Infernalist: Deamon form feedback

I hope someone at GGG sees this post. Playing as an Infernalist in demon form in 0.2 is currently a horrible experience. The core mechanic of this playstyle is staying transformed to cast spells and deal damage.

Getting more than 80 stacks is nearly impossible right now. On top of that, the cooldown on the transformation skill itself makes the playstyle even worse. We can’t maintain 50-70 stacks for long and then we have to revert back to base form just to sit around for 15 seconds doing no damage due to the transformation skill being on CD, it’s not fun.

Getting into more specific points about the class: this ascendancy doesn’t receive any bonuses from the main or off-hand, so the sole damage modifier is based on stack count. Severely limiting the number of stacks makes the class feel underwhelming in mid-to-endgame content. This is a direct result of how HP per stack is calculated. We now get fewer stacks, but the damage per stack hasn’t changed, so it's impossible to reach decent damage numbers in 0.2 compared to 0.1.

Limiting how many stacks we can have is reasonable, but the cap should be somewhere around 300–500. This was achiveable in 0.1 with high investment and was enough to clear content without struggling due to rapid HP drain compared to how it is now. Right now in 0.2, reaching 80 stacks is almost as hard as it was to maintain 340 stacks in 0.1 just for comparison.

Here my take on some changes that could be good for this class:
On the Demon Form skill:
->Remove the cooldown on the transformation skill (this would be a good QoL change).
->Change life drain back to a % base, so we can offset it with life regen and maintain higher stacks counts.

On the Mastered Darkness Ascendancy:
->Establish a cap on maximum stacks somewhere between 300 to 500, scaling with skill level.
->Increase the damage modifier per stack, higher stack counts should reward more damage, as they come with greater risk.

Reverting it back to hp % based drain is a bad idea. All that does is pigeonhole every demon player into using Ghostwrithe and Ming again, leading to basically only 1 very specific way you are allowed to build. That's a terrible experience. Now we can build max hp without completely destroying the entire build, and things like runes that scale regen based on max hp have more weight.

However, I do agree the drain is absurdly high. It's so high that demon form is impossible to use at end game. That's not even an opinion lol, that's just the objective reality. Instead of reverting it back to the old way, the drain just needs to be lowered to around 5 hp per second at max level. Pre nerf it was 1 hp per second, per stack on an end game build. 5 per second is still a 500% increase. But that's fine because now we can use various types of gear to make up for the dmg loss.

I honestly believe that 18.5 hp per sec number was decided upon randomly by someone who had never used demon form before. Nerfing a build that wasn't even top 10 by 1850% is insane. Not a single build in the game got nerfed even half as hard as demon form did and that says a lot considering some builds are 90% weaker now. 1850% is crazy. I guarantee nobody even thought to test this before launch.

Thats because they dont test, we paid 40USD to do that for them.

omg next nerf deamon form.... rune +20% increased spell damage for wands and staves. OK BOUT I don't have it wands and focus.......

I liked this style of play but now it's not profitable.....

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WolfWalksInBlood#9740 wrote:

Reverting it back to hp % based drain is a bad idea. All that does is pigeonhole every demon player into using Ghostwrithe and Ming again, leading to basically only 1 very specific way you are allowed to build. That's a terrible experience. Now we can build max hp without completely destroying the entire build, and things like runes that scale regen based on max hp have more weight.

However, I do agree the drain is absurdly high. It's so high that demon form is impossible to use at end game. That's not even an opinion lol, that's just the objective reality. Instead of reverting it back to the old way, the drain just needs to be lowered to around 5 hp per second at max level. Pre nerf it was 1 hp per second, per stack on an end game build. 5 per second is still a 500% increase. But that's fine because now we can use various types of gear to make up for the dmg loss.

I honestly believe that 18.5 hp per sec number was decided upon randomly by someone who had never used demon form before. Nerfing a build that wasn't even top 10 by 1850% is insane. Not a single build in the game got nerfed even half as hard as demon form did and that says a lot considering some builds are 90% weaker now. 1850% is crazy. I guarantee nobody even thought to test this before launch.

I aggre with the part that hp% drain would lead back to one unique chest and ring. The thing is that I doubt there is enough life regen in game even for 5 flat hp drain at 500 stacks. 5hp flat drain is too much. How do you want to get 2500 regen? Demon form is unusable and Im glad that it gets more attention. I made similar post few days ago. Insaly high hp drain and cd kills it beyond being playable.