Hello, first and foremost, I’d like to mention that the rework that happened in 10.2 was something that greatly improved the spec in many ways. However, there’re still some points of pain that I’d love to see addressed going forward, as obviously there’s always room for improvement.
Antisinergystic talents:
There’re two combinations of them that come to mind:
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Cycle of Hatred and Essence Break/Initiative
The 1st set of talents introduces unsync issues, and those issues were there since Dragonflight started.
The whole rotational cycle of Havoc is based around 20 / 40 second CD windows. (Eye Beam is 40s CD, Essence Break is 40s CD, Vengeful Retreat is 20s CD).
When there’re no CDR talents involved, these windows flow perfectly, and they feel great to play.
However, Cycle desyncs Eye Beam from the rest of the skills in the combo, introducing a new concept of “holding the rest of the combo” just to sync it again. This never felt good to play, and to modify such a tight combo window when it flows so well without this talent feels like the wrong thing to do.
I have multiple solutions to this problem, but I believe Cycle is part of a greater issue that I’ll mention forward, so I will not propose any in this feedback post.
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A Fire Inside and Unbound Chaos/Inertia
The 2nd set of talents punishes you for being lucky. Other than AFI being incredibly RNG, leading to sometimes strings of 5 or more resets, which is topic for another conversation, these strings of good luck lead the Demon Hunter to periods in which you cannot benefit from Inertia/UBC.
In theory you want to use every single UBC/Inertia proc without munching them. Realistically this means that you’ll be sitting at two IA charges in these periods of time, potentially delaying or even making Inertia not fit your normal combo window, and thus, losing DPS.
This friction makes the talent feel incredibly bad to play when you get strings of procs back to back. This might be the first proc in the game I don’t want to get multiple of in a row as it is.
My proposed solution involves changing AFI a little bit.
First proposed solution and most straightforward: Whenever AFI procs, and the Demon Hunter has no Fel Rush charges, restore a Fel Rush charge as well.
Second proposed solution: Rework AFI and the way it procs to make it more predictable, and to ensure that AFI never procs more than twice in a row, making procs more common in return.
The high Meta uptime problem:
This never got fixed, even thought there were attempts to do it by nerfing Demonic duration.
Cycle of Hatred and Shattered Destiny existing make Meta uptime incredibly high (70% as per sims on a 5 minute fight).
In return this causes three things:
- Meta can never be an impactful CD, as it is so easily accessible. As such, the profile of Havoc is flattened, which is never a good thing. Meta doesn’t feel impactful, it feels like a maintenance buff, and Havoc has never periods of time in which you feel strong.
- Eye Beam, because it’s so readily available, can never be a strong skill. I personally find aggravating that Fel Devastation does more damage and is uncapped, while Eye Beam is not. It’s an iconic DH skill, it should do way more damage than it currently is doing.
- The gameplay involved around these talents revolves around uptime, reducing the CD of Eye Beam and extending Metamorphosis. Any downtime (either related to player skill, or simply because of encounter design) massively punishes this kind of build.
I know a lot of people won’t like this, but they have to understand that having high uptime on our main cooldown is not a good thing.
Proposed solution: Removal and replacement of both talents with something new. Cycle can be replaced for a new Eye Beam talent that doesn’t affect it’s CD, something to perhaps uncap it? SD could be replaced by literally anything that doesn’t impact Meta uptime, I leave that up to the reader.
The ‘no mover’ situation:
Ever since Inertia got added, I feel like this should be the default playstyle for Havoc. The developers have stated that the spec has this unique aspect to them that involves movement, and it’s not going away. Not to mention Inertia is the perfect mix between impactful DPS windows and movement without becoming overbearing like old Momentum was. There’s weight to your choices and how you execute your rotation. Anyway, I digress.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong trying to appeal to the people that don’t want to use movement as damage, however, there’s a thing I’d like to mention about no mover that I think poses an issue:
DPS Profile: As a pure no mover build has no access to Inertia/Initiative, their profile suffers in situations in which burst DPS thrives (which is pretty much anywhere). This makes the build much worse than it really should be.
Proposal: Give no mover something they’re good at. For example, branch the tree in a way in which Inertia is a choice node with Chaos Blades and delete Momentum. This would give No mover a good 2 minute burst profile, which is perhaps something that is desirable in some raid encounter or even in M+.
I don’t think a whole build purpose should be “yeah, you don’t want to play the core fantasy of this spec, so have this uncompleted mess instead” or “yeah, movement is not playable in this boss, so have this build that is worse in every single way instead”. Every build in the tree should be good at something.
If the intention of opting out of movement talent by design is simply being worse, then these builds should not exist.
That’s about it pretty much.
Thanks for reading.
Have a great day.