Havoc Demon Hunter Midnight Playstyle and Rotation Guide

• Aldrachi Reaver
• Fel-Scarred

Core Gameplay

Chaos Strike and Blade Dance are your Fury spenders, and are the abilities you will be pressing the most. Chaos Strike has no cooldown, and does moderate single target damage. Blade Dance is a short cooldown AoE damage ability. Talenting First Blood makes Blade Dance do more damage to your primary target.

Fury generation for Havoc is mainly coming from Demon Blades, and picking up Soul Fragments from Demonic Appetite procs. Other than that, Felblade and Immolation Aura also generate Fury.

Throw Glaive isn’t used actively, even when playing builds that increase its damage. This is due to the talent Screaming Brutality spending Throw Glaive charges automatically.

Entering demon form, either through Demonic or by casting Metamorphosis, empowers Chaos Strike and Blade Dance, turning them into Annihilation and Death Sweep.

Havoc’s gameplay revolves heavily around demon form, and specifically the Demonic window, where Eye Beam puts you in demon form for 5 seconds. The goal is to maximize the damage done in demon form by stacking different damage increases, such as Initiative, Exergy / Inertia and Essence Break. Shattered Destiny increases the duration of demon form based on Fury spent, so being able to maintain uptime on your target during demon form is very important.

Both Hero trees can buff their Demonic window further, with Aldrachi Reaver having the option to increase Blade Dance damage by 20%, through Art Of The Glaive, and Fel-Scarred being able to talent into Student Of Suffering, providing a large increase in Mastery for a few seconds.

Generally, the gameplay loop is quite simple: Send everything on cooldown, while trying to line up damage buffs/increases at the same time. A lot of the time, the cooldowns of Eye Beam and Vengeful Retreat will sync naturally.

Vengeful Retreat only incurs a GCD for Felblade and Fel Rush, this means that you can pair abilities with it, such as cancelling its animation with Metamorphosis and essentially saving a GCD.

Vengeful Retreat triggers Initiative. It’s important to pair it with damage windows to buff them even further.

Inertia is one of the talents that Havoc plays around the most, and what should be buffed during it depends on how Havoc is tuned at any given time. Currently Inertia is mostly played for Fel-Scarred builds, and the priority is buffing Eye Beam and Demonsurge with Inertia. For Eye Beam windows this is going to look like this:

1. Vengeful Retreat
2. Felblade
3. Eye Beam
4. Death Sweep
5. Annihilation
6. Death Sweep

If talented into Essence Break, this sequence changes slightly:

1. Vengeful Retreat
2. Eye Beam
3. Felblade
4. Essence Break
5. Death Sweep
6. Annihilation
7. Death Sweep

Maximizing Uptime with Mover builds

One of the most difficult concepts when learning Havoc Demon Hunter is the art of movement. Mover builds are volatile, and with mechanics such as frontals and swirlies on the ground, the movement aspect of the spec is challenging for even the best players in the world.

With Fel Rush and Vengeful Retreat, it’s important to factor in where you will end up when casting them. You don’t want to dash out of range of your target, causing you damage loss by missing out on melee swings and wasted GCD’s, but you also don’t want to put yourself in awkward or dangerous positions while doing it.

Exergy vs. Inertia

For some builds, you might see Inertia sim slightly higher, but people still favor Exergy. This is simply due to Exergy being a maintenance buff, and requires little effort to maintain, while Inertia adds more complexity to the rotation.

Inertia provides an 18% damage increase for 5 seconds, making the short burst windows of Havoc even stronger, at the cost of mistakes being more punishing. If you are not able to consistently set up Demonic windows properly with Inertia, it will end up being a damage loss over an encounter, which is why many people will likely choose Exergy if it performs roughly the same as Inertia.

Defensives

Havoc Demon Hunter has solid defensive options. Although Netherwalk has been removed, receiving a 2nd Blur charge, and Desperate Instincts getting a rework makes the spec very powerful in the defensive department. Keep in mind that the dodge chance portion of Blur has been removed, but with Desperate Instincts, Blur provides 35% Damage Reduction for 10 seconds. Additionally, it provides a passive 10% Damage Reduction when below 35% Health.

On top of good defensive abilities, the spec has some of the best self-sustain in the game with Soul Rending and consuming Soul Fragments.

First In, Last Out provides a small decaying absorb shield after using Fel Rush, so this can also be used to survive big damage events.

Demon Muzzle provides great passive magic damage reduction in situations where interrupting casts with Disrupt is possible. This makes it an amazing defensive tool in Mythic+.

Demon Hunters have access to Darkness, which historically isn’t the best raid defensive cooldown due to the RNG nature of it. However, with Midnight introducing more rot damage encounters than what we’ve seen in recent times, Darkness becomes slightly stronger, as the likelihood of it proccing is higher when there’s more damage events happening.