Reforging was only an issue in the days of fixed hit and expertise caps, because every time you got a new piece of gear, you had to go re-calculate across your entire gear set to try to get past the hit and expertise caps while wasting as few stat points by going over it as possible. I clearly remember having to hit the reforge dude and reforging nearly every single item I was wearing in order to get back maybe a dozen stat points from getting closer to the cap (or to get back to the cap), and usually also having a haste cap in there as well.
None of those exist anymore. Hit and Expertise are gone, and haste almost never has noteworthy breakpoints since the introduction of partial ticks and the reduction of the GCD floor. Without those caps, reforging literally just reduces the benefit spread between optimally itemized and precisely counter-optimally optimized gear. It means that regardless of the base value of the stats on the item, 40% of the lowest-valued stat on that item could be considered to instead have a value equal to your highest-valued stat (or second-highest, if the other stat on the item was already your highest).
Considering how often we encounter situations where using an item of lower itemlevel is better (especially with pure-secondary-stat jewelry), reforging could immensely help with evening out the value of various gear pieces. There’s very little reason not to add it back in at this point, especially with the advent of Azerite items and the ridiculous simming needed to figure out which item is best, and which traits on that item.
I agree whole-heartedly with everything you said (and thank goodness for no more hit or expertise, or weapon skill for that matter…though I sometimes miss armor pen), especially for there not being a [good] reason for bringing it back, but it won’t for a few reasons:
the devs are too lazy to bring it back
the devs don’t want players to have that much choice when gearing characters
it’d ruin the current horrible rng system of gearing that we have (also, see #2)
I don’t. It was too variable. Firstly, it was basically just a flat damage increase, little different from versatility, except it only applied to physical non-bleed attacks. Secondly, it had wildly different values in PvP depending on what you were fighting, and therefore was always either terribly overpowered or terribly underpowered depending on who you were busy murdering.
And third, it had extremely non-linear scaling. It started out as a pretty meh stat, but the more of it you got, the better it got, in contrast to every other stat (all other secondary stats have diminishing returns, if only due to their additive nature). It wildly distorted the gearing landscape, and by the end of the expansion, if you did physical damage, Armor Pen was your best stat by like twice the value of anything else.
These are the key ones. Slot machines are more addictive than player agency. The more RNG in the gearing system, the longer it takes to hit BIS (or near enough that you stop caring), and the more MAU they get from it. They want to have just enough player agency that peeps don’t quit entirely, but as much RNG as possible beyond that.
Blizzard just hasn’t really thought through the notion of burn-out. The people leaving due to AP grind burnout from Legion through BfA aren’t terribly likely to return, and they’ll never be as dedicated as they once were. Blizzard is burning their long-term player base for short-term stock performance.
Yeah, it was kind of a weird stat. It was funny to pvp with stacked armor pen, though. I pvped on my rogue for a bit back then, and I chewed tanks up something awful. But that’s the one thing that made it fun. And I did say I only sometimes miss armor pen. I’m ok with it being gone. Though I’m more ok with hit, expertise, and weapon skill being gone. Those stats were horrible.
/attacks huge dragon leg 2 feet in front of face miss miss miss miss miss miss
Made more sense back in the days of paper and pen RPGs, where AC (armor class), what you rolled against to hit, was an abstraction of both armor and avoidance. While a dragon leg would be pretty easy to actually hit, the armored scales would make it difficult to actually do more than superficial damage. You were more rolling to see if you both hit the target and hit a weakpoint in their armor so you could actually damage them.
Man I miss playing D&D with the gang back in the day…
Thank God there is vengeance otherwise I would have dumped this character. Don’t get me wrong, vengeance is not complicated at all, but at least it doesn’t feel stupid like havoc with it’s bunch of buttons after eye beam rotation.
Can’t stand that spec.
Havoc is fun. Sorry, but there’s dozens of other specs to play if you want something with more buttons. Don’t need to change Havoc to suit you when it’s been this way since they released it. If you don’t enjoy it why are you still playing it?
A 3rd spec for DH would be a great opportunity to add something with more complexity, not by changing Havoc.
I seriously don’t get why people who play Havoc complain about the rotation/playstyle when it’s been this way since its inception. I think Immolation Aura alone was a major improvement to builds that do not take Demon Blades.
I’d understand it if the spec was drastically changed between expansions (E.g. Shadow Priests) that could incur a lot of rage from the community that preferred the previous way it played, but Havoc has had it’s core mechanics since forever. In this case in particular, the “if you are not enjoying it, playing something else” argument is pretty valid.
The only specs that used to be just as fun for me in a raid environment were Legion’s Shadow Priests with massive haste on Voidform stacks and infinite Icy Veins Frost Mages when it was still a thing. Now that the other two are no more, only Havoc remains fun for me.
Not following the logic here. Your response to people who claim a rotation/playstyle is bad in the present is “it’s always been this way”. To that, I may simply reply “Okay, so it’s always been bad.”
I’ve already answered this question multiple times. I play the Demon Hunter class because I want to be a demon hunter. Where there’s room for improvement, there’s potential for discussion.
Tweaking havoc to add a bit more complexity is a much less drastic change than adding a third spec.
“Core Mechanics”… such as? The entire point of this thread is that the core rotation of a demon hunter is sorely lacking. If not for a particular azerite trait, there would be no synergy between our abilities whatsoever. We need to invest talents to have a semblance of a rotation, rather than investing talents to enhance a solid foundation.
What I meant here is that complaining that the spec is boring is weird because it’s always been like this since it’s inception AND it is the most played spec in the game, which it translates to it appealing to a large portion of the player base, which also means that it is quite fun. If you seriously think that Havoc is boring, then it’s not for you.
Havoc is very fun, for me and many others and on top of playing Havoc, I used to like playing Legion Shadow Priest and infinite Frozen Veins Frost Mage which were complex at the time to be played well. These other two specs are way more forgiving in BFA now than they were in Legion.
The core of the class is fine. What can be improved besides fixing the 7 dead talents we have in our talent tree is making First Blood, Demonic and Immolation Aura baseline and then adding something else in their places on top of new abilities that build on top of what we already have in Shadowlands and/or even bringing back some artifact traits, but this can also be said about pretty much every other class. Class design and complexity are in an all time low at the moment and Havoc is not the only one that suffers from this.
Dude, what I and some other people have been trying to say for some time now is that this is a problem with Azerite and BFA, not Demon Hunters in particular. Pretty much every class experiences the same problem. Azerite was a bad decision across the whole board. Everyone suffers from this.
Then again, I did say before that we have a myriad of dead talents (just like everyone else) and that the current talent system is heavily flawed. This of course reflects in everyone’s rotation, just like Azeite and needs to be addressed if Blizzard wants redemption from the dumpster fire that was and still is BFA, although a lot less fire now.
You see, Blizzard once stated in a blue post back in Legion that patches x.5s were going to be focused on class balance and mini reworks if needed. They also said that talents that were picked over 95% of the time were going to be made baseline and something else was to be added in its place. This never came to be, and I doubt it ever will.
There really isn’t anything new being added to this thread. For the love of all that’s holy just let it die already. So I can stop getting notifications to come to the wake of this dead azz topic.
As with everything about this thread your inability to read past the obvious or say anything actually insightful is quite astounding. But you keep shouting at the wind. Maybe they’ll hear you in Shadowlands.