Healing by Shear Force: Another Vengeance Update

[wowheadrename] There was a fairly significant rotational shakeup in the last alpha build. And a couple minor things. In summary, the important changes are:

  • Shear no longer reduces the cooldown of Felblade. Instead, it is the primary Pain generator.
  • Felblade is now a talent, which acts as a cap closer and Pain generator.
  • Immolation Aura now generates Pain over time.
  • Soul Cleave now heals you for a baseline 10% and also heals you with nearby Shattered Souls, which appear on the ground and heal for 25% of your health.

The baseline rotation ends up looking something like:

  1. Use Soul Cleave when you have the Pain and need a heal.
  2. Keep Demon Spikes active when physical damage reduction is needed.
  3. Cast Immolation Aura on cooldown.
  4. Fill with Shear.

If you have Felblade talented, then you squeeze that in the priority above Shear.

Soul Cleave

Shattered Souls spawn far away from you, unlike a Brewmaster’s Ox Orbs. Unlike Ox Orbs, you don’t need to stand directly on top of them to activate the heal.

shattered soul

The wording on Soul Cleave is vague, but it does indeed bring nearby Souls to you to immediately heal you. There are new UI elements that indicate how many Souls are nearby, both on the in field frame and as charges on the hotkey itself. Currently on alpha, the UI shows all souls, even ones that are out of range. Hopefully that changes to only display souls within range.

There’s a bit of added gameplay to Soul Cleave now where you’re not just waiting for when you need a heal, but also for souls to proc. Right now, the primary way to generate souls is killing blows, which isn’t all that reliable in group content. Shear has a small chance to proc a soul, as does the talent Fracture.

Rotation

Truth be told, the original rotation where Shear reduced Felblade’s cd didn’t feel good. You had to constantly watch Felbade’s cd because it was variable and best used as soon as it became available. Brewmasters will have a similar cooldown-reducing rotation, but the important difference is that Tiger Palm reduces the cd of something that has charges and doesn’t need to be used on cooldown: Ironskin and Purifying Brew.

There’s still some funkiness to Felblade. For instance, our artifact, while clearly still a work in progress, increases its damage. As a talent, it does even more damage than Soul Cleave. It’s definitely the choice to add complexity to an otherwise simple rotation, but it feels like it does everything, from a gap closer to damage to resource generation.

There’s also not much of a difference between the AoE and single target rotations. AoE is single target plus Sigil of Flame, though even Sigil of Flame can be used in the single target rotation for dps.