WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Tank Guide

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Introduction

Vengeance Demon Hunter in 10.1 is in a unique position compared to some of the other tanks. Blizzard has stated that their goal with tier sets early on in the expansion is to not have an impact on capstone level talents, and this is absolutely not the case with Vengeance.

VDH was released in legion and was created with a massive class pruning in mind, and the amount of abilities and skills they have reflect this, they’ve always been known as a tank spec that has very few abilities.

We’ll talk about tier later on in the guide, just let it be known once you get the new tier, you’ll be locked into a specific build with little options to play around with talent points, this being said that’s not bad thing, the new tier with the Fiery Brand build creates a playstyle that’s incredibly tanky and an absolute damage dealing monster, combine that Vengeance’s unique utility, you have the makings of an underrated tank that is given the chance to really shine.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

1. High mobility.
2. Unique Powerful Utilities.
3. No button bloat.

Weaknesses

1. Active mitigation focuses too much on armor gain.
2. Can run out of defensives without proper planning.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Stats

Agility is your main stat for Vengeance Demon Hunter, it increases your dodge chance and the amount of armor you gain from Demon Spikes.

  • Haste: Haste reduces the cooldown of Immolation aura and the recharge times of Demon Spikes and Fracture, your active mitigation and to big Soul Fragment generators, add to the fact it shortens your GCD haste takes priority over most secondaries.
  • Critical Strike: The main use for Critical Strike for Vengeance is the rating itself(the stat not the percentage) is your parry rating, in mythic plus stacking high amounts of crits really does help your active mitigation.
  • Mastery: Grants more armor during Demon Spikes and with full uptime with the build below you’ll be gaining this benefit for most of combat’s duration, the issue lies with armor itself, it’s not the best form of mitigation in mythic plus but useful in raid.
  • Versatility: Increases damage and Healing Done while reducing incoming damage(50% value). For newer Demon Hunters I recommend trying to grab as much versatility as you can get. Once you gain proficiency with the spec, you can begin to shed some vers for Critical Strike.

We’re gaining a LOT more secondary stats much earlier on in the expansion and because of that we’re going to be able to play with our stats a little more. Haste is still king, Critical Strike for an M+ focused tank has become incredibly important, combining that amount of parry with the parry from Demon Spikes is going to allow you a lot of mitigated damage. Versatility for new players is still an important stat, but once you come closer to mastering the spec can be dropped off in favour of others.

Haste > Critical Strike =/> Versatility > Mastery

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Enchants, Gems & Consumables

Note: There are new embellishments added into 10.1 and there’s still some ongoing tuning, I’ll be updating this section of the guide to reflect the changes later on while suggesting what embellishments you could use. Embellishments can offer a minor increase in damage or defensiveness.

Gems:

  • Haste Gems are your best options in most cases mostly due to the rarity of Haste gains on gear. Versatility is also a great option to increase tankiness and critical strike to increase damage and parry rating.

Weapon:

  • The best weapon enchants are Sophic and Frozen Devotion. Sophic will provide you with an Agility proc with good uptime, good both defensively and offensively and Frozen is a straight damage proc.
  • For weapon consumables, the Howling Rune provides a sizable haste bonus for 2 hours, to be used in all content.

Phials:

  • Tepid Versatility: This phial is cheap and grats you a chunk of versatility.
  • Glacial Fury: Like Frozen Devotion, this is also a damage proc Phial that only has offensive benefits, but can do a lot of damage if you aren’t worried about yourself defensively.

Enchants:

  • Cloaks: Regenerative Leech is the better all around enchant.
  • Bracers: Leech or Avoidance are solid options here depending on content.
  • Rings: Devotion of Haste due to our love of haste
  • Boots: Watch’s Loam, a nice stamina increase
  • Pants: Frost Armor Kit or Fierce armor kit
  • Chest: Waking Stats is a simple primary stat buff.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Tier Sets

How 10.1 Tier sets change the playstyle

The new tier set plays heavily into Fiery Brand, which works nicely for Vengeance given the tier set interacts with every Fiery Brand talent on the tree, making it spreadable, extendable and increase your fire damage by 40%. Every 20 Soul Fragments spent(4-5 Spirit Bombs) you’ll apply Fiery Brand to your primary target, this is something you are absolutely going to be wanting to track and making moment to moment decisions on whether to continue tanking a pull or to kite, and whether you can apply a Fiery Brand by tier set will 100% be a factor. Due to the talent tree itself, and the talents required for this build, the Last Resort “tanky” build that provides 100% uptime on Demon Spikes can not be transferred over, meaning you’ll be relying a lot more on Calcified Spikes as active mitigation.

Vengeance will now be able to rely on Fiery Brand for both defense and offense in all scenarios which is incredibly fun and something I’ve personally been wanting all season, outside of Fiery Brand windows you will need to watch your pull more carefully and be ready to kite a little more outside of those windows.

2pc: Soul Fragments heal for 10% more and generating a soul fragment increases your fire damage by 2% for 6s, overlapping.

4pc: Fracture deals fire damage, and after consuming 20 soul fragments, your next cast of Fracture will apply Fiery Brand for 6s to its target.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Talents

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Talents
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Basics:

Sigils are a unique Demon Hunter mechanic, you place them on the ground and different effects can occur.

Vengeance is a builder spender tank spec, shatter souls(build) and spend them to gain big damage and healing bonuses.

Baseline abilities:

Infernal Strike: Leap to the targeted area dealing fire damage within 6 yards.

Metamorphosis: Transform into a demon, increasing your current and max hp by 50% and gain 200% armor. Fracture will also generate a 3rd Soul Fragment.

Throw Glaive: Throw a glaive, can ricochet, generates high threat.

Immolation Aura: Engulf yourself in flames, dealing then radiating fire damage over the duration.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Class Tree

  • Sigil of Flame (baseline): You begin with this point automatically, place the sigil on the ground, and talent choice depending, after 1s or 2s, it activates dealing fire damage to all enemies within the sigil for 6s. With the Frailty talent you’ll place one stack of Frailty on each enemy hit.
  • Blazing Path (default): Infernal Strike gains one additional charge. Your hops are incredibly important to you, Vengeance is a high mobility tank that needs to occasionally get out of dodge, Infernal Strike allows you to do this quickly and easily.
  • Vengeful Retreat (flex): Remove all snares and fault away while doing minor damage to enemies nearby. With Entangled now in the affix rotation this is going to be incredibly helpful, adding onto to this, When Fiery Brand windows end being able to buy yourself some time and distance is really good for the build.
  • Imprison (default): Imprison a beast, demon or humanoid for up to 1 minute. Used out of combat you can use this ability as a skip over an enemy without entering combat. You can also use this as a single target stop, it will break upon taking damage but it comes in handy when needing to stop a specific ability from going off.
  • Shattered Restoration (default): The healing of your soul fragments is increased by 10%. Soul healing is one of your main forms of healing mitigation you have. Increasing this is very important to staying alive.
  • Consume Magic (Flex): Purges are slightly rare in the game at the moment and as a tank, Vengeance is the only one to have one baseline(not being a racial). If you know there’s no purges in whatever run you’re in, you can opt out of it.
  • Improved Disrupt (flex): Increases the range of your interrupt by 10 yards. Not having to be in melee for your kick is just incredibly valuable.
  • Pursuit (default): Mastery increases your movement speed. Mainly taken for pathing but more zoomies is nice.
  • Aura of Pain (flex): Increases the critical strike chance of Immolation Aura by 6%. This has synergies with a talent choice in the Spec Tree.
  • Charred Warblades (flex): Your fire damage provides a small steady stream of healing. This is admittedly minimal but while you’re still learning the spec can come in handy to add some extra tankiness to your build.
  • Master of the Glaive (flex): Gives Throw Glaive a second charge and snares enemies for 50% movement speed for 6s. While not the best talent to spend, you need to choose something for pathing. It does help with kiting and threat and when you need to use ranged abilities, since we’re limited there.
  • Rush of Chaos (default): Reduces the cooldown of Meta by 60s. All around strong in all content.
  • Chaos Nova (default for m+): Finally having access to an AoE stun coming over from Havoc in Dragonflight. Does require minimal fury to use.
  • Unleashed Assault (flex): Reduces the Fury cost of Chaos Nova by 50% and its cooldown by 20%. This makes the ability much easier to use and use more often, if you’ve ever pugged an m+ dungeon, you know how you’d love to be able to use more stuns, in a coordinated group this can be opted out of, in pugs, probably mandatory.
  • Soul Rending (default): Increases Leech by 10% and while in Meta, gain an extra 10% leech.
  • Infernal Armor (default): Immolation Aura increases your armor by 30% and causes attackers to suffer fire damage.
  • Demonic (default): Fel Devastation grants you 6s of Meta after you finish its cast. Meta is your big defensive, since Fel Dev is on a variable cooldown due to other talent choices, this adds up to a lot of Meta uptime.
  • Illidari Knowledge (default): Reduces incoming magic damage by 6%.
  • Will of the Illidari (default): Increases maximum health by 6%.
  • Erratic Felheart (default): Reduces the Cooldown of Infernal Strikes by 20%.
  • Collective Anguish (default): When you cast Fel Devastation, an ally demon hunter comes in to Eye Beam on the area for 2s. Big damage.
  • Soul Sigils (default): Afflicting an enemy with a Sigil generates a soul fragment. Rotationally this build has 3 sigils, Flames and Silence, Elysian Decree. This over a run will generate a lot of Soul Fragments to use for damage and healing.
  • The Hunt (default): A 1s cast to charge at your target for a sizable chunk of damage, and applies a DoT on up to 5 enemies in your path. Best used on the furthest target from you to apply the dot properly to as many targets which can be tricky as a tank since most mobs like to be in your face.
  • Aldrachi Design (default): Increases parry by 3%
  • Extended Sigils (default): Increases the duration of sigils by 2s. This seems small but adds up nicely.
  • Quickened Sigils (default): Reduces activation time by 1s and reduces the cooldown by 20%. More sigil of Flames, Silence and Elysian Decrees. All around very strong.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Spec Tree

The Fiery Brand Build provides Vengeance windows where they are incredibly tanky and a monster of a DPS tank spec, this is going to be a really fun season for Vengeance.

  • Fel Devastation (baseline): A 2s channelled cast damaging all enemies in front of you, and heals you for quite a bit. This does root you but you can move your camera around to hit more spread out enemies. This is a big ability for Vengeance, big damage, big healing and with Demonic grants 6s of Meta after the channel ends.
  • Frailty (default): Sigil of Flames, Spirit Bomb and Soul Cleave applies Frailty(with talents selected), a debuff that allows you to heal 8% of all damage you deal while applied.
  • Fiery Brand (Default): One of your big defensives, apply a 40% damage done(to you) debuff onto a target while dealing a fire damage DoT.
  • Deflecting Spikes (default): Demon Spikes also increases your parry rating by 15%. This build offers full up time on Demon Spikes with aggressive play, which means you’ll have full combat uptime on this buff.
  • Perfectly Balanced Glaive (default): Reduces the cooldown of Throw Glaive by 6s, honestly, this is purely for pathing to get Fracture and Spirit Bomb.
  • Fracture (default): This is one of your main Soul Fragments(2 normally, 3 in Meta) and active fury generators(25).
  • Calcified Spikes (default): When Demon Spikes end, gain a degrading 12% damage reduction buff which fades by 1% per second. Basically, let demon spikes end, gain the buff and immediately cast Demon Spikes again gaining both active mitigations simultaneously.
  • Sigil of Silence (M+) vs Roaring Fire (flex): Given current pathing options, you’ll be opting for Sigil of Silence in all Mythic plus content due to the strength of the sigils combined with everything gained from synergizing talents. Roaring Fire is overall a weak option but if there’s absolutely nothing to silence(not m+ content), has more use for pathing.
  • Spirit Bomb (default): One of your main AoE abilities and your main Soul Fragment spender in any AoE pulls, applies Frailty to targets for 6s. Deals reduced damage beyond 8 targets. This ability deals really good damage and will equate to big heals. Given the further talents to increase its damage depending on you quickly you can spend Souls, this is a core ability.
  • Agonizing Flames (default): Immolation Aura increases your movement speed by 10% and its duration by 25s per point. This extra duration counts for a lot since we have so many synergies with Immolation Aura.
  • Extended Spikes (flex): For this build, the 2s extension is needed for full spikes uptime.
  • Fallout (default): Your initial burst of Immolation Aura has a chance to fragment souls from your target, more targets hit, more souls.
  • Volatile Flamebood (default): When Immolation Aura criticals you gain 5-10 fury passively(1s icd). While not incredibly strong if you are adept at fury management, while learning the spec you can quickly feel fury starved, this talent helps in that process.
  • Void Reaver (default): Frailty now also reduces the damage enemies affected deal to you by 4% and allows Soul Cleave to apply Frailty.
  • Soul Furnace (flex): Every 10 soul fragments you use, your next Soul Cleave or Spirit Bomb cast is increased by 40%. Try to use this on spirit bomb where you can, which will net more damage and more healing overall.
  • Pain Bringer (default): Compounding onto the small amount of damage reduction gains, consuming a soul fragment reduces damage taken by 2% per fragment for 6s and multiple stacks may overlap. Playing quickly aggressively you can gain a lot of tankiness from this talent.
  • Darkglare Boon (flex): As long as you fully finish your cast of Fel Devastation, gain a variable cooldown reduction on Fel Devastation and 20-40 Fury back. While the RnG nature of this talent can make planning out defensives a bit tricky, in the end more Fel Devs is more Fel Devs.
  • Volatile Flameblood (default): Immolation Aura generates fury when its critically strikes, with the amount of secondaries we now have, this is good resource generation.
  • Revel in Pain (flex): As with most of the talents in this build, this is affected by our tier bonuses, giving us a reliable, steady and frequent amount of absorbs given how many Fiery Brands we’re putting out.
  • Fiery Demise (flex): Fiery Brand increases Fire Damage you deal to the target by 40%. A lot of our abilities deal fire damage and Fracture will now deal fire damage to boot. Given the synergies for Fiery Brand, this is a no brainer pick for this season.
  • Burning Alive (default): Fiery Brand spreads to a nearby enemy target every 5.2s, this spreads our damage and tankiness naturally.
  • Charred Flesh (default): Immolation Aura Damage increases the duration of Fiery Brand by 0.5s.
  • Down in Flames (default): The CD of Fiery Brand is reduced by 15s and you gain a second charge. This makes the build, plain and simple. The importance of Fiery Brand play is can not be understated with this build.
  • Focused Cleave (default): Soul Cleave now deals 40% increased damage to your primary target. This is now mostly taken for pathing reason, although not without benefit, Soul Cleave dealing more damage is an all around solid option, we’re given up more defensive options, but that’s the downside to the talent trees.
  • Vulnerability (default): Frailty now increases all damage you deal by 4% to afflicted targets. Nice damage amp and since we heal by doing damage with Frailty, all around good buff.
  • Soulcrush (default): This allows Frailty to now overlap, this ability is insanely good. Gaining the benefits of multiple stacks of Frailty is huge for both damage and healing. It does create a very hectic playstyle of getting frailty stacks quickly because your most frail at the beginning of pulls. Absolute must take.
  • Elysian Decree (default) VS Fodder to the Flames (default): Statistically speaking, Fodder is the better play but can be annoying to play around hoping for random procs. Elysian Decree is a plannable damage sigil that with Soul Sigils will grant you a minimum 4 Soul Fragments(if only hitting one target). I prefer Elysian Decree due to Vengeance already not having enough buttons to press but pick whichever you like best.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Spec Tree Flex Points

  • Soul Carver (flex): Deals fire damage to a target, applies a 3s DoT as well. On use shatter 2 lesser Fragments and gain 1 additional soul fragment per second for 3s. On use Soul Shatters, where I wasn’t the biggest fan of this talent in mythic plus in Season 1, the tier set increases the value of this ability considerably. In this build code I opt to take this talent in all content.
  • Pain Bringer (default): Compounding onto the small amount of damage reduction gains, consuming a soul fragment reduces damage taken by 2% per fragment for 6s and multiple stacks may overlap. Playing quickly aggressively you can gain a lot of tankiness from this talent.
  • Stoke the Flames (flex): Increases the damage of Fel Devastation by 40%, more damage, more healing.

WoW Vengeance Demon Hunter Conclusion

The tree combined with the tier set offers a lot of defensive and offensive capabilities but does raise skill ceiling of the spec considerably this season.

We can no longer rely on Last Resort, which has always been an an easy go to for learning to spec which has always been punishing for beginners, the new build adds a new level of complexity that I’m personally looking forward to, but we need to admit learning the spec just got a touch more difficult.

In the end, Vengeance is in a really great spot coming in despite the issues with the talent tree itself, the tier band aids some of the glaring issues while bolstering a very aggressive playstyle. The term Glass Canon doesn’t quite apply here, since you’re dealing the majority of your damage in the windows where you’re at your most tanky, when it all falls off, it falls of hard, but the more aggressive you play, the tankier you become, the more damage you deal.