Demonic in Shadowlands

That suggestion destroys the purpose of the Fracture though, which is to be an alternative to Shear (Demon’s Bite) spam. The whole reason of having abilities transcend spec is to keep the purpose the same with slight spec tweaks.

The only thing that really makes DI subpar is the auto activate; if that was removed, it’d immediately be a good talent. 50% DR on a 1min CD is comparable to Netherwalk, but any “defensive” talent can’t create souls.

Basically what you’re asking for is a Death Pact or Death Strike at this point, which is fine, but Fracture is not the ability to use; Soul Barrier would be a better choice since it works vaguely similarly.

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Exactly. I’ve even said so above.

Not exactly. for Soul Barrier to be a better choice we would need a reliable way to generate enough souls, but I do like the idea of a shield.

Honestly, I’m not sure that’s the case. More likely, it got nerfed because it’s been the go-to talent for the entire expansion. The leech is so easily tuned outside of Demonic that I doubt it was much of a factor.

Actually, it’s a lot easier to balance a passive than an active, because there’s less player agency and choice involved. Passives are much more stable in their benefit compared to active abilities that provide similar net effect.

I’m convinced it is. The most usual complaint in PvP (actual complaint, not just noob whining) regarding Demon Hunters is their leech, which is too much and happens fairly often due to Demonic. It’s also been the go-to talent for the most part, but there are plenty other examples that haven’t seen a nerf as substantial as Demonic did.

When you have it synergize with other aspects like Demonic and Meta I think it makes it harder to balance those aspects too, not just the passive itself. Having a passive account for so much of our survivability is kinda toxic in PvP and just doesn’t require much player thought in both PvP and PvE.

Having to sacrifice a damage in order to get some healing is adds a nice layer of complexity and makes it less toxic to fight against, since you’d be needing to actively think about when you want your healing and when you want your damage. I’m not saying this is the perfect solution or anything, but I’d like to see something like take place for Demon Hunters.

Ya, but Demonic provides zero leech on its own now, and Blizzard clearly understands they can tune Demonic separately from Soul Rending, since they’re also tuning it. That says to me that the duration nerf was directly targeted at its dominance throughout BfA (even though that’s mostly a result of the other two being nuclear waste).

…Which is why they are nerfing it. Havoc really should be more about avoiding damage rather than simply leech tanking it anyway. Being a crazy fast and nimble skirmisher is kinda its shtick.

Ya, but it’s also counter to our existing theme. Again, the only way this could happen is if it came at the cost of Soul Rending, so you’re asking to trade passive self-sustain for active-self-sustain. I’m not feeling that trade, tbh.

I also think it’s rather naive if you think that that trade wouldn’t result in an even further reduction in our self-healing. Controllable defensives are much stronger than passive defensives, because you can target them when you need them, so the net healing over time would have to be weaker (especially if it were just a burst of healing rather than a HoT or something). They certainly wouldn’t undo part of the nerf, since the problem wasn’t just PvP, it was our self-sustain period.

Honestly, I suspect that their goal to counteract that leech healing is mostly by making one of the other two talents the dominant one on that row. Unbound Chaos makes it seem like Momentum is going to be the go-to right now, given just how much damage that demon spawn does.

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But it provides a solid amount with Soul Rending. Demonic is part of the reason we’re so tanky, with or without Soul Rending right now. It’s difficult to believe that part of the reason that Demonic was nerfed wasn’t our survivability that was over the top, mainly our leech. Our leech being reliant on Meta is even more of a reason for Demonic to be more desirable if your focus is durability, but that’s offset by the 25% duration nerf.

Yet they are also removing Blade Dance dodge outside of Meta and nerfing our Meta uptime. Blizzard clearly have no idea what to do with Demon Hunters, both Havoc and Vengeance. I mean, the last Alpha patch notes should’ve been enough proof for that.

And yeah, I’d rather have on-demand sustain instead of passive.

Clearly. I’m just saying it probably won’t happen. Leech fits the DH theme more than a burst heal, especially given how central leech has been for the entire lifetime of the class and how central it is to daddy Illidan in HotS. Something tells me you’re not going to make a lot of headway with this one, unfortunately.

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Well, it’s pretty clear that Blizzard is kind of lost in where to take DHs coming Shadowlands. My suggestion is simply a way for the class to be less “toxic” in PvP and reward better skillful play while punishing misplay. Sometimes sticking to a theme is detrimental for the game as a whole, you see. It’s just unfortunate that Blizzard has been so indifferent to the PvP aspect of the game lately.

And I also want, as stated numerous times previously, Demonic’s nerf to be rescinded. It’s so frustrating to watch your favorite class/spec being dragged into the dirt (I’m purely talking about gameplay feeling, as I’m likely to keep playing whatever I find the most fun anyway regarding of numbers).

I still regard PvP as an absolute cancer on this game. More things have been absolutely murdered in the name of “PvP balance” than anything else in this freakin’ game.

Ya, they could completely delete Soul Rending, and I doubt they’d even consider unnerfing Demonic. As I said, a fair chunk of that nerf, if not all of it, was because of how dominant is has been for the entire expansion. Granted, they could solve that by pitting it against talents that weren’t made by a first grader during nap time, but hey, Blizzard’s in the business of maximum profit for minimum effort these days.

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I keep seeing people say Unbound Chaos is promoting Momentum game play. I’d actually argue Unbound Chaos is worse at least rotation wise for Momentum than it is for Demonic.

Let’s assume you are running the new Burning Hatred so immolation aura last for 12 secs. (Not sure how long it lasts without the talent since wowhead tooltips show 6 secs, so just going off the recent blue post). Immo aura is 12 secs and fel rush recharge is 10 secs, so to maximize Unbound Chaos you want to fit 3 fel rushes into each immo aura window. To do this you are going to need 2 charges or very close to 2 charges right before you use immo aura. I’m also not sure if you need the Momentum buff on you before you fel rush for the inner demon to get the 15% damage buff from it. This would change if you need to fel rush during a Momentum window or right after. Rotation with Momentum would look like: build before immo aura use to about 90 fury -> use immo aura get 20 fury and passive fury gen if need to talent for 12 sec immo duration ->fel rush->dump fury for 5-6 depending on when you need to fel rush again for inner demons to get 15% damage buff->vengeful retreat would fit nicely here->fel rush-> dump fury again for 4-5 sec->fel rush to fit in a third unbound chaos->dump fury in third momentum window

Big problems here with the above rotation are:
Vengeful retreat isn’t going to be up at that point in rotation every time.
You are going to be clipping momentum windows to fit in the 3 fel rushes, so you are wasting momentum uptime which is bad.
You are probably going to have to sit on 2 fel rush charges sometimes to make sure you have 2 charges going into the immolation aura window to get all 3 fel rushes off. Again wasting Momentum uptime.
You need time in between Momentum windows to build fury so you are only dumping fury during the 6 sec window, but you will most likely be fury starved by the third fel rush since they are all back to back to back.

Best case for this build would be to be able to take felblade and demon blades and still have the 12 sec immo aura duration. With this maybe with enough procs of both of those you won’t be fury starved. I don’t see this happening though with the decrease of stats at the start of expansions. Obviously maybe some legendary will magic make this all work, but we don’t know that yet.

This is all thought about from a raiding perspective, so going to be different how it works with pvp and m+. Maybe this build will be the best damage wise compared to demonic just because of how much damage unbound chaos looks like it will do. If it is that’s going to feel really bad even if you liked the momentum play style previously. For single target fights Nemesis might have some merit to being taken which would feel bad to take as well.

Sorry for the long post just upset with what they are doing to demon hunters and what ever direction they are taking them. This is mainly to shine some light on momentum to the people that think just because they are both fel rush talents means blizzard is pushing a momentum play style. Not saying you think this basic, because you seem to understand that unbound chaos is going to do a lot of damage so buffing it with damage% would be good.

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Burning Hatred doesn’t change the duration, it adds fury generation (are you thinking of the VDH talent Agonizing Flame? That increases the duration now). Havoc natively gets a rank 2 at level 26 that extends it to 12s.

Yep, that’s basically what I expected from it. I didn’t say the rotation wasn’t complete cancer, just that it’s probably going to be the top damage rotation. Momentum buffing at least 2 out of 3 (and maybe all 3) of your Inner Demon spawns in every Immo Aura, each of which deals 150% AP Chaos damage (and thus scales with mastery), well, that’s pretty darn strong. I would not be surprised if that ends up being the top DPS combination, even if the rotation is atrocious from a gameplay perspective.

Surprisingly, no. Immo Aura is 30s CD, Fel Rush is 10s CD, so you get back your 3 charges in Immo Aura’s cooldown. I think Immo is still affected by haste while Fel Rush is not, but that’d probably make you sit on Immo Aura’s CD rather than Fel Rush (because you still want to get in 3 Fel Rushes per Immo Aura, meaning sitting on Fel Rush charges isn’t really possible.

Our fury economy isn’t really affected by stats. The GCD and our attack speed scale at the same rate, so the average fury income per second from Demon Blades is constant per GCD (until the GCD floor). Felblade’s reset is RPPM and thus scales with haste, and its CD also scales with haste, and thus the average interval between Felblade usage also scales at the same rate as the GCD.

Actually, if anything, our fury economy is slightly better for Momentum with lower stats. As our haste goes up, we get a shorter GCD, which means we can cast more Chaos Strikes during the fixed Momentum duration, and thus burn off more fury during it, likely making us more fury negative than we’d be at lower stats.

Oh, trust me, I wasn’t saying at all that that build would be fun. Just that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the top DPS build. There’s a reason I’ve basically shelved my DH when it comes to consideration of my SL main. Blizzard seems to have a love affair with using Fel Rush for damage, and I want absolutely zero part of that wasteland.

Edit:

VR is a 25s CD. It maybe still be used on cooldown, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s better to sit on it for 5 seconds to line it up with Immo Aura and 3x Fel Rush.

Ya, Immo aura’s cd is affected by haste. You are probably right though that you would sit on immo aura instead of fel rush. Either way feels bad.

VR is actually a 20 sec cd with Momentum talented. So like you were saying with immo aura you might just sit on VR for awhile too. Again making the rotation feel really bad.

My whole post wasn’t really targeted so much at just you more of demon hunter’s in general. You seem to understand the class and how things work. It was more that this was the most recent thread I saw with someone saying Unbound Chaos leads to momentum game play, so just decided to finally make a post addressing that. It was more for people who have a train of thought of:
Demonic gets nerfed, Unbound Chaos->fel rush, Momentum->fel rush, blizzard obviously pushing Momentum game play onto everyone in shadowlands.
It could be that blizzard is actually pushing a Nemesis play style on us in shadowlands and we just don’t realize it yet.

Edit:

Haste would increase the likelihood that you get a proc during Momentum in the Immolation Aura window wouldn’t it? This is where the proc would be most desirable as you would start getting fury starved. That might not be right and I’m just thinking about it wrong. Doesn’t change too much with what I was trying to show with my post though.

Were this only so! But they’ve walked it back, every time.

I think the Demonic nerf is okay. It was way too easy gameplay-wise for it to be as good as it was for survivability as well as damage.

(Hey Xaedys, would love your thoughts on my VDH mastery post! Unless you don’t have anything to correct or add.)

I mean, they walk it back due to feedback, but they still keep trying to shove it back in.

I’ve actually been doing a really bad job of keeping track of new threads. Partially that’s because I’m now also active in the hunter subforum, and occasionally in the rogue one as well, and partially because I’ve become addicted to Satisfactory >.>. I’ll check it out.

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It’s funny because now they have a system that makes balancing for PvP and PvE completely unrelated to one another, but they refuse to make good use of it for some reason.

Don’t forget this is a AAA company here. Making the only actual good talent worse because the other two were garbage tier from a design perspective.

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Yep. Like I said, minimum effort. Look at the pace they’re releasing class changes during this alpha, ~2 classes every couple weeks. I still stand by my assertion that they’ve got maybe 20% as many devs actively working on SL as they did on Legion. Blizzard (and probably Activision) is testing just how little effort they can put into an expansion and still get all the profits.

It’s sad to see the game I’ve been playing for so long turn into this. I will be playing Shadowlands, but if this trend doesn’t change (probably won’t), it’ll probably be my last expansion.

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I’d bet this would have less to do with them having less devs overall and rather how they distribute them. Torghast doees seem pretty cool, but it clearly takes alot of manpower from them and drains the number of class devs. Which becomes particularly infuriating when you consider the entire community has been telling them to just once focus on classes rather than borrowed power and other systems that will be gone (or highly irrelevant at least) once the next xpac drops.

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They really have their priorities mixed up. The devs are focusing too much on new expansion content like Torghast, Covenants, Legendaries, etc. and are ignoring the very skeleton and infrastructure of what defines a good game for the most part: classes.

Whelp, that was quick.

Unbound Chaos While Immolation Aura is active, your inner demon slams Activating Immolation Aura will cause your inner demon to slam into nearby enemies at the end of your Fel Rush, dealing [ 150% next Fel Rush, dealing [ 165% of Attack Power ] Chaos damage. Havoc Demon Hunter - Level 102 Talent. Havoc Demon Hunter - Level 102 Talent.

Unbound Chaos no longer has horrendous synergy with Momentum. You’d still probably want to squeeze it in during Momentum, but you’ll no longer be mandated to use all 3 charges of Fel Rush possible during the Immo Aura duration.

That at least fixes one of the issues with the new talent, though it also drastically lowers the potency of the talent. They buffed the damage by 10%, but you can only get in one per Immo Aura rather than 3.

Both Immo Aura and Blade Dance scale CD with haste, and while Fel Barrage’s CD doesn’t scale with haste, its total damage done does. All 3 also scale identically with Mastery. As such, the 3 can be compared without consideration of stats, which simplifies matters. Before haste, you get in 6.67 Blade Dances per 60s, 2 Immo Auras (and thus Unbound Chaos procs), and 1 Fel Barrage. Trail thus does 357.33% AP per minute, Unbound Chaos does 330%, and Fel Barrage does 286%.

While there’s a decent spread there (Trail is 25% ahead of Barrage, and 8% ahead of Unbound Chaos), the difference can be made up for during burst windows (ex. Meta provides a flat 25% bonus to Fel Barrage, which almost entirely makes up the difference (almost because it takes the place of Annihilation casts)). In addition, it makes sense that burstier talents are weaker than sustained talents, as burst is invariably more useful than sustained if they are of equal strength.

Personally, I think this is a pretty balanced and effective tier now. You have 3 talents of varying degrees of sustained and burst potency, all 3 of which have different rotational impact but all accomplish roughly the same thing (ie. most AoE focused, but with single target benefit). Trail is entirely passive, and has zero rotational cost if First Blood is also taken. Burning Hatred has virtually no rotational cost, since Fel Rush only triggers as 0.5s GCD. Fel Barrage has the largest rotational cost, but also the largest burst impact.

<hope rises slightly, discontent falls slightly>

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