We finally got out covenant legendaries and we have some interesting options and some not so interesting ones.
Night Fae
Starting with the most interesting legendary,
炽焰亡魂 (Night Fae) is the best and most interesting legendary from these new ones. It synergizes with the talent
释放混沌 allowing us to double dip on the talent every 90 seconds as well as giving us a nice agility buff based on how many targets we hit (capped at 15%). The synergy comes from the
献祭光环 casted by
恶魔追击 while using
炽焰亡魂, as it's a new cast of
献祭光环, it will also grant us the
释放混沌 buff when specced, allowing us to significantly increase the burst provided by
恶魔追击. This is the legendary that has the most potential from the new ones and as a bonus it's already from our preferred covenant for both PVE and PVP.
Venthyr
痛楚凝视 (Venthyr) is second in line. This Legendary is very straight forward: apply
罪孽烙印,
眼棱 to increase the duration, profit. This legendary gives us nice synergy when paired with
恶魔变形 and the
眼棱 reset passive. We can use this interaction in two ways:
- For single target by extending 罪孽烙印 with 眼棱, re-applying with 恶魔变形 and extending again with the 眼棱 reset
- In AoE by applying 罪孽烙印 to every target in range and AOE extending via 眼棱 again.
Powerful synergies in both cases make this an interesting new legendary for our Venthyr friends.
Kyrian and Necrolord
Unfortunately when we look at
盲者信念 (Kyrian) and
恶魔誓言 (Necrolord) they are both quite weak in comparison. Both of them lack synergy and lack throughput in comparison.
盲者信念 has synergy with the talent
恶魔食欲 but this talent is quite weak currently in comparison to
盲目之怒 and
邪能之刃 and the mastery buff it provides is quite weak for Havoc DH.
恶魔誓言 is also quite weak, spreading the
烈火烙印 DoT provides us with nice defense, but sadly the DoT is quite weak, so the damage it offers us is quite lacking. It's also unreliable since it's based on killing the demon from
燃焰饲魂 which is on a proc that we do not control.
Overall I think Blizzard hit the mark with the Night Fae and Venthyr legendaries due to the synergies they offer us allowing these legendary item to slightly alter the way we play as well as providing us noticeable damage. Unfortunately, the Kyrian and Necrolord legendaries fall short and especially in terms of the Necrolord legendary, it seems as it was primarily designed for Vengeance rather than for Demon Hunters.
Demon Hunters finally received a first look at new legendaries in Build 38549 on the PTR. While they are early iterations and not final, we can make some estimates about how they're going to perform with some tests and why they won't affect our covenant choices for Vengeance.
We'll start with the least popular covenants and work our way up.
Necrolord
Demon Hunters of the Necrolord covenant get
恶魔誓言, which casts 5
烈火烙印 on nearby enemies when the demon from
燃焰饲魂 explodes, and then extends the duration of the buff from
恶魔之魂 by 8 seconds, for a total of 28 seconds baseline. While this is a respectable increase to damage and despite being quite nice for survivability due to the synergies with our talents as each
烈火烙印 can each spread with the
火刑 talent as well as extend with
血肉灰烬, there's one major problem with
燃焰饲魂:
it's completely random as to when the demon spawns and this makes it difficult to use in any sort of progression content.
While it could be nice as a DPS legendary on farm or if someone truly enjoys playing Necrolord, random survival generally isn't what we're looking for. In addition, you would have to give up our current strongest survival legendary,
炽热灵魂, which is both controllable and provides about double the uptime that
恶魔誓言 does in any situation up to 5 targets, which is the vast majority of content.
Venthyr
Next we can look at Venthyr, who get
痛楚凝视, which increases the damage of
罪孽烙印 by 10% and each tick of
邪能毁灭 increases its duration by 0.5 seconds. Since
邪能毁灭 has 12 ticks, that means a full extension is 6 extra seconds for a total of 14 seconds. Again, this does have some synergy as it increases the damage contribution of
罪孽烙印 by a massive 92.5%, but there are a couple major issues with it.
Firstly, as
罪孽烙印 gets automatically spread by
恶魔变形, in order to maximize the value of the legendary, we would have to immediately
邪能毁灭. However, we generally do not want to do this as there are often cases where it needs to be held as a defensive. In addition, since the cooldowns are synced between
罪孽烙印 and
邪能毁灭, assuming usage of both the
严格审问 and
邪能防护者 conduits, there will always be a cast that isn't extended as the ones automatically cast by
恶魔变形 take priority.
Similarly to the Necrolord issue, we have to give up extremely powerful defensives for something that effectively only contributes damage. Not only would we have to lose
炽热灵魂, but since we already use
魔化, we are in
恶魔变形, thus making the defensive portion of
罪孽烙印 useless.
Night Fae
Night Fae Demon Hunters get
炽焰亡魂 as their new legendary, which at first glance looks rather powerful as it casts a free
献祭光环 and grants 3% Agility per enemy hit for 12 seconds.
However, it's not as strong as it seems. Even in the best case scenario of hitting 5 targets on every cast of
恶魔追击, we're gaining 15% Agility for 12 seconds every 90 seconds, which is worse than most trinkets give. On average, it's going to be somewhere around a 0.4%-2% DPS increase, depending on the number of targets, which puts it below any of our current legendaries for DPS.
Again, this is going to have the same issue as the other covenants in that even if it were good for DPS, we'd be giving up far too much survivability, but even in the case where it isn't needed, it's not even worth taking over any of our current legendaries.
Kyrian
Finally, we have the Kyrian, who get
盲者信念, which causes
极乐敕令 to generate 2 extra souls and buffs us for 20 seconds, causing any
小型灵魂残片 consumed to grant 1% Mastery which stacks, and 10 Fury.
I honestly have no idea what the developers were thinking when they made this. Our Mastery only works defensively while
恶魔尖刺 is active, making this incredibly worthless. Offensively, it's a decent boost, but there's a weird feedback loop where we will have a bunch of extra Fury that we can't spend in order to maximize the Legendary, so that portion is just entirely wasted.
Final Thoughts
While a couple of the Legendaries we've gotten in this build are fairly decent for damage, it feels like the developers fell into the same trap as always - they designed these legendaries around Havoc, and did the bare minimum to ensure that they worked for Vengeance. None of these options are appealing in their current state for any content.
Sadly, the two best Legendaries are from Necrolord and Venthyr, covenants that are generally not preferred for Vengeance, and despite their strengths, it's not nearly enough to overcome the deficit between them and Kyrian or Night Fae.
I'd like to see some more thought put into these for future iterations as none of our current legendaries are particularly exciting despite being decent, and these add nothing to our arsenal either.
