Leggo's made talents; decent idea, bad execution

Classes Demon Hunter
1

This is specifically centered around Havoc DH but I’m sure this is just as applicable to Vengeance. TL;DR at the bottom.

As the title suggests, yes, implementing Legion legendaries into talent choices was a logical move. But the choices made with Havoc give the impression that very little thought was actually put in. Endless Hunger from Anger of the Half-Giants and Cycle of Hatred from Delusions of Grandeur are now essentially lackluster talents that fall behind the other options on their respective rows.

Now perhaps they could be made more attractive options with some math tuning, but that doesn’t hit the root of the problem.

Yes, AotHG and DoG were some of our best legendaries and were used often, but they weren’t the best because they added any extra complexity or changed up your rotation. They only offered basic throughput.

AotHG was mandatory throughout all of Legion simply because it passively upped your resource generation. That’s not compelling or interesting. And passive CDR to your biggest damage cooldown was only fun when it didn’t come at the cost of your rotational complexity.

Conversely, Raddon’s Cascading Eyes and Loramus Thalipedes’ Sacrifice are examples of legendaries that actually affected your decision making process. Lining up enemies to ensure maximum damage/CDR is a thousand times more interesting than passive throughput. Chaos Theory: even a passive chance at a damage proc is more interesting than passive throughput.

Achor, the Eternal Hunger’s effects could have very easily been baked into a defensive talent option. The damage bonus offered by Mo’arg Bionic Stabilizers could have been made into some sort of talent option that added complexity to Throw Glaive - an ability that now feels robbed of all depth with the removal of Bloodlet.

Do you know what else was a compelling ability we had in Legion that we no longer do? Fury of the Illidari. Even without the artifact trait that made it explode, it was an insanely fun ability. We were a brand new class. Of all classes, Demon Hunter should have seen its artifact abilities baked into it’s core as either talents or generic cooldowns.

All in all, there are far better candidates for talents than the ones you chose. Please consider replacing Eternal Hunger and Cycle of Hatred and stop the process of pruning depth and complexity from a spec that already suffers the criticism of an extremely simple rotation.

TL;DR: You could have picked ANY other Legion legendary to turn into talent options, but you went with the absolute most boring ones.

2

DoG and Raddon’s are already azerite, albeit in weaker forms. Maybe Sephuz as a talent? Idk.

3

Also, the criticism of Havoc having too simple of a rotation is just a meme, and an incorrect one at that. It has been shown multiple times its rotation is on par with other classes, yet this keeps persisting…

1 Like
4

I would make first blood baseline and bring bloodlet or the Bionic Stabilizers damage bonus to replace it.

5

While I get people want throw glaive to do something, not sure bringing bloodlet back would be good. It was pretty niche to begin with on which fights you would take it on and was taken when combined with the Bionic legendary only iirc. Putting bloodlet in that row would be odd to me mainly because you would be left with no real decent choice in that row anymore.

6

We dont even have a choice atm

7

Ya, I’ve never gotten the obsession with Bloodlet. Like, I understand that it was a solid talent for keeping stealthies from stealthing at range in PvP, but that was basically its only useful effect. Throw Glaive isn’t supposed to be rotational. It’s our ranged tag/pull ability, the same way Poisoned Knife, Shuriken Toss, Heroic Throw, Jade Lightning, Moonfire (for Feral), and Lightning Bolt (for Enhancement) are. Some of those have traits or talents to integrate them into the single-target rotation, some do not, but baseline none of them is intended to be in the single-target rotation. They exist purely for pulling and tagging crap at range.

The only reason Throw Glaive has ever been in the DH rotation, even with Bloodlet, was if you took Demon Blades, which opens a boatload of empty GCDs that you have nothing better to do with. Even if they added Bloodlet, it still wouldn’t be part of a non-Demon-Blades rotation or build, because there’s just always something better you can be doing so long as you have Demon’s Bite in your kit (unless they amped the DoT damage up to obscene levels). And to be perfectly frank, neither the ability or the talent are terribly interesting or fun. There was no interaction with the DoT, you simply did more damage with Throw Glaive. It doesn’t scale with mastery (unlike Trail of Ruin), it doesn’t synergize with any of our other abilities, it doesn’t scale terribly strongly with AoE (due to the target cap on Throw Glaive), and it doesn’t even make thematic sense. It’s just a lazy talent, and I’m rather glad it got remade into Trail.

That said, I do think First Blood should be baseline, if only to provide our default rotation with some more depth (the baseline rotation is literally just DB and CS spam with EB thrown in twice a minute). But that would have to come at the same time as that talent row being revamped, because neither of the other two options is very appealing.

Cycle is simply tuned too low. It is an average of 1.2s per Chaos Strike. Averaging across our 3 DHs yesterday on our Grong kill, we averaged 114.3 casts of Chaos Strike or Annihilation over a 335s fight, which is a cast, on average, every 2.93s. That can be expected to reduced the cooldown on Meta by roughly 29% (so 240s -> 170s), making it line up nicely with 3m CDs. But it’s a very passive talent, with little visibility, and it’s too minor to reliably give us another usage (example, on that Grong kill, that talent would have done nothing for me, because the fight only lasted 5s longer than twice the average CD with the talent), and too unreliable as well. In comparison, the similar Marksmanship talent, Calling the Shots, results in an average of ~60s reduction to a 120s CD, which is much more significant (and handily lines up perfectly with Double Tap to boot).

As for Dark Slash, I loath Colossus Smash mechanics like that.

So the net is, I’m definitely a fan of making First Blood baseline, but not with Bloodlet as its replacement, and ideally not with Dark Slash or Cycle of Hatred remaining on that row (or in the tree at all) either.

8

I would guess if anything it has as much or more to do with the fact that our rotation doesn’t change as much between single target and AOE as other classes, but yeah in general it seems enough for me, especially if you spec into fel barrage.