DF Devs are Trying to Kill Demonic and Force Momentum

it’s quite a big jump from playing ranged to playing melee.
it’s not the same as playing momentum vs not playing momentum.
end of the day, you may want to play the spec or talent the guides say its the highest dps, but not have the skill do take advantage of it, and be better off playing something you are comfy with.
most players do not push 30s. the ones that do have no problem with various playstyles imposed by certain talents required for max dps. they adapt easily.
and the community perception is what it is and will remain the same. even in 15s, lads invite the meta. it will always be like this. at least survival hunter allowed holy priests to shine. no hunter/mage/dps shammy meta, no healer besides resto shammy.
if we are being realistic, in DF there will be 2 dps slots to contend for, the 3rd is gonna be an evoker, at least for the first patch. as will all new classes introduced in wow, they will storm out of the gate completely busted, best believe and accept that.

As I’ve already said, I would rather not have to use fel rush for damage ever, but ubc is so minor compared to momentum that it doesn’t really matter. And anyway, ubc is bis on live without taking momentum, so momentum doesn’t have to exist for ubc to be a thing.

They have acknowledged the problem though. They just haven’t done anything about it yet.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/feedback-demon-hunters/1315896/48
They admit that momentum shouldn’t have a strong emphasis on how we play, they just so far haven’t done anything to actually make this a reality.

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They fixed glidementum (thank god) but then they’ve made momentum accessible in such a way that you’d always be able to take it. Like it’s our equivalent of Savage Roar for feral. This has been the situation now for long enough that it’s safer to assume they’re just happy to keep it like that. They’ve nerfed it as a token gesture to people complaining but otherwise I’d parse this as them saying you get what you get.

I wouldn’t be so certain of this if they hadn’t tied Initiative to VR and hadn’t sandwiched the CD talent for it with UBC in between. That seems like a very deliberate coercion for players who are thinking of putting a toe into the column to go all the way and actually try the playstyle. Momentum would just be the logical endpoint. That to me tells me they actually do want to force momentum, you’re not describing hyperbole, but the ongoing state of development.

What I’m saying is, you can’t expect this to be removed, nerfed at best, but you’re going to swallow your pride and take enough talents into the column. You should be making an argument that the right branch needs a better defined route to AMN because going haste/mastery no-momo is the best alternative you have. Right now it looks like it has pretty poor synergy. Idek why you’re talking about talents on the class tree as tho they impact the talents on the spec tree. It just seems to me like the whole discourse has broken down, nobody has any better ideas. Best you’ll get is some alternate consensus after a patch cycle but until then, this is what we have.

So you take that putting it and all related talents to the side and allowing paths to the capstone that entirely bypass those Momo talents as them forcing it upon players?

If you spend those five talent points for Fel Rush, VR, and Momentum you’re not putting those points into something like Growing Inferno, Burning Wounds, and Ragefire.

And then because you took those movement related talents in Havoc, you also don’t have Aura in the class tree, further boosting damage done by GI/BW/RF.

So it’s not like you’re getting Momentum for free, you’re spending points that could get other abilities.

And then also, you’ll have less sturdiness from the class tree as you’d not put a point in to Sigil of Fire (extra healing from CWB), and then Charred Warblades is quite a bit weaker too as your Immolation Aura is so much smaller.

And here’s the crux of the issue:

  1. how much do you think Growing Inferno, Burning Wounds and Ragefire will be balanced around how much damage they can do in multi-target encounters? Ragefire for instance it would make sense that it will pool higher damage the more targets are hit by IA. Burning Wounds and Growing Inferno likewise would presumably be balanced around what an AMN build at its peak would be doing in terms of single-target. Which brings me onto point 2

  2. If they’ve not tempered down the single-target potential of AMN ragefire then what would you take instead of momentum down the middle of the tree? In that instance you would almost certainlty take Initiative, UBC and Tactical Retreat because the crit buff is going to feed into Ragefire. What else in the tree will synergize across multiple talent combos like that? And that’s before you even take momentum!

Exactly, and that’s the problem. It’s antithetical to what they claimed in their post.

They claimed to remove it as a capstone to make it optional and not mandatory, but they have yet to make any noticible changes towards accomplishing that.

No thanks. I want to continue playing the same playstyle I’ve played since BfA. Momentum was never a forced part of that and it doesn’t have to be, now, or ever.

If anything, momentum needs to move to the right, as far away from the single target build as possible.

i doubt they will go live like this.
ragefire is busted, even as a concept, with immo being uncapped, amn, and a crit mastery build you would see impossibly high numbers on ragefire, even after all bugs are fixed.

frankly i would be happier if burning wound was an ST talent, even though that does not fix the issue. have it cap at 1 target and be applied by chaos strike, be done with it and move on.

you can even have ragefire only damage the target affected by burning wound, which would mean you still see a monster number with it, but at least it’s not aoe. I mean come on, with 22% crit and 25% mastery on the ptr, on 3 target cleave, I see ragefires hit for 30k. surely that is insane.

otherwise, they will just nerf the percentage on ragefire, which will probably make it a nice bonus on AOE, totally worthless on ST or priority damage.

Initiative and Ragefire is just First Strike and Winds of Winter from season 2. It’s a s/t funnel that in DF is going to double up as the old Soul Cap from WoD. Like a borrowed power we get to keep. I’m all for it tbh, it fleshes out the immo aura spam of SL. I’m sure tuning will happen at some point somewhere.

I’m looking forward to it tbh!

The thing is they should ot be turning moving abilities into DPS gains which make it a must to use with momentum. You don’t see the devs adding DPS boost after a warrior use their charge or mage using teleport or durid or rouge wijr dash.

Why do it to DH. Also there are suitation where is impossible to use momentum build die how the dungeons o the boss fight works.

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Given the equal position with Momentum a 10% all the time damage boost, ragefire should be very powerful.

The only talents which should be more powerful than Momentum and Ragefire are the capstone talents which come after them.

Balanced well, no one should pass up picking two of the capstones, while Momentum/Ragefire can be dropped from the left/right choice for specific fights or player enjoyment.

I think we should hopefully see variations that include:

EssB/SD with Momentum and Fel Rush talents.
EssB/SD with Ragefire and Immolation Aura talents.
SD/AMN with Throw Glaive and Immolation Aura talents
SD/AMN with Momentum and Fel Rush talents.
SD/AMN with Ragefire, Immolation Aura, and Throw Glaive talents.
EssB/AMN maybe even possible

And then within that there will be additional choices, Glaive Tempest or Fel Barrage, Fodder/Decree…

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ragefire should be powerful, and i’m with you on the fact that it is reasonable to assume it competes with momentum, but bro, there’s a dude on the beta forums who tested ragefire in dungeons and it’s 50% of him damage. and it’s passive. sure it requires some thought, activate immo aura when you have uptime on the targets, but still, it’s way to easy for that sort of damage.
as it currently stands, with immo uncapped and burning wound at 3 targets, i don’t see how they can really balance it. if they cap immo, revolts ensue. if they cap ragefire, there will be complaints that it pops on the wrong targets.
no, i still say it should only damage the target(s) affected by burning wound, and that burning would should really be capped at 1, buffed, and applied by chaos strike…

The thing that’s making me laugh the most about ragefire-momentum is that you would want to spam the buff - and do your best not to overlap! - through the entire IA window so every tick has the 10% extra damage. You’d want initiative at the start and then VR into initiative for the last 5 seconds. That will be how you min/max this.

Momentum cannot remain a flat damage buff going forward because it’s going to result in too many degenerate playstyles like this. They need to stop relying on old stuff that’s already coded into the game and rework it to make it do something new that doesn’t have all of this degenerate synergy. And this should go without saying: nerfing the damage buff window does not change the fact that it is a damage buff window. This is where all the problems are coming from with this talent! Not the movement abilities, but the hard percentage of all damage being increased.

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It already has a 4-5 minute cooldown on Meta. Vengeance can’t pop Demonic nearly as often as havoc and the tuning around it… we are demon hunters, shifting in an out of meta should be par-the-course of playing the class.

Given the same position as Momentum, Ragefire should account for between 6% and 25% of damage over a raid fight or M+ dungeon. Naturally as it is on the AoE side of the tree it should be less effective than Momentum on a single target encounter. And it should obviously be the right choice if you had to choose between the two in M+ where AoE/Cleave performance and burst is important.

My concern with Ragefire is that a Demon Hunter may find that the ramp up is too long and it fires off after the monsters are all killed. Will we do things like precast Immolation so that it will expire earlier, or will we start cancelling Immolation to proc early?

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A cancel aura macro for IA seems like the default play for serious players. Use it to execute smaller adds in a bigger pull, get more effective use than if you’d let it tick further.

Personally I’m still having nightmares about the build someone posted that has ragefire, momentum into EssB and Shattered Destiny. Seems like it’d be an obvious meta build.

both options are quite horrible…
we already have aoe talents, many and diverse. I would rather we had a funnel talent and make our damage profile more diverse. feel off the damage to the smaller adds to smack the big one

Thats where I think a pulse of dmg every time it crits on that mob would be better than a stored dmg as to avoid that missed potential if said pack dies quickly. Avoids having to use a /cancelaura and allows overall output/function of the ability without having too much drawback.

Maybe, but it does give up a lot of talents to go up the right side that far.

I’d think Glaive Tempest and the other talents on the left would generally do better, especially on lower target counts.

Momentum worries me because it’s both a huge part of our damage while also being completely unplayable on several mythic fights per tier, as well as certain keys. Admittedly I haven’t played much this expansion but Sludgefist from CN comes to mind, along with the final boss of TD in BFA. There are also many situations where utilizing movement for damage is severely limiting to the point of being unenjoyable, not merely a challenge.

Having damage tied to movement is simply bad class design.

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I’ve had a play around trying to deconstruct and rebuild (I’m a big Demonic Appetite enjoyer personally) and I just can’t think where you’d get equivalent advantage by dropping any of these talents. Shattered Destiny in and of itself is huge, Momentum combos with EssB and Ragefire and Chaos Theory, you thusly wouldn’t want to spec out of any of those three talents.

What could you possibly trim and where for any equivalent advantage? Going out of Momentum would take you into Chaotic Transformation at best and at that point you’re saying a free Eye Beam and Blade Dance every minute is worth 10% less damage on your Chaos Theory window, your EssB window and your Ragefire charge and burst. It doesn’t compare at all. I keep saying it on these forums and I’m gonna repeat it here, this is the problem with Momentum being a % modifier - if this doesn’t change it’s going to be a mandatory talent at high end.

It also highlights a huge issue with AMN and Ragefire. Specifically that AMN is a talent that impacts the tree for gear choices and not play style. Everything required for the playstyle around an AMN build occurs before you take that talent, so this build effectively lets you take the functionality of an AMN build, without the onus of building an entirely separate set of gear (and without having to play around Throw Glaive, which apparently some people aren’t happy about? lol.) The question of whether it will be viable or not hinges on whether you’re getting equivalent advantage for your Immo Aura damage when you’re just built into haste and crit and if the shortfall of Mastery is offset by the talents you’re taking from the left and center branches. Unless they very heavily tune the impact of Mastery then I can’t see any advantage lost given how much damage Ragefire is - but then that would become a problem in its own regard because if they tune the Mastery too high AMN would become the default even in single target situations.

The solutions I feel are obvious:

  1. Momentum, at last, finally, should have functionality beyond a static % buff (no, it can’t be removed, very obviously movement abilities as damage reinforcement is part of the design philosophy, nothing short of completely redesigning the left branch of the tree is going to satisfy this. There is enough anxiety that DH doesn’t have enough class identity w/o it and there are more than enough players who feel this way. Sorry but that whole column leading into Momentum is entirely intuitive with the state of the game) I’ve seen the suggestion that it buff Chaos Strike damage or buff Blade Dance damage per target hit by Fel Rush. I personally think it’d be funny to buff subsequent Fel Rush casts and reduce the CD on Fel Rush i.e. literal momentum, like the old Monk talent. w/e anyone could do with Momentum though would be better than how it is now, which is causing far too many problems in terms of player freedom of choice. % increase is the bad design part, not the movement activator.

  2. Ragefire should be the capstone of the AMN tree. Maybe put AMN where Soulrend is, hell maybe put it before (or maybe even remove it altogether and bake it into the spec JUST SAYIN’!) but we cannot have such easy access to such an enormous damage gain in the form of Ragefire. It should take everything to invest into something that behaves like that. Same with Momentum, in all honesty. God only knows why they thought making it more accessible would make it function less as a mandatory take.