[Feedback] Don't change the havoc tier bonus - change Cycle of Hatred

The new tier set for havoc is quite interesting, but unfortunately has several issues with the optimal build for pure ST havoc going into 9.2. For completeness, below are the current set bonuses:

  • 2P: Increases Blade Dance and Death Sweep damage by 20%.
  • 4P: Every fifth Blade Dance or Death Sweep instantly refunds its own cooldown and cost. Casting this empowered Blade Dance or Death Sweep has a 15% chance to instantly refund its own cooldown and cost.

The goal of these tier bonuses is clear: press blade dance more, and make those presses feel more impactful, in all situations. This is a good playstyle change to aspire for. Unfortunately, as is, these bonuses are wasted in any single target build that uses Cycle of Hatred, which strongly encourages spending every last drop of fury into chaos strike for eye beam CDR. This problem is exacerbated by the Venthyr legendary, Agony Gaze (stated below)

  • Sinful Brand deals 10% increased damage and Eye Beam (Havoc) damage increases the duration of Sinful Brand by 0.75 sec.

This legendary puts even more emphasis onto getting Eyebeam CDR, by not only tying eyebeam damage/meta uptime to it, but also the possibility of a huge amount of additional sinful brand damage. This playstyle is actually kind of an interesting take on cycle of hatred imo, but presently it has 0 synergy with the proposed tier sets. However, I actually don’t think the tier sets are the issue here! I think the issue is that cycle of hatred, which shares a row with 2 talents that buff blade dance in some way, has 0 interaction with blade dance, which will always keep the button out of any cycle single target rotation.

As such, I think the easiest solution, by far, is to simply change cycle of hatred to interact with blade dance. This both fixes the synergy issues going into 9.2, and actually makes blade dance a button you want to press in ST regardless of tier sets. Presently, cycle of hatred reads:

  • OLD When Chaos Strike refunds Fury, it also reduces the cooldown of Eye Beam by 3 sec.

I think the correct change is to make cycle instead:

  • NEW When Chaos Strike refunds Fury, or you cast Blade Dance, reduce the cooldown of Eye Beam by 2 sec.

The change from 3 to 2 seconds of CDR makes sure that this is not a buff to Cycle. However, now Blade Dance (which costs 35 fury), is an awfully attractive button to press if you’re interested in Eye Beam CDR - as it guarantees 2 seconds of eye beam CDR, at the cost of some ST damage versus a Chaos Strike cast. Whatsmore, this change would smooth out the CDR from cycle, making the talent feel a lot less volatile than it currently does, by effectively guaranteeing some procs.

I want to stress that the change to 2 seconds is not really that important - the amount of CDR can be nerfed to whatever is required to make this not a buff to the talent.

TLDR: The proposed change to cycle would smooth out gameplay, make blade dance an attractive button to press in ST, and ensure that the current tier set could go live and actually have synergy with the dominant ST havoc build in 9.2. Thanks!

4 Likes

I personally think Trail of Ruin should be made baseline and Cycle of Hatred should take its place on the level 30 talent row, that way it doesn’t compete with First Blood. Then they could come up with a new talent for the level 40 talent row (preferably something that isn’t passive).

2 Likes

I personally think Trail of Ruin should be made baseline and Cycle of Hatred should take its place on the level 30 talent row, that way it doesn’t compete with First Blood. Then they could come up with a new talent for the level 40 talent row (preferably something that isn’t passive).

Yeah something like this would be interesting. I think the big thing is that any change really should not be a buff to havoc (at least not a major buff), because overall the spec is balanced well, just not necessarily designed well. The change in the OP would not be a buff to havoc, it would just make the spec more coherent.

While reworking the talent altogether is probably a fine idea, I’m not entirely convinced that this is something that would realistically happen. It’s not unheard of, but talent reworks mid-expansion generally don’t happen.

A potentially good alternate solution is to change Blazing Slaughter to have defined synergy with Burning Wound. Something as simple as;

Casting The Hunt grants you Blazing Slaughter, empowering your next Immolation Aura to do 100% more damage

…could alleviate all of the issues surrounding Blade Dance builds, as Night Fae could very much begin to compete with Venthyr.

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While reworking the talent altogether is probably a fine idea, I’m not entirely convinced that this is something that would realistically happen. It’s not unheard of, but talent reworks mid-expansion generally don’t happen.

I generally agree - but then remember what they did with talents like affliction warlocks level 45 row and stellar drift going into 9.1. These are likely the exception rather than the rule, but it does feel like the simplest issue to many problems is to tweak cycle of hatred.

The change you proposed to blazing slaughter is interesting - I would definitely prefer that to current blazing slaughter.

There are always several problems when they decide to give us blade dance synergy as a power increase. The biggest, and most funadamental, is that blade dance is not a baseline ability of havoc demon hunter.

It looks like a baseline ability, since you do, in fact, learn it as a baseline ability for specing havoc, but it’s literally so garbage that you never press it unless you spec into first blood. So blade dance might as well not exist as a baseline ability with how weak it is now, and you just spec into the first blood buffed version as a talent choice, that’s how garbage blade dance is at a baseline. The DH community has been saying for literally years how the ability is very unattractive at a baseline, and really needs to be buffed to be more in line with the first blood version to open up design space for set bonuses and other forms of borrowed power like this, but alas the button still remains absolute trash.

But an even bigger problem with these bonuses, beyond just forcing you into a specific talent build which is never good design, is how absurdly weak they are.

With a first blood build, running the dancing with fate conduit, you’re lucky if blade dance/death sweep are 15-20% of your damage. Even at 20% of your damage, that means the 2pc is a 4% damage increase, and the 4pc is somewhere around 3%.

That’s a pathetic 7% dps increase in the BEST CASE SCENARIO, And it forces you to play a talent that is generally weak to outright awful in most non-single target scenarios, AND in single target you’d just be playing venthyr since you can covenant swap now.

As for the proposed change, gutting cycle of hatred into some weird abomination that forces you to press an awful button just to get a guaranteed 2 seconds off your next eye beam would do absolutely nothing except ruin the talent. You still wouldn’t press blade dance if specced into cycle of hatred, even if it was a guaranteed 2 seconds off, you just wouldn’t play cycle of hatred at all. Blade dance literally does less than half the single target damage for more fury than chaos strike(on average, chaos strike with the 40% chance to cost half as much averages 32 fury, blade dance is 35).

I’m all for moving cycle to a different row, or making it less RNG based by just basing it off fury spent rather than a proc chance on a specific ability, but trying to entice you to press non-first-blood specced blade dance is never going to work unless the ability is buffed significantly. It’s just THAT BAD.

Fixed that for you. :slight_smile:

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we need that for pvp

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This is shadowed heavily by the frost SoD set; reason being is because with this build you are no longer ST, you are full on AoE, So you can stack Crit and get GTs off and Blade Dance, not to mention Eye Beam which auto crits. You can easily get to 20 to 30k blasts off Winds of Winter with this build, with crits ranging 40 to 60k, all dependant on how much crit you have and how many crits you got.

I think the easiest solution to correct DH and to remove the disconnect between ST/AoE builds (regardless of which legendary is being used) is to make First Blood baseline. Heck, you could make Cycle of Hatred baseline inatead of Firat Blood as well and it would drastically change viable builds. But the proposed Cycle change would work to in the regards to both Chaos Strike and Blade dance. With the change to include BD/DS we can guarantee approximately 8-12 secs of CDR and with still keeping CS’s RNG proc. As that change stands is ties them together, because as you’ve stated, blade dance (even if First blood is baseline) does not synergize with ST Cycle/Agony. I do like being able to press blade dance on CD and thus Im excited for the modifier to it, but I feel like this “tier bonus” really misses the mark of what previous tier sets have done for the classes.

4-set bonus idea: give Eye Beam a % chance per hit to apply Essence Break for 4 seconds to targets hit

Oh that would be interesting, as essence break has a damage bonus for BD/DS :slight_smile: