Eternal Kingdom Forums

Hi guys and gals, I've decided to post some of the feedback that I post on other forums here in regards to Demon Hunter tanking. Agree or disagree, let me know what you think if I post something in here. I was tempted to pull all my posts from all over the place but I'm just going to start with the most recent one that I did yesterday in regards to some DH tuning that they passed along on a stealth hotfix Friday night.

"The goal is for all classes and specs to be viable, so if any prove not to be, rest assured that we will continue iterating" - I actually trust this for the most part, you guys just don't make changes quickly enough on live.

I'm extremely curious as to the reasons for the nerfs as of late and to be honest the buff to FE on Tuesdays notes bringing it up by 300% then back down to do a pittance of damage in the stealth fixes on Friday. In all my raid and mythic + testing on Vengeance I have felt ST dps was good, but not egregious to the point that Vengeance tank damage was an outlier in comparison to all other tanks, or dps for that matter. I have advocated though for strong aoe nerfs for all tanks across the board, because lets face it aoe trash tank dps is ridiculous to the point that bringing 2 tanks to a M+ isn't really a bad idea at all.

Fel eruption: I'm not sure where you guys stand on this spell, what I can tell you though is that it is definitely a shell of it's former self. When you guys buffed this on Tuesdays build by 300%, I was flabbergasted that you did so, because with Fiery brand up I was critting for 1.8-2million already. It made no sense to increase my range to 2.2-2.6 million just for luls. My only thought going into that was due to the aoe nerfs we took in SC I figured that you were trying to bake a return in ST damage back somewhere else that was something other then shear. #Allhailtheshearspam# . After Fridays nerf though this spell feels unrewarding and has made it's entire row for talents lukewarm at best. It went from being the mandatory option in the row, to now being the row that doesn't matter.

While it is still a buff in ST damage, it's place in the totem pole for overall damage on a boss fight is significantly less, I also figured it was worth mentioning that in order for FE to be used to it's maximum dps potential, that you had to forego Fiery brand as a defensive CD that you could count on and instead line it up with FE for the higher damage. Risk vs Reward. Also someones going to say it so i'll begrudgingly say it here, yes this does nerf survivability in the teensiest matter since the nerf to FE damage is also a nerf to Charred blade healing ever so slightly.

Meta form - Let's be real and call this what it is, Glorified last stand that throws in an extra 1.75 60 pain soul cleaves in a 15 second span. While this spell is flashy and cute, it is extremely underwhelming from a tank and raid POV. While the extra buff on hp is great, the CD timer is unwarranted for what this ability actually does. I understand that you don't want to make an Arms race out of cds, but if you are using FB as an offensive tool and meta is nothing but a glorified last stand, then your toolkit as a tank for defensives is now very weak. While it's already a bit late, I'd really suggest taking a long hard look at Meta and coming up with some sort of idea for it. You might consider leaving it in it's current iteration and attaching the cd reduction on feed the demon. I obviously haven't number crunched yet as I'm running late for the gym to type this out but let's be real for a moment here again. It's not like we are swimming in souls already. [insert obligatory plea to make all soul consuming abilities 40 yards]

Fel Devastation It's about time you nerfed this, it had some absurd damage interactions with burning alive and fiery brand. I hope you take a look at all tank Aoe and treat them fairly. Also I like how you didn't nerf to this to point that it was unusable. The choice between this and Spirit bomb is fairly close now.

Spirit bomb, Fracture, Soul Barrier and Soul generation

Spirit Bomb: This spell is looking decent now with the 100% damage buff it received. While it makes sense lore wise to have this pass as a shadow damage spell, I think it would make it slightly more desirable if we change it to Fel and have it receive the benefit from Charred blades as well.

Soul Barrier: Please change the radius of souls used up by 40 yards. Don't penalize us the same way you did BWM monks with their orbs in MOP/WOD. Especially since Spirit bomb, Soul cleave, and Soul barrier all take up souls to use properly.

Fracture and Soul generation:
With the changes to Spirit bomb and Soul Barrier, it almost feels as if you are nudging us to take a soul consuming play-style, or at least offering that alternative. Many on the forums have been asking for fracture to be baseline for numerous reasons. The only one I'm going to touch on now is the fact that taking both Spirit bomb and Soul barrier can be frustrating to play when you are getting an unlucky streak of souls not spawning. You know what's even more frustrating is when you are doing dungeons and you have to move the boss out of aoe and now your souls are too far to reach. <--- Subtle hint to increase range again. Give us fracture baseline so that we have a way to guaranteed souls.

Felblade - I fail to see the reason for nerfing the damage on this by 45%,are you guys pulling data from somewhere that shows vengeance tanks doing too much damage or scaling all too well? The nerf is just far too large and out of touch with what is going on in raids. That or clearly, I'm playing vengeance wrong and maybe I just don't know what I'm doing (Unlikely as my meters tell me otherwise). Please revert the felblade change or at best tone it down to a level that isn't 45%.

Most of what you are seeing in the DH community is a concern of viability in regards to other tank classes. While nobody has our mobility, everyone else has better damage, mitigation, healing, and utility. With the release of the 7.0.3 launch tuning notes you showed that you are buffing DK/Warrior/Guardian damage, and slightly nerfing prot pallies with the Blessed hammer hit. While Demon Hunters aren't being released on Tuesday you took a big fat hammer and hit us anyway. Many were wondering if these tuning changes to the other tanks was simply to compensate for the changes in gameplay that players were going to have to deal with on Tuesday. The last thing you want, is for people who have been doing their jobs since HFC release, to be unable to do their jobs now. Unfortunately slipping in gigantic DH ST nerfs, now has the community worried about your vision, tuning, and goals for DH vengeance at 110.

Obligatory post by the way to say thanks for slowing down my leveling process by gimping my damage even more T_T.

My latest post from the forums regarding DH tanking-

Hi I’m Shinji, I like to tank stuff and post about it! This post is kind of wordy so be warned. One of the things I think about before I post is balance. I don't want to be the super OP tank, nor do I want to be the super weak tank. I kind of want something in between that lets me showcase my skill as a player and not just the class. On beta I currently tank on 3 toons ranging from as low as M+7 to as high as M+10 (I usually pug a few each run, so hard for me to find a group to push higher then 10).

DH STRENGTH:
When you play a DH in M+ dungeons, you can really feel how strong your mobility is and how you can control the ebb and flow of mobs coming in with your pulls. If you have ever watched an old video of hunters back in vanilla/BC doing pulls for tanks it looks a little bit like that. Amazing hunters could really streamline the dungeons/raids for your team and create the perfect flow which took into consideration healer mana, what mobs were still alive, special abilities that had to be handled, and travel time of the mob you were pulling to the group. (I’d mention CDS, but uhh shield wall had a forever and a day timer) While obviously other tanks can do this to an extent, none have the same “pulling power” as a DH does. When people ask me what strengths does a DH have, this dungeon flow is what I tell them.

AOE:
We have decent aoe that requires quite a bit of effort. I hate to even have to put this next sentence in here, but I’m sure someone will come along and say lol AOE Hard. I said effort, not hard. Immolation aura obviously is easy, but having to spawn souls and plan around them being up and throwing gcds to spawn them then use spirit bomb can take some planning, especially when you have to spawn souls via fracture. I actually save soul carver for packs that have 4+ mobs so I can focus on staying alive with my pain bar as opposed to using them spawn to souls to pew pew. Also if you ever have to SC to keep yourself alive and use up all those souls you are back down to 0 spirit bombs.

SINGLE TARGET:
I get that our ST Damage needed a nerf; I was easily top 5 during a lot of our raid testings’ when FE, fire damage interactions with FB, and FD was still super strong. In comparison to my cotanks I was usually a good 20%-35% higher than them based on class. Even then I knew we would get nerfed, it only made sense since we know that in Legion, Blizzard was trying to tune back the power creep of tanks. What bugged me about this though, was how hard we were getting hit when certain other aspects of other tank specs weren’t getting touched as hard as we were on dps (Mainly DK’s/Prot pallies). Now, on the subject of Prot pallies-- I’m a bit understanding since their damage boost comes at a loss in defensives (using Seraphim or spamming SOTR during a burst window for deeps). To be fair though, we had to also give up Fiery Brand as a defensive in order to pull max dps. I’m hoping we get a slight buff to our ST, or that Blizzard finds a way to rework giving us Fel Eruption back by either moving it in the talent tree, or giving us Felblade baseline. If we must accept the lower damage then so be it, as long as other tanks are in line with us (I’d say +/- arbitrary % number here is okay).

MAGIC DAMAGE MITIGATION:
A lot of people are asking for some way to handle magic damage a bit better, my thinking on this though is that Empowered Wards is already on a 20 second CD with a 6 second uptime. As a tank I’m not really afraid of trickle damage, what worries me more is big burst breaths which EW handles. I’m not sure where else we could add more magic damage mitigation without making it overpowered. Do we really feel that 30% DR on a 20 second CD isn’t enough to handle that? – Keep in mind we also have FB on a one minute cd as our shield wall for one mob/boss.

SELF HEALING/SELF-SUSTAIN:
This is probably the topic that triggers the most people, as I said earlier Blizzard is moving us away from tanks being completely self-reliant to actually having to rely on their healers. I for one am happy with this change as it encourages more team game play, but I feel that I’m the minority in this. Then of course if I bring this up people point to Blood DKS and Prot warriors and say bruh, they can do it why can’t we! To that I’ll say this – depending on what content you are doing certain tank classes will seem extremely powerful. If your sample data or experience is coming from heroic dungeons as well as Mythic + 2-6 – then yeah those two might seem way too powerful (even me on a DH barely needs any healing there btw). Outgoing damage at those levels isn’t hitting hard enough to really warrant the healers having to focus on them. Even then, they still need some semblance of healing. When you get to the higher stuff though egx: raids/Mythic 9+ then you will find their self-sustain is nowhere near around what it needs to be for the healer to not really focus on them. They may require less external healing then us on a Demon Hunter, but they will still need healing. I personally feel that our self-healing and defensives are enough to allow the healer to catch up and heal us, when in doubt feel free to leap out and kite just like brewmasters did in MOP (make sure to request a snare from your team though!)

SOUL BARRIER VS LAST RESORT:
I personally am not a fan of Soul barrier in its current form. I never worry about smoothing damage by the paltry sum that Soul barrier does. It may look good on some meters; in fact I have some raid test logs that have it as my #1 heal. Please remember you are making a trade off on soul fragments and a potential soul cleave there, so really the value that you get is whatever shield you gain – the potential soul cleave heal. Purgatory/AD abilities are also extremely powerful on progression and the double digit mythic +. I have a hard time giving up that cushion for a paltry barrier that I have to try make work. A few people talk about how good the minimum shield value on it is (cannot be reduced below xyz value for the duration of SB). Once again while that looks “good” on meters, it’s not very good in practice. You still have to think of the remainder of damage all those adds or the scary boss is hitting you for. Those minimum values aren’t going to save your life, they just make you look slightly better on the healing meters. “SB great for farm content, terrible for progression”

SIGIL OF CHAINS:
I think I wrote earlier on another post that I’m not really going to miss this, I used it for kiting, interrupting, or to fulfill my OCD needs to have clumped mobs that were already in a close enough radius for AOE to be efficient. I’ve seen a few ideas floated around for how to make it better, so for once I’ll post my one and only make this ability better idea.
Sigil of chains:
Initial Activation – Mark an area on the ground that activates to mark mobs in its circle after a 2 second delay.
Secondary Activation – Place a second sigil that moves all mobs debuffed with sigil of chains to said location. Obviously keep the range somewhat low so that it isn’t super OP.

MYTHIC +/ RAIDS:
Balancing issues have always existed, make a toon too strong here in pve and watch them wreck in PVP (Hello prot pallies in WOTLK, yes I’ll admit I ran double prot for fun and maybe after a bad breakup). This is why they separated pve/pvp! The issue now though is they have a new balance to handle! Blizzard now has to balance what is good in M+, as well as raids. While what I listed the DH strength being works for M+ dungeons, it isn’t really viable as a strength in raids, except for maybe a few fights here and there. This may seem like a moot point to some, but it is an issue that is going to come up and in a few instances already has. I’m not sure how they are going to approach this as they can’t very well make a separate tree for dungeons vs raids. No answer here, just like the rest of my post this is just a ramble.