Third spec, Healer

Classes Demon Hunter
1

Hear me out…

The concept would be based on the tapping of mobs essences and using it to heal yourself and your teammates.

Basic mechanics would be based around doing light damage to mobs that translates to healing for you and the party/raid.

Soul Expulsion: Damage over time spell that slowly forces the essence out of the target creating an aura around them that heals anyone in range for X amount. (scale down for number of targets, etc, balance). Stacks up to X time (balance).

Energy Focus: A ‘totem’ type spell, you plant this and it takes the essence you’re tapping from all sources and creates a healing aura around it instead of the targeted enemies.

Essence Transfer: Cast once on a friendly target and a second time on an enemy target. Directly feed essence from the enemy into the target to heal them.
If you target your Energy Focus instead of a friendly unit, you will amplify the healing aura around the Focus.

Self Sacrifice: Allow you to cast your Essence damaging abilities on yourself to heal those around you or feed your Energy Focus.

Charge Focus: Turns off the healing Aura of an energy focus allowing it to store essence.

Discharge Focus: Discharges all stored Essence from your Energy Focus onto the target.

This is just sorta some of what I’ve thought of in relation to this spec idea to give a flavor concept and direction.

I am now accepting flames and insults. Tyvm.

2

DH healer spec? Hard pass. Just flat out doesn’t fit the lore.

Also, to be honest, we already have a boatload of healers in the game as is. What we need is more ranged specs. Since Vanilla, we’ve seen a net change of:

+3 tanks    3 -> 6     Blood, Brewmaster, Vengeance
+1 healer   5 -> 6     Mistweaver
+5 melee    8 -> 13    Unholy, Frost, Havoc, Survival, Windwalker
-1 ranged   12 -> 11   Survival
The astute will notice 28 specs in the vanilla column, rather than 27. That’s because I don’t consider the Feral/Guardian split to actually have increased the number of tanking or melee specs, so I counted vanilla Feral as both a melee and tank spec (despite the fact that Feral honestly couldn’t do either of those roles at a respectable level until at least TBC =P)

Used to be a 3:2 ratio in favor of ranged, now melee straight out-number ranged. If DHs get a third spec at all (which I personally doubt), I really hope it is a ranged spec. It’s the role we really need to see more of, and it’s also the only real way a DPS spec could be added to DH without cribbing a bunch of abilities and flavor from Havoc.

Also, to be honest, I rather enjoy playing a class where some muppet of a raid lead can’t ask me to go offheal for a fight. “I’m undergeared” and “I don’t know the spec well” are rarely persuasive against such an ask. On the other hand, “I’m undergeared” or “I don’t know the taunt swaps” is generally extremely persuasive against offtank asks, while still letting us bypass the queues in LFwhatever when we feel like tanking for a spell.

5 Likes
3

Here was my thinking on that… DH’s are all about taking the power from their enemies and turning it against them. Stealing the essence of demons, etc. I see this as a perfect distillation of that concept.

You’re looking at flat changes as justification for a ranged spec but if you look at the actual balance of specs in the game:

Tank: 6
Healer: 6
Melee DPS: 13
Ranged DPS: 11

Ok, you’re right. >_>

My only issue with a DH Ranged spec is I feel like it has too much potential to creep into warlock territory. I could see something “Hybrid melee/magic” ranged that used a combination of channeled spells, glaive throwing, augmented glaive tosses, etc.

4

I’ve seen Wardens proposed as a thematic basis for the spec, though that stretches lore rather distinctly. A mid-range skirmisher would work fine, though, imo.

That said, the ranged functionality is supported by lore. For both Illidad and Leotheras, when they went into Meta form, they gained long-range attacks (and required a ranged tank for them).

Stealing their power and turning it against them, not using it to bolster or restore their allies. There’s nothing even remotely hinting in the direction of healing the the DH theme. It’s all about the destruction and obliteration of demons. Even Vengeance is a bit of a stretch/retconn from that perspective, because DHs as presented in WC3 and in WoW prior to Legion were effectively exclusively Havoc, concerned entirely with destroying their enemies rather than bolstering their own defenses.

The only two DHs we fought before Legion, Illidan and Leotheras, completely lacked any form of defensive ability. Every single ability both of them had was concerned with dealing damage or killing the raid. All of the prior lore surrounding DHs emphasized that they used mobility and raw aggression to survive in battle, rather than heavy armor, and there’s little mention that I recall anywhere in lore of DHs using fel energy to harden themselves against blows.

So ya, if Vengeance is that much of a retconn, I don’t see how a healer spec would be anything less than throwing lore straight into a Cuisinart.

The weird part to me is that if they’d kept Survival as ranged, we’d be in a good place. 12 melee, 12 ranged, 6 healers, 6 tanks. But some dev at Blizzard got it into his head that SV needed to be melee, and we got the dumpsterfire that is Legion and BfA SV.

5

Don’t even get me started!!

6

I dunno, I enjoy survival hunter. It’s a fun playstyle.

7

No disrespect to those that enjoy it. But a melee Hunter is dumb. And sadly Blizz tried it listening to the Hunter player base. They begged for it a long time. Survival was an awesome spec. Very well balanced and pulled great numbers. My Main was a Sv Hunter from TBC to Legion. Even when it was occasionally nerfed and you went MM for awhile (anyone remember arm pen?) until the next re-balance, Hunters were still in a great place. But then they gutted that too. So now all one can really play is BM. A spec I never really liked because it has always been too pet reliant on damage. A melee Hunter. Jeez. They already had too many melee specs. Just a complete fail imo. Fail!!!

edit: I see MM is actually higher in Mythic Raid than BM. So I guess there is that.

8

I mean, I honestly liked WoW Lore, but stopped taking it seriously after Pandaria and now they are retconning so much stuff… I honestly wouldn’t mind having a healer spec for DH. They just need to make up a reason for it, like they did for Vengeance.

Also, I’d like Blizzard to change the Havoc spell from Destruction Warlocks to some other name. Kind of bugs me having my main characters spec as a spell for another class…

What I find funny is that THE melee hunter in the lore, Rexxar, is a BM hunter, not Survival.

9

Stop. Just stop. I can see a ranged spec but as Xaedys points out we are by our very nature destroyers, not in the least bit concerned about healing others. It’s like asking a DK for hugs.

10

No, by our very nature, we are protectors. The entire POINT of Illidan going Demon style was to give him the power to protect the world and those he loved.

11

Has been all expansion, actually, both in sims and in fact. BM is still wildly more popular, however, because it has a rather higher skill floor due to it being the only ranged spec in the game with completely uninhibited mobility. MM is still vastly more mobile than your typical ranged spec (they only spend ~20-25% of their time hardcasting Aimed Shot, their only must-be-stationary ability), but players that fail to properly anticipate movement can see a DPS loss from said movement, while BM literally doesn’t care.

True story, in a D&D campaign back in college, I played a high-charisma high-bluff high-persuade Blackguard (basically the polar opposite of a Paladin) that would offer free hugs to people and then drain their life with the Blackguard’s inverse of Lay on Hands.

No, his motivation wasn’t protection. He didn’t seek to simply prevent the demon’s from attacking. His entire character was built around the theme of being frustrated with the largely defensive MO of his race (and particularly his brother Malf), and so he sought to use the demons’ own power as a means to destroy them so they could no longer threaten his world.

Ultimate endgoal is still the same, to prevent a threat from destroying one’s world, but there’s a stark contrast between Illidan’s aggressive take-the-fight-to-them and at-and-cost mode of thinking, the same thinking that alienated him from the other NEs and got him imprisoned and then ultimately exiled, and the defensive/protective theme exemplified by the Druids of the Claw such as Malf (though Malf isn’t strictly speaking a Druid of the Claw, he tends to use Bear Form more often than others, and has the same protective nature as that clan).

The demon hunter concept was forged in the heart of battle and fundamentally revolves around seeking to acquire the power to eradicate the demons entirely. That’s why it’s a demon hunter, their entire concept is hunting down and destroying demons and other threats to Azeroth. Illidan throughout all of lore was characterized as being the brother much quicker to anger, much quicker to action, and much more inclined to attack first and ask questions later.

There’s nothing even remotely protective about his personality. Hell, half the reason he was imprisoned in the first place is because he allied himself with the Burning Legion during the War of the Ancients as a way to infiltrate and destroy them from within. He literally actively drained his Moon Guard subordinates to death at one point during that war in his attempts to gain enough power to defeat the legion (there’s even a quest where you live through that exact battle in his shoes and murder his subordinates during the Illidan questchain in Legion). How on earth can you consider that “protective”?

12

Illidan was a selfish power monger only interested in furthering his own goals. Malfurion chastised him again and again about his recklessness and disregard for his people. Not sure why you think you’d catch him chillin around a green campfire and singing Kumbaya. Or wanting his followers to heal peeps in a fight.

13

Seriously, It’s hard to care about the lore nowadays after all that’s gone down, specially in BfA’s horrible story-telling. A DH tank doesn’t fit the lore and we have it, might as well have a healer too.

14

Ok, fair point, but I still expect my games to have at least some respect for internal consistency. Even aside from past WoW lore, DHs have continuously been characterized as highly aggressive and concerns entirely with the destruction of demons and similar threats to Azeroth. It flat out doesn’t make sense to have one start healing. This is literally like asking for a weapon-focused melee DPS spec for priests or warlocks, or a spec themed around corruption spells and/or blood magic from the shaman or druid classes. It just doesn’t fit.

Also, as I pointed out previously, we already have 6 healer specs, and even the toughest fight only requires 5 healers. Even without spec-stacking, that guarantees that at least 1-2 healer specs are almost certainly going to be out of the meta at any particular time. Tanks suffer a similar issue. Ranged DPS is what we need more of, especially since Blizzard still seems to think that anti-melee fights are engaging design.

15

Yea. You got me there Rav lol.

16

yesss give into the darkness.

17

I agree. Healing spec really doesn’t fit the DH character. Demon Hunters are all about hunting down and killing/torturing/punishing their enemies (mostly demons). Makes no sense that they’d ever be concerned for the well being of their allies.

Ranged DPS is what they should get. Would help balance the melee/ranged ratio and half of DH abilities are already ranged anyway, wouldn’t be hard to make a ranged DPS spec from it.

18

Demon Hunter: “I JUST HATE YOU SO MUCH THAT YOU ARE GOING TO LIVE LONGER SO I CAN HATE YOU MORE.”

So yeah doesn’t really thematically fit.