On this page, you will find the best gear, trinkets, and best in slot item recommendations for your Havoc Demon Hunter in World of Warcraft 12.1. From crafted items to advice on how to use your Crests to upgrade gear, we got you covered!
Best in Slot Gear Guide for Havoc Demon Hunter
Welcome to our Gear and BiS Page for Havoc Demon Hunter for Midnight! Check this page to learn everything you need to know about gearing an Havoc Demon Hunter, including the BiS Gear from all sources, Raiding, and Mythic+, information on the best Trinkets, Tier Sets, and much more.
Upgrading gear in Midnight continues to use the Crest system, allowing you to increase the item level of gear along tracks relating to what level of content it was obtained. Harder content drops gear on higher level tracks, thus reaching higher Item Levels. For more information, read up on our dedicated page on how the gearing system works in Midnight.
The list below contains gear from all possible endgame sources, including Raids, Mythic+, Crafting, Delves and The Great Vault. It aims to provide the absolute best possible setup, but bear in mind that each individual item may not be the strongest in your particular gear setup at any given point. Tier pieces have the locations of ideal Catalyst drop locations listed if they're stronger than the standard version.
This gearset aims to optimize your Critical Strike and Mastery rating as much as possible.
FAQWhich Items Do I Use in the Catalyst?
In Midnight Season 2, the Catalyst now retains the secondary stats and cantrips of any item you convert. Therefore, it doesn't matter which slots you use to activate your set bonus, and instead what matters is the items you input.
The absolute best pieces currently available to Catalyze in each slot are:
- Helm –
Gaze of the Coiled Watcher from Ula'tek - Shoulders –
Frothing Venom Spaulders from Vashnik - Chest –
Vest of Reverent Adoration from King's Rest - Gloves –
Abyssal Doomhound's Studded Gauntlets from Entombed Sentinels - Legs –
Coiled Hex Legguards from Coiled Altar
Similar to Season 1, your number one priority is to acquire the 4-piece bonus through any means to unlock Catalyst Unbound for Season 2.
FAQAre There Any High Priority Great Vault or Voidcore Items to Look Out For?
Aman'muso, Warlord's Vengeance - Coiled Altar
Zul'jin's Guillotine Technique - Coiled Altar
Voracious Heart of Ula'tek - Ula'tek
Aqirbane Reliquary - Ula'tek
Gaze of the Coiled Watcher - Ula'tek
These are strong enough that if you aren't killing any Mythic bosses for higher vault rewards, you always have the option to pick up a Voidcore from your Great Vault if none of these show up.
Overall Best in Slot
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The gearset below are the best items available from Mythic+, using gear only available from dungeons in the Season 2 pool, alongside your ideal Tier Set catalyst locations and Crafted items for Embellishments. Note that this is a list of the best items available from Mythic+ dungeons, not a strict list of what you should be using in Mythic+ content.
FAQWhich Items Do I Use in the Catalyst?
In Midnight Season 2, the Catalyst now retains the secondary stats and cantrips of any item you convert. Therefore, it doesn't matter which slots you use to activate your set bonus, and instead what matters is the items you input.
The best Dungeon only pieces to Catalyze in each slot are:
- Helm –
Hood of the Slithering Loa from Temple of Sethraliss - Shoulders –
Somber Spaulders from Voidscar Arena - Chest –
Vest of Reverent Adoration from King's Rest - Gloves –
Desiccator's Blessed Gloves from King's Rest - Legs –
Breeches of Deft Deals from Murder Row
Similar to Season 1, your number one priority is to acquire the 4-piece bonus through any means to unlock Catalyst Unbound for Season 2.
TipsWhich Dungeons Should I Farm?
Sapling of the Dawnroot - Blinding Vale
Vile Vial of Volatile Venom - Altar of Fangs
Vest of Reverent Adoration - King's Rest
Charged Sandstone Band - Temple of Sethraliss
Best Gear from Mythic+
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The gearset below is your raid Best-in-Slot list, using gear from only raid drops, as well as ideal Tier Set pieces (or items to use in the Catalyst) and crafted items to activate Embellishment effects. Note that this is a list of the best items available within the Raid, not a strict list of what you should be using inside the raid.
FAQWhich Items Do I Use in the Catalyst?
In Midnight Season 2, the Catalyst now retains the secondary stats and cantrips of any item you convert. Therefore, it doesn't matter which slots you use to activate your set bonus, and instead what matters is the items you input.
The best Raid only pieces to Catalyze in each slot are:
- Helm –
Gaze of the Coiled Watcher from Ula'tek - Shoulders –
Frothing Venom Spaulders from Vashnik - Chest –
Vestment of the Awakening from Nek'zali - Gloves –
Abyssal Doomhound's Studded Gauntlets from Entombed Sentinels - Legs –
Coiled Hex Legguards from Coiled Altar
Similar to Season 1, your number one priority is to acquire the 4-piece bonus through any means to unlock Catalyst Unbound for Season 2.
TipsWhat Are My Top Items To Chase?
Aman'muso, Warlord's Vengeance - Coiled Altar
Zul'jin's Guillotine Technique - Coiled Altar
Voracious Heart of Ula'tek - Ula'tek
Aqirbane Reliquary - Ula'tek
Gaze of the Coiled Watcher - Ula'tek
Best Gear from Raid
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Keep in mind that Catalyzed Items now retain the stats of the original item!

Trinket Recommendations for Havoc Demon Hunter
Havoc generally seeks to use one on-use trinket that aligns with
Metamorphosis
to enhance its burst windows, and then one strong passive trinket to go with it.
Both stat procs and damage effects are useful due to
Know Your Enemy, so
there's a good amount of flexibility on offer.
Aim to pick up one trinket from each of these categories as a pair:
You can click below to open a ranking chart for other trinkets, in case you've picked something else up and are looking to check how it stacks up.
Click for Havoc Season 2 Trinket Rankings
| Ranking | Trinket |
|---|---|
| S Tier |
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| A Tier |
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| B Tier |
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| C Tier |
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| D Tier |
|
Nebulous Voidcores (Bonus Rolls)
Patch 12.1 brings forward the new bonus roll system introduced in Season 1, providing a way to target big ticket items:
Nebulous Voidcores can be spent after completing endgame
dungeons or defeating raid bosses, granting you an item at random from its
respective loot table. Once an item has been received through Voidcore rolls,
it cannot appear again. In Season 2, One Voidcore is used to roll on
dungeon loot or individual raid bosses, granting loot equivalent to
the item level you'd receive from a weekly Great Vault reward.
These are only available through The Great Vault after the first week of the Season, rewarding one if you unlock three rewards. After 8 weeks, you will also be granted one additional Voidcore for free from Orin Straylight in Silvermoon, next to The Catalyst.
Recommended Nebulous Voidcore Usage for Havoc Demon Hunter
Which item you should target is strongly influenced by what pieces you already have access to, items available through the Great Vault, and what bosses you have currently killed. Due to their extremely limited availability early on in the season, taking one from The Vault should be treated as a consolation prize in the event that nothing better appeared.
When it comes to where you should use Voidcore rolls when you do pick one up however, the answer is quite simple:
FAQWhen Should I Consider Voidcores From The Great Vault?
As the Season progresses and Voidcores are more freely available, recommendations will change, but at the start the hardest thing is knowing when it's valuable to pick one up:
- If you have yet to unlock your 4-piece bonus, acquiring that takes priority.
- If a key chase item from Coiled Altar or Ula'tek is offered, pick that up.
- Look out for individual key items offered from early Mythic boss kills (such as a weapon from Nek'zali), as they're offered at 6/6 Myth, saving crests and saving the need to bonus roll them.
- If an ideal Catalyst piece is offered from Mythic+ that would otherwise
require rolling the entire table (such as
Vest of Reverent Adoration), bear in mind how many rolls it
would otherwise take to guarantee these.
In Havoc's case, the items available from the final two bosses are so strong that, outside of accessing your Tier bonus, it's worth bonus rolling even Heroic versions of the final two bosses to pick up their unique loot. This is especially true for Ula'tek, as it can avoid the bad items through changing over to Vengeance loot spec.
Best Crafted Items for Havoc Demon Hunter
Crafted gear provides one of the easiest ways to pick up high value items in a
season, allowing you to target key pieces to fill out your gearset. With the
release of Season 2, each craft requires two
Spark of Tides.
Unless secondary stats are already assigned by the item, you should use
a
Thalassian Missive of the Peerless for Critical Strike and Mastery on your
crafts.
- Craft a weapon first, as it has the biggest impact early. Warglaive is
best, as it allows you to switch specs. Attach
Hunter's Ritual Stone for your
first embellishment. - Craft an off-piece second - we recommend
Silvermoon Agent's Deflectors
in the Wrist slot. Attach
Arcanoweave Lining as your second embellishment. - Following this, craft items based on gaps in your current gear.
FAQCan I Optimize my Crafts at the Start of the Season?
Due to many of the big ticket items in Season 2 being unique cantrip effects that lock out slots, committing crafts to these places is a lot less flexible than in Season 1. While you still want to maximize the item level of crafts, you don't want to be stuck with something that blocks you from switching to these items should you get one.
That said, there's virtually no situation where a weapon isn't the best
craft, since
Spellbreaker's Warglaive
not only provides a lot of power right out of the gate, but transitions to your best
off-hand once you pick up the cantrip weapon,
Aman'muso, Warlord's Vengeance.
FAQAre the New Embellishments in Season 2 Good?
Some of them. Following very late number tuning deep into the PTR, some new offerings saw massive reductions. While they were looking exceptionally strong, they're now a bit less appealing. The four new offerings are:
Hunter's Ritual Stone serves as a better
Darkmoon Sigil: Hunt,
making it the best weapon Embellishment.
Adorned Fang provides a stacking Haste proc. This is very
close in value to
Arcanoweave Lining, but enough behind that it can't
be justified considering the latter also buffs allies.
Polished Ammolite was hit by enormous nerfs, so while it
would normally fit Havoc perfectly, it's far too weak to be worth using.
Snakeskin Lining also saw huge reductions, so even with the bonus
damage Havoc deals with cantrip effects through
Know Your Enemy, it's
still not worth it.
Once you have your two main Embellishment crafts, you should have a solid setup. Your priority when optimizing your gear further should be toward crafting high item-level pieces to cover holes in your gear. Good candidates are jewellery pieces, as while there are unique strong options available, they're often extremely contested.
For more information about crafting gear you can visit our Professions page.
Crest Usage
Early into the season, or if you have just started playing an alt, you will
have limited access to upgrade crests such as
Myth Mistcrest. These can
be used to upgrade gear to higher item levels. Crests are
limited to 100 per week, and upgrades cost 20 crests regardless of the slot. Due
to that, you should prioritize your usage of these on items you don't plan on
replacing any time soon, or specific slots that offer larger stat benefits:
These are not the only items worth upgrading, of course. They simply offer
the highest DPS gain early into the tier when your upgrade currency is limited.
Note that exceptions are possible, such as special cantrip items that have
additional procs attached to them, such as
Aqirbane Reliquary.
Adding Sockets to Gear
While all Rings and Necklaces come with one socket by default, three additional
sockets can be acquired on the Helmet, Belt and Bracer slots as a bonus when they
drop. These can also be added manually using the
Miasmic Jewelbinder
consumable, which can be purchased using 6
Thalassian Token of Merit, the pity
currency from The Great Vault.
When using these, it's always best to put them on pieces you don't expect to ever replace. This means Mythic items, or any crafted pieces in these slots, since they can't have them added in any other way. Due to them being a very limited currency, if you have these, it's best to plan long term before wasting any.
Evaluating Upgrades
Throughout this page and elsewhere in our guide, we regularly refer to the importance of simming yourself on Raidbots. This is because every character is unique, and each gear piece you have access to can change what is best right now for you.
While we do offer recommendations for gear and trinkets, these are not complete replacements for simming yourself. The only way to truly optimize your character to that degree is by making use of the tools available!

Changelog
- 10 Aug. 2026: Updated for Patch 12.1.
- 15 Jun. 2026: Updated for Patch 12.0.7 with Sporefall gear.
- 20 Apr. 2026: Updated for Patch 12.0.5.
- 07 Apr. 2026: Added FAQ note regarding early crafts to optimize Dawncrest uses.
- 16 Mar. 2026: Updated with full Season 1 recommendations.
- 26 Feb. 2026: Updated for Midnight release and Pre-season.
- 10 Feb. 2026: Updated for Midnight Pre-Patch.
- 30 Nov. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.2.7.
- 05 Oct. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.2.5 with Cartel Chip recommendations.
- 28 Aug. 2025: Re-organized Trinket rankings based on current performance.
- 14 Aug. 2025: Updated for Season 3 release trinket hotfixes.
- 04 Aug. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.2.
- 24 Jun. 2025: Updated to account for D.I.S.C. hotfixes.
- 15 Jun. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.1.7, added D.I.S.C. belt and adjusted BiS list slightly for double Gallywix weapon.
- 12 May 2025: Confirmed Dinar recommendations for Turbo Boost release.
- 21 Apr. 2025: Reviewed for Patch 11.1.5 and added Cartel Chips section.
- 04 Mar. 2025: Adjusted some trinket rankings to account for recent changes.
- 24 Feb. 2025: Updated for Patch 11.1.0.
- 17 Dec. 2024: Updated to highlight strength of new ring following hotfixes.
- 15 Dec. 2024: Updated for Patch 11.0.7 for Cyrce's Circlet.
- 21 Oct. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 11.0.5, shifted recommended trinkets around.
- 09 Sep. 2024: Updated with Season 1 BiS lists.
- 21 Aug. 2024: Updated for The War Within.
- 23 Jul. 2024: Updated for The War Within Pre-Patch.
- 07 May 2024: Reviewed for 10.2.7.
- 22 Apr. 2024: Updated for Season 4.
- 21 Mar. 2024: Slight shuffle of trinket recommendations, but content remains the same for Patch 10.2.6.
- 15 Jan. 2024: Reviewed for Patch 10.2.5, highlighted Ashes of the Embersoul as an alternative.
- 27 Nov. 2023: Added Augury to ideal trinkets.
- 07 Nov. 2023: Updated to remove Sporecloak recommendation, switched to Blue Silk/Toxic Thorn options.
- 06 Nov. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.2.
- 04 Sep. 2023: Added BiS lists for Patch 10.1.7 and restructured page.
- 10 Jul. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1.5 to clean up Trinket and Crafting sections, and add Dawn of the Infinite items.
- 25 May 2023: Added Timewalking section, cleaned up original Trinket recommendations.
- 09 May 2023: Updated for Trinket changes.
- 01 May 2023: Updated for Patch 10.1 and Season 2 release with new gear recommendations.
- 24 Mar. 2023: Updated for Primordial Gemstones hotfixes.
- 22 Mar. 2023: Updated to account for Primordial Gemstone buffs.
- 20 Mar. 2023: Updated for Patch 10.0.7 with Annulet information.
- 24 Jan. 2023: Reviewed and updated for Patch 10.0.5.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated to Gear Page Format.
- 11 Dec. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Season 1.
- 28 Nov. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight launch.
- 24 Oct. 2022: Updated for Dragonflight Pre-Patch.

