The feedback here is absolutely bonkers. It does not bring out the best side of players either.
We have a more productive thread in our own forum, with proposed item revisions.
The DH class does not need a champion, we can speak collectively and be heard.
Very soon, it will be PTR time, and we will see if dev revisions occur out of the gate, let us not forget there is an appropriate forum for PTR feedback that will be opening soon.
My apologies, dmkt and Saidosha.
I played no small part in the derailment of the thread, I fear. I’m really sorry about that.
I play almost nothing but DH’s. Yes it would be nice to get more Buff’s for the DH. But when is it going to end that everybody cries that their character needs more Buff’s.
What to have it where everything you kill is done with one hit. No matter what the monster is. What to have a 100 billion damage.
Plus I’m really sick of the Barb’s this season. No matter what you play. It is like a bunch of little mindless kids, just running as fast as they can through everything.
I had a DH back before the ROS add-on. That was really great and I could do urbs and never die. Where even the best Barb was dying. Then the ROS came out and Blizzard took those buff’s away. Yes I was mad, but I move on and still played the DH.
What the point I’m making is when will this STOP that they keep doing Buff’s on every character. Till we get to a point that we have a 100 billion damage and one hit kills the biggest baddest monster out there.
We’re not asking for buffs just for the sake of buffs, though I do understand your point, but it’s more about class balance.
We’re pretty close to perfect when comes to balance within our own class but when we start comparing to other classes we’re behind.
We’d like to get up to equal footing and since, unless our class overshot some arbitrary goal set by the devs, we haven’t seen many nerfs, then what we can expect is buffs, so asking for them would not be out of line.
That said, your point is well taken.
I’m no Demon Hunter, but quite honestly I had expected you guys to get a new set instead of wizards and barbs.
With that said, I respect the Demon Hunters discipline and hope they get the attention that they need.
@Prokahn: Thank you for trying to bring back some reasoning into this thread. 
By my understanding, the main issue is the following:
The general concept of Diablo III (especially in terms of GR pushing) and the original class design of the Demon Hunter doesn’t match (any more).
Sorry if I sound like a broken record. (And yes, I am aware that I am doing some cherry picking in the examples below).
D3 is strongly focused on Area Damage. More enemies in one place means exorbitant more damage. If you look at any arbitrary High-GR clear, you will see lots and lots of enemies all the time, pulled together, and killing them with AD. Especially in group play.
We have literally no passive that somehow benefits from high density. Neither for more damage, nor for more toughness, nor for better ressource regeneration. On the contrary, we benefit from low density!
Every high GR clear uses Stricken (afaik). The reason is connected to AD as well. Most builds do heavily rely on AD, lacking single target damage. Stricken is a poorly designed kludge to solve this issue, imho.
DH is my favourite class because of the second ressource Discipline, which replaces the ressource “cooldown” from most other classes. The best example is our escape skill Vault, which has no cooldown, but costs Discipline. That’s actually really great, imho.
However, our main ressource is a huge issue. Tbh, I don’t now much about other classes, but from my short trips to other classes, ressource regeneration is not such a huge issue there. The most recent WW Barb for example: If there are enough monsters, ressource regeneration is trivial. The more monsters, the better. Even the “non trivial way” with Istvans leads to a laughably simple ressource management (compared to most DH builds).
The DH can’t regenerate ressources faster with more enemies around. But - surprise - our ressource generators do work even if we hit nothing with it. And almost every build is using a Generator, which doesn’t do any damage at all, but we need to use it, as we need the hatred.
Even with weapons like Manticore and Yang (~50% RCR), hatred management remains an issue. By my opinion a much larger issue than with other classes.
We also always need Dawn for perma Vengeance (10 hatred per second). And if we don’t need the hatred, we need it for the double toughness rune. Because: In S6, we need to go into melee combat, which we wouldn’t survive, as we don’t have supporting passives (or other skills) for that.
The only build without Dawn is N6M4, where we need to stack a lot of RCR and Hatred-Regneration on our gear, often sacrificing other useful rolls. And - surprise again - that build wasn’t even intended and was planned to be nerfed to the ground during a PTR back then. I’m kinda proud that I’ve got my little part in convincing the Devs to let this build stay in the game.
Just buffing the damage wouldn’t do the job, probably. We need more, and these changes would require much more testing than 2 weeks on a PTR.
S20 buff will actually benefit the DH really well if the devs finally give the ability to cube furnace.
Please stop promoting Furnace for the DH. That’s the last thing we need. Furnace is just a “Stricken light”, another workaround trying to fix something, without addressing the underlying problem.
This oft repeated by me but it bears repeating.
We have a “Furnace”. It’s called Dawn. Dawn is so much better than the furnace that it’s mandatory for all builds, so the Furnace wouldn’t replace it.
I’m going to assume, you’re talking about using it in the Shadow set.
So you wouldn’t replace Aquilla with it either because the damage resistance is too good to lose.
So we’re left with the ring slot which would mean losing CoE, Elusive, or RoRG if you’re using Aughild’s. Sooo, the Furnace wouldn’t fit into the build regardless if it was allowed or not.
I’m promoting furnace for this patch, because nothing else will happen in time
And it’s mentalities like yours that will hold you back from experiencing just how strong this seasonal buff really is. Think outside the box for s20, there’s more than cookie cutter builds
Of course, but cookie cutter builds are cookie cutter builds because they work.
Sure you could fit furnace in a build if you didn’t intend to play about T10 or so, but you’re not going to be farming T16 or running High Grifts with Furnace over Dawn, Aquilla, or Aughild’s.
But this will probably be taken as attacking you, which I’m not. I’m just saying Furnace isn’t the great buff for our class you think it is.
Up until s20 there has been no need to look past the cookie cutter build, because we were bound to the standard cube slots. Everything changes this season.
I have thick skin, no one on the forums can offend me lol
@Hebalon
Good post there. But nothing new. They know about it. They are not doing anything about it anyway.
It’s being looked at already for s20
I have never understood why it is so difficult to increase a multiplier on set bonuses. This does not change any mechanical interaction. In terms of DPS, a set that has a 1x multiplier when changed to 3x is equivalent to 7 GRs of monster hp.
smh
I agree. The Furnace is not available to a DH in the Cube because a DH cannot equip it. The request is essentially to remove the Cube’s class restrictions so that other class’s items could be utilised. That would open up the possibility of all sorts of nonsense in Season 20, where you could have three items from the same category as the Cube powers.
I thought of an example off the top of my head, the UE/Grenades DH. If they had access to the Barb’s Oathkeeper (50% increased attack speed and 200% damage to primary attacks) and the Monk’s Flying Dragon (doubles attack speed when attacking) that would lead to huge attack speed bonuses with a 3 times damage multiplier.
Hey Hebalon, I like your thoughts here. I just wanted to touch on one thing:
Ruthless and Ambush actually get an almost identical bonus from Stricken (Ruthless is about 0.8% more efficient).
For instance: Let’s say your Stricken gives you +2% per attack.
If you have an enemy with 1,000,000 life, and you’re doing 1000 damage per attack for the first 70% of life, and 1400 per attack for the last 30% of life, via the Ruthless model, it takes you 219 hits to reduce that enemy to below 300k, and you kill him on hit 257.
Given the same enemy, using the Ambush model, you reduce the enemy below 750k on hit 93 and kill him on hit 259. So, there is a difference, but it’s pretty small.
To start, I should tell you that I feel for you, and for all DH’s who feel like they’ve been left behind. I played exclusively DH for all of vanilla, and the class is still close to my heart.
I need to warn you that a buff that balances your class against other classes is almost certainly going to come at the expense of your interior class balance. Now, I’m definitely not saying “don’t pursue it”, just that you should prepare yourself for what might happen.
I mean, in hindsight, when Free and I wrote BBP, the interior class balance for Barbs was actually pretty good: maybe a 3-4 GR spread between our strongest build / set and our weakest. Today, that spread is roughly 10 GRs. My personal favorite build ever, Leapquake, basically went into the dumpster, and who knows if it’ll ever be seen again. I haven’t looked at the exact numbers, but it seems like a similar situation for Crusaders: one particular set/build is now way, way ahead.
I think you can expect, to a fairly high degree of certainty, that when your new set comes, it’ll be pretty powerful. Sadly, I think you can also expect all your other builds to be left in the dust.
The underlying reason for this, I think, is that the devs have determined that major changes are what bring people back to the game. So, rather than pursuing a policy of trying to bring all major builds for all classes into some logical semblance of balance, they will simply “highlight” a few things each season.
Maybe a season or two after your new set drops, they’ll then drop huge buffs onto some of the items for UE6, and that build will have its time in the sun. The next season, maybe they’ll buff the hell out of corpse lance Necro, and that will be back on top.
Bottom line: expect the overall balance picture to get worse, not better. I certainly hope I’m wrong. Best of luck in your efforts.
Thank you. I understand the situation you’re describing, and I also understand how it feels like you don’t have the personnel to get the ball rolling. When Rage and I were doing the Barb Proposal, we considered reaching out to all classes, finding the community experts, and making a larger, multi-class Buff Proposal pitch. Unfortunately, real life got in the way, and we didn’t have the time to dedicate to the project.
Do you mind if I ask you and other DH mains a few questions here? Maybe they’ll be fruitful.
Assume there are 2 and only 2 ways to buff DHs. The first way is to simply increase multipliers on existing items and sets until their respective builds are competitive. The second way is to overhaul (create new or modified affixes on) items (supporting legendaries only–no sets) to make builds stronger and more competitive. And let’s say the goal is to get every DH build able to do 138-140 at 8k Paragon.
How would ya’ll go about doing it each way for every DH build?
Create two lists. The first is simple numbers increases. Not graceful, but effective. The second list excludes the first and contains numbers increases and completely re-written item affixes–again, restrict yourself to only supporting legendaries, no sets.
For example, here’s a List 1 revision of Karlei’s Point (Impale is my favorite DH build and the only one with which I have extensive experience):
Karlei’s Point
The damage of Impale is increased by344%550% and it returns 15 Hatred if it hits an enemy already Impaled. (Demon Hunter Only)[300 - 375]%[550-625%]
That would be enough to bump Impale up by a few tiers. The damage value would have to be calculated with more precision based on other adjusted items.
And here’s a List 2 Revision:
Karlei’s Point
The damage of Impale is increased by344%550% and it returns 15 Hatred if it hits an enemy already Impaled. (Demon Hunter Only)[300 - 375]%[550-625%]. You take 5% decreased damage from enemies recently Impaled.
I think you get my point. This can be a great way to start a public discussion. You’ll just have to be able to weed out the bad ideas from the good.
Excellent point – I agree 100%. I think the problem lies in the fact that Blizzard has done a very poor job (until recently) in cultiavating their community here on the forums. They’re far too hands-off and unwilling to help cultivate forum experts and MVPs. In other words, part of the reason the community is in this state is due to their inactivity and neglect. There are other reasons, of course, but this is a big part of it.
Some folks in this thread seem hesitant to propose fixes and present problems in a more assertive way, but I’m here to tell you: That’s not gonna work.
You’ll need to do both. Reach out to Reddit, to other D3 forums. If you don’t have experts here, find them elsewhere. Bring them together.
And like Rage noted, throw “balance” out the window. It is not the end goal of getting your class buffed.
Nev has explained this multiple times. You can dig up her posts for more info.
You’re “smh” at a back and forth pun fest that Rage and I had in a thread on the Barb forum? You realize the “win” refers to the puns? Now I’m over here smdh at you because you can have pun, too.
I’m no math wiz, Meteor, but that set up wouldn’t be the huge buff to UE Grenades you think it.
First, Oathkeeper would basically replace Hunter’s Wrath Belt and Depth Diggers. Flying Dragon would increase the attack speed a bit more, but no more than any other kind of buff a season usually gives. The kicker would be being able to use Krysbin’s instead of any other ring since it’s the best in the game.
But even with all those multipliers it wouldn’t elevate UE Grenades to the top of the leaderboard because most of them would be a near one to one switch.