I keep reading that Havoc DH has the simplest PvE rotation in the game. Like, two buttons. So what is the actual, most basic rotation that’s viable? Which abilities?
Also, has Blizz indicated that they’ll make the class more complex in Shadowlands?
Thanks!
In terms of buttons, our baseline rotation has technically 3, Demon’s Bite, Chaos Strike, and Eye Beam, but Eye Beam is on a 30s CD, so the majority of our time is spend spamming two of them. All of the dominant talent builds have at least 5, however (the Demonic build adds in Blade Dance via First Blood, and Immo Aura. The Demon Blades build removes Demon’s Bite, but adds in Fel Blade, Throw Glaive, Blade Dance (First Blood), and if running Momentum, Fel Rush and Vengeful Retreat).
That said, even with talents, our rotation lacks much in the way of RNG variance, interaction, or dynamics. The only real “complexity” to be found is ensuring you cast Blade Dance on cooldown (it’s a huge part of optimizing Havoc), maximizing your damage output during the 8s Demonic window (you need to get at least 2 Blade Dance casts off, and with enough haste, 3, as Meta buffs Blade Dance substantially more than it does Chaos Strike), and if playing Demonic Appetite, ensuring you’re not wasting fury generation or cooldown reduction from soul spawns.
In terms of number of buttons, the most basic one is Arcane. They rotationally use Arcane Blast spam, weave in Arcane Missiles every few GCDs as Clearcasting procs, and occasionally drop their charges via Arcane Barrage (how often they do this depends on their build, mana level, and gear). During their burst phase, however, Arcane Barrage is not used, reducing it to only two buttons.
That said, Arcane actually requires attention paid to mana, and judgement calls on when charges should be dumped and when they should be retained. The entire rotation is about balancing mana costs versus damage bonuses, and thus isn’t really that “simple”.
Beast Mastery has a fairly simple rotation as well. They only use 3-4 buttons, depending on build: Kill Command, Cobra Shot, Barbed Shot, and if taken, Chimera Shot (which has fallen out of favor over the last tier or so). In BfA at least, BM largely doesn’t have to pay attention to focus, and they cast Barbed Shot exclusively for the buff, not for the focus restoration effect. Their only real complexity is ensuring Kill Command is cast on cooldown, and aiming to cast Barbed Shot as close to it expiring as possible, to give the highest uptime on the buff at 3 stacks as they can. The dominant build, Dance of Death, makes this much easier, however, by substantially increases the chance of regaining a Barbed Shot charge on an auto-shot crit (combined with stacking a boatload of crit chance).
On the other end, Affliction with 8 rotational buttons in the dominant single target build: Agony, Corruption, Siphon Life, Unstable Affliction, Shadow Bolt, Haunt, Phantom Singularity, and Deathbolt. However, their rotation is honestly rather boring, as it can easily be described as “refresh all of your DoTs if they are below 30% duration remaining, use Haunt, Phantom Singularity, and Deathbolt on cooldown, and spam Shadow Bolt if you have nothing better to do”. The only real depth to it is refreshing your DoTs and dumping shards into UAs every 30s for Deathbolt, and otherwise aiming for high UA uptime due to its 10% damage bonus while active. Most warlocks I know kinda hate Aff’s rotation, though fortunately it sounds like it’s changing pretty considerably in Shadowlands.
Feral has only 5 rotational buttons (Shred, Rake, Rip, Ferocious Bite, Tiger’s Fury), same as us, but their rotation arguably has some of the most complexity to it due to the snapshoting mechanic on Tiger’s Fury’s damage buff (bleeds applied while it is active retain the damage bonus for the duration of the bleed, unlike nearly every other damage buff in the game). Add in complexity-increasing effects like the Blood Talons talent (requiring them to weave in Regrowth casts at specific times to buff their damage further) and Wild Fleshrending (adding Thrash to the primary rotation), and theirs is a highly complex DPS rotation, despite the number of buttons.
Anyway, longwinded way to say, number of buttons isn’t really a good indicator of rotational complexity. Affliction has more than Feral, but Feral is wildly more complex. Arcane has fewer than Havoc or BM, but Arcane is rather more complex than either.
If anything, they’re likely to continue dumbing it down. They did just announce official support for console controllers, after all, and you can’t have too many rotational buttons if you’re going to be able to do them on controllers.
Oh well, I guess they are moving WoW to the so-called modern gaming in which you won’t have to press too many buttons. Hmm I wonder how people will rotate with a controller. Will the rotation speed be like keyboard rotation?
The controller support is more for people that have motor skill difficulties. No one will play on controller if they can avoid it because mouse + keyboard is always going to be superior for this kind of game.
Ya, for now. Until Blizzard re-prunes everything so you can fit all of the major abilities on 12 keys (2 stars of 4 buttons, plus 2 shoulder bumpers and 2 triggers) and releases WoW on console. You know, just like they did with Diablo.
There are addons that allow for controller support already though. They are just making it official now.
I imagine Blizzard marketing so heavily the unprune in Shadowlands and admitting their mistake on heavily pruning classes in the past won’t play too well if they decide to go the same route latter on.
Well, it’s Blizzard, so we can’t say for sure anymore. Let’s just hope they increase the complexity of DHs some more with people giving proper feedback. I’ve watched Preach on YouTube and he said that classes in general feel more complex in Shadowlands than they do in BfA, so I guess it’s a good thing (for now).
Ya, after the last few expansions, I’m far to cynical to believe that. Blizzard doesn’t turn over new leaves due to feedback, they begrudgingly cave to overwhelming outcry (ex. flying), implement solution that is almost what was asked for, but is specifically designed to be more annoying or requiring more grinding or time than is rational (ex. Pathfinder), and then passive-aggressively make it as difficult and annoying as possible forever (ex. Great Wyrms From Beyond).
People complained about the pruning, so they restored irrelevant flavor abilities like Hunter’s Mark and Fire Blast to non-Fire mages, when the complaint was more based on them taking abilities away and then giving them back as talents (ex. Barrage, Binding Shot, Poison Bomb, Slice and Dice, Cheat Death, Force of Nature, Summon Gargoyle, Unholy Frenzy, Demonic Circle, Mortal Coil, Haunt, Drain Soul, Fire and Brimstone, Soul Fire, Flashover, etc) or rental power. Some of those have come back in SL, but the vast majority are still talents, and that just feels awful.
That’s Blizzard’s habit these days. They ignore most feedback, and what they do listen to, they do what can be said to pay lip service to the ask while completely violating the spirit and intent of the ask.
Basically, I have zero remaining confidence that Blizzard is actually trying to improve the game for us. They are trying to improve the game for them. Saying they are sorry and realize their mistakes is just PR spin. They say that every single expansion, and still do it. Corruptions are literally just a worse form of Legion legendaries, and Blizzard repeatedly said how sorry they were about how Legion legendaries turned out, and that they’d avoid that in the future.
I guess I’m too optimistic for my own good then.
Urgh, replied to the wrong person instead of the thread, hate these new forums.
There’s slightly more nuance with certain azerite traits, but for the most part, just do that and you’re golden.
For general purposes/aoe/cleave use the blind fury/immo aura build. For raiding single target use felblade/demon blades.
This isn’t actually very critical, with our current levels of haste. And you definitely do not want Blade Dance to actually be off cooldown when you start casting Eye Beam. Ideally, it comes off cooldown either as Eye Beam finishes, or one GCD later.
That said, at 8s duration and a 6 GCD cooldown, you need fit 7 GCDs within those 8 seconds in order to get it off twice if it is used as the first and last GCD. That requires a total of 31.25% haste. Since we get 25% automatically from being in Meta, that equates to only 5% haste from rating, or 340 haste rating.
If we have, say, 1000 haste rating, plus another 3500 from 3x Furious Gaze (approximately what my DH has, and he’s only in 445 gear), that gives us a total of 66.18% haste from rating, and thus a total of 107.72% haste in meta. This reduces the GCD to the floor of 0.75s, and reduces Blade Dance’s CD to 4.33 seconds. At that point, you can cast Blade Dance on the GCD immediately before Eye Beam and still get two off during the Demonic window, with room to spare.
Basically, if you have 3x Furious Gaze, you’ll get two off during Demonic automatically. If you don’t have any Furious Gaze traits (or maybe if you only have one), just ensure you don’t cast Blade Dance immediately before Eye Beam.
The dominant build for single target is actually the Demonic Appetite build, not the Demon Blades build. However, much of the strength of that build relies on having good corruption (specifically, Infinite Star, though a couple others work too). Unless you’re raiding mythic, any of the 3 dominant builds (Blind Fury/Immo, Demonic Appetite/Immo, or Felblade/Demon Blades) works just fine, and choice is left to the player based on gameplay preference.