I'll say that I'm a little disappointed, but it's a definitely an improvement. I'm looking forward to Cluster Arrow runes and Iconic Abilities.

I've actually have been using Evasive Fire all along so I don't necessarily think it needs to be buffed, because its secondary effect is incredibly powerful.

The reason no one uses Bolas in Inferno isn't because of the damage output - it's already good against mobs - but that it takes a full second to do its damage. I don't care about buffed damage when there are 4 Spiderlings teabagging my corpse. The only buff that will make it useable in Inferno is decreasing the time to explosion. Bola is fantastic on the earlier levels of difficulty and so the skill is good enough for me.

Grenades are there for LOH tanks and will always suck in every other case no matter what you do. Don't bother trying to fix them; you'll just anger the four guys in the world that actually use them right now.

No one uses Chakram because of its inconsistent hit box. I'm not going to stand there and fire off a weapon that has a 50/50 chance of hitting no matter how much damage it deals. I'll take Cluster Arrow, Impale and Elemental Arrow over Chakram in my Skill bar every time. The only people using Chakram in 1.03 are the DH tanks for Shuriken Cloud LOH procs and they'll be the only people using them after 1.04. They look cool, but they're not practical on a fundamental level.

I like the buff to Cluster Arrow base damage and maybe a rune other than Cluster Bombs will justify its obscene Hatred cost.

I'm hopeful about Iconic Abilities. They suffer from the same problem as Chakram with the inconsistent hit box, but these could potentially be powerful enough to squeeze in my skill bar as a good mob skills.

Sentry is always doomed to be a LOH proc / Guardian Shield machine for DH tanks, because all other DH have to kite. Any stationary damage source is entirely worthless for them. Doubling 0 damage is still 0 damage. If your DH doesn't have to kite, then you don't need Sentry's damage output, in the first place. Make Sentry a pet orbiting around the DH and you might have something.

you can also comment the article directly, I discovered this feature today.

I am a bit disappointed by the DH, it felt to me like the other classes got better improvements.

I agree with you regarding Bola.
I loved it up to level 60 and had to give it up in Inferno. The 1 or 2s wait is too much.

I too am somewhat disappointed.. Like you've said, the buffs apply to skills that don't have much functionality already. Didn't even see anything about the companion skill. Bat is literally the only useful one. Hoping there's some more things that make sense in the actual patch notes.

I changed my mind. Blizzard did absolutely nothing positive for Inferno DH, only negative as they completely killed the DH tank. :(

Skill Rune - Jagged Spikes
Can no longer trigger procs

Grenades
Skill Rune - Gas Grenades
Proc coefficient reduced from 0.5 to 0.165

Skill Rune - Shuriken Cloud
Weapon damage increased from 30% to 34%
Proc coefficient reduced from 0.333 to 0.125

I thought they would nerf it, but not kill it entirely. They just reduced every one of those skills to complete an utter uselessness. There is literally no situation ever when those skills will ever be used ever.

We'll see how much they nerf Ghom if a DH can now kill Ghom without supremely godly gear. I really appreciate correcting the community's outcry of how overpowered the DH tank class was. They can all just go burn in Inferno.

Seriously, though, Inferno Demon Hunters got absolutely nothing in this patch. Not a single change they made will make a notable Inferno-viable subclass. I don't know that any other classes got anything either, but the only thing they did to DH was kill off one niche subclass. I guess they figured DH were good enough already?

What a joke.

DHs have had nothing but nerfs to the ground. I expected to see them rework Nether Tentacles at some point. The last nerf caused this rune to become probably the most useless of elemental arrow runes.

You're saying you don't think it's useful to have a cLvL 60 Rune drain 200 life from an enemy on Inferno? I'm shocked.

Lol. I hate reading sarcasm on the internet, so ambiguous.

Sorry about the sarcasm. I'll say I was a little wrong about Bola. The 30% damage buff makes a difference. When fired into a pack of 4 or more monsters, it does more damage than any other hatred generator DH's have. This is particularly useful in multiplayer where they can pack around your tank. Still relatively niche skill, but legitimately useful in Inferno.

Evasive Fire was already viable and is now perfectly acceptable as the primary attack. Chakram and Sentry are still worthless despite the buffs. LOH Procs are now pointless on DH in Inferno (so glad I killed Ghom pre-patch). Impale is as useful as it once was with little change - a fantastic complement to Evasive Fire. I haven't tried the Arrow Rain.

Overall, I think Blizzard has indeed given us a wider variety of play styles they promised. I'm surprisingly pleased.

I love Bola, I used it extensively on my DH, but had to give up on it i Inferno, it's just too slow.
maybe it's more viable in co-op play.

and I am really thrilled they lowered the hatred cost on Multishot, I love spamming it on Act I mobs or spiders.

can't wait to try the new patch :)
Blizzard deployed it 3 or 4h before the "deadline", kudos to them for that.

Posted by Venoom at 08/22/2012 05:04 AM

and I am really thrilled they lowered the hatred cost on Multishot, I love spamming it on Act I mobs or spiders.

I tried multishot a little. Do you use the reduced cost Rune? It still seemed to go a little quickly for me at 30 Hatred. I never thought to try it on spiders, though, and that has me a bit excited. I hated those swarming critters. Flux on IncGamers is a fan of Rain of Vengeance - Stampede so I might have to try that instead of my Spike Traps tonight.

Multishot is amazing! you just spam everything with it and it cleans your screen in no time provided you have enough DPS.
a Critted Multishot can be deadly for your ennemies.

I use it with the reduced cost Rune. I'd rather use it twice as much than use any of the other runes.
It also gives you nice bonus experience points for the Paragon thingy if you have enough DPS to one-shoot the whole mob.

Multishot is also extremely useful if you ever decide to farm Normal/Nightmare/Hell for Legendaries/Set.
that and some movement speed makes your run extremely fast.

Wow. Thanks for the tip. I hadn't thought about Gold runs on Nightmare/Hell. I have been saving some MF & GF gear when I find it and those would be great for making GF runs and you're right about multishot. Hot knife through butter. Makes me want to try the Grenadier (+Hatred) and Vengeance (+Hatred from health globes) for those runs. Two Grenade-Tinker tosses would generate enough Hatred for another Multishot. Toss on Hungering Arrow for single enemies and you'd basically never have to stop running and gunning with enough pickup radius.

I love feeling overpowered and this has so much potential. Upvote to you, my friend.

Edit: Oh! Oh! Strafe was buffed. You might literally not have to stop running. Might even be worth the Bat Companion over the Ferret companion. So many things to try so little time!

thanks for the upvote :)

if your gear is good, you can use some passives like the one that gives you a bonus movement speed when you're at full hatred, and/or the one that gives you additional hatred/discipline when you pick up health globes (Vengeance) and of course Tactical Advantage for additional 2s added movement speed.
you don't need any SharpShooter, Archery or anything for lower difficulty levels.

and you can use Preparation to restore your discipline, with the rune that gives you a chance to skip the cooldown (since you normally don't need the BattleScars rune in lower levels)

I did a few Act III Nightmare runs with high MF, found some nice gear that I sold for 50k-200k a piece and vendored the rest.
I usually got 1 to 2Mio per run after selling everything.

but the European AH was a bit dead for me recently, I couldn't sell much of what I looted on my last run.
so I geared up (and sacrificed MF) to progress Act II Inferno.

I also often did Poney Level Hell after collecting 5xNV (extremely fast to collect it in Hell) and found some nice amulets/rings and some useless Legendaries.
I might do it again now that they buffed the Legendaries.

Interesting thought on the Preparation - Backup Plan. Keeps the speed up nice and quick.

If Strafe works out, then Preparation - Punishment (restore all hatred for 25 Discipline no cooldown) could allow Strafe to feel like it's going forever. Start with 50 Discipline, have the passive increasing Hatred by 25 +Hatred and Discipline for Health Globes. Toss in added Hatred Regeneration from Gear, Bat companion, and 2 Preparations-Punishments and that would be a very long Strafe in a heavy mob area. Recharge all your resources while you run back to collect the Magic and Rare loot. I'll never be able to afford a full Natalya's set, but that would add +2 Discipline per second and could bump it to 3 Prepartion-Punishments if you run into consistent enough mobs.

Man, I won't have more than 1 NV stack testing this out, but I'll have more fun than I have in the past 2 weeks figuring this out.

why wouldn't you have more than 1NV?
there are tons of Elite in Act III Nightmare/Hell and you collect the 5 stacks pretty quickly.

I just meant I'll be switching skills every few minutes to the ideal Multishot set-up for my gear and the ideal Near-Infinite Strafe build for my gear. How much damage/defense/HP can I give up for Gold Find? The skill changes are going to reset my NV while I work it out and it'll probably take a few runs to get it working right.

Operation Strafe Everything was a mild success. I was able to slice through absolutely everything on Normal with my full MF gear on without taking any damage of note. That was extremely fun for about an hour. I moved up to Nightmare and had to adjusted my skills slightly to accommodate the slightly longer Strafes required to take down Elite packs. With success there, I moved onto Act 3 Hell Sin Hearts and had to put on my full Inferno gear to comfortable kill the monsters and the Strafes lasted much longer. That said, it still held up. I died once from 3 Elite packs converging on me at once. I'm not even going to bother trying Inferno as there's no realistic way Strafe can hold up damage-wise to pretty much any other useful skill at that point. Before the patch, it wasn't viable after Nightmare so the buff was useful to move it up to Hell.

The LOH proc from Strafe must be considerably low, because I wasn't gaining life off of it very often. Blizzard definitely doesn't want DH using LOH gear.

There's absolutely no doubt that the best Leoric's Signet bots are going to be Strafe DH. The monster levels are perfect in Vault of the Assassin so it's a natural MF run. There's a fairly good chance all gold bots are going to be Strafe DH, too. The ability to kill creatures without stopping is awesome. Even with only 12 Yard pick up radius, I was grabbing pretty much every stack of gold that dropped from the mobs I was mowing down. Strafe also holds the speed increase from Vault making it even better for Gold runs.

I tried multishot and while I'm not completely sold on it, I'll probably keep it on with Hungering Arrow for a few days to see if I can fine tune using it. I'll have to try out Rain of Vengeance tomorrow as an alternative to my Spike Trap. I guess the Rampage rune has a pretty impressive stun timer even on Inferno which could prove very useful.

I remember trying Strafe.
in the beginning, I found it cool, and then it stopped working.
My DH would only strife for like half a second then say that he can not do that.
no clue why, and I didn't try again since then. Maybe it's a bug that got fixed. Or do you have to equip a dagger for it to work?
I still prefer Multishot by far anyway.

I tried it yesterday, I rarely ran out of Hatred with the new lowered cost, it really makes a difference.
Loot was mildly better for me but still crap, and no Legendaries for quite a while.
bad luck RNG, I guess.

I think you must've been running out of Hatred, because that's the only time you can't Strafe with the message "I can't do that." It will also stop if you get Jailed or Vortexed which makes it substantially less useful in Hell and above. They'll need to fix it such that the Strafe isn't broken when that happens before it could realistically see play in Hell. Wallers are terrible, because the walls block so many arrows you run through your hatred without hitting anything.

In addition to Rain of Vengeance, I'm going to try Cluster Arrow tonight. The Hatred cost is still stupidly high, but the increased damage could make up for it like it has with Bola. I should probably give Chakram another try since I gave it only 2 minutes before dropping it. It's just so inconsistent I can't ever seeing it be as useful as any other damage skill.

Update: Chakram is worthwhile as long as the enemy your targeting stands still approximately 10 yards away from you. That's it. I hope Blizzard replaces this skill entirely with something else, because it's fundamentally broken and will never work.

Cluster Arrow is great, but you only get 2 or 3 shots before running out of Hatred. for Inferno, you probably need to be able to get off at least 5 shots, so the cost needs to come down to about 30 Hatred.

Rain of Vengeance is definitely better and I'm usually kiting Elites for more than 30 seconds so I can get it off at least twice per battle. I think if I learn how to use each rune effectively, one or two could be a useful skill on Inferno. It's never going to be the "best" skill, but it can be effect through at least Act 2 Inferno.

Sentry is still pointless for a solo character that has to kite every enemy. In groups, it's only useful as a 15% damage reduction skill, which entirely defeats the purpose of the skill. This skill was never useful over the course of the entire game for me. Maybe bumping up the damage made it viable on Nightmare or something, but it seems like another skill that needs to be scrapped in its entirety and replaced with something interesting. When it takes three +200% Crit Damage shots to take down some high level white monsters, 55% weapon damage from the Sentry is barely noticeable.

many many skills are pointless in Inferno.
Before that, you could pretty much tank everything (almost) even with average gear as long as you had enough DPS. I rarely had to kite.
but in Inferno, where almost everything one-shoot you, you have to kite constantly, rendering many skills pointless for a DH.

The idea was that with this patch, Blizzard was trying to allow players to have more builds and not all have to use the same build. For the most part, 1.03 solo DH either used Hungering Arrow & Cluster Arrow-Cluster Bombs or Evasive Fire & Impale (or Elemental Arrow). There was also the odd tank here or there, but that was pretty much it. I found Rapid Fire and Elemental arrow and Bola to be viable with a solid tank in multiplayer.

The DH tanks were eliminated with the proc coefficient changes on all of their LOH generating skills. I'm just searching around their changes to see if I can find which skills are now viable.

Also, with enough gear, Inferno monsters won't be one-shoot you. I can take at least one hit pretty much anywhere in Inferno and in most of Act 2 I can take two hits. 20,000 HP on Health Globe fills up my health bar pretty quick, though I'm thinking I should see if I can push a lot of life regen onto my gear instead.

I've experimented with just about all of the skills now and I think my favorite newly upgraded skill is Fan of Knives from a fun standpoint, but I still don't think I'd run it regularly. The main problem with it is that Blizzard doesn't really seem to know what to do with it.

If they meant it as a melee skill then the cooldown makes it worthless. As a melee skill the cooldown would have to be 1-2 seconds max (not 10). If, instead, they meant it as a way for a bow DH to escape a mob, then they're competing against Vault and they'll lose that comparison every time. If you're interested in slowing a nearby pack of monsters, Caltrops will do that far more effectively than Fan of Knives will.

To make it a viable skill slot, first and foremost, it needs to be 20 yards in the base skill. I tried all the Runes and only the one that increased the radius to 20 yards is Inferno viable for a bow DH. If anything closes to within 10 yards, you're Vaulting away not trying to fight your way through a mob. That's similar to how the only Bola Rune worthwhile in Inferno is the 14-yard explosion.

If you want to try it out, you're going to want to use it primarily for the slowing effect. The cooldown makes it worthless as a primary damage-dealing skill. You'll want to make sure your dps is pretty high and that you can take a hit or two in case it misses (and it does miss sometimes >_<). It shines in the Desolate Sands and the Vault. They're more consistent at slowing the darned jumping Lacunas than Caltrops and there are loads of large slow mobs in the Vault. My favorite trick was to Vault into a pack, set off a Knives, Vault back and let loose a few Evasive Fires. If you manage to get a crit, the entire mob of Skeletons will explode all at once and it's a sight to behold.

If you give me another 2 skill slots, then I might find room for it permanently, because it's probably one of the best niche skills in my opinion. With only 6 skill slots, niche skills don't make the cut.

Ultimately, though, the highest damage set I prefer to run is still Evasive Fire / Impale / Spike Traps-Scatter just the same as before the patch. In multiplayer, Multishot easily takes the place of Impale. I don't think it sees widespread use, because in pretty much every public game I've been in, people have been surprised by how much damage 3 consecutive multishots can do; I'm running about 40% crit chance so 19 of 20 times one of those three hits for a +200% damage crit and 1 out of 7 times the first two both hit for crits destroying entire packs in 1 second. Maybe they're just all used to having the DH sit in the back and fire Hungering Arrows contributing little to the party's damage.

I've found Hungering Arrow / Multishot / Spike Traps to be equally viable solo Inferno. Thanks to Venoom for pointing it out and thanks to Blizzard for lowering the cost to make it Inferno-viable.