Complete Guide to Demonology Warlock Tanking

hey folks if you want to maximize your survivability as a metamorphosis warlock tank the demonology talent Tre is going to be your best option thanks to abilities like Soul link the demonology tank build is able to withstand far more damage than other setups making it ideal for undergeared players or anyone that wants to feel completely indestructible that being said there's still quite a lot of nuance to playing demonology thanks to talents such as master demonologist and it has by far the most flexibility when it comes to Rune selection by the end of this video I'll have taught you everything important that you need to know in order to properly build and play your demonology warlock tank all right so as I said in the introduction demonology can be fairly complicated there's a lot of ground to cover here so before I get into the runes and like the rotation and stuff like that the absolute first thing that I want to go over is talents there is a bit of flexibility here but I think generally speaking you'll find that within the demonology tree your standard build is going to be the same because every single demonology build we'll be going down here and taking Soul link now Soul link I'm going to talk about it first because it is the reason to build for demonology I've had a few people ask me whether it's worth going like Midway through the demo tree and not taking Soul link and taking other stuff as it currently stands at level 40 you have to take Soul link this is the main selling point of this build because it gives you 30% damage reduction effectively it splits it on your pet and 3% additional damage the added damage doesn't really matter you're mostly taking it effectively to have a mini Shield well up permanently also some people don't seem to fully understand how this works it reads like a passive it is technically not a passive it is actually an active ability you press it once and it has an infinite duration so once Soul link is actually active it will never go away unless your pet dies which can happen the main downfall of demonology builds is if your pet dies you lose Soul link and now you just don't have it at all cuz it is taking a large chunk of your incoming damage so the best piece of advice that I could give anybody playing demonology if you are in a group with other people who aren't familiar with that fact tell them right out of the gate say hey I'm playing demonology I am running Soul link my pet will be taking 30% of my damage healer you will need to heal my pet now this may seem like a problem and it may seem like well are you really taking 30% less damage if the healer still has to heal that back up but in practice there's a lot of abilities that will heal multiple targets including your pet and you're going to be getting healed by it anyway your group members are going to be getting healed so your pet is effectively double dipping on that so in a sense you're staggering damage kind of like if you've ever played retail World of Warcraft and you played a brew master monk you could think of this as 30% stagger and this means that your pet is getting extra healing which means you're almost taking twice as much healing from all sources it is a very very powerful ability but it needs to be utilized properly because I've been in situations where people completely ignore Soul link and my pet just rots out and it is a nightmare I have on screen here this was a nergod pug that I did last night and oh my goodness it was bad I had to switch to demonology Midway through just because the healers could not keep anybody alive and I was having to effectively self- sustain myself but that meant that my pet was just rotting out and no matter how many times I said healers please heal me first I was typing it in text and then they finally made a Discord and I said please heal my pet they just really didn't I had to bandage my fell Hunter Midway through the boss in between thermop plug transitions it was bad that being said it was still much tankier than any other setup I could run so even in the worst case scenario where your pet is not getting healed you have options and I will discuss that but I did want to at least start off here with sink because that is the the main thing that you were going for all demonology builds lead to Soul link but going back up to the top of the tree what are we going to be taking so the most important Talent this is something that pretty much every warlock build even if they aren't going full demo will take at least some points in is demonic Embrace obviously 15% extra stamina I hope I don't need to tell you why that is really nice to have it is just free survivability Spirit does not matter for you at all you will pretty much never benefit from Spirit so the reduction effect doesn't exist you're just getting more Health now once you've taken these Five Points there's a lot of random points that you need to spend to advance the tree the early section of this demonology tree it's not too impactful so improved health stone is just nice extra healing if you need it it helps you out obviously if you need to use your health stone in a pinch and if you are able to create Health stones for your other group members then that is a nice little benefit now that's obviously only two points so you'll need to spend five to reach the next row I'll quickly touch upon some of the talents that I'm not taking here and I think all three of these should never be picked up as you're advancing first off improved Health funnel ideally you should never have to use this ability I actually unfortunately in that same nomon pug I just referenced was forced to use Health funnel in between thermop plug transition phases just because healers were ignoring my pet this should never happened this was a disaster scenario generally speaking you won't be using this in any serious situation and putting points into it is really not worth it there are better options improved imp is a weird one because this is a very powerful talent for other builds and in fact most builds that spec some points in the demonology will be taking improved imp the problem is for demonology I think this is a good time to scroll a bit further down the tree and talk about master demonologist I mentioned this briefly during the introduction but from here on out we need to keep this talent in mind when we make all of our other choices because it plays a big factor in why we're skipping certain talents that buff particular pets namely improved imp so you'll notice here our imp when we have Master demonologist reduces our threat cause by 20% that is obviously very bad you obviously don't want to be reducing your threat as a tank that's kind of a no-brainer but there are other really good options here pretty much all of the other pets give us very powerful benefits much stronger than reduced which means that as a demonology warlock imp is pretty much the one pet you can never use it is very very very bad and not taking Master demonologist just isn't really an option and the other pet options are very strong so you're not really going to be upset about losing out of the Imp but this does mean that any points put into improved imp are completely dead now as for improved void Walker the main issue here is that we aren't going to be using void Walker all that much there are Niche use cases for it specifically for demonology I think most other lock specs don't really ever want to use void Walker demonology can but we don't really gain too much out of this realistically speaking this is only buffing sacrifice so the shield that you get from this and while sacrifice is a nice Shield you're only going to be using this in absolute emergencies and I guess while we're on the topic the main case in which sacrifice will ever be used is in conjunction with fell domination and master Summoner you will be taking both of these they're not amazing talents you don't really need to use them a lot but there's no better option so these are pretty much guaranteed picks and what you can do with this is make it so your next demon summoning is only5 seconds which is really really really fast and you can do it in combat too so in theory you could do something like sacrifice my void Walker here press fell domination and then immediately resummon a new one and now my void Walker's back does start at only half health and Mana but I still carry the shield over for another 30 seconds really there is no situation right now in neron or dungeons or anything where you should actually need to do this the only fight where you will ever really want to run void Walker is on mechanical managerie and even then I don't think it's necessary it's just the only fight where it is somewhat useful So in theory if your healers are really struggling and you're on manager and you're running void Walker and cluck goes out and all the bosses get an attack speed boost and you want to sacrifice your Void Walker quickly resummon it which no you can only do once every 15 minutes so little bit prohibitive there that is an option but that is such a niche scenario that will really only occur exactly the way that I just described to the point where improved void Walker is just not worth taking so our only other option which is what we'll be putting points into is felt intellect and this doesn't do a whole lot for us because the only pet that actually really use uses Mana is our imp and that's one that we're not really going to be using ever as a demonology warlock but on the off chance that you know your pet is running low on Mana this gives it a bit more space to continue casting there are some once again Niche situations where your pet may run out of Mana but I would say they are a bit more common than the void Walker sacrifice scenario so if we have to pick we're taking F intellect now moving on to improved add this is going to be your bread and butter this is a guaranteed three points because as we can see from Master demonologist down here this gives you 10% additional damage and in any situation where damage is your priority succubus is going to be your pet of choice it does a pretty significant amount of damage less than the Imp on short fights but more than the Imp on longer fights and thanks to this Talent when you are a demonology warlock it gives you more personal damage and this is a flat 10% that affects everything that you use and we'll get to this later but the advantage of this is demo can run kind of any of the Rune builds that some of the other play Styles use because we're getting a lot of passive modifiers that don't buff any one ability in particular it just Buffs our damage as a whole which gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of how we want to deal our damage so as a result of that of course improved sad is going to be really good because you will be using your succubus very frequently or Incubus you know whatever you prefer now in order to reach the next row cuz this would be five points let's say we put two here three here this would bring us down to this Row three here one here we would still need to put one more point and that's why I have one point in fell stamina then we get down to this row Unholy power increases the Damage Done by your pets Auto attacks by 20% or melee attack so your succubus's lash of pain that would also count for Unholy power I believe so Five Points into that is going to be pretty much an a brainer your pets damage while not a massive portion of your overall is not insignificant so that helps and then we need to access master demonologist so from here we're going to be putting two points at the master Summoner as previously discussed I'm taking one point in demonic sacrifice because it is required to get to Soul link I will quickly note never press this button it's unfortunate that it is a prere to take Soul link demonic sacrifice is completely worthless and there is absolutely no situation ever where you will be pressing this ability it is effectively a wasted point to access Soul link that's just classic for you there's a lot of talents like that it is a necessary pick now since I have two points in master Summoner and one point in demonic sacrifice I'm going to go back up and I have two points that I can either spend in FA intellect or fa stamina I have put them in FA intellect honestly it doesn't really matter but if I had to respect this I would put them in fail stamina it's kind of personal preference if your healer is keeping your pet up the added Health doesn't really make a huge difference but there are disaster situations like I showed before where every little bit of Health your pet can get is important and I did mention that your pet Mana won't usually be a concern so I'd say you can balance them out it doesn't really matter though you're mostly just putting two points here to advance into the next portion of the tree to take master demonologist and then finally to take Soul link now there are three talents down here that I haven't really talked about improved fir Stone improved spell Stone and improved subjugate demon now this is a bit of an interesting discussion obviously improve subjugate demon you're never going to take this you're never going to use subjugate demon at least not in any real situation improve spell Stone this is just something you're never going to use anyway the regular spell stone and you can't even take it cuz it conflicts with soul link so just kind of a worthless Talent down there but the main topic of discussion so improved Firestone it's almost just not in the correct tree if this was down in the destruction tree like pretty much in the same spot right here you would actually take it as part of the deep destruction incinerate setup and I think now that we've gone over talents in order to really explain why improved fir stone is not good and why I generally wouldn't recommend it we need to discuss what runes you'll be running because that plays a big factor so hands metamorphosis duh uh waste now at the time of recording you can see that this is only a 5% damage increase for you or your demon in a hot fix coming up in a few days I believe on the Tuesday reset from when I'm recording this they are buffing this to 25% which is obviously a massive increase as it stands this is a terrible ability and I'm not using it but there's a a very good chance that with the 25% buff grimoire of synergy becomes your best belt Rune I don't know if that's going to apply for all builds because Destro especially with its increased crit chance thanks to things like searing pain or Devastation it has really high uptime on Shadow and Flame in some cases 100% uptime And that effectively amounts to a 10% flat damage increase which if this doesn't have a very high up time this may end up just being better because obviously 100% up time on 10% damage is better than 25% up time on 25% damage that being said if this is something like 50% or more uptime on all builds then it is just more damage plain and simple it is just a flat damage increase compared to Shadow and Flame one of the downsides of these runes both being extremely basic percent damage increases is that one of them will pretty much always be mathematically better I have have no way to test that I have no way to know exactly how good it is going to be when the changes come in but it is something to keep in mind that is like the kind of thing that I will keep you posted in the pins comments on this video if next Tuesday Shadow and Flame ends up no longer being the best and Slot belt option I will tell you I suspect that for demonology though it is probably already guaranteed that grimoire of synergy is going to be really good cuz one of the advantages of this is that it Buffs both you and your demon and for other builds your demon isn't going to be nearly as impactful in your setup especially the Imp on longer fights is going to O itself and if your imp is doing big burst of damage and then nothing then the proc chance is really low but your succubus is constantly hitting the boss it's constantly dealing damage giving you a chance to proc rimor of synergy so I would be willing to bet money that this is going to be the best Rune after the buff for demonology builds because you will have most likely higher up time on it for the other setups hard to say I probably won't have those videos finished the guides for these builds until after the buff happens anyway so we'll discuss it then hopefully I will have the math on that by the time the buff comes in but generally speaking both of these are comparable and it doesn't really matter which one you use Shadow and Flame even after the grimor of synergy buff will just be a pretty good buff uh you don't have I think 100% up time like some destri builds can get on this but you can get pretty good up time on the 10% damage bonus so it is still very powerful for demonology builds and of course invocation is just terrible never run this it's just really really really bad now for chest this is the main one that I want to discuss you are always always going to be running master chandeler because if you are running demonology then you are not concerned about damage now that is not to say that while running this build you shouldn't be mindful of your damage and trying to get it as best as it possibly can that should be something that as a tank you are still doing no matter what a lot of Tanks fall into the mindset of I am playing a tanky build or I am playing a damage build and my goal is only to do one or the other I'm either the person who survives the big damage or the person who deals the big damage and does the threat and stuff like that no that is a terrible way to look at tanking every tank build has a mixture of both and some are more survivability slanted some are more damage slanted demonology is 100% a survivability slanted play style but it still can put out really good numbers if you are playing it correctly so you are not playing this build because you want to do damage you are playing this build because you want to survive but that does not mean that you still can't do damage hopefully that makes sense however what this boils down to is the two main damaging runes Lake of Fire and master chandeler are what most builds are running so if you're running like a shadow damage affliction style build which I will make a guide for later on Master chandeler is obviously the best setup if you are running the fire damage Destruction build Lake of Fire is obviously the best thing to pick but Master Chandler and it's not even close is the best survivability Rune and I think generally speaking it is just the best Rune in this slot because while the Lake of Fire buff does provide you with a lot of damage in a fire damage setup it offers you nothing for survivability while master Channeler even in a vacuum is very close and gives you an insane amount of healing like a ludicrous amount of selfhealing from this room so if you are already planning to play a tanky setup there's absolutely no reason not to take Master Channeler it would be trolling to not take this because if you are trying to build for fire damage as a demonology lock I mean just respect Destro you know at that point just go full threat so you want to build for survivability here but within the context of that survivability setup you still want to maximize your damage hope that we've gotten that out of the way but since we've established that you're always going to be taking Master Channeler just because of the healing and even then it still does a lot of damage this also means that without Lake a fire you're losing one modifier that works well with incinerate and one of the advantages of that destruction fire build is that you're stacking a crapload of modifiers you have 10% fire damage from Ember storm you have 100% increased crit damage from destruction you have incinerate for 25% you have Lake of Fire for 40% a lot of that Stacks up to magnify your searing paines to hit for an absolutely crazy amount but if you start peeling away those modifiers then each one becomes less valuable in a vacuum and one of the other disadvantages of playing demonology for the fire damage setup is we've already said that imp does terrible things for demonology because of the threat reduction and your imp's Firebolt damage counts for Lake of Fire that is actually a pretty significant part of that setup so not having that means Lake of Fire loses even further value and in incinerate is a really tricky Rune to use properly even in the best case scenario I have said many times that I think it is highly overrated it's not bad it is good in very particular situations and I will have a build guide for that but a lot of people think it is just the best leg Rune and that is just not the case just because you're using searing pan a lot does not mean that spending 2.5 seconds to increase your searing painan Damage Done by 25% is worth it incinerate really doesn't hit as hard as a lot of people seem to think it does and the only way to really make it shine is to stack it with all those other modifiers as said to make it really good without l a fire without all the really good stuff in the destruction tree incinerate just doesn't really have all the same power that you see it have in all those other builds and one of the biggest things against it is that the leg slot has some of the strongest runes and you're competing with some really Heavy Hitters now my personal favorite I've talked about this many times before is Everlasting affliction this is what I would personally recommend if you want a setup that does high damage within the context of demonology for mechanical managerie this is the best Rune regardless there is no debate on that I've gotten really good results with it I talked about that in my nomon guide it is absolutely amazing on that fight in particular it's also really good in dungeons but I would not recommend demonology for Dungeon tanking that's something that I guess I'll quickly note here this build is fine for dungeons it's not bad but it just is not really efficient because your AOE Is Not Great the main ways to do AOE are through dot spamming with Everlasting Affliction which the other build that I discussed that goes improved corruption does infinitely better or through Hellfire spam which is deep Destro demonology just does not do AOE super well it can in a pinch but it's not its specialty and generally speaking your survivability in dungeons should never be a concern unless you are pulling literally the entire dungeon and trying to AOE it down but in that case you should never be face tanking things anyway a lot of times you're just trying to hold threat on mobs and kite them while Mages or any other AOE like I don't know rep paladins or something try to do all of the work in cleaving it and your entire job is just searing pain get things off of the damage dealers so they chase after you there is really no situation where the added survivability of demonology helps you in a dungeon scenario and having to like heal your pet in between poles is just extra maintenance that you don't want to have to do because it just slows down dungeon runs so I would actually say this is the worst spec for running dungeons which means that Everlasting Affliction while still good on Menagerie because you can get it rolling on those four targets at the start and then keep it up is really only useful in that setup so as a result Everlasting Affliction really is mainly good on that particular boss mechanical managerie it can be used on single Target fights I've discussed this before but just to quickly restate let's say you're fighting viscous Fallout or crowd pummeler or electrocutioner one of those bosses where pure single Target you never have to do anything else you're going to put corruption on that mob at the very start of the fight and you will never need to worry about it again and the entire fight depending on how long your kill time is that corruption is ticking away it's doing damage and by the end of the fight it will have amassed a large amount of damage and the amount of damage that you got from that single button press of corruption which you're usually going to be doing at the very start of the fight as you pull you can start with like emulate and then into corruption or something like that you're going to want to use your hard cast Then pretty much spam searing pain the rest of the time it will have more than pulled its weight on a longer fight and it's worth noting that your kill time really matters there cuz as you can see here I've been in some demonic neron pugs where it takes forever to kill some of these bosses you have like 2 minute plus crowd pumers or 3 to four minute electrocutions viscus Fallout usually should not take longer than 2 minutes but sometimes it gets really nasty and I think a lot of people that I've seen will look at builds like this and assume perfect conditions and say well if you're going to be killing the boss in 40 seconds like in a speedrun kill why do you need Everlasting Affliction and that ignores the fact that for pretty much 90% of the player base they are not killing these bosses in 40 seconds hopefully every group is not taking 2 minutes or longer but the key to Everlasting Affliction is that the longer your kill time is effectively the worse your group is the better it becomes because you are getting more value out of that single corruption that you applied at the start of the fight so that's something to keep in mind it's a really good rune for single Target bosses early into your progression if your group is doing neron for the first time it's really nice there and this trend will continue as the faces go on there is a reason why Everlasting Affliction is so good on mechanical managerie because it is pretty much the longest fight that we've had so far in season of Discovery and you're getting it on multiple targets so you are getting extreme value out of that honestly the only reason it's not great on thermop plug and it's not bad there either don't get me wrong but you have to recast it at the start of every new phase when he transitions between me suits so you're not getting the full value because you actually need to cast corruption four times in total instead of the ual one per Target so you're losing a little bit there makes Everlasting Affliction slightly worse still not terrible though and yeah as your guild or pug group or Whatever Gets a bit more experience with the raid and you start killing bosses faster you can peel this off and go with some other setups namely demonic Grace and demonic pact now demonic paact addressing the elephant in the room with this one it's obviously a pretty nice ability it gives you increased spell damage and healing to your entire Party by 10% of your spell damage this not only Buffs you and makes your individual spell damage and healing stronger it also means that all of your group members are going to be hitting harder which in theory means that your kill times are faster and I've seen people argue that oh this is the no-brainer pick because it gives your entire party a benefit instead of just giving you a slight damage boost but I think a lot of people once again Overlook the fact that in order to get value out of this your party members need to be playing properly and no shade to some of the groups that I've run with I doubt most of them are going to be watching this video If any I've had a lot of Caster DPS that just really don't do a lot and I doing the vast majority of the group's damage and any spell damage that I gave to them would have been a complete waste so I would view this as you are giving yourself a spell damage and healing boost and if it happens to buff your party members that's just extra so on really fast kill times where you're going to be getting less value out of everlasting Affliction and you still want to prioritize damage Dage you might get more out of demonic pack it's hard to say for sure and if you are in a group where you have absolutely pumper cter DPS and this is going to be really good for you well you probably already know that and there's a good chance you're not watching this video so I don't really think that's worth addressing if demonic pack will be good for your group you'll probably know it there's a good chance they might even ask you for it in that case it's up to you to decide should I actually run it is this actually going to be beneficial hard to say and lastly demonic Grace now demonic Grace this is a very complicated subject that I have had a lot of discussions with people on and I think in order to properly talk about demonic race we need to also talk about Dance of the wicked so I'm going to quickly touch upon feet runes demonic knowledge is the best said this multiple times demonic knowledge absolutely insane gives you a bunch of additional spell damage and healing 41 in this case if I go into my bags and equip infernal packed Essence which is one of the blood moon rewards this gives you even more so it's going to jump up in a second cuz this gives your pet additional stamina and intellect and that stamina and intellect does count towards demonic knowledge worth noting that fell intellect and fell stamina despite the talent names does not actually boost demonic knowledge unfortunately but this trinket does you can see here it jumped from 41 to 53 so demonic knowledge is amazing 53 additional spell damage and healing is massive it is so beneficial and it's competing with some of the worst runes that we've seen so far shadowflame this is just terrible never run this it desperately needs a buff or a change or something I'm surprised it hasn't gotten one and then we have dance of the wicked Dance of the wicked so if you're not familiar you and your pet gain Dodge chance equal to your spell Critical Strike every time you deal a Critical Strike to an enemy so breaking this down because a lot of people don't seem to fully understand how this works when you deal a crit to an enemy you gain Dodge chance for a set amount of time it's not a super long duration I forget exactly how long it lasts based on your spell crit at the time when you dealt that Critical Strike and when that Critical Strike lands you regen 2% of your maximum Mana now one thing just to get out of the way the Mana restoration is terrible now it is absolutely dog water it was really good at the start of the phase it is low like I ran it a few times I checked my logs I was getting absolutely no Mana restoration it was like the entire fight I got a fraction of a single life Taps worth of Mana out of this thing it is really really bad now they overnerfed it I don't know what they did to it it's gutted the demon Mana buff really only matters if you're running an imp and even then if you're running a build that does use an imp which demonology obviously doesn't the Mana is still nowhere near enough to give you a significant damage increase you're still better off playing demonic knowledge so the Dodge chance a lot of people like to say dance the wicked and demonic Grace is really good because when you pop demonic rce you're getting 30% increased Dodge chance let me just go ahead and slap this on my pants just so we can get like a visual representation of what this works like so this is giving you 30% Dodge and 30% crit which means that with dance of the wicked when you land a Critical Strike you are getting that crit chance from demonic knowledge turned into Dodge chance in addition to whatever crit you have on your gear so I have 1% crit here that would also become Dodge for however long the duration is in fact let's go ahead and waack some to test it out all right so I have dance the Wicked on my boots I have demonic Grace so I'm going to pop demonic Grace and then I'm going to start attacking all right Dance The Wicked 37% increased Dodge chance well that's not very good as it now it's only 7% it also completely ate the original buff so I had 37% then I crit again but because demonic race was gone now I only have 7% Dodge chance well that's pretty and a lot of people will say well if you have demonic ree you can get up to 80% Dodge chance and no no you can't not really if you manage like if that very first searing pain had crit then for the 1 second window or so where demonic race was still rolling when I had the dance of the wicked buff I would have maybe had somewhere in the realm of 80% Dodge chance and you know what if all had gone perfect there is a chance that that Raptor would have attacked me and because of my really high Dodge chance I would have dodged one melee swing wow that's awesome right not really and especially you can see that that is like the perfect ideal scenario because outside of demonic Grace you're getting 7% Dodge chance which is really not good Dodge obviously gets exponentially better the more of it you have it there are diminishing returns after a certain point when you get close to like you know 80 90% Dodge that's like when it really gets good there's like I forget exactly how the math works it's like an inverse bell curve or something in terms of how useful Dodge is but the main issue with Dodge and the main reason why if you look at like retail World of Warcraft and how tanks are being built now by blizzard there's a reason for it why is Dodge really not baked into tank kits well because it's just not very good and a lot of people who are only used to Classic gameplay don't really understand why Dodge is not great because a lot of old classic fights only have Auto attacks you know you look at Patchwork Patchwork is the iconic example of a really hard-headed tank fight where is all of Patrick's damage coming from it's Auto attacks and yeah if you dodge one of Patrick's Auto attacks well that's really big that is a lot of damage mitigated but because of the way that sod is being designed the current design philosophy is that we're getting more tank Busters we're getting PE from the chicken on mechanical managerie we are getting Tank Busters such as thermop plugs slam the super cooling smash or the uh sprocket Fire Smash whatever the names of the three different types of smashes that he does are well those abilities will ignore your Dodge chance they are not Auto attacks if you have 80% Dodge you are still taking a fully charged super cooling smash to the Dome on thermop plug it does not matter whether you are dodging his Auto attacks before or after and I think that is the main issue when we look at survivability because like I said before when it comes to building your tank you are not trying to just build I am the survivability tank I am the damage tank you want to strike a nice balance and if you are playing Soul Link demonology in general you already have an insane amount of survivability you're already taking barely any damage from anything now if demonic race was just free and it was just a button that you got for nothing and you could just press it and get 30% Dodge every so often it's a pretty button I kind of skimmed over this but like the fact that it's on the global cool down makes it significantly weaker because you press it by the time I can even use another ability it only has 4 seconds left so you effectively have like two to three gcds to actually get the proc within demonic Grace and then you kind of just need to hope that you don't proc Dance The Wicked again to eat the original Dodge chance boost that you got from demonic rce it's really bad just the way the ability is designed fundamentally is really problematic I don't really know how they fix this but for starters it needs to be taken off the GC and I don't even know if that's enough to make it worth running but as it stands it's just very very very very very weak but ignoring the fact that it's a weak ability and it's not even great for survivability there is an opportunity cost to taking it you have to sacrifice any one of these runes which are fantastic for damage no matter which one you're taking like I said I would not recommend incinerate but Everlasting Affliction one button to get an infinite corruption really good demonic Packa free spell damage and healing and keep in mind and healing that applies to master Channel or to so this if you want survivability is also your best option kind of neglected to mention that before but that does have an impact so you are losing out on fantastic things here to take a slight Dodge chance increase which is pretty terrible on its own and when combined with dance the wicked it's slightly better but Dance The Wicked is also terrible on its own so it's two terrible runes coming together to make one mediocre Rune and in order to take it you're losing out on a massive massive spell damage and healing boost and a either mini spell damage and healing boost or a fantastic damage Source it is just not worth it to run this it is nowhere near enough survivability even in perfect ideal conditions to justify losing out on this much damage and healing you are going to get more survivability through your added selfhealing thanks to master Channeler than you will from the every so often dodging a melee attack thanks to the Dodge that you get from this I know it is a really hard thing for people who are not familiar with playing tanks especially who are maybe used to the classic style of tank where avoiding damage is pretty much all that matters blocking as a prop Warrior dodging and stuff because melee attacks are all there is but we already have so much flat Dr that we do not care about a tiny bit of Dodge chance it just doesn't matter I cannot stress this enough now I got a little bit sidetracked there so I would excuse you for forgetting that this all started because we were talking about improved Firestone so going all the way back back to our original discussion on improved Firestone I think we have the proper context to explain why is this not worth taking well in order to determine that let's go ahead and actually create a fir Stone can make a create regular Firestone here and pop it into our bags and then we are going to compare it against the other ideal off hands that you should be running I don't have every single offhand available here but I have generally speaking a good representation of the nice ones so what what does fire stone do enchant the mainhand weapon with fire granting each attack a chance to deal 40 to 60 additional fire damage and then it has plus 14 to fire spells and effects obviously the 14 damage to fire spells and effects that is pretty straightforward your searing pain really only your searing ping the only other fire damage button you're going to be hitting with the setup is emate this now deals plus 14 and if we were to take two out of two and improve firestones and get plus 30% all right well I have my calculator pulled up 30% of 14 is 4.2 I'd assume they're rounding down so 4.2 + 14 equals 18 fire damage awesome so you would get up to 18 which I will note with improved Firestone this would become the highest plus fire damage offhand that we currently have access to there is no other offhand right now that gives you 18 fire damage the next best thing that we have is umbrell Crystal which gives 17 Shadow damage and then the other off hands I'll discuss here the Necronomicon and the orb of no arahill now one of the other notable downsides to this is it requires you to have a good one-hander now I am lucky enough to have glimmering Gizmo blade here this is obviously unane so if you do have your best in slot which will be a dagger then you can reliably run Firestone but if you have a staff then you just cannot use Firestone in general so this is less of an issue when you actually do have the really good weapons or if you have dagger willing Sacrifice from BFD but I do want to keep in mind that for people who are just starting out who don't have access to all of the best gearing options this is a notable downside to firestones in general it requires you to have a one-hander and an offhand and sometimes just running a staff will be better now the other thing I want to talk about for firestones is you'll notice I have this little proc here Firestone effect that is the thing that is giving my attacks a chance to deal 40 to 60 additional fire damage we're just going to run up here and we're going to just stab this Raptor for a bit we can look this is my damage breakdown fire stone attack did 54 all right still stabbing the Raptor no proc nothing now keep in mind at the end of the day proc effects like this are going to be RNG so this may seem like a little pointless oh right at the end there right as the mob died I got another fire stone attack honestly this is not terrible I it's 6% it's not really 6% CU all I did was Auto attack and your auto attacks in general should be maybe like 1 to 2% of your overall so in practice this would have been. 2.5 something really low percent of My overall damage in a boss it's really not good is what I'm trying to say but the main reason why this is not only not good but completely worthless is that this is a weapon AA effect this is mutually exclusive with other weapon or effects like lesser wizard oil I meant to bring one when I was going to do this demonstration I forgot it in my mailbox and there's no mailboxes nearby so oh well take my word for it lesser wizard oil which is your best weapon Ora enchant lasts for 30 minutes gives you 16 spell damage does not work with the Firestone thing you are going to want to use this and I would recommend that everybody pick the Stu I have a lot of other really really expensive like not great consumables if you're just starting out over here I'm not even going to show them I might make a video on it later on um but way too advanced for this type of video but lesser wizard oil dirt sheap five uses doesn't expire on death so it's the most efficient consumable you can get especially if you're doing Prague absolutely fantastic everybody should be grabbing one of these really really really good which means that fir Stone effectively is just a plus fire damage stat stick that is a really important distinction that I want to make because I see a lot of people getting misled thinking that it is giving them more than it actually is this is only giving you the fire damage you should never be benefiting from the fir Stone effect so with that in mind the fact that fir stone is either 14 or 18 fire damage depending on your talents let's look at what our other options are first off Necronomicon this is your best in slot as like an allpurpose off hand this is from noon I have happen to have this you may not but that's okay because if we go to Scarlet Monastery graveyard orb of the Forgotten sear is plus 12 damage and healing almost as good as this extremely easy to get you can solo Farm Scarlet Monastery graveyard I even have a video covering that very very easy to do you should be able to get your orb with the Forgotten sear in no time everybody should have access to this it's like the Baseline so effectively you are getting two additional fire damage and if you're running this Talent six additional fire damage but what you are losing is the plus 12 healing that this gives so you're losing the healing from Master chandeler really because that's your main source of healing and that does add up there's a reason why Master chandeler is so good especially with all this spell damage and healing stuff it is a tremendous amount of healing and obviously self-healing is a form of survivability we've already discussed that you're trying to strike a balance so I've said a few times that it's worth sacrificing survivability things for increased damage well the inverse is true if you are getting a slight amount of extra fire damage from this off hand but losing out on a massive amount of self healing well that is just not a good trade-off whatsoever but this is all a lot of words to not even touch upon the fact that as we've already said you're not going to be running fire damage stuff at all so this is giving you plus 18 pure fire spell damage to something that is pretty much just searing pain is that worth it absolutely not so okay I think we've properly explained talents we've properly explained runes I will quickly touch upon future Talent selections briefly before we move on because I am probably not going to recreate this guide for the level 50 phase and I won't spoil the runes themselves in case you're trying to keep it to yourself but we have already seen data mined versions of the upcoming runes in the next phase the developers have said do not take this as gospel they're probably going to be changed so I'm not going to say what they are if in case you haven't looked I'm not going to say whether they'll be good or bad because it is subject to change but what I can say is that for demonology it's not really going to change a whole lot that's not to say the runes are going to be bad it's just not going to fundamentally change how you build it or how you play it they will just be like icing on the cake effectively so until we get to level 60 I don't think there will be any reason to recreate this guide and re-explain all these Talent choices that will pretty much stay exactly the same can't predict the future but I'm just saying most likely so I'm going to go ahead and talk briefly for phase 3 level 50 what are you most likely going to put your points into now the no-brainer obvious one is going to be improved corruption because this is something that in any of my Affliction builds any build that heavily uses Shadow damage this is really really good you're going to want to take definitely Five Points into this to get instant cast corruption I use this in a lot of setups it is very very very powerful in fact it is one of the main weaknesses right now of demonology that on multiple targets as I said before in Dungeon tanking you don't really get the full value out of everlasting Affliction because you don't have access to instant cast corruption even full Destro builds can technically take instant cast corruption because the last few points after they take ruin they get some wiggle room there so they could go into ruin take some points and improve corruption and still tank dungeons just fine if they aren't going with a Hellfire setup but demonology is currently the only effect that cannot do this so next phase this is an no-brainer especially if you want to play demo while leveling up absolutely grab this really really really good I still think that a purely Affliction hybrid thing with some Destro abilities will be better if we're optimizing dungeon tanking and once again I will have a video on that but for demonology Dungeon tanking this will be massive going along with that you could probably also take at least one or two points into suppression just to increase your hit chance this is generally speaking good for that style build especially if you're leveling up and doing higher level dungeons where your hit chance isn't guaranteed to be at 100% but also for damage I think improved shadowbolt for like a dungeon scenario is really good I've talked about this a bit on the mechanical managerie section of the nomon guide this increases your Shadow damage dealt pretty nice and also cataclysm if you are not going with dungeon setup so maybe a raid version of the builds would look something more like cataclysm for reduced searing pain because you will still be ressing this quite a lot in demonology and then maybe like two points into suppression a few into improve corruption or something like that just to make it easier to apply this at the start of the fight and presuming that the next raid also has a 5% hit cap you'll want to have at least one or two points into suppression none of the stuff down here is great improved life tap is not bad so that's something you could take I guess improved corruption improve life Tap maybe put a few points into improve drain life that's maybe the only thing that I would say you don't really need it a lot but it's something to consider but just want to touch upon that because I'm sure that like three months from now whenever pH 3 is I'm going to get some comments in this video saying Hey are you going to make an updated guide or you know what would you recommend now that phase three is out so I just want to cover my bases there for all the people watching in the future this was made in advance specifically for you I hope you appreciate that so the final thing that I want to talk about is just to briefly give a rundown on the rotation now I think a lot of this you probably picked up just in passing by watching the video and hearing me talk about talents and stuff but obviously its rotation is kind of flexible depending on which runes you are actually playing with so obviously if you are playing with the Everlasting Affliction setup then it is exactly what I described in the video for neron describing mechanical managerie if you have yet to watch my neron guide then go check that out I have it linked in the video description the mechanical managerie timestamp in particular will tell you exactly how to play that specific play style and the only difference playing it as demo versus playing it as the recommended Affliction build is that you will need to hardcast corruption at the start of the fight that makes it a little bit trickier because first off you do have a chance to get resisted if you're not taking suppression so that can kind of suck if you get really unlucky and it's going to be a little bit spooky having the mobs running all over the place but the first few seconds of the fight you're not going to have cluck active you're not going to have overheat active the bosses won't be doing a lot of damage it's very easy for the off tank to just grab the bosses and if one of them's hitting a DPS whatever get your corruption supplied to the three main bosses then get threat with searing Pain Group them all up together use Shadow cleave to refresh your corruption on all three then start applying your curses on the topic of curses for multi-target fights like mechanical managerie curse of Agony is going to be your go-to if you're putting this curse on a bunch of different targets and it's lasting for its full duration it will do a significant amount of damage that being said there are two other curses that we need to keep in mind which are curse of the elements you can see here curses the target for 5 minutes reducing their fire and Frost resistances and increasing their fire and frost damage taken by 6% and curse of recklessness which increases their melee attack power by 45 but reduces their armor by 290 for 2 minutes the ignoring fear and horror effects thing is a nice little bonus but it obviously doesn't apply to bosses which is mainly where you're going to be using this now specifically on mechanical managerie if you are in a group that does not have people good at dealing with that like I said just use cursive acne I've seen some people argue that well if you put curse of recklessness on one of the bosses to help with the Warriors it'll result in more damage in my experience unless you have absolutely massive pumper Warriors or Rogues who would really benefit from the reduced armor on that fight you're probably just going to end up carrying the damage if you are running by builds and it is just better for you to use curse of Agony however on every other boss if you have a group with a large amount of melee DPS in it in that case curse of recklessness can be good because it reduces the armor so crowd pummeler electrocutioner mechanical managerie like I said that one's debatable and thermop plug on all of those fights with a lot of melee who are doing good damage it can be worth it to use curse of recklessness however if you do not have a lot of melee which unfortunately for warriors and Rogues I know if any of them are watching this they're going to be mad at me for saying this they are not very good anyway anyways right now most groups only opt to bring one or two just for Buffs and things like that generally speaking you are going to have a Caster heavy setup and in that Caster heavy setup curse of the elements is fantastic this is especially good with fire Mages which are very strong right now it's good for you because you have a lot of fire damage but generally speaking this is better with the incinerate build because it's all fire damage than this setup but it's still fine and in terms of the overall groups damage if you have good casters in your group who deal Frost and fire damage then this will really benefit them now I have had some setups where I'm running with like a feral drid two boomkins one Warrior and like a a shadow priest or something like that and I have basically a group comp that doesn't really do a lot of frost or fire damage it's like nature Arcane and then like one or two melee but the melee DPS are gray parsing they're doing nowhere near enough damage to justify cursive recklessness cuz keep in mind it also increases the melee attack power which means you're taking more damage generally it won't matter a lot but it is something to keep in mind in those situations if I'm running demonology and I know my group isn't benefiting from frost or fire damage and they're really not benefiting from reduced armor anyways I will probably just use curse of Agony even on a single Target this is one of those where it's kind of a judgment call I know that for a guide it sucks to tell somebody that they need to make their own judgment call but this is really one of those things where it is group utility it entirely depends on your comp I have no idea what group comp you're running with I would say if you just don't want to think about it and you don't give a my roll of thumb press curs of Agony unless somebody says hey can you use one of the other two curses if I have a group of four Warriors and they say hey can you please use curse of recklessness okay I'll probably use curse of recklessness but otherwise you get the most personal damage in this setup generally speaking by running curse of Agony so just press that unless you make a judgment call otherwise or you get asked to switch now I've talked a lot about util and curses and multi-target stuff the one thing that I haven't really covered at least not explicitly is what is your single Target rotation I'm sure a lot of people are going to ask that it's really straightforward though if you are running Everlasting Affliction obviously you start off pressing corruption you don't need to do anything special once it's on there it just refreshes if you're not running Everlasting Affliction I'm going to assume that you're taking either demonic paact or demonic Grace either for the added survivability or the added damage in which case it's entirely passive it does not affect your rotation at all in that case at the very start of the fight you are going to use one of your curses if it's one of the utility ones then just make sure to apply that to the boss right at the start if it's curse of Agony then you are going to put that at the start and then refresh it after it is fully expired because you want to let it ramp up to its maximum duration and you are going to immediately press drain life just to get that healing going that's really good of course now if you really want to M Max your damage you can still preo with corruption CU it is a two second cast even if you don't have everlasting Affliction even if you're not refreshing it constantly that still is a decent amount over 18 seconds helps you get that initial threat and then you're pretty much spamming searing pain you spam searing pain you keep drain life up you keep cursive Agony up if that is your curse of choice in fact frankly if you choose to be a utility bot and use one of these two curses that is one less butt in your rotation which I know a lot of people will like honestly so for the most part yeah in that case single Target it is probably out of all of the different builds the most straightforward on a single Target now I discussed this a bit earlier when we were talking about master demonologist but there is one final thing that I didn't talk about so void Walker succubus Fel Hunter are the three pets you want to use so succubus is pretty much going to be your pet of choice in almost every situation if you need to hold threat if you want to do damage cu the boss doesn't really hit you very hard so pretty much the first four fights in neron you really shouldn't be taking too much damage unless people really up on grubas then maybe he starts hitting you hard and you could justify using a voy Walker but realistically as long as a cloud doesn't get dropped on top of him you won't need any extra surviv ability and you could just run with the succubus if you want to have a emergency shield on managerie you can run void Walker on there because pretty much all of the scary damage coming out on mechanical managerie is going to be physical so having the additional 10% from void Walker can be kind of nice the unfortunate thing is void Walker still does not generate nearly enough threat to ever tank mobs so it might eat like one or two hits for you at the very start of the fight before you've established threat but after that it's just going to be sitting there doing very very very little damage to the boss and providing you with 10% Dr and 10% Dr it's not nothing but when you already have 30% drva Soul link I just would not recommend it and finally fell Hunter this is an interesting situation where getting plus 40 resistance is nice but it can be hard to tell whether it actually makes a difference so for reference I showed some of this footage earlier but last night when I did a last second nuron pug with a bunch of random people and it was an absolute disaster I actually ran Fel Hunter on thermop plug for the added survivability because the scariest parts of thermop plug are those smashes even if you might mitigate a slight bit of extra damage over the course of the entire fight by running with a void Walker resisting one of those massive smashes that could kill you in a pinch if your healers are not paying attention is absolutely critical so I opted to play Fel Hunter for that and I looked at my logs after the fact and I asked some of my retail friends who are really good at reading logs for help in interpreting that and they gave me this whole long speech about how resistances in classic are really complicated and can't be easily interpreted by looking at a log and I said can you just tell me like roughly how much better my run with Fel Hunter was compared to my other logs and then they just kept talking about how math is really complicated and they showed me all these different charts and stuff like that and I'm like look I'm just looking for like a small fun anecdote to include at the end of my video to like explain to people the slight advantages of running Fel Hunter on a heavy magic damage fight and then they said well if you try to give like actual examples without showing them all of the math and data behind it you'll be spreading misinformation and then I just said okay I give up I I don't really want to continue having this conversation so I guess the moral of the story here is that on the thermop plug kill where I ran a Fel Hunter I resisted seven full magic damage tank smashes from like the little thermop plug frontals and across pretty much all of my other runs without Fel Hunter I mitigated two to three I I have to give you the disclaimer according to all my friends who are really good at math that this is just complete averages and with a non-resistance setup you could get really lucky and get even more resistances than with a Fel Hunter and a f Hunter could low roll and still get really low things and while having resistance on certain mechanics will give you slight damage reduction it's really hard to measure its impact when it's all or nothing and just like you know my entire point that I was trying to make to my friends is you guys probably don't give a about all that it's complicated resistances are hell to math out the entire point that I want to make to you and hopefully you can understand that without thinking I'm spreading misinformation according to my friends is that having resistance on fights like thermop plug where a lot of the scary damage is magical is good so I'm not going to tell you mathematically speaking that it's going to give you XYZ amount of increased chance to mitigate damage or it's guaranteed to make you not take damage from a certain amount of all I'm going to do is is give you a thumbs up on Resistance fights thumbs up for Fel Hunter it's good it may not be good because math is complicated but it's probably good and really that's all that matters like that's all you probably give a about it's probably good enough so if you want to run your Fel Hunter on thermop plug I would say it's not a terrible idea one of the other nice things about having Fel Hunter and thermop plug is if you're in a really shitty pug group and they don't want to get the kicks on the nature phase you have spell lock and you can actually kick thermop plug as a warlock so I would not recommend this on any other fight but since we know thumbs up for Fel Hunter on thermop plug thanks to the resistance and spell lock is added utility it is a worthy consideration but on everything else pretty much just go with succubus because having increased damage and threat is just going to be better and also succubus out of all these does the most damage and it's not even close if I look at my breakdown here for Meer thermop plug uh this is not good by the way I lost all my world Buffs I wasn't using consume so you know don't judge my shitty damage in this pug uh my Fel Hunter did across the entire fight which was decently long 7.9k in terms of General damage and uh I'm not going to look at managerie because on managerie my pet was dead the entire time pretty much right at the start of the fight my pet just wasn't healed and it it liter literally died within like 20 seconds of the fight starting so yeah that sucked like I said that's one of the main frustrations of playing demonology uh and if we look here this was our kill right yeah lynia did 88.3k across a what's the the length of this fight and I I think I can see this electrocutioner combat time 2 minutes 26 seconds linkia did 8.3k thermop plug 7 minutes and it only did 7.9k so my fell Hunter did less damage across 7 minutes than my succubus was able to do in a little over 2 minutes just to give you a general idea of the damage difference between these and void Walker does no damage void Walker just tickles the enemy it does absolutely nothing if you are running void Walker you are only getting the 10% physical Dr Fel Hunter you're at least getting the resistances and interrupt and some okay damage but nowhere near succubus now obviously this is a lot to take in this video is already long enough as it is I hope you enjoyed watching this I tried to keep it on the shorter end and that just didn't work it's really difficult to make these types of videos cuz on one hand I like to do really tightly edited stuff where I'm looking over a script and thinking about every single word and making it perfect the neron video for instance was an 8 and 1 half page script ended up being 23 minutes long and I spent like 5 days working on that the reality is if I were to make detailed scripts for every single one of these play Styles where I talk about all of the stuff that I've just talked about talents runes play Styles pets utility for every single build we'd be here forever I could probably trim out some of the fat there were a few times where I maybe discussed pros and cons between the builds that isn't 100% necessary though I do think it is like slight interesting information for people who aren't aware but I think realistically I just would never have the time to do that so this is kind of a necessary evil that I have to make these longer slightly unscripted videos to actually get these things out in time so you guys can have access to this information so I hope you enjoyed it if you have any feedback on this style I'm still looking to refine it a little bit so within the next few days I'll probably be discussing the destruction setup because it is fairly straightforward I will cover that next then I will cover the Affliction build as mentioned the one that I recommend for mechanical manery and for Dungeon running and then there's just a lot of other little warlock related things that I would like to cover one of the main topics that is really difficult to address because it is important added context and I tried to talk about it when necessary is I discussed offhands right and which is the best offand why is Firestone not good why are these other off hands better and that is kind of just a small subset of a much larger point that being warlock tank gearing which is something that I've seen a lot of confusion and misinformation about and I would love to set the record straight on that so so if you are curious about that stuff if you like the discussion on off hands I am currently working on a much larger video where I have like four different best in slot lists prepared and recommended like B builds and like priorities and stuff like that depending on your play style it's a big work in progress because I've been spending a ton of time researching it practicing it like diving through logs to make sure that all my you know theoretical stuff actually works out in practice and there's a lot of difficult stuff to consider so I could sit here and talk about like why demonology wants certain armor pieces more than others and that technically Falls within the scope of demonology but that is something that I'm going to just talk about in a separate video regarding gearing but I guess to wrap things up if there are any things that you think are important that I forgot to talk about any crucial demonology tidbits that I neglected to mention please ask in the comments I've gotten a lot of really great questions on both my previous neron guide and on the video I made a few months ago about Everlasting Affliction dungeon tanking I'd like to think I left pretty satisfying answers to those questions it's impossible to fully anticipate every little question that somebody may have I tried to get as many out there as possible now but I'm sure I missed something so please let me know in the comments I will do my best to answer but anyways if you enjoyed watching this video I'd greatly appreciate it if you could toss it a like as that'll help other people find it as well and I will catch you in the next warlock guide peace

Channel: Harldan

Views: 24,712

Keywords: wow, world of warcraft, classic, normal, dungeon, tank, boss, bosses, guide, guides, raid, raids, raiding, tanking, build, builds, talent, talents, rune, runes, season of discovery, sod, lock, warlock, meta, strat, threat, phase 2, level 40, 40, metamorphosis, demonology, affliction, destruction, gnomeregan, level, cap, max, demo, destro, strategy, strategies, mechanical menagerie, mekgineer thermaplugg, all, pet, pets, succubus, felhunter, fel hunter, voidwalker, void walker, soul link, tanky, survival, survivability, unkillable

Id: _quhvyQvwIU

Length: 63min 23sec (3803 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024