Infernalist Demon Form

So, let's talk about Demon Form and why it's not worth investing into. First off, what does it do? Here's what it does at lvl 20

+25% Cast Speed
+6 Levels to all Spell Skills
Lose 0.5% Life per second per Demonflame
Deal 17% Increased Spell Damage per Demonflame
(unlisted stat) Increase dodge distance by 100%

That all sounds awesome!....right?

Well, there's 1 major issue. Going into Demon Form disables anything in your left and right hands, so you get no benefit from your weapon or shield. But the buffs are pretty good so it must be worth it. After all, to complete the Demon Form ascendency you need to spend 4 points on it. Well, about that.

For the amazingly high price of....a single Divine, you can buy a staff which has more stats than Demon Form provides, without any of the downsides. And that's just a cheap weapon, if you have the currency, you can get something that will completely blow Demon Form out of the water. Staffs can roll up to 52% cast speed, it can roll both spell and your specific element element damage at very high percentages, +7 levels to specific element spells, and many other things. So not only do you get way more just by getting a good weapon, but you don't have to invest into Life Regen because no Demon Form = no life drain. But there's 2 other big things we need to bring up.

Life Drain

Having such high life drain requires you to do 2 things: Invest into Life Regeneration and invest into lowering your Life as it drains as a % of your maximum Life. And since life drain in Demon Form cancels when you hit 1 Life, this prevents you from using Chaos Inoculation, which sets your maximum life to 1 but makes you immune to Chaos damage. Running a low life, high energy shield build without that can be quite dangerous and considering the investment Demon Form takes, you should not have to make these kinds of sacrifices.

Weapon Skills

So because Demon Form disables your weapon/shield slots, you can no longer use weapon skills. It shows as available but the moment you try to use them, you lose Demon Form. This usually isn't a big deal as most weapon skills kinda suck, but staffs have 2 very good skills you no longer have access to, Freezing Shards and Living Bomb. These are very powerful skills with no mana cost and I would argue losing these 2 skills alone makes Demon Form not worth using as they provide excellent single target damage, something fire spells specifically are lacking.

So what do we do about it? Well, there's a few suggestions I have to revamp the ascendency. Though I will just focus on Demon Form for now. The ascendency as a whole is a train wreck, with most things being "you get this small buff BUT also this big negative that makes it not worth it".

First of all, to make Demon Form feel more impactful, I would change the full Demon Form to require 3 ascendencies instead of 2, so 6 points total. To keep things simple, I will refer to them as Demon Form 1, 2, and 3

Demon Form (in general)

No life drain
Weapon may not show visibly, but is available in Demon Form
No stacks of Demonflame
Allow us to choose appearance between full Demon Form or just wings so we can use our own cosmetics

Demon Form 1

+10% Cast Speed
+1 levels to all spell skills
Deal +50% Spell Damage

Demon Form 2

Increase Dodge distance by 100%
+20% Cast Speed
+3 levels to all spell skills
Deal +100% Spell Damage

Demon Form 3

Increase Dodge distance by 100%
+30% Cast Speed
+5 levels to all spell skills
Deal +150% Spell Damage
50% Less Movement Speed penalty while casting spells


I believe changing Demon Form to something similar to this would fix all the problems it is currently having and make it a significantly more attractive option. Having no weapon, weapon skills, and Chaos Inoculation is way too much of a downside to even consider using Demon Form at the moment. Even if the numbers and effects are not something the devs are interested in, I hope they at least understand the overall message and give Infernalist the love it deserves. It's a really awesome concept, just poor execution. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what you would do to fix this class!

I have some complicated ideas, but simply put, I feel like a good start would be to give the demon her own, specialized skills to justify the removal of weapons. They do this already with the previewed Druid Bear and Wolf forms; a special set of skills attuned to the shifted play-style. Demon form is just a glorified spell-caster and every end-game build is just 50% life converted to ES while the player just spams high-DPS skills that a well-built Sorc could do in the same time it takes for Demonflame stacks to become damage-worthy. And i like the idea of toggling the wings, but the 100% dodge distance would fly you off the map and hurt your positioning more than help you avoid damage. I thematically believe the demon should be a playstyle built on complete devotion into the demon form at the cost of perhaps not ONLY life, because that conflicts with the identity of the blood mage.

Demon Form 'in theory' is the most powerful single buff in the entire game. It scales almost infinitely. There are people with 200 stacks of it.

The loss of weapons is deeply annoying, but 'in theory' since it's also considered a 'weapon set' you can build your skill tree different when in Demon Form.

I'm only in Campaign and it's pretty damn fun clearing maps, although I don't find it super useful on bosses as being a self-cast fire caster feels pretty weak atm.

The other major issue is nothing in the Infernalist tree synergizes with it at all. Really honestly the entire Infernalist tree is 3-4 different ideas all doing their own thing.