Vengeance Demon Hunter Guide for The War Within

Welcome to our War Within expansion guide for Vengeance Demon Hunter. Ahead of launch, this page will contain everything you need to know about the Vengeance Demon Hunter spec in the forthcoming The War Within expansion, including changes, Hero Talent Trees, and some light predictions on the state of the spec going into the expansion.

This page is a constantly evolving work in progress, with regular changes expected as updates hit the War Within beta. This is not meant to be a launch guide for Vengeance Demon Hunter, but instead serves as a resource for you to keep up to date with how the spec is evolving on Beta, and what you can expect from its playstyle and feel on launch.

Vengeance Demon Hunter has received one minor and one major change to its baseline kit or Talents in The War Within thus far, the minor change is that Fiery Demise is being reduced to a 20%/40% Fire damage increase from the current 25%/50%. The bigger change is a nerf to Illuminated Sigils, which in its future form will only give a second charge of Sigil of Flame and reduce its cooldown by 5 seconds. The first change will only be a minor damage loss, the second change will have a more noticeable impact on the performance of Vengeance in Mythic+ where it will reduce our ability to crowd-control enemy casters noticeably. Despite the change Vengeance still remains very strong at controlling enemies, just not as strong as currently.

Beyond this, a new expansion usually brings a significantly lower amount of secondaries as well as new tier sets, both of which have potential to affect Vengeance Demon Hunter.

With The War Within overarching tank balancing will be introduced which includes many minor defensive tunings to Vengeance Baseline kit and talents. All of the changes are included in a list below, where the ones of more significance is the nerf to Void Reaver from 4% damage reduction to 3%, as well as some minor cooldown increases when playing Darkglare Boon and either Illuminated Sigils or Darkglare Boon. Overall these changes will have some minor impact on tankiness and reliance on healers, but the difference will not be monumental.

• Live by the Glaive restores 2% of your health instead of 4%.
• Thick Skin grants 60% increased Stamina instead of 65%.
• Demonic Wards reduce 2% less Physical and Magical damage.
• Soul Cleave healing reduced by 20%.
• Frailty heals you for 2% less of your damage done per stack.
• Void Reaver reduce damage by 3% per stack of Frailty instead of 4%.
• Illuminated Sigils now grants 12% Parry instead of 15%.
• Down in Flames now reduces the cooldown of Fiery Brand by 12 seconds instead of 15 seconds.
• Metamorphosis now only grants 40% increased maximum Health down from 50%.
• Darkglare Boon now reduces cooldown of Fel Devastation by 15-30% and restore 15-30 Fury, down from 20-40% and 20-40 Fury.

Besides all the changes to Vengeance Demon Hunter's core features, The War Within still has major implications for all specs thanks to the Hero Talent Tree system, new tier sets, and the natural reduction in secondary stats when entering a new expansion.

Vengeance Demon Hunter gets to choose between the Aldrachi Reaver and Fel-Scarred Hero Talent Trees. In sections below, we will talk more deeply about the implications of these Hero Talent Trees for the spec, and some thoughts on what looks strong and weak ahead of launch.

The Aldrachi Reaver Hero Tree Talents are primarily based on playing around Art of the Glaive, which empowers your Throw Glaive to a more powerful version called Reaver's Glaive that empowers our next cast of Shear/ Fracture and our next cast of Soul Cleave, granting strong empowerments to each cast.

Right now the hero talent tree is relatively slow-paced due to the requirement of consuming 40 Soul Fragments, or casting The Hunt, to activate Art of the Glaive making the proc fairly infrequent. With current tuning this means you can expect about 5-6 activations per 3-minute window. The passive talents of Aldrachi Reaver however offer some really strong options. Reaver's Mark lets you apply a 15%/30% damage taken debuff to priority targets. Incisive Blade grants a strong 30% damage buff to Soul Cleave, making it a very strong spender, opening up talent points by potentially letting us give up Spirit Bomb without it costing us much or any damage at all. Lastly Thrill of the Fight offers a second damage amplification window to stack with Reaver's Mark.

Power-wise, it seems that the intention is for Aldrachi Reaver to be a fairly strong Single-Target hero tree that focuses heavily on empowered damage windows where you want to focus a lot of burst damage into short windows. However the latest updates to the talent tree might make it strong enough in large target counts as well as very strong at priority and boss damage, making it a possible or even strong option in Mythic+.

Defensively, Aldrachi Reaver does not offer any massive value, however there are a few nodes that does bring passive Soul Generation for higher healing. The choice node Army Unto Oneself and Incorruptible Spirit also offers a somewhat active option for damage reduction when pressing Felblade, or a passive option to increase and smoothen out your healing from Soul Fragments.

The Fel-Scarred Hero Tree Talents center around the core Demon Hunter spell, Metamorphosis, as well as the talent Demonic which grants you Metamorphosis whenever you cast Fel Devastation. Whenever you enter Demon Form, either by means of Demonic or Metamorphosis several of your core abilities become empowered: Spirit Bomb and Soul Cleave from Demonic, and additionally Fel Devastation, Sigil of Flame, and Immolation Aura when you cast Metamorphosis. Empowered abilities deal increased damage, as well as triggering the core mechanic of Fel-Scarred, Demonsurge. Demonsurge buffs the first cast of any empowered spell to cause an explosion dealing damage to nearby enemies.

Gameplay-wise, Fel-Scarred is entirely passive outside of windows where you enter Metamorphosis, only increasing your baseline stats or passively buffing abilities with a small amount. However, the gameplay around Metamorphosis windows becomes significantly more involved, where you want to make sure to get as much value from your now empowered abilities. One potential issue with the Hero tree is Burning Blades, which buffs the damage output of Soul Cleave. This, compounded with our new Tier Set, might lead to very unintuitive rules for when it is better to use Spirit Bomb and when to use Soul Cleave.

Power-wise offensively, Fel-Scarred will likely scale very well with multiple targets as Demonsurge is currently uncapped damage. Violent Transformation resets the cooldown of Sigil of Flame and Fel Devastation, both of which also deal strong uncapped damage. A very large amount of your damage is going to center around Empowered windows, and being able to properly make use of these windows, as well as empowering them with talents such as Fiery Demise. Failing to leverage these windows properly will likely have severe consequences for your damage output.

Defensively, Fel-Scarred offers a few powerful nodes and is comparatively much more powerful defensively than Aldrachi Reaver. Below is a list of the current defensive nodes.

• Set Fire to the Pain offers a minor Stagger-like effect, similar to the core Brewmaster Monk mechanic, which delays a portion of damage taken, and deal it as fire over 6 seconds, and further reducing fire damage taken. This node is deceptively powerful, not only because it effectively acts as a 5% damage reduction to any major Tankbuster ability, but also because mechanics that deal Fire damage are relatively common, and would have been a 10% damage reduction to most mechanics in raids such as Amirdrassil in Dragonflight.
• Enduring Torment and Monster Rising are relatively weak, passive defensive talents. However, they are always present during the moments when you are at your weakest outside of Metamorphosis, making it a welcome addition.
• Violent Transformation resets the cooldown of Fel Devastation and Sigil of Flame whenever you cast Metamorphosis. This means you get 7 more seconds of Metamorphosis every 2 minutes, and the potential to be in Meta for up to 29 seconds in a row for extremely dangerous situations. The extra Sigil of Flame also translates to Parry chance from Illuminated Sigils, however since most of this value will coincide with when you are in Metamorphosis, it is likely not going to add a significant amount of defensive value. Currently on Beta it resets two stacks of Sigil of Flame, however this is in contrast to similar talents for other classes and even for Havoc Demon Hunters who only gain one charge of Immolation Aura from their version of Violent Transformation. It is likely that this is not intended, and it might change in future builds of Beta.

All in all the greater focus on damage in settings with more targets, as well as the defensive power offered will likely make Fel-Scarred into a potent Mythic+ choice, while likely remaining viable in raid content.

Below are the Tier Set Bonuses for Vengeance Demon Hunter in The War Within. After the wording of the bonus, you will find a brief note/commentary that is italicized.

• Demon Hunter Vengeance Season 1 2pc — Soul Cleave deals 15% more damage and has a 35% chance to generate a Lesser Soul Fragment. This will further incentivize spending Fury on Soul Cleave in situations with fewer targets and increase our single-target damage noticeably. The soul fragment is too random to be of impact rotationally, and is more of a very minor bonus.
• Demon Hunter Vengeance Season 1 4pc — Each Soul Fragment you consume increases the damage and healing of your next Fel Devastation by 2%, stacking up to 30%. This will be a passive damage bonus with more impact in situations with more targets, worth noting that the healing from Fel Devastation is extremely low, and always occur in situations when you are extremely tanky, so it could likely be omitted from the talent tree and nobody would ever notice.

Both set bonuses are completely passive, however the current values on the 2-piece bonus might have some unintended consequences on the rotation, this will be discussed a bit more in the following section.

The 2-piece bonus will compound with talents such as Focused Cleave and Hero Talents such as Burning Blades and Incisive Blade which might make Soul Cleave a better spender on higher target counts compared to Dragonflight, where it is currently only better than Spirit Bomb on pure single-target fights. This might have unintuitive consequences by complicating the rotation for Vengeance Demon Hunter. Due to these interactions it will be hard to say exactly how powerful the tier set will be, however some early estimates likely puts it in the range of 5-7% damage on single target, and a bit less in AoE. The souls will not impact you much, and on average you can likely expect somewhere between 6-8 Soul Fragments per minute in a Soul Cleave-centric build, and 3-4 in a Spirit Bomb-centric build.

The 4-piece bonus is almost always going to buff our Fel Devastation by 30%. This will likely land in the range of 2-4% damage for Aldrachi Reaver and 3-5% for Fel-Scarred. These numbers might be increased slightly if we lean into talents such as Stoke the Flames.

The total expected value of the Tier Set is around 7-12% damage depending on your Talents, Hero Talents, and the number of targets, as well as a handful more Soul Fragments from the 2-piece. Offensively, this is significantly ahead of a few other tier sets, and defensively it is likely on the same level as the 3% damage reduction most other tanks got.

Strengths

• Access to plenty of strong mitigation tools for Raids.
• Remains one of the best specs at Crowd-Controlling enemies in Mythic+ despite the nerf to Illuminated Sigils.
• Rotational mastery will lead to greater offensive and defensive gains than previously.
• The Hero Talent Trees allows for different build options in various forms of content.

Weaknesses

• Hero Talent trees are fairly specialized towards different kinds of content, so you might not have much of an option if you want to maximize your power.
• Weaker Crowd Controlling options compared to Dragonflight after the nerf to Illuminated Sigils
• Defensive management in Mythic+ will be significantly more involved due to significantly lower uptime on several defensives.
• Poor rotational skill will be punished much more than in previous expansions.
• Interactions with specific abilities reinforces certain talent choices, reducing the variety of viable talent choices related to your choice of Hero Talents.