Reviewing Aldrachi Reaver Hero Talents: A Different Approach for Vengeance Demon Hunters

Mid-March, Blizzard unveiled 12 new Hero Talent Trees in a preview of the new system coming with the upcoming expansion, The War Within. Our Vengeance Demon Hunter guide writer, Itamae, provides an early review of the Aldrachi Reaver Demon Hunter Hero Talents, which focus on enhancing physical combat abilities and empowering melee attacks.

The War Within Hero Talents Overview

Hero Talents are an extension of the Talent system designed to explore class fantasy with a third talent tree, separate from your class and specialization. Blizzard has revealed an early preview of Hero Talents coming in the next expansion, The War Within.

Our Guide Writers have provided initial first impressions on the Hero Talent Trees revealed so far. Check out all of our released Hero Talent reviews in our new Editorial Section.

Aldrachi Reaver Vengeance Demon Hunter Review

Hero talents are the new system for The War Within, and we've seen a number of trees released. Finally, we get a first look at one of the Demon Hunter trees and this time we managed to get a preview before beta! As a reminder, unlike our current talent trees, we will be able to acquire every single node in the Hero Talent tree of our choice, with our only decisions coming in the form of selection between which tree we take and the options on select choice nodes. Our first Hero talent tree is the Aldrachi Reaver, which I had previously predicted to be our physical combat enhancing tree based on the name. As it turns out, that's exactly what we're getting - improvements to our mobility (Vengeful Retreat and Felblade), primary physical abilities (Throw Glaive, Shear, Fracture, and Soul Cleave), melee damage, and souls. While there are a number of potential interactions, let's start piece-by-piece, with a talent breakdown first and then build up with the interactions and finally overall thoughts. Note that for a lot of this, I'm going to primarily be discussing Fracture rather than Shear since most of our preferred builds tend to run it. All of what I mention will also apply to both spells, with special mentions when warranted.

Hero Talent Breakdown

We'll be going through the talents primarily by row, since it's the easiest to follow.

• Keystone Node - Art of the Glaive

The primary driver of this hero tree, this talent is essentially a consistent proc. Once we've consumed 20 Souls, Throw Glaive becomes a new ability called Reaver's Glaive, which damages 3 targets and enhances our next Shear, Fracture, and Soul Cleave, making our generators apply a 15% damage taken debuff and our spender dealing extra damage.

Based on the 20 soul consumption rate and current Soul generation, we're likely to get this buff roughly every 30 seconds in a Single Target encounter, and around every 15 in AoE without the bonus souls from our current tier's 4 piece bonus. With the debuff lasting only 5 seconds after application, we'll be having short windows of bonus damage triggered by using Throw Glaive. However, this comes at a cost of adding it into our rotation. With our current rotation, we are already GCD capped, particularly in AoE, and this introduces more conflict into our priority.Some of the tooltip is unclear and I'm making an assumption - It states that our next ability is enhanced, and based on some of the wording of other talents, I believe we get exactly 1 enhanced version of each ability.

Other things that are unclear and affect evaluation of this talent are whether our current talents have any interaction with these effects:

• Do we get an extra bounce from Bouncing Glaives for a total of 4 targets? This is probably the least impactful, but could make a small difference.
• How do the extra slashes on Soul Cleave work? Does it cast the ability 4 times and apply Frailty/Soulcrush each time? Does it interact with our current Soul Cleave talents? Does it simply do bonus damage with a different spell with no other interactions? If so, are the extra slashes uncapped AoE or are they also target capped?

Row 1

• Choice Node - Keen Engagement / Preemptive Strike

- Generate 20 Fury whenever you spend the proc from . Not too much value here. Probably the better option in Single Target, since we're primarily focused on Fury generation and expenditure.

- This talent converts Throw Glaive into a true AoE ability, dealing damage near the primary target. Given that it specifically mentions Throw Glaive and not Reaver's Glaive, I have to wonder if it's a typo or intentional. Will it only do this damage during the proc, or is the baseline ability affected? Additionally, is this AoE capped, and how much damage does it do? I don't think it's a powerful increase either way, but could have some minor benefits in AoE situations such as Mythic+.

• Choice Node - Evasive Action / Unhindered Assault

- Extra mobility talent that allows us to double cast Vengeful Retreat within a short period. This could be useful for covering long distances, but it's fairly unlikely we'd want to take it. We already have a significant amount of mobility, and with the restriction being in a 3 second period, I can't think of a time when I'd want to double flip away from something rather than using Infernal Strike.

- Guaranteed reset on Felblade after using Vengeful Retreat. This is more likely to be picked, since it allows for us to immediately charge back into a fight, as well as providing extra Fury. It's still not super impactful, but marginally more useful than the other option.

• Incisive Blade

Simple passive talent that just increases Soul Cleave damage while enhanced by . Not super impactful on its own, but if the extra slashes from the enhancement are also affected, this might be stronger than it seems.

Row 2

• Aldrachi Tactics

This makes the second enhanced ability presumably generate an extra Soul Fragment if it is Fracture, so 3 Souls outside Metamorphosis or 4 Souls in it, and Soul Cleave to generate one along with consuming them. It's probably as simple as the tooltip reads - effectively gaining one Soul per proc, but that's rather lackluster. If so, this is far more powerful for Havoc than Vengeance, since it gets you 33% of the way to your next proc, rather than 5%. However, unlikely as it would be, if the enhanced Soul Cleave causes extra casts of the base spell and each of them can generate a Soul, this would be much more powerful. I doubt that it's the case, but there is a slim possibility of this happening.

• Choice Node - Army Unto Oneself / Incorruptible Spirit

- Simple passive buff to Felblade, reducing physical damage taken by 10% for 5 seconds after each cast. Given our reset frequency, this would have extremely high uptime and is a nice small defensive bonus in ST situations. However, in AoE it is near useless because we hardly ever press the button due to GCD conflicts.

- Gain a 15% HoT from consuming Souls. The value of this talent heavily depends on how it is implemented. We can hardly glean any information from the tooltip, so it could range from effectively worthless to incredibly powerful.

• What is the duration of the HoT?
• Does the HoT overwrite/refresh itself, extend, or stack? If it stacks, is it a rolling stack like Ignite, individual stacks, or additive?
• Is the 15% based on the total healing of the Soul, effective healing (ie no overhealing), or the base heal?

In the worst case, it could work like Feast of Souls, which refreshes on every cast (or in this case, consumption of a Soul), making it do close to zero healing. If it is calculated on the base heal or effective heal, it would be a very small heal as well. In the best case, it could be a significant source of healing from counting total healing and constantly stacking. If I had to bet, it's likely somewhere in the middle - individual stacks based on the total healing, so it'd be effectively a 15% increase in the healing value of souls, but over time.

• Wounded Quarry

This simply gives us a chance after using Fracture during the 5 second debuff to proc extra attacks that can shatter a bonus soul. Given that it states melee attacks, I'm inclined to believe it means only auto-attacks and not any melee abilities. Does Windfury Totem affect this at all? While we don't know anything about proc rate, we know that the duration of the debuff is only 5 seconds, so we're not likely to gain very much from this talent. It's likely another layer of RNG, and I would treat it as a passive bonus, rather than something to play around. There are a few possibilities for how the proc rate works - flat percentage, rppm, and stacking buff - ideally to reduce randomness we'd have a stacking hidden buff that guarantees x procs per debuff, but then we'd want a tracker for it. In addition, if it does happen to proc off melee abilities, it would be a minor rotational change, since we'd want to only use those abilities during the debuff window to maximize our chances of getting extra procs.

Row 3

• Intent Pursuit

This talent will likely provide little value in general given how rarely we will be proccing the empowered abilities - we can expect somewhere between 8 and 12 seconds of CDR per usage of The Hunt in Single Target and 16-20 in AoE. This will cause us to desync abilities, so depending on whether we need to line up the casts with vulnerability phases or other things, it could have a fairly medium effect or close to none.

• Escalation

There is some uncertainty with how this talent will work. The damage portion could either be a flat 10% increased damage to each ability when used, or it could mean a stacking buff so the first ability used gains 10% and the second gains 20%. Alternatively, does it require us to use the abilities in succession without any other casts in between? That would be unfortunate. The second portion of the talent brings up even more questions. It states that the effect of the second enhancement is increased by 100%. For Fracture, it is pretty straightforward - it's likely to increase the value of the debuff by 100% of what it does, so instead of 15% bonus damage, it's now 30%. Effect typically doesn't refer to duration, so I'd still expect it to last for 5 seconds. However, with Soul Cleave, does this mean it will cause 6 slashes instead of 3, or is it simply 3 slashes dealing double damage? If it's 6 slashes, this brings up the same question as before - will each slash be a cast of Soul Cleave that interacts with other talents and applies Frailty? That could make this talent tree quite strong and cause a major change in our rotation, where we'd want to sync our hardest hitting abilities with Reaver's Glaive.

• Warblade's Hunger

Given that this whole tree somewhat disincentivizes using Spirit Bomb, this sort of balances that out by increasing damage on our generators. With the limited information given to us, how much bonus damage is being granted? It could potentially mean nothing and simply be a small consistent bonus on our entire damage kit, or it could potentially have a rotational and build-defining effect. If anyone happens to remember in the final season of Battle for Azeroth, where we were able to heal effectively infinitely with Shear spam, then this has potential to be very similar. If tuned high enough, the bonus damage could cause a feedback loop where we want to press absolutely nothing but Shear on every global, allowing us to heal forever while doing consistent damage.

• Capstone Node

• Thrill of the Fight

Despite being the capstone, this has effectively no interaction with the rest of our Hero talents, and is simply a one-time damage/healing buff to one ability (likely used on one of our harder hitting abilities), and a minor attack speed buff, giving us a little bit more melee damage. It seems rather lackluster for a capstone and provides nothing interesting that would interact with the rest of the toolkit, unlike most of the other capstones we've seen so far.

Talent and Kit Interactions

There are some clear potential synergies between different talents, both in the Hero tree itself as well as with our base tree. Given the focus on physical abilities, I expect all of the talents that deal bonus damage (Throw Glaive, Shear, Fracture, and Soul Cleave) to deal physical damage, so they won't be affected by any of our current talents such as Burning Blood or Fiery Demise. In addition, Vulnerability is whitelisted, so unless these are added, they would not be affected either (possibly wouldn't matter for Soul Cleave if the damage bonus is simply a multiplier to the base spell). Depending on the tuning of the damage procs and extra Soul generation, there is a possibility that Shear spam becomes optimal in situations with extremely high incoming damage, conflicting with our Frailty-focused playstyle.

The soul generation in this tree seems a bit out of place given the focus as well. None of the talents affect Spirit Bomb in any way, but there is random Soul generation thrown in. Due to the way our rotation works, it seems like they will effectively be only useful for a bit of extra defensiveness, since Souls do not contribute to our damage without Spirit Bomb. These extra Souls not only provide extra healing but potentially damage reduction through Painbringer and Demon Spikes uptime through Feed the Demon. If Art of the Glaive is considered Soul Consumption, then we could be double-dipping on Soul Monger as well, potentially making it a talent we'd consider taking. Since we don't know whether the extra damage proc is uncapped or not, this could potentially affect our gameplay in multitarget situations where we currently play Spirit Bomb.

The biggest question, of course, is whether Incisive Blade provides actual extra casts of Soul Cleave or not, and if so, whether Aldrachi Tactics doubles the damage or the number of hits. If they do, then there is potential for us to gain up to 14 stacks in Single Target of Frailty in a single cast, giving us 140% leech, 56% damage reduction and bonus damage. This would be a significant enough multiplier that we would want to sync every single major burst ability with a proc, and potentially line it up with other damage bonuses (Soul Furnace and Fiery Demise) as well.

Masters of Physical Combat

As previously mentioned, the Aldrachi Reaver Hero Talent Tree appears to be focused on a demon hunter's mastery of physical combat. Everything is geared towards empowering our physical abilities and melee attacks through Soul consumption. There are a few damage and healing multipliers that likely stack with our current bonuses that can be applied to all of our spells, but depending on how they work, it could potentially affect the value of many commonly (and uncommonly) selected talents. For example, with the bonuses to Soul Cleave, it's possible that we would be forced away from playing Spirit Bomb since it would not only do less damage but would be difficult to fit in rotationally with the extra globals needed to be spent on Throw Glaive and the enhanced abilities. Meanwhile, Soul Carver could gain some value if Frailty stacks from the enhancement.

Due to the effect of some of the hero talents, we're forced into taking certain class and spec talents to receive a non-zero gain. While most of us do play Felblade as a Fury generator in Single Target already, it's rarely used in multitarget situations. However, the talents are at least on choice nodes so we can opt out of it. Unfortunately, Art of the Glaive is on its own node, and roughly half of our builds simply do not play The Hunt at all. While the Hero talent itself is not a medium gain, it does put pressure on the players to pick up The Hunt, rather than the other two capstones in the class tree. Similarly, many players currently opt out of playing Vengeful Retreat since we rarely need the extra mobility, and it is generally taken in scenarios where we'd like to remove a slow, rather than as a baseline spell. In addition, if there are interactions between our Soul Cleave talents and the Hero talents, then we have a multitude of talents that are simply locked in.

Additionally, the rigidity of Art of the Glaive presents concerns as well. Due to it being a proc that occurs every 20 souls, we're incentivized to spend the proc immediately, since we generate souls so consistently. Every soul consumed while the proc is active would be completely wasted. Since our Soul generation tends to come in bursts, and we have multiple sources of random generation, this would make for frustrating gameplay - we're likely to lose anywhere between 1 and 5 souls per proc depending on ST or AoE and depending on our current cast priority. This also prevents us from being able to control when to spend the proc, since trying to line it up with other abilities would also cause a loss. Finally, Throw Glaive is a spell that Vengeance Demon Hunters hardly ever use. It's effectively used only in 2 situations:

1. To pull enemies when we're attempting to group multiple packs together
2. We're forced away from all possible melee targets for some reason.

Without it, Vengeance is typically already GCD locked in all situations - we currently already spend every global either generating or spending Fury in ST, or generating and spending Souls in AoE. Because of this, adding Throw Glaive rotationally itself would already push out many of our rotational spells for a spell that simply empowers parts of our main rotation. Depending on how the enhancements are implemented, it could also force us to insert 3 specific globals every time, while breaking our standard priority.

Depending on how the bonus souls are implemented and given that we already generate souls based on haste as well as the debuff being an extremely short duration, this tree could also affect stat priority depending on tuning. I'm concerned that the gain from these talents could potentially push us to stack only haste to gain more procs, dipping further into the diminishing returns than we already do.

On top of that, the existence of yet another debuff that we need to manage in Reaver's Mark is problematic. While it is only 15% bonus damage (30% with and an additional bonus in ), if we're unable to stick to our target during the duration of the debuff, then we're losing quite a bit of the effect. As a tank spec, it's highly likely that we need to swap targets to maintain or gain initial aggro, particularly when adds spawn. Spending our proc and then having to decide whether to lose our bonus or pick up the new adds is not engaging gameplay. Similarly, if our target gets burst down when we've used the proc, then it gets completely wasted.

Final Thoughts

I think they've done a fine job of emphasizing what they wanted to focus on for this tree, but due to the design of Vengeance, this falls short of being truly exciting. To be honest, I'm a bit dismayed, since it once again feels like Vengeance was an afterthought when this tree was designed - it was clearly inspired by the current Havoc Tier set and generally seems to be more focused on how Havoc would interact with it, with the Vengeance equivalent spells simply being swapped in. Havoc already rotationally uses Throw Glaive, and the talents that generate a bonus soul make it so that they can have extremely high uptime on the bonus since it only takes 3 Souls to proc rather than 20. They also use Vengeful Retreat rotationally, so they get full value from the related talents, and always play both Felblade and The Hunt as well. Meanwhile, Vengeance will have fewer procs, and the effects appear to be less powerful for us.

Disregarding the specific values since they can always be changed with tuning and looking at it holistically, I don't find the specific gameplay particularly compelling. It pigeonholes us into taking specific talents that we may not want to play, while shoehorning in extra rotational abilities for setup globals. From a tank perspective, having setup globals isn't particularly good unless we gain a medium bonus from it to make up for the time needed to set up. In particular, getting initial threat is problematic when there are setup globals that don't do much. In this case, we're playing 2-3 low-value globals before our setup is complete and we get to capitalize on the bonus, and that bonus only exists for 1 primary ability from and then 2-4 more abilities buffed by Reaver's Mark depending on haste.

Depending on how the bonus souls are implemented and given that we already generate souls based on haste as well as the debuff being an extremely short duration, this tree could also affect stat priority depending on tuning. I'm concerned that the gain from these talents could potentially push us to stack only haste to gain more procs, dipping further into the diminishing returns than we already do.

This tree introduces too many conflicts in decision-making and leans more into debuff-based gameplay, which has been a concern of the community for years. There is some potential for powerful interactions which I've laid out that would make this tree much more attractive than what I am expecting, but even with those interactions, I wouldn't call it a win for Vengeance. While I appreciate that they want to emphasize certain portions of our kit, this feels like the physical enhancement is coming at the cost of much of our magical kit, rather than enhancing our total package. If the intent is that we play this tree with specific talents selected in one situation while choosing the other tree for other situations, then this might achieve that goal, but I'd prefer to see both trees viable regardless of what we play in our baseline talents. To that end, I hope we'll see some major revisions to the tree and that Fel-Scarred will be designed with a better understanding of Vengeance.

About the Author

This guide is written by Itamae, Vengeance Demon Hunter TheoryCrafter and Moderator from the Fel Hammer Demon Hunter discord.

Conclusion

The Aldrachi Reaver Hero Talent Tree for Vengeance Demon Hunters in The War Within expansion focuses on enhancing physical combat abilities and empowering melee attacks. While there are potential synergies and interactions with other talents, the rigidity of the Art of the Glaive talent and the reliance on Throw Glaive could introduce conflicts in the rotation and decision-making process. Additionally, the talent tree leans towards debuff-based gameplay and may require specific talents to be taken for maximum effectiveness. Overall, there is room for improvement and further revisions to ensure a more engaging and balanced gameplay experience.

Want to try your hand at completing the Mythic raid before the new season starts? Count on us by following this link and we will help you achieve that goal