In havoc spec? No. It feels streamlined, not unfinished. In vengeance? Yeah, I’d say so. It lacks any real proper major defensive cooldown (metamorphosis is essentially worthless), the extremely low uptime on it’s active mitigation makes it feel clunky. The class by design makes a lot of trades to be able to do things it can’t do in BFA. It is no longer a high damage tank, And it’s self healing is a joke compared to what it should before how squishy they are. The idea of mobility as damage reduction falls apart on tyrannical weeks in keys when bosses become the issue. The class badly needs some of the artifact traits it lost back (Painbringer for instance) just to be complete and whole and able to do it’s job properly in any higher level setting really. Without those artifact talents, yes. It is an unfinished class.
Lets see.
Imprison
Consume Magic
Metamorphosis
Blur
Immolation Aura
Disrupt
Eye Beam
Throw Glaive
Vengeful Retreat
Darkness
Felrush
Chaos Strike
Blade Dance
Demon’s Bite
Chaos Nova
Thats 15 abilities, seems like plenty enough to me. Also, not a one of these sits unused for more than a couple minutes, Darkness is probably my least used spell, and I still use it every time I need it, which is often enough. DH’s werent changed that much since Legion, and I hope they stay right where they are after BFA.
15 abilities but using 3 consistently isnt what we are talking about.
If you’re only using 3 of those consistantly you’re doing something very, very wrong.
I play a lot of my DH and my Monk and Havoc DH just feels like a streamlined version of Windwalker. There are almost too many buttons to be comfortable for Windwalker, especially with certain PvP talents, but DH feels like it has easy space on my bar for an extra ability from a talent if I need
What DH seems to lack, though, are procs. The rotation isn’t boring, it just isn’t super dynamic. I don’t think Havoc lacks buttons it just doesn’t seem to have much interplay or built-in synergy between abilities beyond what you get from Demonic/Momentum
It isn’t a bad thing though. The rotation has some depth to it and it gives you a lot of room to master the class’ mobility which I think is especially nice when you spec into Momentum. Last thing I want when I’m dashing and jumping all over the place is four more buttons to press
Havoc feels complete and streamlined. Other classes feel like they have almost too many abilities and vestigial stuff that’s survived all of the class reworks over the years
Don’t let Blizzard hear you say that! I can almost hear them sharpening their pruning shears right now.
Problem is, Blizzard has a habit of pruning useful stuff like Soulshatter and keeping retarded stuff like Beast Lore.
havoc is boring in raids, and meh in dungeons and arena. they are fun for questing and bgs
The problem isn’t DHs being unfinished, it’s other classes being less well-made. DHs feel very complete and well-balanced with far fewer abilities than most classes have. (Even Monks, introduced AFTER the Great Pruning, continue to lose abilities.) DHs feel good, although we felt better at one point or another, in Legion. Plus with different talents, you can add or remove buttons to your rotation.
The problem is other classes, and they’ve been reduced, reused, and recycled, to try to bring them into line with the new design philosophy, which DHs were born into.
You are level 109 and providing input on raids and dungeons…What is the name of your max level DH?
The 3 things that actually take skill… I reckon I can see the real issue.
Many people are happy with how Havoc plays. Personally I think it lacks in procs and synergy.
For instance, throw glaive is pretty worthless right now. Only useful if you’re out of range and can’t get back into melee. Even in cleave situations it’s most often a DPS loss to use it over your other abilities.
So here’s an example of the syngergy I find DH lacking that other classes have: If blade dance strikes more than 2 targets, your next throw glaive ability is empowered, increasing its critical chance by 40% and causing the targets to bleed (similar to the old legion talent).
As for Vengeance, it’s in a pretty poor place right now. If it weren’t for Havoc being so popular, the class would have serious troubles, as it only has 2 spec options. Many of the top VDH have either switched to Havoc if they want to stay DH (Shakib for instance), or if they want to keep tanking they rolled a BRM or BDK like Munkky the author of most of the Vengeance class guides.
I could give you a long list of VDH problems, but at the end of the day it comes down to not having enough cooldowns and/or our active mitigation not being up enough to keep us from getting shredded in high end Mythic raids.
Our talent tree is unquestionably broken (5 out of the 7 talent rows have only one viable choice). We need to have spirit bomb and sigil of chains added to our baseline kit, and replace those talents with situationally viable options. The entire point of having a talent tree is to have variety, but if you study the logs for the entire breadth of uldir mythic, there is no variety in the talents we have to choose to remain competitive.
Vengeance’s main defensive cooldown is Meta, and is the weakest of all 6 Tank major cooldowns. It offers about as much defensive capability as one more charge of our active mitigation. It used to empower our baseline abilities, and we used to have built in chances to proc it with our Legion artifact trait. Those have been removed and Vengeance has been stripped down.
What’s left is a raid tank that is squishy and vulnerable when active mitigation is not up. In dungeons we have sigils to control the mobs and we can kite, but in raids our sigils don’t work versus bosses and moving the boss around like your char is a crack addict on a pogo stick is a bad tactic.
Vengeance brings no raid utility, aside from chaos brand which is typically brought by Havoc. What we need is to have darkness returned to Vengeance as an ability we can contribute to the raid.
Vengeance actually had Darkness in Legion beta, but it was removed before it went live because devs were worried Vengeance would be overpowered. Thematically Darkness fits with the DH, and I can’t think of any good reason not to bring it back to slightly help improve Vengeance in raids.
Funny thing is many players don’t even realize that Havoc is the only spec that can bring Darkness. I don’t know if it’s because Havoc is so popular, Vengeance is less popular, or people are uninformed. I have been in quite a few pugs and people call out for Darkness, not even realizing that Vengeance doesn’t have the ability.
Perhaps as an Azerite trait or talent. But Throw Glaive isn’t intended to be rotational in default circumstances, any more than Heroic Throw for warriors, Poisoned Knife/Shuriken for rogues, Lightning Bolt for enhancement, Crackling Jade Lightning for Windwalker, or Moonfire for feral. Every melee spec in the game has some ranged ability to pull/tag mobs with, and the majority of them are completely useless rotationally by default. Most of them, however, have either a talent (Moonfire, Lightning Bolt) or an Azerite Trait (Poisoned Knife, Shuriken) allowing them to be used in the single target rotation. So adding it as a talent or trait would be, in my opinion, just fine. I just don’t think it really needs that effect baseline.
But then, we already kinda have a talent that does that in Demon Blades. Due to the significant increase in empty GCDs that it provides, it encourages the use of free damage abilities like Throw Glaive. So from that perspective, one could argue that we already have a talent that inserts it into the single-target rotation.
Right? Mutilate, Rupture, and Envenom. I think that’s it…
You forgot Garrote and Toxic Blade, both of which are pretty mandatory (well, Toxic Blade can arguably be swapped for Exsanguinate, but that swaps 1 button for another).
That said, there isn’t a single Havoc spec that has less than 5 rotational buttons either. And something like 2/3rds of the DPS specs in the game have 5 or fewer rotational buttons.
Sorta side topic isn’t demo at this point the class with most active dps buttons used currently (think it comes to 8 or 9 actively used ones talents included)?
Last I checked, it was Aff, with 8: Agony, Corruption, Siphon, Shadowbolt, Haunt, Phantom Singularity, Deathbolt, UA. Demo has up to 8 as well: Shadow Bolt, Demon Bolt, Hand of Gul’dan, Call Dreadstalkers, Bilescourge Bombers or Demonic Strength, Doom or Power Siphon, Summon Vilefiend or Soul Strike. That said, I typically don’t include buttons with an average usage interval of 60+ seconds, so Demonic Strength wouldn’t qualify in that list, nor does Grimoire: Felguard or Netherportal, both of which are just adding additional DPS CDs, not active rotational buttons.
Also, Demonic Calling is fairly strong and common right now, which is another button less if you take that instead (personally I prefer Power Siphon due to the on-demand mobility and/or burst gain).
DH is an incredible class with amazing fluid gameplay . Compared to other classes this is probably in the best spot. It doesn’t need to fill 100 buttons with of abilities to feel good to play.
If I wanted to use a ton of buttons, I’d DPS in FFxiv.
I know. ![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")
Just thought it was pretty rich for a rogue to be denigrating havoc for being too simple to play.
DH is the only class created from the ground up in the post pruned classes world (On the Blizzcon slide they showed one of the design goals was to be able to fit every spell on 1 action bar or no more than 12 spells) I thought Legion was awful but BFA is actually better, you can use more than 2 buttons in your single target rotation.
Also got a purge and some more interested (albeit never used) talents.