Havoc Demon Hunter DPS Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Dragonflight 10.1

Welcome to the Rotation section of our Havoc Demon Hunter guide. If you came here without first checking over the Spell List/Glossary page, we recommend that you do so if you are new to the specialization. Understanding what your spells and abilities do will make it much easier to understand what is discussed on this page.

If you are looking for an introductory primer to get started and find the full breakdowns overwhelming, you can always start with our Easy Mode page to get yourself started with a close-to-optimal build and a more straightforward breakdown. While the recommendations on the page below are not strictly optimal for endgame, they provide an excellent springboard to get to grips with the core gameplay Havoc focuses on:

In addition to your rotation in general content, there is also a separate section of this guide devoted to how your playstyle may change in Mythic+ as situations are often less scripted and more hectic. Please take a look at the page below if you are looking for more tailored information for that content:

The content on this page is purely PvE-related. If you are looking for PvP Rotation Tips, please visit our PvP page below.

Havoc's single-target rotation in Dragonflight hinges strongly on two core loops:

• Fury generation and spending through tools such as Demon's Bite (or Demon Blades if taken), Immolation Aura and Felblade paired with expenditure on Chaos Strike.
• Managing Fury around rotational cooldowns that need to be used immediately such as Blade Dance and Eye Beam, and fitting those into cooldown windows.

Talents have a pick impact on how this plays out and dictate how many abilities you need to juggle that pull away from the core build-and-spend loop, so if you are new to Havoc, we recommend looking at the Spells page to get to grips with what is available. Due to the number of abilities that impact this, we have provided a rotation tool below that you can populate with talents taken to generate a bespoke rotation for your build:

Talent Selections
Blind Fury	Chaotic Transformation	Demon Blades
Elysian Decree	Essence Break	Felblade
First Blood	Furious Throws + Soulrend	Glaive Tempest
The Hunt	Tactical Retreat	Momentum
Serrated Glaive	Unbound Chaos	Sigil of Flame

1. Cast The Hunt.
2. Cast Elysian Decree.
3. Cast Metamorphosis on cooldown.
4. Cast Death Sweep on cooldown.
5. Cast Glaive Tempest on cooldown.
6. Cast Throw Glaive to apply the Serrated Glaive debuff before each Eye Beam.
7. Cast Eye Beam on cooldown.
8. Cast Eye Beam, try to pool some Fury beforehand.
9. Cast Vengeful Retreat to trigger Tactical Retreat.
10. Cast Essence Break following Eye Beam. Make sure Death Sweep is ready.
11. Cast Metamorphosis. Make sure Death Sweep and Eye Beam are both on cooldown.
12. Cast Blade Dance on cooldown.
13. Cast Annihilation with Essence Break active, or at 40 and above Fury.
14. Cast Annihilation with Essence Break active.
15. Cast Throw Glaive if at 2 charges.
16. Cast Annihilation at 40 or more Fury.
17. Cast Annihilation at 40 and above Fury.
18. Cast Immolation Aura on cooldown.
19. Cast Fel Rush with Unbound Chaos active.
20. Cast Throw Glaive.
21. Cast Chaos Strike at 40 or more Fury.
22. Cast Felblade at 80 or less Fury.
23. Cast Fel Rush to trigger Momentum.
24. Cast Sigil of Flame at 40 or less Fury.
25. Cast Demon's Bite.
26. Cast Fel Rush if nothing else is available.
27. Cast Throw Glaive if nothing else is available.

Bear in mind that no matter whether you take Demonic or not, you will still be casting Eye Beam in single-target situations. It remains a highly efficient Fury spender but beware of upcoming add spawns so as not to waste damage in AoE situations. Also, with Blind Fury taken ideally, you want to spend as it is coming off cooldown due to its generation, while without it, you do the reverse and pool some Fury slightly beforehand.

Essence Break should always be overlapped with your Demonic windows whenever possible, and you should also make sure to have Death Sweep ready to cast immediately after using it. Ideally, the execution of this combo should involve Eye Beam into Vengeful Retreat paired with a mid-air Essence Break as you pass over the targets and finish with a Death Sweep.

In 10.1, Serrated Glaive is used in single-target. While this is a debuff you can maintain at 100% uptime; you only really need to make sure to activate it just before Eye Beam, as this is when the majority of value is gained compared to the low damage Throw Glaive naturally does.

With regards to Fel Rush, it is a precious tool to generate damage in the empty global cooldowns created by Demon Blades, so long as you can remain within auto-attack range. This is especially true if using Isolated Prey in single-target situations, turning it into a strong Fury generation tool. Otherwise, using this is generally considered a slight loss, as it wastes partial global cooldowns that could be spent on generating or consuming Fury.

For AoE situations, because the overwhelming majority of Havoc's toolkit already comes with Cleave/AoE built into it and is cooldown based, the rotation remains extremely similar to the single-target one, the only thing that changes are the talents selected, so we recommend using the above tool in the single-target section for a general priority to work with. The one exception is Sigil of Flame raises to a higher priority above your Annihilation and should be kept on cooldown.

One important note is, especially if multiple targets are spawning in waves, making sure that you hold some of your AoE tools to hit the maximum number of targets possible (e.g., Eye Beam, Death Sweep and Glaive Tempest). This is preferable to using it as it comes off cooldown, so long as you do not lose an excessive amount of uses in doing so.

Playing the recommended AoE build with Furious Throws and Soulrend also places a higher emphasis on making sure you keep Throw Glaive on cooldown and spend as little time sitting at 2 charges as possible. This extends to single-target as well, thanks to Accelerating Blade, where it takes priority as your Fury spender so long as you are outside of an Essence Break window.

Talent Selections
Chaotic Transformation	Elysian Decree	Essence Break
Felblade	First Blood	Furious Throws + Soulrend
The Hunt	Initiative	Inner Demon
Momentum	Sigil of Flame	Serrated Glaive

1. Pre-cast Sigil of Flame 2 seconds before the pull.
2. Cast Fel Rush to trigger Momentum and engage the boss.
3. Cast Immolation Aura on pull.
4. Cast Felblade.
5. Cast Metamorphosis.
6. Cast Elysian Decree.
7. Cast The Hunt.
8. Cast Throw Glaive to apply the Serrated Glaive debuff.
9. Cast Throw Glaive.
10. Cast Eye Beam.
11. Cast Annihilation to trigger Inner Demon.
12. Cast Vengeful Retreat to trigger Initiative.
13. Cast Essence Break.
14. Cast Death Sweep.
15. Cast Metamorphosis to reset Eye Beam / Death Sweep cooldowns.
16. Cast Death Sweep.
17. Cast Annihilation to trigger Inner Demon.
18. Cast Eye Beam.
19. Continue with the normal rotaton.

The most warping effects on the initial rotation are Chaotic Transformation and Essence Break, which provide a small window to deal huge burst if cycled correctly. The goal is to set yourself up in Metamorphosis via Demonic, have Momentum and Initiative active, and enter an Essence Break window where you can Death Sweep, reset with Chaotic Transformation, and Death Sweep immediately after to fit two inside the overlapping buff windows.

A minor note as well is to squeeze in an extra Annihilation cast before beginning the above cycle if using Inner Demon to consume the proc, as the Metamorphosis cast will overwrite it. You also should aim to apply Serrated Glaive if taken before entering into the combo, as you will not have time to apply it after.

Season 2 introduces a Tier Set available from the new raid, Aberrus, the Shadowed Crucible. The bonuses granted by the Kinslayer set are:

• Demon Hunter Havoc 10.1 Class Set 2pc - Every 175 Fury you spend, gain Seething Fury, increasing your Agility by 8% for 6 seconds.
• Demon Hunter Havoc 10.1 Class Set 4pc - Each time you gain Seething Fury, gain 15 Fury and increase the damage of your next Eye Beam cast by 15%, stacking up to 5 times.

Much like the previous bonus, these are passive boosts that happen in the background that you do not need to pay much attention to. There is no reason to game either effect, and they will trigger through natural gameplay (and very frequently), boosting up your overall damage, and each Eye Beam cast through repeat triggers.

You should aim to get this bonus as soon as possible and swap to the 2-piece once you have it, even if you are using the previous tier set currently.

Season 1 introduced a Tier Set available from the Vault of the Incarnates raid that is still available in Season 2. The bonuses granted by the Skybound Avenger set are:

• Havoc Demon Hunter 2pc increases the Critical Strike chance of Chaos Strike and Blade Dance by 5%, and their critical damage by 10%.
• Havoc Demon Hunter 4pc grants Chaos Strike and Blade Dance a 20% chance to increase all damage you deal by 8% for 6 seconds. Critical Strikes double the chance for this to trigger.

Both of these bonuses are flat boosts to all damage and further incentivize using Critical Strike - a stat Havoc already wants to stack. There is no reason to play around with the 4-piece; it should trigger naturally via gameplay, so treat them as extra damage.

Metamorphosis is a 24-second duration buff on a 4-minute cooldown (which can be reduced to 3-minutes with Rush of Chaos), granting a flat 20% increase to Haste, and converting two of your primary abilities for the duration:

• Chaos Strike becomes Annihilation
• Blade Dance becomes Death Sweep

Each of these new abilities replace their respective spots on your action bars and deal significantly higher damage but behave the same and are affected by all equivalent passives. Pooling 100 Fury or above before entering Metamorphosis is extremely beneficial in allowing for a surge of Annihilation casts. Similarly, you should also drain excess Fury in the last 5 seconds of the buff before you lose the benefits.

Chaotic Transformation also causes the active cast to reset the cooldown on Death Sweep and Eye Beam. We play around with this, ensuring both abilities are on cooldown before casting it to gain an extra use of each.

See our addons and macros page for a Metamorphosis macro.

Havoc has a lot of talents that link up with each other in a powerful way, usually having one pick having a powerful interaction with another elsewhere on the tree. Examples of this are Felblade paired with Demon Blades; Initiative, Unbound Chaos, and Momentum together; or finally Furious Throws, Accelerating Blade, and Soulrend. These packages often complement each other and enable different ability uses when picked in tandem but are not strong enough to incentivize them. For more information on the specifics, please refer to our talent page.

First Blood increases the damage Blade Dance deals to your primary target by 75% and converts it to Chaos damage, allowing it to scale with Mastery. This significantly raises the priority of Blade Dance in all situations and makes it our high-priority rotational ability in single-target.

Furious Throws makes Throw Glaive throw 2 glaives but adds a fury cost of 25 to the ability. Causes Throw Glaive to become a potent spender.

Critical Chaos increases the chance for Chaos Strike to refund Fury based on your Critical Hit Chance. This is the first of several Critical Strike-related talents on the tree that significantly improve its scaling, which is why it is so desirable for Havoc.

Felblade provides an alternative active Fury generation tool that is proc related and fills in for Demon's Bite with Demon Blades to maintain a steady flow of extra Fury. This is especially good, as Demon Blades allows us to generate Fury off the GCD so we can use those on more damaging abilities.

Demonic is a damage boost window effect. It will naturally be triggered by your Eye Beam casts rotationally; making sure to fill as many Global Cooldowns during the 6 seconds as possible with Fury spenders is crucial. Priming Immolation Aura or Tactical Retreat if talented before you trigger the window is excellent for setting up some background generation to fuel your Annihilation casts. Try to minimize the number of committal generation tools such as Demon's Bite if possible, but in some cases, RNG stops that happening.

Unbound Chaos provides a strong single-target option and good, uncapped burst AoE assuming the encounter allows for its use. Due to the positional requirements, this is not always realistic, but it significantly increases your next Fel Rush cast following each Immolation Aura; and is a great pick when played correctly.

Initiative gives a good amount of Critical Strike when fighting new mobs or adds on a given fight. In cases where the movement allows, utilizing it with Vengeful Retreat provides a large boost of flat Critical Strike chance that can be overlapped with other cooldowns to create large damage windows.

Serrated Glaive causes Throw Glaive to amplify Eye Beam, Chaos Strike and Annihilation by 20%. While this boost is strong, unless you have a large number of supporting talents, this only needs to be applied before casting each Eye Beam. Do not invest too many globals on empty Throw Glaive casts just to apply the debuff.

Burning Wound will passively be applied to your target when talented into Demon Blades or can be applied via Throw Glaive. Either works, but you should always attempt to maintain your maximum of 3 DoTs as much as possible, especially when Immolation Aura is active.

Know Your Enemy increases your Critical Strike damage based on your Critical Strike chance, significantly improving its scaling and also allowing abilities that guarantee critical strikes (such as Eye Beam with Looks Can Kill) to still retain some boost from it.

Essence Break Does a heavy amount of Chaos damage to all enemies in a cone in front of you and applies a 4-second debuff increasing the damage of Chaos Strike and Blade Dance by 80%. This is very short but produces an intense burst window in all situations, which is almost always taken because of it. The cooldown also naturally aligns with Eye Beam to activate Demonic, you should ensure that when activating this, that Blade Dance is ready to use immediately.

Shattered Destiny extends your active Metamorphosis or Demonic window based on Fury spent, letting you have more time with your haste increase. This makes time with Metamorphosis active a race to spend to keep it active, and provides a large single-target increase due to how many extensions it provides.

Any Means Necessary converts all magic damage your abilities deal to Chaos damage makes your Mastery scale up their damage. This is mostly beneficial for AoE builds that have a more significant portion of its damage dealt by abilities that otherwise do not scale with Mastery and is an excellent option to provide a complimentary secondary stat alongside Critical Strike.

Soulrend, when taken with the other paired Throw Glaive talents, leaves a significant DoT tuning Throw Glaive into a rotational button on both Single Target and AoE scenarios. This is taken in AoE scenarios or situations where you have sustained cleave and caps off the Throw Glaive package nicely.

Momentum is a sometimes contentious, high-skill cap option, so if you are not comfortable with Havoc gameplay and raid mechanics in general, it can be very punishing. Knowing when to use your charges and when to spend them in conjunction with your burst windows, alongside avoiding mechanics, is a skill that needs practice. Below is an image showing optimal pathing around bosses, as maintaining uptime on a target is a significant DPS gain when triggering the effect:

With Momentum, three different abilities can activate it. These are usually taken in tandem with other movement talents ( Initiative and Tactical Retreat), and start the following effects when used:

• Fel Rush has two charges and a 10-second recharge that grants 5 seconds of 8% increased damage;
• The Hunt has a 90-second cooldown and grants 5 seconds of 8% increased damage;
• Vengeful Retreat has a 20-second cooldown, generates 80 Fury over 10 seconds and resets the ability to proc Initiative on any target you have previously activated it on, granting 12% Critical Strike the chance when you trigger it again. It also grants 5 seconds of 8% increased damage.

There are fundamental rules when using Momentum to bear in mind during combat. First, the spells that activate Momentum benefit from the buff they trigger. The effect does pandemic, so a portion of the remaining duration will be added to your current buff if you activate it a second time while active. You should ideally attempt to spread your windows out to ensure you are spending as few Global Cooldowns as possible on generation during the 5 seconds it is active. This means you should aim to enter a window with 80-120 Fury. You can also trigger passive Fury generation tools, such as Immolation Aura before triggering the damage window to sustain yourself during the 5 seconds.

One of the unique features of Havoc is that it can leverage its movement tools in Fel Rush and Vengeful Retreat to increase your damage output and Fury generation with certain talents. Managing this is important if these have been selected, and knowing whether it is safe to use them based on encounter types is especially important.

You can maneuver with Vengeful Retreat in two different ways. The first of these is a wall that you can consistently leap back into so that the displacement effect is muted and you remain in the melee range of your target. Alternatively, the more consistent option is rotating your character before casting 90 degrees so that you will move across the back of the target's hitbox and remain in range upon landing against any reasonably sized target. Do note that at all times, this spell will vault you backward, so you need to be aware of that when casting. It can also be animation canceled by immediately casting Metamorphosis after pressing to land back on the ground. Felblade can re-engage a target if you wait briefly until you are out of the melee range, which will charge you back.

This movement tactic is used frequently, especially when playing with Essence Break due to it being a point-blank AoE in front of you. This means while in the air from the initial Vengeful Retreat cast, you can cast this on desired targets while traveling and immediately enter into the combo cycle.

Fel Rush, in much the same way, requires a similar awareness of your environment to capitalize upon. Instead of focusing on moving backward, however, you need to face the direction you want to rush and then turn back to your target when you arrive.

Both of these spells incur a 1-second movement cooldown to prevent you from using these to animation cancel each other. As such, you must treat each cast individually and prepare for the movement to minimize the downsides.

With Havoc being so reliant on its resource, you need to be very aware of situations that encourage spending vs. the requirement to build. The general rule is you want to avoid going into the range of wasting Fury due to going over the cap with a generator cast. This means the spend breakpoint is 90 Fury without talents, due to Demon's Bite having a potential maximum of 30 per cast. With Demon Blades, this is more flexible, but given how fast multiple procs can happen, it is preferable to be spending more aggressively when not pooling for burst windows.

When playing Demonic Appetite or Fodder to the Flame, orbs will often spawn outside the close range of your character, meaning that you can hold them until you are at a point where Fury starvation sets in or you need the Demon Soul buff. This means you can have a good catch-up tool, assuming that there are no dangerous mechanics that would prevent you from grabbing the orbs at a later moment.

Remember to adjust your rotation based on refunds from your Chaos Strike casts that grant 20 Fury, as it may shift your upcoming priority when they happen. Similarly, when talented successful interrupts through Disrupt and dispels using Consume Magic that grant 30 and 20 Fury, respectively, can also provide extra resources that you may need to spend aggressively to make use of. For Consume Magic and Disrupt macros, please refer to our macro page.

When using Demon Blades, your Fury management is altered to account for the more sporadic nature of the generation. In single-target, more appropriate rotational rules to adjust the original priority look like this (keep in mind these are un-ordered notes and simply small things that can help to improve your gameplay):

• Cast Chaos Strike/ Annihilation as frequently as possible unless pooling for burst windows.
• Cast Felblade as frequently as possible, as long as you are below 80 Fury as your active generation tool.
• Wait and allow Demon Blades to generate Fury again to continue the cycle.
• Cast Throw Glaive and Fel Rush if out of range of any targets or in empty Globals.

It is optimal always to attempt to initiate a Momentum or Demonic window wherever possible before you begin dumping your Fury into Chaos Strike in this way.