The 9.2 tier set for Havoc is a bit underwhelming, a
刃舞 set bonus was kind of expected, so there isn't a really big surprise and in good old fashion Havoc, RNG is involved. The playstyle of Havoc will most likely not be altered by this set bonus. We will simply pull away from
仇恨之轮 builds and prioritize
第一滴血 to maximize the benefit of the 2-set bonus (
致命舞步).
命运共舞 will benefit from the set bonus as well making it a stronger / mandatory Conduit.
In terms of how strong the set bonus will be it's obviously hard to predict how PTR tuning will change things, but as it stands the set bonus will be decent to say the least.
刃舞 and
死亡横扫 are a significant portion of our damage when using
第一滴血 and adding a 20% damage bonus on top is great.
The 4-set bonus (
致命舞步) seems a bit over-complicated for what it actually does but, in essence, every 5th
刃舞 or
死亡横扫 will have no cooldown and refund the fury used to cast it and give us the "Empowered Blade Dance or Death Sweep" buff. This buff will make our next
刃舞 or
死亡横扫 (the free one) have a 15% to get another free
刃舞 or
死亡横扫. A bit confusing at first read but relatively simple to understand. This bonus is another nice set bonus for sure, but once again, nothing that will impact gameplay except allowing us to press
刃舞 and
死亡横扫 slightly more often.
As a whole, the 9.2 Set bonus are, as previously mentioned, pretty underwhelming in terms of "being transformative" for Havoc. The current values are interesting and will make the 2 and 4-set bonus must-have for all game content but in standard Havoc set bonus fashion, pretty boring.
9.2 PTR has been datamined and we've gotten our first look at set bonuses. For Vengeance, we've got the following:
- 燃烧之饥 (2 Set) Damage dealt by 献祭光环 has a 10% chance to generate a Lesser 灵魂残片.
- 贪婪之饥 (4 set) Consuming a Lesser 灵魂残片 has a 100% chance to grant you 2 sec of 献祭光环, or extend an existing 献祭光环 by 2 sec.
Set Bonus Explanations
Let's break this down first piece-by-piece, then how they work together as a whole with all the other Shadowlands systems. As this is data-mined and currently not able to be play-tested, we will have to make some assumptions.
Firstly, the 2 set bonus: This isn't entirely clear, so it could potentially work one of two ways, one of which has potential to be incredibly strong.
One way it could potentially work is that it has a 10% chance to proc once on each tick of
献祭光环 that deals damage, thus giving us a flat 10% chance for a
灵魂残片 to spawn every second, averaging out to 1 soul per 10 seconds regardless of the situation. This would make it a minor bonus to our healing, offering 6% of damage taken healed every 10 seconds in both ST and AoE. Quite lackluster and not particularly worthy of a set bonus.
The second possible way is that it simply has a 10% chance to proc per instance of damage dealt by
献祭光环, meaning that it would scale with more targets. In this scenario, we would maintain the relative strength of the set bonus in ST, but would scale quite strong in AoE. With 5 targets, it would be approximately one
灵魂残片 every 2 seconds, and with 10 targets we'd average one every second, greatly increasing the amount healed in AoE scenarios. This would be a fairly decent bonus, but is somewhat problematic in that it's quite valuable in AoE situations such as M+, but contributes nearly nothing in raids where most encounters are primarily ST.
Either way, it's primarily a defensive bonus in itself and doesn't contribute much until we look at how it interacts with other systems.
Next, the 4 set bonus: At first glance, the 4 set bonus may not look like much, as it simply extends our
献祭光环 to 100% uptime from the current maximum of ~75% (based on haste). However, due to the interactions it has with multiple other systems in Shadowlands, this has potential to be incredibly strong (at least for damage; it really contributes nothing defensively) and likely won't make it to live servers. In particular, our conduit
滋长炼狱 synergizes heavily with this and if any of you have played the
阴森火绒 build in Torghast, you may have an inkling of how powerful it will be.
Effect on Playstyle, Talents, Covenants, etc...
Unfortunately for us and despite what was stated in the Blue post, these set bonuses only serve to further reinforce our earlier decisions this expansion in terms of talent choice, covenant choice, legendary choice, soulbind choice, and even our rotation and playstyle. Kyrian becomes even more of an optimal choice, as the Legendary
盲者信念 is the only one which benefits from extra souls, as well as generating extra souls for more
献祭光环 extension.
There is one minor talent change in that we may switch back to
深渊打击 instead of
苦痛之焰 due to having guaranteed uptime.
Synergy with Current Systems
At an absolute minimum, in order to maintain 100% uptime on
献祭光环 with no downtime in a fight, we will want at least 12.5% haste to maintain one cast of
破裂 every 4 seconds, generating 2 souls which then provide us with 4 extra seconds. As
极乐敕令 generates 3 souls by default, plus an extra 2 for a total of 5 with the Legendary
盲者信念, we will have ways to maintain
献祭光环 even while out of range for mechanics on occasion. In addition, due to the stacks of Versatility gained from consuming souls for the Legendary, we will be able to generate more stacks consistently due to the extra souls from the 2 set bonus. Finally, if playing the
烈火烙印 build with
炽热灵魂, the extra souls generated will be enough to get us close to, if not over 100% uptime on
烈火烙印, which is decent defensively.
The conduit
滋长炼狱 is capped at 10 times base damage of
献祭光环, and with current conduit levels, takes about 45 seconds to ramp up to its maximum value. After this point, it will always deal the maximum damage as long as
献祭光环 is maintained and is neither recast nor falls off.
Strength of this Tier set bonus
Defensively, this set bonus is quite lackluster for a tank spec. We already have arguably the weakest defensives of all tanks and this set doesn't particularly shore up those weaknesses. However, offensively this set is out of this world. Taking some random logs and looking at them, after a 40 second ramp time, we would be doing nearly double the DPS that we do on live with this set bonus and the Kyrian Legendary. This applies both to ST and AoE, and would put us from effectively the lowest DPS tank in ST to easily the highest, while in AoE we would be doing more DPS than many DPS specs.
Feedback and Final Thoughts
While I do relish the idea of doing significant amounts of DPS, I would rather have a more balanced set that improves our defensive capabilities while also providing some offensive bonus. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, with this 4 piece bonus, there is simply no way of tweaking it so that it's reasonable without breaking multiple parts of the game. If we can't reach 100% uptime on Immolation Aura, then the set bonus is close to worthless, as it would provide less than 1% DPS increase, so simply reducing the duration isn't an option.
滋长炼狱 being capped at a lower value would affect Havoc in addition to Vengeance, and would make Torghast nearly unplayable for both specs. Unfortunately, in its current state it is simply too strong offensively to make it to live, so I would expect a full rework and an entirely different bonus in the coming weeks. If Blizzard's developers are reading this, I'd like to see something that is more powerful defensively and changes up something about how we play the game, perhaps in the vein of past expansions where we had cooldown reduction on
恶魔变形 and empowering it in some way.