VDH Talent Changes Ideas

Classes Demon Hunter
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Tier 1 (Level 99) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

It’s no surprise that Abyssal Strike is the most preferred option. How can we spice that up a bit?

  • REWORK! Agonizing Flames: “Immolation Aura’s initial burst has a chance to shatter Lesser Soul Fragments from enemies. Deals 20% increased damage” <— This keeps it more or less in the fantasy of how the ability should be combining fall out with pre-agonizing flames.

  • REWORK! Razor Spikes: " While Demon Spikes it active, you deal 10% increased damage and reflected 10% physical damage back to enemy attackers per hit." <–This makes you stronger when razor spikes is active and provides a similar thorns feeling keeping it in line with the fantasy of when you are big and bulky with spikes sticking outside your body.

Tier 2 (Level 100) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • REWORK! Feast of Souls: " Consuming lesser soul fragments increases your haste by 3% up to 15% for 10 seconds." <-- This gives us more haste and keeps up on par with Protection Warrior Talent “Into the Fray” and Monk “High Tolerance”. Pretty sure BDK has 10% haste passive somewhere.

  • Fallout: REMOVED

  • NEW! Flaming Soul: “Damage from Soul Cleave and Immolation Aura increases the duration of Fiery Brand by 0.5 seconds for each enemy hit.” <-- Decent for single target fights.

  • REWORK! Burning Man: “Your Fiery Brand now reduces damage by 20% spreading instantly and deals 588 extra Fire Damage per enemy hit. The cooldown is reduced by each enemy hit.” <— This makes it similar to demoralizing shout but keeping it only for aoe if you talent into it giving you a choice.

Tier 3 (Level 102) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • Charred Flesh: Fiery Brand increases the Fire damage your abilities deal to the target(s) by 20%. <-- would function well with burning man finally.

  • Felblade: REMOVED

  • NEW: Erupting Souls: Soul Cleave deals 2,696 additional damage for each soul fragment it consumes and heals you for an additional 7812 over 6 seconds.

  • Flame Crash: Unchanged.

Tier 4 (Level 104) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • Soul Rending: REMOVED

  • Fracture: BASELINE

  • NEW: Shattered Souls: Fracture has a 20% chance to shatter 2 lesser soul fragment from your target while they are below 50% health.

  • Feed the Demon: Unchanged.

  • NEW! Soul Carver: 40 second cooldown. Carve into the soul of your target, dealing 15,131 Fire Damage and an additional 13,623 fire damage over 3 seconds. Immediately shatters 2 lesser soul fragments from the target and 1 additional lesser soul fragment every 1 second for 3 seconds.

Wow look, this row actually competes with itself for once.

Tier 5 (Level 106) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • Sigil of Chains: Baseline.
  • Sigil of Misery has been added to the talent row in replace of Sigil of Chains.

Tier 6 (Level 108) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • Spirit Bomb: Baseline. Frailty 10% leech removed.

  • Fel Devastation: Unchanged.

  • Gluttony moved to Tier 7.

  • NEW! Charred Warblades: You heal for 15% of all fire damage dealt.

  • NEW!: Hour of Reaping: Lesser Soul Fragments heal you for 1200 additional health. <-- this really should be a talent, not an azerite trait

Tier 7 (Level 110) Talents for Vengeance Demon Hunters

  • NEW! Painbringer: “Each soul fragment you consume reduces all damage taken by 5% for 4 seconds”
  • NEW! Gluttony: Consuming a soul fragment reduces the cooldown of Metamorphosis by 0.5 seconds Additonally increases the duration of Metamorphosis by 0.5 seconds for each soul consumed and leech is increased by 25% while Metamorphosis is active"
  • Last Resort: Cooldown reduced by 3 minutes.
  • Soul Barrier: Removed.
  • Void Reaver: Removed.

Anyways, let me know. We need an apparent rework from anyone that plays this spec.

2 Likes
2

Feedback:

  • Agonizing Flames and Razor Spikes now improve survivability, while Abyssal Strike does not. Abyssal Strike is now a dead talent.
  • Burning Man - the CD reduction is too much. You already made it an AoE DR ability with this talent, it doesn’t need CDR as well. It’s also a net loss on single-target in every situations, so it’d be a dead talent outside heavy AoE situations, especially since Fiery Brand is our only actually good DR cooldown.
  • Erupting Souls improves survivability, the other two do not. Would likely be a mandatory talent, unless the healing and damage are tuned to be useless.
  • Shattered Souls - ? I’m assuming Fracture now only spawns a single fragment or something? Because a talent that gives a 20% chance to shatter 2 souls to an ability that already shatters 2 souls seems…?
  • This tier still has the same issue that Feed the Demon has had for ages, the talent that most benefits from extra soul income competes with the talents most adept at providing additional soul income.
  • Misery <-> Chains - Ouch. As handy as Misery is, it’s not talent-worthy. No one would ever take it over Quickened Sigils.

Overall, I think this is at best a wash, and at worst a net loss for VDH. Gunna have to say that I’m really not a fan. You’re not really introducing more competitive talents, because you have survivability talents competing with non-survivability talents, and for a tank, that’s a pretty forced decision, unless those survivability talents are simply garbage (like Gluttony and Fel Dev are right now).

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Hey Xaedys, thanks for commenting.

  • Agonizing Flames and Razor Spikes now improve survivability, while Abyssal Strike does not. Abyssal Strike is now a dead talent.

Is it dead though? It still gives hyper mobility which I always hear from the community is “Vengeance has so much mobility so Blizzard can’t buff them”. It gives you a choice of survivability for raid or mobility for pvp?

  • Burning Man - the CD reduction is too much. You already made it an AoE DR ability with this talent, it doesn’t need CDR as well. It’s also a net loss on single-target in every situations, so it’d be a dead talent outside heavy AoE situations, especially since Fiery Brand is our only actually good DR cooldown.

Okay take away the CDR and you have people who might use it for pvp situations. 20% reduced damage to you from all players is still pretty powerful as it spreads. The point here is to give you choices of pve and pvp. It would definitely be more of a mythic plus talent and that’s totally acceptable with the state of the game. Can you say fortified weeks?

  • Erupting Souls improves survivability, the other two do not. Would likely be a mandatory talent, unless the healing and damage are tuned to be useless.

Alright let’s tune the numbers. How low do you think it would be? Flame Crash is arguably such a huge dps increase in this scenario. Would you still pick flame crash 100% of the time over this? Or this 100% over flame crash? How close would it need to be to be almost equal? Remember we do get leech from our flame sigil, even if its tiny.

  • Shattered Souls - ? I’m assuming Fracture now only spawns a single fragment or something? Because a talent that gives a 20% chance to shatter 2 souls to an ability that already shatters 2 souls seems…?

Arguably, it seems pretty close to essence sever. I worded it wrong originally. Since fracture already gets 2 souls you would get 2 extra souls, 4 souls. 20% chance to spawn 4 souls on a target with less than 50% hp. Is it better for pve? or for pvp? or for mythic plus? 20% chance is still random. Or would it be better if you could only spawn extra souls if your own hp fell below 50%?

  • This tier still has the same issue that Feed the Demon has had for ages, the talent that most benefits from extra soul income competes with the talents most adept at providing additional soul income.

I feel (pulling a Tyrannus here) that fracture combined with feed the demons would increase demon spikes up alot making it better for Raiding situations. Do you have some math to show otherwise? I’m more a dreamer in this situation seeing how things could compete brainstorming. Numbers can be tuned later.

  • Misery <-> Chains - Ouch. As handy as Misery is, it’s not talent-worthy. No one would ever take it over Quickened Sigils.

Alliance players love Sigil of Misery. They can shadowmeld and skip trash packs with vengeance. It makes sigil baseline while offering horde players an alternative and even alliance players an alternative. Choices for players is always a good thing. What would make sigil of misery better? “For 5 seconds after fear breaks the tank gets 100% increased threat generation from all feared targets?”

Overall, I think this is at best a wash, and at worst a net loss for VDH. Gunna have to say that I’m really not a fan. You’re not really introducing more competitive talents, because you have survivability talents competing with non-survivability talents, and for a tank, that’s a pretty forced decision, unless those survivability talents are simply garbage (like Gluttony and Fel Dev are right now).

I guess I was trying to see the game from more than a raid perspective. I’ve tanked almost every boss on a high end mythic level. I’ve done 19 and 20 keys and have dipped into pvp with vengeance. A change is needed in many departments but I’m playing the talent game right now. I still agree with you on the baseline armor buff but I think you should know by now 7 months in it’s a 9.0 rework and you (blizzard) can only ignore player feedback for so long on classes before they just unsub in droves.

4

Talents that are forced by content aren’t that fun, though. And while we have strong mobility, most of the “benefit” of that mobility is kiting because we can’t face-tank. If the choice is between an improvement to our already potent Infernal Strike, and improved survivability, people will almost always choose the latter in PvE content.

There shouldn’t be talents for PvE and talents for PvP. PvP has its own talent system for a reason. Talents should all have reasonable PvE usage, and sacrificing our one good DR cooldown for a half-as-powerful AoE cooldown isn’t exactly a fantastic trade even in the AoE-centric M+ environment. Talents that replace an ability with one that’s worse in a significant portion of content are rarely ever competitive.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that PvPing as Vengeance is common. The only PvP use for the spec that I’ve seen regularly talked about this expansion is flag running for RBGs, and that largely died when they made Demonic Trample share charges with Infernal Strike.

Depends on how solid Charred Warblades ended up being. And to be fair, that’s a reasonable synergy, Flame Crash only really granting survivability with Charred Warblades. Charred Flesh would still have issues, though. Too low of a bonus, and essentially has the same but much weaker version of the synergy that Flame Crash does with Charred Warblades.

In any case, the tuning on Erupting Souls + Hour of Reaping or Fel Devastation would need to roughly equal both the DPS and healing from Flame Crash + Charred Warblades.

On that note, something I missed earlier, but Spirit Bomb being baseline is very odd. Now the baseline kit has two abilities that both consume pain and souls to heal and do AoE damage. They would need to be reworked (like the suggestion I’ve throw around a few times where Fracture/Shear is purely a pain generator, no souls, Soul Cleave consumes pain to deal damage and generate souls, and Spirit Bomb consumes souls but no pain to heal and do AoE damage).

That actually makes it remarkably weak. That’s essentially a 20% chance to save yourself a Fracture and get off a Spirit Bomb after only 1 Fracture, but only under 50% HP. And there’s also a chance it procs off the 2nd Fracture and you waste one of those souls.

Probably a better one would be to give Spirit Bomb and/or Soul Cleave a chance to spawn souls, since those would effectively never be wasted. I’m still not sure the 50% HP thing needs to be there, though. Doesn’t feel like it enhances the flavor much, and just weakens the talent unnecessarily.

Leave Misery baseline, there’s no reason to make it a talent. It’s simply not strong enough to be a talent. If you make Chains baseline, replace it with another Sigil-affecting talent, like Cycle of Binding or the effect from The Defiler’s Lost Vambraces (Soul Cleave reduces the remaining cooldown on a random Sigil by 8 sec.)

5

I guess the issue is monks don’t have to sacrifice mobility for face tanking and either do warriors with heroic leap and intercept/charge to get away. Odd statement.

We can agree on this. PvP does have its own section and maybe some tune up here can be done.

I know you have mentioned Charred Warblades should be our mastery, I believe? However if it was a talent with 15% healing, it would affected by:

  • Sigil of Flame
  • Flame Crash
  • Spirit Bomb
  • Immolation Aura

I’m assuming this is why you have said Charred Warblades should be our mastery and more mastery = more self-healing? You’d have to remind me.

I guess I don’t feel our other talents are “balanced” appropriately, at all.

That is something I realized after posting it but was too sleepy to go back. I’m trying in my head to get a feel of a fracture/soul cleave combo without making it too micro-managey but they would have to buff our passive mitigation a crap ton so we aren’t spending too many GCDs on weird things.

I’m assuming you’d do fracture, soul cleave, fracture, soul cleave, spirit bomb?

I didn’t play legion much but that legendary seems like a great pick for a talent alternative! Good pick. However I could see them making it into a cycle of binding scenario where Afflicting an enemy with a Sigil reduces the cooldown on a random sigil by 8 sec. However, I feel like you could game the system (adding a bit of complexity?) keeping 1-2 sigils on cooldown and making it less random. Still would be a solid pick however, I feel.

6

That’s what I mean, though. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice survivability for mobility, so having defensive talents compete with Abyssal Strike feels wrong.

I’ve said as much before, yes, and I stand by it. It’s a very thematic mastery, and it was how we were tuned throughout Legion. We’re obviously not intended to have the reactive burst heals of a BDK. Our tuning is very much around a constant trickle of self-healing via souls, Soul Cleave, and/or Frailty. So having a self-healing mastery makes sense with that.

Even as a talent, though, it has solid synergy. My point with the portion you quote was that a bonus to fire damage while our major DR CD is active (Charred Flesh) has a much weaker synergy with Charred Warblades than a talent that simply massively improves our fire damage output (Flame Crash). So having them compete also feels odd.

They largely aren’t, but that doesn’t mean a proposed talent revamp gets a free pass on having inherently imbalanced synergies. My point was really just that you need to make sure you’re crafting the talents with that balance in mind.

The idea that I had would be to still aim to cast Spirit Bomb every ~6th GCD, which is what’s possible currently with the Fracture/Bomb build (Fracture has a CD of precisely 3 GCDs, so you can do a Fracture Fracture Bomb combo every 6). Fracture x2 Cleave x2 (intermixed or in order, doesn’t matter) Bomb would leave 1 utility GCD per cycle, which works well. Immo Aura has a CD of 10 GCDs, and Sigil of Flame is a fixed 24s CD (~18.5 GCDs with 15% haste). That would let Immo Aura be used roughly every other cycle, and Sigil roughly every third, leaving an occasional spare GCD for other stuff (like perhaps a 3rd Soul Cleave, since Immo Aura generates extra pain).

That’s often how it was used during Legion. We’ve keep only Sigil of Flame on CD, letting us drastically reduce its CD and thus increase our DPS. And to be honest, proc CD reduction is fine, in my opinion, since Quickened Sigils already reduces the CD by a fixed amount and Concentrated increases their duration, so their competition should also increase the DPS output of Sigil of Flame somehow. Personally I’d prefer Cycle of Binding in that spot, but Defiler’s would work too.

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Personally, i sometimes miss having the ability to activate Fiery Brand and receive a huge amount of health based on the amount of stacks I had from our old legendary. Although some may see it as a waste to activate our big CD mitigation, it was a very nice “oh sh**” ability. I’ve read many threads and do understand our main issue is AM, but could it be possible that a big healing cd like that could help as well. Maybe not threw FB or even Meta, but some new talent working in that way of increased stacks = increased healing.

Could even make it work in a way that you received X amount of healing per auto attack until the max amount is reached to help stagger some of the damage. I mean, call it leech if you want.

Another idea could be, You siphon the life of your enemy per auto attack. While no aM is active, you siphon more life. Increasing based on the number of enemies present.

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I was actually talking to a fellow guildie that a leech tank would be nice.

Vengeance Demon Hunter could fit that thematic with how Xaedys was talking about Charred Warblades functioning as a mastery and consuming souls via spirit bomb or soul cleave could maybe empower the current self healing you are doing to yourself to go from constant little hots into empowered bigger hots instead of the yoyo that we are now. They would have to buff our passive armor alot though obviously but it would feel better?

Would be very thematic to maintain meta while tanking as well. The flat 100% extra armor makes us feel good baseline.

Like a big hulking diablo wrecking bosses :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’ve said as much before, yes, and I stand by it. It’s a very thematic mastery, and it was how we were tuned throughout Legion. We’re obviously not intended to have the reactive burst heals of a BDK. Our tuning is very much around a constant trickle of self-healing via souls, Soul Cleave, and/or Frailty. So having a self-healing mastery makes sense with that.

I actually quite like this idea, as I despise our current mastery. I want to see a mastery that benefits us at all times, rather than feeding into the feast-or-famine we have now. My only real issue is that I feel like it completely reinforces the already forced talent paradigm we have, by forcing you to spec into Flame Crash and Spirit Bomb, as you need to get all the fire damage you can. I would love to see this mastery coupled with a talent rework, as one of the biggest disappointments I have with our spec right now is how cookie-cutter our talent build is.

1 Like
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Well, that mastery idea was complimented by a number of other changes, which do help address that. Flame Crash is admittedly an outlier in that setup, though. Here’s the post where I laid out my ideas for both short and long-term fixes for VDH:

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That’s definitely some changes I could get behind.

I’d also like to see changes to many of our other talent rows as well, given how many of them have exactly 1 viable talent choice that stands head-and-shoulders above the others.

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Feedback:

T1:

Add a new tier 1 talent and make Abyssal Strike baseline, or the other two will be too strong.

T2:

Flaming Souls will either be bad or too good if the damage reduction stays the same. Feels kinda clunky too.

T3:

Felblade is a good talent but Flame Crash is a great talent. I’d love to talent Felblade but no way would I give up Flame Crash for it, just make Flame Crash baseline.

Erupting Souls is like a bandaid for the nerf bat we got to soul cleave for this xpac, just give us back our old useful soul cleave.

T4

I do not like Fracture, but I talent it because it is too good. What I want is for a reason to push other buttons then Shear if Fracture is not talented.

I miss the old Soul Rending.

T5

This tier has always been meh, we need more situational Sigils here, maybe even a healing Sigil, or a slow Sigil.

T6

I talent Spirit Bomb not because I like it, I talent it because it is too good. I do not want it baseline, I just want more options.

T7

Meta still sucks so Gluttony is kinda meh, Last Resort un-nerf’d is counter to what dev’s want, and some people actually like Soul Barrier, so I can not see it being removed.

I like your suggestions that put us closer to what we once were an expansion ago, but I do not think these changes will make us a great raid tank (we are not now, and were not pre-nerf). I think un-nerfing us to be closer to what we were in legion would be a big step in the right direction, but we still need something that will have people want to bring us to raids over other tanks.

TDLR: Everyone talents Fracture and Spirit Bomb because they are too good, not because we all like them. Any changes that un-nerf us to be closer to Legion Vengeance is good.

13

Xaedys, do you have handy reference to your discussions of why baseline mitigation is so bad (comparatively) and also why our mastery is the worst? Trying to find these as references for discussions with friends.

No bigs if you don’t feel like doing that, but you ARE the best. :smiley:

14

I’m not Xaedys, but the answer to your questions is pretty simple. Our baseline mitigation is so bad because Demonic Wards (our tanking passive) only provides an 80% increase to Armor. The only other tank with Armor lower than us is Brewmasters, who only get a 25% Armor increase (which is, of course, offset by baseline Stagger, plus 100% uptime on Ironskin Brew). Every other tanking spec has significantly higher Armor levels than us.

Our Mastery is also awful because it feeds into the main problem we already have as a tanking spec, which is that our mitigation is strong while Demon Spikes is up, but terrible when DS is down. Our Mastery just makes this rollercoaster worse, by providing additional mitigation when we don’t really need it, and providing nothing at all when our mitigation isn’t active.

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Aren’t we the only tank whose mastery is not contributing to survival all the time?

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For the mitigation, here’s the calculations I did. Mastery, the issue is more that it’s the only tank mastery that only affects us while our AM is active (all other tank masteries increase survivability at all times), rather than the mastery being tuned poorly. It’s actually a reasonably decent stat on tuning, it’s just unreliable because it increases our survivability during the times we’re already at high survivability and does nothing during the times we’re at our lowest survivability.

1 Like
17

This is precisely why I hate our mastery, and have always hated our mastery. Changing our mastery to be something that affects us at all times would be such a nice change.

18

I think metamorphosis should be more of an innate ability and should proc when certain criteria are met. Like taking more than x % of health or dropping below a certain percentage. This should be right out of the box and not a talent or should their be a button to transform into metamorphosis.

When you think metamorphosis you think of some uncontrollable “hulk” version of the ability, something that is innate that helps protect its host.

Metamorphosis should also have it’s at least one of its own abilities that is available only when demon form is active.

My biggest complaint with vengeance is the lack of buttons unless you pick up talents. This spec was culled way too much from legion.