Update (April 18, 2012) – this post is a little outdated already so I have updated the Demon Hunter’s Passive skills in this extensive DH guide.

During the original play through, I believe I played through with a normal cross bow. I could be wrong on that. I’ll jump into that a little, I think, during the active abilities, just so I can show you the hatred difference as far as spending it. Archery is based on the type of weapon you get different bonuses.

Perfectionist, reduce the discipline costs of all skills by 20%. Discipline is used to fuel many of your tactical and defensive skills. So quickly, just to demonstrate this: Vault is a standard ability. Let’s go ahead and show it here. It’s pretty cool, actually, you can chain it together. Once I have enough I’ll go ahead and do a Vault and keep moving, because that’s another thing. It doesn’t interrupt movement.

For some reason, I remember it did, but I could be totally wrong on that. While I was playing through, that was the second class I played, whatever. So the vault is 10 discipline, so if we have 30 discipline here, that means I can use it three times and then I’m just totally out.

Now if I’m doing my math correctly, I would only spend 24 discipline to use it three times if I had that particular passive skill. It’s 8 per because 20% of 10 is 2, and then that makes the remaining cost 8. So let’s go ahead and say that it costs 24, and I may have actually regenerated those 4 by the time I’m done doing 3.

So that might be the kind of thing where I could actually break out and, during the course of using three, I’ve generated enough discipline to use a fourth immediately after. That’s a guess. I really don’t know how it’s going to play out and I can’t test it and so whatever.

Custom Engineer, the duration of your Caltrops, Marked for Death, Spike Trap, and Century abilities are increased by 100%. I don’t know, this could be very useful, but really from what I’ve seen, with Caltrops and Marked for Death, duration isn’t an issue. But again, I could be totally wrong on that. I haven’t seen Spike Trap and I haven’t seen Century. So take it for what it is. I don’t know how that will play out. A lot of these deeper things I’m just not going to know because we can’t test them. We can’t see if they’re good or not. Maybe diablo 3 guide will help us this issue.

Grenadier, reduces the hatred cost of your grenades and cluster arrow
abilities by 15. Upon death, you drop a giant grenade that explodes for 91
to 137 damage. That’s what it is.

Sharpshooter, gain a 3% chance to critical hit every second. This bonus is reset one second after you successfully critical hit. I’m guessing, this reminds me a little bit of Ash in League of Legends, 3% chance to critical hit every second and that’s accumulating. So you have 3%, 6% and 9% after three seconds. That keeps accumulating so you’re basically, after a little period of time, almost guaranteed to crit. That’s a guess. I don’t know exactly if that’s how it’s going to play, but there it is.

Ballistics, damage from rockets increase by 100%. Rockets are fired from certain socketed skill effects. Okay. Socketed skill effects? I’m not even going to get in there because I don’t know. So let’s go ahead and get into the active skills.