How often should I use Demons Bite? should I use it to get my bar full then CS/bd or only use it enough for CS and/or BD?
No, Havoc doesn’t really pool, because of Blind Fury and Immo Aura. You generally want to go into Eye Beam with as little fury as possible, and need to be aware of the passive trickle of fury from Immo Aura when it is active. There are some caveats to that, though:
First, you need to make sure you don’t starve out Blade Dance. If you cast Chaos Strike right before Blade Dance comes off CD, and have less than 15 fury afterwards, now you have to Demon’s Bite instead of Blade Dance, delaying Blade Dance. The easiest way to avoid this is to simply not cast Chaos Strike while below 55 fury (slightly less with Revolving Blades on your armor). You also never ever want to delay Blade Dance (or Death Sweep, when in meta), because it is by far your single highest damage-per-cast-time ability.
You also don’t want to starve out Eye Beam, but also not waste too much of the fury from Blind Fury. As Eye Beam’s CD is almost done, you want to try to ensure that you’ll have at least 30 fury the instant it comes off CD, so you can instantly cast it (unless you’re delaying Eye Beam for adds spawning within the next ~10 seconds). This takes a bit more guesswork, since the vagaries of Demon Bite’s fury RNG generation and Chaos Strike’s RNG refund make it difficult to pin down, but the short version is, you want to be as close to 30 fury as you can without being under it. Being over it is a small DPS loss, but it’s a much larger DPS loss to delay Eye Beam, so you’re better off wasting some fury be being too high going into Eye Beam than too low. The mechanism at work here is that Eye Beam costs 30 fury, and then generates 120 fury over its duration due to Blind Fury. So any fury you have over 30 when you cast Eye Beam is effectively wasted, since you’d end up at maximum fury after the channel regardless.
Otherwise, there’s no benefit to pooling and then dumping fury, unless you’re running the Azerite trait Seething Power, which is both not recommended and is only a minor DPS gain for pooling anyway (and only while you have no stacks active). Pooling also increases your risk of wasting excessive fury via Blind Fury, and wasting fury by having Immo Aura tick while at or near maximum fury. Excepting the fury jockeying leading up to Eye Beam, your general rule of thumb is, cast Blade Dance on CD regardless, cast Chaos Strike if >= 55 fury, cast Demon’s Bite if < 55 fury.
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Thank you for the Seething Power explanation. I hate the trait, but am now donning 2 of them, because I hate the other choices in that ring even more. I often wondered if I do myself a disservice if I delayed Blade Dance in order to use it during a higher Seething Power stack.
Sounds like 0 stacks vs. >0 stacks is the only significant increase. I will now only delay Chaos Strike if <2s on the buff and not full on Fury. This will let me build a fresh stack on the next GCD.
depends on ur other talent choices imo.
me personally i use the spec recommended by tren (rank 1 dh)
he suggests demon blades and felblade, and i tried it out and i really like it. demon blades r cool because they can dmg and generate fury while ur pressing ur other buttons, because they proc off auto attacks. does huge dmg if u get lucky on the procs and u can sometimes have enough fury to get off 7 annihilates in a row. feelsgoodman
Is this for PvE? If it is, it’s a terrible spec. In theory, the Momentum build (Demon Blades + Felblade + Momentum) can do perhaps 1-2% more single-target DPS than Demonic, but it’s unreliable, incredibly susceptible to disruption, has a very high skill requirement (that most players, even mythic-raiding ones, cannot meet during a realistic encounter), has substantially weaker AoE and cleave, has massively weaker survivability, and generally all around isn’t worth it.
Now, for PvP, I honestly can’t say. I’ve been told that Felblade, at least, has a lot of potency there. But for PvP, the Demon Blades build is more for people that just really really love Momentum and don’t really care about the performance.
With Demonic, not Momentum.
The big problem with momentum builds now is that it’s dependent on hitting with vengeful retreat for the fury, rather than just hitting the button whenever/wherever to proc momentum. It limits the usage of it pretty significantly for pvp (and imo makes it rather clunky in pve since you need now time your fury dumps with its cd). It also doesn’t help that many of our traits heavily favor demonic builds (either directly boosting eye beam, or doing things like giving a free eye beam for meta), and that (in pvp at least) the self healing from being in meta all the time is basically essential to survival.
I do however miss the legion model where fel barrage and the glaive toss bleed gave havoc a quasi short range-Ranged dps type of utility to the class. Momentum setups where super fun back then and it felt interesting to kite out melee with ranged attacks and more or less dynamically shift between melee / “ranged” roles (with an obvious damage penalty at range to incentivize being in melee when possible)
I was looking at Warcraft Logs recently and it looks like there’s a large portion of DH’s using that spec in Mythic BoD now - 3,2,0,3,2,2,1. So it’s a combination of some of the standard Momentum talents and Demonic. I was somewhat shocked to see that build being a top choice for some fights.
Its demonic/felblade/demon blades. What your not noticing more then likely is that it is purely a st build for the most part because it utilizes the enchant Gale-force striking. It also requires you have furious gaze (preferably around 2+) to make it work. The build has been available for awhile via the dh discord I think only recently though its been pulling ahead at the higher ilvls.
I’ve used that spec for experimenting since the other demonic dh build exacerbates my carpal tunnel. It’s quite strong with chaotic transformation. However, the biggest issue is consistency in building resources. This can cause significant lulls when you don’t want them, i.e. burst phases.
On the average, the spec performed quite well, sometimes beating out the standard build, but because of the randomness of the resource generation, you can really get punished just because of rng. Many people, myself included, have offered numerous suggestions as a way to fix this talent in order to make it more consistent (and therefore more viable) as an alternate to carpal tunnel dh.
To the OP: avoid capping your resources as you will absolutely waste them. Remember that your primary damaging abilities are Blade Dance and Eye Beam. Do not delay them for any reason, even if you will over cap from EB. You can avoid capping to a certain extent by casting EB at the optimal 30-50 (plan ahead). Since EB generates 120 fury, you are most likely to waste some every time you hit EB.
With tellmewhen you can change the color of the icon depending on the power level, but unless you plan ahead by several second, you will cap a significant amount.
However, it is absolutely worth it to cast these two abilities immediately upon cooldown for optimum dps. Also, try to blade dance immediately before eye beam as often as possible as running furious gaze will provide a huge haste boost along with the haste received from meta, and the cooldown on blade dance will be reduced significantly.
Eh, I really really don’t understand why. It deals essentially identical single-target damage, has more RNG and therefore more variance in damage output, and doesn’t really gain anything over a Blind Fury + Immo Aura build, while losing the AoE benefits of Blind Fury. Like…what’s the benefit here?
Granted I don’t have Galeforce to test it with (and I’m not burning a crystal for it), but I have 2 Furious Gaze slotted, and it’s still ~0.5% behind for me on ST. I don’t see the draw, unless you’re one of those DHs that just really hates having to manually generate your resources.
Ehh the only plus I can see it is in theory you should have a higher uptime simply because felblade works great as a gap closer for when you have to move out or switch targets, which quite frankly is every damn fight this tier. But it seems that the difference overall is negligible compared the standard demonic build. I am curious though how it would perform for myself, finally got my 2nd furious gaze trait only took 6 damn pieces to get, so I may try it out to see how it is.
Yeah I don’t think I will try it - I don’t get the chance to raid very much this time around and when I do, my performance has been meh for BoD. I am no Mythic raider and very casual so I will stick to what I like which is pure Demonic. When I did play fel blade, I liked it. However, I really hated the RNG factor that Demon Blade’s brings into the equation. I can see it being worth trying if I was raiding at that level but I am not so I am just going to stick with what I enjoy the most.
One of my fellow DHs in my guild (and probably the best of us 3 DHs, tbh) tried it for a bit on our Mekkatorque attempts last night. His response was, and I quote, “ya, @#$^ that build”.