Hello everybody. I’ve been a Havoc main since the class got introduced in the Legion prepatch. I have cleared every single tier since then except CoS within Cutting Edge as Havoc DH. I’d like to share my feedback around the current issues of Havoc, in the hopes that they’re read and addressed for Dragonflight.
Havoc, being a spec that was designed with Artifact Weapons in mind, always suffered from the same issues ever since Legion ended and said weapons got removed. I will list them along with my personal suggestions in order to try and fix them.
1- Lack of scaling
In Legion, Havoc had a very clear secondary stat scaling, crit strike, because Chaos Strike refunds were tied to it. After Legion, this refund got changed to a flat 40% chance on CS.
In Legion we also had Chaos Blades as a talent, a personal DPS CD that scaled with Mastery. This DPS CD got entirely removed.
Our mastery increases the Chaos damage we deal. However, a huge part of our damage is not Chaos Damage. For instance, Blade Dance is physical, Immolation Aura is fire, melee damage is physical, Demon Blades is shadow damage, etc… This makes mastery a much worse effect than it originally looks like, turning it into a worse Versatility.
My suggestions to fix this come in four ways:
- Adding back crit scaling to CS refunds. If Blizzard feels it’s too strong, it can be fine tuned, like making it a flat amount + 1/2 of crit strike. The point here is adding a scaling point to refunds back.
- Chaos Blades is added back as a personal cooldown. Again, if the mastery scaling feels too strong, it can always be nerfed. I will speak more about this into the post.
- Making all the skills from Havoc’s spellbook deal Chaos damage.
- Rework the mastery effect from scratch.
2- Overall, very simple spec
What I mean by this is that the basic rotation, as it is in Shadowlands, with no talents, has only 2 rotational skills that you press, with 2 minor cooldowns.
The baseline rotation in Single Target without talents is spamming Demon’s Bite into Chaos Strike, while using Eye Beam and Immolation Aura on cooldown.
While Blizzard has always told us that they want to keep Havoc simple, I think this goes way beyond that. Because of this simplicity, Havoc gameplay suffers as a whole. Also, borrowed power gets hit because of how hard it’s to design when Havoc has so little baseline skills to work with, as a reminder of the T28 tier set and how boring it ended up being.
My suggestion for this includes reworking the basic rotational flow of Havoc, adding an extra skill and you’ve guessed it, said skill is Blade Dance. For this to happen, First Blood has to become baseline. Also, Blade Dance has to be buffed. As it stands in Shadowlands it required both First Blood and the Dancing With Fate conduit to make First Blood builds viable (this was before Venthyr overtaking everything).
Also, another thing that Havoc needs is an AoE spender with no cooldown to replace Chaos Strike in AoE situations (2+ targets). It is good gameplay wise to make the player choose whether they want to do ST or AoE damage.
By implementing both solutions, the basic rotational cycles of Havoc would become:
For ST: Blade Dance into Chaos Strike with DBite as a generator
For AoE: Blade Dance into “new AoE spender” with DBite as a generator
This new AoE generator should have a refund interaction exactly the same as Chaos Strike, but making it beneficial only in AoE situations (refund chance increases per target hit).
Having altered the basic rotation, talents can be added or modified to add more flavor and mechanics onto said rotation.
3- Lack of burst
First, let me start by saying that not having a burst DPS profile in WoW is a disadvantage. Literally every single mechanic and encounter is better done by bursty profiles. A window of damage you have to exploit? You want burst. An add that just spawned and has to die quickly? You want burst.
At best, consistent profiles are about equal to burst profiles when absolutely nothing is happening for a long time (and potentially better depending on timings). However, these situations are extremely niche.
Ever since Legion finished and specifically Chaos Blades and Nemesis got removed, Havoc lost all of its burst and instead became a spec with a very flat DPS profile.
A part of the reason our profile is so flat is because Metamorphosis, as it is, is only a minor buff to our spenders, and is very easy to access to through Demonic. Metamorphosis has to be weak because Demonic exists, basically.
A lot of people have also complained about Metamorphosis being such a long cooldown and how hard to use it is in raids and M+ because of timing restrictions.
Because of both of said points I don’t think the lack of burst can be addressed properly without changing Metamorphosis or Demonic, at least one of them.
So, my suggestions are the following:
- Remove Metamorphosis as a 4 minute cooldown
- Make the talent Demonic baseline, buffing it (maybe 12 seconds duration instead of the current 6)
- Add Chaos Blades as a DPS cooldown, 2 minutes CD, same duration as the Demonic window
Adding Chaos Blades back as a cooldown addresses our lack of burst, and also gives Havoc another scaling point in the form of mastery. It being a 2 minute cooldown means it can also be used much more frequently and helps fight that feeling of “Meta is such a long cooldown I don’t know when to use it”, specifically in dungeons and M+.
This way, Havoc has two different windows of burst. A strong one, in which you pair a Demonic window with Chaos Blades, and weaker ones with only Demonic. The spec would become a 30s mini-burst / 2 min burst spec, which is much healthier for the game that constant DPS profile we currently have.
4- Way too much RNG on talents
I’m talking about Demon Blades and Cycle of Hatred. I’ll start with DBlades.
Dual wielding specs have a chance to miss on swings. On top of this, DBlades is a 60% proc chance. Also, the amount generated is RNG in an interval.
That’s 3 layers of RNG for a fury generator. Demon Blades can sometimes end up being extremely frustating because of long chains of starvation.
My suggestion: Lower the amount of fury generated by Demon Blades and increase the proc chance to 100%. Keep the fury RNG interval.
This solution removes only one layer of RNG, but makes the talent much less frustrating to play around.
On the topic of Demon Blades / DBite, I’d also like to add that almost nobody enjoys pressing DBite. A new talent that copies Fracture of Vengeance (charge system generator, much higher generated fury, but also with a CD) could potentially open new ways of playing the spec that are fun for everybody.
And now, about Cycle of Hatred. From SoD in Shadowlands to Sepulcher, CoH was played with constant complaints from the players because of the huge swings in variance this talent caused.
Cycle of Hatred is a talent that refunds EB cooldown on a Chaos Strike fury refund. That means if you get a refund you can use Eye Beam sooner, and because you got fury back, you can use more Chaos Strikes, which end up being more refunds and more EB CD reduction, which in turns ends up being more Meta uptime because of Demonic and more damage because Annihilation hits harder than Chaos Strike.
It’s a Feast or Famine RNG proc that, as said, causes huge variances in DPS performance, and worse, makes gameplay feel incredibly bad and slowed down, while having absolutely no iteration with the player. This got exacerbated in 9.2 and 9.2.5 because of the Venthyr build, since Eye Beam extended Sinful Brand.
CoH also has another issue. It doesn’t work with Blade Dance at all. Through 9.2 and 9.2.5, Havoc has been forced to play this talent due to Venthyr and it almost completely killed any usage whatsoever of Blade Dance, because you still wanted to get CoH procs even if you were in heavy AoE situations due to Sinful Brand extensions (unless the targets were going to die before the brands expired).
Suggestion: Rework all % on use procs on Havoc’s talent tree to “After X fury spent”, to make them somewhat predictable and to lower the huge variance swings.
To rephrase, the issue with these RNG talents is that they completely change how you play with 0 iteration with the player, and it doesn’t feel good when they proc. It feels bad when they don’t, both in gameplay and performance.
5- Eye Beam and its lack of identity
I’ll be honest, I don’t know what’s the purpose of this skill anymore.
In Legion it was an AoE skill that we didn’t press in Single Target at all. In BfA it got buffed to be a DPS gain in ST while being a little nerfed everywhere else while we got introduced to our friend the massively overpowered Furious Gaze and in Shadowlands it does a little above average damage in ST and is completely useless in AoE because it deals reduced damage above 2 targets.
The skill is only pressed on AoE because it enables other stuff (Demonic, a nerfed from BfA Furious Gaze and Sinful Brand extensions), but the damage is pitiful for a skill that screams AoE damage.
Also, this skill is guaranteed to crit. This makes it gain absolutely nothing from the critical strike secondary stat. Similar skills, like Chaos Bolt from Warlocks, gain extra damage from their crit secondary stat.
My suggestions:
- Remove the reduced damage at 2 targets, move it to 5/8 targets.
- Keep the “Main target takes extra damage” so the skill is still impactful in Single Target
- Increase EB damage based on your critical strike secondary stat
- I would honestly consider if Furious Gaze should remain as a passive or not at this point. I feel it adds absolutely nothing of value to Havoc, other than harming EB damage.
6- Momentum / Fel Rush and its impact on rotations
I think Momentum has always caused, from the moment it was introduced into the game, friction in the gameplay. Sure, it’s an unique gameplay that no other spec can imitate. However, it also introduces a plethora of issues that are very worth mentioning. Because it’s unique, it means that this issues will never be fixed either, because they’re not a fault of the talent, but of the content we’re doing and they affect Momentum exclusively.
- Its viability heavily depends on the content you’re doing. In some raid bosses, Momentum is basically unusable due to spread mechanics or dangerous zones. I personally believe that a playstyle that becomes a DPS loss or basically kills you by playing it in some situations is not well designed.
- It trades your mobility for damage. In order for this trade to be fair, the damage increase of this talent ought to be massively better than other options at the same level. This has never happened, with Momentum only giving marginal gains at best over Demonic.
This creates an issue in which Momentum is always the best pick or it should never be used at all.
- Because of the other two points, this talent is virtually impossible to balance correctly. It needs to be strong, but in some bosses it’s unplayable. How do you tune it? So it’s overpowered on bosses it can be played? If then, what’s the point of the other options? About equal to the other options in the bosses it can be played? Then it’ll never be played because Momentum takes more than it gives.
- Momentum pairs very badly with small hitboxes. A small humanoid, for instance, you will Fel Rush through it for multiple times it’s hitbox size, sending you outside of melee range. This isn’t necessarily a DPS loss, but it feels bad to play.
- Fel Rush, to this day, it’s still bugged. It has a chance of randomly DCing the user when they turn their camera too fast, if you use it on terrain with a slight bump it also has a chance of propelling you to abusrd distances, depending on your ping the traveled distance changes, etc…
- And finally, I personally don’t believe Fel Rushing in your rotation is fun. There’s a lot involved in just Fel Rushing in order to do it properly: looking where you’re going to Fel Rush, seeing if there’s something there that will kill you, looking if the mobs are going to do a frontal, calculating the distance through the hitbox so you don’t leave it after using the skill, etc… As said, this playstyle asks way too much of the player and sacrifices way too much of Havoc’s toolkit for the DPS it gives.
My suggestion is clear. Delete Momentum. As explained in the introduction of this section, this talent is way more harmful than fun. It introduces issues in basically any level and it’s impossible to tune properly. It’s also not enjoyed by a big part of the Havoc community strictly at a gameplay level.
As a secondary point of this, I also believe the talent Unbound Chaos should be changed so it buffs another skill that isn’t Fel Rush, for the points I mentioned above, even if Unbound Chaos isn’t as negatively impactful because it doesn’t force you to Fel Rush as much.
An example of a rework would be to buff Throw Glaive, increasing it’s damage by 2000% (an example) and making it bounce to up to 20 targets, so the initial niche of the talent remains, but we don’t have to Fel Rush to use it.
Needless to say, if you feel like adding or commenting anything of this post, feel free to post.
