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Kanai's Cube Comparison

Hi everyone,

I've shared this video on my Youtube already a couple of days ago, and from the feedback I've heard I thought it might be a good idea to share it here as well. I was trying out the Kanai's Cube a little bit on the PTR, and I decided to show my results and explain the two different paths of item progression that open up with it in patch 2.3. In this video, you can see what the process of Upgrading Yellows to legendaries looks like and how it compares to the Reforge Legendary recipe, backed up with some math to outline the advantages and disadvantages of both.

I crafted 400 yellows bows and upgraded them to legendaries via the Cube, with the goal of getting a good ancient Yang's Recurve. Fortunately, you can craft both the yellow items for upgrading and the blue items to transform the materials in case you have too few of those (for the level 70 yellow version, you need 15 whites/blue/yellows, for the lvl 1 blue belt you need 2 whites/blues). Out of those 400 legendary bows, I got 57 Yang's Recurves (14.25%, 7x ancient), and it took 10000 Death's Breath + 20000 whites/blues/yellows (and another 6000 of each for crafting the yellow bows, but that's unnecessary to do on live when you can just collect them).

TL;DW: Both recipes are okay to use if you really need that one specific item, most importantly build-defining pieces like an ancient weapon. You can farm up most of the materials passively when playing the game, and fortunately they don't overlap - Upgrade Rare requires 25 Death's Breath + 50 white / blue / yellow crafting materials, Reforge Legendary requires 5 of each bounty material and 50 Forgotten Souls. I tried to approximate how many hours of game time you would need to invest to (given the numbers you could reach in high-end parties), and interestingly they turned out to be fairly even. Upgrade Rare seems a little bit more efficient if you have very common items (like Yang's Recurve), and a lot worse for very uncommon items (like Kridershot), while Reforge Legendary always has the same chance to yield the item you seek. All in all, it seems like Upgrade Rare will be much better to use early on in the gearing process on items with several good options (e.g. if you need gloves for 3 different sets, or two different bows), and Reforge Legendary will be used a lot more to target farm very rare items later on.

All of this matches the general progression strategy for season 4 quite nicely, where you would want to do most of the torment farming more towards the beginning and most of the greater rift farming towards the end of the season, simply because focusing on items first makes a lot more sense until paragon grinding becomes more valuable. Both options are fairly well balanced in that regard, and will make it much easier to gear out your main or alternative characters and even the playing field for the leaderboards as a result.

Hope it helps for those trying to gear up quickly after the season starts, or for those that have been hoarding lots of materials on nonseason already!

Quote from Quickk»

Great guide! Loved the read. Can't wait for season 4! Really hope we get some nice diverse builds to play around with.

http://ptr.d3planner.com/297068008

This is my Nats set up I was thinking about for season 4. Any thoughts? Any help improving?

Seems pretty good, but I think you should aim for AD / CC or avg dmg / CHD rings instead of taking dexterity. Fulminator definitely is one of the better options in the cube, but Xephirian is pretty worthless. You should either accept you'll have to skip reflect or wear it yourself - the expected damage gain of a Hellfire is only ~8-10%, while the expected damage gain from a cubed CoE is ~50% (for Nats). In any case, I'm really excited to try out the fixed area damage again with all the new builds we'll have!

Natalya RoV Optimization

Reddit Link

Greetings all,

you might remember my post about UE + M6 optimization in the beginning of S3, and I thought it’s about time that I do some stuff like that for Natalya as well. Now that the end of season 3 draws close, I guess many are trying their best to get on the leaderboards, and I decided to put some more time into it. N6 has been used basically the entire season for solo and speedruns, and later on also got included in group pushing as well, effectively competing with UE for the top DH set in a tight race. This post mainly focuses on greater rift pushing, which generally requires the most optimization (and low level content farming efficiency has more parameters than just pure dps). It contains points for the current situation (patch 2.2), but I’ve added a lot of things to look out for in the next season (patch 2.3) as well, and included a TL;DR at the end. I was working on this as a side-project for quite a while but never quite managed to finish it, so here it is.

The structure of the post is as follows:

• Natalya For Dummies
• The Rain of Vengeance runes
• Preferred stat rolls
• Optimal CDR values
• The Math – 2:1 vs. 3:1
• Patch 2.2 solo: Stampede (fire) vs. Flying Strike (cold)
• Groups
• Patch 2.3
• TL;DR
• FAQ

Enjoy.

[Natalya For Dummies]

The Natalya set heavily relies on Rain of Vengeance (RoV) to deal damage, and generally you aim at reducing the cooldown as much as possible using the 2-piece bonus. To achieve this, heavy CDR stacking is required, and a combination of Strafe + generator (mostly Evasive Fire (EF) for increased hatred regen) has proven to be the best, because like that you can get more attacks per time unit than you normally would when only attack with a regular skill. The RoV, combined with the Crashing Rain (CR) belt (especially in solo), is your main source of damage. The generator casts and Strafe are basically irrelevant, and because of that you don’t require a weapon damage roll on your offhand weapon (RoV and CR scale only off your mainhand weapon damage). In your offhand, you generally take a Balefire Caster when you are the only dps (solo / 2man / maybe 3man) and a Calamity when you are not (maybe 3man / 4man, or whenever you are using a non-fire rune). The reason why a Balefire Caster is better is because elemental damage is a separate damage multiplier and you generally only have 20% from bracers (or 40% if you got lucky with your amulet), while you have lots and lots of additive damage (30% Strongarm, 55% RoV, 20% Steady Aim, 30% Wolf, in groups even more) which is the same category as Calamity.

Completing a combo of Strafe + EF + RoV is called a cycle, and there are mainly two variations: a 2:1 cycle and a 3:1 cycle. For a 2:1 cycle, that means you cast 2x EF and 1x RoV while Strafing permanently, then repeat (3x EF for 3:1). That playstyle is a little bit difficult to get into, but once you get into the rhythm things become a lot easier and you can actually focus on other things much more during the rift. A reset is what the N2 procs are called, and you generally try to chain them in a way that you start and end a cycle with Strafe.

[The Rain of Vengeance runes]

Before we start to look into the details, it’s a good idea to know how Rain of Vengeance actually works. Here is a table where I collected some data, and some of these findings are quite interesting. There are some more things to it as explained in the video, but I’ll stick to the most noteworthy ones here. So far, it seems like everything remains the same for 2.3:

Shade is pretty useless (mostly because it creates huge amounts of lags), but might be worth revisiting in 2.3, and Dark Cloud generally is only worth for speedfarm content (because it is very weak, but follows you around as you move). In patch 2.2, Blizzard has removed the “Dark Cloud counter” from the buff bar (but ironically added a "Sentry counter" for the thereafter never to be used M6), but my testing implies that you can still stack it up to 5 times (so in extreme scenarios e.g. with Channeling Pylon you will lose a little dps, but it doesn’t matter that much). In any case, you’ll need to use one of the “controlling” runes (Stampede / Flying Strike) for solo, and Anathema is strictly reserved for groups where you have someone grouping things up for you. Unlike the 5800% weapon damage specified in the tooltip, Anathema actually does 8700% (9570% with Grenadier), which can be seen in the video (Blizzard pls). My guess is that it was designed like that on purpose, and they just assumed that most targets will not get hit by all the grenades (20x290% = 5800%, which would mean a 66.67% hit chance out of the 30 grenades). However, as seen in the video, even small targets like skinny zombies are usually getting hit by more than 20/30 grenades, and on big targets it’s certainly possible to realize its full potential. It’s also worth noting that it has a crazy proc coefficient: 30x0.12=3.60, which is something that might be very interesting for cubed weapon effects in 2.3.

[Preferred stat rolls]

For the CDR rolls, many slots are basically a no-brainer: Both weapons (2x10%), shoulders (8%), diamond in helm (12.5%), gloves (8%). On your offhand, you want to have elite damage and (Calamity) / or (Balefire) area damage, or if that is too difficult to get, RCR. If you use a Calamity, having vitality is also going to help a little. Generally, elite damage / area damage are better than RCR even if you run out of hatred, just because we have very little of both and they're such a huge damage boost. Even trading an ancient offhand with RCR for a nonancient with elite damage is worth it (given equal CDR values). It’s generally advisable to have area damage or RCR on the shoulders, hatred regeneration on the chest helps as well. The rings are dealt with in more detail in a moment. Using Evasive Fire or Strafe damage bonuses on your items is not recommended, as their share of your total dps is negligible.

[Optimal CDR values]

This is where it gets tricky. There has been a lot of talk about which cycle is the best: clean 2:1, delayed 2:1, 3:1, or something else entirely? Well, I have generally been advising for a delayed 2:1 setup using 6 resets, and generally thought that a 2:1 setup is only worth using if you have a pretty GG Flavor of Time. I do have one with dexterity, double crit, CDR and socket, and whenever I tried it I was disappointed. This suggests that the 2:1 cycle might actually not be the best, and only be worth using if you Flavor of Time is far superior to your Hellfire Amulet. In case you don't have either of those, but do possess another amulet with elemental damage instead of mainstat, it's close to a dexterity Hellfire. To assess the proper CDR values, we'll have to take a little look at the numbers:

[The Math – 2:1 vs. 3:1]

So here is the math I've done on Natalya RoV. These results (at the end) speak mostly for solo, but can be applied to groups as well with little modification. The above link compares 4 different setups: Clean 2:1 (full CDR everywhere + Gogok, 5 N2 procs), Delayed 2:1 #1 (no CDR on jewelry + Gogok, 7 N2 procs), Delayed 2:1 #2 (CDR on one ring + Gogok, 6 N2 procs), Clean 3:1 (no CDR on jewelry + Taeguk, 7 N2 procs). Keep in mind that things like better crowd control and grouping from more RoV casts are not factored in. I have compared the CDR values ["CDR" part], then included the APS values with their respective strafe breakpoints ["IAS" part], estimated their cycle time by adding each individual step together, which gave me the RoV casts/Min number ["Cycle Time" part]. This number was further modified with the expected damage gains when moving from a full CDR setup to a lower CDR setup by comparing near best in slot values ["Dmg" part]. Taeguk was included as a flat 40% additive boost (40% is only rank 60, but you also need time for stacking and might lose it once etc.), Caltrops was calculated as a flat 11% multiplicative boost (even though the expected damage while the effect is active gain is approximately 14-18% depending on crit chance / Single Out etc.).

On the right I have gathered some numbers from empirical testing to verify if my cycle times are correct, and they seem to overlap by about 95% with my numbers. To get the data, I have reviewed several of my solo and other DHs' runs with the different setups and created some extra footage for the missing parts. The empirical data is not entirely accurate as I have not done a frame by frame analysis, but instead I was using strong slow motion and collecting time stamps when attacks started and ended. The numbers suggest that with 2.00 APS, you will need to stand still when casting Evasive Fire or RoV for 0,25 sec (50% of attacking time), while the remaining 0,25 sec can be used for movement. While Strafing, this share is reduced to what seems to be 33%, meaning that you can move and strafe again after only 0,167 sec (which is the actual reason why we use Strafe in RoV builds in the first place).

The damage numbers at the end were derived from my old M6/UE spreadsheet, which I modified a little to be used for N6 comparisons. The added benefit of dmg rings vs. CDR rings was calculated by adding perfect ancient average damage to 6 CC / 50 CHD rings, which nets a 7,3% increase in power for the first and another 6,8% increase for the second ring (discounting the inflated damage boost you get from a 672 dps offhand). I also found some more interesting gearing stats, for example nonancient avg dmg is about equal to ancient dex, both of which are about 2-3% worse than CHD / ancient avg dmg. If you have high crit chance from Single Out / Archery / Caltrops, CC obviously loses value but still remains strong, about equal to CHD / avg dmg. Generally it seems to be the best choice to balance all of the stats (excluding dex) on the rings, while putting an emphasis on CC if you don't use any of these skills / passives, and putting an emphasis on CHD / avg dmg otherwise. Iceblink is about 4-6% effective dps behind Taeguk, but adds the benefit that you have better slow uptime and can group things better as well, so the gap is smaller in real scenarios. The Bane of the Stricken is very difficult to theorize, but it's very likely going to be a much bigger damage boost than the Taeguk, even putting a further emphasis on replacing Gogok. I averaged the benefit of the Hellfire Amulet to 9%, which is about what we can expect to get from Ambush, Steady Aim or Single Out.

Comparing the actual resulting damage numbers (RoV casts per minute multiplied by the damage bonus factors of slower cycles) from the different setups (35,150 for Clean 2:1; 36,435 for Delayed 2:1 #1; 37,790 for Delayed 2:1 #2; 43,380 for Clean 3:1) suggests that the latter is in fact the strongest raw output wise, with a considerable margin of 23,4% over the Clean 2:1 and 14,8% over my old solo setup, Delayed 2:1 #2 (N2 6 procs). The 3:1 casts about 25% less RoV than the 2:1, however those are about 63% stronger on average (not necessarily the damage numbers, but also because you have higher crit chance). The damage increase from the additional stats on the rings and the Hellfire passive is quite considerable, but what really seals the deal are the Caltrops, which are used in place of Preparation - Punishment (that all of the other setups require). Obviously losing precious discipline to Caltrops will make survival a lot more difficult, but in good rifts we are often sitting at full discipline with no way of using it. Even when removing the skill entirely the 3:1 setup still remains the strongest, so the discipline can safely be spent for survival when necessary.

These numbers seem very weird at first but the 3:1 is in fact the best choice in the end, especially with the added benefit of Caltrops. Previously, most DHs have been using Preparation - Focused Mind instead of Punishment in its place when running this setup, and usually it felt about even with the 2:1 setups. Even if we can realize only half of the theoretical damage boost, we are still looking at one additional tier we can push higher. All in all, these results seem to confirm that the Flavor of Time setup is in fact the weakest, and only worth using if you have a good elemental damage roll (just like I've been suggesting all along), and that the Delayed 2:1 cycle I'm using is in fact the strongest before considering the new / old 3:1. The big advantage of FoT (with elemental damage) is merely that it is much more easily acquired than a Hellfire (yet still very difficult to get). What's important to note is that the 3:1 is the most unforgiving in CDR requirements. If you don't want to sacrifice a ring for it, you will need to have perfect rolls on every slot, and even then it's very close (2,20 sec RoV CD vs 2,263 cycle time, including 0,24sec of human error). This is something that I have noticed quite clearly when playing it in the past - when you manage to execute the cycle optimally, you will have a short delay with 46% CDR. Depending on your item rolls, it might be advisable to use one CDR ring and the best item rolls (in my case, I have 7% ancient Pauldrons of the Skeleton King and 6% ancient Natalya's Gloves). If you get 3-4% damage out of that it's definitely worth to go with one CDR ring, as it makes the cycle much smoother as well (and with enough practice you will regain most of the lost damage by cutting the cycle time closer to 2.05-2.15 sec), but I'd recommend to do that anyway. This takes away a little bit from the damage advantage of the 3:1 again, but eventually you will feel the difference when running only 46 CDR, and you get other perks like increased wolf uptime as well.

[Patch 2.2 solo: Stampede (Fire) vs. Flying Strike (Cold)]

There has also been a lot of debate about which element to use, and I’ll try to summarize the points here quickly. For 2.3, Flying Strike will be useless anyway because of the CC nerfs, Stampede still work almost as usual (sometimes for the better, sometime for the worse). For 2.2, there are two main differences:

1) Consistency: Flying Strike can deal with much more aggressive and dangerous rifts. You can permanently freeze any white monster and almost any blue elite, and can easily skip yellows.

2) Damage: Flying Strike naturally deals less damage because we can’t use Balefire Caster, and apparently it also has a hard time against Rift Guardians, which take significantly longer. However, its huge advantage is that once you have a good crowd in one spot, you can just kill them off very quickly without knocking everything all over the screen, splitting them up and losing all your AoE damage.

Personally I enjoy the cold playstyle a lot more. Even with the Caltrops setup, you can deal with difficult rifts quite well, while you basically get screwed with fire whenever you have to skip and can’t stabilize. However, the RG damage is a huge problem – basically you will lose your whole rift clearing speed advantage here, and the only solution is to fish for Stonesinger. You can see this quite clearly in the 65/66 runs I have done using cold, where I was able to get through the rift quite nicely, but took an eternity to kill Perendi, but still managed to kill Stonesinger very quickly with a Power Pylon. Basically, if you look at my successful tier 64 run, or the 66 run from before, those were dream rifts for cold (with the 66 being impossible to beat for fire, because you just knock the teddies away too much). Just in general, you will get more out of almost any rift with cold, especially those that are filled with a lot of small monsters, but will lose out on the RG. In order to maximize the cold build, it is advisable to use an Ess of Johan for group things up (the best rolls are 20% cold, 100 CHD, dexterity), because you really want to pull and keep everything in one spot.

[Groups]

For groups, the prime choice is Anathema + Grenadier, you don’t want to knockback anything and don’t want to use the weak cold / physical / lightning runes. Obviously for groups, the benefit of Taeguk and Caltrops will decrease a little, as you will have much more additive damage and crit chance from party buffs. Not only that, but you will generally run at the 2.5 breakpoint with 1-2 buffs, or in some cases even at the 3.0 breakpoint (with Gogok, Law, Voodoo and IAS Slow Time simultaneously). Judging from my experience, completing these cycles at these breakpoints without any double Strafe ticks at all is very difficult to do consistently. Since you risk dying in groups much more than in solo, and sometimes you have to stop dealing damage, Taeguk really falls behind and I suggest to use Bane of the Powerful or Bane of the Stricken instead. The elite damage really helps, as you generally don't have any other source of that (unless you got lucky with your offhand). Because all of this, running a 2:1 cycle with double ticks on Strafe is probably a good idea for those who can't master the 3:1 yet, which is still going to be stronger eventually. The thing is that you don't really want to use Preparation – Punishment in groups (since Marked for Death is a better choice), and you will run out of hatred because of that. If everything is permanently controlled or relatively safe, that's not a big deal – just fill up your hatred with Evasive Fire for a full cycle and continue like normal after that. To alleviate this problem, you can use Night Stalker when running at high breakpoints. With the 3:1 cycle, you won't have many hatred issues (yet still run low occasionally) even without the passive.

[Patch 2.3]

As for Season 4, we'll see what becomes of the Natalya set. With the cube, Bane of the Stricken and the removal of perma CC many things are going to change. Build-wise, we have a lot of different options to try out: You can go a heavy RCR setup with Yang's Recurve and include e.g. Fan of Knives, use the Demon's Demise to proc some more "passive" AoE damage, cube some cool melee weapons for insane procs, or run setups without Strafe at all by exploiting the benefits of Hunter's Wrath / Yang's Recurve / Helltrapper. We might even see some 1:1 setups, and maybe they turn out to be incredibly strong, however at this point I don’t think that they’re really going to be worth it. There are many different things to explore, and I expect to see some strong new builds emerge over the course of the coming weeks. I’ve tried to give some hints at what to it's going to look like most likely, and so far it seems that Natalya and Unhallowed Essence remain about equally strong for most activities, unless something completely unforeseen happens that will push one or the other set a lot higher (Natalya has a lot more options here, and benefits a lot more from the buffed Conduit Pylons as well). Obviously, for speedfarm content, Natalya is getting slightly more buffs (with In-Geom being much stronger for this set), while Unhallowed Essence is getting slightly more buffs for slower runs (with Convention of Elements being much stronger for long fights).

For Kanai’s Cube, we have a lot of options: Calamity, Helltrapper, Demon's Demise, In-Geom and some of the melee weapons are definitely worth looking at for the weapon slot, Hexing Pants are probably going to be the go-to choice for armor (and they might enable 2:1 setups to run without Preparation) or we will see some use of the Leoric's Crown, and we have Obsidian Ring / RoRG / Convention of Elements for the jewelry depending on your build.

We’ll see how things play out, currently I think that both sets are going to be used for both group and solo pushing, and will yield close to the same results depending on rift / RNG / party composition.

[TL;DR]

Anathema is bugged and does way more damage than it says, and also has a crazy proc coefficient. For 2.2, math and testing shows that a 3:1 setup surpasses any 2:1 (clean or delayed) in both solo and groups. You're aiming for 47-49% CDR, 46% is not enough because you will have some downtime. For 2.3, many things are out in the open; we might see some pretty cool builds with cubed melee weapons, the new Demon's Demise and potentially some that don't even include Strafe anymore (e.g. using Hunter’s Wrath, Yang’s Recurve and / or Fan of Knives). It's too early to tell exactly but we'll definitely see a lot of innovation with the Natalya set (most things were just impossible to test in full detail on the PTR because of the latency, missing items and lack of proper groups). All in all DH is in a good spot for speedfarm content, and in a very uncomfortable spot for high end content. DHs have a much harder time to survive and deal equal or less damage than other classes currently, so we’ll have to fight our way up there. In any case, I'm fairly confident that DH will still be an appreciated choice in groups, and that patch 2.3 will be quite enjoyable for us as well.

I hope you enjoyed the read and / or my video, and maybe got inspired to min/max the Natalya for yourself or try some of the new things in patch 2.3.

Cheers,

wudijo

[FAQ]

Q: What does the Natalya set do exactly?

A: (2) Set: Reduce the cooldown of Rain of Vengeance by 2 seconds when you hit with a Hatred-generating attack or Hatred-spending attack.

(4) Set: Rain of Vengeance deals 100% increased damage. [Multiplicative, counts for Crashing Rain as well]

(6) Set: After casting Rain of Vengeance, deal 400% increased damage and take 30% reduced damage for 5 seconds. [Multiplicative]

Q: Isn't it a good idea to try Ball Lightning with it, because it can hit multiple times and reduce the cooldown by a lot?

A: No, only the first hit of every attack counts. The exception are channeled abilities like Strafe, which repeat an animation cycle over and over.

Q: What does the 6-piece bonus boost exactly?

A: It boosts all of your damage, including gems, procs and the conduit pylon.

Q: What about items that change how skills spend resources (like Krider)?

A: Kridershot / Spines of Seething Hatred work as usual, Danetta's makes Vault work too.

Q: Why Strafe?

A: Strafe + any other spell makes for many more N2 procs, thus reducing the cooldown much quicker than it would if you just used a single ability.

Q: What are the important Strafe breakpoints?

A: 1.67 / 1.88 / 2.15 / 2.50 / 3.00 APS.

Q: If I have hatred issues, should I reduce attack speed in paragons?

A: No, that doesn't make much sense. With more attack speed, you can use your Evasive Fire more quickly, and regenerate more hatred that way. Obviously this will speed up the cycle a little bit, so the passive hatred regen won't have that much of an effect anymore, but you can also fill up quicker should you run out of hatred.

Q: Why should I roll off the damage range on my offhand?

A: RoV and CR take only your mainhand weapon damage into account. Since these two attacks make up for almost all of your damage (90-99% depending on number of targets), it's a much better idea to go for one more primary stat on your weapon.

Q: Which legendary gems should I use?

A: Bane of the Trapped + Zei's Stone of Vengeance + (in order of my priority) Bane of the Stricken / Taeguk / Iceblink / Gogok. For groups that heavily rely on no sources of crowd control at all (e.g. because you have a pulling support Barb), dropping the Zei's might be necessary.

Q: Which passives should I use?

A: Awareness, Cull the Weak, Ambush, and then one or two out of Steady Aim, Archery, Single Out, Night Stalker.

Q: How much RCR or hatred regen do I need?

A: This completely depends on your cycle and how well you can execute the playstyle. Generally, the quicker cycles (2:1) require you to have some sort of active hatred regen (e.g. Preparation – Punishment), and you can do the slower ones (3:1) without if you have a little bit of passive regen (e.g. Archery, RCR on shoulders, hatred on chest). Usually it's best to figure out what cooldown setup you want to run, and solve the resource issues after.

Q: Why shouldn't I choose the 20% buff from Calamity over a Balefire when running a fire rune?

A: Calamity stacks with most of your other damage amplifiers like Wolf, Steady Aim, Taeguk, Strongarms, etc. Balefire only stacks with your fire elemental damage. This greatly increases the relative impact of having more fire damage, making Balefire stronger.

Q: Do Calamity and Marked for Death stack?

A: Yes, you can have one of each effect up on a monster at the same time.

Q: I have a Calamity with elite damage and a Balefire without, what should I choose?

A: For solo, Balefire will prove to be better anyway, and maybe you get another decent stat from it (say RCR or AD). In 2.3 with Bane of the Stricken, the duration of elite fights will play a much smaller role anyway.

Q: Area damage seems really good, should I stack it?

A: Yes, now that the stat finally got fixed again, it's definitely worth going for it. The most obvious slot is on the shoulders, the next on the offhand (after CDR in both cases). If you have those, you are in a pretty good spot already, going for more is probably not worth it unless you trade some of the "bad" damage stats for it (e.g. nonancient dexterity on a ring).

Q: Is it worth using an amulet with CDR that is not a Flavor of Time?

A: Not really. As we have seen in the math section, the 2:1 cycles are behind the 3:1 anyway, and if you really need CDR on the jewelry, you'll want to take it on the rings. Amulets roll much higher values of dexterity, crit chance and crit damage, but exactly the same CDR.

Q: Why do you use [insert Pauldrons of the Skeleton King / Pauldrons of Zakara / Homing Pads / Corruption here]?

A: Generally, you should just use the shoulders with the best stats, their special effects are almost worthless, with the best one being the cheat death proc of the Pauldrons of the Skeleton King. The problem with these is that they always roll armor + vitality, so you can only have 8 CDR and 15 RoV damage and no RCR / AD in addition to that.

Q: Which follower should I use?

A: If you have hatred issues, Templar is the way to go. Other than that, Enchantress does a good job at proccing the slow with Thunderfury and generally attacks more often than the Templar when you need to outrange stuff.

Q: How do I proc the slow for Bane of the Trapped and Cull the Weak in solo?

A: You use your follower. On the PTR, many have been cubing the Thunderfury themselves as well, but I think that's definitely not the best option we have, and the Enchantress usually does pretty well in most rifts.

Quote from Hyperborea»

Hi Wudijo, an idea of mine i really want to test for 2.3 is a cold Nat's build with frostburns + rimeheart in the cube.

What's your opinion of that?

The cold RoV build will be dead in 2.3 with the new cc changes, there's no reason to use a weaker version of it when you can't even freeze anymore - and even assuming a permanently frozen target the numbers for Rimeheart are deplorable.

Quote from Helycon»

Quote from wudijo»

Quote from Helycon»

Thanks for a comprehensive overview! I'm wondering how the Nat's set is going to perform for speedfarming. I've been using it for quite some time now and it's doing quite well. I hadn't factored in the ORotZ and it seems to work quite well. I had a Wiz on seasonal and made a DH today to see how it performs and I like it quite a bit. Looking forward to your GR guide, if and when that's coming

Depends on what tiers you're running, I guess for the most part, both sets will remain almost equal going from 2.2 to 2.3. Obviously Natalya profits a little more from quicker runs (In-Geom has more value for Nats), and UE profits a little from longer runs (Convention of Elements has more value in extended fights). If you want to see my UE vs. N6 comparison for 2.2, I have done a video for that.

Quote from SetonCZ»

Hi!

Hunter's WrathNew

Legendary Belt

Your Hatred generators attack 30% faster and deal 45-60% increased damage

It means that slow balls with Krinder can profit from this belt?
Can someone pls test it on PTR and give me(us) feedback? Thx

Krider does not work with Hunter's Wrath, regardless of wording

Aye, I have seen the 2.2 vid. I was however wondering on the 2.3 GR guide. Which set would be the most viable, options for the cube. They are pretty different from Speed Builds I reckon. I'm going to be mucking about with UE at least and probably some Nat's as well and see what I like best and gets me furthest. Some pro insight is never bad though

It seems like UE vs. Nats will be a tight race for basically anything. I'll cover that in more detail once things have settled on live - I don't like to do a guide on something no one can have a clue about yet.

Yes, Loaded for Bear is just not that good in general, and much less so for speed farming. You generally don't have someone grouping things up for you, and if you did, you'd use Cluster Bombs because they are just much stronger. The rockets on the other hand go all over the screen and seek out those targets that did not get caught in your explosions, making it much easier to clear big areas with many monsters.

Well done
You should add a hint or notification that people have to enable the Youtube subtitles for this, I guess not everyone will think about that

Quote from Helycon»

Thanks for a comprehensive overview! I'm wondering how the Nat's set is going to perform for speedfarming. I've been using it for quite some time now and it's doing quite well. I hadn't factored in the ORotZ and it seems to work quite well. I had a Wiz on seasonal and made a DH today to see how it performs and I like it quite a bit. Looking forward to your GR guide, if and when that's coming

Depends on what tiers you're running, I guess for the most part, both sets will remain almost equal going from 2.2 to 2.3. Obviously Natalya profits a little more from quicker runs (In-Geom has more value for Nats), and UE profits a little from longer runs (Convention of Elements has more value in extended fights). If you want to see my UE vs. N6 comparison for 2.2, I have done a video for that.

Quote from SetonCZ»

Hi!

Hunter's WrathNew

Legendary Belt

Your Hatred generators attack 30% faster and deal 45-60% increased damage

It means that slow balls with Krinder can profit from this belt?
Can someone pls test it on PTR and give me(us) feedback? Thx

Krider does not work with Hunter's Wrath, regardless of wording

DH Builds for Torment 6-10

Hey everyone,

I posted this over at Reddit already, here is a guide I made for the Patch 2.3 DH farming builds. Keep in mind this is mostly focused on Torment farming (which is something we're going to do a lot, like it or not), but can be applied to speed GRs almost the same up to around tier 50-55. For GRs specifically, I will make other videos once the new meta has settled a little during Season 4, right now it's very difficult to predict what tiers and party compositions are going to be the preferred choice.

The Video is split into the following parts:

1) Intro
2) Difficulty scaling + general considerations
3) Unhallowed Essence setup + runs
4) Embodiment of the Marauder setup + runs
5) Natalya's Vengeance (Strafe) setup + runs
6) Natalya's Vengeance (Vault) setup + runs
7) Outro

I've tried to keep it as short as possible while still including all the vital information, even to players new to the Demon Hunter class or the game in general. Feel free to skip the parts / builds you don't need to see, this video is intended to give an overview of the different options and to be a place to go back to once you decide to try some of the other builds. Torment builds are something that can never be set entirely in stone, and personal experimentation is definitely encouraged. Especially with the new Kanai's Cube we have a lot of new and exciting options to either boost our damage, mobility or utility, and many choices bring their own advantages and disadvantages.

TL;DW:

DH is really good for speedfarming, UE and Natalya are almost equal with different strengths and weaknesses; M6 is usable if you are a fan but a little behind the other builds. Going for Torment 10 is not always the best choice if you have to sacrifice too much mobility, so lower difficulties might be more efficient (especially when soloing).

As for Kanai's Cube: In-Geom is definitely a good addition to almost any build, we don't have many compelling choices for the weapon slot. For jewelry, RoRG or Obsidian Ring are the way to go, Convention of Elements is not really good because it's just not consistent (you want to nearly oneshot anything even without the buff anyway). For the armor slot, we have a lot of good options: Cindercoat / Pride's Fall for resource heavy builds, Goldwrap + Boon of the Hoarder for invincibility, or just some nice bonuses like Nemesis Bracers / Warzechian Armguards / Gloves of Worship.

Cheers,

wudijo

Quote from Skelos_bg»

What happens if blizzard doesn't fix the paragon design:

After some years the items will be less important than the Paragon level.

It's their choice after all. Do they want to gain botters/lose players or not?

We're rather looking at "after some weeks" instead of "after some years". Farming paragons is that much more lucrative compared to any item / gem progression.

Quote from Bagstone»

Edit: And just to confirm how cancerous the official forums is, my post got downvoted there. Similarly, on Reddit the only response is basically "go season" (which I find ridiculously short-sighted, as people will reach paragon 2000+ in S4). Faith in DFans restored ;-)

Quote from Savi

Removing XP bonuses from gear would be a great change. Running speed rifts for XP gets boring so fast. You should be able to do bounties, normal rifts or greater rifts and gain roughly the same amounts of XP imo.

I think that it's good to have different activites to farm for different things - if you really want to push your paragon level you will speedfarm GRs, if you really need that one specific item, you will farm bounties, if you just want overall progression, you farm rifts, and on top of that you have conquests / uber bosses / grift pushing. No harm in that, but you shouldn't feel like shit whenever you are doing anything besides farming experience because it is just so much better than anything else.

I used the Natalya's Vengeance set without the ring, and a Balefire caster in the offhand. For the enchantress, I gave her a Thunderfury, lots of attack speed and the knockback, hex and ias abilities.

[DH Tier 64 solo - 13:33]

Hey everyone,

I came back after basically a ~4-week break, this is the result after a mere 14 tries: An incredibly disgusting rift featuring Cave of the Betrayer, Unburieds, one single elite pack, and obviously Stonesinger (Casualbuff multiplied by Streamerbuff).

Over the last couple of weeks I've been doing trials here and there and somehow managed to farm up 246 tier 64 keys and about 100 tier 65 keys. Should have done it the other way around I didn't really expect to clear tier 64, at least not that quickly, but somehow I did. Unburied + Goatmen rifts are about 1 in 40, so with those keys I could have expected to get 5-7 rifts with this combination, and sometimes they turn out to be really bad density or elite wise. The next goal is obviously going to be tier 65, but I will probably not push beyond, with my (comparably) lowish paragon and dps in general my hopes are very low for anything after that.

Enjoy the run!

Setup:
Fire RoV, 48.68 CDR (~56 with Gogok), Balefire with CDR + RCR, Pauldrons of the Skeleton King.

Passives:

Cull the Weak, Ambush, Steady Aim, Single Out, Awareness

Well yes, they nerfed it in a weird way, but at least they have done something about it, and I think it's in what you could consider a good spot. It will give more flexibility for farm(ish) content and will probably still be the way to go for pushing, but not my a large margin. Especially in groups people might consider not running it if others already do, and it makes for interesting choices with multiple players. Also, you have to consider that the primary and the secondary effects are basically working into opposite directions - the former is strongest on long fights, the latter is strongest on short fights, which makes it almost useless in high GRs (since it's all about getting to the RG in the first place, not about killing it).

"ZE are pretty gg" - can confirm

Yes, you will not proc it from pets. So far, it's probably best summarized like this: If it proc Focus or Restraint (or N2), you will also proc the gem. All of your damage will be increased, including pets.

I have already posted most of this as a comment on this Reddit thread, but since the video is up now and I found out some more things since then, I decided to start a new one, and maybe spur some more discussion about these findings.

[Bane of the Stricken Testing + Mechanics]

Bane of the Stricken

Primary: Each attack you make against an enemy increases the damage it takes from your attacks by (1 + (0.1 x rank))%.

Secondary: Gain 25% increased damage against Rift Guardians and bosses.

Summary

• No cap.
• It stacks additively with itself and multiplicatively with other effects. [In the video I say additive but I goofed on one calculation there.]
• The number is bugged. I leveled it to rank 30, which means 4% per stack. In fact, however, it's 3% for me. So far, I couldn't confirm if a rank 0 gem (1%) doesn't stack at all (I don't have a spare gem).
• The secondary effect is multiplicative.
• It has an ICD, which with my limited means on PTR I estimated to be 1/3s.
• Only spells with a proc coefficient can proc it, however the proc coefficient itself is irrelevant, as long as the spell deals damage.
• The damage buff is hidden, and disappears when you switch zones. You can take the gem off and it stays though.
• If you hit multiple targets, only the first enemy hit will gain a stack, however the buff will not reset when attacking another target.
• Seems like it has the same logic as Focus and Restraint, or Natalya 2 piece: If you can proc one of these with a spell, you will also proc the gem (e.g. Sentry - Spitfire Turret and Sentry - Chain of Torment work, but other pets don't).

Comparing it to Bane of the Trapped makes their difference in strength strikingly apparent: At rank 80, BotT will add a 39% damage multiplier, which is why it's the most commonly used dps gem for high end content. With a rank 80 BotS (9% per attack) you will need 4.5 attacks to reach the same, which you can do at a rate of (presumably) 3 attacks per second. With some optimization, it will be possible to reach the same effect as a Bane of the Trapped after only 1.5-2 seconds fighting, effectively adding more and more damage for free after that.

Even if we assume this gem was additive to Damage Increased By Skills (which I mistakenly did in the beginning) and compare it (rank 80) to Taeguk (rank 80), we can see just how strong it is: With no further DIBS involved (which is unlikely enough already), Taeguk will be a 50% boost, so you'll need 5.5 attacks to get the same value, which is more or less 2 seconds. After breaking even at ~3-3.5 seconds, it's the same infinite damage again, and you don't even need to look at your buff bar to not drop the Taeguk.

Obviously, these two scenarios are single target comparisons, while high GR builds usually rely on heavy AoE spells. Nevertheless, due to the nature of the gem and the long fights at high tiers, it will stack up rather quickly even on multiple targets and will effectively make elite and RG fights much shorter (which is what usually takes away a lot of time in a GR). Taking the numbers from above and assuming uniform stacking on every enemy, it should break even with the Bane of the Trapped after approximately 2.5-3 seconds per target. Even with 5 targets, that's only 12.5-15 seconds, probably quicker because the fights will have to be set up first (pulling, F&R procs, debuffs etc.), not even considering the secondary effect for the RG.

In my opinion, it should be capped at a maximum of 10 stacks, which would still probably make it the go-to choice for basically any dps build in high end GRs already, but would contain the damage bonus in a somewhat balanced value. Since only the first target hit will get a stack, it could just ignore those fully-stacked targets after the cap, and instead go for the next one. The ICD is good, no cap is bad. It's not Furnace-1.0-bad, but it's heading into the same direction. Infinitely stacking damage is overpowered no matter what, especially considering it's multiplicative. Not only will it take away any choice in gemming (since this one might become even more mandatory than Bane of the Trapped), it will also throw season vs. nonseason completely out of balance. Blizzard, fix this please. Other than that, I think it's a pretty cool addition to the game and I'm excited to build my character and playstyle (especially positioning and targeting) around this gem.