Havoc Demon Hunter Raid Guide

Welcome to the Havoc Demon Hunter Raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.0! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Havoc Demon HunterRaid

Single-Target

Strong

AoE

Strong

Utility

Average

Survivability

Excellent

Mobility

Excellent

• Aldrachi Reaver and Fel-Scarred are the new Hero Talent tree options. However Aldrachi Reaver is currently significantly stronger in both ST and AoE scenarios which makes Fel-Scarred not an option until further balancing.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: Blade Dance deals 20% increased damage.
• 4-Set: Chaos Strike deals 20% increased damage, and has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Blade Dance and reduce its Fury cost by 50%

Single-Target

Multi-Target

Dead or Alive

The most important part of doing damage and being a useful part of your Raid group is staying alive. With movement being a core part of your damage rotation you NEED to always be aware of your surroundings. Do not Fel Rush or Vengeful Retreat into frontal abilities or area of effect zones.

You cannot do damage while you are dead and neither can you stop abilities from going through.

Being able to execute the perfect rotation isn't going to help you if you are lying dead on the floor or if you need externals/healing that your tank would need otherwise.

Making proper use of the Restless Hunter talent

Restless Hunter increases the damage of your next Blade Dance by 50%, however what most people don't know is that Restless Hunter also triggers when you are currently in demon form and activate Metamorphosis.
Additional to that Death Sweep has a small "cast time" or animation window which allows you to benefit of the Restless Hunter talent twice.
The way this works is showcased below, basically you cast Death Sweep, into Vengeful Retreat and animation cancel the Vengeful Retreat with the @Player Metamorphosis Macro from the Macro section and press Death Sweep again.
This is going to take some practice but being able to perform this combination properly greatly increases your overall damage especially if you are combining it with an on use trinket.

Using Reaver's Glaive the correct way

Even though there are simulations that suggest that you should use the Chaos Strike into Blade Dance combo at a certain amount of target (3+) to maximize overall damage output, I highly recommend always picking your main target (the target with the highest priority) and do the Blade Dance into Chaos Strike combination.
Priority damage is significantly more important than padding the overall damage for zero reason even though it makes you look worse on the damage meter.
If your aim is to be as useful as possible always pick a proper main target and do as much damage to it as you possibly can.

Immolation Aura

Manage your Immolation Aura charges properly as it is the biggest portion of your damage breakdown in AoE scenarios. When you are about to overcap on charges but you don't have Fel Rush charges ready to spend on Inertia uptime just use your Immolation Aura charges and ignore Inertia.

Never overcap on Immolation Aura charges, no matter what!

Initiative Windows

Another important part of your damage is managing your Initiative windows properly. Remember that every single hostile enemy procs Initiative and Vengeful Retreat also resets it on EVERY hostile enemy.

You can optimize this by staying out of range of some enemies to procInitiative again later.

Haste ?!

Even though Haste Sims pretty poorly on paper, it is a great stat for multi target scenarios as it smooths your gameplay out by a lot.

Haste increases the amount of Immolation Aura charges you have as it decreases the recharge time and helps with Fury generation as well as helping you fit more abilities into your Demonic windows.

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

The following tips are mainly applicable to Heroic Bosses. Mythic tips are released after our progression concludes.

← Scroll for more Bosses →

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Havoc Demon Hunter. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

• All secondary stats are affected by diminishing returns. Click here to learn more!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Great stat to reduce the damage intake of "Area of Effect" abilities.
• Leech - Provides additional healing through damage dealing.
• Speed - Niche tertiary that can be very useful and has been proven useful in the past. Makes playing certain mechanics a lot easier.

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that some trinkets are better than others depending on the raid boss.

Active Trinket alternatives

• Skardyn's Grace
  • On use mastery trinket with baseline mainstat, synergizes very well with the Havoc Demon Hunter 2 minute bursty profile
• Treacherous Transmitter
  • 1.5 minute on use that doesnt really fit into the profile of Havoc Demon Hunter but nevertheless is very strong, but hard to play
• Mad Queen's Mandate
  • 2 minute on use trinket that does massive damage, synergizes well with the high crit chance of Havoc Demon Hunter and the Initiative talent

Passive Trinket alternatives

• Ara-Kara Sacbrood
  • Strongest passive trinket choice, gives you baseline haste and a high amount of mainstat with high uptime
• Dead-Eye Spyglass
  • Second best passive trinket, gives mainstat passively and substantially increases your critical strike chance on a proc basis
• Void Reaper's Contract
  • passive damage procc trinket, does low damage currently but might possibly get tuned, synergizes well with the raid weapon if you can get your hand on it

Embellishments

• 2x Dawnthread Lining
  • It is a good choice if you have over 80% health most of the time and during your cooldowns.
  • The optimal slots to craft on are Wrists, Boots, Waist, or Cloak depending on your available gear.

Honorable mention

• Darkmoon Sigil: Vivacity
• Blessed Weapon Grip

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 636 item level and regular items are 636 on max item level, therefore, it's not beneficial to equip crafted items outside of your 2x embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

Simcraft

To find the best combination of gear available to you or identify the best possible upgrades, visit our Simcraft guide to learn how to utilize Simcraft easily and effectively.

• Phials
  • Flask of Alchemical Chaos -- maximum DPS.
  • Flask of Tempered Versatility -- less DPS but more survivability.
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
• Combat Potion
  • Tempered Potion
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion -- a big burst of healing
• Weapon
  • Ironclaw Whetstone
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Masterful Ruby
  • Culminating Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem color to enhance your Culminating Blasphemite.
    • Deadly Sapphire
    • Deadly Emerald
    • Deadly Onyx

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Havoc Demon Hunter in raiding, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Shadowmeld -- Nightelf
  • Provides nothing in Raid, but can be useful in Mythic+ in very niche situations.
• Arcane Torrent -- Bloodelf
  • Removes 1 beneficial effect from hostile targets around you.
  • Generates 15 Fury.

Recommendation

It does not really matter which Race you chose for Havoc Demon Hunter, as both provide about the same DPS benefits, it is however advised to go Bloodelf as Arcane Torrent might come in handy in some situations where you need a quick AoE purge and can be used to gain 15 Fury while you are out of range of any target in combat.

Discover recommended macros for Havoc Demon Hunter during Raid encounters and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Cursor Macros

@Cursor Metamorphosis Macro - Uses your Metamorphosis at your cursor's location

/cast [@Cursor] Metamorphosis

@Cursor Sigil of Flame Macro - Uses your Sigil of Flame at your cursor's location

/cast [@Cursor] Sigil of Flame

@Cursor Sigil of Spite Macro - Uses your Sigil of Spite at your cursor's location

/cast [@Cursor] Sigil of Spite

@Cursor Sigil of Misery Macro - Uses your Sigil of Misery at your cursor's location

/cast [@Cursor] Sigil of Misery

Mouseover Macros

@Mouseover Interrupt Macro - Interrupts your Mouseover target if you have one, Interrupts your current target if you don't have a Mouseover.

/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Disrupt

@Mouseover Fel Eruption Macro - Stuns your Mouseover target if you have one, stuns your current target if you don't have a Mouseover.

/cast [@mouseover,harm,nodead][] Fel Eruption

General Macros

@Player Metamorphosis Macro - Uses your Metamorphosis at your current location

/cast [@Player] Metamorphosis

@Player Sigil of Flame Macro - Uses your Sigil of Flame at your current location

/cast [@Player] Sigil of Flame

@Player Sigil of Spite Macro - Uses your Sigil of Spite at your current location

/cast [@Player] Sigil of Spite

@Player Sigil of Misery Macro - Uses your Sigil of Misery at your current location

/cast [@Player] Sigil of Misery

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Havoc Demon Hunter, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

• MRT -- Notes, Raid cooldowns, and more
  • Helpful addon for Raiders, especially for Raid leaders and officers.
• BigWigs -- Generic Boss Mod
  • BigWigs is a boss encounter add-on. It consists of many individual encounter scripts, or boss modules; mini add-ons that are designed to trigger alert messages, timer bars, sounds, and so forth, for one specific Raid encounter.
• WeakAuras -- Jack of all trades
  • WeakAuras is a powerful and flexible framework that allows the display of highly customizable graphics on World of Warcraft's user interface to indicate buffs, debuffs, and other relevant information. This addon was created to be a lightweight replacement for Power Auras but has since introduced more functionalities while remaining efficient and easy to use.
• Plater -- Advanced Nameplates
  • Plater is a nameplate addon with an extraordinary amount of settings, out of the box debuff tracking, threat coloring, and support for scripting similar to WeakAuras and wago.io + the WeakAuras-Companion for Mod/Script/Profile updates.
• Details -- In-depth Damage Meter
  • Most powerful, reliable, handsome, damage meter.

WeakAuras

Immolation Aura + Ragefire tracker

Shows you your Immolation Aura uptime to position properly for the Ragefire pop.

Unbound Chaos tracker

Shows you the time you have to Fel Rush before your Unbound Chaos buff runs out.

Patch 11.0.2

• All ability damage increased by 13%.
• Eye Beam damage increased by 100%.
• Consuming Lesser Soul Fragments now heals for 6% of maximum health (was 10%).
• A Fire Inside chance to refund a charge of Immolation Aura increased to 30% (was 25%).

Patch 11.0.1

• Soul Rending now grants 6% Leech (was 10%).

Q: Is it worth holding my Eye Beam for X?

A: It is almost never worth holding your Eye Beam for specific points unless you hold it for less than 3-4 seconds. You are better off just using your Eye Beam, Essence Break and Vengeful Retreat on cooldown.

Credits

Written By: Nicememes

Reviewed By: Kush