The lack of engagement on here (What, 20 posts?) pretty much speaks for itself right now.
These changes are so unimpactful that I’m feeling actively cold about them. I can’t point to a single ability in that tree that excites me, and that’s a scary proposition when it’s all that we’re getting for the next 10 levels.
New build, new Aldrachi changes. As always all of my feedback comes from Havoc.
Most of them are great, the Hunt granting a RG charge gives us a way to open and solves a pain point, thank you very much.
Felblade being a DR is also extremely nice.
However, the Thrill of the Fight change worries me. I’m losing sight of what this tree is meant to do.
On one hand, as I see Aldrachi Reaver, Reaver’s Glaive and the combo enhancements for both CS and Blade Dance are meant to be the highs of the tree, however, with so many damage amplifiers tied to weird spots, they’re anything but, they’re just being used to set-up DPS windows.
This is specially prevalent with Thrill of the Fight, granting you, after this week changes, yet another DPS window, but after you’ve used both enhancements and thus the ‘high’ of the tree is over.
Havoc already plays around 40 seconds DPS windows with Essence Break, and those are not going to go away. We have a very tight setup combo that is incredibly hard to modify. Adding DPS windows through Aldrachi will naturally make us want to have them up for this combo. Aldrachi doesn’t have an identity other than “ramp for the burst window”.
With this week changes, I believe it is ideal to get a RG charge, get both Thrill of the Fight and Reaver’s Mark going and then do your actual opener/Essence break combo. The way of accomplishing this currently is by holding 4-5 seconds doing nothing after doing RG → BDance on the opener, waiting for BDance CD to come back. When the CD is ready you cast Chaos Strike and proceed with the normal opener.
This feels very backwards to me. These bonuses should play in our burst, increasing it or augmenting it in some way, not being DPS set-up windows.
What’s the point of granting us DPS windows during the combo or after it? These play into nothing. I’d honestly suggest that, if you want to add a damage amplifier, you tie it to RG, so the rest of the enhancement/combo skills are buffed, and Havoc can play the normal Essence Break windows without disruption, as RG is an oGCD skill.
On the other hand, I believe we’re not seeing the whole picture. Havoc now has access to a 60% (!!) damage amplifier window. This is stronger than anything the whole base tree has to offer.
So, to summarize:
Thank you very much.
EDIT: Feedback after raid testing. Havoc really needs a way to gather the souls other than walking over them. It’s incredibly easy to miss them entirely.
On Aldrachi Reaver:
This hero tree feels like it adds cognitive load to one of the already more complex specs in the game, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Setting up for essence break combos feels a little awkward since you need to blade dance a few gcds in advance to get a 30% Reavers Mark and the 30% Thrill of the Fight damage buff for your Essence Break combo while also having Death Sweep ready in time. If this was the only complaint, I don’t think it would be that bad and players would get used to it with practice.
The thing that makes this hero tree feel particularly bad in my opinion is that souls are the primary avenue to proccing Reaver’s Glaive. Souls on havoc at least are pretty RNG, with the main source being Demonic Appetite procs. This, combined with souls being a little hard to see visually and cumbersome to pick up off the ground, makes for a system that feels pretty bad. This could be ameliorated somewhat by having Art of the Glaive be its own proc seperate from soul consumption or potentialy tied to something else like fury spent or casts of a spell like Blade Dance or Throw Glaive (building toward a big moment of damage). The change recently allowing The Hunt to proc Reaver’s Glaive did a lot to help with this in the opener, and more deterministic proccing in this vein would be appreciated.
EDIT: Additionally, souls feel REALLY bad if you have to move during the opener and souls get left behind - it doesn’t really feel right to go and get them and lose uptime but it also feels really bad to lose out on several aspect of the glaive stacks.
A couple thoughts on Aldrachi after raid testing:
I like the big payoff, and this tree is playable on a target dummy. But Aldrachi will be frustrating in a raid environment while souls remain the trigger for Reaver’s Glaive.
Hi, I’m mainly a Havoc player, so my post will be just about Havoc.
Felscarred Feels fine to play. It feels lackluster and mainly ‘passive’ outside of Student of Suffering adding anything to the class. Which is fine, but without visual appeal Fel Scarred is bland. Eye Beam, Immolation Aura, and Sigil of Flame getting these updated enhanced versions but having the same visual is boring. It promotes Cycle of Hatred which I’m not a fan of, as it de-syncs our Eyebeam and Essence Break combo. I would like for Cycle of Hatred, if it’s going to stay, get the Anger Management treatment and also reduce the cooldown of Essence Break. But I also don’t know what could be done to not promote Cycle of Hatred for the Heroic Talents.
Aldrachi is a whole mess of problems. The recent change was to help alleviate a major pain which is not having Reaver’s Glaive at the beginning of an encounter/opener. Which is a success but the new thrill of the Hunt 30% Damage Buff and other changes has made Havoc a lot more complex, holding off our Thrill of the Hunt buff so we can get our blade dance/death sweep back and line it up with the rest of our combo.
Then there’s Souls being a resource for Havoc to generate a Reaver’s Glaive. It’s clunky and RNG base, regardless if we get a higher chance or not, it’s still based on one Ability to generate it outside of using our Sigils. The Sigils also feel bad to use, as their main purpose is to just generate souls when they’re off cooldown. Those souls are also difficult to see during a fight and even if we do more than 6 souls banked we don’t automatically generate a Reaver’s Glaive, after casting Reaver’s Glaive, until we generate and consume another soul. Havoc does not play well with Souls cause, unsurprisingly, we don’t use Souls outside of it being a healing bonus and making something the Spec doesn’t play around to play around it feels really really bad.
Altogether, Aldrachi Reaver feels just awful to play. Hunting down Souls to consume, not having it up automatically, a much more complex rotation and opener. I just think the Hero Talent needs to be reworked. Maybe lean into using Essence Break? It’s our already built in Damage Amp.
This next part is about Throw Glaives. I actually enjoy the Throw Glaive gameplay of S1 M+ build and S3/S4 IMO is peak gameplay of Havoc this expansion. But right now both the Heroic Talents do not promote or care about Throw Glaives. This is also doubled down with the Tier Set. That’s fine, one season playing around our Tier Set isn’t a problem but S2 and S3 with none of our Heroic Talents wanting to play with Throw Glaives, Havoc will have 4 of our talents just dead the whole expansion.
Aldrachi Reaver works against Throw Glaive. None of the important Throw Glaive talents work with Reaver’s Glaive, and once you have Reaver’s Glaive, holding onto it for your combo means you can’t use throw glaive. Fel Scarred has one talent that gives it Throw Glaive some damage but why would you press that when you can press Chaos Strike that also gains the same damage but it also procs Cycle of Hatred so you can get into Demonic sooner so you can demon surge more.
Our current Tier Set for S3/S4 for Dragonflight is honestly very fun and very impactful in terms of Demon Hunter gameplay. I wish it would come back, but I understand that it basically deletes Throw Glaive as a button to press. It also made The Hunt worth press, and right now The Hunt is only good to press as a Reaver’s Glaive generator, but with the Tier Set, the Damage was doubled and the Cooldown was Halved. It felt good to see one of our Class Capstones actually being a large part of our damage. Right now Aldrachi Reaver picks two of them, The Hunt and Sigil of Spit, just to be a generator for the Heroic Talent.
TL;DR
Fel Scarred needs a visual and audio to play and maybe something else to get away from Cycle of Hatred or be more neutral towards it instead of promoting it.
Aldrachi is just so frustratingly awful to play with and really needs a rework.
Throw Glaive talents are unsupported and just might as well be deleted with our current Heroic Talents.
Dragonflight S3 tier is amazing for Havoc.
VENGEANCE FEEDBACK!
The spec is wholly unchanged from Dragonflight, with all of its strengths and weaknesses intact, so nothing to report on there.
ALDRACHI REAVER
This hero spec doesn’t FEEL like anything. I can occasionally push my Throw Glaive button and it does something different. As far as I can tell there are no big effects for Reaver’s Glaive - maybe the color changes? It’s so fast it’s hard to tell that close to the target. There is no fantasy here.
Art of the Glaive - 40 fragments feels like a lot in play but at least I know I can generate them consistently and they get automatically scooped up by my abilities. It just means every 8 Spirit Bombs or the equivalent in Soul Cleaves gives me the enhanced glaive. I guess this is ok but it really doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything.
Intent Pursuit - Right now, using The Hunt bugs Art of the Glaive. It doesn’t give Reaver’s Glaive as advertised and it also doesn’t give you Reaver’s Glaive after consuming 40 fragments. The Throw Glaive button lights up like something has happened, but it doesn’t change, and the soul fragment counter will just keep stacking up well past 40. One day I might be bored enough to see how high it will go.
Army Unto Oneself - The 10% DR on Felblade is nice. Combined with Unhindered Assault on the node before it and the refreshes it gets from Shear/Fracture you can use it to generate Fury as needed and still have that 10% basically any time you need it.
Wounded Quarry - Shattering additional souls is nice, helps get to the next Reaver’s Glaive quicker, particularly with the attack speed buff from Thrill of the Fight.
Warblade’s Hunger - This does not appear to do anything that I can tell. In theory it’s a pretty significant boost to damage. According to the in-game Combat Log tab there is nothing labeled Warblade’s Hunger and Fracture is doing the same damage.
Thrill of the Fight - 30% additional healing will be nice to play around for survivability assuming it applies to all healing (soul fragments, Soul Cleave, Fel Devastation, etc). Damage buff nice too, never going to complain about that.
FEL-SCARRED
Again, this hero tree doesn’t FEEL like anything. I was really hoping for some sort of cool new effect on Metamorphosis, Demon Spikes, or just some sort of change to the character (like glowing green scars) in general. Something to really sell the fantasy of being scarred with Fel energy. It’s all exactly the same as it was before.
Demonsurge - Nothing exciting, but another automatic source of AoE damage is nice to have in the toolkit, even if its most regular trigger is already a big AoE. Also, it seems pretty obvious to long-time players that the Demonic talent is “necessary” for this hero spec, and it’s hard to imagine anyone playing without it, but you don’t get Demonsurge after Fel Devastation if you don’t have Demonic. New players might miss that.
Pursuit of Angriness - I love this name. It’s so dumb. Please don’t change it.
Burning Blades - It’s an extra passive source of healing with the Charred Warblades talent. The damage is low, which means the healing is low, but it’s free so I’m not complaining.
Untethered Fury - More Fury = More Better. Feels good to fill up the Fury bar, hit Fel Devastation, and then dump all of that Fury in enhanced demon form abilities. Wouldn’t be possible without this talent.
Violent Transformation - This effectively turns Metamorphosis into a DPS CD. I’m sure that’s fine, but considering Fiery Brand is already kind of a DPS CD with the Fiery Demise talent it makes us have to choose between “Do damage now” and “Wait until I need to survive a big hit and then do damage”. This just really highlights the lack of a Survival Instincts/Shield Wall/Icebound Fortitude type defensive CD in the Demon Hunter’s toolkit.
Student of Suffering - I wish it lasted as long as the Sigil of Flame that applied it did. That would give some gameplay between it and the Charred Flesh talent.
Enduring Torment/Monster Rising - Thematically these add the most hero spec flavor because they bring the demon benefits to your non-demon form. I just wish there was some sort of representation of such on the character.
Demonic Intensity - This doubles down on using Metamorphosis as a DPS CD. You can now get 5 Demonsurges and each one does 10% more damage than the previous so it encourages holding all of your abilities and then blowing them in Meta. Again I’m sure this will be fine, but it just seems a little odd for both of our defensive CDs to have such high DPS upside when we have nothing else that’s purely defensive.
OVERALL
Vengeance Demon Hunter looks and feels exactly the same as it does in Dragonflight, which is ok I suppose because I like how it looks and feels in Dragonflight, I was just hoping for more with a system called Hero Talents. Mountain Thane gets lightning, Colossus gets bigger, Oracle has glowing golden eyes, Voidweaver is just awesome all the way around. Sunfury mages get their phoenix and orbs and the Farseer shaman gets its ancestors. Even the hunters, silly as theirs might be, get extra effects (I particularly like the Sentinel owl that comes and drops meteors on the target). Vengeance gets nothing. Really kinda disappointed in that.
Gameplay wise, it’s fine. If you like Vengeance in DF, you’ll like it here because it really isn’t any different. You do get to make a choice with Aldrachi Reaver whether to get the 15% damage increase with Fracture and then double the damage from the Soul Cleave enhancement or do Soul Cleave first and then get 30% increased damage from the Fracture enhancement. But that’s about it, everything else plays pretty much the same.
In summary, let us talent Blur. I just want a “reduce all damage taken by x%” button. Increase the CD if you have to (you probably would). That would make me happy.
Aldrachi concerns This will be a bit of an essay, my apologies, thoughts after extensive testing for raid purposes/ will not include raid specific issue’s
Coming out of s3/4 Havoc, I’ve got to admit this feels like a massive step backwards for us in terms of ST raid design. Coming from being relatively strong, consistent and well-rounded in the DF raids with our tier set and mini re-work, this iteration of Aldrachi is concerning to say the least. The punishment for dealing with things like raid mechanics, especially at or around our meta windows is going to be quite rough.
(I will be mentioning tuning stuff in here, I understand that the tuning number’s will change but the premise of my concern’s stand no matter what the numbers say we do at the current moment in time, tomorrow they could come in and nerf everything but the way this hero talent tree stacks buffs and incentivizes manipulation of said buff’s is where I see a negative gameplay loop happening"
as it stands currently this hero talent tree is going to take a class with a fun but real skill gap in terms of movement, amongst other things, and just overload it with complications that even us as long term and experienced havoc players are going to struggle to juggle. My initial fear is the max potential damage our aldrachi opener will be, given meta talent options, is going to be incredibly high comparatively to alternative builds or hero talent’s, as well as very hard to achieve, this is going to cause our dmg ceiling to be very high, which will end up with getting the whole class tuned around it… problem is most “regular” players won’t be able to achieve it reliably because of how complex our buff management will be, personally as an highly experienced Havoc with hours and hours on a training dummy in beta I’m able to get crits on a single Deathsweep final slash in the realm of 5-6ish mill when executed perfectly with some luck(crit), that crit chance will get better with gear and stats coming into the season, and while I find this rewarding, the fact it won’t be consistent will become an issue when tuning is looked at weeks into the tier, I don’t want this to be seen as “we do too much dmg” or " the class is too hard" I think the premise of how we get our big ST dmg through an exact build is to binary and restrictive, and so far it doesn’t seem like there is other competitive alternatives, as someone who has coached / helped newer players and less experienced Havoc’s in the past this is going to only really hurt the average player. I believe as it stands now havoc has to many highly impactful - short/medium term damage buffs which include inertia, initiative, Thrill of the fight, art of the glaive, incisive blade, chaos theory, essence break,etc… all of these buffs with the movement the class does ( based on the meta talents which require movement) is going to cause those that are mechanically and mentally capable to manipulate the buffs to the point where it will be leaps and bounds better than anyone doing anything else on the class in terms of ST and likely 2-3 target cleave (including playing the alternative hero talent Fel Scared). This has always been the case in all classes, of course, but this floor-ceiling range is going to likely dramatically stretch as the lows increase and the highs increase. Example: right now in current DF it is perfectly viable to take a slight damage loss and play a non-high movement based build in most encounters, which has certainly helped many players find spots on AOTC all the way to CE raid teams as a havoc. I am concerned with this possibility because as we have seen in the past, classes will be tuned and adjusted based on the max potential, and if that max potential is far higher than the median average than its just going to make the class feel under tuned for the mass of the playerbase
I think most of us higher end CE-HoF havoc’s will figure this new build out relatively quickly and it will just eventually become exhausting to play in raid, and the punishment of having our buff sequence broken or slowed down due to natural raid mechanics amongst other situations will be very punishing and honestly just aggravating. Based on my testing personally our current opener and realistically every meta window will likely end up being 17-20 abilities (excluding trinkets,pots,etc… ) this rotation will have to be done in perfect sequence with no interruptions in order to get what is able to effectively be max output as it stands now, throw in the movement that we do naturally and even some proc chances, and this window which is now closer to every 2:30 seconds due to stuff needing to line up, is going to be very important and where a large source of our burst dmg comes from. Havoc has always been a punishing class when things are interrupted, s2 cycle build, current inertia meta window’s, it all sucked when we have to break from the boss or hold abilities to wait for new phase for a dmg window, and that’s a true statement for all melee, and also is a large part of where player skill comes into play, but with Aldrachi this loss of dmg is amped significantly, especially if an interruption happens in the middle of a dmg window, which regardless of the real dmg loss, is just going to plainly feel like crap.
I personally think that the flaws of Aldrachi are much deeper than a tuning issue, as a class that depends on very quick paced dmg buffs, and given how quick the windows are, specifically with Essb, I’m not sure exactly how to make this hero talent tree more user friendly and to lean off burst windows where our sole objective is to make 6 or more buffs line up to a 4 or 5 second window, it currently feels like you have to be preparing for your next Essb window at all times, holding abilities, and trying to think very far ahead into an encounter to determine where things need to be used and the ramifications of sending/using micro CD’s. A big thing I think that there needs to be is ways for havoc to get soul’s other than running in circles around a boss, maybe tie it into fel blade, or TG, or just passively.
I just wanted to pop in here and give some feedback after participating in M+ and raid testing over the past few days as a Havoc Demon Hunter
Fel Scarred
feels fine, has enough to change the rotation to where it’s not exactly the same, but is a bit boring in my opinion, some extra visuals would REALLY go a long way here
Aldrachi
The recent changes to Aldrachi where the hunt generates a charge of glaive (perfect, love it, fixed one of the bigger issues) and the bottom buff being changed to a 30% all buff for 10s instead of 30% to next ability fixed some issues, however, they also opened up a LARGE can of worms
essentially now Aldrachi exists in a space that is adding significant complexity to a spec that is already amongst the more complex specs in the game, requiring you to not only overlap your current Essence Break rotation as you do on live, but to now interplay that with the glaive, requiring a setup roughly 8 seconds before each essence break. The opener itself is now a roughly 19-20 button opener that will be repeated every 2 minutes. The 30% damage amp combined with the 30% reavers mark amp are just so spec warpingly powerful that it absolutely changes what you are doing in such a complex way to where the cognitive load on the spec is now much too high, especially with boss mechanics. Combine that with the RNG generation of souls, how difficult they are to see, the fact havoc cannot track them with a WA the same way venge can, and the fact that they spawn very far and we have no way of consuming them like vengeance, leads to a frustrating play pattern. My suggested minor changes without reworking the tree:
Give some kind of soul attraction/consumption effect in the tree, on a low cooldown rotational button we use often (fel rush/Chaos strike/Fel blade). This will allow the collection of souls that spawn far/in dangerous areas, or that are just invisible in the flow of combat. Especially since most of Havoc’s soul generation is RNG from chaos strike or the talent tree, this WILL ease a lot of frustration
Have thrill of the fight happen once you USE Reaver’s glaive, not after. This will eliminate most of the weird gameplay where you use the glaive, and then wait 5-8 seconds for blade dance to come off CD again. Blade dance and Deathsweep are also some of our strongest abilities, and one’s we really want to amp.
Remove Reaver’s mark, replace it with a large single target hit from chaos strike. This can be its own damage source similar to art of the glaive. The Damage amp from chaos strike is problematic, especially with thrill of the fight. Doing your rotation incorrectly to where you chaos strike first leads to just dropping 50% of your damage amp, and even using Art of the glaive in cleave in raid feels bad since you miss so much extra damage to the boss. By having it be a large single target hit, you retain the prio/ST focus spender, while also allowing more opportunity for Art of the glaive cleave to be used. This also allows the tree to better represent itself in logs/on meters, and could even add more opportunities for Visual effects!
Please add more visuals to both this tree and fel-scarred. Compared to essentially almost every other hero tree in the game, both demon hunter trees are basically the same as live.
Again, these are what i believe will ease a lot of the cognitive load that goes into this hero tree, while retaining the same idea and theming of gameplay with glaive combos and souls.
I’m still gathering my thoughts for a feedback post on Demon Hunter as a whole in The War Within, but have a list of bugs I’d like to report first. Some of these were already mentioned by a couple of people here, so thank you to those who reported them.
All of these have been confirmed to still be active as of 11.0.0.55120:
For the vengeance demon hunter fourset, we get a buff called Soulfuse that increases the dmg of our next fel devastation. Soulfuse lasts for 15 seconds and is refreshed everytime you spend more souls. My problem is that 15 seconds feels a bit tight. I could see myself dropping my soulfuse stacks between pulls if there is a heavy amount of travel time (like city of the threads). Could you look into increasing the duration of the soulfuse buff?
Hi, friendly neighborhood as— Potspoon here,
I did not want to do this but here we are. I am not here to: tip toe around the feelings of others, or sugar-coat anything. I do not want to be friends with the developers or need employment from blizzard to make myself feel better about my life. I am here to give concise and critical feedback, straight to the point.
I have played WoW since the beginning: from a clicking noob to a key bound no lifer. Majority of my experience in WoW has been in high end raiding and dungeons/M+; while most recently dabbling in PvP/Arena semi-seriously for the last couple of expansions.
Majority of my feedback, if not all, will be centered around Aldrachi. All the issues I will be mentioning, that others may have already mentioned, were all glaringly noticeable in PvP while others were waiting for r PvE mobs with enough “scaled” HP to test things out on.
Also, for the life of me, I cannot understand why you would invite ONE person to test and provide Demon Hunter feedback from the start of Alpha. I noticed that there was significantly more Caster whin—testers for some strange reason just based on the amount of feedback some classes provide compared others like Demon Hunters. This is totally unfair as these are always the classes that seem to get books upon books of Patch notes and, what seems like, reworks every Patch/Build.
The squeaky wheel gets greased, right?
The recent changes made to Aldrachi were not even thought to be mentioned in last update? We had to find out from WoWHead and word of mouth of the ONE guy you invited to Alpha?
This is complete disrespect and shows why some of us Demon Hunter players believe we are purposely being ignored.
On to the feedback:
– The base damage feels incredibly weak as all the power comes only from the Reaver’s Glaive combo maintaining the Thrill of the Fight and Reaver’s Mark. Outside of this the damage is literally nothing. I understand this could all potentially be a tuning issue but watching some classes spam 1 button and topping meters – doing more damage than my Essence Break + Death Sweep combo – while I am trying to calculate The Reimann Hypothesis to get my damage rotation going –It is extremely difficult to keep my Inner Demon from bursting out and just cursing at everyone.
– S3/S4 DF 2p should 100% come back as some sort of talent as half of our Havoc spec tree is dead on arrival. Playing with all Glaive talents (which I have been playing around with) feels incredibly counterintuitive to TWW 4p (I am extremely in love with) which incentives spamming Chaos Strike/Annihilation to proc your Blade Dance/Death Sweep resets (Big moments, gone but never forgotten).
On the PvP side, it is frustrating trying to keep our slow on someone or having no DoT damage rolling on them while being kited, taking DoT damage myself. If I have a Reaver’s Glaive proc waiting to be sent, there is no way I can slow them without wasting it and even if I do press it, it does nothing a normal glaive ability does as well.
What kind of hero am I?
– Souls: Great idea, poor execution. 6 is a lot to start performing a rotation. The required souls to get Reaver’s going should be reduced to 4 or at least 5 – this way my opener is guaranteed with: Soul Sigils + Sigil of Spite + Sigil of Flame.
It seems Aldrachi may have been specifically engineered for Vengeance as anyone who tested this – for Havoc – would notice the glairing issue of not having a guaranteed way to absorb/consume souls laying around.
My suggestion? Lean into the theme of Souls and give Havoc Soul Bomb (thanks Miho from Fel Hammer). Solves an issue without having to code/create something new while providing us some extra damage and a, potential, on-demand heal.
– The Hunt: the damage of this ability, for a 1.5-minute cooldown, is just sad. The initial hit needs a significant buff , especially with the recent change of having The Hunt provide a Reaver’s glaive charge at the loss of cooldown reduction of the ability (which I already miss).
Currently for Havoc, Aldrachi Reaver requires a tedious rotation to “optimize” the short buffs granted from the Aldrachi Reaver tree and from the Havoc Spec tree. Stuff like Thrill of the Fight, Inertia, Reaver’s Mark and Essence Break. We have to perform what we’ve been calling the “Delayed” opener. Where you need to use Reaver’s Glaive, Use the Blade Dance enhancement FIRST then Chaos Strike to apply the 30% Reaver’s Mark from the Chaos Strike enhancement. While spec’d into Essence Break, Blade Dancing before using Essence Break then sitting around for a couple globals feels VERY bad.
Make Reaver’s Glaive itself also Apply a 30% Reaver’s Mark when it hits 1 target. Make it apply a 15% Reaver’s Mark when it hits multiple targets and have it also grant both Thrill of the Fight Buffs instead of Thrill of the Fight being applied after consuming both enhancements. This allows us to use The Hunt, Reaver’s Glaive and get straight into our opening rotation without waiting around for Blade Dance to come off cooldown.
-Chaos Strike has now lost it’s enhancement though with this change, so I suggest getting rid of Incisive blade and making Incisive Blade the Chaos Strike enhancement. Opening up the Incisive Blade node which is very bland at the moment.
Reaver’s Glaive itself currently doesn’t do a whole lot besides grant the Chaos Strike and Blade Dance enhancement buffs. It also feels like it has little benefit in Multi-Target situations but in Single Target it’s great, so with this change it’s also an impactful button to press.
SIDE NOT BUT REALLY STRONG FEELING SIDE NOTE.
Managing Soul Fragments as a Havoc Demon Hunter is very bad. We lack control of generating Soul Fragments unlike Vengeance Demon Hunter and we lack control of consuming the Soul Fragments unlike Vengeance Demon Hunter.
Grant stacks to Art of the Glaive from generating Soul Fragments rather then consuming them.
Give one of Havoc’s spells the ability to consume souls on use like Soul Cleave and Spirit Bomb for Vengeance. Something simple like Chaos Strike.
Change Soul Fragments to Fury spent for Havoc Demon Hunter. I personally like the idea of Fury spent because it adds some “skill based” aspect to playing the Hero talent tree to its capacity rather then random Soul Fragments procs for Havoc Demon Hunter.
PS: On live a 4% PvP damage nerf went through and it’s also effecting PvE. Please fix.
Thanks for reading. 
Hello! I’ve been maining Havoc Demon Hunter since 2021 and it’s pretty much been the only spec that I’ve played since Castle Nathria/Sanctum. I don’t think I’ve (ever) had posted any feedback on the forums but I felt like it was important to give feedback since there are some glaring issues I’ve noticed and many other players have noticed on an otherwise fun and interesting design on the hero talents. I’m going to give feedback to the most important thing 1 thing for each hero talents I feel needs to get fixed/tuned on Aldrachi and Fel-scarred that many other players I’ve talked to agreed with before this hits live.
HAVOC ALDRACHI REAVER FEEDBACK:
I think for starters on paper/testing on a dummy Aldrachi Reaver works pretty well. I think on bosses currently it has a 19~22 button opener (this is still being optimized) which is pretty hard and complex for average and even for CE players and it’s on the borderline of being too much, but that’s okay! With a bit of practice I think anyone can learn and the pay off feels great (tuning is off though compared to other specs to do WAY less set up and do more damage but at least I think the spec can be a lot more bearable to play at minimum).
In reality on bosses it’s the most frustrating things in the world when you’re already performing probably the hardest opener of the patch but you’re heavily restricted by souls and how they function and you’re doing less damage than other specs with way less set up on top of that. There already is enough friction between the set up with Reavers glaive, Inertia, and Essence break and how long it takes and having to run around trying to pick up souls feels terrible and ruins the immersion and class fantasy of skillful and precise glaive work/ability hits.
Solution:
Bake it into a talent so you automatically pick up souls! I think it’s a really good quality of life option that improves the gameplay a ton and it has almost 0 down sides. THIS WON’T EFFECT TUNING TOO MUCH BUT WILL IMPROVE QUALITY OF LIFE! The rotation is still going to be very difficulty, it just reduces the frustration and mental load of doing your rotation while dodging mechanics and trying to collect souls. As it stands right now Army Onto Oneself is going to be the default options because 10% DR feels great planned or unplanned, so incorruptible spirit could be a good option in the hero talents to have a meaningful option that creates enough friction where you’re not default taking one talent over the other. Demonic appetite is also another good option to bake an auto pick up soul talent that won’t interfere with how Vengeance plays.
HAVOC FEL-SCARRED FEEDBACK:
Currently I think right now as a hero talent it is very well made. It’s a little boring, but also it’s difficult to make hero talents for Havoc because the fantasy and the playstyle is everything currently that I think every havoc player can confidently say they already enjoy so I think it’s a well made tree. I think the issue Fel-scarred has is the way it interacts with other talents specifically AFI. Currently AFI (a fire inside) feels great to get bonus procs, but on beta during your rotation if you manage to get 2 resets of AFI, you are pretty much requires to press Metamorphosis and waste your free procs that you got out of the talent, and on top of that you don’t have any Fel Rush charges to be able to use your empowered immolation auras! It feels similar to Fodder to the flame in season 1 and 2 of Dragonflight where you’re at the mercy of getting good procs at specific timings and even though it feels great to get those procs at optimal times, it feels way worse to get those procs at terrible time.
Solution:
Make fel rush reset with Metamorphosis! This could be easily baked into violent transformation. This also won’t complicate the difficulty of this spec since you can kind of get away with pressing all of the glowing buttons, but also it lessens frustration with not being able to use immolation aura/fel-rush procs after your opener and this raises the well needed damage Fel-scarred needs. It doesn’t entirely fix the tuning issue it has currently compared to Aldrachi reaver and this hero tree still probably needs help tuning wise, but this is a great quality of life and damage buff that the hero talents need.
Thanks for reading! I probably yapped quite a bit but I hope some of these issues can be fixed before live. I think this will make the hero talents a lot more enjoyable for veteran and new players! Thanks for developing havoc! You guys are doing great!
PS: PLEASE ADD VISUALS TO FEL-SCARRED PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BLIZZARD PLEAAAAAAASE
Aldrachi is OVER the TOP and completely over complicated for a spec that went from very gamer friendly to one of the most complexe.
Havoc has to contend with movement to dps and contend with boss movement and abities, add to that a strict rotation to take care of dps and abilities that can desync and here we are staring at a hero talent that is not only unappealing but add an extraodinary layer of complexicity that is frankly off puttting.
Depth should not mean complexicity necessarily which is aldrachi. I wont go into the “hero” design not feeling at all heroic lore wise… come on glaives!?
I primarily focused on testing tanks this weekend during the m+ testing. A few observations on the Vengeance options thus far:
Alrachi feels fairly clunky at this stage in the beta. It’s a proc triggered on a skill we typically try to avoid using rotationally, but that same button is also one of our only tools for picking up targets at range. It feels bad to end up with a proc and then end up throwing on some random mob while trying to gather.
Fel-Scarred feels completely invisible. There are obviously a few enhancements to the overall kit with this tree, and it feels like it is doing something numerically speaking, but the feedback to the player that anything is happening is pretty low. It feels effectively almost exactly like playing Veng on the live servers today (which is obviously very strong). Overall, it seems like the power level of this spec is fine, but the visual/audio clues that you’ve done something could be enhanced.
The Double-Sigil elephant in the room is that Vengeance will continue to be the unquestioned king of all things dungeon related as long as they have access to 2x silence, misery and chains sigils. The only version of this that doesn’t continue to see them dominate the landscape is if their survival gets reduced to un-fun levels. While I understand that it is fun to have so many tools available, it is extremely unhealthy for the game as a whole to allow Vengeance to be so far out of whack compared to every other spec in the game.
Easiest solution would be make utility such as chains misery silence as 1x and the damaging sigils remain as 2. Otherwise definitely will need to take away from survivablity or damage and that wont be fun
its hard to give proper feedback with so much bugs plaguing vengeance, i hope we see alot of these bugs resolved so we can give proper feedback around the gameplaye feel
until then i only have to say, that i really like how f elscarred is and frankly the only thing it needs t o make it perfect is more engaging visuals
Havoc:
The thing that I have been questioning the longest is: why does Cycle Of Hatred not effect Essence Break as well?
We are almost always sitting on one waiting for the other. So why not just add it to CoH anfld fix the desync issue that majority of Demon Hunters complain about?
My feedback is going to be very simple. Playing Havoc with Aldrachi Reaver made rotations go from bad to worse. Most everything, including throw glaive now requires resources I don’t have at the beginning of combat. Havoc by itself has always been clunky, but adding Aldrachi Reaver just makes it unplayable.
To anyone that doubted me: ROFL.
At this point it just seems like the havoc/dh team does not care and is pretty much murdering the spec.
Was the budget cut cause we’re blind and they thought we wouldn’t notice?