Havoc DH Shadowlands Wishlist

Classes Demon Hunter
1

Revised and Shortened

Baseline
Ability - Blade Dance - Damage revised to chaos damage. Damage modified to deal increased damage to primary target (1/2 of first blood baked in). Dodge mechanic of death sweep removed.

Ability - Fel Reflexes (Placeholder) - 15-25 second cooldown. No fury cost. Not on the gcd. - Increases dodge chance by 100% for 1-2 seconds.
Increases our skill cap. Actively control when we want to use our dodge.

Ability - Fel Cleave - Costs 40 fury. No cooldown. Deal x% chaos damage to all enemies within an x yard radius. Worth pressing instead of chaos strike if 2+ targets are present

Ability - Fel Blade - Costs no fury. Two charges. Ten second cooldown. Deals chaos damage (less than chaos strike). Ten yard range. If Fel Blade successfully lands, applies “touched by fel” to target.

Touched by Fel (Placeholder)- Deals x% chaos damage over 8-12 seconds. Spell school is physical, not magical (not dispellable by healers, except for paladins with bop).
Chaos strikes made against this target have an x% chance to reset your blade dance’s cooldown, and decrease the fury cost to 15 (2/2 of first blood).
Fel cleaves made against this target have an x % chance to reset your blade dance’s cooldown, and decrease the fury cost to 15. Secondary targets have an additional chance to proc this effect (with diminshing effect per additional target).

Felblade is made baseline to replace fel rush in damaging rotations. Any legendaries, like erratic core, talents, like unbound chaos or momentum, or pvp talents, like mortal rush, are now based on this ability instead of fel rush. It is given the touched by fel effect to justify its usage in a primary damaging rotation, regardless if momentum is used or not. This better adheres to blizzard’s apparent fixation on requiring mobility to be pressed for rotations like momentum, but has application in higher level environments, like mythic raiding, because the charge is targeted.

Summary - gives our core toolkit proc synergy between blade dance (our central short cd nuke), chaos strike and fel cleave. Felblade becomes a core ability in our rotation, and pressing it is validated because the dot it applies to the target is high-priority. Issue with fel rush not being viable as a button in the damaging rotation is corrected.

Passive - Demonic - Casting eye beam transforms you into a demon for x seconds, empowering your chaos strike, fel cleave, and blade dance abilities by x%, and increasing your haste by y %. This is a less powerful demon form than what we get with the metamorphosis cooldown (less haste / damage % increases to chaos strike / blade dance / fel cleave). For every x fury you spend, reduce the cooldown of eye beam by y seconds, up to a maximum cooldown reduction of z seconds.
Transforming into a demon is core to our class fantasy. It should be baseline. However, because its baseline, the final talent tier to replace demonic should be demonic empowerment, which makes baseline demonic as powerful as metamorphosis.

Ability - Fel Rush - Cooldown increased from 10 seconds to 15-20 seconds. However, this cooldown can be reduced by talenting into it, discussed below.

Passive - Demonic Vampirism (Placeholder) - 5% leech baseline, increased an additional 5% leech in demon form (10% total in demon form). Nominal amount of leech is made baseline to adhere to class identity of having leech. The talent is replaced by a button we can actively press to increase our healing. Discussed below.

Passive Chaotic transformation / rank 4 of meta - Removed. Made demonic, cycle of hatred, and leech baseline. Has to be a tradeoff. Remove this passive.

talents
1st Row - Fury Gains:
Blind Fury - unchanged
Demonic Appetite - Unchanged
Felblade - Revised - Felblade now generates 40-45 fury when it successfully hits the target.

2nd Row - Fury Gains:
Insatiable Hunger - Unchanged
Burning Hatred - Unchanged
Demon Blades - Unchanged

3rd Row - AOE
Trail of Ruin - dot lasts two seconds, rather than four. With blade dance being able to proc, duration of dot needs to be reduced.
unbound chaos - Replace fel rush with felblade. Otherwise unchanged
Glaive Tempest - unchanged

Fourth Row - Defensive / Healing:
Soul Rending Removed - Replaced with Vampiric Strike (Placeholder) - No cooldown. Costs x fury (likely 40, similar to chaos strike). Deals x % of ap chaos damage (lower than chaos strike) and heals you for y% of damage done in the last z seconds.
Desperate Instincts - No longer auto-procs, but defense boost is unchanged.
Netherwalk - Unchanged

5th Row - Mobility
All three previous talents, cycle, first blood, and essence break are scrapped.
Cycle is baseline, first blood is effectively baseline, and essence break is rendered redundant because demonic is now baseline.
Fel Rush - Reduces the charge cooldown to 10 seconds.
Fel Catapult (Placeholder) - 1 charge - 25-30 second cd. 20-25 yd range. Leap to the targeted location. Capable of z-axis movement (like a warrior’s leap)
Blurry (Placeholder) - Passive enhance effect - Blur now prevents your movement speed from falling below 100%, and increases your movement speed by x%.
6th Row - utility
Unchanged overall
7th Row - Final
Demonic Empowerment - Demon form granted by eye beam is now as powerful as demon form granted by metamorphosis.
Momentum - Unchanged, however it is now proc’d by baseline fel blade, rather than by fel rush.
Fel Barrage - I’m less interested in this final talent than demonic empowerment vs momentum, so unchanged, or whatever really.

Anything on the PTR not discussed here is unchanged.

3 Likes
2

This still fails to address a fundamental problem with Havoc. A truly baseline issue: We lack any true variety of spenders. continually reworking, or buffing/nerfing current abilities are just layers of gauze. We need to stitch the wound. Add more spenders.

3

I’ve never heard a demon hunter complain that we don’t have enough spenders. At least, not outside of the context of wanting first blood baseline. With this build, we’d have:

  1. Spammable, low priority spender - chaos strike
  2. Spammable, low priority aoe spender - fel cleave
  3. Short cd higher priority ST/aoe nuke with a proc reset mechanic - blade dance
  4. High cd highest priority ST/aoe nuke with cd reduction - eye beam.
    Four spenders as a baseline. You could then talent into glaive tempest, if you so choose.
    This is plenty, in my opinion
3 Likes
4

I was speaking more as a matter build to spend ratio. the spenders you suggested would be nice, even nicer if it came with a trimming down of either demon’s bite or ditching imo aura (maybe it’s just me… but never been a fan of this ability in havoc).

5

I think it’s just you, haha. Immo aura was one of three core abilities (excluding meta, which had a long cd) a demon hunter had back in the warcraft days. it is very much a fundamental ability to our core toolkit. Though, the way it works is much different. Where in warcraft 3 it would be something we activate at will that would consume mana (in wow, it would be our fury), and would just keep consuming until we ran out of mana or deactivate it, in wow it is a minor generator with a cooldown. All the same, i think you’d experience a riot if the ability was removed from baseline, even if the revision made relative to BFA wasn’t really what we were looking for.

Personally, i think demon’s bite is a mechanically boring ability, but after many conversations with other people, i wouldn’t want to see it removed. Not every ability has to be super exciting. It’s simply a way to ensure we’re maximizing every GCD when we have nothing better to do. I wouldn’t hate it being given a passive effect though, like an x% chance to cause us to passively generate y fury over z seconds. For me, at least on the initial creation of the wishlist, my primary concerns were the reeeaally big issues we’re seeing with havoc. My annoyance with DB being somewhat boring just didn’t rank highly enough for me to include it in the OP, but i do agree with you in this regard

6

Maybe it is just the ability itself, and the super spammy nature of it. It is one of the reasons why my main DH (the one I am posting on) is FB/DB. Yes, the downtime of not having the spam can get a bit boring (though this happens less being above 475ilvl)… I would gladly take that bit of down time over having to compulsively spam an ability to work a rotation. It is part of what I like about BM in some ways. Yes, BM had its problems too… but the rotation felt much smoother.

7

You could at least get rid of the auto activation part since this is a wish list. Blizzard keeping this talent the same in Shadowlands and even nerfing it still baffles me.

Something I’ve seen suggested and thought about as well for an active healing ability is something like fracture. It would be an ability that cost 60 fury with a short cd (say 5 secs) and would shatter 2 soul fragments from the target. This would provide a good amount of on demand healing when needed. Then if you take Demonic Appetite it effectively costs nothing, also the reason it has a short cd so it’s not spammable. DA is generally going to be the weakest talent until later in the expansion when you have more haste. Here DA can have a bit more synergy as a self-sustain build and maybe see more play early on for high damage fights. The cooldown of fracture might have to be increased some for pvp.

I’m a little on the fence about fel rush not being baseline anymore. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like warrior as much because you have to have a target to use charge, just like felblade. I see we can get it back as a talent and it’s not unheard of to have 3 talent rows for utility/non-damage things, as there are a few other classes like that. I don’t know, just losing the 2 charges of fel rush baseline just doesn’t sit well with me.

Overall I like a lot of these proposed changes and hope Blizzard does give us an overhaul at some point down the line.

1 Like
8

Good point. I’ll edit this to reflect that change.

This would be interesting, though I would think the cd has to be much higher than 5 seconds if implemented. I believe lesser soul fragments heal 10% of our max hp, right? Healing 20% max hp every five seconds (on average, 4% hp every second) seems a little too powerful. I think if the number were instead changed to heal approximately 1% every second, so at minimum a 20 sec cooldown, this would be more reasonable.

This was, admittedly, what I expected to be the most contentious of all the changes I’d like to see.
My reasoning was that, demon hunters, as a fantasy, are known for whizzing around in combat, right? In combat, considering raid / mythic / high lvl pvp mechanics, a targeted charge is much more feasible than a charge like fel rush. Baseline, and in terms of combat, felblade is a much better choice. If talented into, it also provides the utility of enhanced fury generation. If momentum is taken, it solves the issue of having to use fel rush.
Moving fel rush to a utility talent row then allows it to be identified as strictly used for mobility, with no other benefit.

When I thought about my attachment to fel rush, the only reasoning I could really defend it was it makes movement feel a little more free in the world. Personally, I choose combat over movement in the world, and I believe, in terms of class fantasy with regard to movement, mobility in combat is a greater consideration than mobility in the world, which is why I switched felblade and fel rush

9

I agree with everything you are saying about putting momentum and stuff on felblade. Those changes would fix a lot of issues with the class.

While felblade does work better in combat then out of combat (since you can’t even use it out of combat) it is a lot worse than fel rush. With fel blade you can’t use movement to get out of mechanics. We would still have Vengeful Retreat and our just naturally higher movement speed, but fel blade would be of no help here. You also can’t full make use of both charges if you wanted to get from one point to another. If you needed to switch to another target you can only fel blade once in range, only using one charge to maximize movement. With fel rush you can use these charges whenever and can use both charges to get to the new target faster.

It doesn’t have to be since they made monks roll only be a benefit for mobility and it is baseline. Admittedly moving fel rush to a talent might be the only way Blizzard would actually remove the damage components of fel rush, which just makes me sad.

I understand what you are trying to do with fel rush and fel blade and I think overall they would be more beneficial to the class. It’s just a change to fel rush like that would probably be enough to drive me off of playing demon hunter.

10

Yeah, which is why the only way it would work is if felblade became baseline.
If felblade is baseline, i think it would be too much baseline mobility to also have fel rush.

Thing here is - we don’t really need it. If dk’s can get out of mechanics, we can too. with high mobility, baseline VR, and jump + glide spam, there isn’t anything we can’t get out of that would reasonably be in the m+ / mythic raiding scene. In addition, no one is doing these high level elements of gameplay without investing in talents, which is why I see a pure-mobility ability like fel rush better relegated a utility / talent row. Maybe a reasonable compromise would be that, baseline, we have one charge of fel rush with a 20-25 sec cd, and the talent into fel rush would add a charge, and reduce the cd by 5-10 seconds?

Still, this would feel like we’re overboard on mobility.

That, or Blizzard could just recognize that felblade accomplishes everything they’re designing around fel rush in a much better way, make felblade baseline, and relegate fel rush to pure utility.

If that’s how you see it, then I’m at fault for my design, because driving people away from the class is definitely not what i want to do haha. What if it was redesigned to the below:
Felblade - yd range reduced to 5 yards, so it’s hardly even considered a charge.
Fel rush - Remains baseline with two charges, however the cooldown is 20-25 seconds, rather than 10 seconds. Talenting into it in that row would reduce the cooldown to 10 seconds.

This way, that row would either enhance blur by giving it a freedom of mobility element, give us an entirely new mobility ability that is capable of jumping on z-axis maps, or reduce fel rush’s cooldown to the current level.

Momentum - in addition to felblade proc’ing momentum, the talent would also increase the charge range of felblade to 10-15 yards

11

This is true and I was just explaining it from a broad perspective. For specifics we can look at a fight like Mythic Ra’den. On that fight my guild had the demon hunters go out and attack the orbs with the ranged dps, while the warrior, ret pally, and dk stayed on the boss. This was a somewhat tight dps check both with killing the orbs before they reached Ra’den and bringing Ra’den down low enough to not get 4 orb phases. The other melee stayed on the boss because they lacked the mobility to get to the orb and back to Ra’den fast enough to be worth losing their dps on the boss. Demon Hunters had that extra mobility to be able to do this specific job that they otherwise couldn’t without all that mobility. I guess it’s less about being able to get out of dangerous mechanics and more that I like how our mobility allows us to perform different jobs that other melee cannot.

Yeah, the charge on felblade is whatever for me. I would be fine with no charge on felblade anymore or talenting into makes it a charge. I agree it’s a lot of mobility with it, just would rather see felblade lose all mobility than lose fel rush baseline.

12

I like most of this. I especially like the Blade Dance proc off Chaos Strike. Solves the issue I was trying to solve with Felblade, retains Blade Dance as a central rotational nuke even in single target, avoids the Blade Dance spam in AoE, and still gives a rotational differentiation in AoE.

Easiest way to do this, btw, is to just use the square root formula that Blizzard has started using for a fair amount of AoE scaling. Basically, the base chance is multiplied by the square root of the number of targets hit (or if it’s an independent chance per target, square root of targets over number of targets, but that doesn’t really need to be used here).

So if the base chance was, say, 20%, then the chance against 2 targets would be 20% * √2 -> 20% * 1.4142 = 28.28%. Against 3 targets, 34.64%. Against 4 targets, 40.00%.

This makes its scaling naturally drop off with each additional target. Against 10 targets, for example, only at a 63.25% chance. Against 20 targets, 89.44% chance.

Blizzard already uses this for scaling damage for a number of abilities (Eye Beam being a notable one in SL, basically any ability that says “deals less damage to secondary targets” has square root scaling in SL), and for certain other effects like Agony’s shard generation rate in multi-DoTing.

Easiest way to do this is to make the demon form have some base level of damage/haste/whatever, and then make the casted version of Meta put us in demon form and also increase our damage/haste/whatever by an additional X% for 30s.

That also avoids extension synergy with Demonic, because Meta would be less about maximizing uptime, since the bonus over Demonic would be fixed duration.

Oof. This one I cannot support. Fel Rush, and mobility in general, is Havoc’s trademark. Felblade is not a replacement for that, because it’s basically just a super short-range clone of Charge, with some damage added on. And since Felblade would be dealing Chaos Damage, it would either have to be undertuned as hell or would be a central rotational ability, in which case it is not used as mobility.

That’s actually most of the issues with Momentum, plus no baseline mobility.

2 Likes
13

Agreed, I’ll update the notes.

Admittedly this was a huge concern of mine, which was why I had chaotic transformation removed. Eye beaming into a less-powerful demon, and then burning the meta cooldown… what would we become?
That makes sense, though.
My thought was the Demonic Empowerment / row 7 talent would effectively bring eye beam demonic meta to the level of the casted meta’s boosts. But yes, I wouldn’t want the nerf to demonic meta to impact the actual meta cooldown’s impact. I’ll clarify in notes, and add your idea.

I expected a lot of pushback here, but wanted to call to attention the idea that having two charges of fel blade, plus two charges of fel rush, plus VR, might be too much mobility.

I’ll revise the OP though, cause this feedback helps a lot.
To coincide with momentum (blizzard’s philosophy that momentum just has to be proc’d by movement), I knew felblade had to have some semblance of a charge, and I think the shortest it could be would be ten yards.

What I really struggled with was replacing the entire fifth row. Since 2/3 become baseline and the third is rendered redundant, I figured a mobility row would be fitting, which is why my initial thought was to replace fel rush with Felblade. This was probably a hasty decision though, cause I get why losing FR is essentially a non-starter.

What would you want to see in the 5th row?

Or, what if fel rush was baseline, but its cooldown was increased to, say, 20-25 seconds. Talenting into it in the fifth row would bring the cooldown back to 10 seconds

Edit: in this design, I had a hard time reconciling fel blade’s purpose.

To correct momentum, fel blade had to be baseline.
Felblade shouldn’t have a proc mechanic, because we have procs with blade dance.
Fel Blade, therefore, effectively replaces fel rush (in terms of legendaries and talents like unbound chaos), so it has to have two charges.
At the same time, no one wants to lose fel rush.

So, we have a charge, and we have a dash. Baseline, the two abilities are somewhat redundant.

Felblade doing chaos damage was primarily motivated for aesthetic (green flames, if they could be implemented), and to solidify that it is fel rush’s replacement in terms of damage and combat utility. We know it would be on the gcd, so it should do damage, but it can’t be a huge amount (similar to our current fel rush). It isn’t intended to be a damaging rotational ability, rather a mechanical replacement to fel rush in terms of borrowed powers, talents like unbound chaos, and the momentum proc

14

Does it though? What you could do is replace momentum with fel blade. The talent fel blade would then be the ability with 2 charges just like you have, but would also have the trigger for momentum attached to it. So, now this talent is an extra ability we gain that gives us the momentum damage buff when used. This fits with Blizzard’s philosophy of active abilities giving more and being better than passive things.

With this though you would need to change a number or talents. Fel rush would be baseline again. You’re first row talent, Fel blade, would need to be revised. Easiest thing to do here is just add an ability that is exactly like the old fel blade with no charge. So, it would be an ability with a cd that does some damage and generates 40 fury with a proc chance to reset its cd.

The 5th row is where it could become complicated. You could just do what monks have. So, we have 2 fel rush charges baseline with a 15 sec recharge now. The first talent would add an extra charge to fel rush and reduce the cd by 5 secs. The second talent could turn fel rush into a targeted leap like infernal strike. So, it would be 2 charges of this leap at 15 sec recharge. Then the last talent could be the same as Blurry.

For Unbound Chaos you could just make it the next throw glaive or chaos strike causes an inner demon to slam down. I think that addresses everything where fel blade was.

15

Yes. While I focused more on momentum, you also have to consider talents like unbound chaos and legendaries like erratic core.
It’s obvious blizzard is very much into designing talents and borrowed powers around movement. Presumably, this is centered around our class fantasy of speed, mobility, and reflexes. The issue here is it being based on fel rush.
I like and understand where their head is at, but fel rush isn’t the answer… felblade is.

Think this would then be getting overly complicated, and would add yet another button to our rotation. If momentum, we’d have felblade, and potentially this new ability you’re talking about, and potentially glaive tempest.

Where I’m coming from is “blizzard likes movement. They’re gonna design stuff around it, so we have to have a movement ability that’s baseline. However, that ability can’t be fel rush”.

That’s what I’m thinking. Idk if we should have three charges of fel rush, but I’m thinking the base cd of fel rush could be higher, like 15-20 seconds (revised from my initial idea of 20-25 seconds), and the talent would reduce it to 10 seconds.

Wouldn’t hate that, but like I said earlier, I think blizzard is intent upon making mobility a staple in our rotation. Personally, I actually think it’s a really cool idea, and would make us, and our damaging rotation, very unique. It just has to be executed properly

16

Could just leave erratic felcore the same and leave the pvp ms talent the same. So, the legendary is just for if you want more movement or more ms for pvp. Still wouldn’t be our worst legendary.

The new ability was just an example. It could be another passive fury generator. I think it’s fine though because all these extra abilities are talents. You have the choice if you want more abilities for a more complex rotation or less abilities with more passives. So, it’s just one extra ability difference from my version and yours and if you make the new talent a passive instead it’s the same number of abilities.

I’m fine with Blizzard making some demon hunter abilities designed around movement. I just think the better approach for Blizzard would be to make all these abilities talents. So you keep your baseline movement abilities completely separate and then if you want movement abilities tied to damage it’s a choice to gain these extra abilities with these effects tied to them. I get that it would be easier to design things around a baseline movement ability. A lot of players don’t want this and I bet some would still think fel blade is too much for momentum. I just feel if Blizzard wants to take this unique approach of tying damage to movement, they should take the extra time and make talented abilities that do this.

The ability fel blade could still have a charge on it. So the new talent to replace momentum would still be a movement ability. This just wouldn’t be a baseline ability. You are just choosing the extra movement ability now with the momentum buff tied to it.

Edit So, thinking about it more, the movement of fel blade is nothing like the movement of fel rush. I forget fel blade even has a charge most of the time I use it. You are already right up next to the boss, so the charge doesn’t even do anything most of the time in a raiding environment. I think this is the main reason Blizzard is so hard stuck on keeping momentum and damage that is tied to movement on fel rush. There isn’t any thought involved with positioning on using fel blade versus any other damage ability we have. Fel Rush we have to think about where we are going to end up and make sure we are positioned correctly before using the ability. This is all coming from my perspective that is mostly focused on raiding. I just don’t see much difference between fel blade and say an ability like chaos strike. You seem to be more pvp focused, so maybe from your perspective there is more of a difference for you.

17

Eh, issue with that is it won’t be viable in raids. There would be no offensive benefit to it, because it would no longer benefit momentum. I really can’t imagine ever wearing that legendary.
Ms talent being tied to fel rush and momentum being tied to fel blade would be… A LOT, haha. I have to do a charge to get a buff, and then a dash to apply a debuff. And I gotta keep doing that highly-regularly. It would just feel a little too overly spastic, and I’d have fewer globals to actually do damage.

Yes, and no.

We have to be given a baseline toolkit, but how we use it is what should be augmented by talents and borrowed powers. Momentum is a great example of this. Fel rush is baseline, but momentum converts it to an offensive/buff-maintenance ability. Problem is, fel rush is a bad ability for this purpose.
In my design, fel blade is baseline, but would otherwise be a charge and a fury generator (I updated it to having a baseline fury generation). Baseline, this isn’t significant enough to justify getting a legendary to support it. However, if I talent into momentum, now erratic core looks a whole lot better, because it buffs a baseline ability which is no longer just a fury generator and a minor charge. It’s now also what procs my damage buff I have to maintain as often as possible.
Talents should be centered around augmenting / enhancing our baseline, and additional borrowed powers should be the final layer, but again they have to be focused on the baseline. You can’t have a legendary that directly boosts glaive tempest.

This is a good point, but a few things to consider:

  1. you’ll start the fight using it as a charge.
  2. any time you ever move away from the boss, you’ll use this ability as a charge back as soon as you get in range
  3. it generates fury, so it is logically tangential to the concept of building momentum
  4. it has a highly-mobile animation (doing a front flip), so even if we don’t displace, we’re still leaping off the ground, if only slightly

In reality, for pvp, I have less complaints about fel rush being tied to momentum. It’s just a matter of consistency. If momentum procs from fel blade, and all movement-based talents / borrowed powers are centered around felblade, pvp should be as well. Otherwise it’s just too busy

18

So, that row is an “AoE row” right now. Put Fel Barrage on that row, replace it on the final row with Chaos Blades. Having a talentable CD is exceedingly common amongst DPS specs, and can also be exceptionally valuable to the only DPS spec with a >3m cooldown on their major DPS CD. Throw Bloodlet on the 5th tier as well, people seem to adore that talent (I don’t really get why, but w/e), and bake Master of the Glaive into it for good measure. Maybe also make it cleave to an additional 2 targets, for 5 total.

For the final talent, a passive would be proper design, so either Revolving Blades (azerite trait) or Anguish (artifact trait) would work well there.

That just leaves filling in the slot of Master of the Glaive with another utility/control talent. I’m open to ideas on this one.

19

Is it? Fifth row is Cycle, first blood, and essence break. I guess If the idea is “cycle reduces eye beam, therefore aoe”, but that also benefits ST. I guess first blood reduces fury cost? But it seems more ST-driven than aoe. EB is a hybrid, really. If you use it in ST, you aren’t pressing blade dance. Using it in aoe does benefit blade dance though. For an aoe row, it’s awfully confusing. Then again, the first blood talent row has been a problem child for many years now, so it’s not a wonder it’s confusing.

Wouldn’t it feel a little redundant to have two rows committed to aoe, especially considering our class is already so aoe-inclined?
Then again, I suppose saying that sounds a bit hypocritical, considering I’m advocating for a mobility row. Still, it would be the only mobility row, and I do believe most classes and specs have something to that effect.

Then again, if fel rush isn’t nerfed as I initially proposed, my entire motivation for making it a mobility row is effectively void, so I really don’t know what I want it to be.

I’m 100% in favor of removing fel barrage in its current design, but I just thinking having glaive tempest and fel barrage as talent options is too redundant. I don’t think we need them both.

I sincerely don’t understand it. It harkens back to legion “snapshotting” play, and it wasn’t good design. Also, what does bleeding opponents have anything to do with our fantasy? Maybe if it were reworked to “causes your Throw glaive to erupt in felfire, burning your targets hit for x chaos damage over y seconds, I’d be on board with it, I guess. At least the snapshotting element doesn’t exist any more, so that isn’t a problem.

I’d say keep the talent for the slow factor. Bloodlet can have the additional charge, but MOTG would have the slow.

Also, humor me on this.
I keep thinking about felblade, as a baseline, generating fury, and I don’t like it. I don’t like that as a baseline it competes with demon’s bite.
So, what if I baked in the passive blade dance effect (chaos strike/fel cleave proc’ing blade dance) into felblade.
So, as a baseline, felblade would apply a dot for 8-10 seconds (lower or same duration as the felblade charge cooldown) that has the effect of causing your chaos strike or fel cleave to reset cd/reduce fury of blade dance. In aoe fights, fel cleave would spread the dot to enemies around the target, and those secondary targets would (with a diminishing effect) further increase the chance of proc’ing blade dance.

I think I want felblade to be essential to the rotation outside of momentum, but I’m just having a hard time fulfilling its niche as a baseline.

20

Neither is Chaos Theory, heh. I guess it just depends if they want all the spec legendaries to be all dps increasing ones. The general class ones aren’t, so they could maybe get by with one spec one not being a dps one as well.

Yeah, that would probably be too much. Do you think the ms talent would need to be buffed at all since it wouldn’t be an aoe spread anymore if it was on fel blade?

I agree, but Blizzard already has talents that are abilities that don’t really do anything to our baseline. Glaive Tempest is one example of a talent that does nothing to our baseline. You could slap that on a warrior and it would work the same.

That depends on talent setup. With momentum yes you would probably open with it. With Blind fury, Burning Hatred, Your new Demonic Talent, you would most likely precast immolation aura, fel rush in, eye beam, blade dance, dump some fury and then press fel blade. Especially if you are going to have fel blade give fury baseline, you might not use it right away because you would over cap with Blind Fury.

Depends what you were doing by being away from the boss. Maybe you were killing an add. If that is the case you might not have a charge of fel blade up so you would just fel rush back. If you are playing momentum it might not be the best case to use it instead of fel rush to get back. If you are using fel blade at 0 fury to get back, you then start a momentum window with only 40 fury on the boss. It still keeps some of the same decisions as fel rush because it is both a movement and a damage increase in this case. Some people see these as issues with momentum and others see this as added complexity.

I guess. I feel like this point and the next are stretching it a little bit. Demon’s Bite and immolation aura build fury as well.

So is blade dance. We even sort of spin when we immolation aura.

As I think about it more momentum probably just needs a complete overhaul with a name change if it is going to be untied from fel rush.

It’s been one of my main points in the beta feedback thread of why first blood should be baseline or removed from that row. First Blood doesn’t really fit the theme as well as the other two for aoe damage. The whole row is just a mess and I don’t think Blizzard really knows what they are doing with it.

I think that is the main reason they are making two rows of aoe talents. They seem to be doubling down on demon hunters as an aoe class. All our damage legendaries are aoe focused except Chaos Theory, but that still has us using blade dance, an aoe ability, to trigger it.

I think it was more that it added an additional ability to our rotation. It was also a high damage ability that didn’t cost any fury so we could weave it into our momentum windows easily. With the Fel Bombardment legendary I don’t think we really need bloodlet back for this expansion at least.

For me some of it comes down to it not having the proc chance anymore. I think the proc chance of the original fel blade is what keeps it somewhat fresh and different from demon’s bite. It isn’t an ability you always know when it will be available. If it’s just a recharge based ability with a set cd that isn’t reduced by haste, it just becomes something that is set in the rotation that you press every 10 secs instead of demons bite to generate your fury. There’s some thought with momentum and things, but with fury generation backed in baseline as well, it’s just a bigger Demon’s Bite we have to also make some talents viable.