I genuinely don’t know how to play Demon Hunter… I see people say it’s a brain dead class but now I feel below brain dead for not understanding it. I’m sure a lot of it is because I refuse to get essences and gear with SL lurking around the corner…
But for a newb, can someone give me an idea of the rotation or how to play?
That’s the basics. 'course, it’s changing a bit in SL, but for now, that’s the gist. As for spec, the recommended for beginners and less serious peeps is Blind Fury, Immolation Aura, Trail of Ruin, Soul Rending, First Blood, Unleashed Power (Fel Eruption is also a solid option), and Demonic.
That differs slightly from the build used at the top end, but that build requires a fairly specific set of Azerite traits and corruption.
For Azerite traits, Furious Gaze is your best trait by far, you ideally want 3 of them. After that, it’s nice to have 1 each of Chaotic Transformation, Revolving Blades, and Thirsting Blades.
If you can get an Azerite gear combo that has 3x Furious gaze and has Eyes of Rage as an available option, you can swap into the more dominant end-game build, which runs 3x Furious Gaze, 1x Eyes of Rage, any 2 of Chaotic Transformation, Revolving Blades, and Thirsting Blades, and then stacks the crap out of RPPM corruption effects (especially Infinite Star).
Havoc doesn’t really have any special interactions with essences, so it’s really just the generic damage ones for us:
Lastly, stat weights. These of course vary a bit by gear, but as a general rule mastery is absolutely atrocious for us, and haste is rather substantially depressed in value by Furious Gaze. As a result, your general order of stat weights is likely to be:
With versatility and crit potentially swapping places with each other depending on your gear level, your stat corruptions, and how much you have of each.
The above link goes to the “ELI5” portion of the Wowhead guide on Havoc, but there are also other pages with much more detail if you want to dig into them.
As a side note, I highly recommend using Wowhead for guides for specs down the line. They’ve largely taken over from Icy-Veins in terms of guide quality and update frequency. They actually have all of their guides centrally accessible via the “Classes” button in the upper left of the main bar (right under “News” and “Leveling”, under the main Wowhead logo. You have to scroll to the top of any given page before the “Classes” and other guide button will appear, however).
basically you build fury (your spell energy) using immolation aura and demon’s bite then you spend it with chaos strike and blade dance, being blade dance your priority but pressing chaos strike as many times as you can. You need to stay in metamorphosis via eye beam and metamorphosis buttons as often as you can. Also collecting those shadow orbs that you get when you kill an enemy helps you to regenerate fury and health. Always keep your fury going.
The rest is all about speed, positioning, timing and utility and knowing when to use your utility and ccs (timing).
DHs are not brain dead as people like to call them, at least they aren’t more barindead than any other class… in fact you will find that it is not easy to be proficient when you play in pvp against good players. You need to know what to press and when, and you will find yourself using 17 or more buttons all the freaking time in a frenzy while jumping, rushing and charging all over the place. It’s pretty fun and fast gameplay.