How To Improve As Havoc Demon Hunter — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Welcome to our How to Improve page! Here we go through some of the most common pitfalls new Havoc players make, and provide some actionable tips on how to avoid falling into the same trap yourself.

The most common mistake many new Havoc players (and most melee in general) make is fairly simple: not managing their rotation to avoid empty Global Cooldowns. It often comes down to not pressing buttons quickly enough, mixed in with putting yourself in a situation where you run out of resources. Havoc has a few things to bear in mind:

• Fury Cadence - since the bulk of your generation comes passively through Demon Blades auto-attacks, your active abilities are often used to bridge the gap when you run out. When Felblade and Immolation Aura are on cooldown, you need to be aware that you're at risk of running dry.
• Keeping a Resource Buffer - certain abilities are cast on cooldown the moment they're ready - in particular Blade Dance and Eye Beam. You always need to try to keep Fury available for these windows.

If you over-commit to Chaos Strike when you're put in these situations, it often cascades into these abilities being available, but unable to be cast. This then leads to bad sequencing that desyncs cooldowns, and can be hard to recover from. As you spend more time playing Havoc, you'll build an intuition on when you're in these states, and know when you have room to aggressively fill your GCDs with spenders, while also getting a feel for when it's time to shift to generation tools instead.

Alongside that, each Hero Tree has an impact on your Fury management (and, by extension, how aggressively you can spend your resources). These are differences depending on which you play:

• Aldrachi Reaver generates significantly more Soul Fragments, meaning you occasionally have bursts of extra generation tied to consuming them. Keep an eye out for surges of extra Fury, and adjust your rotation accordingly.
• Fel-Scarred generates significantly more Fury during Metamorphosis, and also has a higher Fury cap. You need to be spending aggressively while transformed, aiming to build up the Burning Blades DoT as high as you can. While not transformed, you maintain the higher Fury cap, so have more of a buffer to pool up with generation tools.

Both of these trees also have altered priorities, which makes it important to develop an understanding of each of their resource cadences. Generally, Aldrachi Reaver is more predictable in terms of what it needs to maintain Fury for, while Fel-Scarred is more erratic, demanding adjustments on the fly to your generation state to optimize Chaos Strike casts.

Regardless of the situation, Eye Beam is a core ability that's used on cooldown. Due to the amount of secondary effects attached to it (and the high damage it deals), making sure you understand its applications in both single-target and AoE is important:

• Single-Target - you should cast it immediately, making sure to cast Vengeful Retreat the global before. Aim to keep it synced with Essence Break and Metamorphosis. Early in an encounter (before Cycle of Hatred is fully stacked), there is some inevitable drift, but it should naturally realign with one or two brief delays.
• AoE - in AoE, you need to bear in mind that using Eye Beam on a single foe right before (meaning, it won't be available for) a wave of adds is a significant loss. You need to identify when there's room to squeeze a cast in versus when holding would result in hitting more targets.

We go into more detail on the sequencing surrounding your Eye Beam casts on our Rotation Page, as this can be influenced both by your chosen Hero Tree and the current target count.

Havoc has access to a variety of cooldowns, each with their own use cases and sequences. While its complex overlap combos are a little less rigid in Midnight, it's still good to understand where you can draw out extra value from these powerful abilities.

Metamorphosis is Havoc's primary cooldown, and while it can be accessed in short bursts through other means, the main method is through the 2-minute active use. This grants bonus Haste while active, and converts Chaos Strike and Blade Dance into Annihilation and Death Sweep. Additionally:

• While active, your Fury generation is significantly increased (even more so if you're playing Fel-Scarred). This means you want to enter with some resources available when it begins.
• With Chaotic Transformation, it also resets the cooldown of both Blade Dance and Eye Beam. That means you want to have both of these on cooldown before casting it.
• For Fel-Scarred, this also extends to Immolation Aura.

Due to there being a lot of individual differences between both Hero Trees, alongside a lot of different talents that involve this window, we recommend referring to our Rotation Page for more.

Essence Break is both very potent, and very short. This should be layered over Metamorphosis to make use of the bonus Haste, and should align with every other Eye Beam - allowing you to use Demonic:

• Vengeful Retreat is cast if playing Initiative / Tactical Retreat;
• Felblade is cast if playing Inertia;
• Eye Beam is cast, triggering your Demonic Window;
• Essence Break window begins;
• Death Sweep is cast.

Following this, every global should ideally be used on Annihilation until it expires. In AoE, with Chaotic Transformation you should ideally be using the reset to double Death Sweep.

Inertia is best deployed alongside your other strong cooldowns, as it's such a short duration. You want to activate it right before your Eye Beam cast as often as possible. It's activation method - Vengeful Retreat - should always sync up with these cooldowns, so just make sure you don't drift abilities away from each other.

With how varied modern World of Warcraft has become, it can be a daunting task to accurately assess whether an item or setup is worth it or not. The first place to start is Raidbots, which allows you to sim your own character to know a baseline. This will give you a number to strive for as you learn and improve, while also giving you extensive help when identifying upgrades, knowing what to farm for and much more.

By now, simming has become very easy to get started thanks to modern tools. There's no need to understand code or complex SimulationCraft APLs, nor does it require its own installation. All you will need is the in-game SimulationCraft AddOn, and this will give you the output to add to the Raidbots website.