Demon Hunter Season 1 Dragonflight Tier Set Bonuses - Guide Writer First Impressions

Dragonflight Posted 4 hr 52 min ago by

These tier set bonuses for Havoc only provide pure damage, and has no interaction with changing our rotation or affecting procs. Our play style remains entirely unaltered, however it has a great synergy. Due to Know Your Enemy we already stack Critical Strike as our main secondary stat, and the increased Critical Strike Chance/Damage from the 2-set benefits greatly, this also greatly increases the change to proc on the 4-Set. The 4-Set however has a much higher uptime than may be expected, the chance to proc is per damage event and due to Chaos Strike hitting twice per cast, and Blade Dance hitting four times per cast per target the uptime even on single target easily hits 80%+, however on AoE Blade Dance is nearly guaranteed to give the proc every single cast.

How Powerful is the Havoc Demon Hunter Tier Set?

The Havoc Demon Hunter tier set compared to other sets is actually relatively strong. In Single Target scenarios it provides an 8.5 - 11% DPS increase, with variation based on how much Critical Strike Chance your character has and the talent build. With our expected Single Target build the uptime of the 8% damage buff is around 90%, and the damage share of the 2-Set buffed abilities is nearly 50% of our damage, bringing the bonus around a 10% DPS Increase. On AoE the damage share of Chaos Strike and Blade Dance drops SIGNIFICANTLY which lowers the throughput value of the 2-Set heavily, however the uptime on the 8% damage buff is almost permanent. This keeps the value good even on AoE, closer to a 9% damage increase from the entire set bonus depending on target count.

Feedback
I'm actually incredibly happy with our tier set, it's simple but these tier set bonuses are supposed to be basic. The 2-Set plays into Critical Strike which we were already stacking, and due to First Blood all of the buffed damage is also affected by our Mastery which further pushes up our 2 stats we wanted to stack. We also got a strong set due to the 4-Set having an incredibly high uptime on a flat 8% damage increase. The only complaint I have is that the 10% increased Critical Strike Damage is additive, meaning your Critical Strikes only do 5% extra damage (210% critical strike damage instead of the base 200%) which was not my expectation to how it read and helps the 2-Set feel less relevant.

Havoc Demon Hunter Guide

Vengeance Demon Hunter Tier Set First Impression





The Vengeance Tier Set Skybound Avenger's Flightwear bonus is out and it seems fairly decent. Our 2 piece bonus, Demon Hunter Vengeance Class Set 2pc smooths out our rotation with extra Fury generation (5 with Fracture, 4 with Shear and Shear Fury talented, 2 without) and gives a minor bump in damage, as well as a 15% chance for one extra soul. The 4 piece bonus, Demon Hunter Vengeance Class Set 4pc is a simple, random passive buff to our finishers, which just do extra damage and cause damaged targets to deal 15% less damage to us for a short period. Neither of these bonuses particularly affect how we play the game, as they're not strong enough to play around, nor are they predictable. There is currently a bug where the damage reduction only applies to our current target, rather than all targets damaged, but I'm going by the tooltip for expected behavior. In terms of synergy, it just reinforces some of the talents that we will always take in current builds anyway, so it doesn't particularly change anything, which is good for a first tier bonus.

The 2 set bonus is worth about 2-3% damage in ST, dropping off as we scale into AoE. Now that we actually do decent damage, it's quite a nice bonus. The extra Fury generation also gives a bit of flexibility in choosing talents as it reduces the need for extra Fury gain from talents, freeing up a few points that can be placed elsewhere. The 4 piece bonus is, on average, a 6% damage buff to Spirit Bomb and Soul Cleave (overall around 2% as well) and about 25% uptime on 15% DR. In total, based on current testing, I'd value the set at around 3-5% damage with minor defensive benefits. However, as it is random, in short fights it has rather high variance due to lack of any sort of bad luck protection. It's well designed for a first tier, with fairly equal benefits in both ST and AoE encounters.

In general, the set bonus appears to be quite a solid first tier bonus, but I'd like to see the random chance on the 4 piece either be redesigned to a guaranteed proc (as it's currently tuned, ~every 8 casts would be appropriate) or have some sort of bad luck protection, as during testing I've seen some dry spells going on fairly long streaks without any procs due to the bonus being a flat percentage chance per cast. The 2 piece has similar randomness for the bonus soul (about 1/7 casts) but the number of cast events as well as the probability of occurrence are higher, and the impact of an extra soul is of lower magnitude than the 4p bonus, so it's not particularly of concern. Otherwise, it just needs a bug fix for the damage reduction portion.


Vengeance Demon Hunter Guide

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