[Beta] Vengeance Discussion

[Delimit]

Alright, knocked out a quick dungeon to get some preliminary feelings.

The Shear change is excellent. I ran a dungeon without Felblade, because that ridiculous talent change system is now in and I couldn't swap any talents, and the extra pain from Shear was definitely noticeable.

Fracture doesn't look/feel as impressive to use now, since the crits are separate rolls and are much smaller, but overall I think the damage definitely went up, especially when counting the extra pain generation from Shear.

Soul animations, seem to be much quicker than they used to be (look smaller I think?).

Soul Carver is a datamining error I think. It's definitely doing both the initial hit, and the dot still. I'll go with what Wowhead has and that it's 490% now and that's a buff.

Defensively, I definitely felt worse even with FTD, which I usually don't run in dungeons. (seriously, the talent restriction thing.... ) I'm really hoping that the magic portion of Demon Spikes is returned to us, even at half value or something just so that we can have somewhat consistent magic reduction.

Also, finally training dummies in the hall. Get wrecked on the raid tanking dummy.

[gcsmith]

So.... Nerds to the survivability of the squishiest tank...

[Primalthirst]

It sure seems like they really aren't sure how to handle Magic damage

[Deleted]

Hi fellow Demon Hunters,

reading all the stuff which is going on here and finally decided to take part in the conversation.

I'm the same opinion than Primalthirst, they aren't rly sure how to handle magic damage. I just did a few heroics and expected to be crushed sometimes but it felt still quite smooth. The 20 second timer seems a bit odd, Pala has 30 on magic right? But overall it felt okish, i didnt get rekt or something else. I honestly would pref a lower % of magic reduce on demonspikes and perhaps a 1 min cd on the magic cd. Shear feels great now!

[JimSolo]

Perhaps they're planning for us to make haste a prio in order to heal through said magic damage instead of resist it. To be fair having DS as a %DR was mechanically boring (although necessary given the toolkit limitations), and made mastery extremely strong. Mastery is back to being fight situational now which means carrying around extra gear and such.

If Empower Wards had some sort of mechanic attached to it that further benefited MR. Given that it's basically AMS and ripping off other classes abilities makes up 90% of DH, what about Glyph of Regenerative Magic? If no magic damage is taken for (for example) the last 3 seconds of the duration of EW the cd is reduced by 5 seconds or something. Just to make it a bit more intuitive as to when it's used and so we aren't forced to go "EW isn't up? I die now."

[Delimit]

There will be a proper haste/mastery balance to keep, the re-gimping of Demon Spikes for magic resist won't change that.

As long as Paladins and especially Guardian Druids exist in their current forms, I can't give any idea of what I would want to see other than Demon Spikes being given magic damage reduction again. Paladins can maintain similar uptimes as Demon Spikes (+-5-10%) with higher magic damage (all damage) reduction. Druids can sit on 100% uptime of their 30% magic damage AM, on top of the 10% base kit + 15% from Pulverize and a chance to increase resists from artifact on top of it all. I can't even suggest anything reasonable because those 2 classes have seen no signs of nerfs, so I don't know if that kind of power is what we're supposed to be aiming for, or if Blizzard has just been negligent in bringing them back down to reality. 10% baseline,and an extra 30% for only 30% of the time isn't going to cut it if things are tuned around 100% tanks. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Demon Spikes the way it was if Guardians and ProtPal are the standard. Granted, we have some decent healing to help compensate for part of that. Perhaps Blizzard is counting on that to be enough, but I just don't see it.

The armor nerf really boggles my mind, even with the new stamina bonus.

[Primalthirst]

There's no way Guardian can keep that sort of uptime. It's not "Active Mitigation" if it's always up, *points at Stagger*.

[JimSolo]

Well the armor nerf seems as if it's there to counteract the indirect nerfs to mastery through DS, thus giving mastery more weight. Not as much as when DS was %DR but more than if DS is %PhysDR with 200% base armor.

In.. theory.

[Deliverer]

I think the main problem with demon spikes is that they scale well with both mastery and haste. Paladin sotr is incredibly strong but the uptime is low compared, while Druid can keep up physical or magic dr cause they are limited by rage.

I'm not sure about numbers tho I can't and don't want to lvl up all tanks on beta so I'm waiting for 110 premade a to test them. I was expecting some sort of nerf to demon spikes but reverting the change was too much in my opinion.
The change to baseline armor increase is silly though.

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I think they should have empowered wards at least scale with haste and be an active mitigation rather than a CD

[Leadros]

Well thats a bummer.

i would have understood the demon spike nerf without the armor nerf, but this seems a bit too much.

i really hope they flesh the spec a bit more out before it goes live. my demon form really feels underwhelimg, asdide from the visual. id be happy if they gave it something like passive demonspike while its active.

[Deliverer]

Can someone confirm empowered wards aren't scaling with haste ?

[Deleted]

Can someone confirm empowered wards aren't scaling with haste ?

yep, its baseline 20 seconds and doesnt scale with haste

[Deliverer]

It sucks this way but we need to ask them to change it so it scales with haste on beta feedback forum. The main problem is demon spikes will easily get to 100% uptime because haste and feed the demon and having 100% uptime on both phys and magic dr that scales with mastery is just too much. The armor reduction is to counter the uptime in phys dr.

On The other side if emp ward scale with haste getting it down to an even 12 sec would mean 50% uptime which is reasonable.

[Promdates]

Paladin sotr is incredibly strong but the uptime is low compared

Their uptime scales with haste and crit I believe. There's a google doc around that shows how the stats work to give it a very high uptime.

[Deliverer]

I linked it a few pages back and it shows that you will never reach 100% uptime unless I read it wrong
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=1373645603

[Promdates]

Ah, I hadn't checked it in a few builds.

[Deliverer]

At 52% haste and 62% crit you have 60% am I correct?

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Before it was every judgement crit = 1 stack now it's 2 sec off every judgement and + 2 if crit

[Promdates]

At 52% haste and 62% crit you have 60% am I correct?

66% according to the sheet.

[Manu9]

So, is this a worrisome change? or will we be fine and people are just complaining? :O

[Delimit]

Well, there's still tuning to be done. Adding extra spikiness to the spec isn't doing us any favors in general. Considering we were already quite squishy outside of Demon Spikes, and early on we're not going to be sitting around with 100% uptimes. There is atleast 1 boss so far that is basically 100% magic damage, which will likely have Vengeance being a pretty sketchy choice to bring to that fight.

Blizzard won't make any tanking class completely nonviable for mythic raiding, so I'm not that worried. I do wonder if we'll see any progression races happening without a Druid/ProtPal though.

Edit: I'm also a little concerned about our damage at this point. I would expect to see some nerfs before we ever hit live. (tanks in general) Immolation Aura is a little absurd.