Vengeance Demon Hunter - Rolling Feedback

vdh-rolling-feedback.md

Tier 1

• Soul Cleave is capped at 5 targets. This means that we cannot hit every target on a >= 6 target pull and has implications for defensive use (Frailty) and aggro; it ultimately mandates that we take Spirit Bomb. Requested solution: remove the hard cap at 5 targets. It can be reduced damage after 5 targets if need be.

• Talents like Fiery Demise/Burning Blood nudge you towards holding for example Fel Devastation until Fiery Brand spread enough or Frailty was stacked, which is counterintuitive because you cant do that in challenging content

• Whenever we have to kite or cannot spend for a longer time we're suspectible to synced autohits nearly or entirely oneshotting us when going back in because our debuffs fall off. Frailty is too short-lived and takes too long to build again if you go back, you'd need e.g. Fel Devastation again, to be able to be tanky enough to build resources

• This leads to also the requirement of having to pool resources at the end of a previous pull to not just fall over at the start of the next pull, something no other tank has to do except Blood DK, but they have quite a couple more tools available for smoothening incoming damage and can guarantee having Bone Shield at the start of the pull, while we cannot guarantee having Demon Spikes because we cannot have 100% Demon Spikes uptime

• We´d propose making at the very least Fiery Brand a buff on the player, allowing us to prebrand ourselves before a dangerous pull. I can also see moving Frailty towards more of something like Bone Shield is; a long lived stacking buff on the player granting you more benefits at higher stacks

• Which is another issue; all other tanks can maintain 100% mitigation. We still cannot, even with Feed the Demon

• We are extremely dependant on Demonic because of that. Without Demonic, the spec is close to unplayable in highkeys/challenging content

• Half of our spec tree is dead to the degree of never even remotely thinking about picking it. the two far right columns see zero play. in particular, these are especially problematic in their current form:

  • Fel Flame Fortification is one of the worst shadowlands legendaries, providing not only unreliable but also little mitigation
  • Sigil of Chains, a signature spell, gated behind not only 2 talents of very little value, but also in a direction where you currently do not want to invest any further, making it too expensive
  • Bulk Extraction, a talent that never saw any tuning and was copied over from the old talents, where it already had 0 play. not only does it do insignificant damage, its cooldown is also obscene. heavily suggest removing it entirely
  • Soul Barrier, another talent just copied over. We've proposed multiple times to return to the (deleted) Legion version which basically worked like the aegis trinket from SoD. Currently, the shield is simply too small to warrant ever using souls for it when you could just spirit bomb instead. Bringing back the Hour of Reaping azerite trait would be a great replacement here.
  • Revel in Pain does not work with Burning Alive. the shield is also rather tiny without Fiery Demise buffing it, but at least those talents are close together
  • Chains of Anger: 2 yards is .. not much. don't see how this talent is possibly salveagable, I see no scenario in which you want more radius unless its gating something you actually want (please dont)
  • Cycle of Binding: is not applying per target. Would be too strong currently if it did, but could be useful if cdr is applied per target hit, e.g. 0.5s
  • There's no non-pvp reason to ever pick Meteoric Strikes but its gating the entire right side despite there being no interaction to any connected ability. We'd suggest making it a PvP talent
  • Retaliation is undertuned. even a 300% buff would not make it interesting enough, as it counteracts design wise with Demon Spikes in general. I'd suggest tying it to the reverse scenario: parrying (possibly regardless of Demon Spikes being up? or both in Demon Spikes and Meta being up) cause the attacker to take physical damage. the thread modifier is irrelevant, both now and in the future, we don't have threat issues
  • Ruinous Bulwark is counteracting Demonic. I understand it's probably also there because Demonic is not baseline and Bulwark is better without Demonic, but everybody plays Demonic
  • Roaring Fire is the same as Ruinous Bulwark. suggesting to either just remove Roaring Fire or to merge them. unless Demonic changes, these will never be picked
  • Soulmonger has and is counteracting all other sources of heal we have. It does nothing when you're struggling to survive and when you don't, you don't need 10% additional hp anyways. Heavily suggest reverting it to the azerite trait version (shielding per soul fragment consumed, removing the overheal requirement)

• A lot of talents from the class/spec tree in general feel like "filler talents". For exmaple we need to spend five points to get the entire value of Frailty while the "main frailty generator" (Soul Cleave) is target capped at 5. That feels extremely unsatisfying.

• An 8 minutes cooldown on Last Resort with 0 cooldown reduction tied to it feels anachronistic.

  • Battle-Scarred Veteran is 3 minutes, no cdr, but not a full cheat
  • Ardent Defender has 2 minutes cooldown but is not passive, and can be further empowered + has cooldown reduction
  • Gift of the Golden Valk'yr is a secondary cheat similar to BSV but has only 45s cd, while also adding cooldown reduction to Guardian of Ancient Kings
  • Divine Shield is a literal immunity on top
  • monk has Stagger permanently
  • Purgatory is an actual cheat with 4 minutes and no cdr
  • A suggestion would be to add some form of cooldown reduction to it (e.g. based on souls or fury consumed) or to simply lower the cooldown

Tier 2

• Most of our talents seem to be taken from the artifact weapon and recent shadowlands content, with a couple of azerite traits sprinkled on top (despite azerite traits getting mostly changed).
  • many other specs have multiple of their shadowlands legendaries as option. we have:
    • Fel Flame Fortification -- was not played at all
    • Darkglare Boon, modified and made more reliable
    • Collective Anguish in the class tree, which was only rarely played as tank but is a welcome addition
  • many other specs have set bonuses available. we have:
    • a better T21 2pc as Deflecting Spikes
    • We'd suggest looking at the T21 4pc (parrying reduces Meta cd) in particular, since we currently have 0 cdr for a 3 minute cooldown, as well as the Fiery Soul, Razelikh's Defilement legendaries, both often used
• The feedback cycle for Fury is currently near nonexistant. yes, gives you more Frailty stacks but the actual impact is near zero. if you check resource waste for top logged keys youll see anything between 10 and 40% -- some of that is attributable to Volatile Flameblood proccing at "unwanted" times, but it doesnt vary this much. You can waste anything between 5-25% Fury actively and still live just fine, which is extremely counterintuitive.
• Even when you try to waste a minimum of Fury (which is hard to get below ~8% depending on key level/affixes/pull size), you usually end up in a cycle of building fragments, spending with Spirit Bomb (in aoe) and then cleaving away remaining Fury with Soul Cleave -- a rotation that feels good. However, due to Soul Cleave being target capped and doing generally speaking not much damage, in many pulls this may already put you in a situation where you can drop dangerously low because it takes quite a lot of globals to build the next spirit bomb if its a ST situation or Immolation Aura (Fallout) is not available.
• Metamorphosis could be more impactful in regards to the actual gameplay. Currently it only increases the amount of souls and fury we get from Fracture. It would be great if some spells could get empowered like the Havoc version of Metamorphosis does. Empowering Fracture to hit several targets, making Soul Cleave deal fire damage or enhancing Spirit Bomb in a certain way
• Brand spread without T30 4pc will suffer from a lack of brands. Another argument for Fiery Soul, which achieved the same as the current T30.
• The Class tree has several severe issues for Vengeance in particular.
  • We have to spend 2 points for Erratic Felheart (probably) because felrush is good for havoc eventhough VDHs dont even pick Meteoric Strikes (which has way more value/talent point spent). But we need to Erratic Felheart due to Colletive Anguish´s passive damage increase.
  • Demon Muzzle´s value is really low and at best used in niche situations. Demon Muzzle was a conduit from SL that already never got picked.
  • Darkness has a way too long cooldown and is just not reliable/doesnt actually replace the usage of defensives because of the randomness (people pair it with Spirit Link Totem in Raid)
  • Left and Right "triangles" provide little to no value at all.
  • As mentioned above we are extremely dependant on Demonic. There is no actual choice betweem First of the Illidari and Demonic
  • Feast of Souls never really got picked since BfA. The healing it provides doesnt scale well into more difficult types of content and sadly it doesnt stack several applications.
  • In general the amount of 2 point nodes the class tree contains is massive.

Tier 3

• Souls should spawn based on haste rating. above 25%ish haste, you press Fracture at 3 souls and the gcd is ready while the second soul is still spawning so you have to hold Spirit Bomb briefly before you can use it. One suggestion is to make the Soul-System function like a normal Combo-Point system from Rogues or Ferals.
• Brand should not be able to spread to pets (e.g. fodder to the flame demons).
• Brand spread at 2 seconds and on a random target is another layer of unreliability because you dont know whether it´ll spread to the 2nd tankbuster mob you currently have in your pull or not