Spotlight’s on Havoc Demon Hunter in the Necrolord covenant. The covenant ability Fodder to the Flame was recently redesigned to be passive. It is the only passive covenant ability in the game which is pretty odd. It roughly procs once per minute and summons a demon which you can kill. When you kill the demon, it explodes for AOE damage, heals you and drops a demon soul which you can pick up and it gives you 20% increased damage for 15 seconds. I created a weak aura for this ability and it’s built in 2 parts. The first part notifies you when a demon spawns to make sure you do not miss it. It puts an image over their nameplate so you cannot miss it and it plays a sound. The second part is a demon soul tracker, it plays a sound alert and shows the duration left on the demon soul buff. It is useful because a lot of the time it is difficult to see where the soul is on the ground. You kind of just shuffle around with this weak aura and listen for the sound alert to notify you when you picked it up. This is especially useful in raids when there’s a lot of spell effects going on right in front of you.
PROS and CONS 1:33
When it comes to pros, it is a lot of fun and a cool mechanic to play around. Every time a demon spawns it is a massive dopamine rush and feels really good when it lines up with other things. When people first heard about covenants, we were all somewhat bummed that we would not be able to casually swap between them and play around with all the different abilities at our own leisure. Once you choose a covenant, you may feel stuck and grass is always greener on the other side. Switching to Necrolord for this week, has sort of scratched the itch in a sense. It’s been super fun to play something different for a while. It’s like your spec got a new ability or mechanic added to their tool kit. This ability has really good AOE damage potential. I’ve been using it with Emeni who provides lead by example as the very first soul bind trait. This gives you 5% agility for 20 seconds every time Fodder to the Flame procs. Gives 2% to each of your nearby allies and then an additional 2% to you for each ally affected. In a five-man group, like mythic plus dungeon, that’s 13% extra agility for you approximately every minute. Going further down the talent tree, you can also unlock Gnashing Chompers which is probably the route you want to go considering there is really one worthwhile potency for havoc. This trait gives you 3% haste for 10 seconds after defeating an enemy up to 15%. This build has pretty wild potential for mythic plus.
What are the cons? There’s a few big issues with this covenant ability and I am not sure if this is intentional or not. I’ve reached out to Blizzard and a hotfix did go out recently after the patch went live. However, these issues are not addressed so it is kind of suspicious. The problem is that the demon can be targeted, attacked, and killed by your allies. This was not the case in previous iterations of this ability, so I am not sure why this is the case now. Our discovery of this was kind of a progression throughout the day. I don’t think this is intentional but if it is, this could be a deciding factor. If Blizzard wants to keep it working this way, they need to make the demon’s HP scale with the amount of friendly allies present. Kind of like how a world boss does. That would prevent it from literally and instantly dying from incidental AOE damage and raid. When it would spawn in raid I didn’t even have to touch it, did not have to use Throw Glaive and did not even have to look at it. It would literally just fall over immediately.
Why the way this ability works is fundamentally a problem when it comes to raiding, despite the ability being an estimated one proc per minute, it is not coded to more likely proc at the beginning of combat if the internal cooldown is available. Which means you will more often than not never get a demon in your opener. This is problematic if your raid team is popping lust and you are using meta. Obviously you want to stack that extra 20% damage from the demon soul but that might not happen and there is nothing you can do to help it. You might not get a proc at all until a minute in, you may get a demon that lines up with some of your harder hitting abilities like an unbound chaos charge saved up or you have an i-beam ready to go. Or alternatively you can get one when you are just chilling and you do not have anything available. You could also get a demon spawn during an intermission of a fight. This is where it becomes problematic. A raid encounter has very few important moments where damage is important and you want to do anything in your power to stack your cooldowns to take advantage of that window of opportunity. With lust or with your meta or even a phase of vulnerability that a boss might have. Boss fights only have a few of those moments and they are weighted very heavily.
5:54 On the flip side, mythic plus has more windows of opportunity as you are starting a new pull every 30 seconds to a minute and fighting 3 to 5 bosses throughout the run. There’s so many more chances that getting a demon can line up with something else important.
What Necrolord has to offer is cool and works exceptionally well in mythic plus but falls really short when it comes to a raid scenario where you want your damage to be as predictable as possible especially on progression.
Will I be staying in Necrolord to destroy demons like a true demon hunter? Or will I swap back to Night Fae and return to super saiyan charging enemies and players to the moon? Solely due to the fact that I am a mythic raider and my team is still working towards getting cutting edge, I am going back to the more reliable and consistent ability with the Night Fae. The Hunt keeps all the power and control in your hands and the only variable you really have to worry about is whether it crits or not. You control when you want to use it. You have the choice to include it in your opener or hold it a little bit for that vulnerability phase that might be coming up.
Class ability aside, I enjoy the soul binds of the Night Fae way more. There’s some valuable options in single target with Niya and AOE with Karan. If I was not mythic raiding and solely did mythic plus, I truthfully would probably more inclined to stay in Necrolord.
