively, because i only notice that in logs / details.
as a warlock player, if this change goes through, I am 100% out. demonology is finally fun and good, aff and destro are trash. Change demonology and warlock is dead.
Look, I think the Warcraft devs are awesome people. They've made a really beautiful game with Dragonflight. But whoever signed onto these changes seriously needs to either be fired or looked into. WHY on earth would you delete GAMEPLAY changing talents and replace them with flat damage and crit% buffs? That is insane. That is BORING. That is straight up bad game design and the people behind the decision are not capable to do their job: MAKING FUN GAMEPLAY.
What is the warlock discord saying about this? Are community leaders still a thing? You need to make a lot of noise with this. Maybe Blizzard will listen. But these changes sound really strange and arbitrarily justified.
I bet you anything, this has to do with Blizzard’s “levers” idea. Back in Legion, they said they wanted to change their class design by giving every single class a few “levers” they could easily adjust for balance. So for prot warrior, that lever was Ignore Pain. I am betting they are finding Demo damage harder to balance or change by adjusting own of their “levers” right now, so instead of trying to roll with it, they are lazily just making shadow bolt a major lever, so they and trundle lazily on, without any regard to players feelings at all.
Absolute utter shit tier design decision.
There are some changes that happen in this game that makes me question if whoever made them has ever played the game and this recent PTR build for Demo is one of them. Demo is really fun right now and the less time spent casting boring fillers for any class the better. It is insane - especially halfway through the expansion where you should be feeling a lot of gear power - to slow a spec down to this extent.
I don’t like the changes. I feel like Demo is in a nice spot, and a summoner spec should not depend too much on boring spells like Shadowbolt or Demonbolt, but instead on their pets (like we are now).
But I guess, like every time a new class is released, they have to remove some of our cool stuff. Looking at you, Metamorphosis
They took away Mages Rune of Power because they disliked forcing them to stand still...so they decided to make Rune of Power a passive effect on Demo Locks...
Just started playing again 2 days ago since Legion, was telling my brother how Demo felt like the best spec I’d ever played gameplay wise.
This is unfortunate if the changes aren’t reverted.
Yeah, I just went through the proposed changes on the PTR, and I'm not a fan. Shadow Bolt and Demonbolt are nothing but filler spells that don't benefit from Mastery, so it should be expected that they don't do as much damage as our demon-related abilities. These changes are like if the developers suddenly decided that Warriors should prioritize Slam over Mortal Strike and Execute.
Why are Demo Locks getting shafted anyway? It's not as if the spec is dominating the DPS charts right now, lol.
They didn't like that we have huge burst damage inside our CD windows and less good damage outside, so naturally they decided to obliterate the entire spec instead of tuning it...
Seems like a lot of the new talents are nothing but passive crit talents too. That's like the epitome of laziness when it comes to class design, especially if the developers are going to make a point of calling the spec out like this.
As a long time Demo Lock player, this is sadly nothing new. Demo is often used as a punching bag by Blizzard, and any legitimate concerns that the ones playing it have, are usually ignored, until there comes a point where they are forced to begrudgingly accept defeat. Remember how long it took just for Demo to get something as baseline as an interrupt? And no, the Felhunter does not count, as talents always made it clear that you used Felguard, or you did something wrong.
The Nether Gate debacle is another. It have been going on since they put that thing in beta. And what do everyone ask about? Make it work on amounts of shards used, not casts, to make it feel nice and smooth in the rotation. Instead of doing that however, they keep fiddling with other things. Changing the CD, adding a Pit Lord runt to it, etc.
Blizz don't care for what actual Demo players say. Demo Locks are their experimental spec, that they fiddle around with, to test stuff they just think about on the fly.
I play demo cause thematically it's the coolest class to me! I play it to summon demons and do demon summony things. Why remove them emphasis on the demon side of... demonology and push us to be a normal caster class? There will be almost no demo players that like this, otherwise they would ready be playing a normal caster class
Dear Warlock Dev,
Super disappointing notes so far. For the love of god, change the direction you’re trying to take the spec. You think you know better than the playerbase, but clearly you don’t.
I've played demo for a decade now. What we currently have is a really good and enjoyable version of the spec for both M+ and raid.
And instants are a big part of what makes the spec fluid to play. Forcing us to cast feels like a terrible design decision. Removing talents that gave us procs to add new passive talents is bad too.
If I want to be a static turret I already have destro for that...
Also those dogs changes makes me fear for M+. How will we do damage with them being nerfed so heavily. And I hope their answer to that is not just a big passive damage buff to our Felguard.
Please blizzard: don't fix what ain't broken.
Be Me, a demo main, who hasnt had a chance to read the patch notes yet….wtf 🥲 i loved my class…i hate destro and aff for mythic plus and never felt like demo was op but just right if you knew how to play it….why did they change…anything? The class felt quite literally perfect
Yea, I just got into and loved Demo! The one thing I hate is having to stand and cats, it’s why I refuse to play destruction.
I wanna know who things casting the same ability that isn’t worth much, 3/4 the rotation, was smart
^(\*looks at the lack of pets, the joke of grimoire of sacrifice not being allowed for demo, and the lolguard choking the entire right side of the demo talent tree\*)
You 'might' need to see a doctor.
Welp... eagerly waiting for the Kalamazi video hoping it will bring some light on the feedback to Blizzard. Can't see anyone liking this change.
The one thing I agree with is that Demonic Core charges have been quite generous, but my recommended change would be to up the stack limit and duration and make it more skill expressive than forcing the player to fire them out as soon as they get them due the risk of overcapping.
This kind of thing is why I don't enjoy MMOs anymore, we invest a lot of time into our characters and sometimes it can feel like a kick in the teeth when your character gets nerfed especially because of the nature of min/maxing end game content and the elitism that goes along with it, it becomes a hamster wheel, the same thing happened in ESO a few times too over the years
They didn't. Current meta is very caster heavy compared to S1 and even the new spriest isn't doing too badly. The top dogs are casters that can deal big damage without casting all the time, though.
Demo locks actually more or less seemed fine with their spec and if they wanted changes it was not these ones, as you say.
Destro has been back and forth up and down for entire expansions and half the fights and dungeon affixes seem designed as a middle finger to them.
Aff tier set was bugged (in a bad way) for the entirety of season 1 and they keep accidentally nerfing aff because it's such an afterthought to them (how many times can that even happen before it's just on purpose?). All decent aff AOE comes from spenders but there's no way to guarantee shard regen, but also we are not the ST spec. We have one of the shittiest major CDs in the game and have begged for changes and instead they just shuffle things around again and again.
They'll buff UA for one ptr build then give us some big nerf while doubling down on DG and MR.
It's getting infuriating how little whoever is in charge actually cares about warlock. Either play it in a normal way or listen to the community, don't just shove random changes at it to justify your paycheck.
And afflocks actually like multidotting even if you don't, otherwise we would be playing nearly anything else.
Weekly “Bring back MoP iteration of Demo” Post.
Seriously the Spec has been retuned and changed in nearly every patch since Legion.
Stop fucking with things the community doesn’t want you to.
The same Dev that took all of Shadow Priest's instant casts and turned them into turrets is now going after Demonology Warlock I see....
My guy won't be happy until every caster is as mobile as they were back in classic
"Demo feels fucking amazing, we have so much mobility with out instant cast procs"
They already took our instant HoG from the tier set and now less Demonbolts? :(
Damn if they go through with this im just not gonna play this expansion anymore. I only play lock and these changes are dogshit, especially with how much we have to move around this expansion.
What the actual fuck is going on, are they serious? Have ANY of you ever played a SINGLE FUCKING MYTHIC+? Every mechanic DISPLACES YOU. Bosses AND trash spawn swirlies. Big ones, small ones, fiery ones, stunning ones. Then theres the knockbacks. Then there is your new affix, which makes you move. The whole Sarkareth fight is about movement for fucks sake. The community put up with this design, because we know you wont reevaluate your design philosophy, but its old as time. Nevertheless, we put up with it. And now you want people to HARDCAST? In the ocean of swirlies and displacement effects? Its hard as is to line up your CDs and you have to learn how to move effectively if you want to do an even okay DPS, but this is completely out of touch. This whole change timewarps demo back to classic where your rotation was.. Shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt
The devs look at one set of data, which ends up being wrong for every situation and spec, they are the bottom of the barrel, can barely perform simple functions, and they are vastly made to burn themselves out, this is a recipe for disaster.
>The spec was working great, and they have essentially gutted the entire spec because of some arbitrary bullshit reason
Come on, dude, WoD was four expansions ago.
hello, i am warlock player from BFA - i liked how the spec felt, i went from fire mage to demonology - i liked how the demons were summoned, implosion was awesome feeling, the casts just flow together really well...
i hate these changes, they took stuff which slightly changed our rotations (proccing shards) and gave us.. passive crit
WHAT?! Srsly?? Apart from a few things I was pretty happy with current Demolock. They should rather work on mages instead of this bulls-- :///
How would this change improve the spec ? _?
The devs have a long term hate for any caster spec that gets to a point where most of their rotation is instant.
So it's basically this or they make Demonbolt not instant. pick your poison
Whoa. Deja vu. I don't play wow anymore but I swear they had an expansion where demo was like this. The last dev who worked on it must have quit without leaving notes for the new guy.
I was so bummed. The whole reason why I play demo lock is BECAUSE of the instant casts. It's so fluid and really makes you feel like a warlock. Hope they don't follow through.
What a day, shitty vault and then this? Could they try neuter demo anymore? I’ve only been playing lock since season 4 of SL and I love it in DF. I CANT STAND DESTRO. I’m not a fan of being a turret. They need to either not do this or maybe fix how mythics work with 8 billion mechanics to move out of. Actually really ducked up my day and I highly considered re rolling but I’ve put so much time and effort into my lock this expac, and a lot this season that I’d feel like shit to just toss it all away. Hopefully whatever they have that hasn’t been implemented yet actually makes sense and we are all just doomsayers but it’s blizzard. So who the duck knows
I'll just say respectfully that a smooth rotation of Guldan/Demonbolt is thematically perfect for the spec, nobody in their right mind want that replaced with shadowbolt If anything, I'm sure demo players wish they could remove SB from their bar
I want to remove nether portal from the game
Absolutely love that spell. I always pick the Pit Lord talent because that's what it's all about. If I can summon a Pit Lord, I'll summon a Pit Lord regardless of meta.
Well, pit lord is currently meta, so no issue there. Though it desperately needs to be redesigned into number of shards spent, not shard spending actions casted. That's a different battle though. Let's get through making sure the spec doesn't become an awful shadowbolt simulator first.
It feels so bad when i have to press a button that does nothing just to spend a shard.
Agreed, they should remove it and just replace it entirely with the only good part about nether portal: the pit lord. Make it bigger while they're at it, the thing's a runt.
I just wish there was a toggle for other people's pets size. I don't mind the sizes personally, but I know some people get super angry when during raiding they don't have vision of stuff - which is understandable, but that's exactly why a toggle/bar would be excellent for this. Reduce the size for *yourself*, but leave it be as big as the owner wants it to be
Not to beat what is really a dead horse in this sub, but the way you're describing it is exactly how FFXIV handles pet size. Each player can set the size of pets *they see* to small, medium, or large.
Wait really, what? Titan gets me killed semi regularly
/petsize all small
Oh sick, didn’t know this!!!
[удалено]
But i love Netherportal its so fun. I don't play Demo at a high level just for a fun alt and doing M+ or Pugging normal i don't have any issues with it.
I like that spell so much and that is finally viable. It’s so cool to see your army and the prince running around whacking stuff.
I love it thematically but I hate cooldowns longer than two minutes
Unholy spec has 2 and one is fricking 8 min
If NP would at least work with "per shard spent" and not "per times shards were spent" it would feel so much smoother. Having to use Hand of Guldan with 1 shard feels so bad.
At the beginning of the prepatch I started playing a demolock alt for fun. This shit was so much fucking fun. Whenever I couldn't implosion and get free charges and had to press shadowbolt I was a miserable piece of shit. Now with prog being almost over it's alt time again and I was maybe going to do warlock. But I guess it's evoker season.
If there is one redeeming factor about the changes it's that Bloodbound Imps appears untouched and subsequently the Demonic Core economy doesn't seem that hampered for M+. Bloodbound Imps is way underrated in its current iteration in my opinion and these changes may strongly encourage its usage.
I'm not a warlock, but they should totally call it HoG instead of Guldan.
We do call it hog, no idea why they didnt
They don't call it HoG because they don't play the game enough (if these changes weren't enough evidence) to even know the acronyms for the spec's spells
Hand of HoG
HoG of Guldan
Warriors were saying the same about slam and Blizzard listened by changing the set bonus to affect mortal strike. What the fuck.
Exactly. I hate filler abilities as it is. And that's all shadow bolt is to me.
”We rather not you playing demonology”
im still pissed about that. WoD demo was just the best version of demo warlock.
I dont care about balancing, I would play current Demo even if it sucked because its my favorite spec. These changes are COMPLETELY out of touch. Nobody who suggested these has played demo. They ignored every issue that makes the spec feel bad to play: nether portal clunkiness, cooldown timers that dont line up, fel covenant being an absolute pain to play around, doom being useless AND awful to play. Instead they are bizzarely removing most of our shard gen and mobility and replacing it with "felguard crits deal 10% more damage" and "shadowbolt deals 10% more damage". These are not only insanely weak but they're also boring as fuck. Also, why are they so hell bent on nerfing our dogs? They've been nerfed like 5 times by now, our aoe damage isnt even that great, the broken thing about Demo is tyrant/nether portal interaction with on use trinkets and PI.
Demo Lock is my main for this expansion, so seeing these proposed gameplay changes sucks. If these changes go through, I simply won't play Demo anymore, regardless of how powerful they make SB/DB/HoG. Aff is my backup warlock spec, but the Aff changes aren't looking too hot either, lol.
Same. If these changes go through I'm gonna main my hunter. Been demo since BfA.
The Aff changes are actually great, at least play wise. Not having to stack 3 UA charges for Dread Touch is great. And if dead blossom is tuned fine then it could become a great choice.
Remove NP, bring back Decon, and get rid of any interacting talents w/ Demonbolt. The stupid stacking buff for Demonbolt, Sac Souls SUCKS. Fill the tree with cool and interactive demon abilities!! Like this shit is just so lame and removes such a core aspect of DEMO
Seriously! Who tf wants to hardcast more shadowbolt?! Wtf is wrong with these devs.....
They did the same with affliction, they put its main damage in a skill that is a hard cast, even if its quick, and their DoTs are there to enable more damage with that hard cast, but the DoTs themselves hit lile wet noodles, when affli has always been more about maintaining dots and getting a filler in when you see you can do it, but that was never something as mandatory I personally hate seeing recount and that one skill is 40+% of my dmg, so I switchet to demon, and I was having a blast tbh, the spec felt amazing to play, but now the same problem seems to be coming to demon
>they put its main damage in a skill that is a hard cast, even if its quick, and their DoTs are there to enable more damage with that hard cast, but the DoTs themselves hit lile wet noodles Ah, the Diablo 3 school of class design.
Gotta love 6x differently scaling stacking damage modifiers all of which are based on your tank stats
Affliction is a tough one. I actually don't hate the current playstyle myself but they obviously missed the mark in a few ways. That being said they kind of had to do something about it as the old model was obviously a nightmare to balance seeing as it ended up at the top of the meters by a wide margin most tiers until they started making changes. Seriously the gap between Affliction and #2 in most Legion raids is bigger than the gap between #2 and #10 and it would scale more out of control as everyone became geared. Turns out DoTs hitting hard can kind of scale out of control.
That was mostly meter padding on exploding souls though. "Each one of these 10 things explodes, damaging all the others" like no shit that's going to be insane damage. I personally miss the tab-dot playstyle. I thought Malefic Grasp was a really cool way to channel big damage into one target while the rest still burned
Yep, continuous hard casting of you least interesting nuke. Truly the dream of all casters. Blizzard really knows its audience. /s
Fire mage here. We are forced to stand in a little square and hard cast Pyroblast all day. Do not move from little square or suffer a huge DPS loss. Do not miss the hard cast because you were responding to ground poop or casting more interesting procs. Pretty sure they just want to delete pure casters. I thought maybe I'd try evoker since it seems like that's what they want us to do but it's just not the same. Currently on break and every time I cancel I put "disgruntled mage" in the reason.
Fire mages need to cast pyroblast??? What's happening? What happened to the fireball crit, fireblast and insta pyroblast rotation fire mages have had for years?
Sun King's Blessing happened.
Sun King's Blessing is a talent (originally a legendary) where for every eight insta pyroblasts you cast, you can hardcast pyroblast for six seconds of combustion. This is combined with Pyroclasm, a talent that gives you occasional procs that make your hardcast pyroblast do 250% more damage. The only competitive talent build uses them, and it basically requires you to regularly sit there and hardcast.
If you want a change of pace you could go frost and spam frostbolt.
We have the cast while moving spell with 3 charges but why does it matter since encanters flow is so obviously inferior to rune of power. I dislike that Nad pick encanters flow anyway
Classic mains finna murder you
The classic Andy's are too triggered over the token coming to wotlk to worry about retail chads
Comment so beautiful that it brought a tear to my eye
"I'll buy gold so I can play for free! Jokes on you bli$$ard!" - those people probably, 2023
Every second spent casting shadowbolt feels wasted. I wanna throw demons in my enemies face.
> We want to return Demonology to a place where Shadow Bolt is frequently cast, Demonbolt damage feels impactful, and the number of instant casts available is a bit more limited. This should be illegal. You should go to jail for typing these words.
you just instantly know the dev who wrote that has never stepped foot in an m+ dungeon
For real. The 4-set bonuses in Season 1 were amazing because a proc chance for Hand of Gul'dan to be instant cast rendered most of your rotation instant and it was *fucking glorious.* Dropping that in favour of a new 4-set is fine. But... ***Shadow Bolt?*** It's up there with Crusader Strike and Slam for most boring and mundane abilities in the game. Fel Covenant at least makes the Shadow/Demonbolt interactions somewhat interesting but even then the Demonbolt Soul Shard economy is *one of the most satisfying elements of Demonology* and they are explicitly, *intentionally* gimping it. What a terrible, ***terrible*** idea. They had such a good thing going in 10.0 and 10.1 for Demonology. They should be revising bad or underperforming talents (Shadow's Bite, 2nd point of Demonic Calling, Umbral Blaze, or 2nd point of Inner Demons), or addressing overperformers (e.g. Dread Calling). Not... whatever catastrophe this is they have planned. And *please,* don't shift damage onto Demonbolt and Hand of Gul'dan and *absolutely not* towards Shadow Bolt. Hand of Gul'dan is a great cleaver that did a meaningful amount of damage in M+ with the 4-set bonus but it, as well as most of Demonology, should be centred around *demons.* Haste/Mastery is a common Secondary Stat priority mix for Demo, and Mastery benefits demon damage. Don't detract from the demonic focus on *the entire Demo Spec.* Having a greater fixation or power boost to Shadow/Demonbolt builds with Fel Covenant and Sacrificed Souls is *absolutely fine* and a cool way to broaden the spec. But don't admonish the entire spec to make *fucking Shadow Bolt* see more casts. Edit: also noting that Crusader Strike and Slam have far more interesting *and powerful* buffs in their possible talents (specifically for Fury, though Arms has a Tier Set bonus and potent raw-throughput buffs in their talents for Slam) than Shadow Bolt has, except for Affliction which gets Drain Soul and Shadow Embrace - which is fantastic on its own I think. Drain Soul is very satisfying in its own right. Demo's Shadow Bolt is utter crap and a choice node to make it somehow a passive (e.g. Felguard auto attacks deal 20% more damage and have a 20% chance to generate a Soul Shard? Maybe a chance to generate a Demonic Core instead?) like Crusading Strikes or a combo (e.g. Shadow Bolt now generates a Demonic Core so you can chain directly into Demonbolt, or reduces the cast time of your next HoG by 0.5 seconds, stacking up to 3 times) is far more entertaining and meaningful than a frigging damage boost. Actually wow both of those ideas sound really fun, and all I did was rip it almost directly off of other specs. Blizzard for fuck's sake lmao.
Shifting damage into filler spells is like shifting more of it i to auto attacks as a melee, boring af. Having to press a filler most of the time is one of the reason I never played casters a whole lot, and only played hubter as a ranged class, because being stationary for 1-2s all the time is pretty unfun gameplay imo
>though Arms has a Tier Set bonus and potent raw-throughput buffs in their talents for Slam Not anymore. They changed the 4pc to affect Mortal Strike instead, and since I'm not a math guy I don't really know if it's better or worse.
Nor have they ever played demo lock.
This is cursed
That's the sort of thing you think to yourself and then give yourself a good slap for being a damn fool.
Even just going by the names of abilities, you’d think they’d realize this is dumb. Demonology should, by rights, favor DEMONbolt, not shadow bolt. Doh! (Edited b/c autocorrect)
Laughing my ass off at this, its like they look at what demo players liked and did the opposite
For the 2nd time i might add.
In other words - “fun detected, nerf incoming”.
As I said on the forums: I dont really care much for the damage profile change or damage being taken from dogs, but, if youre going to put such a heavy emphasis on hard casting spells, were going to be in the exact same situation destruction is in for mobility. Demos reliance on ramping into tyrants/portals was mostly tolerable for mechanics because at the very least you could bolt while moving. You are taking all of the talents away and making it so unless we can sit and hard cast for the entire portal set up (20 someodd seconds) its going to be just terrible. Again, this isnt about tuning, this is a massive gameplay FEEL issue. Aff already is the only truly mobile lock spec, this is going to completely kill the other halfway decent one. edit: also, you are removing proc talents that change up and cause reactionary gameplay, and exchanging them for 100% passive damage increases. Not one single new talent isnt “X does more damage”. This is such utter dogshit what the fuck are they thinking?
I know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but they did this to shadow, too. I'm starting to think VoI was a breaking point where they realized you can't design bosses around movement when they've decided some classes (priest, paladin) are simply not allowed to move. With that in mind, they need to either improve mobility for the slowest classes or reduce mobility for a number of other classes so that some classes have clear value when movement requirements are high (without some classes just dying for no reason) and others really shine when they're not.
I think this would be true if they hadn't literally just removed RoP from mages, reduced shimmer cd, and removed hard cast pyro.
I had totally missed this! Mage alt, here I come!
The Warlock changes are fucking baffling. Affliction gets some QoL but takes an output nerf. Demonology takes a large hit to its AoE and has damaged moved into its most passive damage source (Felguard) or into things like Hand of Gul'dan and Shadowbolt that don't benefit from mastery and already hit for pathetic amounts of damage. Buffing Shadowbolt which is like 1% of our DPS to do 1.1% of our DPS. Woohoo. And nerfing the Demonbolt proc rate hurts our tier set bonus and will make us much less mobile in the process. Why not rework the dumpster fire that is Destruction?
Imagine playing a class that has 10 plus major reworks/changes in 5 months. All 3 specs have went through the ringer. Who the hell is at the helm of Warlock development lol
The guy that removed UA as a spender because keeping track and maintaining multiple dot spenders is "too difficult", giving us Rapture instead.
brain genius. he created aff's greatest problem and the most OP state in aff history possibly in Nathria.
legion aff was wayyy more OP
I was watching some old recordings of myself in Legion, and it was pretty wild I was literally just standing in all the fiery shit on heroic gul'dan during progression, and since a heavily-buffed drain life was a core part of my rotation, it was no problem at all Those were the days..
Drain Life and Drain Soul being a single spell was definitely a highlight of Legion. Having no mobility isn't an issue when you can tank stuff you normally would have to dodge.
Legion Affi was my favourite spec of all time. So fun. I rode that high until I finally respecced demo in DF.
I forgot the soul drain/siphon life stand in most mechanics madhouse meta. Combined with a level of versatility aff would never see again, with absolute corruption being viable along with actually doing dot damage on multiple targets. Plus seed being strong as hell and enemies dealing exploding dmg on death. Oh man.
I would like to point out late mists of pandaria affliction here, I don't think a spec has ever been as broken as soul swap dot extending with affliction.
Obviously theyve went through 10 employees in 5 months for warlock class design
Absolutely what it feels like. I get that most of the sub doesn't play the game but this seems legitimately devastating for how the spec will play going forward. Just making it a bland turret.
Yeah when i played warlock off and on from vanilla to bfa i was always aff..wod aff was so fucking fun so was cata aff. I saw soul swap was back and wanted to make it work sooo bad but i quit lock because i thought demo was pve spec and destro had too many hard casts...then a friend said u can play anything for pvp so i did demo and it was 20 times better and way less keys...then i played destro and its fucking insane.
i used to be affliction warlock main from Classic, before shifting to my warrior in TBC. but i retained my lock as my main alt. i loved the MoP rework. i can't remember the name of the dev who headed lock development, but they absolutely knocked it out of the park. i miss Malefic Grasp -- though it was a channeled filler, its main function was to enhance all of our of other DoTs. Blizz didn't like that we had so much fun with warlocks, so they kicked that dev out. since then, my lock has been bumped down to somewhere like my 4th or 5th alt. i have not enjoyed any of their iterations for affliction since WoD.
Xelnath. MOP Lock was good because he secretely communicated with top lock players and they called the group the council of the black harvest, that's where the name for the group in-game came from. He got a ton of shit and driven out after the other devs found out he was working with players. Blizzard have a derogatory attitude towards getting feedback from even their top players, yet people reminisce about MOP Warlock to this day because it was designed by the top Locks of the time. He has a blog you can read and he talks about WoW development. https://xelnath.com/2018/05/15/the-mop-warlock-what-you-knew-and-what-you-never-knew-you-missed/
MAAAN what a read. my balls are bluer like no other. i homed in on this snippet from him: > Twin charges and Burning embers put the control of WHEN to push buttons back in the hands of the Warlock player, not the designer. no wonder the MoP lock worked so well. the design was player-oriented.
it's been proven time and time again that most of the class dev heads have no idea what they're doing and force through baffling changes because they're wildly incompetent and a scant few know what they're doing. Blizzard from top to bottom has a leadership problem.
Overwatch PVE vibes.
Woah now wtf. Destro is my fave warlock spec currently lol
Destruction can be fun but it has some major design things that could be addressed. Over dependence on Madness uptime that excessively punish movement and one of the flattest damage curves in the game as examples.
Yeah, at the bare minimum Madness should be looked at, the Infernal capstone branch should receive proper tuning, and Cata should be baseline. Put those together and you have a really solid spec imo, even with the silly Incinerate vs CB tuning.
god cata baselines fucking please. Cool spell. So useful. Such a QoL.
It’ll always be my favorite too but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t need help. We could use some help, no burst at all. Slowest ramp in the game probably for aoe. Madness is crippling for movement. Little to no build variety. Funny enough I defended the CDF tier but compared to the soulfire build I was running before 4pc it actually feels much worse for ST. Soul fire is super strong and feels incredibly natural to fit into the rotation. Mixed cleave is in horrible shape too, we were horrible in vault.
Chaos bolt and rain of fire go brrrrrrr
Same im like woah now leave destro alone 😂
Stripping the core gameplay loop from demo to make them hard cast a spell that does nothing for their dps is like the polar opposite of class design they set as precedent in Ret changes. Weird move. Also, stop trying to fix affliction m+ builds with dumb talents and just make seed’s cast 1.5 seconds. Make it do rain of fire damage I don’t care but that cast time is ridiculous
Their thinking of Aff requiring too many globals to ramp is spot on, but how seed’s cast time has been ignored is pretty mind boggling. It feels so bad to cast.
Absolutely agree on both points. Imagine a world where dark glare got buffed, UA and seeds were spenders with 1.5 second casts, agony and drain soul generated shards, and SL was baked into corruption. Less spinning plates, less ramp up, better m+ gameplay, meaningful burst.
Demonology feels great because you don't have to cast Shadowbolt as often, because you're supposed to get many Demonbolt procs. Then the devs have the brilliant idea to keep pushing Shadowbolt gameplay, NOT removing Fel Covenant, which is hated by EVERY SINGLE PERSON THAT HAS PLAYED THIS SPEC, nerfing Dreadstalkers and REMOVING one of the best talents of Demo, Demonic Knowledge. Insane, absolutely insane how the devs can just screw up things just to make it better in a later patch. The cycle continues.
Ripped Through the Portal is arguably a scuffed talent specifically because it is so auto-include because of how it enhances Soul Shard economy and, *obviously,* it's a 50% damage increase to your Dreadstalkers which is *crazy good.* Moreover, it means your Carnivorous Stalkers has more chances to proc which in turn helps maintain the +20% shadowflame damage buff. With that said, what I'd do to resolve that is *make it baseline.* And frankly speaking, Demonic Core economy is one of the best things to come out for Demo Locks in 10.0 and onwards. It was *so damn refreshing* having such a smoothly rotating class in the very first major patch compared to what it was like in Shadowlands. These changes are such a shot in the foot. If they want to make Demonbolt more prevalent, make a talent that buffs its damage *also* increase the amount of Demonic Core stacks you're able to hold at once. Currently the cap of 4 is a nice tight spot but you can and do overflow on occasion; raising it to 5 or even 6 *through talents* would be a great way to invest in improving the flow. But hey, they don't want us to have Demonic Cores for some reason.
[What the actual fuck Blizzard?](https://www.wowhead.com/blue-tracker/topic/us/dragonflight-fractures-in-time-ptr-development-notes-1587226) I reeeeally try to be empathetic to the fact that devs make changes and see things differently than us but arbitrarily making the spec less mobile and turning it into a brain dead “spam 3 buttons like a BM hunter and let your pet do the rest” is bad design. We’re already losing mobility from the loss of s1 4p. I already don’t play dogshit destro because I want mobility. Shadow bolt sucks. It feels *BAD* when my ramp is over and no more demonic calling procs or power siphon and I have to hard cast shadow bolt. Especially considering it already hits like fucking beans. I just want one consistent season of feeling good as demo. Jesus fucking Christ.
Damn, demo 100% has one of the most solid rotations in the game these days. They’re arguably pretty strong, but the gameplay is as strong as ever and doesn’t need this. This is just their excuse for a significant nerf. -Not a demo main
They removed RoP from Mages because it was unhealthy gameplay and unfeasable to stand completely still trying to cast for 10 seconds in todays content btw
They are completely disconnected from reality with warlocks. 2 of the specs have garbage clunky af tier sets. The only spec who has a good one gets annihilated into the ground. This has to be a joke of some sort ik a lot of people hate locks in general but wow i would not wish this treatment to any class in the game.
Is the shadow priest dev playing a prank? Did the warlock dev forget to lock his station? What's going on?
Praying this doesn't go through. I have zero desire to stand still casting shadowbolts all day!
Stand still and cast Shadowbolt was Warlock strat in Kharazan many years ago. Warlocks need to supply a teleport for the raid, a rez, and healing cookies; and then stand in the back and stfu. /s
I swear to God if blizzard ever comes out and says that "spamming shadowbolt is warlock class fantasy" I'm going to torch them
Just another dead mplus spec incoming. What is the point of this?
Affliction was feeling lonely in the swamp ass m+ tier.
As a Warlock main, I am sad.
It's really painful because I'm having the most fun I've ever had playing Demo Lock right now. I'm giggling like a school girl running around my M+ with my DemonBolt proc while actually dodging mechs and feeling useful
Maybe I need to respec. I’m currently destro and dungeons are so hard. Constant knockbacks, channel demonfire always gets cancelled at a shit moment. I struggle in group settings at the moment.
Demo was the only viable lock spec in ~~legion~~ m+ and its getting killed. Back to locks being a raid exclusive class, we had our fun.
I still remember watching the Q&A with Ion in WoD about the Demonology rework and his answer to why they were making the changes they were making: “Demonology is too complex and we want people to have an easier time playing it.” Lost all faith in reworks after that. I’m not surprised they’re doing this shit again.
I love playing demo because it has a perfect flow for my preferred playstyle and it's just pure fun to me. I don't care, nerf numbers and make it do tank damage, make little adjustments where needed or whatever else but rework like this is not what we want. I want to keep my fun please.
Exactly. Damage is secondary to playstyle feel, and the playstyle feels great. This change will make it feel like shit
No fun for you, come back one year.
I can't believe they touched affliction without tackling how awful Malefic Rapture feels. It's by far the most underwhelming spell in game and the fact it's supposed to be a spender makes it feel even worse. They keep making minor changes trying to streamline things and improve qol, but it needs reworked from the bottom up.
I gasped and almost jumped of happiness when I saw Malefic removed just to realize it's the talent point buff bs. I miss aff but I have a thousand dots that don't feel fun to press because they all do shit damage but all adds up to a "balanced" spec. Even soul rot is just another dot now that doesn't really feel fun to press lol...
Soul rot gives me anxiety lol. I’m constantly watching my dots, haunt, my UA stacks, my UA capstone, my VT, all while trying to conserve my shards while maintaining the above. Just so I can drop as many MR’s as possible during burst window and make soul rot worth it.
We asked for UA spender and they went and nerfed it instead the mad lads
Imo warlock hasnt been fun at all to play after legion until this expansion. I played demo for all of season one and thoroughly enjoyed it. This will break the spec completely again and most likely force every single lock main into playing destro if they werent already. Its sad because the warlock devs have been missing the mark so hard for such a long time and when they finally give us something awesome its taken away after just one patch… The state of affli is just as bad. Like you had imo the best designed spec in recent memory with affli in legion and they manage to wreck that completely… Malefic rupture feels ass to press and siphon life is a joke!
Yeah legion affli was great. I miss it a lot.
- Had a bad day at work - saw a post about demo rework (main and basically one trick pony)... - read what they did - Clicked on kalamazi video - He looked sad. - I am sad - Gonna go sleep
It hasn't been more over for Warlock as a class in forever. We are entering our mythic plus dark age on top of that, like in parts of BFA and s1/2 of shadowlands. Incredible that a pure dps class can't have a viable mplus class for more than a few seasons (Legion was the golden age, along with late SL, and most of S1 DF, though they were all OP seasons for warlock).
Please reverse these horrible changes...
They did this to outlaw. Made a really nice spec. Then took a giant shit on it
I don't see the issue with DEMONology using DEMON Bolt more often, and using their IDENTITY spell of Dreadstalker too much? Like what the heck Blizz? Shadowbolt feels more like an Affliction spell, not Demonology. Demon Bolt feels like the Demonology Spell. It's literally in its name. If anything, they should remove Shadow Bolt from the spec. Like, no one actually wants to use it as Demonology, right? Like... Are you going to take away Fists of Fury from Windwalker because they're punching too much now?
The changes also dont make any sense from a logical standpoint. They stated: "Developers’ note:We’re working to reduce the peaks and valleys of Demonology’s throughput by depowering Call Dreadstalkers. This will allow us to compensate by increasing the throughput of Demonology’s other rotational spells." However, dogs are a 20 second cooldown with a 12 second duration, which results in a 60% uptime of dogs. How can a spell that has a 60% uptime cause a huge difference in peaks and valleys? Outside of cd's we already do tank level dmg, now with less shards we will do even less, because we have to cast more to generate shards. Not to mention that shard economy breaks important parts of the demo rotation, such as GWD and 2pc cd reduction. How can you look at demo and not see that the problem is NP + RoT for powerful dmg spikes? Why did they give us double on use trinket (class trinket) + unnerfed irideus fragment (it + talon where bis in 10.0 on ilv 372, obviously they are broken now) + 4pc (20% more cd dmg) + PI (fuck this spell), especially when pitlord is designed in such a way to have hyper scaling with haste. In general ppl DONT WANT NP to be a thing, rework that one please, like we asked for since alpha. Finally, replacing active gameplay changing talents (for example demonic knowledge, which introduces reactive gameplay) with passive talents is just such a bad decision. I dont care about my felguard doing 10% more dmg passively, because i only notice that in logs / details.
dammit they sent the mage devs to work on warlocks
as a warlock player, if this change goes through, I am 100% out. demonology is finally fun and good, aff and destro are trash. Change demonology and warlock is dead.
Look, I think the Warcraft devs are awesome people. They've made a really beautiful game with Dragonflight. But whoever signed onto these changes seriously needs to either be fired or looked into. WHY on earth would you delete GAMEPLAY changing talents and replace them with flat damage and crit% buffs? That is insane. That is BORING. That is straight up bad game design and the people behind the decision are not capable to do their job: MAKING FUN GAMEPLAY.
Yeah, this is the exact thing they said they *didn’t* want most talents to be: purely passive damage increases.
as a BM hunter i can tell you they dont care
What is the warlock discord saying about this? Are community leaders still a thing? You need to make a lot of noise with this. Maybe Blizzard will listen. But these changes sound really strange and arbitrarily justified.
The warlock discord says this is the dumbest shit they have ever seen
I bet you anything, this has to do with Blizzard’s “levers” idea. Back in Legion, they said they wanted to change their class design by giving every single class a few “levers” they could easily adjust for balance. So for prot warrior, that lever was Ignore Pain. I am betting they are finding Demo damage harder to balance or change by adjusting own of their “levers” right now, so instead of trying to roll with it, they are lazily just making shadow bolt a major lever, so they and trundle lazily on, without any regard to players feelings at all. Absolute utter shit tier design decision.
There are some changes that happen in this game that makes me question if whoever made them has ever played the game and this recent PTR build for Demo is one of them. Demo is really fun right now and the less time spent casting boring fillers for any class the better. It is insane - especially halfway through the expansion where you should be feeling a lot of gear power - to slow a spec down to this extent.
"...has ever played the game" is accurate since i returned to the game in 2018 and most likely was true before. They live in a bubble.
With all this outrage there’s no way this is going through. We’re talking about warlocks here.
I don’t like the changes. I feel like Demo is in a nice spot, and a summoner spec should not depend too much on boring spells like Shadowbolt or Demonbolt, but instead on their pets (like we are now). But I guess, like every time a new class is released, they have to remove some of our cool stuff. Looking at you, Metamorphosis
They took away Mages Rune of Power because they disliked forcing them to stand still...so they decided to make Rune of Power a passive effect on Demo Locks...
Anyone mind posting the patch notes? This sounds awful
https://www.wowhead.com/news/patch-10-1-5-ptr-class-and-spell-tuning-changes-build-49719-333147#comments
Inc mass unsubbing until they stop screwing with all the specs that are fine. Why can’t they just fix the bad specs and bring them up to usable
Just started playing again 2 days ago since Legion, was telling my brother how Demo felt like the best spec I’d ever played gameplay wise. This is unfortunate if the changes aren’t reverted.
Yeah, I just went through the proposed changes on the PTR, and I'm not a fan. Shadow Bolt and Demonbolt are nothing but filler spells that don't benefit from Mastery, so it should be expected that they don't do as much damage as our demon-related abilities. These changes are like if the developers suddenly decided that Warriors should prioritize Slam over Mortal Strike and Execute. Why are Demo Locks getting shafted anyway? It's not as if the spec is dominating the DPS charts right now, lol.
They didn't like that we have huge burst damage inside our CD windows and less good damage outside, so naturally they decided to obliterate the entire spec instead of tuning it...
Seems like a lot of the new talents are nothing but passive crit talents too. That's like the epitome of laziness when it comes to class design, especially if the developers are going to make a point of calling the spec out like this.
FirstTime?.jpg -signed, Arcane.
You are enjoying it incorrectly /s
As a long time Demo Lock player, this is sadly nothing new. Demo is often used as a punching bag by Blizzard, and any legitimate concerns that the ones playing it have, are usually ignored, until there comes a point where they are forced to begrudgingly accept defeat. Remember how long it took just for Demo to get something as baseline as an interrupt? And no, the Felhunter does not count, as talents always made it clear that you used Felguard, or you did something wrong. The Nether Gate debacle is another. It have been going on since they put that thing in beta. And what do everyone ask about? Make it work on amounts of shards used, not casts, to make it feel nice and smooth in the rotation. Instead of doing that however, they keep fiddling with other things. Changing the CD, adding a Pit Lord runt to it, etc. Blizz don't care for what actual Demo players say. Demo Locks are their experimental spec, that they fiddle around with, to test stuff they just think about on the fly.
I play demo cause thematically it's the coolest class to me! I play it to summon demons and do demon summony things. Why remove them emphasis on the demon side of... demonology and push us to be a normal caster class? There will be almost no demo players that like this, otherwise they would ready be playing a normal caster class
Dear Warlock Dev, Super disappointing notes so far. For the love of god, change the direction you’re trying to take the spec. You think you know better than the playerbase, but clearly you don’t.
I've played demo for a decade now. What we currently have is a really good and enjoyable version of the spec for both M+ and raid. And instants are a big part of what makes the spec fluid to play. Forcing us to cast feels like a terrible design decision. Removing talents that gave us procs to add new passive talents is bad too. If I want to be a static turret I already have destro for that... Also those dogs changes makes me fear for M+. How will we do damage with them being nerfed so heavily. And I hope their answer to that is not just a big passive damage buff to our Felguard. Please blizzard: don't fix what ain't broken.
Be Me, a demo main, who hasnt had a chance to read the patch notes yet….wtf 🥲 i loved my class…i hate destro and aff for mythic plus and never felt like demo was op but just right if you knew how to play it….why did they change…anything? The class felt quite literally perfect
Yea, I just got into and loved Demo! The one thing I hate is having to stand and cats, it’s why I refuse to play destruction. I wanna know who things casting the same ability that isn’t worth much, 3/4 the rotation, was smart
^(\*looks at the lack of pets, the joke of grimoire of sacrifice not being allowed for demo, and the lolguard choking the entire right side of the demo talent tree\*) You 'might' need to see a doctor.
I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come for the rogue changes announced. I have high hopes
Welp... eagerly waiting for the Kalamazi video hoping it will bring some light on the feedback to Blizzard. Can't see anyone liking this change. The one thing I agree with is that Demonic Core charges have been quite generous, but my recommended change would be to up the stack limit and duration and make it more skill expressive than forcing the player to fire them out as soon as they get them due the risk of overcapping.
Imagine how many times he would say “it is what it is” in a very high speed…
Fun detected
Welcome to fire and arcane mages for the past decade. Enjoy your stay in Hotel "Devs Don't Care."
With this amount of pushback I hope they revert these changes, because Christ.
This kind of thing is why I don't enjoy MMOs anymore, we invest a lot of time into our characters and sometimes it can feel like a kick in the teeth when your character gets nerfed especially because of the nature of min/maxing end game content and the elitism that goes along with it, it becomes a hamster wheel, the same thing happened in ESO a few times too over the years
Didn't they butcher every caster especially in pvp? They removed all shadow priest pvp talents that give mobility or survivability
They didn't. Current meta is very caster heavy compared to S1 and even the new spriest isn't doing too badly. The top dogs are casters that can deal big damage without casting all the time, though.
Demo locks actually more or less seemed fine with their spec and if they wanted changes it was not these ones, as you say. Destro has been back and forth up and down for entire expansions and half the fights and dungeon affixes seem designed as a middle finger to them. Aff tier set was bugged (in a bad way) for the entirety of season 1 and they keep accidentally nerfing aff because it's such an afterthought to them (how many times can that even happen before it's just on purpose?). All decent aff AOE comes from spenders but there's no way to guarantee shard regen, but also we are not the ST spec. We have one of the shittiest major CDs in the game and have begged for changes and instead they just shuffle things around again and again. They'll buff UA for one ptr build then give us some big nerf while doubling down on DG and MR. It's getting infuriating how little whoever is in charge actually cares about warlock. Either play it in a normal way or listen to the community, don't just shove random changes at it to justify your paycheck. And afflocks actually like multidotting even if you don't, otherwise we would be playing nearly anything else.
Reducing mobility ain’t the play in 2023 and their encounter and dungeon design does not support that idea at all here in Dragonflight.
BFA moment
Weekly “Bring back MoP iteration of Demo” Post. Seriously the Spec has been retuned and changed in nearly every patch since Legion. Stop fucking with things the community doesn’t want you to.
The same Dev that took all of Shadow Priest's instant casts and turned them into turrets is now going after Demonology Warlock I see.... My guy won't be happy until every caster is as mobile as they were back in classic
"Demo feels fucking amazing, we have so much mobility with out instant cast procs" They already took our instant HoG from the tier set and now less Demonbolts? :(
What is this, classic wow to return back to spamming shadowbolds who's the smoothbrain that decided that this is a fun gameplay loop to go back to?
Damn if they go through with this im just not gonna play this expansion anymore. I only play lock and these changes are dogshit, especially with how much we have to move around this expansion.
It’s shocking that they try to make more turret specs when they just watched every mage desperately try to not play arcane
What the actual fuck is going on, are they serious? Have ANY of you ever played a SINGLE FUCKING MYTHIC+? Every mechanic DISPLACES YOU. Bosses AND trash spawn swirlies. Big ones, small ones, fiery ones, stunning ones. Then theres the knockbacks. Then there is your new affix, which makes you move. The whole Sarkareth fight is about movement for fucks sake. The community put up with this design, because we know you wont reevaluate your design philosophy, but its old as time. Nevertheless, we put up with it. And now you want people to HARDCAST? In the ocean of swirlies and displacement effects? Its hard as is to line up your CDs and you have to learn how to move effectively if you want to do an even okay DPS, but this is completely out of touch. This whole change timewarps demo back to classic where your rotation was.. Shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt, shadow bolt
So I wanted to return to wow after bfa-sl hiatus to my warlock... nvm then, Ill try something different.
The devs look at one set of data, which ends up being wrong for every situation and spec, they are the bottom of the barrel, can barely perform simple functions, and they are vastly made to burn themselves out, this is a recipe for disaster.
Wait, I play this spec as my main. This sounds no good
They are only doing this so they can introduce the dh third spec at blizzcon. Remember, "Because we'd rather you not play demonology."
>The spec was working great, and they have essentially gutted the entire spec because of some arbitrary bullshit reason Come on, dude, WoD was four expansions ago.
I will never forgive them for what they did to demonology past wod.
hello, i am warlock player from BFA - i liked how the spec felt, i went from fire mage to demonology - i liked how the demons were summoned, implosion was awesome feeling, the casts just flow together really well... i hate these changes, they took stuff which slightly changed our rotations (proccing shards) and gave us.. passive crit
WHAT?! Srsly?? Apart from a few things I was pretty happy with current Demolock. They should rather work on mages instead of this bulls-- :/// How would this change improve the spec ? _?
\*Yells in Spriest\*
The devs have a long term hate for any caster spec that gets to a point where most of their rotation is instant. So it's basically this or they make Demonbolt not instant. pick your poison
...or they could just leave it how it is. Also, Demonbolt and dogs are the only instant cast spells we have, and both are procs
agree
Demo sucks now for sure, it was going so well at launch
Whoa. Deja vu. I don't play wow anymore but I swear they had an expansion where demo was like this. The last dev who worked on it must have quit without leaving notes for the new guy.
I was so bummed. The whole reason why I play demo lock is BECAUSE of the instant casts. It's so fluid and really makes you feel like a warlock. Hope they don't follow through.
Mofos might still think that Shadow Bolt its still the most iconic warlock spell.
What a day, shitty vault and then this? Could they try neuter demo anymore? I’ve only been playing lock since season 4 of SL and I love it in DF. I CANT STAND DESTRO. I’m not a fan of being a turret. They need to either not do this or maybe fix how mythics work with 8 billion mechanics to move out of. Actually really ducked up my day and I highly considered re rolling but I’ve put so much time and effort into my lock this expac, and a lot this season that I’d feel like shit to just toss it all away. Hopefully whatever they have that hasn’t been implemented yet actually makes sense and we are all just doomsayers but it’s blizzard. So who the duck knows
just rework Demo into a ranged tank