Doomguard (warlock minion)



The Doomguard is a temporary demonic guardian minion available to warlocks. It can only be summoned via Ritual of Doom.

Abilities
The Doomguard's single ability is Doom Bolt, which is cast on the warlocks' current target. Like all warlock minions, it also benefits from Avoidance (passive), reducing non-player AoE damage taken by 90%.

History
The Doomguard used to be summoned via Curse of Doom (now simply Doom) or Ritual of Doom. Curse of Doom, when dealing the killing damage to any mob that granted experience, would summon a Doomguard. However, the summoned Doomguard was not under the warlock's control, and would immediately attack the warlock upon spawning. The Doomguard was quite capable of killing the warlock and his allies, and had to be enslaved via Enslave Demon in order to control him, although he could resist enslavement, or break free later on and begin attacking the warlock again.

Alternatively, Ritual of Doom could be used to summon a Doomguard, albeit by sacrificing the life of a random party member. The Doomguard summoned from the ritual was automatically under the control of the warlock for 15 minutes, and despawned after that time. The spell was later changed so that party members did not die outright from the summoning.

These two summon sources were removed in the Cataclysm expansion. In their place, the ability Summon Doomguard was added as a single-target summon with a 10 minute cooldown. At the time, it would only attack targets with Bane of Agony or Bane of Doom on them, and would cease attacking if no targets had one of those two debuffs. In the Mists of Pandaria expansion, the reliance on Bane of Agony or Bane of Doom was removed, instead attacking the warlock's current target for the duration. In Legion, Summon Doomguard's cooldown was reduced to 3 minutes and it became the primary single-target DPS cooldown for warlocks for all specializations, sharing a cooldown with Summon Infernal (which was used as an AoE cooldown). The Doomguard was also available as a permanent pet option via the talent Grimoire of Supremacy, available to all 3 specializations.

In Battle for Azeroth, Summon Doomguard was removed entirely in favor of specialization-specific demon cooldowns, and the Doomguard itself was restored to a spawn from Doom killing blows, though now a low probability spawn rather than a guaranteed spawn as it was originally from Curse of Doom.

In Shadowlands, Doom can no longer summon Doomguards. Instead, Ritual of Doom was returned, although it has hefty drawbacks (requiring 5 people to do the ritual, of which one will die, and the Doomguard itself starts hostile and has to be subjugated by the warlock)

Trivia

 * The Doomguard appears as a rare card for the Warlock class in Hearthstone. The flavor text reads: "Summoning a doomguard is risky. Someone is going to die."