Demonology Warlock Talents Guide

The War Within Introduces two hero talent trees for Demonology. Diabolist and Soul Harvester.Currently both Diabolist and Soul Harvester are very close to each other in terms of damage on both single target and AoE with Diabolist taking a slight edge on AoE due to the power of Ruination.

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With the current design of the class tree, we are very talent point “starved” and it's hard to pick up things like Fel Domination, Shadowfury, Burning Rush, Swift Artifice or fiendish stride without giving up something else. There is always a way to pick up the talents you need for a given fight, for example Amplify curse can be very powerful in certain scenarios, but it is not a default choice. Even sargerei technique can be dropped for more utility but at the cost of single target damage.

If you are struggling to find talent points for utility nodes, I would remove talents to free up points in the following order:

1. Fiendish Stride
2. Swift Artifice
3. Frequent Donor/Ichor of devils (if you don't need the cdr)
4. Fel Domination
5. Fel Armor (not unless absolutely necessary)
6. Sargerei Technique (Last resort)

Demonology has a solid talent tree, although without too much choice. There are single target talents like Sacrified Souls and Imperator and AoE talents like dreadlash and Antoran Armaments.

On single target you will obviously go full single target, but as you start adding additional targets, you remove the lowest point in ST value and add it to the highest point for AoE.

The best example of this is taking 1 point from Imp-erator and putting it into dreadlash for cleave, and suddenly you have a well balanced high ST setup that can do some cleave when needed.If you download the Talent strings, the changes that are made from ST to AoE are obvious and few.

Diabolist Hero Tree

This hero talent functions similar to the Dragonflight season 3 tier set. Spending a shard on a damaging spell grants Diabolic Ritual. While Diabolic Ritual is active, each Soul Shard spent on a damaging spell reduces its duration by 1 sec.

When Diabolic ritual expires you gain demonic art, causing your next hand of Gul’dan to summon an Overlord, Mother of Chaos or Pit Lord. Depending on what ritual you proc you will gain a bonus effect on one of your spells:

• Overlord: enemies damaged by your overlord take 5% increased damage from you and your pets for 15 sec.
• Mother of Chaos: Empowers your next Shadow Bolt to become an Infernal Bolt. Infernal Bolt deals bonus fire damage and generates 3 soul shards.
• Pit Lord: Summoning a Pit Lord causes your next Hand of Gul’dan to become Ruination. Ruination costs 0 shards, and calls down a meteor dealing chaos damage to all enemies within 7 yards summoning 3 imps.

Soul Harvester Hero Tree

This hero talent tree is focused on generating a ton of shards and spending them on empowered Hand of Gul’dan casts in addition to DoT and on death effects like Soul Anathema, Feast of Souls and Shared Fate.

On top of that there is Necrolyte Teachings which synergizes well with the current tier set, Sacrificed Souls, and Rune of Shadows.

The entire tree is mostly passive damage, read up on it if it is interesting but for the most part there are going to be “random” sources of damage showing up on your damage meter as you do your normal rotation.

Hero Talents Choice Discussion

As it stands right now, Diabolist is the current champion of the two hero talents.

With excellent burst damage through Diabolic Ritual demons and Abyssal Domination and an all round fun playstyle with lots of bonus demons to summon it is not only the most fun to play in my opinion, but also the strongest.

Diabolist changes the way you play in a much bigger way than soul harvester in terms of your rotation, where you have to keep track of what demon is being summoned next from your diabolic ritual in order to properly plan and react to the bonus effect that it has. This is especially noticeable when you summon a pit lord followed by ruination and Mother of Chaos followed by an infernal bolt.

Soul Harvester has its redeeming qualities. Sustained AoE damage and benefit from adds dying close to prio targets, but as it stands right now anything Soul Harvester can do, Diabolist seems to do a little better.