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?
1 Like
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.
4 Likes
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:
-
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.
-
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.
It also works as well with Glaive Tempest.
Ragefire compared to Glaive Tempest on single target raid boss with a small add phase. This is what I’m talking about.
I suppose those crits aren’t guaranteed. Still though, Immo Aura is already such a huge part of our dps, I can’t imagine it’d be worth going into Growing Inferno and Burning Wound if Ragefire couldn’t create additional s/t value. At that point you may as well pull out of the right branch altogether and buff up eyebeam damage.
That’s what should occur.
On single target I wouldn’t consider the tree balanced properly if Ragefire/BW was more powerful than Glaive Tempest and Isolated Prey.