Havoc definitely feels like it’s getting worse every build, but I’m not convinced it’s dead yet.
I agree that the blade dance nerf was warranted. Realistically the idea that such an ability makes the player impossible to hit makes sense from a flavour perspective but on a main AOE spender that’s a very broken trait to put in.
I also agree that some nerfing to leech was required. Taking the extra leech talents in the live game makes you nearly invincible if you’re doing enough damage (and at this point in the expansion who isn’t?). Having said that, the magnitude of the leech nerfs fail to take into account just how squishy havoc is, and we didn’t get any extra survival tools to help with that when they walloped the class with the nerf bat.
To those comparing the changes with the DK changes for Cataclysm, from what I remember (from first hand experience) DK dps was affected fairly substantially, but not survivability. And certain spec recovered from that pretty quickly. The demon hunter changes affect both.
Full disclosure: I previously commented that the doom and gloom was unwarranted. I still believe that, but the situation is getting worse. I can’t see them reverting the changes they have made at this point (and they probably shouldn’t anyway), which would leave re-design as the way forward. Which isn’t going to happen mid-expansion…
No, I don’t think the class is dead, and a lot of the “doom and gloom” is unwarranted. It really is. DH’s are looking fine in both pvp and pve.
What gloom is warranted, in my opinion, is how lacking the class is with regard to its playability. It’s boring. It’s far too easy, as it always has been. We’re in desperate need of attention. We only have one dps spec, and it’s a snooze fest. Our reliance on borrowed powers becomes blatantly obvious when you move from one expansion to the next. PTR, I can promise you, is going to be absurdly boring
For people who want to able to play an alt with their feet, DH will be an appealing class. But for a lot of us, who want our mains to be a little more engaging and complex, the DH hasn’t fulfilled that want for the last two expansions, and looks like it won’t in shadowlands either.
The whole “make the hero class easy for new players” thing doesn’t apply any more - the class starts at level 8.
I really want to play my demon hunter. I’ve wanted to play a DH since Warcraft 3. But I can’t go another expansion falling asleep due to a low skill-cap rotation
You can’t really argue they didn’t kill Guardian Druid. They released a whole animated short about them killing bears off in Shadowlands. Blizzard just admitting Guardian is dead for Shadowlands.
I just try to live my life with as little hysterics, hyperbole, and drama king/queen performed by me as possible.
Is guardian in a rough spot? It seems to be. It is a spec killed by blizzard? No, and this is demonstrably false every time someone plays guardian, DH, BFA arcane mage etc. and enjoy themselves. I reserve saying blizzard “killed” something for when it actually happens like ranged survival hunter.
Saying blizzard “killed” a spec when it’s just a gimped spec is like saying your “starving” when you’re mildly hungry. I know what you mean, but you dialed it up to 11 for a 2-3 out of 10 problem.
The class will be okay. If I wasn’t going to be main healing raid, I’d probably stay DH. Be grateful at this stage in the beta DH isn’t as bug-ridden as the poor monks.
Engagement is a silly, short term thinking strategy. It may work for awhile but after awhile you are tuned out. After the 3rd or 4th spec is dead you lose credibility with me at least.
Truthful and/or interesting is better than clickbait overwrought “engagement”
They wanted that, they turned us into a meme troll, and here are the results.
It’s a disappointment as an arrogant paladin like Retrox more shows his ability as a human paladin exploit instead of helping out the bugs in WoW, we just got criticized over and over again just because some noobs couldn’t kill or are knows a new class.
But what is it if another new class comes out superior to the demon hunter? a Tinker class, a necromancer or a Shadow hunter would break the state of the game, while the paladin is still 1M damage and nobody tells him anything.
That’s why it’s a disappointment how the community didn’t treat us and how hypocritical it was for a game that didn’t treat us right during these 3 expansions.
So in your mind because the playstyle has stayed the same they should just stick the knife into the talents that work and gut them hard? Because that’s the message kind of coming across here.
Some talents are strong. First Blood is real strong, Demonic is strong, etc. Sometimes that strength is exacerbated by a lack of good alternatives in that row. Momentum is kind of strong, but it’s way too finicky to justify. Nemesis has niche uses but is pretty mediocre. So the 110 row is pretty lopsided in Demonic’s favor.
First Blood is one where maybe it is just too strong. I think nerfing it is a bad idea though, it just makes it less strong but no less unappealing. Trail of Ruin, though picked a lot, actually did have some competition with Fel Barrage, both being pretty alright AoE damage sources. Fel Barrage had strong synergy with Demonic too, which is good! It encourages picking it even more to make a viable alternative to heavy usage of Death Sweep.
Look, I’m no Method raider, hell I’m hardly a RaiderIO raider. But the problems with DH aren’t just a bunch of too strong talents. Even if you nerfed the three most overpicked talents in our spec, it’s not going to improve the situation, because the problems with DH are at the root of the spec, and they’re problems that, to be frank, have been discussed to hell and back repeatedly.
