Playstyle & Rotation
General Rotation
The general rotation of demonology revolves around resource management and building/spending shards properly. Summon Demonic Tyrant is a talent that is pretty much always taken, and a lot of your rotation will revolve around what's called tyrant setups. The goal of tyrant setups is to extend all your "big" demons (Dreadstalkers, Vilefiend / Gloomhound / Charhound, Grimoire: Felguard) and at least 10, or as close to 15 imps as possible if talented into Reign of Tyranny. The priority is always to extend your big demons. The amount of imps you are able to fit into a setup is a bonus.
General priority can be summarized as this:
- Don't overcap soul shards
- Don't overcap Demonic Core procs
- Cast Call Dreadstalkers on cooldown
- Clean Tyrant setups
- Don't use Hand of Gul’dan below 3 shards as it will spawn up to 3 imps based on shards used (unless you're supposed to, we’ll get to that later).
Opener
Precast Power Siphon (if talented, with 1 or 2 points in Inner Demons) around 10-5 seconds before combat.
- 2x Shadowbolt (if less than 30 yards away, only cast 1)
- Grimoire: Felguard (if talented)
- Summon Vilefiend / Summon Gloomhound / Summon Charhound (if talented)
- Build to 5 shards with Shadow Bolts
- Call Dreadstalkers
- Build Soul Shards with instant Demonbolt if available (demonic core procs) and Shadow Bolt without overcapping shards
- Hand of Gul’dan on 3+ Soul Shards. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until 5 seconds left of either Grimoire: Felguard, Vilefiend, or Dreadstalkers.
- Cast Hand of Gul’dan until 0 shards or less than 2 seconds left on either Grimoire: Felguard, Vilefiend, or Dreadstalkers
- Summon Demonic Tyrant
- Demonic Strength / Bilescourge Bombers (if talented)
When Tyrant has less than 13 seconds left, try to make sure to have 2+ core procs saved and full shards. Then, repeat the opener from step 2.
Call dreadstalkers and Vilefiend / Gloomhound / Charhound can sometimes get desynced by a few seconds, making it available later in your tyrant setup. When this happens, make sure that you are able to extend all of your bigger demons (Dreadstalkers, Grimoire: Felguard, Vilefiend / Gloomhound / Charhound).
For example, if dreadstalkers is more than 15 seconds away, but your Grimoire: Felguard, Vilefiend, and Tyrant are ready to go, delay the tyrant setup until you can fit all the big demons before the Tyrant to maximize demon extensions.
General Priority Outside of Tyrant Setups
- Call Dreadstalkers unless you decide to hold a few seconds for a Tyrant setup. Generally, you don't want to hold Call Dreadstalkers for more than 5-10 seconds. The number of seconds it is acceptable to hold depends on fight timings, mechanics, and when you need your next Tyrant to be.
- Vilefiend / Gloomhound / Charhound
- Power Siphon (if talented), unless you have 3+ core procs.
- Instant Demonbolt if close to Demonic Core cap (4) unless it will shard cap
- Hand of Gul’dan on 3+ Shards
- Instant Demonbolt if 2+ demonic cores available.
- Shadow Bolt
Try to hold on to 1 core proc for movement or refreshing Doom if talented.
Multi Target
The Multi target rotation revolves around Implosion Cycles and spreading Doom with instant Demonbolts if talented. The goal is to implode all your imps while using as few globals on implosion as possible, giving you more globals to build and spend shards.
With the rework of doom in The War Within you want to spread as many doom debuffs as possible. You do this by targeting mobs with your instant demon bolts that do not already have doom active. I highly recommend using a mouseover exists macro for this as it's easier to get back to your “main target” while spreading brands around.
Advanced
The biggest change to the rotation from single target is that you press implosion before any imp expires. You can play it safe, and implode a few globals before the lowest energy imps expire. As you get more comfortable with the spec, you can fit in more Hand of Gul'dans into each implosion cycle.
Because of the cyclical nature of the gameplay and the linear correlation between your cast speed (haste) and the lifetime of the imps (six casts scaling with haste), an Imp timer is not 100% necessary because you can always fit the same amount of globals between the implosions regardless of haste.
If this is something outside of your comfort zone (I suspect it is for many), I highly recommend using Demon Timers https://wago.io/DemonTimers or https://wago.io/im9enEyIB to track when your imps are going to expire.
If Implosion talent is not taken, the only change on multi target is doom applications.
Reverse Tyrant setup for M+
In mythic+, you can sometimes do what is known as a reverse setup. Instead of summoning all your big demons first, and then your imps before your tyrant, you can end a trash pack or a boss with a sequence of Hand of Gul’dan and instant demonbolts to build up 6-15 imps (depending on timing and procs). This gives you a head start going into the next pack, where you can use dreadstalkers and all your big demons into a quick Tyrant + Demonic Strength for massive burst damage.
This can be especially useful when fighting for damage with classes with less setup time (cough cough melees).
Playstyle
General Playstyle & Cooldown Usage
In most raid encounters and mythic+, you want to use your cooldowns as soon as they are available to not lose out on possible uses. This is also true for Demonology, but there are cases where you will need to hold cooldowns or sometimes even rush cooldowns to have better cooldown alignment throughout the rest of the fight. When reaching more advanced levels of demonology gameplay, your thoughts should not be on the current Tyrant setup. Focus should instead be on where the NEXT Tyrant will be. If you get used to the "think of the next cooldown" mentality, your damage will go up on average.
Demonology has been known for having poor mobility, but that isn't necessarily the case anymore. We have enough Demonic Core procs if used wisely, and Burning Rush + Demonic Circle being pretty much mandatory class tree talents, we can move around freely outside of cooldowns. For most cases, as long as you know the fight and can find a 10-15 second window to stand mostly still and set up your cooldowns, no amount of movement should feel awful.
Defensives
Defensive usage as a warlock comes down to pressing Dark Pact BEFORE you take incoming damage. With the cooldown reduction from Frequent Donor or the increased power Ichor of Devils, it is one of the strongest short cooldown defensives in the game. If that wasn't good enough, you have Fel Armor giving 3% flat damage reduction +10% stagger and Demonic Skin recharging your soul leech at a constant rate. You also have a 3-minute cooldown 40% damage reduction, or 2-minute 15 seconds cooldown 25% damage reduction in Unending Resolve to fall back on.
Soul Harvester Hero talents brings benefits to Dark Pact via Friends in Dark Places, and Diabolist brings benefits to Unending Resolve via Infernal Vitality.
The War Within brings with it the Pact of Gluttony talent, which might be the most powerful defensive tool of them all. It gives you the ability to use multiple healthstones per fight on a 1 minute cooldown. Pair that with Soulburn and you have 1 minute defensive cooldown that heals you for 65% of max health and increases your max hp by 20% for 12 seconds. This can be paired with Dark Pact (scales with max and current health) for one of, if not the most powerful 1 minute defensive combos in the game.Other Notable mentions are:
- 15% flat stamina from Demonic Embrace and Demonic Fortitude
- Soul link for another 10% flat damage reduction
- Lifeblood
- 4% damage reduction for 10 seconds after using Demonic Circle or Gateway via Abyss Walker talent