New Demon Hunter Covenant Legendaries in Patch 9.1 PTR Build 38549 - Demon Hunter Guide Writers Review Effects

PTR Posted 2021/05/10 at 5:23 PM by Jaydaa

New Covenant-Specific Class Legendariesbuild 38549 of the 9.1 PTR

Our Guide Writers and Experts have given their thoughts on the Patch 9.1 PTR Class Changes and new Legendaries for Build 38549. Check out all of our released opinion articles for the build below.

Class Tuning Opinions Build 38549

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Covenant Legendary Opinions Build 38549

Demon Hunter Covenant Legendaries - Guide Writer Thoughts

Demon Hunter Legendaries in Patch 9.1

NEW (Kyrian) Elysian Decree shatters 2 additional Lesser Soul Fragments and grants you Blind Faith for 20 sec. For each Lesser Soul Fragment you consume while Blind Faith is active you gain 1% Mastery and 10 Fury.
Inventory Type: Chest, Back
NEW (Necrolord) When Fodder to the Flame's demon explodes it inflicts Fiery Brand to 5 nearby enemies for 5 sec. Additionally Shattered Soul's duration is increased by 8 sec.
Inventory Type: Waist, Wrist
NEW (Night Fae) The Hunt engulfs you with Immolation Aura upon reaching your target and you gain 3% Agility for 12 sec for each enemy hit.
Inventory Type: Shoulder, Feet
NEW (Venthyr) Sinful Brand deals 10% increased damage and Eye Beam / Fel Devastation damage increases the duration of Sinful Brand by 0.5 sec.
Inventory Type: Head, Legs

Writer Opinions & FeedbackHavoc Demon Hunter Writer Opinion & FeedbackKibFel Hammer Demon Hunter DiscordStreamWe finally got out covenant legendaries and we have some interesting options and some not so interesting ones.

Night Fae

Starting with the most interesting legendary, Blazing Slaughter (Night Fae) is the best and most interesting legendary from these new ones. It synergizes with the talent Unbound Chaos allowing us to double dip on the talent every 90 seconds as well as giving us a nice agility buff based on how many targets we hit (capped at 15%). The synergy comes from the Immolation Aura casted by The Hunt while using Blazing Slaughter, as it's a new cast of Immolation Aura, it will also grant us the Unbound Chaos buff when specced, allowing us to significantly increase the burst provided by The Hunt. This is the legendary that has the most potential from the new ones and as a bonus it's already from our preferred covenant for both PVE and PVP.

Venthyr

Agony Gaze (Venthyr) is second in line. This Legendary is very straight forward: apply Sinful Brand, Eye Beam to increase the duration, profit. This legendary gives us nice synergy when paired with Metamorphosis and the Eye Beam reset passive. We can use this interaction in two ways:

For single target by extending Sinful Brand with Eye Beam, re-applying with Metamorphosis and extending again with the Eye Beam reset
In AoE by applying Sinful Brand to every target in range and AOE extending via Eye Beam again.

Powerful synergies in both cases make this an interesting new legendary for our Venthyr friends.

Kyrian and Necrolord

Unfortunately when we look at Blind Faith (Kyrian) and Demonic Oath (Necrolord) they are both quite weak in comparison. Both of them lack synergy and lack throughput in comparison. Blind Faith has synergy with the talent Demonic Appetite but this talent is quite weak currently in comparison to Blind Fury and Felblade and the mastery buff it provides is quite weak for Havoc DH. Demonic Oath is also quite weak, spreading the Fiery Brand DoT provides us with nice defense, but sadly the DoT is quite weak, so the damage it offers us is quite lacking. It's also unreliable since it's based on killing the demon from Fodder to the Flame which is on a proc that we do not control.

Overall I think Blizzard hit the mark with the Night Fae and Venthyr legendaries due to the synergies they offer us allowing these legendary item to slightly alter the way we play as well as providing us noticeable damage. Unfortunately, the Kyrian and Necrolord legendaries fall short and especially in terms of the Necrolord legendary, it seems as it was primarily designed for Vengeance rather than for Demon Hunters.
Vengeance Demon Hunter Writer Opinion & FeedbackFel HammerDemon Hunters finally received a first look at new legendaries in Build 38549 on the PTR. While they are early iterations and not final, we can make some estimates about how they're going to perform with some tests and why they won't affect our covenant choices for Vengeance.

We'll start with the least popular covenants and work our way up.

Necrolord
Demon Hunters of the Necrolord covenant get Demonic Oath, which casts 5 Fiery Brand on nearby enemies when the demon from Fodder to the Flame explodes, and then extends the duration of the buff from Demon Soul by 8 seconds, for a total of 28 seconds baseline. While this is a respectable increase to damage and despite being quite nice for survivability due to the synergies with our talents as each Fiery Brand can each spread with the Burning Alive talent as well as extend with Charred Flesh, there's one major problem with Fodder to the Flame: it's completely random as to when the demon spawns and this makes it difficult to use in any sort of progression content.

While it could be nice as a DPS legendary on farm or if someone truly enjoys playing Necrolord, random survival generally isn't what we're looking for. In addition, you would have to give up our current strongest survival legendary, Fiery Soul, which is both controllable and provides about double the uptime that Demonic Oath does in any situation up to 5 targets, which is the vast majority of content.

Venthyr
Next we can look at Venthyr, who get Agony Gaze, which increases the damage of Sinful Brand by 10% and each tick of Fel Devastation increases its duration by 0.5 seconds. Since Fel Devastation has 12 ticks, that means a full extension is 6 extra seconds for a total of 14 seconds. Again, this does have some synergy as it increases the damage contribution of Sinful Brand by a massive 92.5%, but there are a couple major issues with it.

Firstly, as Sinful Brand gets automatically spread by Metamorphosis, in order to maximize the value of the legendary, we would have to immediately Fel Devastation. However, we generally do not want to do this as there are often cases where it needs to be held as a defensive. In addition, since the cooldowns are synced between Sinful Brand and Fel Devastation, assuming usage of both the Increased Scrutiny and Fel Defender conduits, there will always be a cast that isn't extended as the ones automatically cast by Metamorphosis take priority.

Similarly to the Necrolord issue, we have to give up extremely powerful defensives for something that effectively only contributes damage. Not only would we have to lose Fiery Soul, but since we already use Demonic, we are in Metamorphosis, thus making the defensive portion of Sinful Brand useless.

Night Fae
Night Fae Demon Hunters get Blazing Slaughter as their new legendary, which at first glance looks rather powerful as it casts a free Immolation Aura and grants 3% Agility per enemy hit for 12 seconds.

However, it's not as strong as it seems. Even in the best case scenario of hitting 5 targets on every cast of The Hunt, we're gaining 15% Agility for 12 seconds every 90 seconds, which is worse than most trinkets give. On average, it's going to be somewhere around a 0.4%-2% DPS increase, depending on the number of targets, which puts it below any of our current legendaries for DPS.

Again, this is going to have the same issue as the other covenants in that even if it were good for DPS, we'd be giving up far too much survivability, but even in the case where it isn't needed, it's not even worth taking over any of our current legendaries.

Kyrian
Finally, we have the Kyrian, who get Blind Faith, which causes Elysian Decree to generate 2 extra souls and buffs us for 20 seconds, causing any Lesser Soul Fragment consumed to grant 1% Mastery which stacks, and 10 Fury.

I honestly have no idea what the developers were thinking when they made this. Our Mastery only works defensively while Demon Spikes is active, making this incredibly worthless. Offensively, it's a decent boost, but there's a weird feedback loop where we will have a bunch of extra Fury that we can't spend in order to maximize the Legendary, so that portion is just entirely wasted.

Final Thoughts
While a couple of the Legendaries we've gotten in this build are fairly decent for damage, it feels like the developers fell into the same trap as always - they designed these legendaries around Havoc, and did the bare minimum to ensure that they worked for Vengeance. None of these options are appealing in their current state for any content.

Sadly, the two best Legendaries are from Necrolord and Venthyr, covenants that are generally not preferred for Vengeance, and despite their strengths, it's not nearly enough to overcome the deficit between them and Kyrian or Night Fae.

I'd like to see some more thought put into these for future iterations as none of our current legendaries are particularly exciting despite being decent, and these add nothing to our arsenal either.

Comment by vodrinTLDR: they are all pretty bad and won't see play in their current iterations (outside of night fae havoc pvp and the rare havoc's that want to punish themselves by being venthyr)Comment by GeigeI was really disappointed with the necrolord legendary. Here's hoping it gets a rework but that's probably a pipe dream.Comment by ApprThe more important piece of information to discuss is whether or not any of these legendaries will actually be used over anything else that currently exists in the game. The only potential one I see Blazing Slaughter. The others seem quite weak in comparison to what is currently available, for both specs.Comment by Felweedthe rare havoc's that want to punish themselves by being venthyrComment by DraconaxBasically as I expected, no VDH should ever be using any of them, regardless of covenant, over Darkglare or Fiery Soul. Disappointing that we get 4 new legendaries, and not one of them is worth using.Comment by deadlyshadow532Same!Comment by the9tailI was really disappointed with the necrolord legendary. Here's hoping it gets a rework but that's probably a pipe dream.Comment by theresinUgh, mastery buff...really? As if VDH doesn't already have too much.

Sadly, however .. even if it were vers or haste I still don't see any progression tank not using our current two best legos.

Would be nice to have at least one "fun" (objectively) legendary ... Fiery Soul is definitely very nice for survival, but compared to other classes our choices are pretty tame.Comment by LautnerFor me personally, my Single Target damage as Venythyr (40) goes from 5.5 to 5.6k when I swap to Night Fae (35). It's like 150k dps which will only increase with better gear buuut.. I mean, who cares?

Sooo I just stayed with the vampire buds.Comment by SolidusSearsthe rare havoc's that want to punish themselves by being venthyrComment by DhrallGIVE HAVOC A REAL BUFF YOU COWARDS!Comment by VitchmanFeels like Blizz is throwing hundreds of new darts at the wall and hoping they'll stick. The covenant idea was scrutinized going into SLands and continues to be so. Just wish they'd stopping plugging 900 different systems at a time.Comment by EromanderIt seems like the demon soul buff you're referring to with the necrolord legendary might be an old version since it's now baked into the Shattered Souls ability which now only lasts 15 seconds before adding the new necro conduit to it Brooding Pool. At a baseline you'd be getting 15 seconds + the 8 seconds from this new legendary for necrosComment by phandaalFeels like Blizz is throwing hundreds of new darts at the wall and hoping they'll stick. The covenant idea was scrutinized going into SLands and continues to be so. Just wish they'd stopping plugging 900 different systems at a time.Comment by Felweedthe rare havoc's that want to punish themselves by being venthyrComment by SweatdemonKind of a weird thing to put here lol. It entirely depends on the content you do. You can use any covenant for M+ or raids. *!@# doesn't matter. PvP, has to be fae otherwise it's a meme. Sure you can have fun in the game, that's what you come here to do, but your response just looks like you're trying to make a point or an argument out of nothing. The choices matter in a minmax scenario. just how it is. Anyone can say they beat out meta but is it all the time? Does the player know the class well? So many variables.