Why is Demonology the exception ?

#0 - Nov. 4, 2008, 7:07 p.m.

With your goal for all DPS trees to do roughly the same damage (+- tiny bits here or there, and supposedly slightly - for hybrids....i.e. boomkin, retadin). Why is warlock's demonology tree significantly lower due to it's supposed survivability?

If survivability really is the demonologies focus, why is its best defensive skill an 11pt talent for all warlocks to get? Any warlock can go a proper DPS tree and get this survival skill to. The only things past soul link that give survivability are:

Master Demonologist which with a felhunter, VW, felgaurd only is only 1/4 as effective as soul link (-5% damage or -10% to either spell or physical).

Metamorphesis which I have been stun locked to death in (meant to be anti melee AND anti stun/snare). This talent doesn't help much if you don't see it coming (i.e. rogues are usually stealthed) and you can be CC, kited, laughed at, they go immune, or they simply play normally because it's only a 20% damage increase that has no defense verse spells at all.

Demonology also pigeon holes you with felguard, the be all end all of our demons, only demonologists get to use. I feel more safer with a fehunter or void walker. felhunter is almost mandetory verse casters and VW although i gotta sac him, is my only solution to avoiding the initial onslaught of most physical now that I have no stamina (and in wotlk we'll ahve mage level health without the tricks to become immune, avoid damage, escape, root, snare, remove debuffs). warlocks also can't shift demon to suit their attacker like a mage can with their armours.

Some core abilities need changing or added to give warlocks in general a solution to this inability to survive now. But I want to focus on a 51pt demonologist. With no snare (not like warlocks are going anywhere since all melee have better snares and a means to close distance), and no nether protection.

Meta.... keep it. It is good the way it is. The complaints about it are actually more complaints with the core class issues in general, and a 51pt talent should never be the solution. CloS tried to do that and became a core ability. It dosn't solve melee issues, it doesn't make us immune where trained skills or 31pt skills do, so don't say that it does then move on as if problem solved. Keep Meta, fix this issue elsewhere though.

Demonic empathy.... WTF???? To put this in perspective, BM hunters pets get 50% damage and total CC immunity at the same level. and their pets are more DPS focused than ours. As a demo lock id never use imp, i have a hard time trying to find a reason to use felhunters or succies EVER, VW was only useful while bugged, and the felguards....is not even close to 50% or total CC immunity. This abiliity had much potential and could of fixed the issue im going to raise now.

Simplicity.... CTRL+1 to pet attack, immolate>CoA>corruption>shadowbolt spam. Thats it. No new spells, talents, nothing to add to the rotation, nothing demonic, nothing changed since lvl5, cept our imp has been replaced by a questionably better melee pet.

Demonology needs some new spells of it's own to add t a rotation and stop with all the passive amplification of what limited spells it does have. Maybe, some suggestions.

Demonic Blast. The effect varies depending on demon.
Felhunter = mana burn with more focus on damage than mana.
Succ = a snare type shadowbolt.
Imp = a DoT that does fire damage and hurts other mobs close to target
VW = A DD version of drain life
Felguard = A physical damage based spell.

I like what you have done with the new doomguard and infernal....but the infernal lasts 1 minute then dies, no chance of enslaving, and the RoD version of doomguard means any warlock now has access to our best demon. Demonologists also lose the MD buff using him and do not get dark pact buffs, as well he isn't technically enslaved....way to knock off our invested talents.

Felguard defiantly needs improvement, this isn't even a joke. I have been using my VW way more tha felguard since patch tanking raid bosses, sure i know that was a bug, but at least for once my pet had a use that wasn't CS/dispell in PvP. I'm sure now that VW is back to normal he will be totally unusable again, even for a demo lock.

Which brings me to another point. Way back in original, I went demonology because I loved out pets, our ability to match the situation. Made sense to go demonology then. I could use a 15 minute cooldown to dynamically changed my pet if i was caught with the wrong one. This fit in with my 10 min CD deathcoil, 1hr infernal and doomguard.....15 minutes for a 'near' instant summon is rediculous when everything seems to be 1-3 min CD now, rotation spells are 5-20 seconds, and truly oh #!** spells are 5 mins.

Demonoloist should be able to switch pets on the fly easier, it should be a spec defining aspect. We can yank demons outta the void a lot easier than others. and we should have a reason to use others. Maybe a talent to allow demon locks

Ghostcrawler

#1 - Nov. 4, 2008, 7:13 p.m.

Your'e arguing a couple of things here.

1) I think you can understand that if Demonology did the same or greater dps as other specs, and had more survivability, why Affliction and Destruction locks would take issue.

2) If your argument is that Demo doesn't have the survivability we claim it has, then that is something we can look at. It does, so far, appear to still be the PvP spec of choice, but we'll see.

Ghostcrawler

#112 - Nov. 5, 2008, 5:15 p.m.

Many of you are taking my comments to far different places than what the words actually say. It's cool if you want to use this thread to discuss several different related warlock issues -- honestly, we'd rather have fewer, longer threads than dozens of tiny ones. But my comments were only refering to two specific points:

1) Specs that can do the most dps generally make sacrifices along other axes to get there. Specs with a lot of extra utility or flexibility give up some dps. If dps is all that matters to you, then Demonology probably isn't the right spec for you. We can still make the dps good (and with the recent coefficient changes, we think it is), but specs are ultimately about making choices. Not every choice is between one way to maximize dps and some other way to maximize dps.

I do disagree (and I know you healers do to) that survivability on raids is only the responsibility of the healers. We have even existing fights (like Naj'entus) where you'll just be dead if you sacrifice everything for dps. I agree that survivability in PvP or when soloing is a bigger concern than on raids. But I disagree that survivability is not a concern on raids.

2) The OP seemed to argue that Demo dps wasn't competitive because it was supposed to have more survivability, but that it in fact did not have survivability. Maybe it doesn't have as much survivability as you like and maybe the class as a whole doesn't have as much survivability as you like. I didn't really address either of those points. All I said was that people keep spec'ing Demo for PvP (not 100%, but they do spec it) so it must offer something besides highest dps.

Ghostcrawler

#144 - Nov. 5, 2008, 8:59 p.m.

Q u o t e:
I was so hopeing for a response to address the issues. Making suggestions as of where players and devs could meet somewhere in the middle to make everyone happy but instead we get the same blue post we started with restated. Way to build up my hopes and dreams and then slap me in the face.

Here is where I stopped reading your post and skipped to the next one, just FYI.

We are looking at Demonology's dps. The coefficient buff did help it more than you might guess. A raid-buffed Felguard can also do 1000 dps or so at 80.

Overall, for any class, I wouldn't say the goal is for any tree to be identical in dps. They can be close, but we are going to take the rest of the tree into consideration.