demon form

hello.

i thought on giving a little of feedback on demon form while not much time has passed. Before continuing i have to say that i have only played with infernalist up to act 4, thats not much, but i can see things turning out and plus what people are talking on reddit.

In general, infernalist is kinda weird because a lot of her stuff need end game solutions, but her demon form falls off in endgame because her demon form bonuses are not far from really well rolled weapon at a cost of 2-4 ascendancy points.

what change i want to suggest here is merge two ascendancy nodes "demonic possession" and "mastered darkness" into one (demon form with max 10 stack), and then second node would remove the cap and new rules on stack would apply: stacks would increase while life is above 90% and quickly decrease while under 90% (dropping stacks to zero would cancel demon form). So picking second ascendancy node additional life recovery would boost demon form in somewhat stable non ramping way and it wouldnt get worse in endgame.

what do u think?

I tried really really hard to use demon form at all points of the game. I reached lvl 75 and never once did demon form feel good except the speed bonus you get when spamming spacebard.

I dipped HEAVILY into life regen%, increased life regen, even using life regen when low life ect. essentially the entire tree dedicated to it. Not once did I ever use demon form from act 1 - tier 5 maps. Even in a perfect world where you start at lvl 100 with all the passives, if you take the node that caps stacks at 10. You gain +6gem levels, 23+?% cast speed, and 180% spell power, at the cost of 5% life degen per second and have no weapon/shield slot.

Currently my wand is Item Class: Wands

Gain 27% of Damage as Extra Cold Damage
33% increased Spell Damage
+82 to maximum Mana
+4 to Level of all Cold Spell Skills
55% increased Critical Hit Chance for Spells
22% increased Critical Spell Damage Bonus

My spell damage is rolled pretty poorly, it could be 80+% and if it rolled spell+cold% or fire/lightning damage as extra 25%+, this wand is more damage then demon form with 10 stacks could ever be, without the need of 5% degen AND I have a shield for block/res/stats/damage ect.

Outside of demonform being extremely weak compared to wand+offhand. It also feels really really bad to transform into/out of demon form because the animation is really slow, it does not feel good to play with at all.

Y'all building Demon Form wrong. I wear Ghostwrithe and intentionally keep my life as low as possible and stack flat life regen on all my gear. Currently have 700 life and 120 life/sec.

This lets me sustain 30 stacks of Demo Flame until my health even starts going down and up to 100 stacks for 1,800% spell damage with heavy flask usage.

At 100 stacks I literally one shot everything running Archmage + stacking Shock effect.

The MAJOR problem is that

A) It takes 100 seconds to get there and the damage is absolute garbage until at least 30+ stacks
B) With the 30s down time it means I'm only doing max damage for ~10s out of every 130s

Massive opportunity cost. This same build I'm playing would be better in every way with a Stormweaver that can do nearly as much damage 100% of the time by having two shocks w/ 70% effect for a 289% damage increase on top of everything else which is plenty to one shot most bosses without having all the downsides of demon form. So yea it definitely needs some buffs imo. Especially defensive. Losing the shield slot is a massive loss in both energy shield and resists and since it takes a crappy unique chest to make it work, you lose out on every more maximum energy shield.

To fix it, I think it needs to have no cooldown, MORE cast speed instead of increased and have defensive bonuses (increased resistances, or maybe even evasion being a flying demon and all).

OR it needs to be balanced around allowing for weapon stats. Lower the + gems but keep the spell damage stacking with demon flame.


If not I bet the internal data will show this is one of the most meme ascendancies that most players don't stick with once they realize it starts falling off hard in end game compared to other caster options.

yeah..
apart from the power level im not really a fan of this ramping stuff and mastered demon form being a second node.

usually we, the forum poster, tend to suggest mechanically mild alterations mostly focusing on numerical changes, but there might be also be more interesting more drastic mechanical changes, would be interesting to explore those options too.

im saying this since im not too sure about losing life part, because it makes build making kinda hard (few options), i mean, you definitely cannot recharge life with eternal youth (probably same with energy shield) which makes es stacking a lot less good; doing mind over matter (optionally with agnostic chest piece) also goes into conflict with infernal flame mana conversion if you wanted to pick that node.

was thinking maybe smth could work with agnostic unique chest piece with demon stitcher gloves, but not too sure on that.

maybe they could switch to infernal flame regeneration (without interrupting cooling) if infernal flame node is picked while in demon form, that maybe would broaden build range, idk.

WTB attack based demon form.

I have been running Demon Form as my 1st and 2nd ascendancies for the entire campaign, now into tier 5 maps.

Just for the hell of it, i bought a 1 ex Wand and 1 ex Focus

Wand
Gain 18% of Damage as extra fire damage
43% increased spell damage
41% increased fire damage
+3 to level of all fire spell skills
72% increased chance to ignite

Focus
+26 to maximum energy shield
95% increased spell damage
83% increased fire damage
18% increased cast speed

my sheet avg. dmg per use of fireball is 1265.14 with this setup

my sheet svg. dmg per use of fireball in Demon Form with 10 stacks is 1242

plus, my mana costs are unmanageable in Demon Form. The extra skill levels on the gems take my fireball from 207 mana per cast, to 300 mana per cast, while doing less damage.

Demon Form, and i suspect Shapeshifting in general, is not worth it at all.

Though, the improved dodge is very nice

Hey guys, I tried a demon form approach with 94 percent reduced life and ghostwrithe which leaves me with 17 maximum life. I managed to get 152 regen per second and theoritically i should be able to sustain without flasks up to 800 stacks or more of demon flame. BUT, at 120 or so stacks the regen stops and i am only losing life until i hit 1.. Any ideas as to why is that happening?

Unless you run Minions Infernalist is just a waste of time right now. Stay away.

Fire nodes are the worst of the three Elements. Ignite does nothing but prime for other skills which other classes don't even need to do to match the damage. I've played Lightning, Cold and Fire based characters at this point and I'm amazed how bad Fire is.

Pyromantic Pact and it's other two notes.. Just play Stormweaver or something.

I tried rerolling from minion to demon form and spending quite a lot of money to respec. Once I respec and played for a while I noticed the same thing players mentioned here, the power ups brought by the demon form is totally not worth it and even if we can stack it to 50+ stacks (as proven by most people), it takes way too long for the wait and not worth the effort.... Please give the demon form more power, at least more than possible with a combination of cheap wand and focus considering the limit of 10 and the cost of ascendencies points.... Or make it so the ramp up is faster if we can build around it...

This ascendency is totally a waste unless you're using it to play minions and even then it's barely good enough

I agree with all of these posts.

Mastered Darkness feels like a downgrade, not an ascension, especially not a higher tier ascension.

Playing the uncapped forms life regen mini game feels bad when it comes to damage uptime unless you play sweaty and super build into it.

Easy way to fix this would be to make mastered darkness allow weapons OR give immunity to fire damage so it synergizes with pyromantic pact which would allow it to have the ability to spam high cost spells to make up for it's capped damage potential.

If those suggestions are too OP then just raise the max stacks quite a bit to make it an actual upgrade rather than just a cool skin that has to use shock spells and arch mage in order to compete.

I don't mind that people like to play the uncapped mini game so I think demonic possession node is perfect with heavy risk for heavy reward.

As it is, Mastered darkness is just a wasted ascendency point.

Don't even get me started on Pyromantic pact being worse than a moderately well build mana regen build. It's too punishing for not enough benefit.