A Look Back at Demonology Warlock in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

Demonology Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

Demonology Gameplay Overall in Dragonflight

Overall the new talent system has favoured Demonology quite a bit throughout Dragonflight; from having strong capstone talents throughout varying patches and even having strong talent choices overall throughout the tree. There has typically only been one “niche” talent build that you play each patch however that can feel somewhat limiting to player choice and certain tier bonuses that pidgeon holed you into taking specific talents for that patch. Generally speaking these things have been well received and even felt good to play (at least until 10.2 in my opinion).

With the latest raid release Demonology went well away from playing what most people consider to be a defining ability subset to playing something that just doesn’t feel as good to play, especially given how Demonology has played throughout the majority of Dragonflight and even going back to Shadowlands. That combination of playing Summon Demonic Tyrant (with Soulbound Tyrant + Grand Warlock’s Design) making our damage profiles way more fun to play than reducing Summon Demonic Tyrant to basically being a remodeled Darkglare (sorry Affliction players, Darkglare has not been an impactful cooldown button since Legion). We went through a few different talent tree iterations and the addition of the Fel Invocation/Shadow Invocation talents really fleshed out the top of our tree without taking too much away from the rest of the talents.

The one major pain point of our talent tree, unfortunately, is smack dab in the middle of the tree and that eyesore is Doom. While I understand this is an iconic Demonology ability since we went through the removal of Metamorphosis and became the “summoner” spec during Legion, this talent has had basically no use case the entire expansion.

Demonology: the Poster Child of Warlock

Demonology has also been basically the poster child of Warlock specs (again) for this expansion being the defacto option to play during almost all of progression for each raid tier while also being the strongest spec to play in Mythic+ for a large portion of Dragonflight. With that comes the caveat that we never really had much in the way of struggling in any content type but also not really being the “meta” spec at any given time. Demonology was more than viable to play in all situations but was never something someone looked at as a “must have” like other classes/specs through the expansion.

Thankfully because of Demonology being strong baseline we have not felt much of an impact from this expansions lack of borrowed power but we also did get some help with minor talent reworks and additions, which successfully changed how we played quite often changing gameplay loops every tier.

Out of all the tier sets that changed our gameplay loops the bonuses for Season 2 and Season 3 were the most successful; giving us back the ability to line up Grimoire: Felguard with Summon Demonic Tyrant felt really strong and fun to play during Season 2 and allowed us to have basically stacking damage buffs between the tier bonus and Summon Demonic Tyrant naturally. Season 3 bonuses also have felt fun to play despite some early criticisms from me about juggling the debuff. It feels rewarding to play in both single target and in AoE while filling in on some spec (and class) flavour that we have been missing bringing back the Doomguard into our mix of demons.

Looking Forward with Demonology into The War Within

In terms of improvements to the spec there are definitely some things that could be done to help things feel better;

• Bake Soulbound Tyrant into baseline Summon Demonic Tyrant – having this ability as a 2 point node in the first place feels weird and the additional 5 shards when you case Summon Demonic Tyrant had been a staple of Demonology for nearly all of Dragonflight and was a staple for all of Shadowlands.
• Give something akin to Shadowlands Tyrant’s Soul where we gain additional damage after casting Summon Demonic Tyrant, or give us X amount of some secondary stat, replacing Soulbound Tyrant and giving it multiple points to scale.
• Either remove Nether Portal entirely or finally give it the design it should have had for a long time; where you summon demons based on the number of soul shards spent during the time the Nether Portal is active and NOT based on every time you spend a shard (forcing us into 1 shard summons either with Summon Vilefiend/Grimoire: Felguard or 1 shard Hand of Gul’dan). The fact that this ability is still a three minute cooldown also does not really align with other design philosophies that Blizzard has taken with other specs removing three minute cooldowns almost entirely. If they keep this ability as is they need to make a superpower of a cooldown or rework it in some way.
• Rework Ner’zhul’s Volition and Gul’dan’s Ambition. These talents are thematically cool but ever since they blacklisted Nether Portal demons from Summon Demonic Tyrant and tried to give that damage amp back to those demons by changing Ner’zhul’s Volition but then that change gutted any damage the Pitlord was doing. This experiment failed longterm and should be rethought.

Regarding The War Within since we have not gotten any preview for our Hero Talents and what is presumed to be the Demonology tree; Diabolist. While the literal meaning of the word may not be what Blizzard is going for we can infer some things based on the name so far:

• We could be servants of demons – getting taken over by some powerful Demonlord (Kil’jaeden perhaps?) which maybe transforms you (harkening back to Metamorphosis of old) where we ARE the demon commander.
• Possibly have the ability to further enhance our summoned demons (new abilities, more baseline demons, etc).
• Maybe we will transform our own demons into more powerful versions of what we currently control: Dreadstalkers -> Corehounds, Felguard -> Fel Annihilator, Wild Imps -> Imp Mothers, etc.

Closing Thoughts

Throughout all of Dragonflight Demonology has been in a quite favourable position overall even though Warlock itself has not always been in the best of spots. We have benefit often from talent tweaks and additions and got quite a bit of help through the Season 2 and Season 3 tier bonuses. Blizzard has tried to flatten out our incredibly spiky damage profile over many different iterations; it was even so bad to a point that we were doing sub tank DPS at times when we did not have our cooldown cycle.

I hope this is something that can be addressed overall in The War Within and I believe that there is a lot of promise all around for The War Within. The structure of Demonology as it stands and with the Alpha/Beta around the corner hopefully we get to see a glimpse of what we could become with more things refined, changed or expanded upon from the ending of Dragonflight.

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