After much waiting we finally got some feedback from Blizzard about our tier bonuses and there were some significant changes for Demonology.
What does this mean for us? It means Blizzard recognized the Soul Shard problem and the fact that the tier bonuses design was not the best as it forced players to have outside resources to track very specific timings for the 4-piece as to not overcap on
Сердце демона.
Unfortunately the overall damage of the Malicious Imp was not terribly good to begin with. During previous raid testing, the Malicious Imp was around 8% of your overall damage; however, this included a much higher uptime on Malicious Imp due to spawning at roughly 50% chance per Soul Shard spent instead of the intended 5%. When modeled at the correct 5% per soul shard spent spawn rate, the old 4-piece was approximately a 3% damage gain.
With the updated 15% per Soul Shard spent spawn rate
and the buff to the on-death effect, the bonus now looks closer to a 9% damage gain overall. This performs much better than the old iteration and impacts the spec in a more meaningful way rather than having to send out Demonbolts at a rate higher than you can spend the Soul Shards it is generating for you.
How does this compare to the 2-piece bonus? Currently the 2-piece bonus is approximately a 9.8% damage gain and it is clearly
very strong and provides more flexibility to your talent choices as a result.
Overall I think this fixes a large majority of the issues that there were previously outlined specifically about the 4-piece and makes it a bonus that is actually more worthwhile to put on and not make you feel overwhelmed by the responsiveness that you would have needed to have in order to take advantage of the old implementation.
Currently there is a bug with the 4-piece where the Malicious Imp is not counting towards your demon count for Демоническое поглощение which is something that will have to be addressed one way or the other. There was a recent change to make it so Malicious Imp does count towards
Демоническое поглощение so the previously outlined issue has been addressed, the value of Malicious Imp is equal to 1 normal Wild Imp.
It's still be investigated if the damage of the Malicious Imp's Роковая стрела will also be affected by Хитрость псаря. We have also been able to determine that
Роковая стрела is not affected by
Хитрость псаря which would have been a minor adjustment regardless.
We still have not been able to truly test the 4-piece bonus fully as it has either been changed or bugged in some manner; the current state of the 4-piece bonus is that it is spawning at 5% per Soul Shard spent (instead of 15%) but doing the buffed damage or, in the case of the most recent Mythic testing, not working at all.
The tier bonuses are unlikely to cause the stale
Демоническое поглощение to be unseated by other options; however, the overall power of these bonuses is definitely interesting and should help continue solidifying Demonology as a premier progression spec (if you can convince your Priests to keep giving you
Придание сил).
