Changes to Demonology Warlocks in WotLK Classic – Demonic Pact

• Author: Pride
• Date: July 21, 2022
• Updated: July 21, 2022
• Expansion: WotLK Classic

Players are no doubt extremely excited to try out WotLK raids and arenas with the brand-new level 80 template characters that were added in the new beta update. As a result, some of the other changes made in the patch notes went unnoticed. Blizzard was undoubtedly aware of this, so they chose to highlight something in specific that they thought players should be aware of: the Demonology Warlock talent Demonic Pact will receive several changes in WotLK Classic, compared to how it functioned in OG WotLK, intended to fix some of the more annoying issues it had back in the day.

The changes are as follows:

• Demonic Pact will no longer overwrite an existing Demonic Pact buff, unless:
  • There are less than 10 seconds left on the buff (e.g. it has been up for 35 seconds or more).
  • The spell power bonus of the new buff are higher than or equal to the power of the existing buff.
• Additionally, the internal cooldown of Demonic Pact has been lowered to 5 seconds (was 20 seconds).

For those who are not aware, Demonic Pact is a Demonology talent that increases the entire raid’s spell power by a 10% of the Warlock’s spell power every time their pet gets a critical strike. The issue with it was that it’d refresh itself every time your pet crits. For example, let’s say you have 3000 spell power thanks to a trinket proc, and your pet scores a crit — you now buff your raid’s spell power by 300. However, your trinket proc now fades and you go back down to 2500 spell power, and your pet crits again — the previous buff of 300 spell power would be overridden by the new buff, which only provides 250 spell power.

To combat this issue, Demonology Warlocks would use all of their trinkets and other spell power boosting effects, send their pet in, and then pull it back out of the fight after it crits, so it won’t crit again and offer a lesser buff. This is highly unintuitive, as the whole point of having a powerful pet is to send it in to do damage for you — you shouldn’t need to pull it out until the buff needs refreshed again. Thankfully, Blizzard agrees that this is indeed problematic, and have made these tweaks, which should entirely remove the hassle of micromanaging your pet to this extent and nerf your own damage in order to buff your raid. Great change by them!

What are your thoughts on this topic? Are you more likely to play a Demonology Warlock now that Blizzard has fixed this annoying issue? Do you think Blizzard should make more changes like this, to classes that have awkward and unintuitive interactions? Let us know in the comments below!