Vengeance Demon Hunter Tank Guide — 12.0.5

Midnight Season 1 has released, and with it came a lot of new content. It brought with it three new Raids, alongside heralding the start of Season 1 for both Mythic+ and PvP. With all the new things available, we've provided some dedicated hubs covering everything available!

Vengeance is receiving some minor buffs in Patch 12.0.5, as well as an extremely minor nerf to Annihilator, which is very unlikely to change anything in regards to choices we make. The buffs target Fracture and our Apex talent Untethered Rage. Overall the buffs will make our self-healing slightly smoother, increase our Metamorphosis uptime slightly, and increase our damage a little bit.

• Fracture base cooldown lowered by 0.5 seconds.
• Untethered Rage now gives 12 seconds of Metamorphosis.
• Celestial Echoes now only increases the Fury generated by Fracture by 3, down from 5. Further only increases Fracture damage by 25%, down from 30%.
• Feast of Souls now heals you for the full amount immediately.

In addition to this, a variety of open world content releases worth checking out!

• The Voidforge Unlocks!
  The Voidforge is Midnight's take on Bonus Rolls and Turbo Boost, allowing you to target specific big ticket items through a new bonus roll system. You can also further empower trinkets and weapons, and we have recommendations on our Gear page.
• Void Assaults are Unleashed
  Eversong Woods and Zul'Aman are under siege from the forces of the Void. Thwarting their attacks provide a new way to acquire gear all the way up to Hero level, and you can check out more on our Void Assault hub.
• Disrupt Ritual Sites
  Sharing a similar reward structure to Void Assaults, Ritual Sites are instanced content similar to Delves. You can find out all about them on our Ritual Sites page.

Click for Previous Season 1 Hotfixes

On April 7th Vengeance received some minor tuning to specifically target our single target damage. These changes amount to somewhere 2-4% damage against a single target and quickly falls off as more targets are added. The size of the buff depends on if Soul Carver is talented.

Show April 7th Class TuningHide April 7th Class Tuning

• Melee Auto-attack damage increased by 40%
• Focused Cleave now increases Soul Cleave damage against our primary target by 60%, up from 50%.
• Soul Carver damage increased by 50%

Vengeance Demon Hunter received some general tuning on March 17th, as well as buffs targeted at increasing the damage performance of the Aldrachi Reaver Hero Talents. The following list mentions all the tuning that was done. With these changes Aldrachi Reaver is closer in performance to Annihilator against low target counts, but it still falls noticeably behind when you go beyond 2-3 targets.

Show March 17th Class TuningHide March 17th Class Tuning

• All ability damage increased by 10%
• Immolation Aura damage increased by an additional 10%
• Wounded Quarry now deals 20% of Physical damage to your marked target.
• Reaver's Glaive damage increased by an additional 8%
• Fury of the Aldrachi damage increased by an additional 8%
• Thrill of the Fight now grants 8% Haste, up from 6%.

Blizzard has also mentioned in a post that there might be further tuning on the release of Mythic difficulty in the week of March 24th.

Midnight Class Tuning

When it comes to tuning adjustments, our next planned pass is expected to arrive with the Midnight Season 1 launch on March 17. Our next pass will follow immediately afterwards utilizing data gathered during the week Heroic difficulties are available; these changes will go live with the launch of Mythic raid difficulty and Mythic+ on March 24.

Beyond these dates, we will look to perform more tuning passes based on data gathered during the starting weeks of Mythic difficulty for Season 1 and the March on Quel’Danas available the week of March 31.For these two passes we err on the side of caution with the amount of tuning we do until their respective Mythic end-bosses die to avoid being overly disruptive to progression. After these key dates we will have several check-in passes planned roughly a month apart. Once players obtain higher item level and better optimized gear sets, the throughput of several specs will shift up or down relative to others and we feel it’s important to be diligent in looking at the current state of class balance as time goes on.

The Midnight expansion has brought a long list of changes to Vengeance Demon Hunter spells and talents including an entirely new Hero Talent tree. Below you can see breakdown of changes which have a large impact on the specialization but excludes changes that are just numerical tuning of existing effects.

There have been several baseline updates to our Hero Talents.

• Sigil of Spite now activates Art of the Glaive instead of The Hunt, which is no longer available forVengeance Demon Hunter.
• New Talent: Broken Spirit - Sigil of Spite spawns an additional Soul Fragment, and casting Soul Cleave has a chance to spawn a Soul Fragment.
• New Talent: Keen Edge - All Physical damage is increased and Reaver's Glaive damage is increased Further.
• New Talent: Bladecraft - Reaver's Mark to stack up to 3 times, and finishing your Reaver's Glaive combo with Fracture puts 3 stacks of Reaver's Mark, and finishing the combo with Soul Cleave grants 12 slashes instead of 6 from Fury of the Aldrachi.
• Thrill of the Fight now increases Reaver's Glaive damage by 30% and grants 6% Haste for 30 seconds. Does not stack.

Annihilator replaces Fel-Scarred as our second Hero Talent option. It plays around Voidfall, a buff we build up with Fracture and releases with our spenders to deal massive damage to enemies and reduce the cooldown of Metamorphosis through World Killer.

Most of the remaining Hero Talents can be broken into a couple categories such as; buffs to abilities like Fracture, stat buffs linked to our Voidfall stacks, buffs and effects tied to Metamorphosis, and simple buffs to Voidfall damage.

There have also been changes to both active and passive parts of our defensive toolkit.

• Fiery Brand now applies a buff to us which reduces all damage taken by 40%, instead of being reliant on the DoT effect to reduce enemy damage done.
• Passive talents Painbringer and Frailty no longer have the option to stack, instead the baseline values are stronger to give more upfront defensive value without being reliant on ramping.
• Demon Spikes now has the Parry built into the base spell, a longer duration and only a single baseline charge with the second locked in the Class Talent Tree. Feed the Demon is buffed and more easily available and functionally guarantees full uptime.
• Demonic has been removed for Vengeance, making Fel Devastation more of a damage ability.
• Soul Barrier have been reworked to a passive talent which gives a shield based on Soul Fragments consumed by Spirit Bomb.

Our offensive toolkit has also seen some changes.

• Spirit Bomb is now on a hasted 25-second cooldown, and deals flat damage which increases based on the amount of Soul Fragments consumed by it.
• Soul Cleave is now uncapped and hits more than 5 enemies, damage is also increased based on the amount of Soul Fragments consumed.
• Vengeful Beast increases the duration of Metamorphosis and increases the damage of some of our core rotational abilities while it is active.

There have been some changes to some of our Utility Spells.

• Sigil of Chains now replaces Sigil of Misery instead of being a separate spell.
• Focused Ire brings a longer stun to our main target.
• Burn It Out and Soul Cleanse offers ways to dispel ourselves from Diseases and Curses respectively.
• Wings of Wrath increases our Glide speed when talented, which could potentially enable us to do certain skips or reach places we would not be able to without it.

The Midnight Expansion adds a new feature called Apex Talents, located at the bottom of the Vengeance Talent tree, which unlocks gradually as you level to level 90. You can invest up to 4 points into these talents to get the full benefit, and while they are optional their tuning and power make them very desirable for Vengeance Demon Hunter and are likely to be recommended in all content.

For Vengeance Demon Hunter the talents effectively do two things. The first and last points give your spenders Soul Cleave and Spirit Bomb an increasing chance per Soul Fragment consumed to give you an extra, shorter duration, cast of your main cooldown Metamorphosis, which is both a strong offensive and defensive effect. Meanwhile the second and third points are passive in nature and increases the damage of Soul Cleave and Spirit Bomb, as well as allowing both to consume one additional Soul Fragment, which further increases your chance to activate the first effect.

This all leads to a fairly enjoyable rotation with somewhat predictable bursts of power when you spend Soul Fragments, and the increased soul consumption for each spender works well with the increased amount of Soul Fragments we can have active, leading Spirit Bomb to be able to consume all 6, and Soul Cleave half of the full amount at 3.