Vengeance Demon Hunter Tank Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — Shadowlands 9.2
On this page, you will learn how to optimize the rotation of your Vengeance Demon Hunter, depending on the type of damage you will be tanking. We also have advanced sections about cooldowns, procs, etc. in order to maximize your survivability and DPS. All our content is updated for World of Warcraft — Shadowlands 9.2.
Rotation for Vengeance Demon Hunters
The rotation for Vengeance Demon Hunters is based on the following priority, and it is very straightforward, but keep in mind that this does not account for your active mitigation, which we discuss below.
For beginner players who want an easier guide to get started, please visit the Easy Mode page linked below.
The basic principles are to use up the Fury you generate through various abilities, so that you do not cap and waste it, while managing Soul Fragments.
Fel Devastation on pull.
Spirit Bomb if 4 or more Souls are active.
Fracture if you will not cap on Fury/Souls (also make sure not to cap on charges) and you have
Fracture talented. Use
Shear if Fracture is not talented.
Immolation Aura if you will not cap on Fury/Souls.
Soul Cleave 1-2 times after
Spirit Bomb or when you need to dump Fury while not taking
Spirit Bomb.
- If not Kyrian Covenant and not using
Razelikh's Defilement, use
Sigil of Flame. If you are Kyrian and you are using
Razelikh's Defilement legendary power, do not ever use Sigil of Flame
Shear as a filler/if you will not cap on Fury/Souls and you do not have
Fracture talented.
Throw Glaive as a filler.
In addition to these abilities, you should also make use of
Infernal Strike (which is off the global cooldown) to deal
additional damage. We recommend always keeping at least 1 charge in reserve,
however, unless the fight requires no movement whatsoever, in which case you
can use up both charges.
Keep in mind that Fiery Brand is, above all, a defensive cooldown
and it should not be used offensively unless you can afford to do so.
Active Mitigation and Defensive Abilities
As a Vengeance Demon Hunter, you have one active mitigation ability,
Demon Spikes, and 2 other defensive abilities,
Soul Cleave and
Fiery Brand. We will look at them very
briefly here before going into more detail later on in the guide.
Demon Spikes should be used frequently to avoid big Physical damage, even simply against auto-attacks. Always keep at least one of its charges rolling.
Soul Cleave should be used whenever you require additional healing, to dump Fury, or to consume Soul Fragments.
Fiery Brand should be placed on the target when you anticipate that they will deal high damage to you, or when you simply want to reduce the damage you take (whether Physical or Magic).
Defensive Cooldowns for Vengeance Demon Hunter
As a Vengeance Demon Hunter, you have one defensive cooldown.
Metamorphosis increases your current and maximum health
by 50%, and your Armor by 200% for 15 seconds. It also enhances your
Shear and
Fracture to generate 1 extra soul and
10 extra Fury. It has a 3-minute cooldown and no cost.
Metamorphosis works both pro-actively (to increase your health in
preparation for damage) and re-actively, as an emergency cooldown to heal you
up when you drop low on health. The extra Fury that Metamorphosis generates is
also a nice bonus, which you can use on Soul Cleave for more
healing.
Taunting
Torment is your only taunting ability. It only works on a single
target and has an 8-second cooldown. It forces the target to attack you for 3
seconds, and also increases the threat you generate against that target for
the same duration.
Optional Read: Mastering Your Vengeance Demon Hunter
The above rotations and ability usage will allow you to perform very well as a Vengeance Demon Hunter. However, there are several concepts that deserve further explanation.
Maximizing Defense
The guide as a whole provides the keys to a mixed style of both offensive and defensive gain. This section is if you want to forego any offense for defense.
There are 2 main things that can be changed to maximize defense. We explain these strategies below.
Feed the Demon
The first involves taking Feed the Demon. This increases your
active mitigation uptime, while decreasing your "burst healing" (that you would
gain through
Fracture 2 Souls at a time).
It is overall smoother, though how much smoother is heavily fight-dependent.
This style is heavily reliant on Soul consumption and Haste. It will scale very
well with Haste as it double dips via lower global cooldown and
Demon Spikes cooldown reduction. So, this may not be heavily
relevant at the beginning of the expansion, but may be later on, after more
gear is acquired.
An optional thing you can do is to spam Shear. If you do this,
you will reduce your DPS and threat generation by a large amount, but will
have the highest possible survival output, especially if stacking
Soulmonger. This allows you to generate maximum souls for maximum
Demon Spikes uptime and maximal healing from souls. This is not
recommended for general use, and only when you do not need to worry about
DPS or aggro. For instance when off-tanking a boss.
Demonic
Demonic replaced Gluttony in Shadowlands. Demonic
will trigger Metamorphosis for 6 seconds after casting Fel Devastation. Fel
Devastation should be used on cooldown, unless there is something requiring
Metamorphosis to survive in under a minute.
Fury
Vengeance Demon Hunters use a resource called Fury. It is very similar in functionality to Warriors' and Guardian Druids' Rage. For you to properly master your Demon Hunter, you must understand how Fury works.
The Fury bar has a maximum capacity of 100, and is empty by default. Fury decays at a rate of 1 per second when out of combat. In combat, Fury does not decay. Fury comes from a variety of sources, as follows.
Immolation Aura generates 20 Fury over its 6-second duration.
Shear generates 10 Fury per cast.
Metamorphosis generates 7 Fury every second for its 15-second duration for a total of 105 Fury.
- Successfully interrupting a spell with
Disrupt generates 30 Fury.
- Purging a target with
Consume Magic provides 20 Fury.
Mastery: Fel Blood
Mastery: Fel Blood increase the Physical damage reduction provided
by
Demon Spikes and also increases your attack power. The actual
increase amounts depend on how much Mastery you have.
Soul Fragments
Soul Fragments are a unique Vengeance Demon Hunter mechanic. The baseline
ability comes from the Shattered Souls passive.
When you kill a target, there is a chance that a Soul Fragment will be created. This is an orb that is placed on the ground at a nearby location, which persists for up to 20 seconds. If you walk over it, you will consume the Soul Fragment, and be healed for a certain amount (348.075%% of your attack power in health). Only you can see and interact with your Soul Fragments.
Moreover, if a Soul Fragment comes from a Demon target, consuming it will also increase your damage done by 20% for 15 seconds.
In addition to these Soul Fragments, there are also Lesser Soul
Fragments. These have a chance to be created when you damage targets with
Shear, or with
Immolation Aura (provided that
you have the
Fallout talent), and using the
Fracture
talent also generates 2 Lesser Soul Fragments each time it is used. They work
in exactly the same way, but they heal for 6% of damage taken in the last 5
seconds, or a minimum of 1% of your Maximum Health.
It is worth noting that each Soul Fragment or Lesser Soul Fragment you
generate if you already have 5 active will be instantly consumed. Moreover,
Spirit Bomb will consume all Soul Fragments within 25 yards.
One final mention worth making is that your Soul Cleave ability
will instantly consume 2 Soul Fragments (including Lesser ones) in a 25-yard
radius. This is significant because,
given the frequency with which you use Soul Cleave, walking around to
manually collect Soul Fragments is simply not necessary. Note that any Soul
Fragments consumed by Soul Cleave (as well as by your
Soul Barrier
talent) will still heal you.
Fury Management
In general, Fury management is fairly simple. You should always avoid
reaching maximum Fury (try not to exceed 80) so as not to have any additional
Fury wasted, and you should also always keep some amount of Fury in reserve to
allow the use of Soul Cleave and
Spirit Bomb.
In-Depth Ability Usage
In this section, we will go into more detail about some of the abilities mentioned above, as well as cover a number of other useful Vengeance Demon Hunter abilities.
Infernal Strike
Infernal Strike is off the global cooldown, and deals damage on
impact. It should be used on cooldown as much as possible, though charges
should be saved if movement is required.
Flame Crash
Sigil of Flame stacks up to 3 times due to this ability. It is a dps
increase to overlap 2 Sigils as opposed to doing seperate casts. Wait a
second before applying the second debuff. This simply looks like:
Infernal Strike >
Sigil of Flame.
Throw Glaive
Throw Glaive is a ranged attack that deals a small
amount of damage and generates a high amount of threat on its target, and which
can bounce to up to 2 additional targets within 10 yards, damaging them as
well.
Normally, this ability is not worth using in your rotation, however when
you take the Fracture talent, you will use this ability as a
filler. The only reason to use Throw Glaive otherwise is to pick up new
targets (such as adds that have just spawned) from afar.
Consume Magic
Consume Magic simply purges one buff from an enemy and provides
you with 20 Fury if you successfully do so.
Disrupt
Disrupt is a simple ranged single target interrupt with a
15-second cooldown. Successfully interrupting a spell generates 30 Fury. It
should be used as often as possible to benefit from the Fury it grants.
Sigils
Sigils are abilities that you cast a targeted location on the ground, and which produce an effect at that location 2 seconds later.
Sigil of Flame deals Fire damage to all enemies in the Sigil, and
places a 6-second Fire damage DoT on them as well.
Sigil of Chains pulls all enemies to the center of the Sigil and
snares them, reducing their movement speed by 70% for 6 seconds. Note that
this is a talent.
Sigil of Misery causes all enemies in the Sigil to cower in fear,
being disoriented for up to 30 seconds. This acts as an interrupt against
non-boss targets, since moving around causes them to stop their cast.
Sigil of Silence silences all enemies in the Sigil for 6
seconds.
Advanced Active Mitigation Usage
Demon Spikes
Demon Spikes is off the global cooldown, and
increases your parry chance and reduces your Physical damage taken for 6
seconds. It has 2 charges and a 20-second recharge time (reduced by Haste).
You will normally want to have a minimum uptime of 30% (increased by Haste) on this ability, which means you always make sure one of its charges is on cooldown. Using Demon Spikes even when you are only taking melee attacks from a boss is perfectly acceptable.
The only reason you would ever want to have 2 charges available and not
use them is if you know you will need to chain 2 Demon Spikes casts
for a long period of continuous damage reduction in the near future.
Soul Cleave
Soul Cleave costs 30 Fury. It damages the enemies located in front
of you, heals you, and consumes 2 Soul Fragments in a
25-yard radius around you.
Fiery Brand
Fiery Brand is a defensive ability; in fact more of a cooldown,
since it has an uptime of 8 seconds per minute.
It deals damage to the target, and debuffs them for 8 seconds, causing them to deal 40% less damage to you.
Fiery Brand should practically
always be saved for damage reduction against the primary target. That said, you
should still look to maximise uptime, so do not hold on to it for too long.
Changelog
- 19 Feb. 2022: Page reviewed and approved for Patch 9.2.
- 01 Nov. 2021: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.1.5.
- 28 Jun. 2021: Reviewed and approved for Patch 9.1.
- 09 Mar. 2021: Reviewed for Patch 9.0.5.
- 24 Nov. 2020: Updated rotation and talent suggestion for Kyrian and using a Razelikh's Defilement legendary power.
- 12 Oct. 2020: Page updated for the Shadowlands pre-patch.
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This guide has been written by Excidias, Vengeance main since Beta of Legion. He raids in Poutine and you can watch his YouTube channel when it comes back in Shadowlands.
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