Perhaps I’m behind the times, but in my day AE abilities were used for AE, and then not used in ST. I didn’t cast Prayer of Healing every fight as my Priest, I didn’t hit Cleave as my Warrior on every fight.
Are we now supposed to be able to use any ability any time it’s available in any situation? Should an AE ability that can hit multiple targets also be the go to choice for ST when available?
It comes down to havoc players getting used to the idea that our abilities work for both st and aoe (which is how it was implemented originally)
That design choice came from developing dh with the legion ability prune in mind. And while other classes got more abilities back later on havoc was left with relatively the same abilities with the exception of immo aura but thats hardly a huge rotational changer.
Blade dance used to be always pushed ST but given tuning now you dont see that occurring.
Havoc already gets a bad rep for being stupidly simplistic with very few buttons to push and while often exaggerated not pushing blade dance in ST without First Blood can leave players feeling DH is lacking.
This is not necessarily true. The first time Blade Dance ever made it into the single target rotation was back in Tomb of Sargeras, but the tier at that time turned Blade Dance into a generator rather than a spender. Titanforging allowed that tier to continue to see play into Antorus. Battle for Azeroth was the first time Havoc really pressed it on cooldown without some external power emphasizing it.
A tier trying to push Blade Dance is not unheard of, it has happened before. The problem is that this tier set directly contradicts a build that is going to see a substantial amount of popularity on what I suspect will be a good number of bosses in the next raid to such a degree that its effect is simply not used.
OK, that’s something I didn’t know about Demon Hunters. I had something like 3 years of played time on my Warrior and Priest, but then left after Wrath and only came back with 9.0.5.
I chose DH because it didn’t have a lot of stupid skills for every situational. Just what’s needed, ST attacks, fury builders, AE attacks and basic interupt/CC. I honestly didn’t mind having BD/DS as a situational use only.
For myself, I dislike that the two bonuses are essentially just the same approximate 20% damage buff. 20% more damage is not much different than an extra attack every fifth (20% of attacks).
They do multiply, which is nice sorta. 20% more damage on the extra attacks. So if you did 100 damage per BD, on five attacks you’d do 600 damage, then another on top for an additional 120. 720 vs 500, 44% bonus for that ability. Add in the 15% chance proc and its about a 47% increase in possible damage done by Blade Dance across five+bonus attacks.
Am I miss re-remembering that? Woops I thought we pushed back in EN with momentum build as well. Been sometime since then, my bad.
Edit: Checking my logs it looks like blade dance was indeed not in Emerald Nightmare for ST. It was however in ST by Nighthold so before Tomb. So the majority of Legion at least.
Your suggested 2 set is the most boring, unimaginative and band 2 set possible. Like c’mon really just a damage buff? If it needs a buff Blizz should just buff it.
IMO your 4 set should be the 2 set, and both the proposed 2 and 4 set Blizz lists should be rolled into the 4 set.
I can’t remember, was this during a period of time Chaos Theory was good? If so, that’d be why.
It’s the closest approximation to a reasonable request as I could make. Windwalker’s tier 2 piece is just increased Fists of Fury damage, and there isn’t too much in Havoc’s kit at a very basic level that I’d be able to work off of otherwise. Either way, my main point was less so “use this exact tier set bonus and no other alternatives”, rather it was a suggestion as to what it could be. The primary point I did want to make is that the tier is not going to have an impact on one of the two primary builds Havoc will use next tier at all.
2 set: Chaos strike decreases the fury cost of Blade Dance by 5 fury. Stacks up to 3 times.
4 set: Blade Dances Cooldown is reduced based off of the base cost of Blade Dance.(so first blood would give ~50% reduced CD, and with max 2 pc stacks 100%) X% chance on Blade dance use to not consume 2pc stacks
Yeah Chaos Blades was used during that time as well as First Blood.
I disagree. Blade dance is trash and is nowhere near eye beam in terms of how it looks cosmetically and feels dps-wise. Hitting eye beam in a pack of adds is 1billion times more satisfying than hitting blade dance IMO. I feel like while other classes are getting buffs to skills they already use, blizzard is just trying to make blade dance “good” again. I don’t like it and it just throws off the play style of venth so much. If this tier set isn’t changed then havoc will be trash again:/
If you buff the duration of immo aura too much it’ll end up clipping…However if it buffed the damage of your next immo aura hmmmmmm. Supercharged immo auras could be fun
Yes please. It would be a dream come true to have Raddon’s Eye back.
Also, make First Blood baseline 
It is absolutely ridiculous that we are currently set to get a tier set 4 piece bonus that is useless. Tier 4 sets are supposed to be interesting, engaging, and powerful. With the 2nd legendary system, Venthyr + Agony Gaze + Eye Beam makes it so our 4 piece would essentially have no viability. As a spec that already has limited GCD’s compared to other classes, it makes no logical sense to give us this current tier set that actually makes that issue worse, rather than fixing it.
As the Resto Shaman tier set is now receiving a complete rework, I think it is a completely reasonable and necessary request that Havoc receives a similar rework. Either that, or first blood / blade dance needs to receive a sizeable tuning buff to make it outshine the current Venthyr/Gaze build that will become Meta in 9.2 if nothing changes.
This is what I would recommend for a reworked tier set bonus. I believe that our 2 piece bonus could remain as is, but there needs to be significant tuning to increasing the damage of blade dance to ensure that is always used in all scenarios.
2 Piece Bonus: Blade Dance’s damage is increased by X %. (This can largely remain as is).
*** 4 Piece Bonus: Every time you cast Blade Dance/ Death Sweep, the cooldown of Metamorphosis is reduced by X seconds.
I think this type of rework would allow our iconic class ability to once again, become a button we always want to hit, and it would add another GCD to our ST rotation. Further, the best part of Havoc has always been Metamorphosis and playing around it. As our singular, most important CD on a 4 minute timer, having a way to reduce the CD would be both interesting and powerful. Further, this would ensure that Blade Dance/Deathsweep is always cast as much as possible. This is a far better alternative to the current tier set 4 piece, which is underwhelming and heavily RNG reliant. Metamorphosis CD reduction has always been a popular legendary/interaction amongst DH players, and it is something that hasn’t been implemented since Legion with the Delusions of Grandeur leggo. I believe a rework that tied both Blade Dance + Meta Reduction together would be a far better alternative to the current set.
This partly true and untrue; Blade Dance in Legion when we had the bonuses simply turned it into a fury refund, not a generator. But because we were stacking so much haste back then, we were getting off more BDs then Chaos Strikes, making it a generator. Though the refund effect would be a nice 2pc though. Hmmm
Just saw Jedith’s youtube video about this.
I don’t play Havoc, but I have to say: if Blizzard actually pivots on what they plan to do with your tier set based on the feedback you’ve provided, it’ll be a major morale boost for the players!
The more they pivot based on player feedback, the more player morale and faith in Blizzard will rise, and I hope they understand that over in Irvine.
The current 2 pc feels like it should just be a standard tuning pass and should be replaced
New2pc: Throw glaive summons a glaive tempest (at reduced strength) at the location of the target hit.
New4pc: Every 5th Chaos Strike empowers Blade dance. Casting empowered blade dance refunds fury cost and reduces the cooldown of eyebeam by 3 seconds per target hit. (Max 15 seconds)
As someone who does enjoy blade dance and playing first blood I still see issues with the tier set.
Ultimately it seems like the problem is that the set promotes using an ability that some don’t want to or is a DPS loss in situations where you’d want to use Cycle of Hatred.
If the devs want us to press blade dance don’t make it a chore or a detriment to do so… Tier sets should be fun and enhance our kit. Not ‘force’ us to play a build that isn’t viable in certain situations.
2pc suggestion is just something that sounds fun but the 4pc offers the type of synergy with out kit that I think a lot of the players are looking for.
I crunched some numbers based on the raid testing I got to do yesterday and here is what I came up with. Some background first, this is a small sample and only 2 of the bosses. I was testing with another DH in the raid. The other DH is better than me in every metric. Their best average parses on mythic is 96.3 mine is 75.2, their highest key timed is a 24 mine is a 22, they full cleared mythic faster than I did, so just all around better and I expected to get out damaged.
This DH was testing using the new tier set and I was testing using the current Venth single target build. I only compared our damage on pulls where our deaths were less than 10 seconds apart to cut down on getting the numbers skewed. On Dausegne, which has the boss and an add that frequently spawns the other DH(tier set) did on average of 8.9% more overall damage than me with the lowest difference being 1.9% and the highest being 15.0%. This makes sense as my single target build doesn’t gain much from the extra add. However, the difference in boss damage was staggering. I did an average of 15.1% more boss damage, with the highest difference being 27.7% and the lowest being 12.9%. Since typically (there is always exceptions) boss damage is the more important metric than overall this is disheartening for the tier set.
As for the boss Skolex which is pure single target the other DH(tier set) did an average of 2.9% more damage than me with the highest difference being 4.8% and the lowest being 1.0%. This surprised me since my build was the pure single target build, but again I am worse than them in all metrics.
Now lets compare that to the dps gain of Shards of Domination. Currently I sim 14.5% higher DPS with 5 shards at max level compared to having no shards. A gain of 8.9% overall with a significant loss in boss damage, or a gain of 2.9% of the tier set is drastically lower than shards. Now I know this doesn’t take into account double lego’s but I believe the Venth single target build gains the most from adding a lego. Another point to make is “this just needs a tuning pass” but as many others have pointed out with current builds changing the tier set to impact other abilities would slot into more builds.
My personal thought would be to agree with the original poster as to how to change the tier set. The biggest thing I want is to be excited to get my tier set, and currently a better player than me with a full 4 piece set beat me by a small margin.
This will get nerfed quick if that even becomes a thing, because we have First Blood, thats 20 Fury reduced already, now your adding an additional 15 reduced fury so thats 35 fury, Blade Dance, thats making Blade Dance 0 fury, on a … what is a 15 second CD which is reduced by haste, making it around 6 to 4 seconds while in Meta/Demonic. Does that not sound a lil overpowered?