Amirdrassil, The Dream's Hope Tier Set Bonuses for Havoc Demon Hunters
Havoc Demon Hunter is looking to get small scale changes to how the spec works in patch 10.2 that are currently unannounced which make heavily change the value or playstyle implications of the tier set, however looking at it compared to how it currently works can be done.
The Havoc Demon Hunter tier set revolves around free
Throw Glaive procs at reduced damage, and minor cooldown reduction of
The Hunt per throw glaive cast with a 4 second duration increase to the damage over time. This tier set is relatively low impact, ironically removing
Throw Glaive from our rotation on single target as the tier set will consistently maintain
Serrated Glaive and kill demons spawned by
Fodder to the Flame. The cooldown reduction of
The Hunt is incredibly small at the current value of 0.4s per throw glaive cast, with an average of 2 throw glaive casts per blade dance on a 5 minute fight this works out to about 38 seconds of cooldown reduction with 47 casts of
Death Sweep or
Blade Dance which is over 20 seconds short of gaining you an extra cast.
How Powerful is the Havoc Demon Hunter Tier Set?
The tier set is incredibly weak at current tuning, to the point that wearing higher item level pieces or better stats will win out. This has been said consistently for most recent Havoc Demon Hunter tier sets but the numbers on the Season 3 tier set are absolutely horrendous. Simulations have not been made to work with the tier set currently while awaiting the class rework, but some raw numbers can be provided.
While it seems the intention is for the set to push you into a
Throw Glaive build, the build would need to gain about 26% dps to match our serrated glaive single target build, which it just is not in the realm of accomplishing. The 2pc being 35% of
Throw Glaive damage per proc and an average of 2 procs per
Death Sweep due to the 50% chance per slash works out to 72 procs with 36 casts of
Death Sweep and
Blade Dance on a 5 minute simulation.
Furious Throws does work with these procs, doubling the number and providing 144 throw glaives at 35% damage. This is enough to match the damage rotationally used
Throw Glaive is dealing, valued at about 10% dps leaving this build 16% behind
Serrated Glaive. With the 4pc at 0.4s of cooldown reduction per
Throw Glaive cast, the 144
Throw Glaive procs and the 92 from regular casts would work out to an average of 94.4 seconds of cooldown reduction on
The Hunt, with a cooldown of 90 seconds this provides one extra cast which is about a 0.8% dps gain while the increased damage over time duration would be another 1.2% dps gain. This leaves the tier set at a total increase of 12% on its intended build, which leaves it 14% behind at estimate.
Since you would not swap off of the regular raid build for single target encounters due to the above, the
Serrated Glaive build does benefit from the tier set due to
Serrated Glaive and
Fodder to the Flame eating valuable globals that would be entirely passively covered by the 2pc. It is difficult to give a value to the dps without simulations, but the globals you will save on average in a 5 minute fight by not casting throw glaive would be a moderate value gain around 3% dps. The
Throw Glaive procs would directly contribute 915 dps, around a 0.6% dps gain overall. This 915 dps comes from around 94 procs of throw glaive per 5 minutes, contributing around 38 seconds of cooldown reduction off of
The Hunt, while this does not even gain a single cast on a 5 minute encounter it would only contribute about 0.8% dps to gain a cast of
The Hunt. The 4 seconds of extended duration is another 1% dps gain which totals the entire tier set to under 6% dps.
The tier set does perform slightly better on AoE, due to the
Throw Glaive build being focused primarily on AoE dps however it is behind currently in AoE scenarios prior to the tier set which has to work hard to bridge the gap. It is target count dependant as the 2pc gains no value over 3 targets due to
Throw Glaive having a target cap of 3. The 4pc has value up to 5 targets due to the target cap of
The Hunt, however the cooldown reduction is per cast of
Throw Glaive meaning it has the same reduction in AoE as it does in Single Target.
Feedback
Due to the fact the 10.2 Havoc Demon Hunter changes are not known it is incredibly hard to take the current implementation of the tier set seriously. It's not all bad, the set is unique and a breath of fresh air from having tier sets revolving around our pressed on cooldown buttons. However the current values are an absolute joke that simply cannot have the impact needed despite any changes that are yet to be seen for Havoc. It seems to be a consistent issue that the values on the tier sets that for Havoc are not tuned correctly for how small the affected abilities are of the overall dps value in the spec, which seems to be a byproduct of it having an exceptionally high amount of damage sources. Unfortunately
The Hunt and
Throw Glaive are not currently impactful enough to how Havoc plays or its damage to truly make the tier set exciting even if the numbers are fixed.
