How To Improve As Havoc Demon Hunter — The War Within (11.2.7)

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, Sigil of Flame and Immolation Aura are all on cooldown, you need to be aware you're at risk of running dry.
• Keeping a Resource Buffer - certain abilities are cast on cooldown as soon as 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 it can be hard to recover. 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, and when it's time to think about using generation tools instead.

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

• Aldrachi Reaver generates significantly more Soul Fragments, meaning you occasionally have bursts of extra generation tied to these effects. 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 very 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, especially in Season 3, that make it important to develop an understanding of their resource cadence. 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 as often as possible. Due to the sheer 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 whenever it comes off cooldown, to make sure to keep it synced with Essence Break and Metamorphosis. Early in an encounter before Cycle of Hatred is stacked, there are some inevitable moments where it drifts, but it should naturally realign after your second burst window.
• 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, all with their own quirks and requirements. It's known in The War Within for its complex overlap sequences between its cooldowns, so you need to have an understanding of what each of them does to effectively layer them together.

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 respectively, both dealing significantly more damage. There's a few things to keep in mind:

• 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 to start strong, and spend aggressively right up until it fades.
• 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 as it begins to capitalize on that.
• For Fel-Scarred, these rules also extend to Immolation Aura and Sigil of Flame.

Due to there being a lot of individual differences between both Hero Trees and a significant number of talents that influence this, we recommend referring to our Rotation Page for more. This covers the nuance in how to sequence it alongside your other cooldowns.

Essence Break break is both the most potent burst window, and also the shortest. This needs to be layered over Metamorphosis, and aligns with Eye Beam - allowing you to use Demonic triggers to cover it. It generally follows a few sequencing principles:

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

Following this, things can diverge depending on whether you have Metamorphosis available or not. Chaotic Transformation influences this window significantly, so again, there's some rules to bear in mind when navigating this:

• Aldrachi Reaver will alter the sequence slightly, instead ordering things in the following:
  Eye Beam ➜ Essence Break ➜ Death Sweep ➜ Vengeful Retreat + Metamorphosis
  Death Sweep ➜ Annihilation until expiration
• Fel-Scarred in Season 3 completely alters these windows. Due to how powerful Burning Blades is, it instead wants to fill all Essence Break GCDs with Annihilation instead, opting to begin the window when all other setup is complete.

Due to the large number of variables and how important Essence Break use is currently, we strongly recommend referencing our Rotation Page if you want to fully understand its use cases.

Inertia is best deployed alongside your other strong cooldowns due to its short duration. You want to layer it with Eye Beam and Essence Break as much as possible, and it naturally aligns with these due to Vengeful Retreat's 20-second cooldown.

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