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Build Guide

Greetings,

What we have today is a modification of the standard Shadow's Mantle Impale build making use of the new season 10 legendary affix on Holy Point Shot to throw 2 additional impales, this makes Impale as long as your hitting a target refund quite a bit of hatred, allowing us to largely disregard a primary generator (Vengeance Seethe and Templar Loyalty also plays into that equation).

One of the glaring differences to this build from a majority of Shadow's Mantle's builds is the inclusion of Fan of Knives. In play as FoK:PinpointAccuracy the CD is ~6.5-6.75 seconds depending on your CDR, reducing it from the increased 15 seconds that the Pinpoint Accuracy Rune gives us. Given that we've cubed an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, the actual CD will be about half of that making us able to use FoK every ~3.5 seconds due to our impales helping reducing the CD. Because of either using a Lord Greenstone's Fan or having one cubed we gain upto a 6,000% increase to our FoK damage. In practice however, we'll be seeing closer to an 800% increase assuming we cast FoK every 4 seconds. Realistically though you won't be casting it if the density isn't there, so it will continue to ramp up for you. This damage increase is amazing, to the point that in simulation FoK ends up doing approximately 80% of our damage, with impale taking the last 20%.

For extra damage we have Marked for Death: Contagion. You mark one target kill it, and the next three closest targets are automatically marked and it can continue to chain. For a 15% damage increase to a marked target for 30 seconds, this absolutely makes more sense to me than Animal Companion: Wolf's 10 second buff. For 3 Discipline per usage, you should have no problems managing your discipline pool for marking.

Why? Because you are Vaulting for free due to Chain of Shadows and your impales. Each impale resets the 2 second buff of free vaulting, and you'll be using multiple impales per second assuming you have some density and not stuck in a cave tunnel or hallway with nothing. The Rattling Roll rune also allows you to use either Strongarm bracers or APD due to its knockback and stun

Vengeance. You want to shoot for 50-52.05% CDR, pairing with your Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, and throwing our impales you'll have perma Vengeance without Dawn. Seethe is your normal go to rune for hatred regen, Dark Heart is 50% damage reduction. It is possible to play without Seethe just using Dark Heart and freeing up the armor slot in Kanai's Cube. Some have been using Aquila Cuirass in place, and on high enough difficulties where things aren't being 1 shot, this works fairly well, albeit AC occasionally drops in between using impale and the hatred return from Karei's Point. If you wanted to try this alternative, some itesm worth mentioning for Kanai's would be: an additional bracer from one above that your not wearing (Nemesis Bracers, Ancient Pathan Defenders, Strongarm Bracers), Beckon Sail (for an extra safety net), or possibly something to tweak the playstyle such as using a Goldwrap here and socketing a Boon of the Hoarder or using Frostburn and changing the lightning element damage to cold along with FoK and Impale). Personally, I think Vengeance: Seethe with a cubed Visage of Gunes will help someone get used to the build and playstyle, but might be swapped out as the player becomes comfortable or is seeking more DR for higher grifts.

DH's survivability is typically an issue. This build as with all Shadow's Mantle's builds makes the DH more tanky. Perma Shadowform gives us all the runes (Gloom 35% damage reduction, Blood Moon - double Life/hit) really help keep us up. Endless Walk set gives us up to 50% damage reduction while moving. Vengeance Dark Heart gives us 50% damage reduction. Clicking Shadowform for an extra 60% damage reduction for 8 seconds due to Elusive Ring help as well. Vault:Rattling Roll on our free vaults thanks to Chain of Shadows allows us to reposition ourselves and stun enemies in the process. Lastly, Awareness gives us a 2nd chance in the event we were going to die.

A note on the damage reduction incase you're thinking 35+50+50+60 = 195% Damage reduction and you've somehow unlocked God Mode, you'd be wrong. The damage reduction is multiplicative and seems to be affected by some dimishing returns so we end up with a max of 93.5 damage reduction. This is still really good, but also its still really possible for you to die, so that's why things like Vault, Awareness, health pots and support characters/follower can really be helpful.

Link to the D3planner Page for the Build, open this link in a new window for the D3planner build, there you'll see the build with perfect ancient items with lvl 70 Caldesann's Despair augmentations, with legendary gems at lvl 75. You'll see some simulation data as well. Realistically, you'll never have perfect items, but I suppose with the possibility of primal ancients, that's why the build has those stats. You can adjust the augmentations, legendary gem, and paragon levels, but I picked values typically around the middle tier of seasonal player. I suppose that counteracts the perfect stats on the gear, but its more for speculative number crunching than anything and seeing about how much damage this thing could potentially do. A potential 12.2 trillion points of damage during fan of knives is pretty insane, but mathematically its possible, just statistically very unlikely to see.

Best of luck in S10.