Diablo 3 Demon Hunter

Most interesting part in the Killer Guides D3 Demon Hunter guide was their section on the BUILDS! Knowing your builds is like knowing your religion. You know exactly how your going to play up your Demon Hunter just like how I knew to up my chr.

Chakram, this was interesting. I did make use of it in a couple of places. It was a little silly though. Here you go. So I’m a ninja that shoots that. I
don’t know, it might be something you think is really cool. I think it
looks kind of dumb and I think it’s pretty hard to land. They are going to
be some pro players who manage to do it amazingly.

But I don’t know, it’s not going to be me, probably because I’m not going to be playing this too much. But there you go, that’s Chakram. Decent amount of damage. Ton of hatred. Not as much as Grenades, but ton of hatred. There it is.

Impale, so these are the abilities I haven’t gotten to use yet, everything grayed out obviously. And some of them, as soon as you get past level 13, I
believe that’s where the cutoff is, everything past level 13 is just not
available in the beta at all.

So here we go. Impale, cost 20 hatred. Fire a massive shot to impale a target for a 220% weapon damage. Now I’m not sure if there’s anything different about the word impale, like maybe there’s some CC attached to it. It doesn’t say it so I’m going to assume there’s not. But 20 hatred shot, 220% weapon damage. That’s pretty substantial.

Spike Trap, lay a trap that arms after 0.8 seconds and triggers when an enemy approaches. The trap does 16 to 20 physical damage to all enemies within eight yards. You can have a maximum of three Spike Traps active at one time. My thoughts on it based on the game that I’ve seen so far: traps don’t have a purpose and neither do Caltrops, which I’ll get into. They don’t have a purpose yet, because nothing is getting close to me in such a way that I actually want to use it. I might be able to make some use of it on Skeleton King, I don’t know. But anyway, I’m sure that later on down the game, these kinds of things are going to be very helpful, especially on more complex boss fights.

Elemental Arrow, 25 hatred. Shoot an Elemental Arrow or charged arrow that deals 100% weapon damage as fire damage to all targets it passes through. So take it for what it is. It’s passing through targets. It says that in the description, but I’m not sure the mechanics of it, whether it will pierce through all targets. But that could be pretty powerful, I don’t know.

Multi-Shot, fire a massive volley of arrows, dealing 110% weapon damage to
all enemies in the area. So Mult-Shot is two little concepts, I’m not sure
which one it’s going to be, volley versus multi-Shot, multi-Shot being the
ability where you shoot several areas in front of you, versus a volley
which is ….

So here’s what I’m getting at. I’m not even going to try to
belabor this terrible, distorted, contorted description I’m saying. Is it
going to be a cone in front of you, or is it going to be an area effect?
Is it going to be an area effect like I think hunters in World of Warcraft
had an AOE. They would target a location and arrows would rain down,
whatever. Or is it going to be a cone in front of you, where it’s going to
hit targets in front of you? I’m not sure from that description. We’ll see.

Cluster Arrow, 35 hatred. Fire a cluster grenade that explodes for
120% weapon damage into a series of additional mini-bombs that explode for
40% weapon damage each. Could be cool. Could be really cool in AOE packs,
large groups of mobs. I don’t know, but the description makes it sound
like there’s some interesting mechanics there. I mean, mini-bombs, cool.

Rapid Fire, 20 hatred per second. Rapidly fire at six times you normal
attack speed, dealing 30% weapon damage with every shot. 20 hatred per
second, that’s what I’m missing there. So for 20 hatred per second, you
can rapidly fire at six times your normal attack speed. The math just
quickly in my head, that seems like it would be good. Somebody’s going to
get real deep into those numbers and it’s probably not going to be me.

Straif, 20 hatred per second. Shoot three times per second at random,
nearby enemies while moving at 55% of normal movement speed. Every shot
deals 60% of weapon damage. It sounds like you move slower and you are
randomly shooting but you are actually hitting enemies as you move. Every
shot deal 60% of weapon damage so not that much, but you could probably
clear through a large area with stuff that’s not too difficult. I don’t
know. This could be amazing. I just can’t tell you. It seems like you
would be moving slowly but like an AC130 blowing everything up as you go.

Let’s see. Finally, Rain of Arrows, one minute cool down. Fire a massive
volley of arrows around you. Arrows fall from the sky for five seconds,
dealing an average of 105% weapon damage per second. From the sky, so
maybe the other one is a volley. Multi-Shot is just a straight shot in
front of you, maybe a cone or something. Arrows fall from the sky. I
hated that animation, but it could be pretty cool, as far as the damage
dealt.

It’s like these ceilings don’t mean anything in here. When my
diablo 3 barbarian leveling was jumping through the ceiling to get somewhere? It could be
pretty good damage. There’s nothing interesting about that. One minute
cool down. That’s it.

Caltrops, let’s get back into here. So the first section I did was the offensive section. The second section here is going to be the discipline section. This is going to be stuff that actually uses our discipline bar. So let’s start with Caltrops. These are little traps that I can lay all around. Lay a trap from Caltrops on the ground that activates when an enemy approaches. Once sprung, the Caltrops slow the movement of enemies within 12 yards by 50%.

This trap lasts 12 seconds. It lasts quite a while. If you’re going to use it, you should be able to lay it and it will still effect whatever you need it to effect. That’s why I was questioning how valuable is the 100% additional time on passive. Situational. It may be very, very valuable. I don’t know. On Caltrop, this doesn’t do any damage. So I had no use for it in the play through. That’s just how it is. There wasn’t really much need for defensive play in the play-through.

So there you go. It doesn’t do much damage. It does work as advertised. It does slow enemies approaching you, so it would be effective in that regard when you need to use it.

Let’s go ahead and look at Vault. I already showed you this. This is amazing. I can’t do it a third time here because I just used too much. Anyway, it doesn’t work too well on stairs, if you see. Well, it didn’t work so bad on stairs. But my experience hasn’t been so good on stairs.

Anyway, it’s very, very good for quick repositioning on say, fights like the Skeleton King, where it has a charge animation. If you time it right, you can always charge away when he is landing in. It’s pretty straightforward. It’s not as good, in my opinion, as the Furious Leap, or whatever the barbarian skill is named. It’s not as good as that leap, because the cool down is shorter, you can chain it together. It’s just different. It’s not that it’s better or worse, it’s just different. But you can’t go over the barrier and
obstacles that say the barbarian can. Even in places where it looks like
you should be able to, you can’t.

So the diablo 3 barbarian guide has an edge on where he can get to, the versatility of it, whereas 3 demon hunter here has an edge on getting wherever you want to go really fast. So that is what it is.

Let’s go and look at the next abilities here. Marked for Death, I made some use of this, just applied it to my two-button and quickly any mob that I see, I can press two on, very quickly, it will … wow. Well here, perfect. I didn’t even realize that was there. So I’ve just put that on. There it is. And let’s go ahead and use our grenades. Anyway, Marked for Death, I can apply it. It will cause me to mark and enemy. The marked enemy will take 20% additional damage for the next 30 seconds.

Smoke Screen, 15 discipline. Vanish behind a wall of smoke, becoming momentarily invisible for two seconds. I do not know how this works. Can I actually move while this is active? I assume yes, but I don’t know. It costs 15 discipline, so I can only use that twice quickly before I’m totally out of discipline.

Companion, costs 10 discipline. Summon a raven companion.
Your raven companion will periodically peck at enemies for seven to nine
damage. I don’t know how long it lasts, whether it’s a permanent
companion, or whether it will go away after a short time. It doesn’t say
anything about that, so I’m hoping it’s going to be permanent. The ten
discipline cost isn’t very much. Finally, demon hunter has a summon skills like diablo 3 witch doctor guide.

Shadow Power, 20 discipline. Draw in the power of the shadows, increasing attack speed by 50% for ten seconds. That’s a high discipline cost, but again the discipline stuff is actually pretty defensive. So if you’re not too worried about the defensive parts and you can get the Marked for Death up, Shadow Power is probably going to be a good thing to use, especially in pretty serious fights where you’ve got a group, and your group is taking care of the incoming damage.

I don’t see too much that’s going to be too much more important but let’s see.
Invis, Vault, Caltrops, Marked for Death, so you want Marked for Death up
obviously. Companion, you probably, hopefully will be able to summon that
beforehand. So Shadow Power looks like a great offensive skills, ten
seconds of hugely increased attack speed.

Century, ten discipline. Drop a turret on the ground, because this is normal. Our demon huntress is actually an engineer. Drop a turret on the ground. The turret begins firing at nearby enemies for 40% of weapon damage. Lasts ten seconds.

Let’s go ahead and throw this out here. Let’s say Shadow Power 50%, earn 20 discipline. Century, 10 discipline, so I could use both of those. 6
discipline on Marked for Death. Just some quick math here. So you could
actually use all three of these, but if you have the 20% reduced discipline
cost, you could use Marked for Death, and then immediately use Shadow
Power, or use Century and immediately use Shadow Power. And you could use
all of them without any regen occurring at all. Just a guess. I don’t
know if this will be useful to anybody or not.

Finally, Utility, cool down 120 seconds. Instantly restore all discipline. That’s pretty useful. But it is what it is. You’ve seen the abilities that use discipline. They are pretty cool, particularly something like Vault, Shadow Power, Century, Century is probably pretty cool, Marked for Death. Well, Marked for Death is 30 seconds. You would never use preparation to use Marked for Death. I’m just going to say that here, hopefully.

Anyway between these, you do get some pretty cool abilities. Diablo 3 class leveling going to help out. Pretty straightforward. So now we’ve covered everything as far as active skills. If you haven’t paid attention to this during play throughs, the thing to know about them is that you only have a certain number of slots available. You can’t do something like apply a buff to yourself and then switch out the buff spell.

In Marked for Death, let’s see if I can find any enemy very quickly here. Let’s see if I can get this mark out. Now instead of having Marked for Death, let’s switch this over here. What’s going to happen, nothing. The Marked for Death is staying up and I’ve switched the ability out. At the very least I’ve showed you that you can actually pick Marked for Death and then switch out to a different ability.

But the whole point that I was getting to here is with active skills, you can only have a certain number in your tool kit at a given time. So if you’re in the midst of combat and you don’t want to be switching out skills, you want to go in with the skills that you want to have for that fight. Or just generally, for dungeon running, a general set of skills. So you won’t always have what you want. But over time, you get more slots to have more of these skills available to you on-hand, on your hop bar, ready to use.

And as you have more of those available to you, you can use more of these cool things. Like Caltrops, for instance. I would not even consider using it if I only had two or three slots available. But once I had all slots available, I might have a good use for Caltrops.

I might say I’m making use of this enough to justify it. Anyway, all about the tool kit. All about the number of skills you have available at a given time. We got this one, I think, at level nine. The Chakram, the one that’s filled with Chakram right now. Then obviously 12, 18 and 24.