Why You're WRONG About Momentum and Havoc Demon Hunter in Dragonflight
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So Max made a tweet about the state of Momentum yesterday and it got people talking. He essentially said the current Dragonflight version of Momentum is bad and the older versions were better because it wasn’t treated as a maintenance buff.
While I agree with him in a sense, I think there’s more to consider and come to terms with when you REALLY look at how Momentum works now. There’s also a massive misunderstanding amongst the community about what Momentum is and what that gameplay looks like now.
So let’s dive into this and clear some things up, once and for all.
Momentum has had this stigma around it for as long as I’ve played the class:
“It’s a very high skill cap playstyle that only the best of the best players can pull off and if you mess it up, you’ll do negative damage.
It will also rob you of all the amazing mobility we get as Demon Hunters and you’ll definitely fail to all the mechanics because now your Fel Rush is on cooldown all the time.”
I never understood this excuse because there are so many other classes out there who don’t have an off gcd 15y nitro boost to get out of things. Ret paladins and DKs seem to manage just fine. Not to mention we have Glide which actually makes us move in a direction faster than natural run speed. Oddly enough, the people making this argument seem to have forgotten that we’ve played with Unbound Chaos for the majority of Shadowlands and even towards the end of BfA for a bit. It could be argued that talent is even more impactful than Momentum in big AoE situations.
Using movement for damage has always been a staple for Havoc Demon Hunters in some form or another. It’s just gone unnoticed or unrecognized if the discussion wasn’t focused SOLELY on the talent Momentum. We’ve had Unbound Chaos in the more recent past and even if Momentum was completely deleted now, we’d still be playing around Vengeful Retreat and Initiative.
In terms of being a high skill cap playstyle, I also don’t think this is exactly true. Sure, it was something you had to pay attention to; you wanted to track when you had the buff and when it was going to fall off..But let’s be honest - How much did BfA and SL versions of Havoc really need to track? Where the difficulty lied for most was learning the timings of the encounter and the appropriate times to use their Fel Rush to get Momentum. This forced a certain level of “awareness” into the gameplay which was super satisfying once you had it all figured out. That advanced awareness is something that most classes need to learn early on but the most commonly used Havoc builds didn’t require it. And this is where we run into the first of the major problems.
At level 70, we’ll almost certainly be playing a build that includes both of our stat scaling talents: Know Your Enemy and Any Means Necessary. To get Know Your Enemy, we have to work our way down the left side of the tree - Picking up things like Initiative, Unbound Chaos, Tactical Retreat, and Essence Break. Momentum is right along that path.
By having all those talents, particularly Essence Break, our damage profile becomes less about sustained damage like in BfA or Shadowlands. Due to it being “sustained”, this is why we felt like we needed to keep Momentum up as much as possible.
Our damage profile now, is all about the bursty Essence Break window every 40s. Actually using the abilities to properly execute an Essence Break window will automatically give you the momentum buff for that window.
I have two closing statements on Momentum that I’d like to make.
1) You don’t have to be afraid of Momentum. It’s not the scary monster you might remember it being. It’s not going to force you to use all your Fel Rush charges and make you die in the fire. It doesn’t work that way anymore.
2) It doesn’t work that way anymore. It doesn’t work in any way, really. It lost its character; its potential for engaging gameplay. It was chosen to stay in the new Dragonflight talent trees because it was such a contentious talent. People loved it or loved to hate it - which resulted in it actually being a choice you had to make. Unfortunately, there’s no choice any more and you’re just doing less damage if you don’t take it, regardless of how casual or elitist you are.
But I like to look at it this way - the high skill cap burst window that Momentum used to provide has simply been shifted and moved into Essence Break.. And I'm totally cool with that.
demon hunter dragonflight jedith havoc dh
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So Max made a tweet about the state of Momentum yesterday and it got people talking. He essentially said the current Dragonflight version of Momentum is bad and the older versions were better because it wasn’t treated as a maintenance buff.
While I agree with him in a sense, I think there’s more to consider and come to terms with when you REALLY look at how Momentum works now. There’s also a massive misunderstanding amongst the community about what Momentum is and what that gameplay looks like now.
So let’s dive into this and clear some things up, once and for all.
Momentum has had this stigma around it for as long as I’ve played the class:
“It’s a very high skill cap playstyle that only the best of the best players can pull off and if you mess it up, you’ll do negative damage.
It will also rob you of all the amazing mobility we get as Demon Hunters and you’ll definitely fail to all the mechanics because now your Fel Rush is on cooldown all the time.”
I never understood this excuse because there are so many other classes out there who don’t have an off gcd 15y nitro boost to get out of things. Ret paladins and DKs seem to manage just fine. Not to mention we have Glide which actually makes us move in a direction faster than natural run speed. Oddly enough, the people making this argument seem to have forgotten that we’ve played with Unbound Chaos for the majority of Shadowlands and even towards the end of BfA for a bit. It could be argued that talent is even more impactful than Momentum in big AoE situations.
Using movement for damage has always been a staple for Havoc Demon Hunters in some form or another. It’s just gone unnoticed or unrecognized if the discussion wasn’t focused SOLELY on the talent Momentum. We’ve had Unbound Chaos in the more recent past and even if Momentum was completely deleted now, we’d still be playing around Vengeful Retreat and Initiative.
In terms of being a high skill cap playstyle, I also don’t think this is exactly true. Sure, it was something you had to pay attention to; you wanted to track when you had the buff and when it was going to fall off..But let’s be honest - How much did BfA and SL versions of Havoc really need to track? Where the difficulty lied for most was learning the timings of the encounter and the appropriate times to use their Fel Rush to get Momentum. This forced a certain level of “awareness” into the gameplay which was super satisfying once you had it all figured out. That advanced awareness is something that most classes need to learn early on but the most commonly used Havoc builds didn’t require it. And this is where we run into the first of the major problems.
At level 70, we’ll almost certainly be playing a build that includes both of our stat scaling talents: Know Your Enemy and Any Means Necessary. To get Know Your Enemy, we have to work our way down the left side of the tree - Picking up things like Initiative, Unbound Chaos, Tactical Retreat, and Essence Break. Momentum is right along that path.
By having all those talents, particularly Essence Break, our damage profile becomes less about sustained damage like in BfA or Shadowlands. Due to it being “sustained”, this is why we felt like we needed to keep Momentum up as much as possible.
Our damage profile now, is all about the bursty Essence Break window every 40s. Actually using the abilities to properly execute an Essence Break window will automatically give you the momentum buff for that window.
I have two closing statements on Momentum that I’d like to make.
1) You don’t have to be afraid of Momentum. It’s not the scary monster you might remember it being. It’s not going to force you to use all your Fel Rush charges and make you die in the fire. It doesn’t work that way anymore.
2) It doesn’t work that way anymore. It doesn’t work in any way, really. It lost its character; its potential for engaging gameplay. It was chosen to stay in the new Dragonflight talent trees because it was such a contentious talent. People loved it or loved to hate it - which resulted in it actually being a choice you had to make. Unfortunately, there’s no choice any more and you’re just doing less damage if you don’t take it, regardless of how casual or elitist you are.
But I like to look at it this way - the high skill cap burst window that Momentum used to provide has simply been shifted and moved into Essence Break.. And I'm totally cool with that.
demon hunter dragonflight jedith havoc dh
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