Havoc Discussions - 7.2.5 Mechanics and Feel

#1 - June 7, 2017, 9:58 p.m.

*****HIGH PRIORITY: Lore reponded to this thread on page 45. I am modifying this thread to now be a general feeedback thread, or I can create a new one if the moderators would like. *****

Please use this thread to provide constructive feedback to the developers about other mechanics of Havoc than Demon Blades. We can still help them improve the class this way.

The revert on the change to Demon Blades was probably the one thing I feel should have been avoided. Everything else would have been better to adjust if you wanted to change anything further.
 
With this revert, you have forced us into a spot where we still do not have the consistency to give you quality feedback. We will be giving you either really good feedback, because we had good luck, or absolutely terrible feedback, because we were forced to do nothing but wait for fury from Demon Blades again.  The 60% proc rate of 12-20 leads to a feeling of "feast or famine," where you either are waiting on fury during your cooldowns due to no procs (either by AA misses or non procs), or you feel like you literally cannot spend all of your fury.  This was mostly solved by the 100% proc rate, which, combined with the new 18 second duration chaos blades meant you would always have fury during your cooldowns, which lead to less feelsbad moments.  Numerically, the two were basically equal, so it seems to be a mechanical only change - and one that seems to be a step backwards.
 
Also, the inconsistency of this implementation of Demon Blades swings the variance too far in the wrong direction. The stark difference between good and bad luck - which cannot be manipulated in any way by good or bad play - makes it very difficult for the average player to identify when things are actually going wrong, or when they had poor luck. This is exacerbated by healthy RNG elsewhere in the spec (read - Chaos Strike crits) that when combined has an unpleasant playstyle effect on players.
 
This is especially noticeable when you read feedback from players that identify the massive swings between positive and negative streaks of RNG during cooldowns - something that has by now become a core part of the specs gameplay.
 
For feedback on Prepared, Vengeful Retreat's cool-down of 15 seconds, and the 10 seconds it takes to receive the fury, is too long to be worthwhile to take. Over 1 minute, it only generates 400 fury, and that's assuming you can use it every time it is off cool-down, without delay, from the 0 second mark to the 60 second mark. When boss mechanics that require specific positioning are included in this situation, its fury generation decreases, since we may not be able to use it as often as necessary. We also run the risk of being out of boss range, or away from a priority target that needs to die quickly, because of Vengeful Retreat's movement.
 
The 100% Demon Blades was providing us with 409 Fury per minute, and the feeling of consistency we have been lacking for the majority of the expansion. It allows us to maintain specific positioning required for certain mechanics, as well as the ability to prepare ourselves in advance for burst phases on priority targets, by giving us a consistent resource generation to pool with.
 
 
I ask you to please reconsider this revert. I love this class, but eventually everyone gets tired of having a random number determine their fate. Please return Demon Blades to 100% chance, so that we can gain the consistency required to give you quality feedback on the performance of the class.
 
 
Sincerely,
 
Kalino, Zarania, Wordup, Strifelol, Lazel, Fragnance and the DH Community

#893 - June 14, 2017, 12:19 a.m.

Thank you for all the feedback, and apologies for the delayed response.

We agree that there are moments of frustration with the live version of Demon Blades, and are continuing to look into how to address them, but also think that a smooth resource income is not the best solution.

For Havoc, we wanted to create a style of play that used fewer core abilities in favor of having deeper gameplay in other areas (e.g. a higher reliance on movement and battlefield awareness, and higher variation in resource generation). Part of what makes Demon's Bite, a spammable resource generator, work for Havoc is that its interaction with Chaos Strike is not static. You need to monitor how much Fury it generates, and react with Chaos Strike when appropriate.

We tried out having Demon Blades at 100% on the PTR mostly as a quality of life change, and to reduce the periods of time where players running Demon Blades found themselves unable to use any abilities. However, in practice, that change took an already simplified rotation and made it almost completely predictable. Though effective, it made the spec very dull to play. Reacting to your Fury bar is a core aspect of Havoc gameplay, and we don't want to lose that gameplay with Demon Blades.

All that said, we still agree that the current version of Demon Blades is not perfect, and we will continue to iterate. The version we tried on the 7.2.5 PTR was just not the right direction for Havoc.