A Retrospective on Vengeance Demon Hunter in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist - Editorial

Vengeance Demon Hunter in Dragonflight: A Retrospective

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Vengeance Demon Hunter Writer, Itamae, offers a retrospective highlighting Vengeance's journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec's next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

New (but Old) Talent Trees

Let's begin with the biggest change going into Dragonflight: the revised Talent Tree system that takes us back away from the tiered select-one-of-three system that was introduced during Mists of Pandaria, to a modernized version of the classic talent trees. Although Demon Hunters never had a classic version, since we were introduced in Legion long after the MoP system was created, the system itself is recognizable for any long time players. As stated by Blizzard, talents were intended to be the replacement for borrowed power systems that had been the focal point of the preceding expansions. In addition, they were supposed to allow more freedom for choosing talents based on the content you were doing, while being flexible enough to be able to switch without too much friction, yet preventing you from being able to acquire everything you want at once. Early on, it was also intended that most of our Class Trees were utility and/or defensively focused and gave access to some cross-spec abilities that previously had not existed, while specialization trees were for most of our throughput options.

In my opinion, I don't think they managed to quite hit the mark for most specs, but some are certainly closer than others. Looking at it strictly through a design lens, I don't think a single spec or class hit that ideal across the board. With regards to Vengeance, we ended up with a mix of throughput and utility options in both Class and Spec Trees, while often being locked into a single build due to restrictions on our spells. While it could be said that for casual players there was freedom of choice, for anyone who is remotely competitive, there really aren't valid alternative options.

To break it down further, let me provide a visual overview of the talents:

Compared to the old talent tree, I would say there isn't much difference in the end. For more casual players, there is more build variety, but realistically most of the points we spend are getting back things we had in the past that were baseline, and we've given up some of that because they simply aren't worth a point when compared to other options. While it's true that we've gained access to new abilities as well, it often feels like we're being forced to choose what to give up in order to get specific utility for a situation, rather than given the choice of what to take.

I think talents such as Disrupting Fury and Swallowed Anger should be outright removed, replaced, or fully redesigned to make them an interesting option. Similarly, in the Spec Tree, despite multiple buffs, talents like Soul Barrier and Bulk Extraction are never taken, simply because their design is ineffectual. Other talents are also traps, such as Last Resort. In the old talent system, that was taken because it competed against other talents that were even lower value, but in the current design, it isn't strong enough to be a capstone, especially when gated behind other talents that aren't particularly strong. There are more talents with these issues, but I won't bring all of them up because it would take far too much time to discuss.

Gameplay

While the current gameplay is relatively interesting, with many micro-scale decisions needing to be made at any given moment, there are a number of parts that don't fit the standard paradigm. This stems partly from our Spec Tree being so locked due to the design of our kit. Currently, since Spirit Bomb is our only uncapped spender, we're forced to take it in any AoE scenario. This is a restriction which no other tank spec has. Additionally, with our reliance on maintaining multiple short-duration defensives, the developers have been sort of forced into making Metamorphosis a high uptime, low power cooldown. One of the strengths of Vengeance right now is the high amount of control provided in Season 3 dungeons through Illuminated Sigils, in combination with Sigil of Silence, Sigil of Misery, and Sigil of Chains as well as Chaos Nova. This allows for less reliance on the group to stop dangerous casts. Unfortunately, we're less useful in raid situations, since our only group defensive is Darkness, a niche tool that relies on randomness to prevent damage. It works better against ticking damage than large bursts, and generally isn't reliable enough on its own. That said, as a baseline spec even without the utility, tuning is good enough for Vengeance to comfortably do any content in the game.

Tier (or by another name, Borrowed Power)

Despite Tier Sets really being just borrowed power, the current acquisition is arguably quite fair. Unlike in the past, where we had to raid every week and hope to get the drop, it's now accessible to all players through the Catalyst system. My only gripe with them now is that they don't feel quite balanced across specs and since they are our only source of change for a given tier, they're too restrictive. Essentially, bonuses for some specs often work far better in Mythic+ than Raid, and vice-versa. It's hard to design a bonus that is good for both sorts of content in PvE, and is exacerbated by having to work in PvP as well.

Support

The introduction of Augmentation Evoker in 10.1.5 was a major shift for the game, bringing the first support spec. It was quite a significant boon for Vengeance, but not to a greater extent than any other tank specs. While we gained quite a bit of survivability and damage from Augmentation, I'd argue that the most unique gain comes from combining Oppressing Roar with Sigil of Silence. Despite Augmentation being one of the most controversial things added to the game, I think it's a good first step, but it will be difficult to balance until we have many more support specs that do different things.

Conclusion

While there are still improvements to be made, particularly in terms of talent design and gameplay balance, Vengeance Demon Hunters have come a long way since their introduction in Legion. The revisions to the talent tree system in Dragonflight have provided some flexibility, but there is still room for improvement to fully reach the design goals laid out by Blizzard. With the upcoming expansion, The War Within, it remains to be seen how Vengeance will continue to evolve and whether it will address the concerns and wishlist outlined in this retrospective.

As always, we're excited to see what the future holds for Vengeance Demon Hunters and will continue to provide updates and guides to help you navigate the challenges and adventures ahead.

Written by Itamae, Vengeance Demon Hunter TheoryCrafter and Moderator from the Fel Hammer Demon Hunter discord.

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