This is a detailed analysis of each spell and feat available to the Demonologist in terms of how useful each one is in gameplay. It will be broken up into the two main magic focuses, Fire and Lightning, on the assumption that you don't try to split your talents between both fields (which would make each much weaker than they could be), and then followed by the Summoning and defensive skills/feats.
NOTE: This is a 100% subjective opinion created by players! Take the information in here with a grain of salt; just because this says to use (or not use) a skill or feat one way does not mean you can't use it another way that may be useful.
Also, one tactical note: While the Demonologist is casting a spell you can queue up one more by pressing that skill key. The Demonologist will instantly start casting that next one the moment they finish casting the current one, and the lack of delay will obviously improve your overall DPS output.
Lightning (Havoc)[]
- SHOCKSTRIKE: Standard spell. Your bread and butter attack skill, you'll use this more than anything else in your arsenal. Very high damage, awesome range when boosted with Bombardment.
- SHOCK: Standard spell. Lower damage but instant cast. Useful for popping off between Shockstrike blasts for a bit of extra DPS, finishing off a heavily wounded opponent where Shockstrike would be slow overkill or quickly grabbing the aggro and kill rights on an enemy NPC when multiple players are hunting the same one for a quest.
- STORM CHAINS: Standard spell. A decent length root, but breaks quite easily and has a long cooldown. Primarily useful to escape a losing battle (such as against a particularly tough boss)
- SHOCKBLAST: Standard spell. A powerful, wide range AOE spell, but because of its cooldown you'll have to tag-team it with the Fire variant Inferno of Amher to get consistent AOE damage output.
- LIVING THUNDERSTORM: Feat spell. Complete and utter garbage. Summons a small tornado spitting lightning that controls like a pet that if commanded to attack will do one larger burst of damage on the target and then dissipate, but it has a slower summoning time, an absolutely painful cooldown time and rather mediocre damage even on the final burst (less than a single Shockstrike). Skip it completely.
- AGONIZING JOLTS: Feat spell. Relatively decent damage output in an AOE cone, effectively a Lightning variant of the Waves of Flame spell, but has a quite slow cooldown period which single handedly drops it to moderately useful at best.
HAVOC FEATS (not including ones that grant a spell).
- SWIFT SHOCKSTRIKE: Perfectly useful for speeding up Shockstrike, but since you're forced to max it before getting any other feats in this tree it doesn't really matter anyways.
- DISCHARGE SHOCKS: You rarely ever fight one enemy at a time, so boosting the AOE effectiveness of Shockstrike is definitely useful.
- NATURAL CONDUCTOR: Boosts the damage of your Electrical spells by a flat number, and that number is increased by both the number of points you put in the feat and your level. Also very useful.
- RAPID RECHARGE: When maxed it decreases the cooldown on Shock from 8 to 6 seconds, but considering Shock's low damage and that 6 seconds is still pretty slow this really won't have much effect on anything but extremely long fights against heavy bosses. Not really worth it. More useful if combined with the Soul Resonance feat, but still rather limited in strength.
- DEMONIC POWER: Can increase the damage output of your demonic servants by up to 50%, but 50% more of utter crap is still utter crap. Not worth it. You're not a Necromancer.
- OVERLOAD: Definitely useful, any feat that over time can notably drop your mana consumption is a good one for long fights.
- BOMBARDMENT: Perfectly useful for Shockstrike. Maxing this to get a 32 meter range Shockstrike opens up a whole host of tactical options and even improves your survivability as the enemy will get hit more often before they even get to you to counter attack. This is almost at the limit of how far away an enemy can even be targeted with the mouse.
- EARTH RECHARGE: Another feat that can reduce your overall mana consumption over time. Again, quite useful for long fights (or sequences of fights without a break).
- SOUL RESONANCE: This actually could be handy and only takes one point. About three seconds after Shock hits a target, a second AoE burst hits a small area around the Shocked target for 50% of the original Shock damage (which isn't much), but the more important aspect is that it puts a 30 second debuff on the original target reducing their resistance to Lightning, Fire and Cold damage, which can be stacked (and a fresh stack also resets the 30 second timer). Over a longer fight this allows the Demonologist to gradually but severely break down the magic defenses of the target.
To be continued...
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