Dragonflight Season 2 Tier Set Bonuses & Models for All Classes & Specializations
Our Guide Writers have provided initial first impressions on the Dragonflight Season 2 Tier Set bonuses. Check out all of our released opinion articles below.
First Impressions of the Dragonflight Season 2 Tier Set Bonuses
Death Knight Tier Set First Impressions
Druid Tier Set First Impressions
Evoker Tier Set First Impressions
Mage Tier Set First Impressions
Paladin Tier Set First Impressions
Warlock Tier Set First Impressions
First Impressions of the Dragonflight Season 2 Tier Set Bonuses
Our Demon Hunter Writers, Shadarek (Havoc) and Itamae (Vengeance), have dissected the newly datamined tier set bonuses to give a deeper first look as to how these bonuses will likely affect their specs in Dragonflight Season 2.
Havoc Demon Hunter Season 2 Tier Set First Impression
The Havoc Demon Hunter tier set bonus is a simple agility proc on high uptime, with a bit of bonus fury generation and a stacking increase to Eye Beam. The only real reason for the stacking damage bonus is to balance the CDR of Cycle of Hatred by making builds including it get less of an increase to Eyebeam.
The season 2 tier set for Havoc Demon Hunter doesn’t do anything to change the playstyle of spec, except for the minor increase of fury generation from the tier. However, our single target builds are already flooded with fury causing extra over-capping while our AoE builds only gain extra single target damage via Chaos Strike from the fury. The 4-pc bonus has multiple positive interactions due to Eye Beam talents like Blind Fury and Looks Can Kill. This shifts our builds around and makes them a bit less flexible to include the talents to further buff up Eyebeam.
How Powerful is the Havoc Demon Hunter Tier Set?
The tier set is frankly weak. If the intention was to provide more power than the previous tier set, they have missed the mark with the current Havoc set. While the power level is similar between different content types and damage profiles, it is punished by downtime which is a hit to the mythic+ performance. It’s around a 7% DPS increase on ST and AoE scenarios using the values currently live on PTR, however with the values included in the post announcing the tier set this drops a moderate amount closer to 5.5%. The tier doesn’t do anything interesting to change how we play or excel in any scenarios while feeling like it is incredibly under tuned.
Feedback
While I am not unhappy with the current tier sets design, the numbers seem to have missed the mark. It doesn’t typically hit 5 stacks in our raid build and has no interaction with Chaotic Transformation causing an entirely unbuffed Eye Beam with Metamorphosis. The one positive is that the stack system is a cool workaround for Cycle of Hatred existing to increase the damage of Eyebeam without forcing Cycle of Hatred into all forms of content. As it currently stands this set sits moderately behind the Season 1 Havoc Tier Set in power level; while it’s very slightly more interesting it requires 4pc buffs near doubling the values to be competitive with the Season 1 set.
Havoc Demon Hunter Guide
Vengeance Demon Hunter Season 2 Tier Set First Impression
(2) Set Bonus: Soul Fragments heal for 10% more and generating a Soul Fragment increases your Fire damage by 2% for 6 seconds. Multiple applications may overlap.
(4) Set Bonus: Shear and Fracture deal Fire damage. After consuming 20 Soul Fragments, your next cast of Shear or Fracture applies Fiery Brand to its target for 6 seconds.
Unfortunately, it’s not yet implemented on the PTR, so it’s speculation at this point, but we’ll be doing a quick analysis based on the tooltip provided.
Implementation and Synergies
First, let’s talk about what each of the bonuses likely do and will mean.
Our 2 set bonus is a decent increase to healing, putting us ever closer to how much souls used to heal prior to the nerf in Shadowlands. With both the 2 piece and Shattered Restoration, we’re looking at healing either 7.2% or 7.26% of damage taken in the last 5 seconds per soul, depending on whether the bonus is additive (likely) or multiplicative (unlikely). Regardless, the difference is small either way. Currently, soul healing is typically somewhere between 30-50% of damage taken, so this is a fairly decent 3-5% increase in self-healing overall. In addition, generating a Soul increases fire damage by 2%, with each stack overlapping. This likely will work on the Ironfur system like our Frailty and Painbringer stacks currently do, so we’ll generally be averaging around 3 stacks consistently, for an average increase of about 6% to fire spells.
Our 4 set bonus on the other hand, is strictly a single target bonus. It converts our primary generators into fire, which is ~42% increase in their damage due to no longer being reduced by armor, and then will cast a free Fiery Brand with 6 second duration whenever we’ve consumed 20 Souls. With current haste values, this is likely to proc about 2 times per minute, or every 30 seconds on average. We’re not expecting it to work with Burning Alive but it’s already a fairly substantial increase in survivability and decent for damage in a single target situation. Unfortunately, both parts are quite weak in any AoE situations, as the fire damage change only affects a single target ability, and even if it does work with Burning Alive, it’ll be limited to 2 extra targets, which is quite lackluster. Finally, there’s currently an unaddressed bug with Down in Flames and Burning Alive in which the spread stops working if more than one Fiery Brand is active. If this interaction holds true with the 4 piece bonus, it effectively breaks one of our talents in a negative way, reducing our survivability.
Preliminary sims have the 2 set bonus looking like ~1-2% increase in ST, and ~7-8% in AoE. Log analysis has us estimating the 4 set bonus to be an additional ~10% damage in ST on its own, but less than 4% in AoE, so in total, we’re looking at somewhere between 10-15% DPS gain in all situations, 4-6% healing after taking into account leech, and a fairly high ST survivability gain from more Fiery Brand uptime, but negligible in AoE.
Based on these same sims, it seems that this will have very little effect on our rotation. In single target, there’s a chance we may want to delay casting Fiery Brand when the 4 set bonus procs, since it’s likely based on previous similar effects that a hard cast will overwrite, rather than extend a proc. Other than that, we won’t want to change our rotation at all. Due to the bonus fire damage from the 2 set, one may think that prioritizing Spirit Bomb even in single target would be a gain, but it’s currently worse than simply playing our current rotation.
There are some minor synergies with our talents – primarily Burning Blood, which will be an additional multiplier on our fire damage along with the 2 and 4 set bonuses. This may change our recommended talent build slightly, but not too much from the current recommendations.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Overall, I think this set is fairly reasonable if their target is to be slightly better than the current tier, but it does suffer from a few issues.
Firstly, the set feels more like a 2+2 set bonus, rather than a single 4 set bonus that has full interactions and synergies. It’s strong enough that we’ll likely want to wear it in all content, given highest item level, but not strong enough that we’re likely to drop item levels much to get it. In addition, the 4 set bonus is significantly less appealing in Mythic+, though it’s fairly decent for priority targets and bosses, while the 2 set bonus is much stronger in Mythic+ than Raid.
Second, even assuming the bug with Fiery Brand is fixed, it suffers from the same overarching issue Vengeance has had since the Dragonflight redesign – all our defensive sources are debuffs on targets, which means they take time to build up and we can struggle on pull, as well as against any environmental damage. This set really continues to play into that theme.
Finally, the 4 piece bonus being entirely ST focused means we’re again getting very little defensive gain in AoE, which is where we tend to struggle the most.
On the other hand, the overall gain is quite nice considering that Vengeance has generally been in the lower end of damage and survivability for tank specs, and this helps shore up some of those weaknesses.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think the set bonus is on the better end of the known bonuses, but due to spec design, could still be improved. Since we’re unlikely to get a redesign for our major issues, modifying the set would be a good compromise until Vengeance gets some baseline changes. Numerically, everything seems good if the tuning target is around a 10% gain, but defensively I’d like to see something less focused on Fiery Brand and providing more general defensiveness that isn’t linked to debuffing enemies.
Vengeance Demon Hunter Guide
