Warlocks Getting Buffed

[KiloVictor]

The changes look to be moving in the right direction.  I would've liked them to touch on some of the other big problems a bit sooner, such as the escape spell and the soul shard issues.  I haven't used the enslave demon much, but in terms of it being useful, if the subsequent enslaves have little to no duration and frequently resist (costing a shard still), then the 5 minutes guaranteed is just fluff.  5 minutes is no length for a pet.  We need to be able to somewhat reliably hold him for longer than that given the shard cost to maintain the spell.

I've actually liked some of the ides about pets, such as keeping the pet guaranteed, but requiring a soul shard to be "fed" to the pet every 5 or so minutes, or in decreasing durations.  One guy even suggested permanent durations for an non-elite enslave because they have been shown to be not significantly more powerful than hunter pets.

On that note, the demons themselves need a slight buff while enslaved to make the reward a bit closer to the risk.  They also didn't make note of the bug that comes with these summons, being the "going blue and despawning" bug.
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Enslave demon is one of those tricky things to balance; I'm not sure they'll ever get it right.

In one of the previous patches (1.3 or so), we ran BRD with a 'lock that was able to hold his demon pretty much permanently. Every 4 minutes or so, he'd park the demon, back up, wait for enslave to break, cast CoS really quickly, and reenslave. This was a huge pain -- it disrupted the flow of the party so consistently that I thought this was more than enough price to be paid for the damage done by his demon doggie. His pet did ~130 DPS if I remember correctly, which was more than he'd get out of any other pet at that level, so it was still worth the pain.

Fast forward to today, and enslave as it currently sits is pretty much not worth using. Given that Things Go Wrong™ all on their own, there's no point in introducing a cantankerous pet into the mix, regardless of what sort of damage it might do.

Somewhere in between is a balance point which I'm starting to despair of ever seeing. Maybe the idea of a semi-permanent pet and a "feed pet" type of skill would be the best. Given pet performance like a hunter, it only seems reasonable that we shouldn't have to work too much harder than a hunter to manage our pets. Maybe Warlocks should have the ability to enslave one demon and keep him as a "custom" pet, similar to the Hunter ability to train the beasts that they find in the wild. That would mean that you could dismiss and re-summon the demon, and you would have to somehow manage the happiness of your demon just like a hunter. Using shards as food seems like a reasonable approach.

I still think though that Infernals and Doomguards should be on a higher level than "pets", and a lot of players still have the expectation that they should just summon one up and have it follow them around happily. I'd personally still like to see it as a higher risk/higher reward thing than just another pet.

Kv