Demonic Eyebeam Build

[Deleted]

You can modify simcraft's APL to be closer to what you realistically do while playing a Demonic build and it sims in range of 1-2% within Chaos Blades build (better without AotHG, but Demonic scales better in general).
The point that stands is that for extremely short fights, around 2:15, CB will be a clear winner for almost everyone. Anything shorter or longer and Demonic is close, equal or ahead (that's mostly because CB pulls HUGE burst numbers, but sustained damage is around 300k in between these windows, whereas Demonic doesn't burst, but it has 400k+ sustained at all times. The absurd sustain is just a bonus currently, and isn't factored anywhere) of CB.

Now, to debunk some myths:

Meta isn't that fantastic of a dps gain

Meta is the strongest DPS cooldown in the game hands down, surpassing Crusade, Heroism, Combustion, and many others. CB is powerful because it's multiplicative on top of Meta, and it benefits greatly from the haste it grants. Don't believe me? Look at your own logs.

Being in meta when your nemesis isnt up isnt going to net you much damage.

It works similiar to Chaos Blades, the difference being that Demonic actually nets you over a minute of Meta each time you invoke it. The choice is basically extreme burst windows vs powerful sustained, and having 100% buff uptime during meta might come in handy, since momentum will never be able to net you such an increase.

Eye beam is also a dps loss on ST

EB is DPS neutral on ST if you're using Demon Blades, since it takes away your swings, and therefore your fury gains. Anything other than that and it starts to be DPS positive, but the increase is rather minor. Now add generating 100+ fury to the equation, and we're in the 'use it on CD' territory without even taking Demonic into account.

You need to keep in mind how hard annihilate hits for. it's 85-90% stronger than chaos strike.

Annihilation is literally a 30% stronger CS, just like Death Sweep is a 50% stronger Blade Dance.


Demonic should, if the sims aren't wrong, be equal to CB on a 4 min fight. But it clearly wins in any AoE situation where the mobs won't die to CB+Fury+EB, simply because of a permanent haste increase. Chaos Blades for burst, Demonic for sustained, Fel Barrage for shooting broccoli.

Keep in mind CB and Demonic SHOULD be equal on ST, but might not be, since Demonic will barely benefit from having legendaries such as Cinidaria on ST due to long wind-up time. (At very least 3 globals without AoTHG). And it is plagued by Inner Demons procs, since these cancel your channels.

[Wardonis]

Annihilation is literally a 30% stronger CS, just like Death Sweep is a 50% stronger Blade Dance.

You are right. somehow I got a weird version of annihilation when I looked it up and ran the math. the numbers on that version were much higher almost twice as high. it was 1376% instead of the correct 929% vs chaos strikes 715%

[Deleted]

but Demonic scales better in general

How does demonic scale better than chaos blade? Chaos blade is literally based on your mastery, your most desireable stat. Demonic and Chaos blade are pretty equal when you have low mastery but as soon as you get more mastery cb drasticly runs away. Until you have high amount of mastery (35-45%) and 4p the standard 2220311 build does a fair bit amount of more ST damage anyway than both the demonic build (3310313) and standard mastery build (1310311) that is currently looking to be the best setup for endgame.

Although most of this is really close and will most likely come down to your gear and legendaries which is actually the best, but as has been seen before generally your ST damage is what really matters, which demonic isn't fantastic at providing. The only scenario i see demonic being the best is if you have raddon's and are fighting a boss with a lot of adds (5+) so you get really low cd.

[Wardonis]

How does demonic scale better than chaos blade? Chaos blade is literally based on your mastery, your most desireable stat. Demonic and Chaos blade are pretty equal when you have low mastery but as soon as you get more mastery cb drasticly runs away. Until you have high amount of mastery (35-45%) and 4p the standard 2220311 build does a fair bit amount of more ST damage anyway than both the demonic build (3310313) and standard mastery build (1310311) that is currently looking to be the best setup for endgame.

Although most of this is really close and will most likely come down to your gear and legendaries which is actually the best, but as has been seen before generally your ST damage is what really matters, which demonic isn't fantastic at providing. The only scenario i see demonic being the best is if you have raddon's and are fighting a boss with a lot of adds (5+) so you get really low cd.

the demonic build is 331?333

crit is far more important than mastery for the build. you need to crit with chaos strike and annihilation as much as possible for the fury refund and thus more attack with them for more soul fragments.

the reason demonic wins out is the shear amount of uptime you get on demon form, it's that simple. when you are in demon form for over a minute, for the entire duration of the nemesis buff, the damage you deal just outshines a very short, if strong, cd

[Deleted]

the demonic build is 331?333

crit is far more important than mastery for the build. you need to crit with chaos strike and annihilation as much as possible for the fury refund and thus more attack with them for more soul fragments.

the reason demonic wins out is the shear amount of uptime you get on demon form, it's that simple. when you are in demon form for over a minute, for the entire duration of the nemesis buff, the damage you deal just outshines a very short, if strong, cd

Whatever dude, if you don't want to listen to sims because "they are incorrect" (you could just edit them to be correct yourself) and ignore any arguments then go ahead. Demonic is certainly better than in 7.1 but its not nearly as OP as you make it out to be.

[ZaraniaWoW]

Sorry that you'll need to copy / paste links for the moment, this is a new account on these forums.

demonic doesn't sim properly, the sim doesn't know how to use demonic appetite properly.

Source please. Seeing as it does

it's 85-90% stronger than chaos strike.

Nope.

imgur .com/a/yTT3j

You can modify simcraft's APL to be closer to what you realistically do while playing a Demonic build and it sims in range of 1-2% within Chaos Blades build (better without AotHG, but Demonic scales better in general).

This is correct that Demonic sims very similarly to Chaos Blades after APL updates. Here's my T19H_NH profile (WIP) for a random example:

imgur .com/a/hp7vY

However, saying that demonic scales better is incorrect.

imgur .com/a/FEcKm

[Wardonis]

Sorry that you'll need to copy / paste links for the moment, this is a new account on these forums.



Source please. Seeing as it does


Nope.

imgur.com/a/yTT3j



This is correct that Demonic sims very similarly to Chaos Blades after APL updates. Here's my T19H_NH profile (WIP) for a random example:

imgur.com/a/hp7vY

However, saying that demonic scales better is incorrect.

imgur .com/a/FEcKm

I already corrected myself on the chaos strike thing, i got bad numbers off wowhead

demonic can't sim right, the way you pick up soul fragments is too reactive and tactical, I don't know that anyone could calculate that and program it properly.

I haven't attempted to do it myself because frankly I don't know how, i've never touched sims before today.

i've been fiddleing around with simulationcraft but I cant figure out how to make it sim my char on the ptr. I also can't figure out how to change the talents on http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T19P.html

[Littlepwny]

i've been fiddleing around with simulationcraft but I cant figure out how to make it sim my char on the ptr. I also can't figure out how to change the talents on http://www.simulationcraft.org/reports/Raid_T19P.html

Just download this.

type /SimC
copy-paste in PTR-SimC and change the talent row (talents=1233111).
if you want to change the default action list, you can copy-paste it from sample profiles and modify it


On you comment about the way you pick up fragments, SimC assumes a zero-MS loss when picking up soul fragments but it does not care if you are in or outside of Metamorphosis, it just picks them when you lack fury. It *might* be better to pool some fragments for use during Metamorphosis and only pick outside of Meta when fragments cap (~5 afaik) but that comes at a risk (fight-mechanics/fragment placement and shit pick_up mechanism) while probably providing a negligible DPS increase in the simulation.

If anything, until pooling is proven to be better by a non-negligible amount, SimC's imaginary "pick_fragment" no-CD spell favours the Demonic build rather than the opposite.

[ZaraniaWoW]

demonic can't sim right, the way you pick up soul fragments is too reactive and tactical, I don't know that anyone could calculate that and program it properly.

I haven't attempted to do it myself because frankly I don't know how, i've never touched sims before today

Just because you don't know how something can be done doesn't make it impossible. Especially so when you are unfamiliar with a system.

Soul fragment pickup is made more complex because it also will pick up others near it. It currently picks them up when you waste no fury which is likely better than it is in reality. I'll do some testing and see how bad it is to manage them in game.

[Deleted]

I am excited if this build is going to be decent because it visually matches what I think a demon hunter should be so much more.

A Jojo Stand?
/S

Anyway, a Demonic build has me interested aswell. Although I'm much more inclined to hope for a First Blood/ Momentum build just because I loathe having Chaos Strike as a standalone spender.

[Deleted]

I could swear it's still 70% on the ptr, really that entire talent line is viable with this build but the amount of self healing from soul rending is insane. I soloed elites that tanks have a tough time soloing. and in raids and mythics it's even better. that said, demonic appetite does still generate a lot of self healing.

Meta itself gives a baseline 30% leech, soul rending gives another 70% which equals to 100% if you take the talent. But considering raiding, netherwalk COULD have more uses (cheesing mechanics, etc) ^^

[Deleted]

However, saying that demonic scales better is incorrect.

imgur .com/a/FEcKm

Are you, by chance, using gear that doesn't have a lot of mastery? I found Demonic to scale better, but that's only by virtue of having 85%+ of total damage dealt being chaos damage, thus benefitting mastery more than CB, that's assuming you sim it with almost exclusively Crit/Mastery gear.

How does demonic scale better than chaos blade? Chaos blade is literally based on your mastery, your most desireable stat. Demonic and Chaos blade are pretty equal when you have low mastery but as soon as you get more mastery cb drasticly runs away.

As above, I found it to scale better with mastery than CB, because outside of CB+Meta's extreme burst window, Demonic has more use of it. Even with Chaos Cleave CB, around 25% of your damage is non-chaos, while it's sub15% for Demonic. That shifts drastically once you get AotHG, and I've mentioned that Demonic is stronger without it, but not as strong with it.

Of course Chaos damage % out of total damage doesn't mean a lot when you flat out get 30%+ total damage during CB. The reason why Demonic benefits it more is because Annihilation is stronger than CS, and you get to cast Annihilation almost 3 times as much as you would with a CC-CB build ( 163.0 vs 56.4 on average in my latest sims, raddons + cinidaria, no tier).

As for tier set bonus, Demonic scales better with it than the other 2 builds (First Blood CB and CC-CB) since it casts Chaos Strike/Annihilation the most out of these three. Both Demon Blades and Demonic Appetite cause your crit value to get higher, you simply have a different reason for it (less downtime for DB, more fragments for DA which is directly tied to Meta uptime).

But, as I said many times, the difference in sims is marginal (FB-CB pulling ahead without tier by about 1-2%, Demonic being 1-2% stronger than CC-CB with tier, and CC-CB being the strongest with AotHG, surpassing Demonic by about 2%, and leaving FB-CB in the dirt). This is player playstyle choice right here. The major difference between them is that CB offers you massive burst windows every 2 minutes, whereas Demonic grants you sustain and more sustained damage. Both have their applications, but I'll probably be playing Demonic in all situations, mostly because I like the theme.

[malgor21]

Are you, by chance, using gear that doesn't have a lot of mastery? I found Demonic to scale better, but that's only by virtue of having 85%+ of total damage dealt being chaos damage, thus benefitting mastery more than CB, that's assuming you sim it with almost exclusively Crit/Mastery gear.



As above, I found it to scale better with mastery than CB, because outside of CB+Meta's extreme burst window, Demonic has more use of it. Even with Chaos Cleave CB, around 25% of your damage is non-chaos, while it's sub15% for Demonic. That shifts drastically once you get AotHG, and I've mentioned that Demonic is stronger without it, but not as strong with it.

Of course Chaos damage % out of total damage doesn't mean a lot when you flat out get 30%+ total damage during CB. The reason why Demonic benefits it more is because Annihilation is stronger than CS, and you get to cast Annihilation almost 3 times as much as you would with a CC-CB build ( 163.0 vs 56.4 on average in my latest sims, raddons + cinidaria, no tier).

As for tier set bonus, Demonic scales better with it than the other 2 builds (First Blood CB and CC-CB) since it casts Chaos Strike/Annihilation the most out of these three. Both Demon Blades and Demonic Appetite cause your crit value to get higher, you simply have a different reason for it (less downtime for DB, more fragments for DA which is directly tied to Meta uptime).

But, as I said many times, the difference in sims is marginal (FB-CB pulling ahead without tier by about 1-2%, Demonic being 1-2% stronger than CC-CB with tier, and CC-CB being the strongest with AotHG, surpassing Demonic by about 2%, and leaving FB-CB in the dirt). This is player playstyle choice right here. The major difference between them is that CB offers you massive burst windows every 2 minutes, whereas Demonic grants you sustain and more sustained damage. Both have their applications, but I'll probably be playing Demonic in all situations, mostly because I like the theme.

As far as M+ my current thoughts are Soul Rending +DEmonic for Fortified and Netherwalk + Chaos Blades for Tyranical

[ZaraniaWoW]

Are you, by chance, using gear that doesn't have a lot of mastery? I found Demonic to scale better, but that's only by virtue of having 85%+ of total damage dealt being chaos damage, thus benefitting mastery more than CB, that's assuming you sim it with almost exclusively Crit/Mastery gear.

That's with a pretty close to BIS T19 mythic nighthold gearset. ~45% mastery. I need to sim the different trinkets to see which ends up being best still.

As for tier set bonus, Demonic scales better with it than the other 2 builds (First Blood CB and CC-CB) since it casts Chaos Strike/Annihilation the most out of these three. Both Demon Blades and Demonic Appetite cause your crit value to get higher, you simply have a different reason for it (less downtime for DB, more fragments for DA which is directly tied to Meta uptime).

Not really. Depending on how you set up CBlades, it can cast CS more since less time spent Eye Beaming.

But, as I said many times, the difference in sims is marginal (FB-CB pulling ahead without tier by about 1-2%, Demonic being 1-2% stronger than CC-CB with tier, and CC-CB being the strongest with AotHG, surpassing Demonic by about 2%, and leaving FB-CB in the dirt).

As I showed above with a profile using tier, Demonic is not stronger with tier. And CBlades scales better with legendaries (in the range of ~5% higher with one legendary, though I need to see why shoulders aren't simming so hot for Demonic). If you have an APL that is doing better than the current SimC one (latest nightly has most of the changes I've made) then provide it and I'll merge them in.

[Wardonis]

As I showed above with a profile using tier, Demonic is not stronger with tier. And CBlades scales better with legendaries (in the range of ~5% higher with one legendary, though I need to see why shoulders aren't simming so hot for Demonic). If you have an APL that is doing better than the current SimC one (latest nightly has most of the changes I've made) then provide it and I'll merge them in.

what legendaries are you using? head and shoulders should be BiS with the ring in 3rd. What pick up method for soul fragments? Like, how are you telling it to pool them? the trick is holding off if eyebeam is 8 or less seconds from being ready dump fury to 50-60 hit eyebeam, drop to 50-60, go meta, dump to 50-60, immediately hit eyebeam again. the rotation has a lot of fluid reaction to fragments and the way you need to manage resources is unreal. the build has a ton of nuances for being a 4 button spec

Anyway, a Demonic build has me interested aswell. Although I'm much more inclined to hope for a First Blood/ Momentum build just because I loathe having Chaos Strike as a standalone spender.

If you wanted to go first blood instead of chaos cleave it isn't a large dps loss, only about 1.5% and in aoe, cleave and st it performs well. you won't get the same uptime on demon form but it will be close. first blood hits hard now and it almost makes up for the loss but the change up to the rotation is really fun, try it. I wouldn't fret about the tiny bit of dps lost if it makes the rotation more engaging for you.

[psyquest]

How do you manage to keep track and pickup fragment on a mythic fight with 19 other people, x melees and a number of pets and effects on the ground and around the boss.

Just for these I highly doubt this build will even compare to standard chaos build. In fact the more I think of it and the more gimmicky it sounds and look.

A build must perform well in a real raid situation, not against a target dummy.

[Littlepwny]

How do you manage to keep track and pickup fragment on a mythic fight with 19 other people, x melees and a number of pets and effects on the ground and around the boss.

I mean, I think the build has potential but the kind of fragment optimization/banking that Wardonis is suggesting is not going to happen in a real scenario. The soul fragment spawn points are too chaotic and unpredictable to optimize their usage (e.g. leave 4 on the ground till Meta and pick the 5th) while avoiding picking them by mistake due to dodgy spawn points, not having them despawn, not getting more than maximum.

[ZaraniaWoW]

what legendaries are you using? head and shoulders should be BiS with the ring in 3rd. What pick up method for soul fragments? Like, how are you telling it to pool them? the trick is holding off if eyebeam is 8 or less seconds from being ready dump fury to 50-60 hit eyebeam, drop to 50-60, go meta, dump to 50-60, immediately hit eyebeam again. the rotation has a lot of fluid reaction to fragments and the way you need to manage resources is unreal. the build has a ton of nuances for being a 4 button spec

Currently it will pick up soul fragments whenever you can use the 35 fury. A quick sim shows that picking up fragments only if eyebeam has 10+ sec on the CD nets 0 gain.

Sims show for me that ring followed by shoulders are best, not helm.

[Pigglix]

How does demonic scale better than chaos blade? Chaos blade is literally based on your mastery, your most desireable stat. Demonic and Chaos blade are pretty equal when you have low mastery but as soon as you get more mastery cb drasticly runs away. Until you have high amount of mastery (35-45%) and 4p the standard 2220311 build does a fair bit amount of more ST damage anyway than both the demonic build (3310313) and standard mastery build (1310311) that is currently looking to be the best setup for endgame.

Although most of this is really close and will most likely come down to your gear and legendaries which is actually the best, but as has been seen before generally your ST damage is what really matters, which demonic isn't fantastic at providing. The only scenario i see demonic being the best is if you have raddon's and are fighting a boss with a lot of adds (5+) so you get really low cd.

How come Demonic Appetite turned to be better than Demon Blades or Prepared?

[sajin001]

How come Demonic Appetite turned to be better than Demon Blades or Prepared?

The extra shards lowers the cooldown on eye beam. Which in turn ups time spent in meta