Havoc Rotation is Boring Please Fix

Classes Demon Hunter
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unfortunately I server transferred and returned to my original name i’ve kept since cataclysm. With that, my logs disappeared. While heroic and mythic are not comparable, my heroic logs are legendary on this character. This week, we extended our raid lock to queen’s court, so we skipped over the first five bosses when i otherwise would’ve been able to have logs posted. I’ll be raiding mythic this week, and should have parses posted. Check back then. For QC itself, our comp was less than ideal (we had far more melee than most would on a clear). It’s not a melee friendly fight, and with as many melee as we had and me still lacking a few key pieces of benthic gear, i’m fine with 57%.

I don’t want to destroy it either. But, presently, the core damaging toolkit of a Demon Hunter is not well-designed. I’m open to criticism regarding the ideas I had. Some may not have been written well, others (such as the dual-resource idea) I could see not being well-received no matter what. I’m all for that. They were simply ideas in the interest of pointing out what other classes have that we don’t, and why those types of abilities are more engaging than what we currently have.

Opinions can be wrong assuming we’re talking about an objective concept with a clear answer. Is 2+2 = 4? Yes. If your “opinion” is that it’s three, you’d be wrong.
Reasoning behind an opinion can be wrong as well, certainly. However, no one really attacked my reasoning behind my belief that the class isn’t well-designed. moreso, people responded with criticisms to the ideas i had as solutions. This is fine, but is not the same as disputing my reasons for finding the class boring. I’m almost tempted to delete that entire section of the OP in the hopes it might shift responses to what really matters.

This is a fair point. I can see how it came off as elitest, and for that I do apologize, to you and everyone else.

If so, the cooldown reduction of eye beam from eyes of rage should also be baseline. This would at least somewhat alleviate my complaint that, as a baseline, our abilities do not synergize with each other.

Yes, and no. When dk’s started in wrath, they had access to three essences, two different diseases that needed to be pressed at start of fight, along with several more abilities. Granted, this was before the prune, but the point is they still started with a lot of their fundamental toolkit.
If I were create a frost dk right now (I use frost Dk because their rotation is also considered to be relatively simple), as an example, it would already have frost strike, obliterate, and howling blast. Talents aren’t required for these abilities, and they already synergize because of runic empowerment (which is available upon character creation). They have their two resources, and the core rotation is established without any talents necessary, and the way they synergize is clear. Remorseless winter is learned @ 57. The talents serve to augment / enhance the ability priority rotation or the way the abilities interact with each other, but there is a core rotation and synergy that is present upon character creation. DH’s don’t have that.

First blood doesn’t really “liven up the base rotation”. In reality, it causes us to press a button we otherwise wouldn’t press unless to dodge or in aoe circumstances. Dark slash would otherwise invalidate blade dance. This talent tier either makes blade dance relevant, or removes it from our core rotation altogether. That being said, I do very much like the idea of dark slash. I wish it were redesigned altogether and baked into our core rotation.

While a fun talent, it’s terribly designed, and is currently not viable in any aspect of gameplay.

Not a rumor, this is what’s happening. I agree with your optimism in this regard.

my primary grievance with demon’s bite as it exists now is it’s a “get fury spend fury” design. Our rotation is essentially blade dance off cooldown, chaos strike if we have fury, demon’s bite if we don’t. It’s just so uncreative and there’s a lot of room for improvement by either adding an effect to demon’s bite, or giving us a more synergistic toolkit.

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Yet you call for other player’s opinion while ignoring others that have much, much more experience than you…

Again, your PvE progress is a complete joke, and again, passed of opinions from players who are simply better than you, as of they did not matter.

So you should not be surprised at this stage, that those who are experienced have now walked away from you, and dismissing your actions.

As for your thought on how to improve the spec, they’re trash.

HDH is intentionally simple.
Because of your confirmation bias, you remain ignorant of a class that is not what you want it to be…

Enjoy the carries :roll_eyes:
We’re done :poop:

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Hallelujah. You’ve said nothing of value this entire thread. Please leave :slight_smile:

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If the CDR proposal does not also include Demonic Appetite (that remaining a talent, or disappearing entirely), then sure. That, or it shifting from being something from consuming souls to a proc off Chaos Strike directly. I really hate the positional world object mechanism of Demonic Appetite, and I’m very reluctant to put anything additional on that mechanism, or even to retain what we currently have tied to it.

But starting Frost DKs lack Rime, which is what makes Howling Blast actually useful in single-target (aside from the disease application, which doesn’t really do anything synergistic since they removed the disease scaling from Obliterate). It’s also worth noting that the baseline kit lacks a strong Runic generator to smooth out the rotation, with that instead being provided by the 57 talent tier.

As for the comparison to pre-WoD DK, I feel it’s a bit inapplicable, because, as you note, that was pre-prune. DHs are the only class that was designed post-prune, so our baseline kit is much sparser than other classes as a result. Talents shore that up, which again, can be argued as bad design (and I don’t necessarily disagree).

It shifts the rotation from being nearly entirely pure generate/consume, to at least have an ability we press on CD aside from that. It doesn’t bring it up to level, imo, but it definitely helps.

Blade Dance isn’t part of our core rotation to start with, it only gets added if First Blood is present. Regardless of talent selection on that tier, Blade Dance is still used on CD in AoE circumstances. I’m not quite sure what your point with this was, tbh.

As for Dark Slash, I’m not a huge fan of those vulnerability period mechanics. On its own, it’s probably fine, but with included alongside Demonic, with 2/3rds the CD, I find it extremely problematic. Having one burst period ability is fine, two is just annoying.

That’s not the fault of Demon’s Bite, though. Now, perhaps I get a bit prickly when it comes to people suggesting removing Demon’s Bite, but part of that comes from having more than half of Legion stuck in Demon Blades land, and the very regular suggestions to make Demon Blades baseline and Demon’s Bite the talent. I much prefer the active agency on generation (and the GCD-locked rotation) that comes from Demon’s Bite. Very nearly every single other melee in the game uses a passive resource generation model, and I’m rather keen to keep Havoc as an active-generation model.

I wouldn’t necessarily contest having some additional synergy beyond simple resources in there, but I don’t think it actually necessary, as long as something is added to the rotation as a whole. Every ability doesn’t need to have synergy, and there’s nothing innately wrong with a simple generator (ex. Steady Shot) or a simple spammable consumer (ex. Arcane Shot), as long as the rotation as a whole has some degree of complexity.

So I think I generally agree with what you are trying to accomplish, just not how you are proposing to do it. Havoc definitely is a bit simplisitic, and especially so baseline (though baseline hardly matters, no one plays without talents). The issue is that most specs are fairly simple these days, and getting simpler by the expansion. Blizzard seems to be developing purely with casuals in mind. It’s quite unfortunate, tbh.

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Right, so one of our core abilities that we’re given is not a part of our core regular rotation unless talented. if it’s not talented, it’s eye beam, chaos strike, demon’s bite. That’s sad times.

Sure, but they get rime as a passive ability a few levels later. It’s not something they have to talent into. They’re given a base toolkit that has a semblance of synergy, and some of the proc mechanics are given over time as they level up. Makes sense to me. They would still want to cast howling blast without rime to apply the dot.

Right, and without it, and with our base toolkit, it would be a pure generate / consume. That’s terrible design when we’re talking end-game. We shouldn’t have to spec into a talent to press more than two buttons (excluding eye beam pressed once every 30).

Not to sound antagonistic at this point. I think we both agree, as you point out later on.

Agreed. Having an eye beam burst window and a dark slash window would feel cluttered. the cooldowns wouldn’t align, and dark slash would be an additional global we just wouldn’t want to press. That being said, the fact that they’re available and not mutually exclusive reflects bad design.

I think where we disagree is that I don’t necessarily care if it’s an active / passive resource generation, provided that every single one of my gcd’s is actually occupied. Demons blade is a much more popular pvp talent, but i want to bash my head on the wall sometimes when i’m waiting for fury to do something. Those are empty-gcd windows, and I agree that I don’t ever want to be in a situation where I feel like I’m waiting on rng to do anything. However, I also want gcd’s to feel more meaningful. If demon’s bite were to be given a proc mechanic of any sort, such as causing your next immolation aura’s cd to be reset, or causing blade dance / chaos strike to have any sort of modifier, it would feel more meaningful to cast the ability other than as a filler. When I even bring up removing demon’s bite, it’s because i think there’s room for more meaningful abilities to be cast, and that the rotation could be built in such a way that we would be gcd-locked with abilities that are more fun than “get fury in a global”. Give demon’s bite a proc mechanic, or give us 1-2 more abilities that keep us gcd-locked and synergize with each other in more meaningful ways. I think it’s a hard sale to propose removing demon’s bite, though, because the initial assumption is that my reasoning is “i like demon’s blade better”, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I like the concept of demons blade better if it means I still always have something to do and never have empty gcd windows, which implies we need more meaningful abilities added into our rotation. Demon’s bite, on the other hand, could also be great if pressing the button meant a bit more than “get fury”. It could also mean “chance to increase fury generation by x over the next y seconds”. It could mean “next x ability does y”. Maybe “casting demon’s bite increases your haste by x over the next y seconds, stacks up to z times”.
Or, these concepts could be baked into new abilities, which interact better or buff us in some way.

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I ran into this the other day, small sample, but I think it clearly shows a trend on many players liking how havoc plays.

For the record I myself don’t really like how Havoc plays, and I share some of the OP feelings about it, however that doesn’t mean it needs to be changed to cater to my liking, it just means I play something else.

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I mean, that’s not unusual. You make it sound like every single ability a class is given should be part of their single-target rotation, which clearly isn’t the case. First Blood, like a number of other similar talents, adds one of our AoE abilities to our single-target rotation. This issue is how sparse the rotation is without that, not First Blood itself.

The issue is, passive resource mechanics basically never have full GCDs, because the entire point of it being a resource is that it isn’t unlimited, and thus that it meters your gameplay. There are a few examples of resource mechanics that don’t have downtime, but they are rare, and always involve an active generator of some sort.

MM is a good example of this, but most of their focus comes from Steady Shot and Rapid Fire, not their hilariously slow passive regen. BM also is basically GCD-locked, but that’s because their resource generation is high enough that it basically never matters, factoring it out entirely as a mechanic (their primary mechanic these days is Barbed Shot maintenance and refresh timing).

So that’s the issue. Either it limits your GCDs, or the resource isn’t really relevant. The only exceptions are when you have a consumer that consumes huge amounts of resource, relative to maximum. Starsurge, Templar’s Verdict, Glacial Spike, Earth Shock, all of these reflect resource systems where you generate it in discrete quantities, then consume most or all of it in a single attack. That is not well-oriented towards what Havoc is about. And given that Havoc is melee, making it be about that would necessarily move it towards the lots-of-short-CDs model that Ret uses, which I’m also wildly opposed to.

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The funny thing about this is the only two people so far to agree with him are #1 a DH with ilvl 379 and a shaman. And he thanked both of them for their opinions. Also, neither of them gave analytical or logical reasons for agreeing with Haugs, they merely agreed that the spec should change and isn’t good as is.

What you really mean, same as this entire thread, is “I don’t agree with you and therefore don’t value your opinion.” Rockford has given plenty of input backed up by analysis and logic, you just don’t like it.

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rather, she is more grateful for her vanilla style because she is not together with the Demon Blades talent with immolation aura, just to get one, so having more nerf to DH, than an excellent combat style that was seen in Legion.

so that it looks different from Havoc, it would be the use of a new talent, much like pet control like the DK unholy talent or a stealth type Rogue Assasins or subtlety as a third special talent for DH.

apart that I would use DH daggers in previous Legion before of the 7.3

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Ty for saying and recognizing that. The Forums are of course a place for discussion and differing opinions. As long as you are able to give and take. For how can we seek to understand if we leave no room to be understood? Makes you all square with the house imo. Classy move Haugs.

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I’ll be commenting without quoting anything specifically because there was too much stuff happening when I was gone and I’m on my phone, so here it is:

Well, OP keeps saying that he wanted some stuff other classes have that we don’t, but we have something that other melees don’t too. We have active, no cooldown resource generation and the option to talent into passive if we wish to, that’s good.

Eyes of Rage soul part used to be baseline and way more powerful than it is currently (it used to be 5s reduction per soul to both Eye Beam and Chaos Nova), but was mitigated a bit with Eye Beam 15s reduction to its cooldown, so I think this is a clear candidate for the unprunning. Yes, Azerite was a mistake.

Current talent trees have been regarded as a major design failure by the vast majority of the playerbase across all classes. Havoc currently has 7 dead talents and talents that should be baseline, namely Immolation Aura, First Blood and Demonic. First Blood especially feels like mandatory because it feels horrible to play without it and because the other 2 options are part of the 7 dead ones.

Now reiterating this part, OP complained about Havoc being simplistic and to be fair, I believe everyone agrees with that. The thing is, this is not in any way exclusive to Havoc. The majority of specs right now are just as simple and some even simpler, save a few. Complex rotations are not part of Blizzard’s design philosophy for this expansion.

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Unfortunately, I think the “this expansion” qualifier on there being unreasonably optimistic. I don’t think complex rotations are part of Blizzard’s design philosophy for the foreseeable future. They are simply targeted a different demographic than WoW initially targeted.

This is the same demographic for which reading the literally 2-3 sentence synopsis/cliff notes guide in the Encounter Journal before doing LFR is simply too much work. The rotations need to be simple enough that a random person with next to zero knowledge of the class or spec can infer something approximating a rotation simply from reading the 4-6 tooltips and the spec description on the spec selection pane of the talent window, and for that rotation to do enough that the person doesn’t feel overwhelmingly inferior in groups or unable to manage in solo content.

This is the new normal, unfortunately.

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“Please fix” how incredibly broken they are in pvp.

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Stop spamming the DH forums because you got your butt beat in pvp. This was a discussion about current class mechanics. Go qq somewhere else.

I’m hoping that we’ll get another button or two in BL to give the class a little more flavor, hopefully from the Legion artifact. But also, yeah, not counting on much.

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Please provide one quote of that in this thread.

Agreed. Too many dead talents. To be fair, though, there are often cookie cutter builds that people spec into. The difference is that our talents aren’t modifying a toolkit that inherently has a decent number of abilities and synergistic mechanics. We have to take a particular build, and the extent of that talent build’s synergy (excluding azerite) is that eye beam causes meta and meta buffs the damage of our two abilities. We’re still pressing the same buttons the entire fight with this synergy, it’s just we might be pressing our buttons a lil harder cause we feel cool in meta.

I do want to clarify that when I say things like “I want a more complex/meaningful rotation”, I’m not saying I necessarily have a problem with the current damage rotation design philosophy of blizzard. In my opinion, five - seven frequently pressed buttons in a damaging rotation is plenty engaging, especially when they synergize. I think that’s fine, because if the rotation is too complex we might be required to use so much brainpower on the rotation that we lose focus on other gameplay elements in raids or arenas (anywhere, really). What usually separates players from each other isn’t just dps/hps, it’s attention to mechanics, and it’s the ability to do high dps/hps while managing the mechanics.

Whenever I use the word “complex”, I’m not trying to say I like complexity for the sake of complexity. I mean it strictly in the context of havoc demon hunters as they currently operate. I want them to be more relatively complex than they are, but not to the degree I think other people think I want haha.

You are 1600 with 150 games played. When you’re bad, everything is “broken”. rmpala is the strongest comp in the game currently. Rogue/mage has been the or one of the strongest comp choices since the dawn of arena. if you’re complaining about dh’s with a 1600 rating, you don’t know what you’re doing.

This is basically what I’ve wanted to say all along, without all the contentious remarks, and in much fewer words.

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The difference between us, Haugs, is you want to completely want to redo the core mechanics of the spec whereas I like the spec as is and would be good with another flavor-type ability… Which you would know, if you had actually bothered to read any of my - or anyone else’s - posts (which, by your own admission, you didn’t bother to do) instead of getting all haughty on us.

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Not necessarily, Sienge. Sure, I want our core mechanics to possess synergy without the need for azerite traits, but I’m not asking for an all-out revamp of the class. I’ve thrown out some ideas that might fix some of my issues for the class. Those ideas were an open invitation for criticism, but were not primary point of my post, as I’ve said multiple times.

yes, that is exactly what i want.

I didn’t say I didn’t read the posts. I said I understand where i came off as elitest.
Where we’re at now in the conversation is i agreed with what you were saying, and you’re currently being “haughty” with me. Move on?

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You see, every class, I mean EVERY class currently needs azerite traits to function competitively and this is the design philosophy for this expansion. A crappy one? Absolutely. But this is what we have for now.

Some of these traits were removed from the core of the class in Legion and put into rental pieces of gear that we have right now. In Havoc’s case those are Eyes of Rage and Chaotic Transformation. Your complaint here however, is pretty much universal for every class as we hope some, possibly all, of these traits are made baseline coming the next expansion.

Our rotation currently has 5 buttons actually. Demonic Appetite build has Demon’s Bite, Chaos Strike, Blade Dance, Eye Beam and Immolation Aura as the last two have their cooldowns considerably reduced in the form of Haste and picking up Souls.

Demon’s Blade build also has 5: Fel Blade, Chaos Strike, Blade Dance, Throw Glaive and Eye Beam. You can also use Fel Rush on dead globals for absolutely maximum DPS.

To be fair here, several people voiced this same opinion across multiple posts on this thread, myself included maybe more than once, so I get where Siengé is coming from.

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Hmm…

Wait, where is this going?

Oh wait, that’s where it’s going.

What were you lying?

I agree that what of the class is lackluster right now totally comes from this. Granted, that’s a blanket statement across every class. The loss of the Legion artifact abilities left a gaping hole in a lot of classes. I do still find hDH more fun to play than the other classes (hence my changing of mains after 14 years of combat, erm, outlaw rogue-ing), but the loss of the artifact traits hurt every single spec in the game.

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This “borrowed power” is a newer thing that hopefully when we lose our HoA and azerite traits in the prepatch will be a little less shell shock. Even without those things, I don’t feel that any class is “missing” anything though, but those powers add on a whole lot. Next expansion we’ll have a whole new system to invest in. Blizz alluded to feeling just as powerful, so I’m curious just how much will become baseline.