After leveling my Pally and my Hunter, I want to level my DH, but wonder how leveling with them is? I did get mine to 112, but they just seem so squishy and a bit of downtime due to no constantly available self heals.
And this was in the dps spec. I can level as a tank. I did so on my pally. Just not wanting to in dungeons
I did my initial leveling as a tank, but after getting half the talent tree unlocked, I switched back to DPS and I level insanely fast because I was getting quests done in record time. Havoc actually lasts pretty well with certain talents unlocked and selected. You can kite a bunch of trash mobs together and then blast them all at once with the eyebeams before mopping up any leftovers with Blade Dance.
Havoc becomes extra desirable once you have Demonic available at 110 and utilize the popular Demonic build. I blasted through Zandalar way faster than my balance druid did, including quests I missed on said druid.
Havoc DH is a glass cannon if you don’t know what you’re doing. Take full advantage of its mobility though and you can practically tank on it when questing. The build I’m using is the one icy-veins has. I chose Immolation Aura over Demon Blades, and Demonic over Momentum.
I enjoy leveling and questing so much on my DH, it’s always jarring when I switch back to my druid.
So yeah, DH is godlike with leveling. The high mobility and DPS on Havoc makes it perfect for getting around and finishing areas fast.
Vengeance Demon Hunter virtually seems made for solo questing and leveling. As a tank, you can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’, from mobs to rares. Daze and dismount is not an issue. Plus, as a tank, Vengeance deals some pretty good damage itself.
Havoc is ridiculously good for leveling, much faster than vengeance and as much survivability. If you feel squishy, you’re doing something wrong.
You’ll go full demonic build, and make sure you talent unleashed power for the 108 talent, as that will be a huge part of your survivability.
Just round everything up you see, between 6-10 mobs, get them bunched up, cast chaos nova, which will spawn between 3-5 health balls depending on how many adds you have, then go right into your eyebeam/blade dance rotation. Everything melts in about 4 seconds. If you get low, go pick up the health orbs you produced when you used chaos nova.
Even after the big power dropoff at 116, this still works. It may take a wee bit longer to kill them, but you can’t die. The trick is, you have to pull big. Little pulls with only 2-4 mobs may not spawn health orbs when you stun them.
I’ve leveled paladin, hunter, druid, and priest this expac, and none of them come close to my havoc in terms of self healing and damage done.
I can only assume you are trolling at this point.
DHs are far from squishy, able to pull and kill 10+ mobs at once all the way to 120.
They have the most reliant self-heals in the game between chaos nova soul fragments and killing mobs.
There is literally zero downtime while leveling due to the excessive amount of soul fragments.
Not at all. Compared to my other characters, I just felt long term survivability was low. I felt the same on my pally in Ret.
Which talents are you using and what play-style are you employing? Using the right talents makes a whole lot of difference like with everything else. And with surviveability with large numbers of mobs, a good rule of thumb is to a) try to hit as many as possible, b) eliminate the weakest target(s), c) don’t just stand around in one place, and d) don’t massively overpull.
I am pretty much guaranteed to take out 5-6 mobs easily without a dent in my health. 8-10 I have to be more careful but I can make it. 12 is pushing it, but I can make it if I pop blur and use Chaos Nova before resuming the normal rotation. Anything past that is a crapshoot.
Heck, I can actually solo many world bosses easily with barely a dent in my health as long as it doesn’t involve frequent long stuns and adds with immobilizing abilities.
Havoc is only squishy if you get stay in one place and get massively overwhelmed. The key to mastering DH at least is to be very proactive in how you move.
To use an example, the other day I was doing a Legion world quest involving a world raid boss thinking it would be easy pickings like every other world boss (Lady Si’vash). I was dead wrong because she had a LOT of long stuns and her adds constantly rooted me down. And then I kept getting caught her her tidal wave attack because I did not know what I was doing. Combine that with her insanely high health, I barely did much damage even with another overleveled player who also underestimated the boss. Honestly, that fight would have been impossible to solo even as a 120 toon with an ilvl above 320.
I was lucky the Alliance boomie was there and we were able to figure things out without the ability to communicate ideas. Even still, we only beat her on our third try. It was on the second try, when I tested to see if Vengeance does better (it did not) that I realized as long as I dodged the tidal wave and avoided getting immobilized, she couldn’t do much to my health. So once I did that on my Havoc (and the boomie tanked the adds away from me while I kited Si’vash around well away from them), I easily whittled her down within about 10 minutes.
This is actually a consistent pattern I noticed when playing a DH. I only am squishy if I get swarmed. On the other hand, if I kite and utilize my CDs and pop an eyebeam, I typically have a lot of surplus soul fragments at the end.
So yeah, playstyle matters a lot on DH. I rarely die on him and usually when I do die it’s either because my game lagged and screwed me over or I made a serious miscalculation on how many and which mobs to pull.
Edit: Also, I should mention that knowing when to make a quick retreat helps too. If you’re getting overwhelmed and your eyebeams are on cooldown, using vengeful retreat and then fel rushing away usually gives you enough time and distance for the cooldown to end so you an instantly pop the eyebeams on the first few to catch up to you. The eyebeams recover part of your hp and the soul fragments from the mobs you kill cover the rest. This method has saved my life more than once.
Havoc is without a doubt the strongest leveling spec in the game. Vengeance can easily solo anything that havoc can’t leech through in meta.
Leveling as havoc means pulling literally every mob in existence until you cant pull more without them resetting, casting eyebeam, and killing unlimited mobs in 8 seconds while taking zero damage.
FTFY
/10char
vengeance is far superior. zero downtime, huge pulls, etc.
Im with everyone else here. Ive done Fury war, Ret, BM hunter and Havoc to 120, and its not even close. Pulling 5 or 6 mobs, blasting them with eye lazers, stunning the rest, and finishing off with blade dance leaves me multiple healing orbs. Sure, youll drop to half health as you get the group rounded up, but after eye beam starts its game over for them, and leech/purple orbs all over for healing. It was idiotic pre 116, as the Raddons cascading eyes headpiece legiondary means little to no downtime on Eye Beam.
Side note, DH havoc in timewalking is hilarious. Between the legiondaries and T21, Eye beam alone will do half the groups damage in those dungeons. It’s spectacular.
You say that like Havoc has downtime, can’t do massive pulls, and doesn’t do 2-3 times as much DPS during those massive pulls. Havoc levels the exact same way as Vengeance, pull 8-15 mobs at once, AoE them down, but Havoc kills them in a fraction of the time.
Can confirm as someone who initially did Vengeance because the starting experience scared me out of Havoc for a while, but switched back to Havoc as soon as I realized the survivability is about the same as Vengeance after unlocking the first few talents.
I’m currently lvling my DH and I been havoc since 110 not having the legos from legion. my leveling hasn’t been really bad once u realize ur pull limit. its funny I can melt 6 to 8 mobs faster than I can solo one mob it seems. I have done vengence for 2 rares but other than that I have only died to my own mistakes. lvling as havoc been pretty much a breeze
On a completely different subject why are you running the tank darkmoon faire trinket lol @op