Infernalist Ascendancy Demon Form is poorly designed

Does anyone else feel that the Demon Form in the Infernalist Ascendancy is poorly designed?

In the current version, Demon Form automatically levels up as your character level increases. This makes the Life Loss per second per Demonflame rise as well. But the bonuses from Demon Form don't scale — each level gives only 1% increased cast speed, while life loss goes up sharply. I find this very unreasonable. The skill becomes weaker as my character levels up, which doesn't make sense.

In The Last of the Druids,the core skill is transformation. I think Demon Form should be optimized similarly to Druid's transformation, but the designers haven't changed it — it feels like this Ascendancy class has been overlooked. Also, High Infernal hasn't been fully fleshed out. Players can only toggle between Infernal and High Infernal back and forth, and have Elemental Archon active only half the time. I think either Infernal needs changes, or Elemental Archon should be reworked to have no cooldown.

Here are my suggestions, hoping to inspire the designers:

Demonflame has no maximum — change this to allow players to set their own stack count for Demon Form. For example, a player could set it to 222 stacks, and each transformation would default to exactly 222 stacks. This change is intended to remove the ramp-up (warm-up) time of Demon Form.

As Demon Form level increases with character level, the life loss increases. At the same time, Deal more Spell damage per Demonflame should also scale with level, for example (2–5)% per Demonflame, and the cast speed bonus should also be increased more generously. Because as level increases, the life loss is too high. Now this vesion is [(0.8—18.5) Life Loss per second per Demonflame].But Cast Speed only incearse 1% per level skill.

https://poe2db.tw/us/Demon_Form

Nobody play Demon Form?

just give up

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e_sen#2038 wrote:

just give up

Can't give up!It's poorly designed!

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zuiemojiu#0295 wrote:

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e_sen#2038 wrote:

just give up

Can't give up!It's poorly designed!

Add it to the list. :)

I fully support your post! I was about to write something very similar, but you beat me to it. :)

I stayed silent for four patches, waiting for the developers to change something, but it seems the time has finally come.

I came to this game only because of the possibility to play in Demon Form. I think GGG were the first to add such an option to an ARPG, and that is amazing.

The disappointment came after patch 0.1. The nerf to the Blasphemy + Hexblast interaction made the Demon Form Infernalist build unplayable, because it was the only setup that allowed us to avoid getting too close to enemies while still dealing decent damage and sustaining Demon Form.

As for the Beira’s Anguish charm build, I consider it a bug and do not take it into account. And builds based on Lightning or Cold skills should probably be left to the Sorceress.

Right now, playing an Infernalist in permanent Demon Form feels like one big debuff:

1. On top of the usual need to scale elemental resistances, Life, and Energy Shield/Armour, you also have to constantly manage Life regeneration and Life gained on kill just to avoid losing Demon Form.

2. On top of the usual need to scale damage, you also have to make sure you do not kill yourself with Infernal Flame while dealing damage to enemies and casting spells.

I chose the path of “avenging the burned sisters,” so why does fire affect me the same way it affects everyone else?

3. The Altered Flesh node in the Infernalist Ascendancy tree makes Physical damage also hit you as Chaos damage — the very type of damage that bypasses Energy Shield and goes straight to Life, which we are already struggling to sustain.

4. The more Life the character has, the harder it becomes to sustain it with regeneration. Goodbye, late endgame.

At the same time, by equipping a Talisman, any character can “for free” shapeshift into a beast. By “for free” I mean without spending Ascendancy points in the passive tree and without constantly losing Life. How does that make sense?

I also want to separately mention damage mechanics. A demon should deal damage through a combination of Fire damage with Ignite, Physical damage with Maim and Bleeding, Chaos damage, suppression, and fear-based debuffs.

In my opinion, players who want to deal Chaos damage while in Demon Form should have a separate path in the character’s Ascendancy, not just a single node in the passive skill tree.

As for summoned creatures — friends, what Skeletons and Zombies are we talking about?

A demon is not a Necromancer. A demon should summon imps, demons, succubi, and hellhounds. Similar to the Disciple of Varashta, but instead of Djinn, it should be able to call powerful Archdemons for aid.

Regarding Loyal Hellhound, which is granted through Ascendancy points, I would really like this node to swap places with Minion Life. This would help players who do not plan to build around Minions, but still want to take the Infernal Hound to apply debuffs to enemies.

I have talked to friends who play PoE 2 about the Witch’s Infernalist Ascendancy in Demon Form. Most of them like the concept, but they are put off not so much by the difficulty of the character, but by the “masochism” you have to deal with while playing it, instead of being able to focus more on actual game activities.

As a player who considers Demon Form Infernalist my main class, I have to get through the start of the campaign and early activities on meta characters first, just so I can later play my favourite class at least somewhat comfortably.

That is a little sad.

I really hope the developers take this feedback into account and make adjustments to this character in the near future.

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zuiemojiu#0295 wrote:

Does anyone else feel that the Demon Form in the Infernalist Ascendancy is poorly designed?

At least in this patch, everything works for me.

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Exorcist#5614 wrote:

Physical damage also hit you as Chaos damage — the very type of damage that bypasses Energy Shield and goes straight to Life, which we are already struggling to sustain.

In PoE2, chaos damage deals double damage to Energy Shield instead of bypassing it. So this is still a strong ascendancy in terms of physical damage mitigation.

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Exorcist#5614 wrote:

The disappointment came after patch 0.1. The nerf to the Blasphemy + Hexblast interaction made the Demon Form Infernalist build unplayable, because it was the only setup that allowed us to avoid getting too close to enemies while still dealing decent damage and sustaining Demon Form.

BL/BW
Curse+Doedre+CoC/CoE
Frostbolt/Frost Nova + CoC
Chaos spam
Plants spam

This is the first thing that comes to mind for uncapped demon form in the current patch.

But essentially, you can run almost any spell in demon form. The main thing is being able to maintain a large number of stacks.