Outside of 1 or two talents, and the VoP gluttony meme build going away, VDH seems really samey and boring. Everyone is still gonna play a spirit bomb styled build with little meaningful talent options (quickened sigils is still a thing like ???) and with feldev being thrown into the mix we’ve got a cool button to press that doesn’t really change up the playstyle in any meaningful way, it’s just diet eye beam without all the cool flare of eye beam. With demonic being added to the talent mix, VDH seems like its losing more of it’s already shaky identity and just becoming the smash equivalent of havoc’s echo fighter.
4 Likes
Let me correct that for you: Demon Hunter changes are extremely underwhelming, be it Vengeance or Havoc.
Yes, Blizzard needs to reevaluate what they are going to do with this class. Vengeance needs more durability outside of AM and Havoc needs more rotational buttons. Both talent trees also need major overhauls.
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Honestly, ive grown too accustomed to the vop/glut.
I dont care if you call it a meme build… i like it a lot. The Jekyll-and-Hyde shifts into your demon form with high uptime, big fan. It seems they want a less-rng based approach to meta procs by making demonic a thing… but its not nearly going go to have the uptime it currently does. That makes me a little sad… i know its only been since 8.2, but i remember the 8.0-8.1.5 slog fest where we were papertanks, i was not a fan of that. 
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Fel dev would need to be a 20 second CD for it to even be as good as vop and gluttony combined.
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I think it would be ok to have it a 30s just like Eye Beam minus the cooldown reduction from Demonic Appetite. Of course they’d need to improve our tankiness outside of AM too.
Several talents also need to be reworked, for both specs. There’s no real choice as one of them is always the clear winner for every situation on some rows.
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They need to stop making VDH havocs inferior little brother.
Either make DH 2 dps specs or make VDH an actual tank, not a half assed dps tank hybrid, its been how many years now ? Clearly the spec underperforms for most of legion and bfa yet they refuse to address the core issues of mitigation and resource generation/spending.
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Vengeance should have gotten the Blade Dance immunity. That would be just about the most active mitigation imaginable.
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They should go back to legion VDH and then build from there, BFA vengeance has always been half baked.
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Legion VDH was a crutch. Like, the spec was garbage until they made the cost of Fracture reasonable, but the problem with that was, it completely upended our resource system. We went from pain being our primary resource to pain being a resource for generating souls. They leaned even harder into that in BfA by making our generator just natively generate both. Now we have redundant resources, and it’s flat out garbage.
They need to go back to pain (or fury, I don’t care what they call it or what color the bar is) being our primary resource and souls being an occasional perk (sorta like BrM’s orbs), rather than something you actively game around.
This is my standing wishlist:
This would straight up fix like 95% of the mechanical issues that Vengeance has currently. Even proximity-consumption of souls wouldn’t really be a big deal, since they would no longer be a true resource (though I’d still prefer to see them lose their proximity consumption mechanic for VDH).
We’d have a sane primary resource that directly affects our survivability, our generator would be cooldown-metered, guaranteeing open GCDs in the rotation for damage and utility effects, and our mastery would help us all of the time, rather than during the period we, by definition, least need it. Spirit Bomb would stop completely eclipsing Soul Cleave, and instead would be a truly optional way of trading survivability for burst AoE, somewhat akin to Revenge or Seraphim.
Throw in some numbers tuning to reduce the potency of Demon Spike and substantially increase our passive mitigation (outside of Demon Spikes, and VDH would be in a really good spot.
The crazy thing is how few changes this would require. They’d need a new talent to replace Fracture, but there are a lot of old artifact traits they can draw from there. The new mechanics on souls and soul cleave already exist in the game (on tanks, no less), so that’s easy. And Spirit Bomb would be being completely redesigned. Everything else is really just numbers tuning.
2 Likes
Statistically, I feel confident expecting anything you suggest to never happen.
Please stop having remotely good ideas.
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I love the idea for the most part, this is by far the best suggestion to fix resources.
Im not entirely sold on the concept though, DK self heals like this and struggled badly for alot of BFA to the point they gave them so much more AM in SL.
Considering they have already have much more AM than us in BFA how do they make this work for a class with essentially little to no AM and a DS nerf ?
That’s mostly tuning, though. DK passive mitigation, even with Bone Shield (DKs are actually the only spec with worse baseline mitigation than us, and that’s actually a bit impressive, given that they are wearing plate armor), is atrocious, and Death Strike is incredibly strong. The model I used for Soul Cleave was based on Light of the Protector, rather than Death Strike. It heals for more as our health gets lower, which let’s it somewhat scale with damage, but it doesn’t directly scale with it like Death Strike. Net result is that they can afford to give us more passive mitigation than DKs.
Actually, frankly, they should do the same for DKs. Reduce Death Strike’s potency, buff their passive mitigation. They become less spiky and thus automatically better tanks.
Fair enough but dont you think having enough passive mitigation to survive nerfing DS would be a little unrealistic ?
I mean we are getting trucked on in the current alpha, so i doubt they can make it worse but i fee like we need another active layer of defense rather than making passive stronger and active weaker, this wont be a good feeling tank, at least for me.
Then again both DK and Pally look so monsterous and monk seems to have potential on the alpha, sadly i can already see another expac of DK kings 
DHs start looking as monk pre-patch on wod, where blizzard just leaves it on garbage until legion
Not…really? I mean, there’s no reason Death Strike needs to be so far ahead of Ignore Pain, Light of the Protector, Frenzied Regen, etc. I mean, I get the class fantasy, and inverting the mitigation model so their resource fuels their heals rather than their mitigation is fine, but I think it’s move too far away from mitigation. Having VDH and BDK as the two self-heal tanks, where our resource fuels our self-heals rather than mitigation, only works if our mitigation is worthwhile baseline. Other tanks can increase their mitigation via resources, we and BDKs can increase our self-healing, but both should have fairly similar baseline mitigation as a result. If anything, the healing tanks should have a bit higher baseline mitigation, since healing is reactive.
Having a weaker active and stronger passive is precisely what we need, and what DKs need for that matter. The problem with both VDH and BDK is that we’re crazy spiky. The VoP/Gluttony build has largely hidden that by actually giving us the ability to have a defensive of some sort up more or less all of the time, but our mitigation without anything up is atrocious, worse than any other tank (with the sole exception of BDK, and only without their 100% uptime Bone Shield active).
If our baseline mitigation was stronger, even at the cost of the potency of our active, we’d feel a lot better as a tank. Right now, if we have Demon Blades up (or Meta or Fiery Brand), we’re solid. If it’s down, we’re in near panic mode. I’d much rather lose the panic mode.
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Dont get me wrong i understand what you are saying.
If SB was a baseline ability or we got painbringer back it may feel better but ive always felt that our tools are lacking for mitigation especially in BFA.
I generally love your ideas but we still need something “tanky” in our kit outside of meta ,firey is pretty meh, even being less spiky DS uptime will be mandatory to live in many combat situations and if its nerfed we become SoL in those situations.
I feel that otherwise we will just be reliant on some new borrowed X or Y to fill the void, maybe mastery changes could reduce the problem a bit but its inherrent because we have relied on artifact + uniques, then azurite + essence.
Untill they man up and accept that i dont think many changes they make will help to make VDH feel less like a dps hybrid.
1 Like
SB = Spirit Bomb? Spirit Bomb isn’t a mitigation ability, it’s a damage ability. The Bomb build has always been about sacrificing durability for DPS. The only reason it was as strong as it was for so long is because it feels a bit more fun to play, and because our baseline DPS and TPS is so atrocious that we basically had zero option, at least until TD came along and fixed it for us.
The “tanky” part is being tankier baseline. Right now, we sit somewhere around 60-65% mitigation before AM. Imagine if that were, at ~73-75%, where Warriors are without AM. We’d be taking 30-40% less damage at all times. That’s be like having Fiery Brand up permanently. You’re saying that wouldn’t feel better? That you wouldn’t be willing to give up some of Demon Spike’s potency to get that?
I mean, I doubt that’s going to change. Blizzard seems completely content to leave their classes incomplete and only filled out by the expansion’s respective rental power system. Fire is going to feel like a hollow shell without Lucid Dreams for the Combustion window. Even if Balance weren’t being completely upended, it’d feel hollow and empty without VoP + Streaking Stars. Assassination is going to feel awkward as hell without Shrouded Suffocation (god, I hope we’re not trapped into Master Assassin, I hate that opener. If I wanted burst direct damage windows like that, I’d be playing Sub). Beastmastery without Dance of Death is back to being even more completely brain-numbing. Destruction without VoP and Lucid is going to feel slow as hell.
So the spec relying on rental power to feel complete definitely isn’t just a VDH issue.
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Idk about that.
I play veng and I can 1v1 most havoc DHs in PVP.
Again not much to argue with other than blizz broke those classes rather than never finished them lol.
Blizzard could split Vengeance’s Mastery in half, really. Make it give 50% of the mitigation it gives right now as baseline and then the other 50% when in Demon Spikes. Tune it accordingly maybe.
Mastery’s weight would be pretty high, but at least it’d be a tiny little bit more interesting than Versatility. It also gives us attack power, so there’s that.
3 Likes