demon form

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rootlus#6532 wrote:

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.

These are some good ideas!

But sadly wouldn't fix it still because 10 stacks is just so ridiculously inferior to the opportunity cost of a wand/focus/scepter still.

Maybe the Mastered Darkness node is something crazy like "In Demon Form, you have 100 stacks of Demon Flame.". Now THAT would be interesting. I think I'd take 100 stacks 100% up time vs waiting around for 100 seconds to get there when I eventually can't sustain them anymore around 200 stacks. Better yet would be "Upon entering Demon Form, start at 100 stacks of Demon Flame."

Even then I still think Demon Pact needs MORE cast speed instead of increased, making investment in other sources of cast speed more impactful and somewhat mitigating the massive opportunity cost and loss of defenses, resists and spirit you could have.

i just tried to respec into demon form and see how it felt in act 1 cruel rn, and it feels like a downgrade, i think they should change a few things about how demon form works, i think they should still apply your weapon slots because it seems that its easy for demon form to become a downgrade with any decent wand/focus or staff. to balance this the spell gem level increase should be lowered, and the damage buff per demon flame as well. thats my thoughts anyway, i just dont think it feels good at all rn

complete trash, and why doesnt the tooltip show you lose hand slots.

sure i can go 10hp with 200regen, but why must i do empyrian levels of build complexity to have ANY use for this trash.
onto the next class i guess.

Currently I am level 81. Playing mix of minion (caster form) and fire spell (demon form).

I have +5 fire wands with +4 minion scepter.

I felt demon form do give me a temporary damage boost but it need time to ramp up the demon flame, which is a big issues. As i already have a +5 fire spell from wand, turn into +6 from demon form doesn't really give me much extra damage.

Further more i lost my +spell damage from my wand initially. So for first 20 demon flame I am actually doing less damage, but once i increase stack higher my damage do increase quite a lot.

to summarize i felt demon form have the following problems:
1) lost weapon slot's stats, while demon form's spell damage increase will eventually make up for it. it will take quite a while for that to kick in (for me i need at least 20+ demon flame before start seeing benefit and need 50 demon flame to actually feel worth it). So demon form become a downgrade
2) reduce defense, losing weapon slots like focus/shield mean you lost out resistance and energy shield. so it is further downgrade on both damage and defense
3) lost spirit from scepter is another downgrade. beside minion, losing spirit means we can't keep aura/buff up (my demon form sloted few gems that require spirit. so beside the demon form gems, the only buff i can keep is SRS. i would like to see more buff supported or allow play with minions)
4) lack of synergy in ancestor trees with demon form. With demon form that is % dmg on max hp. You want to minimize your max hp, but the left side of the tree is prefer higher max hp. pyro pact also don't really benefit much too.

my proposal:

1) i felt it is better to lost the +6 spell level from demon form to allow us to keep our stats in weapon slots. This probably immediately solve problems 1, 2, and 3. While i don't mind keeping the +6 spell level buff, it maybe too strong when combine with the plus level from wand/staves. Beside the casting speed, the overall damage increase still need to be wait over time to happen.

2) propose to have additional nodes for demon form.
suggestion:
a) start demon form with 10 flame, second node start demon form with 15 flame reduce hp lost from 0.5% to 0.4%. (or something like that worth investing into)
b) Slow down/speed up demon flame increase which also can introduce different kind of builds
c) i think it's also will be interesting if we can remove cooldown off demon form but keep the demon flame counters. When out of demon form the counters start decreasing but won't continously damaging the human form

Hello there,

I went from minions to demon form. I enjoy it a lot reaching 100+ stacks with black doubt and everlasting gaze (ghostwrithe has an ugly skin), having no problems mapping T13+ at +300% with a half-divine equipment price for the moment. Cooldown is fine with Second wind and Ingenuity as support gems on the DF as long as you can sustain 60 stacks+.


However:

- Ramp up feels too slow
- Second DF ascendancy node is only useful until early endgame
- Weapon/passive nodes change cannot be used at all when in demon form
- The ascendancy is very unique-dependent -> resistances difficult to get
- DF is dependent on Archmage to ramp up faster / be competitive at all
- DF has very few potential spirit sources because of the unique-dependancy, low-life requirements, and no weapon switch (+ poor synergy with life-reservations node on infernalist tree)
- Pyromantic Pact does not synergize very well with DF due to Archmage


Suggestions:

- Max 10 DF stack on 1st DF ascendancy node (remove debuf node)
- Add node to start at 20 DF stacks for 25% life reservation (lower ramp up)
- Count max life after reservation while in DF (more durability, less unique-dependancy)
- Add a node to add +30 spirits when in DF (alievate unique-dependance)
- Allow weapon/passive nodes shift while in DF (core mechanics of the game ?)
- Add +0.5% to all res. incl. chaos per demon stack. (alievate absence of second hand, alievate unique-dependance)
- Add a node to make Archmage scale with Pyromantic Pact (alievate unique-dependance, add in-tree synergies, would work for all infernalists)

This summed up issues pretty well- slow ramp up, issues on losing weapons, too many uniques issue and second node being awkward not making sense..

i think i heard somewhere that ggg planned on introducing a new gear slot for shapeshifters but not 100% sure on this, would be interesting how that would affect build making, but still, i think letting player equip weapons/shield gives player more build options.

i see a lot of issues coming from DF stack design. This is the first time seeing a suggestion to make it reserve life instead, interesting, it would remove all current low life + flat regen shenanigans. For a long time now i was on a camp to remove DF stacks entirely and balance DF in a different way, like with basic more dps and speed multipliers with a small recovery drawback, but i wasnt sold on that idea either.

maybe on top of other changes giving a new skill baked into DF ascendancy node would be interesting idea, making it less boring if that comes to be.

pyromantic pact is another humongous colossal can of worms, i have made a thread about it some time ago as well, now i will just say that archmage probably should stay away from pyromantic pact to make it less same-y, give pyromantic pact its own toys instead.