Infernalist Demon Form - Issues & Suggestions

So, the core mechanics and concepts behind this skill are pretty straight-forward and reasonable: You get a significant DPS boost to your spells at the cost of escalating damage to yourself (at least, until you get the max demonfire node) and higher mana cost due to higher skill levels. Neat!

The issue is that the implementation of this transformation seems to be a mix of bugs and/or strange design choices.

The biggest issue I have with demon form is that it is a skill given to a class that - unless you're taking the novel approach of playing a non-minion witch - depends on its scepters to maintain enough spirit for its minions. So why does activating the transformation remove your equipped weapons? (It might remove all equipment, I've not bothered to look at the stats)

The skill already has huge, inbuilt drawbacks (health and mana consumption) which are further exacerbated the more nodes on the ascendency tree you pick up. It doesn't need the additional drawback that it cripples your spirit pool.

Secondly, the way that demon form just randomly decides which spirit-based abilities it's going to disable when you transform is not ideal for a skill that effectively has a time-limit, and is designed to be an 'oh @##*&' button. If the current design of removing the witch's scepter on transformation (which again, makes no sense) remains a thing, then demon form should have some kind of pre-set loadout we can arrange so that we have full control over what skills are active upon transformation.

Thirdly, the way you have to leave a buffer of unused spirit to handle any spirit cost associated with the support gems you add to this skill (of which there are few) before you even use the skill, when spirit is already at a massive premium, is kinda silly. This feels more like a bug to me than a design choice.

Now, if the intent behind this ascendency is to encourage a witch to go lean with their spirit pool and/or to not rely on scepters for minions, maybe the solution is to significantly buff the hellhound summon - make it summon additional hounds as it levels, or make the one hound it does summon much tankier.

However, given that infernalist gives you one of the few nodes that significantly boosts your spirit (locked behind several trials and a fairly nasty phys->chaos penalty and health reservation), that doesn't seem like the intent.

At the minimum, if the disabling of scepter spirit pools is an intended and permanent fixture of this skill, maybe have a tooltip in the skill description telling us that this will happen? That way if you're running a minion build, you'll know to avoid this skill at all costs (especially as respeccing ascendency points doesn't seem to be a thing).

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Xndar#6927 wrote:

The biggest issue I have with demon form is that it is a skill given to a class that - unless you're taking the novel approach of playing a non-minion witch - depends on its scepters to maintain enough spirit for its minions.

For the record, Witch has never been, and won't be in PoE2, the "minion build only" class.
It is the main class for minions, yes, but its not just a class for minions.
There are multiple Witch builds and picking a non-minion one really isn't novel.
Witch is also the class for chaos caster & curse builds that don't use any minions. Arguably, chaos caster builds may actually be more common than minion builds.

In that vein, Demon Form is a node that is there quite specifically for the non-minion forms of witch.
I hate to be the guy to outright say somebody's idea for a build is wrong, but if you're playing minion witch and choose to use Demon Form, you are indeed just wrong.
It's like taking Wooden Wall on a warrior who doesn't use totems.

Minions aside, Demon Form having the function of effectively unquipping your weapons is something I can get behind, provided the buffs of the form are enough that you aren't just massively weaker than the weapons make you.
In addition to being a fun and unique way for a character to be handled, if balanced, it would also make it a great build to use as your first character of a league, when you don't have any good gear yet anyway.
That "if balanced" is obviously important though. I don't want to go construction a build where you don't get your weapons, only to find its so much weaker than the weapons that it just feels bad.

The specific matter of losing spirit from a scepter wouldn't be on the list of ways you get weaker in the form though, because a build where you use scepter spirit and a build where you use Demon Form simply should not be the same build in the first place. You don't spec into Weapon Master on a Mercenary who isn't going to use two weapons, or Overwhelming Toxicity on a Ranger who doesn't use poison, or Demon Form on a Witch who wants to use scepters.
The comparison is not Demon Form vs what I'm doing with the extra spirit from a scepter, because I wouldn't be using one. The comparison is Demon Form vs whatever non-scepter gear I'd be using.
As a comparison, look at the Monk ascendancies. One has nodes that give you free spirit, so you can make a build that uses more spirt gems. The other has a node that replaces your spirit, so you have none, so you can't use any spirit gems. Demon Form Witch is like Darkness Monk. Having less spirit is part of the build.

Any Witch I make who uses scepters, whether for minions or to slot other spirit costing functions (Cast On's, stacking curses in Blasphemy,) is not going to use Demon Form.
The Witch I make who uses Demon Form, won't use any extra spirit from a scepter. They'll be specced out to the same 60 spirit as all my other characters who don't use scepters.

The above reply reinforces the need for a tooltip on the skill that explicitly lays out how the skill works. If this skill is intended to disable scepters/equipment, tell me that. Don't assume that players will intuit that the transformation works this way, as no other ARPG I've ever played with druid transformations or the like (D2-IV, Last Epoch) does this, and no other skill in PoE1 or 2 does this.

The current skill description leads you to think that this ability would be a nice augment to the typically-low DPS of a minion build.

If the skill is working as intended and the desire is for this ability to be mutually-exclusive with minion builds, a few lines of text would do wonders to avoid confusion - especially if ascendency points are permanent allocations.