A buff is a buff, and is always welcome, but it’s obvious a 5% buff to abilities will not be sufficient to fix the core problems with our class both in terms of performance and, more importantly, our design.
Firstly, a 5% buff to all our abilities cast will have a greater impact on aoe than it will ST, because in ST, (as an example), let’s say 20% of your overall damage is non-ability-related, which could be from melee attacks, trinket effects, or procs like eternal skirmish, shadowcore oil, and potions. In aoe, this number will lower dramatically because our abilities will comprise more of our damage.
While the buff is nice, the problem is that the buff to all abilities benefits aoe more than it does ST, and ST is really our biggest issue.
So, what’s obvious is that we need help in single target. With ST being the issue I think we should look to chaos strike as the means of solving our issue.
Easiest solution would be to simply buff the damage of chaos strike.
Blizzard does that, they’ll predominantly fix our core issue in terms of performance both in pve and our consistent dps in pvp (which is largely an issue. We cannot go toe to toe with any other melee class right now).
Still, design issues won’t be fixed, because we’ll have the same fundamental problems we’ve had since our inception in legion.
Few ideas for solutions that would be both reasonable in terms of difficulty of implementation and would give our baseline a semblance of synergy:
- Utilize what’s already an anima power and make immolation aura boost the damage done by chaos strike. Would read as *While immolation aura is active, your chaos strike deals an additional x% damage.
This would create synergy between two baseline abilities, and would further boost the value of our chaos theory legendary, because an immo aura window with a chaos theory proc would feel really impactful.
- Cause auto attacks to have a chance to increase the damage of your next chaos strike by x% (and give it a guaranteed crit chance?).
This would introduce a sorely-needed proc mechanic to our baseline rotation, and would encourage a fury-pooling style of gameplay, similar to what we’d already be doing with demonic and momentum. This would also further increase the value of haste, giving us additional stat scaling, because it would be a RPPM proc.
- Introduce a modifier to throw glaive, wherein the primary target struck by throw glaive will take x% increased damage by chaos strike for x seconds. It could also boost damage of eye beam? That way you won’t feel bad throwing a glaive before casting eye beam and taking advantage of the synergy with annihilation.
This encourages the use of an additional ability in our single target rotation we otherwise would not use (unless playing demon blades), creates synergy between two abilities, and similar to above, would reinforce a fury-pooling style of play.
- give chaos strike a dot component
Perhaps critical strikes from chaos strike could put a dot on the target, stackable to up to x stacks. While this doesn’t do much in the way of rotational interaction, it would provide additional stat scaling in favor of critical strike.
Alternatively, chaos strike could simply put a dot on the target for up to x seconds. Applying additional stacks would increase the damage but not the duration.
Again, encourages a fury-pooling style of gameplay, because you’d want to chaos strike back-to-back as much as possible to get the dot to as high a stack as possible.
These are just some examples of ways blizzard could not only implement an increase to our ST rotation, but also actually provide rotational interaction, or at the very least additional considerations, such as fury pooling.
Feedback or other thoughts? While yes I absolutely want a greater buff to our ST, I’d rather see it accompanied by an enhancement to the quality of our rotation.
