Havoc Demon Hunter DPS Guide — Battle for Azeroth (BfA) 8.3

Havoc in Battle for Azeroth has gone through somewhat of a maturing process, trying to focus more on the talent tree and allowing for more diverse options in gameplay approaches, alongside tightening up some of the more loose aspects of the original implementation. It still remains a predominantly builder spender style rotation and is largely Global Cooldown locked. The core hook is making the most of your Fury pool and reacting to unpredictable gains, ensuring you use high burst cooldowns and windows to push yourself even further. On top of that, it comes with a variety of mobility and defense tools, creating a versatile toolkit with some unique abilities that can be used in a variety of ways.

We are maintaining a list of changes for Demon Hunters for Shadowlands, the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, which you can access using the link below. We also have pages for the new Covenant abilities and Anima Powers.

While the changes for Havoc Demon Hunter do not go far beyond simple bug fixes, you can view the Patch 8.3 change list below.

In addition, we have:

• new gear from the Ny'alotha raid, which can drop corrupted (see our guide to Corrupted Items for more information);
• a new Legendary Cloak;
• 7 new Patch 8.3 Essences;
• changes to existing Essences (including a 3rd Minor slot);
• a new Azerite trait ( Heart of Darkness);
• and a new reusable augment rune ( Lightning-Forged Augment Rune).

• Powerful burst single target damage
• Extremely powerful cooldowns for high damage requirement moments
• Flexible mobility allowing for great positioning control in encounters
• Can switch targets without any downsides, and can pool resources for instant burst
• Powerful, versatile cooldowns for different situations
• Strong group utility, especially via Chaos Brand

• AoE is tied to cooldowns, which hurts sustained damage
• Some RNG is built into the resource system, which can on rare occasions lead to starvation at bad moments
• Outside of cooldown windows, damage can be lackluster
• Some talents have problems with certain encounter types, which can hinder options.

Havoc still likely remains a dominant melee specialization due to the power of the Chaos Brand debuff, and its versatile damage toolkit in most situations. Alongside this the utility tools such as Darkness and Netherwalk bolster its place in the raid, and it is unlikely that Havoc will not be present in most raid groups throughout Ny'alotha.