Entangling Shot has Potential. Please make this Viable

Demon Hunter
1

So ENTANGLING SHOT is a skill that is rarely ever used and for a long time, never been a viable option.

I have a suggestion to Spruce things up and really make Entangling Shot super interesting and could shake up the meta and even complement the upcoming Season 27 “Power” theme.

Currently it only has the effect of -entangled enemies take 150% damage from all sources-
Reason why no one uses this: effect only lasts 2 seconds, up to 4 enemies can only be debuffed, and lastly it only damages the first enemy hit and not the entangled enemies.

UPGRADE:
Enemies snared by your entangling shot also receives damage from primary target and all snared enemies take 150% increased damage from all sources.
Gets the Chain Gang, Heavy Burden, Bounty Hunter rune, and doubles the passive’s effectiveness except for bounty hunter.

So now we have:
8 enemies snared and damaged
lasts 8 seconds
80% slow

Notes: This new effect for Entangling shot would go so well with the new sanctified power for strafe. It will greatly complement the spender’s damage through its utility.
Gears of Dreadlands will have another option to use for its primary.
Even Marauder’s set can make use of this instead of yang’s recurve.

PS: Quality of life suggestion. Vengeance’s Personal Mortar rune. Make the grenades bounce with hellcats just like the Strafe’s demolition rune.

Grenade (Primary) faces the same issues as Entangling shot. An interesting upgrade to make this viable is to add “150/175/200%” damage multiplier to hellcat for all sources of grenades.

This will definitely open up new builds for Demon Hunters! :slight_smile:

2

I’m just going to talk about grenades since you mentioned it at the end. I’m thinking Hellcat should just give a the 800% increase to Grenade damage and they could move the bounce mechanic to another item possibly even a crafted item like the Devastator Mace.

So it would basically be Grenades get 800% on every bounce, just not the last one.

And I mention, Devastator because the level 60 version has a legendary effect of making the ground tremble but the level 70 version doesn’t have one. It also comes with a guaranteed increase Fire Damage roll. But they could also give the new legendary effect to Balefire Caster Hand X-bow for that same reason.

I’m thinking these changes would make using Depths Diggers unnecessary for a build like GoD Grenades since we can strafe now with melee weapons.

It would probably though make M6 too powerful though as the straight 800% damage to grenade damage would make Loaded for Bear the go to rune on Cluster Arrow since Sentries don’t get the bounces from Hellcat anyway. But to fix this, they could just make it applicable to the Primary Skill and not the grenades from other skills.

But doing that ruins any LoD Strafe Demolition build that might have existed.

In other words, it’s a bit complicated but in essence Grenades should do more damage, I’m just not sure how it should be done.

3

It is quite tricky and complicated my friend. Please do reply more if you get more insights. I just wanted to bring the grenader builds to light. Its such a fun build aesthetically.

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4

The reason nobody uses ES is because it only has a 150% additive damage modifier, whereas:

  • Hungering Arrow = 7x + Devouring Arrow mods
  • Bolas = 6.875x
  • Grenade = Hellcat ~3.5x
  • Entangling Shot = 2.15x

IMHO this is a wasted opportunity because we already use Entangling Shot frequently today for supporting other skills. The time here could be applied to rejuvenating a more exciting skills like Chakram / Elemental Arrow / Rain of Vengeance / Fan of Knives / Strafe, etc.

Okay great – 2 extra Grenades @ 150% weapon damage but there is a big problem with this concept… no Simplicity Strength, Depth Diggers or Hunters Wrath multipliers. Standard Grenade is over 12x stronger than Vengeance mortar grenades.

You might want to also ask for Personal Mortar to be treated the same as the Primary Skill Grenade, and if I were to pick a rune, it’d be Cluster Grenades. The most logical place to amend the behavior of Vengeance is on Hellcat Waistguard itself.

Nobody should choose the Personal Mortar rune because it results in 50% DR loss.

Grenades have a chance to bounce 4 times dealing an additional 50% damage on each bounce. This bonus is increased to 800% on the final bounce. Vengeance releases 2 Cluster Grenades instead of homing rockets.

5

Thanks for this constructive reply dmkt.

I just want to highlight that each primary has its own strength. Hungering arrow is definitely the pick for dps. While my suggestion seems like an upgrade to boost overall aspect, that is not the case for its intent.

The strength entangling shot has is its utility. If we can just strengthen its core then its a good supporting skill to your main damage dealer rather than lets say, picking this over hungering arrow in GoD-DH.
The main concept is to provide 150% more damage to any source of damage to 8 enemies while slowing them and hitting for a bit of damage.

Now the Grenades, like i said, its for a quality of life update. Grenader/Demolotion build is a lot of fun and pick non-meta builds is a good way to freshen up things, but only if its worth it.

One fun thing I enjoy about Diablo is that I have to make sacrifices for the builds I want. So for example, if I really wanted all of my kit to include grenades, I could sacrifice my helm to get Visage of Gunes (Dark Hear rune) so I can get personal mortar on vengeance. It doesn’t have to be all meta but at least fun and “viable”

Now if the devs decide to make more competitive. I’d really love to hear what they can do with it.

I agree on this as well. I’ve been wondering if its a good idea to add Chakram, Fan of knives, and Caltrops to the Shadow Mantle set. Any thoughts and ideas how to incorporate it into the set?

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I personally use Odyssey with M6 Cluster Arrow, it’s really a great damage booster for that skill and it impacts the playstyle from spamming Cluster Arrow to charge and burn. It’s helpful with regular UE6 Multishot too.

If I had to make Entangling Shot a pure DPS skill, I’d take the Shock Collar route and create a new Amulet with this legendary effect:

Entangling Shot gains the Shock Collar rune and deals 30% damage per chained within 50 yards.

You would pair this ability with Hungering Arrow and go dual skill. Use Entangling Shot to obliterate the trash and finish your strays with Hungering Arrow. Allowing the the Amulet to grant the Shock Collar rune to any rune choice lets you stick with the Cold element. So you take Heavy Burden.

To give you a sense of the damage, assume you make large pull of 50 enemies and entangle them all:

80% * (.20 * 50) * 2.5 = 20x
50 hits: 50 * 20 = 1,000 total damage

Whereas Devouring Arrow deals:

155-435% * 7 = 10.85-30.45x
5 hits: (1.55 + 2.25 + 2.95 + 3.65 + 4.35) * 7 * 2.15 = 221.99 damage

ES damage ramps up, in peak conditions you’re going to see lots of hits around 100T damage, but as the trash dies off that damage gets reduced.

When your trash pile gets down to about 10 pieces, it starts makes sense to switch to Hungering Arrow.

It is my preference to play UE6 Grenade with a Buriza. I like this build a lot, I hope to see UE’s 6pc bonus updated, any amount of extra Cluster Grenades is only going to multiply the damage substantially. (2 extra Cluster Grenades is like a 200% damage buff - 7GRs).

Though, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing GoD 2pc and 6pc effects modified so they include Strafe.

There are many ways to boost Chakram damage:

Option #1
A separate 25,000% straight damage multiplier on Shadow’s 6pc bonus for Chakram, which would take the skill into GR131-132 territory @ 5k paragon. Once that’s done, all they’d need to do is grant ~400% damage on Spines of Seething Hatred.

Spines of Seething Hatred: 200% Chakram Damage and Chakram always lands a critical hit. (~6.1x if optimized)

Option #2
Your Twin Chakram’s path now turns into a loop and deals 750% more damage for each successive enemy hit. (When Chakram Boomerangs, it can hit the same enemy up to 4 times. If an enemy is hit twice by the overlapping Chakram it takes 750% + 1500% + 2250% + 3000% damage).

The second option is really aimed at UE6.

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