Vengeance Demon Hunter Guide for The War Within - Dragonflight 10.2.7 (2024)

Last updated on Jun 15, 2024 at 16:15by Meyra54 comments

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

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

Vengeance Demon Hunter has received one minor and one major change toits 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 thecurrent 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 Flameand reduce its cooldown by 5 seconds. The first change will only be a minordamage loss, the second change will have a more noticeable impact on the performanceof Vengeance in Mythic+ where it will reduce our ability to crowd-controlenemy casters noticeably. Despite the change Vengeance still remains very strongat controlling enemies, just not as strong as currently.

Beyond this, a new expansionusually brings a significantly lower amount of secondaries as well as new tiersets, both of which have potential to affect Vengeance Demon Hunter.

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

Vengeance Demon Hunter gets to choose between the Aldrachi Reaverand Fel-Scarred Hero Talent Trees. In sections below, we will talk moredeeply about the implications of these Hero Talent Trees for the spec, and somethoughts 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 morepowerful 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 requirementof consuming 40 Soul Fragments, or casting The Hunt, to activate Art of the Glaivemaking the proc fairly infrequent. With current tuning this means you canexpect about 5-6 activations per 3-minute window. The passive talents ofAldrachi Reaver however offer some really strong options. Reaver's Marklets you apply a 15%/30% damage taken debuff to priority targets. Incisive Bladegrants a strong 30% damage buff to Soul Cleave, making it a very strongspender, opening up talent points by potentially letting us give up Spirit Bombwithout it costing us much or any damage at all. Lastly Thrill of the Fightoffers 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 fairlystrong Single-Target hero tree that focuses heavily on empowered damage windowswhere you want to focus a lot of burst damage into short windows. However thelatest updates to the talent tree might make it strong enough in large targetcounts as well as very strong at priority and boss damage, making it a possibleor even strong option in Mythic+.

Defensively, Aldrachi Reaver does not offer any massive value, however thereare a few nodes that does bring passive Soul Generation for higher healing. Thechoice node Army Unto Oneself and Incorruptible Spirit also offersa somewhat active option for damage reduction when pressing Felblade, or a passiveoption 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 Demonicwhich 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, andadditionally Fel Devastation, Sigil of Flame, and Immolation Aurawhen you cast Metamorphosis.Empowered abilities deal increased damage, as well as triggering the core mechanicof Fel-Scarred, Demonsurge. Demonsurgebuffs the first cast of any empowered spell to cause an explosion dealingdamage to nearby enemies.

Gameplay-wise, Fel-Scarred is entirely passive outside of windows where youenter Metamorphosis, only increasing your baseline stats orpassively 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 empoweredabilities. One potential issue with the Hero tree is Burning Blades,which buffs the damage output of Soul Cleave. This, compounded with ournew 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 multipletargets as Demonsurge is currently uncapped damage. Violent Transformationresets the cooldown of Sigil of Flame and Fel Devastation, bothof which also deal strong uncapped damage. A very large amount of your damageis going to center around Empowered windows, and being able to properly makeuse of these windows, as well as empowering them with talents such as Fiery Demise. Failing to leverage these windows properly will likelyhave severe consequences for your damage output.

Defensively, Fel-Scarred offers a few powerful nodes and is comparativelymuch more powerful defensively than Aldrachi Reaver. Below is a list of thecurrent defensive nodes.

• Set Fire to the Pain offers a minor Stagger-like effect, similar to the core Brewmaster Monkmechanic, which delays a portion of damage taken, and deal it as fire over 6seconds, and further reducing fire damage taken. This node is deceptivelypowerful, not only because it effectively acts as a 5% damage reduction to anymajor Tankbuster ability, but also because mechanics that deal Fire damage arerelatively common, and would have been a 10% damage reduction to most mechanicsin raids such as Amirdrassil in Dragonflight.
• Enduring Torment and Monster Rising are relatively weak, passivedefensive talents. However, they are always present during the moments when youare at your weakest outside of Metamorphosis, making it awelcome addition.
• Violent Transformation resets the cooldown of Fel Devastation and Sigil of Flame whenever you cast Metamorphosis. Thismeans 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 extremelydangerous situations. The extra Sigil of Flame also translates to Parrychance from Illuminated Sigils, however since most of this value willcoincide with when you are in Metamorphosis, it is likely notgoing to add a significant amount of defensive value.Currently on Beta it resets two stacks of Sigil of Flame, however this isin contrast to similar talents for other classes and even for Havoc DemonHunters who only gain one charge of Immolation Aura from their version of Violent Transformation. It is likely that this is not intended, and it mightchange 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 apotent Mythic+ choice, while likely remaining viable in raid content.

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

• Demon Hunter Vengeance 11.0 Class Set 2pc — Soul Cleave deals 15%more damage and has a 35% chance to generate a Lesser Soul Fragment. Thiswill further incentivize spending Fury on Soul Cleave in situationswith fewer targets and increase our single-target damage noticeably. The soul fragment istoo random to be of impact rotationally, and is more of a very minor bonus.
• Demon Hunter Vengeance 11.0 Class Set 4pc — Each Soul Fragment you consumeincreases 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 insituations with more targets, worth noting that the healing from Fel Devastationis 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 the2-piece bonus might have some unintended consequences on the rotation, this willbe discussed a bit more in the following section.

The 2-piece bonus will compound with talents such as Focused Cleaveand Hero Talents such as Burning Blades and Incisive Blade which might make Soul Cleave a better spender on higher target counts compared toDragonflight, where it is currently only better than Spirit Bomb on puresingle-target fights. This might have unintuitive consequences by complicatingthe rotation for Vengeance Demon Hunter. Due to these interactions itwill be hard to say exactly how powerful the tier set will be, however someearly 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 youcan 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 Devastationby 30%. This will likely land in the range of 2-4% damage for Aldrachi Reaverand 3-5% for Fel-Scarred. These numbers might be increased slightly if we lean intotalents such as Stoke the Flames.

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