⚙ Gears of Dreadlands - Performance Testing & Feedback

PTR Feedback
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Where to start?! The DH community reported some incredible testing and feedback so far – thank you all for sharing. If you haven’t already checked, please review the links below for Gears of Dreadlands / Primary Skill specifics:

Recorded Clears

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeHl59TZTsY [M6 HA - GR131]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fdRk314PVo [GoD6 HA - GR123]

A Vision for Gears of Dreadlands
Before going into performance, I want to address this most important point first – the design direction of the GoD set and how it stands beside other DH sets.

GoD: How Much Spin?
My own opinion: Gears of Dreadlands needs to become 100% spin-to-win so the set is distinct. Once patch 2.6.9 is finalized, we’ll hopefully have 4 strong options: Impale, Hungering Arrow/Bolas, Rapid Fire and zDH.

Right now we have to decide what we want for Gears of Dreadlands, so far I’ve played every flavor of Hungering Arrow, Bolas and Grenades on the PTR, there is a world of depth for our primary skills, and hopefully I can shed some light into the nuances of each set:

  • UE6 stands out on it’s own. It is fun. It is intuitive. It offers diversity in the form of passives, cubed slots and supporting legendary items. Unhallowed Essence just makes sense for all generator options – it needs to be embraced and seen as a different path for generators.

  • M6 performs just like UE6, centered around Endless Walk, but with a lot less mobility so we play this at close range. It packs a punch and you can stay surrounded by enemies without penalty. Only effective with Hungering Arrow.

  • N6GoD4 equals the potency of the underpowered GoD6 HA. Natalya’s has a familiar feel to N6M4, you sprinkle in RoV freezing strike to ensure survival, while also spinning w/ Strafe for the 60% bonus and mobility. It is durable and you can choose Endless Walk or CoE+Squirts. You might be thinking, N6GoD4 is better than GoD6 because of the stronger 6pc bonus – this is simply not true as you are sacrificing a jewelry slot and/or a weapon slot to form the hybrid.

  • S2GoD2 Bolas is fragile, but has the ability to incorporate CC3/M2/Aughild/Sage and other mix and match options. From my tests, it’s about 1-2 GRs weaker than GoD6 Bolas, but it has character – and it’s just cool.

Where does that leave GoD6? I believe it should be the de-facto, spin to win set for Demon Hunter.

I strongly feel keeping Strafe as a spender is a mistake, and will result in yet another UE6 clone, which is missed opportunity.

  • GoD6 = I want to Strafe and I’m easy to gear.
  • UE6 = I want to Vault and/or stutter step, but my gear requires max discipline rolls.
  • Everything else = I want to be different.

Performance Test Results
When it comes to the following upgrade recommendations, we must consider saving UE6.

Set Bolas H. Arrow Grenade Impale
GoD6 GR110 GR123 N/A N/A
M6 N/A GR131 N/A N/A
UE6 GR120 GR128 GR118 N/A
S2GoD2CC3 GR109 N/A N/A N/A
N6GoD4 N/A GR120 N/A N/A
N6GoD2 GR110 N/A N/A N/A
S6 N/A N/A N/A GR128

*I am near 5k paragon, most of the above clears have the potential to be 3-4 GRs higher with fishing, Grenades can go even higher. For someone like me, with GoD6, I should be able to casually clear GR135 (5-10 keys) to achieve balance with the recently nerfed AoV Heaven’s Fury. The list below is intended to help 5k paragon player achieve GR135-137 territory with our new kit:

Set Tuning: Boost GoD 2pc Set Damage to Save UE6/M6 and the Hybrids
Balance the whole GoD set damage package with UE6. We target slightly above 48,300% total set damage.

  • Keep GoD’s 6pc set bonus at 10,000%.
  • Update GoD2 to total to 400% (average stacks should be like 19).

Gears of Dreadlands: 2-Piece Bonus
Gain a Momentum stack when attacking with a Primary skill. Each Momentum stack lasts 4 seconds at a maximum duration of 20 seconds. Your Primary skills deal 20% more damage per stack of Momentum.

Raise the Power of All Primary Skills by 5GRs
Yes, we still love you Grenades… although you can use some TLC.

Hunter’s Wrath

  • Your primary skills attack 30% faster and deal 500% increased damage.

Raise the Power of Bolas by an additional 9GRs
I use Leonine Bow, Emimie’s Duffel and Buriza (cubed) for maximum damage. With this setup, I find Bolas is much weaker than Hungering Arrow. Without Dawn, we have partial Vengeance uptime. Bolas is dangerous to play because Leonine’s pull effect places enemies within melee distance. Due to the 9GR gap between Bolas and Hungering Arrow it has become impossible to effectively measure the benefit of playing dual skill builds (Bolas + HA w/ Stone of Jordan)

  • Add 100% pierce chance to Emimie’s Duffel so that we can equip Dawn for consistent defense.
  • Raise damage of Emimei’s Duffel to 425%
  • Raise damage of Leonine Bow of Hashir to 400%
  • Tighten the pulling effect of Leonine Bow of Hashir, the enemies are too spaced out post pull, try to emulate Ranslor’s Folly tight pixel pull.

Leonine Bow of Hashir

  • Bolas have a 100% chance on explosion to pull in all enemies within 24 yards, and also deal 350-425% increased damage

Emimei’s Duffel

  • Bolas is guaranteed to pierce, explode instantly and deal 325-400% increased damage.

Entangling Shot/Odyssey’s End is Fine As Is
I’m grateful this supporting item is now more potent – thank you for this. UE6 Entangling Shot barely did GR105, so it’s clearly not on the table to do anything but assist our other skills.

Stone of Jordan
I feel this item was intended for dual skill builds under compatible sets. Assuming you can balance Bolas w/ Hungering Arrow, GoD6 fits this criteria. The problem is the ring itself doesn’t supply enough damage to replace favorites like F&R, Compass Rose or CoE . In another thread, the following suggestion was made and I agree with it because it will separately make items like Etrayu and Balefire Caster worthwhile:

Stone of Jordan
Each of your elemental’s damage bonus is equal to your highest static elemental bonus to skill. Your static elemental damage bonus is now doubled

Holy Point Shot: Another 4-5GRs Please
While this has nothing to do with GoD, it is important to mention that Impale needs more power. Today i whipped up my AoV Heaven’s Fury Crusader, opened a rift, and cleared GR135 solo in 12 min. I simply cannot replicate this with Impale – please consider the following buff to HPS:

Holy Point Shot
Impale throws 2 additional knives and deals 250-300% increased damage .

Gears has potential to become a fulfilling set provided we get past the fundamental issues with Momentum stacks, Primary Skills inheriting all of their properties via Strafe, set and supporting legendary item damage adjustments. Decisions will need to be made on whether Strafe becomes a Spin to Win build. Perhaps there are other ways to improve it?

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I’ll list some of these in the suggestions section of my big ptr thread tomorrow.

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Thank you for great feedback.

I intentionally did not test Marauder set because current game play of GoD set is much closer to UE.

I did not test grenades or bolas too much because it was clear they are far behind HA.

In my feedback topic I even said they may consider toning HA down a bit and buffing all primary skills after that, via legendary items and set itself.

Depending on what route Blizzard takes with this, HA has potential to be trash killer.

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Great post! I hope we’ll get some more reasoning now in the PTR feedback. :bow_and_arrow:

I haven’t played all the variants, so I will concentrate on GoD-HA now.

In general, I do agree with your numbers. If I see it correctly, you are suggesting a buff for GoD-HA by ~11 GR: Buffing G2 to 400% will give us a multiplier of 2.5 (~6 GR), your buffed HW another 5 GR.

I would have suggested a few GRs more (say, 15), but that is already fine tuning.

My number is based on my observations during the PTR (GR102 in ~8 minutes with ~1200 Paragon + 2 augments) and my current live S2 DH, where I managed to clear GR108 without any augments (and a tiny bit of fishing, meaning 2-3 attempts). By that my guess is, that the current GoD is a few GR behind our live sets. I think we all agree, that we need a buff by roughly 10 GR for S6 - so I come to a 15 GR buff for GoD-HA. - But it could well be that your numbers are more accurate.

But I would change the items where this buff comes from.

  • I do agree that buffing GoD-2 by ~5GR is a good idea. I also like your combination of more stacks and more damage.
  • What I would like to add is something like a “positive cooldown” to the stacks. I think it would be great when the stacks don’t start to fall off immediately, but stay at maximum for a few seconds before they start to fall off.

With that being said, I want to share my thoughts about “spin to win”. As written by Ophnir here, and a few hours earlier by myself here, the basic fantasy behind this set seems to be a wind-up mechanic. I actually like that. If Strafe would refresh Momentum stacks, that fantasy would be gone.

  • However I do think, that after winding up our gear, we could be a little bit more powerful - or at least stay powerful for a little while. And that would totally fit into the overall fantasy. A good clockwork keeps the “Momentum” for quite some time, and only at the end there will be a loss in movement, dancing, drumming, whatever the wind-up toy does, before it stops completely.
  • This could be achieved by my proposed change of how Momentum falls off.
  • In addition, HA not guaranteed piercing should be fixed. Whether triggering AD should also be possible I’m unsure. Maybe not. But guaranteed pierce while strafing through a large pull would result in a lot of pierces, dealing a great amount of damage - probably more than from manually cast primaries from some distance.

In this context: fix some other inconsistencies as well, for example not triggering F+R and such.

  • With these changes, we would be stronger during Strafe. It would add some power besides quick movement to this part of the set, but without inducing a “boring” spin to win build, and without destroying the overall fantasy of the set.

Now, back to some decent buffs for GoD.

You are mainly suggesting to buff supporting legendaries. I do see why you are going this way. But I would prefer a straight buff to GoD-6 from 10,000 to something between 30,000 and 50,000.

My arguments for this are:

  • I do believe that UE is intended to be the Multishot set (remember John Yang beeing “offended” by UE - Ball Lightning?). While I do agree that there should be some other variants possible, the main pushing build should be centered around MS. Together with my thoughts about “NOT spin to win”, UE-HA would feel similar (but not the same, the difference between Vault and high speed Strafe is huge, imho!) to GoD-6, which is probably not a good idea.
    Sure, UE-MS would need another buff with that, maybe by pushing Yang or DML a little bit more. Or maybe UE-4 from 60% to a 400% or whatever.
  • I don’t think that the Devs would be very happy with the existence of more hybrids. These are even more difficult to balance - which at the end wouldn’t be good for us players, too. So I don’t think that we should focus our desired buffs around these hybrids. I do like build diversity as well, but too many hybrids could deal more harm than well.

Therefore, I would suggest not to buff the supporting legendaries, but to increase the buff of GoD-6 directly.

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Bolas has to reach a point where clears the map faster than HA, otherwise, it’s solely a utility item. With UE6 Bolas, i see hits up to 70-80T, with M6 HA i see fewer hits as high as 400-600T.

Real game play is counter intuitive. Leonine Hashir Bow groups enemies into a circle. Bolas strikes a 20 yard circular region surrounding the impact. It usually doesn’t cover all enemies. Imagine a Venn Diagram, that is Bolas, where a only the portion of 2 overlapping circles only takes damage.

So you have to play this point blank, and surround yourself with enemies, which is also counter intuitive because you’re moving enemies around from one location to another. It’s really sloppy and ineffective due to the nature of the projectile. Making Bolas 100% pierce partially solves this problem.

On PTR i see enemies taking roughly 70-80T bolas hits in perfect conditions (fire + oculus and 120% AD). If what I proposed gets implemented, we’ll see enemies take 250-300T hit in peak conditions. Even that may not feel adequate.

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Let me elaborate why I think HA can be trash killer. I already wrote about it in my feedback post here:

HA is not so strong because of supporting legendaries. It is strong because of how Devouring Arrow rune is working.

“Each consecutive pierce increases the damage of the arrow by 70%”.

70% part is multiplicative, for each pierce!

If you want to see many pierces you need tight groups of monsters. In that scenario you can expect HA to pierce 20+ times and you can see really high damage numbers.

In solo I was at around GR 128 with UE + HA just like you. But in group with pixel Barb I cleared 135 in 10 minutes. Skill is scaling well with what supports can bring to the table. You add monk to that barb and all of a sudden DH can use Squirts instead of flavor of time. In 135 toughness becomes a problem if you are solo and you need to drop some multipliers and get more damage reduction. In group you can take all available damage multipliers with no problem.

I always imagined solo play like this: grouping up monsters with Strafe → Bola Projectiles and melting them with HA afterwards. Current iteration of Set does not allow that kind of play.

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Good post dmkt!

I dont understand the internal aspect of the set. Want the devs a ‘stop-rush’ game style? If yes…I would change the set bonuses in a bit different way to let work the mechanic in a mirrored line to get a ‘rush-stop’ feeling!..maybe like this:
2 Set:
Enemies hit by Strafe let you gain a stack of momentum to a maximum of 20 stacks and
Momentum will be active after stop channeling. Momentum last 0,2 seconds per stack and increase the attack speed by 100 % and the damage by 400 % from your primary skills.
4 Set:
Strafe shoot your last used primary skill.
While channeling Strafe and 5 seconds after your damage taken is reduce by 60 %.
6 Set:
Double the movement speed from strafe and primary skills deals 15.000 increase damage.

This change will end up in a more usefull game play.
I need Strafe to load my full damage (while I do decent damage) and use this movement skill for travel and right positioning…and then I have a 4 second window to shoot all my buffed damage from primary skills.

So I would say it makes more sense :thinking:

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I’m not sure whether it’s a misunderstanding on my side or yours, but to be sure:

The 70% more damage per pierce are added for each pierce. With each pierce we deal 70%, 140%, 210%, 280% (and so on) more damage.
The damage for the next hit after the n-th pierce is

base_damage * (1 + (0.7 * n)).

The damage is not increased by a multiplier of 1.7 after each pierce.

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Edit: made a mistake first time in formula for total damage done.

Formula for total damage done should be:

`base_damage*(n+1+0.7(1+2+3…n)) where n is number of pierces.

if you HA pierce 40 times damage of 40th pierce would be base_damage + base_damage*0.7*40 or ~29 times stronger then first hit it originated from.

What I wanted to say is that each next hit is getting stronger and stronger due to multiplier.

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Hey Heb, thanks for the feedback.

For anyone who is following along, here is an easier way to see the requested changes.

Bolas H. Arrow Grenade Impale
Gears of Destruction 2pc +6 +6 +6 N/A
Hunter’s Wrath +5 +5 +5 N/A
Leonine + Emimei’s Duffel +9 N/A N/A N/A
Holy Point Shot N/A N/A N/A +5
------------------------------------------ ---- ---- ---- ----
Total Lift for GoD6 +20 +11 +11 N/A
Total Lift for UE6 +14 +5 +5 N/A
Total Lift for S6 N/A N/A N/A +5
------------------------------------------ ---- ---- ---- ----
Expected Clear for GoD6 GR135+ GR135+ GR129+ N/A
Expected Clear for UE6 GR135+ GR135+ GR129+ N/A
Total Bonus for S6 N/A N/A N/A GR135+

Apparently, someone around 5k paragon has managed GR125 with GoD6 HA. So this would land the person somewhere around GR136. Another player with even higher paragon achieved GR128 with a GoD HA build too. These peak clears will only increase on live servers, as more players compete for permanent leaderboard clears, on servers nearer to home.

I requested that Momentum stacks last 4 seconds. I didn’t want to go too far into the bugs, game play & mechanical issues that were being covered in other’s feedback and bug reports – i actually removed a large chunk of my post covering those bugs to make the read less exhausting – but of course all of that all needs fixing, and if for some reason they cannot be repaired, they should compensate in GoD’s 6pc bonus.

The concept is cool, it just can’t get in the way of performance and balance. So if we’re looking to achieve this fantasy, something great has to happen during the unwind period. When the user activates Strafe, it should act as a 5 second power pylon that temporarily increases the momentum stacks by 5x, so 10 stacks goes up to 50 stacks for 5 seconds, then resets down to 0 stacks. The whole thing needs to result in higher average damage than if the player were to keep winding and maintaining the Momentum stacks. This is moreso a function of the 4pc bonus, which could lead to some impressive bursty group play.

I dunno, I don’t think multipurpose sets should have a single identity. Unhallowed Essence covers Multishot and Generators. Multishot is effectively used today for T16 and personal enjoyment pushing – it is roughly 10GRs behind the new power standard and you won’t see it anywhere on the leaderboards after 2.6.9 hits.

At this stage of the game, it’s boring of seeing 1-2 dominant builds covering the whole leaderboard. Variety keeps this game interesting, it keeps players engaged to try new things. Multishot’s legendary items might need to receive another buff, hopefully this happens in 2.7 – although I doubt we’ll have our GG duffel, HPS and ninth satchel by then. But you never know, a MS resurgence might come in a new form, doesn’t a modified Blackfeather with 300% rocket damage sound fun?

That is the straight and narrow path my friend. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Here’s to hoping for new and interesting play styles, theorycrafting and gearing options!

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Deleted Content Due to Regrets

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Very cool clear by the way, I’d like to try this out too for fun. HA does love density, and probably a bit more than Bolas.

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I was on par with progress in 140. But we would fail on RG for sure xD so we quit rift mid run because we could not gain advantage.

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Ask Iria I am sure he will agree xD and please make sure you do record… I will prepare popcorn for that one.

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Sure it’s simple, but it’s widely favored, especially by newer players. WW/Rend is crazy popular – it’s most of what you see in pub games. The thing is, we can technically still play GoD6 as you described – but you probably want the set to reward you for working harder – I’m in agreement with this – something more should be added (wind/unwind was a good suggestion).

In the end, I personally don’t want a UE6 clone where Strafe is being used the exact same way as Vault.

Here’s another suggestion. We shot around an idea like this on stream to help encourage dual damage skills, where the 6pc bonus rewards the use of multiple Primary Skills, kind of like Tal Rasha’s mixed elements:

Tal Rasha’s 6pc
Attacks increase your damage by 2000% for 8 seconds. Arcane, Cold, Fire, and Lightning attacks each add one stack. At 4 stacks, each different elemental attack extends the duration by 2 seconds, up to a maximum of 8 seconds.

Gears of Dreadlands 6pc
Attacking with a Primary Skill increases your damage by 10,000% for 5 seconds. Attacks with a unique a Primary Skill add one stack for an additional 10,000% damage per stack up to 3 times.

So you’re punished a little bit if you just hold down the button, but you’re rewarded 2x for weaving in an additional skill. But if you know what you’re doing you’ll probably come out ahead managing those CoE cycles right, especially if SoJ gets the bonus you’re rallying for in the other thread.

Clunky? Definitely – weaving 3 skills together before the CoE cycle changes sounds like… effort. It might have a steep learning curve to maximize the CoE cycle – or it might cause your fingers to become prematurely arthritic, or make for a great macro script.

And sadly, there are really only 2 good CoE cycles to maximize, unfortunately they are in the reverse order.

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THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSS.

New sets have to be FUN or they won’t be played.

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It’s hard to say what Gears of Dreadlands is capable of because of the bugs. I second the notion of it being spin-to-win though. It should be as fun, casual and powerful as wastes or tempest rush.
I really enjoy UE/HA. There are a few variants I really like. It feels very tanky. Bolas / entangling shot variants were interesting, but not as fun.
I tried recreating GoD with Nats and it’s pretty much the same thing. lol. It’s amazing what you can fit into that set. It’s so flexible.
Looking forward to see if they post an update to the PTR, or just let it ride and see if they can figure it out on their own in season 21.

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I like the idea of GoD doing a Tal Rasha or a Nayr’s, alternating between Primaries to boost DPS buffs.

for max DPS, one would have 4 primaries, 1 strafe leaving just 1 skill for defense.

gonna be super glass cannon

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I disagree, still, I do believe in a middle ground, such as:

This would allow Spin-to-Speedfarm, but no for pushing

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I respect your opinion. The overall feedback I’ve seen is that if GoD does become a full-time Strafe set, it needs something more to keep advanced players interested:

  1. Skill management for more dps.
  2. A game play mechanic.

I’m looking at your suggestion. It seems very similar to how it is right now, in GR push i would tap Strafe every 5-8 seconds, or if i need to move around.

Why punish players so severely for Strafing?

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