Trenacetate's DH PvP Guide 9.0.2

Apr 4, 2021

About the Author

About the author

Hey there! My name is Jamal but I go by the name Trenacetate ‘‘Tren’’ within the WoW community. I’m a full-time streamer and content creator with the focus on helping people improve in arena with the Demon Hunter class. I’m also playing competitively in the Arena World Championships.

I’ve been playing PvP since s6 (Wrath of the Lich King) where I managed to get my first Gladiator title and I achieved my first r1 title in s8. I kept on playing until Cataclysm where I was forced to take a break due to studies and other IRL obligations. I came back in Legion where I picked up playing Demon Hunter and I’ve been playing it ever since.

As a Demon Hunter I’ve achieved R1 on multiple Demon Hunters since s21 (Legion). During s23 I was the only player to have achieved R1 as a Demon Hunter in both NA and EU. From there on I’ve always been playing on the highest level and been the highest Demon Hunter in both 2s and 3s brackets.

A big thank you and shoutout to Akyran and Sara for helping me create this guide.

General changes with Shadowlands

As you all know by now Demon Hunters have been hit with huge nerfs especially on our defensive abilities such as Blur , Soul Rending and Blade Dance .

The biggest nerf that is noticeable is our Blade Dance. Not being able to dodge melee abilities is a huge nerf to our survivability and makes it hard to face tank any melee. I noticed early on in the expansion that classes such as Warrior’s and WW’s would completely dominate Demon Hunters by just tunneling them and have great uptime against them. This in combination with the Blur and Leech nerf is a big hit to our defensive kit.

Demon Hunter used to be a ‘‘dampening’’ class and what I mean by that is that you used to win on basically the mana bar. SL is extremely fast paced so playing a dampening strat/talents won’t always work.

Some new talents have been added such as: Mortal Rush , Cleansed by Flame and Glaive Tempest these are the ones mentioning that you will actually pick in certain situations.

Mortal Rush : I feel like this talent is EXTREMELY powerful in 2v2 in combination with Mana Rift. The healers will oom a lot faster due to the MS effect. You don’t need to max tryhard to have uptime on it but when you have burst and you have nice pressure try to keep the MS effect on the target. This talent becomes pretty useless in 3v3 since your best comps will always have a partner that has a MS effect so you can pick another talent instead.

Cleansed by Flame : This is a really overlooked talent and really situational. You only want to play this when you don’t need to use either Reverse Magic, Detainment or Cover of Darkness. Most of the time those 3 talents will be better than Cleansed by Flame but I find myself picking this in 2v2 more often since you don’t really need Cover of Darkness vs a caster.

Glaive Tempest : This is basically our old artifact ability in Legion. I really like this talent because it gives a really nice burst on a low cooldown. I try to use this during stuns or when I know that the target won’t be moving from his location. Trail of Ruin sims higher on a patchwerk fight wich means it will deal more damage on a long term fight but Glaive Tempest has more burst during stuns and gives you better kill potential.

Demon Hunter general playstyle in Shadowlands

Havoc Demon Hunter is a squishy leather class with high mobility. You want to keep in mind that you are SQUISHY. You can’t face tank melee’s anymore you need to be very careful. The class is built around spending your Fury. You generate Fury trough Demonsblades (Your auto attacks) and Demons Bite. And you spend your Fury on Eye Beam and Chaos Strike.

The current way to play DH is very defensive. You need to be extremely causious to not get caught without cooldowns and kite correctly.

Stat Priority / Gear

Agility> Versa> Haste/Crit> Mastery

Having lots of haste is really nice especially when you play with Felblade Demon Blades (this will be the most comfortable to play with GCD) and max out on Versatility.

Trinkets

Before SL you would be playing OP PVE trinket like Drest or Bike or tank trinkets. Since you are versa stacking as a DH you will benefit a ton from the PVP trinket set bonus. I will always play with a PvP trinket and either a Insignia or a Battle Master. I will pick a BM trinket only against RMP and insignia vs the rest.

Talents

Yes boys Felblade Demonblades is back. I feel like this spec is by far the best for Demon Hunters atm and I will explain why. You might be thinking logically and ask ‘‘Why not play with Demonic Appetite since we are so squishy?’’ Well to be quite honest I feel like Demonic Appetite does jack shit. You will still die trough the healing of Demonic Appetite and you can’t face tank anyone. The only way to survive these days is to KITE and KITE and KITE. Felblade Demon Blades gives you that option because you can use Felblade as a gap closer and use your Felrush for mobility to KITE. This spec also does more damage than the Demonic Appetite spec.

PvP Talents

You always want to run Detainment, as it enables Mana Rift to land and is really good to use for both defensive and offensive purposes. For example this can be used as CC when you or your healer needs peeling.
Mana Rift is the current playstayle for Demon Hunters in 2v2 vs most healer + dps comps. One of your main winning strategies is to OOM the opponent healer through Mana Rift and reaching high dampening.
Against double DPS swap out Mana Rift for Cover of Darkness to have extra survivability for you or your teammate.
Rain from Above : This ability should be used both offensively and defensively. Make sure to not use this ability when ranged classes have their offensive cooldowns available because it makes you an easy target. This is the highest damage ability in the game for Demon Hunters. It’s not only used offensively but also defensively, for instance you can dodge Stormbolts, Kidney Shots or even Chaos Bolts when you time it correctly. This ability can put you in a very vulnerable situation so think ahead and don’t die like a fly in the air.

When you have Metamorphosis active you will get increased haste which will lead into 2 extra Fel Lances.

Cover of Darkness: This is only used against double DPS in 2v2. You can pick this instead of Mana Rift. You won’t need Mana Rift against 2 DPS.
Reverse Magic: This talent is mainly used to remove cc off your healer (such as polymorph, traps, repentance, hammer of justice, priest silence, claw etc). For yourself its good to use to remove snare effects vs Druids and Shamans.
Solitude: This talent synergises really well with the “Fel Blade Spec”. I find myself always picking this when I play Option 2 in the talent images above. If you don’t need any of the benefits from the other honor talents feel free to pick this talent.
Cleansed by Flame: This is a really overlooked talent and really situational. You only want to play this when you don’t need to use either Reverse Magic, Detainment or Cover of Darkness. Most of the time those 3 talents will be better than Cleansed by Flame but I find myself picking this in 2v2 more often since you don’t really need Cover of Darkness vs a caster.
Mortal Rush: I feel like this talent is EXTREMELY powerful in 2v2 in combination with Mana Rift. The healers will oom a lot faster due to the MS effect. You don’t need to max tryhard to have uptime on it but when you have burst and you have nice pressure try to keep the MS effect on the target. This talent becomes pretty useless in 3v3 since your best comps will always have a partner that has a MS effect so you can pick another talent instead.

Legendaries

Currently I play with 2 Legendaries which are:

Chaos Theory : This Legendary does by far the most damage of any legendary. I will only play this when I don’t need my auto-darkness and I feel safe and I can pump out maximum pressure. You need to play around this legendary tho. You can’t just spam Blade Dance and Chaos Strikes and dump your fury constantly without having the buff up. Try to play smart around the legendary and every time you use Blade Dance try to have enough Fury to spam Chaos Strikes.
Darkest Hour : I can’t tell you guys how many times this Legendary has saved my ass. This Legendary is insanely powerful against burst comps such as RMP or Jungle as an example. The great thing about this Legendary is that it is a 2minute cooldown and the best part is that it does not put your own Darkness on cooldown. Even when your Darkness is on cooldown the legendary will still proc which is insanely powerful against certain teams. In 3v3 I find myself pick this most of the time.
Collective Anguish (optional): I personally don’t like it but I’m just writing it down. If you don’t like the RNG from Chaos Theory you can pick this one.

Covenants

In Shadowlands I will be playing Night Fae on my Demon Hunter. The conduits for Demon Hunters are very strong and well designed. I will be using most of my conduits on Endurance (defensive) conduits to be as tanky as possible. None of the other covenants are even decent in arena PvP. Venthyr could be a competitor to Night Fae but since Sinful Brand is dispellable it will not work on higher brackets. The big burst you get from The Hunt is the only burst Demon Hunters actually have and it is the only thing that makes us win games.

Night Fae

This covenant gives us 2 awesome abilities which are The Hunt and Soulshape. The Hunt is a very fun ability as it does insanely high damage. I personally use this as an execute rather than force cd’s. I will always use this ability during moments where if the enemy player does not react he will die. As I stated before Demon Hunter survivability has been gutted by a lot and we need to KITE all the time. Soulshape is a great tool to kite with on a very low cooldown. Make sure to abuse this ability to its max potential.

Conduits

Conduits are divided in 3 categories

Potency (damage)
Endurance (defensive)
Finesse (utility)

Best Potency Conduits:

Relentless Onslaught

This is by far the best Potency conduit you can go for. This synergizes very well with the Chaos Theory legendary.

Unnatural Malice

(This conduit has been nerfed by 50% in PVP) Before the nerf I would have placed this on top but after the nerfs I feel like the Chaos Strike legendary takes the cake. However this increases the damage of The Hunt by a lot.

Best Endurance Conduits:

Viscious Ink

This is by far the best conduit vs casters. Having an extra 9% damage reduction against casters is HUGE. This also stacks with your Demonic Wards passive.

Fel Defender

Since I don’t like to play with Demonic Appetite I don’t play with the Shattered Restoration conduit. So for extra survivability and defensiveness I pick Fel Defender to have more blur uptime.

Best Finesse Conduits

Ravenous Consumption

This gives u 21% chance to purge a second magical debuff from the target. It does not award an extra fury generation from Consume Magic but it can be insanely powerful against casters that have lots of buffs up.

Felfire Haste

This conduit on max rank is ridiculously strong and nobody actually plays it. This can allow you to kite better or to chase around pillars.

Healer Partners and their general Playstyle 2v2

In the current state of the game right now the main focus you have as a Demon Hunter is to Mana Rift and mainly win the games, especially in 2s with mana. The goal is to OOM the opponents healer and score a kill. Here below are my personal preferences when it comes to healers to queue with.

Healer Rankings

Shaman
Paladin
Druid

Monk

Make sure you don’t DR your incap with the Healer’s incap so coordinate with your Healer for consistent Mana Rifts. When the Monk can use his Leg Sweep on the healer, use this moment to land a free Mana Rift. But usually the Monk has to use Leg Sweep for his own survivability so don’t count on your healer to use his stun offensively. The Monk should keep the 5% physical dmg debuff on the target the Demon Hunter is hitting as much as they can.

Shaman

When playing with a Shaman I prefer to kite a lot and let my damage do as much damage as possible. I try to trade damage during stuns and not face tank people and make my healer constantly heal me. Resto Shamans deal a lot of damage at the moment so make the most out of it. The main playstyle/goal with this comp is for the shaman to drag away the DPS from the enemy team that’s sitting on him/her and to let you 1v1 the healer alone. In certain matchups the extra Purge pressure will help, especially in late dampening, just make sure that the Shaman doesn’t run oom while doing so, otherwise it will go from win to lose really fast. The Shaman should also use his Wind Shear ability accordingly so try to communicate your kicks as best as you can with your healer.

Druid

In matchups vs melees they should use Bear Affinity and against casters they can play with Feral Affinity. Bear Affinity gives the Druid lots of tankiness against Melee targets and Feral Affinity will help you land either Mana Rifts from Rake Stun or interrupt the enemy casts if you can’t stop it. Feral Affinity also does decent DPS. The benefit of Demonhunter + Druid are the hots so the Demon Hunter is free to roam around the arena and he can do what he wants and sustain his HP.

A Druid can play with Cyclone, but trying to setup clones to Mana Rift off Cyclone is not worth the effort & leaves your Druid more vulnerable/costs him quite some mana.

Paladin

Paladin’s are really strong right now and they have the longest stun in the game. Communicate properly with your healer so that the healer uses his stun first and not you. Paladin’s have many cooldowns such as Sacrifice, Bop, Freedom and Wings which can keep you alive easy during high pressure games which are 90% of the games in this current meta.

General tips for burning

If the enemy is an Orc or is playing with Relentless you are always required to be in Metamorphosis before stunning the target. The reason why is because you will get additional haste for faster globals so your Fel Eruption>Mana Rift will land before the target will walk out of it.

If you are not in Metamorphosis or mis-time it you can use Vengeful Retreat for a 70% slow so they won’t have time to walk out of the Mana Rift.

Picking the Honor talent ‘‘Detainment’’ will allow you to land your Mana Rifts from the Imprison because the duration is increased by 2 seconds. As a sub of my twitch channel, you can find a Weak Aura that helps you with the timing of Mana Rifts out of Imprison talented with Detainment on my Discord.

vs Monk

Mana Rifting a Mistweaver Monk is by far the hardest and is the most complicated healer to burn. The reason why is because they have a very short port cooldown and rolls to get out of your Mana Rift. Whenever a Monk has his port ready you always want to use a re-stun to make sure your Mana Rift lands. If the Monk has no port or is out of range to port away you can then use Imprison to Mana Rift. Otherwise do not try to burn out of Imprison (it won’t work if he’s half decent).

Mistweavers heal really well in low dampening so don’t expect to win fast and play it slow. A few good things to do vs a MW are:

Never hit or try to go through a Cocoon, rather keep your Imprison for it and try to Imprison the Burst of Life trait before the Cocoon expires.
Never overchase a MW, making you overextend is what they are best at and they have more mobility than a DH if they play correctly. Try to get your burns with double stuns/imprison and swap back to the DPS.
The goal is to OOM them by keeping up your DPS pressure and reaching dampening before your healer runs out of mana.

vs Druid

Resto Druids are the easiest class to burn/oom. The biggest mistake Demon Hunters make is over chasing the Resto Druid and they lose pressure because the Druid is simply kiting them around the pillars and their DPS is killing you or your healer. What you want to do is basically pressure the Druid whenever you go for a stun>burn when a Druid uses Barkskin/Ironbark you can swap target to the dps to keep up the Damage pressure and oom him faster. A druid heals by hotting a target and that takes many globals and it hurts their mana by a lot. When you see a target is fully hotted they are doing max healing and there is simply no point wasting your DPS into that target. Swap on hots as much as you can but keep in mind to not overswap when you need to babysit/play defensive on your target.

The main winning condition for Druids is their stealth drinks. You can counter this by having that pressure on their DPS from swapping constantly on their blooms or you can tell your healer to start chasing down the Druid to stop the drinks if you are not in position yourself. Remember you need to do MAX pressure constantly as a DH but sometimes your healer is unable to stop drinks because if they do they become a vulnerable target by having bad positioning. Always keep an eye on them and preemptively react when they are trying to leave combat to get a restealth.

vs Shaman

Every Resto Shaman has Pack Spirit nowadays. It basically heals a % of their HP when they are in Ghost Wolf and therefor makes them hard to pressure. Because of that they need to spend almost 0 mana to sustain their HP so it’s really bad to tunnel a Resto Shaman. What you want to do is hit their DPS as much as possible so they actually need to CAST heals in order for their DPS to stay alive. This makes a Shaman go completely oom and in between these go’s you go for the regular stun/incap burns on cooldown.

vs Pala

Paladins are the most offensive healers damage wise. They are extremely tanky with their short cooldowns such as Avenging Wrath, Divine Protection, Blessing of Sacrifice and Blessing of freedom etc. What I really like to do against this healer is use all of my offensive cooldowns after he or her used his or hers (Girls play too you know, we gotta embrace them. <3) Avenging Wrath. A Paladin is the most vulnerable when they don’t have their defensive cooldowns up and you gotta score a major cooldown/kill during this time. Burning a Holy Paladin is quite easy, just follow the general guidelines and you should land them just fine.

vs Disc Priest

The most common matchups you will face when seeing a Priest is Priest: Rogue/Mage/Ret. These DPS classes can make it quite difficult at times to burn the priest. You don’t want to overextend too much against a Priest because their DPS is always ready to make a go on you when you are in a bad position. Burning a Priest is quite simple since they don’t have much counterplay against it.

Disc priest has huge defensive cooldowns such as Rapture/PS/Dome all of these defensive abilities are easily countered by a bunch of swaps. Rupture is dispellable, PS means swap to another target and simply don’t hit the target that’s standing in the Dome. If you play correctly around this the priest will eventually flop and go OOM very fast. Once he’s oom and he starts kiting you try to just kill their DPS with stuns and play very aggressive with your healer to roll them over.

vs Holy priest

A Holy Priest has a few tools to make your life harder in the arena. They have Holy Ward which makes them immune to every CC effect for 30 seconds and it has a 30 second cooldown. Luckily as a DH we have Consume Magic so every 10 seconds you can attempt a purge on the priest to dispel the Holy Ward. You can also use your Metamorphosis daze to remove the Holy Ward but this is a niche kind of play. Your healer can also assist you with either Purging/Stunning/Incapping etc it doesn’t really matter as long as they can remove the Holy Ward so you can land your stun/burn.

Vs a holy priest you always want to prioritize your stuns/incap on the last bit of Greater Heal to get maximum pressure on them. They have an ability called Greater Fade which makes them dodge every single spell except for your kick ability. Save your kick for that exact moment so you can rotate every single defensive CD of them. So basically use your stun into an Imprison into another stun when he’s healing and when he uses Greater Fade you will have your kick ready for that moment. If you master this pressure against Holy Priests you will win within a few moments.

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