Intro
The Tier 32 set bonuses for The War Within have been discovered and as par for the course for the first set of an expansion, they are generic improvements to our base spec rather than build-defining. This time around, it's likely due to the introduction of Hero Talents which will already shake up how our specs work as we level up to 80 and ideally will impact both Hero trees relatively equally. However, with the current design, that's not quite looking to be true.
Bonuses and Interactions
Our two piece bonus,
惡魔獵人復仇11.0職業套裝2件, causes
破魂斬 to always deal 15% bonus damage and gains a 35% chance to shatter one
靈魂碎片 from a target it hits. Despite the tooltip, the bonus chance to proc is only once per cast, rather than per target hit. The damage increase appears to correctly multiply with
鋒銳之刃 from our Aldrachi Reaver tree, as well as
燃刃 and the empowered
靈魂切割 granted by Fel-Scarred's
惡魔湧動 bonuses. For a spell that is a regular part of our rotation, the damage buff alone is likely to be one of the stronger set bonuses this season. However, we'll likely be treating the
靈魂碎片 generation as an additional bonus rather than something to play around due to both the randomness of the proc and it being on our primary spender. Because this bonus does not affect
靈魂炸彈, it's likely to shift our rotational priority based on number of targets to favor
破魂斬 on a higher target count, rather than simply using it on ST as a default spender or as a Fury dump after using souls on
靈魂炸彈 in AoE. We'll be hashing out the exact rotational changes with further testing, but it's likely to affect all target counts.
Our four piece bonus,
惡魔獵人復仇11.0職業套裝4件 grants us a stacking 2% buff to damage and healing on
魔化破滅 for each
靈魂碎片 consumed, up to a maximum of 30% (15 souls). This also works with
魔化荒寂 when empowered by Fel-Scarred
惡魔湧動. In most cases without large amounts of downtime, we can expect that we will always reach the maximum bonus, so it's effectively just a 30% bonus to the damage. Given that
魔化破滅 is one of our highest damaging abilities per button press, it's quite a nice bonus to our damage overall. Unfortunately, the healing from
魔化破滅 is negligible considering that the vast majority of our healing actually comes from the transformation into
惡魔化身 with
魔體轉化.
General Impressions
Our first Tier bonus for The War Within seems to be tuned quite high for damage, which is quite welcome, but appears to be a fair bit more powerful than those of the other tank specs. I expect it will be brought in line for tuning, but it's not wildly out of line either. Unfortunately, it's almost exclusively an offensive bonus, with the only survivability gain coming from extra damage for leech and the 35% chance on casting
破魂斬 for an extra soul to be generated. Coming from the end of Dragonflight, where we have multitudes of souls to the point where we are often overflowing due to the Tier 31 bonus on
火焰符印 as well as significantly higher secondary stats, our soul generation will be in stark contrast. It's also just a bit odd that
every other tank spec gets a flat 3% damage reduction on their tier sets. While not particularly relevant, it does make one think.
As far as first Tier bonuses of a new expansion go, the Vengeance set seems to be one of the more impactful ones, whether it's a good thing or not. I think it's got very slightly better synergy with Fel-Scarred and will likely be useful in all sorts of content, which is better than most of our past Tier sets that were either not good in anything, or extremely powerful in some content while being absolutely abysmal in others. A bit of minor tweaking would be welcome, but assuming no further changes, I think most players will be relatively happy with this one.
