- New Set:
4 set bonus “Casting Strafe against enemies will automatically shoot your last used primary skill, and also give 60% damage reduction while strafing and for 5 seconds after. While casting Strafe, you move faster per stack of Momentum.”
Right now Primary skills shoot by Strafe are not doing as much damage as Primary skills you shoot manually.
Damage of Primary skills shoot by Strafe dont scale with attack speed, they don’t proc area damage and they don’t pierce always. I don’t know if this is intended but right now it is best to use Strafe as movement/repositioning skill and do damage with manual casts of primary skills.
Described game play is too similar to UE generator build. UE is giving bigger set bonus to generators so there is no reason to play new set over the UE.
Even when used with UE set bonus damage of builds that utilize new legendary items (bolas and hungering arrow) is low. There is only one viable build that is using Hungering Arrow, Devouring Arrow rune. But that is only because how this rune works and not because Legendary item is powerfull.
- Primary Skills:
Hungering Arrow, Devouring Arrow rune is better than anything else.
“Each consecutive pierce increases the damage of the arrow by 70%”.
70% damage bonus is multiplicative and when you combine that with new Quiver The Ninth Cirri Satchel (Hungering Arrow is guaranteed to pierce) you can get many pierces in a row (20+) if monsters are pulled in a big group.
UE build using this skill and offhand is ahead of any other Primary Skill build but, for solo and group it is still behind builds for other classes. It is fun to play.
So maybe approach here should be to scale this skill down a bit and after that buff all Primary Skills (including this skill) with Legendary and new set by Huge amount.
- Shadows Impale
I am not sure what was the intent of the buff to Holy Point Shot. Was it GR 130 @5K Paragons for average player? Or was it intended as DH Rift Guardian Killer in 4 mans?
What ever was the intent of the buff it is not enough. Shadows Impale is behind other classes solo builds on PTR and it is behind Crusader for RGK role.
It feels like Holy Point Shot needs a buff of +8-9GRs (250%-300%) when compared to what it can do on live servers.
- Group play
Currently on PTR there is no place for DH in 4 man GR groups.
Shadows Impale is behind Crusader in terms of single target damage and Crusader can also kill Rift Guardians that spawn adds fast unlike DH.
There is no reason to invite DH RGK over Crusader.
There is no other build DH could use as RGK. Hungering Arrow, Devouring Arrow Build is slower for RGK role than Shadows Impale.
Currently there is no build that can make DH trash killer in GR. Nerfed WD and Corpse explosion Necro is million times stronger than any DH trash killing build (including that Hungering Arrow, Devouring Arrow build).
No one can push out Barb from 4 man group because it is too valuable. DH Support (with new Odyssey’s End Quiver) can’t push out Monk out of the group because trash killers need Monks Shield to keep huge Squirts necklace Buff up.
There is also no place for DH in speed 4 man GRs (GRs ~120).
If things don’t change dramatically. DH might get a bit better solo performance but it will be excluded from endgame (playing GRs in 4 man groups). This is really disappointing because DH is the last to get the patch and DH is also out of efficient 4 man groups for 4-5 years now if not more.
You promised that there is going to be a time for DH to shine “soon”. This looks like a fail so far.
EDIT:
There is a chance to make Hungering Arrow, Devouring Arrow build trash killer. It can’t play to it full potential in solo because there is no good, consistent way to pixel pull monsters solo. Also, to be able to survive in higher GRs you need to drop some damage buffs and use some damage reduction instead.
In group its damage would scale up because of Barb pixel pulls. For this to be a trash killer in 4 man groups it would need bigger buffs.