GC why do u keep bringing this up?

This feels like one of those "I'm going to take things out of context to try and add fire to my own agenda" deals. Apologies if that's not what's going on.

The context was how do you find 3 distinct niches for a dps class such that each of the trees has its moment to feel special and shine yet over the course of a raid tier, all 3 feel like they do about the same dps. That's a really challenging goal.

It wasn't a "buff Demo" discussion as much as what the roles should be for pure dps talent trees, unless you fall back on the classic "PvP, PvE and the spec nobody takes."

If we buffed Demonology, and we buffed it too much (even if it was only on some fights) then what you'd probably see is most raiding warlocks shift to Demo. This is exactly what happened when we made Survival better than Beastmaster. What does that really accomplish other than giving players whiplash and perhaps giving those players who really just love a certain spec a little bit of time in the sun?

Q u o t e:
Why are you even thinking about "fights" when you look at a tree like this? You should first think about how/what you want a Tree/Spec to do, then think about how to make it do those things, THEN and only THEN think about what fights it might or might not be good at. If the Tree/Spec is designed with a solid variety of cool + useful abilities that synergize with each other and portions of the other trees nicely, then all the rest will fall in place.

I think Demonology has a lot of cool and useful abilities. It's pretty fun to level with. But players understandably get very focused on max potential dps, and Demo currently doesn't offer that.

We're all for making fun trees, and just having the trees be fun is enough for a lot of players who aren't necessarily focused on end-game progression. But we recognize that a lot of players are focused on end-game progression, and at this day and age, even the players who aren't get bombarded by it.

"Oh, you're Demo spec? And what's with those gem choices? I'm kicking you from this group."

"But it's normal Violet Hold...."

I don't really find it a "confused and unfocused" tree. Players like to say that a lot on the forums, for every single class, but we rarely agree. When you look at what we do to talent trees, even when coming into an expansion like Lich King, we adds some talents, remove some talents, and shift things around a little bit. We don't replace say 50% of the talents, and if we thought a tree needed that, we would have done so by now.

So whenever you're coming from a standpoint of "burn it down and start over" you can probably stop and think to yourself "Hmmm, I bet Blizzard won't agree with me at all." If we're probably not going to agree, then going forward with your proposal is of questionable value.

Demonology is simple compared to Affliction or Destruction because of the pet. Demo gets a lot of damage and utility out of the pet so it's a big deal when the pet dies or when the player isn't controlling it optimally. That may not be an issue on fights where you just send the pet in and let it autoattack, in which case your rotation might look simple compared to other classes (though to be fair, I don't think anyone has an overly punishing rotation these days). But consider the opposite scenario where you do need to spend more of your brain GCDs on getting the pet in or out of trouble and suddenly all of that get this up before that stuff the other trees have to contend with can be overwhelming.

This is a design challenge for both Demo and BM, and this is not the first time I have posted as such. We aren't going to steer those trees away from pets (though not every talent needs to be a +pet talent, and they aren't). We do need to make the pets easier to control so that the player isn't fighting the UI or the pet's limited AI so much. We also need to make sure they are doing more with the pet instead of just using it as a missile to blast at the enemy while they go back to Shadowbolts or Steady Shots.