The first round of changes to the Outlaw tier set have been made and it's a super good step in the right direction so far. With the original version having an almost non existent payoff of less than 1% dps this version looks to be much greater with easy potential tweaks if they decide to change more in the future. With the change the payoff is much greater than before but in my opinion still a bit weak. Firstly, a lot of the synergies are a lot less promising than first envisioned upon making sims for the set.
双手精通 is still an incredibly weak conduit, so attempting to optimize stats and rotation for adding
剑刃乱舞 to the core rotation is a dud. The second potential synergy I touched on before was other legendaries.
绿皮船长的柳枝 is much stronger than before due to changes to how the 4 set works and it's interaction with
可乘之机 and
无休锋刃. Now you always get the big
手枪射击 hits from the legendary, and it now works with
无休锋刃 to get even more casts of
正中眉心, which also has great synergy with
明澈回响 so it sounds like huge value! But sadly, to be the bearer of bad news, the raw output of
狂猛迅疾 is still too much for the potentially more gameplay altering legendaries to get breathing room to be best in slot.
So with the changes the tier set was looking at around a 5% dps gain from the 2 set, and only about 3.5% from the 4 set. A big improvement over the previous build but just needs a little bit more of a push. The biggest part of the change is the fact that it now works with
无休锋刃. After testing the set a lot on training dummies on PTR, and playing the spec during all raid testing so far, the set feels pretty great. While my original concern was that the 2 set being random it would be too difficult and awkward to play with but I can say after playing with it my concerns are no more. It feels great to have any amount of extra resources especially combo points but the 4 set is nothing too special. It doesn't really feel like it's doing too much, but it's giving a bunch of CDR which is great.
In conclusion this is a great start and hopefully we see some more mild tweaks moving forward. Personally I've noticed a few people dislike how random the set might feel, which is a bit ironic considering which spec they are designing a set for, maybe just turning that 50% into a 100% to make people feel better and make it a bit stronger in the process. The 4 set
正中眉心 proc could also gain an increased damage effect and "reloading" of combo points akin to
袖里乾坤 back from BFA. You could make it so the 4 set causes both the
手枪射击 and
正中眉心 cast be guaranteed a critical hit to really push the
绿皮船长的柳枝 dream. Overall I'm loving the set as it's fun to play with and there is still some cool design space they could explore to give it a slightly bigger boost.
