by Magistrate - 8 years ago     show comments

In our continuing detailed recap of World of Warcraft: Legion at BlizzCon, we take a look at the Demon Hunter during the game systems panel. Senior game designer Jon LeCraft (@TheCrafticus) presented on Demon Hunter specs, mobility, and more.

At its heart, the Demon Hunter is about a “dark hero,” one that gave up its soul to fight the Burning Legion, a threat that most on Azeroth don’t actually even know exists or believe in, given the millennia since the last true Azeroth invasion.

The class wears leather and focuses mostly on melee with high mobility. They tend to use the weapons of the enemy against them, including their weapons of choice, Warglaives, which can be thrown at the enemy, as well as Fel magic.

When creating a Demon Hunter, players can customize horns, tattoos, and custom skin textures in addition to all of the pre-existing character creation options. New voice acting and lines have also been written for Demon Hunter emotes and actions, adding more class flavor.

Havoc Spec

Havoc is the melee DPS spec of the class, focusing on building and spending Fury, moving quickly to avoid attacks and strike, often “fighting fire with more fire.”

Fury is a basic build and spend resource. A purple bar below the health bar, it builds with weaker attacks and is used on powerful ones.

Havoc throws a Warglaive

Some Havoc skills mix up Fury generation to keep players on their toes, like Demon’s Bite, which generates a random amount of Fury, or Chaos Strike, which uses no Fury if the hit is a Critical Strike. The hope is that the variation will prevent a lot of rotation tedium.

Blade Dance

Another interesting ability, Blade Dance strikes through the enemy in several quick strikes trailed by Fel fire. The picture doesn’t do the skill justice–it’s incredibly quick. For now, the ability is a talent, although there is internal discussion of changing it to a core ability.

Vengeance Spec

Vengeance is largely in development, so there wasn’t much stuff LeCraft could share. The tanking Demon Hunter spec, the class focuses on a mixture of taking brutal amounts of punishment, utilizing protective spells, disruptions, and parries with its Warglaives.

The class boils down to a “demonic inquisitor” fantasy, one that has mastered the art of extracting information from demons through inflicting pain. Being so close to the enemy has also necessitated picking up some defensive magic that can be used on the Demon Hunter and, sometimes, its allies.

Metamorphosis

Metamorphosis is key to both Havoc and Vengeance specs, although it plays very differently for both and is used in different ways. Cosmetically, it temporarily reveals the inner demonic form of the Hunter, which is different for both specs as well as genders.

For Havoc, Metamorphosis seems to be more sporadically used in combat. The Hunter jumps into the air, transforms into a vicious demon, and slams down with an AoE stun. Fury generation and damage increase drastically.

Keeping inline with the Demon Hunter’s fantasy of survivability through offense, Life Leech jumps to 100% for the duration of the transformation.

Vengeance’s Metamorphosis, again still in development, focuses on taking a ton of damage as a kind of immovable wall. It’s on a big cooldown, so this will be the ability saved for tricky situations in raid encounters and similar. This also makes it, according to LeCraft, good for modifying through talents and Artifact traits (for more on Artifacts, see our recap).

As an additional perk, all mobility skills can be used in Metamorphosis.

Fel Magic

Demon Hunters also boasts an array of Fel magic-inspired attacks. Eye Beam is a standard cone AoE spell with a 2-second channel, where Chaos is a powerful AoE stun.

Consume Magic is a medium-ranged interrupt that generates a full bar of Fury for Havoc when it’s successful.

For Chaos Nova and Eye Beam, as well as some other skills, the demonic powers inside the Hunter come out, temporarily showing wings or a demon body.

Mobility

The Demon Hunter is huge on mobility, and this comes through with its array of both offensive and non-damaging mobile abilities.

Personally, I’m unsure which skills work with which spec. It seems like Double Jump works for both specs, and Fel Rush, while only demonstrated for Havoc, would make sense for a tank charge attack for Vengeance. Wrathful Retreat might only be a Havoc ability, since, well, a tank focuses more on confronting enemies than in popping in and out of combat (and thereby messing with aggro).

Double Jump and Glide are both bound to the spacebar/jump key, so they don’t take up more space on your ability bars. In theory, you can jump, jump again in mid-air, and then glide down to where ever you’d like. LeCraft described Glide as “your own personal Goblin Glider,” and the ability reveals your demon wings.

Fel Rush

Fel Rush projects the Hunter forward in a rush of green Fel fire. It requires no target and does damage, so it can be used to either quickly traverse space like Blink or charge an enemy. Vengeful Retreat is a cool way of saying you’re backing out of the fight quickly and with some dignity, quickly moving backwards.

Fel Rush and Vengeful Retreat can also both be used while in air, so there’s some really interesting gameplay possibilities for Double Jump, Fel Rush, and Glide, in particular, that were demonstrated well in the video for navigating lava streams.

Spectral Sight

Spectral Sight has interesting implications for PvP combat and open world adventuring. When used, green fire stretches across the player’s screen and enemies in stealth, invisibility, and behind all physical objects (including walls) are revealed in red silhouettes.

The ability does slow the caster down somewhat as they creep, but it’s not as slow as what was shown in the gameplay video, which has since been buffed.

That’s all for the Demon Hunter recap. Stay tuned for an overview of class changes from lead class designer Kris Zierhut!