I’ve done a full rework of each of the class sets, and have posted for the Demon Hunter. In case anyone wants to check it out, I posted it in the main forum. I’ll just link it here to keep any comments consolidated:
Thank you for the effort, but I don’t think that your rework ideas will do any good for Demon Hunters …
Why do you want to make rarely used skills even less attractive by adding a cooldown to it? Chakram and Entangling Shot with a cooldown? Why?
The DH is my favourite class, because there are not that many cooldowns.
And why do you remove the ressource costs from our spenders? It’s one key design element of the DH class, that we have to manage our hatred - event if it’s quite simple in endgame with Dawn and/or CC3 and stuff.
Three of the DH sets are fine, there is absolutely no need to rework all of them at the risk of destroying the balance we have right now. And the fourth (Natalya) works very well in combination with Marauder. A few adjustments to some of the skills/items, maybe a competive rocket-based M6 (not with Hellcat), but that would be it.
UE with Rapid Fire? No. Rockets already deal a good amount of single target damage. S6 is an elite hunter, yes. Thats the key point of this set.
We already have that. 
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For the offensive skills that have a cooldown, they are pretty short and will of course have proportionally greater damage than skills without cooldowns. So for a skill like Chakram, it’s like packing 2 seconds worth of damage into a single cast. It allows the player to reposition or use an ability during those 2 seconds without losing any DPS.
It’s interesting because because it creates a slightly different playstyle from abilities where you attack continuously.
Entangling shot is used for CC in that set. It also hits more enemies and its effect last indefinitely, justifying the cooldown. Entangling shot is currently an absolute joke. Useless for both damage (no competitive multipliers) and CC (too few enemies, too short a duration).
So it takes a cool, but currently useless skill and makes it pretty useful.
The rework explains that its how the build functions with full equipment. So yes, resource becomes a non-issue as is already the case.
There is no balance right now. You have UE build which is god tier below a certain GR level before falling far behind other builds. Impale build doesn’t even function properly until very high GR levels where you stop one-shotting everything and you can actually sustain your hatred.
Working “well” is to be debated. It has a clunky set mechanic of having to num-lock cast rain of vengeance or your hero stops dealing damage and dies instantly. Sentries have an unnecessary cooldown, limiting how fast you can advance through the map. Then your hero still has to attack with your primary hatred spender anyways, begging the question as to why not just make that attack deal all the damage? Finally, you have 3 skills that you need to cast on rotation - two “attack” skills that actually deal no damage, and one ultimate whose uptime needs to be micromanaged.
That’s literally half your bar that has to be pressed on a timer just so the hero functions correctly at the most basic level. It honestly offensive.
You’re doing 10 different things to accomplish one. The rework cuts out all the BS and just gets to the point. So instead of wasting your time routinely attacking with evasive fire even though it deals no damage and doesn’t CC, you actually get to utilize skills that actually make a difference in the fight, such as slowing enemies or drawing them into your traps.
Yes. But seriously though, when a giant AoE is the best option for both large groups of enemies and a single enemy, there’s a design flaw. Thus each set gets an AoE skill and a single-target skill. You get to use a greater variety of skills, and each set gets to alternative between using two primary attacks that are actually effective at dealing damage, making it more interesting to play.
No, we don’t. We have every DH build that requires running Vengeance with permanent uptime, which means cubed dawn and CDR rolls. We have every DH running wraps of clarity for toughness and running around shooting evasive fire (since its the least terrible way to spend your time attacking with a skill that does no damage).
So every build has the skill that deals the damage, Vengeance for damage reduction, and vault for mobility. Every other skill serves no other purpose than to prop up the damage skills, or boost toughness. So even if those skills happen to be different between builds, it’s meaningless because they are serving the same purpose.
The only meaningful difference between builds is a single skill. The mechanics of that single skill is solely responsible for the build’s entire playstyle. The 3 primary builds seem to be:
- Bombardment (top DH ladder)
- Impale (most popular push build)
- Multishot (T16 speeds)
Bombardment has the highest damage potential but small AoE, making it a poor choice for speeds. The Shadow set can only be an elite hunter because it’s a single target skill. Multishot is the only skill of the three that has a large enough area to be viable for speed runs.
This isn’t variety. It’s 3 niche builds with garbage set mechanics and glaring weaknesses.
I played N6M4 for a several seasons, and I never felt the urge to use Numlock with it. There is plenty of time between the cooldown ends and the end of the buff. And I actually like how sentries work there. You just have to place them strategically, so that you can benefit from them for a reasonable amount of time. I really like this playstyle.
You can even play T16 with S6. Use Blood Vengeance, maybe Bat for more hatred or even Punishment instead of FoK during speeds. And of course the lightning rune, as the ricochets don’t oneshot everything. It is just not true that S6 only work in very high GRs. It’s not as fast as UE6 later, but at the beginning of a season it is a great choice for Public Bounties, and can be used later as well.
You do have a point there. But that’s the way D3 is played: There is only one skill that deals damage, the others are for support. Due to the general damage mechanics in D3 with all its mutliplicative Buffs, it is in most cases better to maximize the damage of one skill, and not increase two (or more) skills. I think thats the same for all classes. Changing that would be nice, sure, but it would require a total rework of the complete game.
Another good point, and a reason why I liked N6M4 that much. However, with CC3 and Gogok, there’s not much need for 2-3 CDR rolls anymore, so “only” Dawn is required.
All except S6 and LoD. And I don’t think that this is a bad thing, that many builds require Wraps of Clarity, as they work very well with the general need of a generator in most builds and of course F+R. Imho it is a great item, as it makes generators actually useful (besides generating hatred).
We have 3 different builds in the Top 20 - LoD, UE6 and S6. I don’t know much about the other classes, but I would say that we’re in a good spot with in-class balance. And afaik M6-MS and maybe even N6M4 can also reach a decent spot in the leaderboards, even if they’re not that popular.
And when it comes to speedruns - yes, UE is god tier because of its huge AoE and the weakness of even elites on T16.
3 niche builds? You call GR pushing a niche? That’s the major element in the game …
The main aspect of Vengeance for UE and M6 is “more hatred”. Damage reduction is used additionally in some variants (with Gunes), and of course in S6.
Yes, because Vault is a truly iconic DH-skill. Its the only mobility/escape skill without cooldown in the game. But there are actually builds without Vault.
I am not saying that our sets and builds are perfect. They are not. But a rework would require some more work than what you posted. And some ideas (especially CD on Chakram and ES) would do more harm than good, imho.
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You should try a D2 trap assassin. It’s the same premise, but just way better. It’s the build minus the BS, and it’s a blast. And yes, as I mentioned in the Nat’s set rework “playstyle” comments, it’s all about strategic trap placement.
Hence the rework. You gain a second skill that deals meaningful damage. They each have distinct uses so there’s constantly opportunities to use both (in other words, you don’t have 2 AoE skills where you just end up using the better one). You gain unique form of CC for each set that has a significant impact. Then you consolidate the effects of 2-3 damage reduction skills into a single skill for simplicity. That skill gets to be different for each set, adding to the theme of the set and adding variety to the class.
That’s true. The rework continues to focus on buffing one main skill with multipliers. In fact, current set bonuses often don’t even make any sense anymore. They sometimes buff half a dozen skills (i.e. Maurader), only one of which can supported through legendaries because of multipliers. This reason alone justifies reworking them - they aren’t even designed coherently.
The intention of each set’s secondary skill is that it also gains multipliers, without being at the expense of the primary skill. Meaning, for example, multishot retains its supporting legendary powers. Rapid fire is additionally included in set bonus and supporting items.
It doesn’t take a total rework. All it really takes is small adjustments and some reshuffling of effects that all exist within the game already. It would certainly be significant enough changes to be major patch, but the game wouldn’t have to be overhauled.
Makes them “useful” by being a glorified item mod. Even worse that an item mod, in fact, because at least item mods are always in effect. It just makes a skill where you just use it monotonously - press X button every Y seconds or your character sucks. That’s not interesting or challenging. It’s just boring and bot-fodder.
The rework makes attack skills useful too (they aren’t strictly categorized as generators). It does so in a way that actually makes them a viable attack skills like they were designed for. Imagine that! That’s way better than pressing a button every 5 seconds or you die.
Niche in the sense of function - one skill with a very specific mechanic means that the build does one thing. Sometimes that “thing” can be useful to some degree in multiple scenarios (bounties, speeds, pushing), but it’s still doing one thing. Bombardment is only good at focusing a huge amount of damage in a very small area. It has limited AoE and lacks mobility. Impale is only good at damaging an enemy or two at a time. It also lacks AoE and tools to deal with density.
For example, sure you can do regular T16 rifts with an impale build. You skip everything other than the elites, gather the globes, then snipe the guardian. For the most part that’s really all you want anyways. But you have to play that way because you don’t have any tools to do much else. Even then it’s not well suited for it.
This is not a game where there’s one giant enemy every 3rd screen. It’s a game where there’s dozens of enemies on every screen with one giant enemy at the end. Therefore builds should be designed appropriately for the content and have corresponding offensive and defensive tools.
To fail to do is simply a design error.
I pick that single quote, because I think we do agree here. I really hate all these “Hellcat” builds. UE-Generator was terrible, M6-Bombardemant also, and now LoD/LoN as well. It is way too fishy, imho. But this is not the fault of the set-design - it’s the belt and the RNG that comes with it.
For the other builds: M6-Rockets and S6 are decent builds for T16. Especially S6 is a fun build for it, and it is not “only” elite jumping. With AD on gear you can also kill smaller groups quite fast, and I often do it for Gold (= speed and pickup radius) when I use S6 for t16.
Well, for M6 there are at least two skills that can be used for pushing: CA (with grenades) and Multishot. I’m not an expert for this, but dmkt had done a lot of work for M6-MS.
Chakram would also be possible, if they would buff the Chakram-Sword a little bit.
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M6 Multi works, i recently took the physical rune and cleared a GR125, though my clear time wasn’t faster than S6 Impale, it still did the job. UE6 Multishot was slightly (10-15%) better on average because I could fire shots the whole time.
I’ve been revisiting lots of the flagship DH builds recently:
UE6 Multishot, M6 Multishot, S6 Impale, N6M4 Multishot, N6M4 Cluster Arrow, M6 Cluster Arrow, LoD Rapid Fire, N6 Rapid Fire
There is a real problem with Marauder’s, unless you equip Yang’s Recurve w/ CC3. Those 3-piece sets have little synergy with M6 Cluster Bombs because fitting in Hellcat causes the loss of Zoey’s Secret, and Aughild Bracer causes the loss of Wraps of Clarity.
Like the leaderboard suggests, there is excellent balance with Multishot and Impale – but Rapid Fire leads the pack by 5GRs~.
For the past few months I’ve played Crusader builds (Blessed Shield, Condemn, Invoker) and it’s a bummer that our DH builds are half the power. You really notice this with trash clearing builds – they are all so underwhelming – and you cannot take Rapid Fire into a group and get good results due to Wojhanni’s DIBS.
While Captain Crimson / Aughilds helped a few builds survive in GR125+, the class needs damage buffs … again …
Here’s What I Recommend to Fix the Flagship Builds
- A new bracer that reduces the amount of rockets cast by 1, but buffs all rocket damage by 600%. (to prevent lag, and to make certain runes competitive with grenade / hellcat).
- Manticore needs an upgrade, make it 50% RCR to everything and 500% damage. (improve CC3 synergy – helping with defense while making the builds more mobile)
- Bombardier’s Rucksack, give it 50% cooldown reduction on Sentry (less clunk).
- S2 bonus should go up to 12,000%. (FoK and Impale need help – this is 5GRs and 3:00 min RG kills in GR150)
- Nerf Wohjanni Assaulter to 2250% @ 75% per stack, but make it multiplicative DIBS. (Rapid Fire % rolls and Strongarms/MfD now matter – best of all you can take this into groups)
- Lord Greenstone’s Fan, lower the cap to 15 stacks, increase to 1000% per second and, drop the buff after 3 seconds of use (i want to chain cast Knives Expert).
This will make M6 Cluster Arrow a thing (Shooting Stars and Maelstrom should be more potent). It will put Multishot Arsenal on top – it should take out the fishiness, 2 rockets will strike targets very hard. It will also make S2 hybrids very good for FoK, and may help offset damage buffs to N6 Strafe and RoV which will increase the ceiling of N6 FoK clears. I think the 15 second to full charge on LGF will make FoK appealing to more players.
Here’s What I Recommend to Fix the Forgotten Builds
- Strafe xBows need multiplicative damage around 350% each. (it’s never just strafe, this skill is always paired with RoV and or FoK)
- Crashing Rain needs to buff Rain of Vengeance damage, so an appropriate % should be assigned here – I do not have a number in mind.
- Danetta’s Hatred Set, shadow clones should buff damage by 50% and defense by 8% per clone, buff Vault damage to at least 4000% – with this behavior, players can use this set just like Wizards use Deathwish + Etched Sigil – for big explosive play.
- Chakram/Elemental Arrow are treated as a primary skill when either Spines of Seething Hatred or Kridershot is equipped. (buffed by Depth Diggers, Simplicity Strength and Hunters Wrath)
- Spines of Seething Hatred is increases damage by 350%. (Chakram skill is slightly weaker than Elemental Arrow btw.)
- Augustine’s Panacea increases damage by 300% to slow ball and the other skills are 1400%. Kridershot remains the same.
- Spike Trap gets buffed by a new set.
With these number recommendations, I am targeting GR134-140 for high paragon players. Let me know what you think.
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