Demon Form and future of shapeshifting

Awesome in theory and feels good on paper, but the reality of it is super underwhelming and makes me think future shapeshifts will be terrible if they're supposed to have a similar design to them. Shapeshifting need less upfront value but excessively more scaling potential.

Losing weapons that scale with a hyper specific type of skill is a real problem. Just comparing it to casters as our only form we trade mh/oh weapons to get +6 levels and 26% cast speed for the possibility of +7 w/ 67% cast speed or quiver stacking with something like +10, 200% proj, and free pierce. If you brought it to melee classes atm you'd need something to compete with raw weapon damage and titan's grip, which is possible to be nearly 2x stronger depending on how it works.

With current demon form being limited in some ways, it does have an insane ramp with demon form if you can maintain climbing beyond with a build built around it, but ultimately it kind of is just worse. Imagining a normal build will get to 300% more damage and 500% increased damage. If you can build a demon form around 66 stacks, which is a slow ramp but doable, you will get about 1200% increased damage which lets say is x2. The loss of weapon levels might be 30% more and the lost cast speed from weapons could be 40% of the builds speed. So its like 200% damage vs 182% dmg and 2 ascendency points and the cost of weapons.

All this is for a kinda weird gimmick that's really fun but only kind of rewarding. Seems like an impossible task to balance around with how insane losing slots of gear is, especially weapons. Would love to see more player driven power around shapeshifting, if that means we have relevant weapons, supports, or something to add levels and features to our shapeshift in the future.

shapeshifting on trailers have it's own nodes on tree so i guess it will also get uniques and ways to scale it further when druid will come. also with prefix and afix mods for items.

My biggest gripe by far with demon form aside from the obvious bit about disabling your weapons deck is that it also disables all reserved effects that do not have the spell tag.

"Those are some nice skeletons on the class that recommends mostly skeletons for its skills. Shame if we put those away. Oh, you wanted to try some trigger casting? Sorry fam, don't see any spell tags in those trigger skills. Oh you wanted to use your defensive abilities to stay alive? Gonna need to see your spell tag or you can wait outside."

We can't really define our opinion as a "ultimate" for now and suggest anything to be honest as
We don't know what are plans for shapeshifting, how it will work when they will add another stuff for it. What exact mechanics are..

what if all the nodes and stuff that comes with druid will be powerful and more interesting than weapons?

i heard shapeshift will get THIRD weapon slot special for shapeshifting forms.

for me.. they failed to provide classess and ascedancy nad picked the worst ones.

The slowest attacking hammers and nothing else for melee vs trials/sanctum
witch - with no minion ascedancy
witch with shapeshift - with no shapeshift stuff
monk - with only elemental and no physical/wind ascedancy
sorceress - with all of those cast on stuff that kills the entire core of the poe 2 meaningful synergy combos and ends with just POE 1 gameplay.

I think there's a lot of potential, which is why I made an Infernalist at launch, but yeah its in an odd spot.

Let's set aside the numeric evaluation aside for a moment. Just conceptually, losing weapons kills 2 slots to chase upgrades or get creative and kills potential weapon swap fun. Even if Demon Form were numerically insane, I'd still feel like it needed some work.

Back to numerics, Mastered Darkness is basically a way to save a bit of money, or an SSF thing. Uncapped Demonform is honestly decent, but requires a very, very specific way of gearing, and I'm afraid Ghostwrithe will get caught inEverlasting Gaze/conversions nerfs which would just destroy Demonform's viability.

In any case, I guess we know there's future shapeshifting stuff coming and this will all get reworked, so the numerics are only so relevant.

The enhanced dodge is useful and unique, so it's not just about spreadsheet DPS. Whatever happens I hope that stays. I like the unique reduced HP/regen gearing angle, we're not just looking for the same simple upgrades most builds are.