I do not care about Blade Dance

I just saw the data leaked for the havoc tier set bonus and I notice it revolves entirely around buffing blade dance and giving blade dance additional procs. Whilst I am dimly aware that there are those in the demon hunter community who lament that blade dance has fallen out of our single target rotation I would like to propose a counter-narrative to this:

Blade Dance should not be part of a single target rotation. What makes this ability compelling is weighing when to use it in a multi-target situation and when to prioritise chaos strike for priority damage. Flattening it into a single target rotation will remove any of the thought behind when to use it and will turn it into another static ability in a priority queue.

I feel like this should be common sense, but I guess the designers don’t feel the same way. I thought the point of 9.1.5 was to open up the covenant system and offer players more flexibility in choosing different builds to play. I’ve greatly enjoyed playing venthyr demon hunter and adapting my rotation around sinful brand, I’ve also been enjoying some builds that actually take blade dance as a higher priority thanks to the buffed conduit. I was really excited to try some different builds with the dual legendary system, such as darkglare boon with agony gaze or everburn with blazing slaughter so as to maximize fel-rush damage.

There are so many different possibilities and I was really looking forward to trying them out with the new patch, however once I have completed a 4-set bonus I am going to assume I will have to talent exclusively around abilities that buff blade dance. Being locked out of cycle of hatred, unbound chaos or essence break is going to result in a very generic model of havoc that everyone is going to play.

Ultimately I’m not entirely concerned about this, I enjoy havoc enough that I’ll play whatever is most viable, but I find the philosophy here confusing. With all of these new features intended to make the game more versatile and offer players the opportunity to create different builds out of the content that’s added to the game, why create a tier set that revolves around just one ability? Aren’t these expansions meant to prioritise the additional features like covenants and legendaries, or are they meant to revolve around the default toolkit? Personally I think new features added to the game should be viable if only for one patch, I’d like some incentive to craft different legendaries and experience different playstyles, otherwise what’s the point of putting them in the game if we’re only going to play the same model of demon hunter that we all played fresh in legion.

tl;dr: class design should revolve more around opening up the additional options that get added to the game, rather than neglected abilities. Blade Dance has it’s place in a demon hunter toolkit, but the whole gameplay shouldn’t revolve around it for every situation. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.

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this is a long post full of nothingness…you’re just upset cause the BROKEN idea of using sinful brand with DGB might not be optimal…the most broken thing the game has ever seen if it went live(which it wont)…You’re completely out of touch with reality if you think they are gonna let that build go through…you would have 100% uptime on Sinful brand…quit your crying…a large majority of DH players enjoy BD being worth pushing…Dont worry people will find out the optimal spec for you to play so you dont have to be creative and u can just hop on every top players build. Cause i hear u need to be playing what the best in the world do to be 4/10 mythic 4 months into a pacth

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I honestly think that might have been the reason they have the armor focused upon BD. Vent/DGB are going to be very strong in 9.2, so they set the armor up to help the momentum DB build from being left in the dust.

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I mean they are just listening to the players, everyone has been basically begging to press blade dance…welp we got our wish =) DGB/SB leggo will be too broken if it goes live with the way those spells work today…zero chance they dont change something about it

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They may be just listening to some of the vocal ones, but heck no not all of us care about pressing BD on CD, as you claim. So PLEASE leave your opinions that BD ON CD might be optimal, or just continue to be salty about it.

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Ah yes, right on cue a troll has come to play with her strawmen. Perhaps if you spent more time considering the argument presented rather than relying on ad hominem about raid prog to make cheap rhetorical points you might actually have something worthwhile to contribute. But what can you expect from the 3/10 mythic prog knaves? o:)

As I stated in the original post, I’m really not too concerned about SB/DGB, I think the base design of havoc is entertaining enough, and I can already see plenty of opportunity for inventiveness around the talents that compliment blade dance. I’m already keen to see how alternating between first blood and essence break will compliment the four set in a m+ scenario, perhaps the advantage of essence break will pull ahead for consistent multi-target pulls even in a tyrannical week.

If anything though, I think the substance of this response demonstrates everything that’s wrong with the discourse between the community and the developers. There’s too much angst about having to play some FotM build without any real articulation about what it is the dedicated players actually enjoy about the game - which clearly has you so frustrated you’ve projected your upset about SB/DGB onto me personally. A little strange, but to be honest I can’t say I blame you. It would be frustrating to have to default to that particular build for the majority of raid prog. If I wanted to play a melee class that maintains a single target dot for the majority of its damage I would just play feral druid or sin rogue. But if all we’re going to do is come to the forums and make gripes to the effect of “not this, something else” without ever acknowledging what that something else should involve then what right do we ever have to complain when we’re getting subbed out of raid and m+ for the other FotM specs?

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I could care less about playing venthry, you literally made a post basically crying about the tier sets BECAUSE your precious venthry build might not be optimal…you must think you’re the only voice that matters…again since u obviously cant read or even understand the original post that you fkin made. I do NOT CARE ABOUT the SB build or how it plays now or later…You can look through this DH forum and see countless ppl wanting a reason to press blade dance…welp they made changes so ppl could press it…deal with it

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Agree. Perma-Demonic is biggest cheese, let alone Sinful Brand.

Perma-Combust Mage was also big dumb.
Patetic game design with major cooldowns at near 100% uptime.

I’ve always thought of Blade Dance as one of the base DH attacks. It’s kind of weird that there are multiple builds that avoid its use in single target. 1 button spamming is not fun.

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I like how I can literally type the words

and you’re still here catatonic about SB/DGB. Slipperi, you’re safe, it won’t be viable next patch. The crying can stop now. :slight_smile:

Personally I’m more annoyed I can’t play UC spam if I’m forced to take trail of ruin, but I have a sneaking suspicion it might work anyway. I mean, if I’m getting the full 5 stack agi buff then that’ll buff the blade dance casts anyway. The additional UC cast is already so powerful, I can’t imagine trail of ruin doing more damage overall. I guess we’ll see!

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It’s bound to happen. Our single target “rotation” is way too simple…

It hasn’t really happened though has it? The problem is that blade dance at the base level doesn’t fit into the demon hunter toolkit given how strong simply spamming chaos strike is. If we’re in a situation where we have one ability that we don’t even put on our bars until we’re using a patch specific tier set then that’s degenerate game design. There can’t be any debate about it.

Blade Dance should most definitely be on your bars. Death Sweep with 2+ targets and Blade dance with 3+.

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Nobody tell this person that AG/DGB or CA is easily 10% ahead of any Night Fae build on Single Target and that there isn’t any way it won’t be optimal save for tragic nerfs, which would essentially invalidate the tier’s effect entirely on ST…

If I had to pick one ability as representative of the DH class, it would be Blade Dance.

That zig-zagging is one of the most dynamic, eye-catching animations in the game.

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tbh at this point I’ve changed my mind about the 4-set. I think factoring in Blade Dance into a havoc rotation isn’t that big a deal and you can play near enough any build you want, the procs are hardly game-changing compared to what dual legendaries will do. It would be nice if the 4-set could change blade dance procs into charges because that would give us a lot more versatility around when it is we want to use them, which in turn would give more leniency to builds like chaos theory/cycle of hatred or momentum/essence break. It would be nice if the DH community could ease up the crying long enough to come together on this as a reasonable demand but I suppose I can’t hope for miracles.

Ironically enough, I think agony gaze/sinful brand will be the meta even with the tier set designed the way it is, you just take chaos theory for a 2nd legendary. Honestly, if you play havoc and have a chaos theory legendary go equip it, spec cycle of hatred/demonic and try it out on a target dummy. See for yourself how easy it is to manage your fury and get back into a demonic window when you spend on the refund proc from chaos theory. The only reason you don’t play this build right now is because there’s not enough advantage for being back in demonic, but with agony gaze you’ll get a permanent sinful brand, you’ll prioritise the additional blade dance casts to get in a chaos theory window and ignore the refreshed blade dance CD. Right now, the biggest problem with the havoc 4-set is it’s not going to lend intuitively to what will probably be the highest performing DH build.

So… who’s going to bet on a hard agony gaze nerf? :upside_down_face:

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Define “hard”. A nerf is one thing… a HARD nerf is another.

hmm … well… maybe they change it so eye beam increases the damage instead of the duration… then there’d be no point reducing the window between eyebeam casts bc you’d only buff the last few seconds. only viable venthyr legendary after that would be DGB which everyone’s already upset at for having no synergy a blade dance centric 4-set. maybe it’ll be worth it in terms of pure number but even then if you made agony gaze a damage buff then it’d be a big game of RNG, which i assume is why nobody plays venthyr dh as of 9.1.5

Although I do wonder what the low-effort blade dance spam build is going to look like. what legendaries would people play to compliment? just everburn and… what else? still go nf for first strike? I think that kyrian legendary looks pretty good… I’ll not be playing it either way :innocent:

At this exact second the build is going to be 112x1x1, Venthyr with Chaos Theory and Agony Gaze. This build requires us to Blade Dance on CD to proc Chaos Theory, and with Chaos Theory procs you get enough CoH procs to get extension cheese.

Looks rather good to me.

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Nah, the rotation is brutally generic with Demon’s Bite/Chaos Strike spam. The class is broken and empty without the talents. It was bad enough the spec got copied off of a bad spec like WW Monk and then removing the 100% dodge for 1 sec because that was the only surviability havoc had that wasn’t a long cd. Getting rid of it on single target on a whim like this? Gosh, no.

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