If all four/five passives do more for damage/survivability then it's just bad design from blizz as it's misleading - taking a passive where the skill is written directly in has less impact then the other ones. Sad.
It's worded fine. Anything that increases skill by a percentage is in the same stack as other items that increase skill by a percentage. It's just less effective when you combine it with other items, but there's nothing misleading about it.
Actually, that is just in fact why it is misleading. Where in the game does it spell out for you that Taeguk %dmg done is the same thing as skill %dmg done? Where does it say that trapped is a multiplier on everything? It is confusing.
Honestly, with your gear the way it is in just the discussion above, I don't think it is a gear problem in the rifts. I am guessing it is a gameplay issue. There are a number of things that DH have to do to be successful in higher rifts when running sentries.
1.) You have to be smart about sentry placement. This means you have to be able to predict where you will be going and place sentries ahead of your path so you can pull mobs into your existing sentries and sort of step forward. When you have maps that have super low density this slows down sentry builds a lot more because of the ramp up time for damage. The high density maps are all about kiting into your existing sentry trap and constantly moving that trap forward.
2.) You are probably not being aggressive enough on your movement. This means that you are probably placing a sentry and then hiding and waiting for the CD on your next sentry or waiting for the existing sentry to finish off mobs. You really have to drop a sentry, run around looking for mobs to kite into that sentry and then drop another one. You end up making this kind of circuit where you are activating sentries that are too far away to fire on their own but you get more mobs pulled into existing sentries. It is kinda hard to explain, so maybe someone has a video of it.
3.) Don't waste time with small packs. I play Hardcore and I basically have to clear everything that is in decent numbers because everything is so deadly at higher rifts and if you leave a bunch of mobs up you cut off your escape/kite paths. When I play on my crusader though, I run from elite pack to elite pack and just ignore everything else and it is much faster. Being softcore though, you can be much more aggressive with this, skip small groupings of mobs (1-3 etc) and skip low progress mobs. For instance, I would not stop to kill a pack of the little guys that can get rezzed, but I would stop to kill just two of the big hulking guys with the spiked backs. The smaller pack while it may be like 8 mobs is almost no progress. That pack of two hulking mobs can be sometimes 2% of a progress jump.
I will see if I can find a video to show you what I mean about the kiting.
For a non sentry build the attack speed probably is not that much use to you, I would roll it off for CHD. However, if you are eventually moving to M6 then a decent magefist is a good holdover until you can get a taskers and you will probably want the 5% attack speed then. With that said, if you are hardcore I would roll the IAS off for CHD, if you are softcore I would roll the vit off for CHD and have trifecta magefists.
So I play DH main and love the crusader, but I want to be more effective with my crusader time. I geared him up by essentially speed running T6 rifts on DH and then logging over and gambling on the crusader when I capped shards.
Now I am at a point where the condemn shield will not drop for me but I can only do T4 at most with any efficiency. These are the problems I am having at the moment:
I play Hardcore, so I have to balance toughness a little more than most.
I have been using darklight with a firestarter build. The damage is good because I have permanent akk, but with the firestarter rune I am squishy. I really need to be running prophet to go higher, but that tanks my damage a ton. To counteract this I have been running hoarder gem with goldwrap but it makes me invincible one second and almost dead another.
I want to move to a 2H build and take advantage of prophet rune, but I can't get a skill setup that can kill anything with any amount of time.
My question is, should I keep shard farming on my DH until I get a shield or just slog through T4 with mydarklight build and getting shards/exp slower but getting other gear pieces as well? Are there some better builds that will up my damage and allow me to use prophet and go to T6?
You ment GR 37 or is realy 27? Probably im missing the point here but why play this style if is way worse then what DH can actualy do with others specs?
Because it is fun?
Taeguk is a good gem if you spend fast because it stacks up quickly and at 25 has some extra defense attached, but using an xbow it will not stack very high and stuff will be dead before you get much use out of it. I was using taeguk on a 1hand crusader build and it stacked super high really fast, but when I switched to two-hand it slowed down to not be worthwhile.
Have you thought about replacing one of your skills with gloom? 35% damage reduction would be nice and with the passives you have you could keep it up a lot.
Also, have you thought about running M4 and Nat4? With a RoRG you could fit both in and it would get you a nice discipline boost using ring/cloak/wep for nats and shoulder/helm/gloves for Mara. That might give you hatred problems going to the hand bow, but it would open up rain of vengeance as another damage source and allow you to use taeguk again getting more armor and damage. Mini conduit would also be fun.
Man I have everything but the pants and you are making me think this would be a fun build for T6 rift farming. Just run through everything and watch it die!!!! I will have to try it out!
I will probably experiment with the two set setup mentioned above and taeguk, slow, and probably hoarder. Make this my build that I use to farm bounties and rift shards. I don't have illusory boots though, I seem to remember that you can just strafe around frozen stuff and you would have to SS to get out of jailer, but everything else seems like it would be okay.
Maybe I will try with a frostburn or cindercoat and see what I can get away with... Looking forward to it tonight!
The Act 2 Keywarden still reflects somehow on my pet and sentry damage. It is actually a chore to kill that when farming hellfire amulets. Outside of that the sentry damage is not reflected which is good, but you also don't get things like area damage, life on hit, etc.
Is this just a graph of single hit damage? I am guessing you are probably taking into account a "rotation" at the 2.84 BP and are counting up EA and MS damage in comparison to CA because just looking at the start point of 1 target is way off if it is just damage from one hit.
CA is 550% with a 900% rocket, so 1450%
MS is 360% with a 600% rocket, so 960%
EA is just 330%.
So that leads me to believe your numbers are either wrong to start with since CA should be higher on single target, or you are somehow taking into account the number of abilities fired in a rotation and comparing those numbers.
Why would you say zei? Why would you not include the most obvious gem enforcer?
Zei is calculated as your turret distance from mobs, and while you can intelligently place turrets to take advantage of the gem, a large chunk of the gem is wasted. Enforcer gets 100% use, trapped gets 100% use from just have EA/Frost in your skill setup. The third choice is what people use from personal preference. Things like Powerful are okay for the flat 15% elite damage, but I find that the 20% damage is not up when I need it most of the time. Toxin is pretty cool because it is a flat 10% increase for everyone. Invigorating is good for some people to help with jailer damage. Also some people run with hoarder gem.
You don't need reaper's, and as was already pointed out you could make some gains with aughild's shoulder/bracer. Should reroll the vit on your rucksack to sentry damage, and get sentry damage on shoulders.
Well, the increase in mob health goes up roughly 75% per torment. The legendary drop increase from T4to T6 is negligible. If you are looking to farm shards and only shards then you should farm at the torment that is best for you speed wise. For example, if you can clear T4 in 6 minutes, then a 75% increase in time is 10 minutes 30 seconds. So if you can clear T5 faster than 10.5 minutes then it is more time efficient to farm T5, etc.
Myself, I find that I get more shards and legendaries by doing greater rifts. I can run grift 29 about as easily as T6 and I *feel* like I get more legendaries and I know I get more shards. Of course I have to run T6 rifts a bunch because now I am short on mats all the time because of kadala change.
First of all, I would change your skillbar setup. I would put elemental arrow on left click and sentry on right click. It makes it easy to place sentries and if you accidentally left click something in the world elemental arrow is cheaper than multishot.
Secondly, you have the wrong skill/rune setup. Vault needs to have the 50% reduced cost on second vault so you can vault more and on demand. Remember that since you can't have both vault and smokescreen, you have to use vault like smokescreen. You are immune to damage for 1 second while vaulting the same way as smokescreen, but you get the benefit of rolling through mobs. Vault>smokescreen once you get used to using it in this manner. Also, your elemental arrow needs to be frost arrow to trigger slow effect, which we will take advantage of with a change to your passives and gems.
Okay, now that your runes are setup correctly you can change your ambush passive to cull the weak, and swap out your miniconduit gem for bane of the trapped. Congrats you just got 40% increased damage for basically nothing.
If you are having problems living then there are a couple of things that you can do that will increase that nicely. First of all, change the gem in your helm to an amethyst which will increase your health a ton and you won't notice the slight increase to sentry drops. Also, dex classes rely on dex for armor and paragon/gems for resist. If you swap out your dex gems for diamonds it will boost your ability to live when you do get hit a ton at a minimal loss to your dps. You can also run with aughilds bracer and shoulder to gain 15% damage increase and nice damage decrease as well. I also prefer to go with the toxin gem instead of elite gem because elite gem is not active when you need it most and now that sentries stack it you can get 10% increased damage all the time for freebies.
There are lots of things to redo on your gear, but guessing on what you have rerolled you know what to do and are just hoping for rerolls to land.
There are some other things, but that is a lot to start off with.
Here is my hardcore DH as a comparison. I can do T6 rifts in about 6 minutes, and I can do grift 31 in about 11 minutes and could probably do higher completion once I get unity. DPS is there easily with my 650K sheet dps because of the way everything stacks up. 20% steady aim, 20% cull, 20% pet gem, 20% slow gem, 10% toxin gem, 20% calamity, 41% sentry, etc.. it stacks up quickly so you don't need tons of sheet dps to do realworld dps.
Just to play devils advocate, is it necessarily so bad in a game that relies pretty heavily on RNG and just sheer amount of time played that you have to effectively hunt the correct rift just as you would hunt a piece of gear?
You could go with Bane of the Powerful, the bonus damage after elite kill and 15% elite damage at rank 25, or if you are playing hardcore the one that reduces damage from control impairing effects is good. A lot of the time the only damage I take is from jailer and it can be quite deadly.
I still run trapped, enforcer and hoarder though as my sentry DH is better at farming mats because I can run around and pick everything up while they kill stuff.
If you are still gearing out, the conduit gem is a pretty big increase, it just requires you to stand a little closer than you would normally later on. I also think the primary skill increase gem could be good if you use a krider shot, but that depends a lot on just how much you are using krider.
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1.) You have to be smart about sentry placement. This means you have to be able to predict where you will be going and place sentries ahead of your path so you can pull mobs into your existing sentries and sort of step forward. When you have maps that have super low density this slows down sentry builds a lot more because of the ramp up time for damage. The high density maps are all about kiting into your existing sentry trap and constantly moving that trap forward.
2.) You are probably not being aggressive enough on your movement. This means that you are probably placing a sentry and then hiding and waiting for the CD on your next sentry or waiting for the existing sentry to finish off mobs. You really have to drop a sentry, run around looking for mobs to kite into that sentry and then drop another one. You end up making this kind of circuit where you are activating sentries that are too far away to fire on their own but you get more mobs pulled into existing sentries. It is kinda hard to explain, so maybe someone has a video of it.
3.) Don't waste time with small packs. I play Hardcore and I basically have to clear everything that is in decent numbers because everything is so deadly at higher rifts and if you leave a bunch of mobs up you cut off your escape/kite paths. When I play on my crusader though, I run from elite pack to elite pack and just ignore everything else and it is much faster. Being softcore though, you can be much more aggressive with this, skip small groupings of mobs (1-3 etc) and skip low progress mobs. For instance, I would not stop to kill a pack of the little guys that can get rezzed, but I would stop to kill just two of the big hulking guys with the spiked backs. The smaller pack while it may be like 8 mobs is almost no progress. That pack of two hulking mobs can be sometimes 2% of a progress jump.
I will see if I can find a video to show you what I mean about the kiting.
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Now I am at a point where the condemn shield will not drop for me but I can only do T4 at most with any efficiency. These are the problems I am having at the moment:
My character for reference:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Tyrean-1721/hero/53019276
I play Hardcore, so I have to balance toughness a little more than most.
I have been using darklight with a firestarter build. The damage is good because I have permanent akk, but with the firestarter rune I am squishy. I really need to be running prophet to go higher, but that tanks my damage a ton. To counteract this I have been running hoarder gem with goldwrap but it makes me invincible one second and almost dead another.
I want to move to a 2H build and take advantage of prophet rune, but I can't get a skill setup that can kill anything with any amount of time.
My question is, should I keep shard farming on my DH until I get a shield or just slog through T4 with mydarklight build and getting shards/exp slower but getting other gear pieces as well? Are there some better builds that will up my damage and allow me to use prophet and go to T6?
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Taeguk is a good gem if you spend fast because it stacks up quickly and at 25 has some extra defense attached, but using an xbow it will not stack very high and stuff will be dead before you get much use out of it. I was using taeguk on a 1hand crusader build and it stacked super high really fast, but when I switched to two-hand it slowed down to not be worthwhile.
Have you thought about replacing one of your skills with gloom? 35% damage reduction would be nice and with the passives you have you could keep it up a lot.
Also, have you thought about running M4 and Nat4? With a RoRG you could fit both in and it would get you a nice discipline boost using ring/cloak/wep for nats and shoulder/helm/gloves for Mara. That might give you hatred problems going to the hand bow, but it would open up rain of vengeance as another damage source and allow you to use taeguk again getting more armor and damage. Mini conduit would also be fun.
Man I have everything but the pants and you are making me think this would be a fun build for T6 rift farming. Just run through everything and watch it die!!!! I will have to try it out!
I will probably experiment with the two set setup mentioned above and taeguk, slow, and probably hoarder. Make this my build that I use to farm bounties and rift shards. I don't have illusory boots though, I seem to remember that you can just strafe around frozen stuff and you would have to SS to get out of jailer, but everything else seems like it would be okay.
Maybe I will try with a frostburn or cindercoat and see what I can get away with... Looking forward to it tonight!
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CA is 550% with a 900% rocket, so 1450%
MS is 360% with a 600% rocket, so 960%
EA is just 330%.
So that leads me to believe your numbers are either wrong to start with since CA should be higher on single target, or you are somehow taking into account the number of abilities fired in a rotation and comparing those numbers.
1
Zei is calculated as your turret distance from mobs, and while you can intelligently place turrets to take advantage of the gem, a large chunk of the gem is wasted. Enforcer gets 100% use, trapped gets 100% use from just have EA/Frost in your skill setup. The third choice is what people use from personal preference. Things like Powerful are okay for the flat 15% elite damage, but I find that the 20% damage is not up when I need it most of the time. Toxin is pretty cool because it is a flat 10% increase for everyone. Invigorating is good for some people to help with jailer damage. Also some people run with hoarder gem.
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I think if you are crafting though, that the damage range on an arcane barb at a lower attack speed is equivalent to the bow at higher speed.
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Myself, I find that I get more shards and legendaries by doing greater rifts. I can run grift 29 about as easily as T6 and I *feel* like I get more legendaries and I know I get more shards. Of course I have to run T6 rifts a bunch because now I am short on mats all the time because of kadala change.
1
First of all, I would change your skillbar setup. I would put elemental arrow on left click and sentry on right click. It makes it easy to place sentries and if you accidentally left click something in the world elemental arrow is cheaper than multishot.
Secondly, you have the wrong skill/rune setup. Vault needs to have the 50% reduced cost on second vault so you can vault more and on demand. Remember that since you can't have both vault and smokescreen, you have to use vault like smokescreen. You are immune to damage for 1 second while vaulting the same way as smokescreen, but you get the benefit of rolling through mobs. Vault>smokescreen once you get used to using it in this manner. Also, your elemental arrow needs to be frost arrow to trigger slow effect, which we will take advantage of with a change to your passives and gems.
Okay, now that your runes are setup correctly you can change your ambush passive to cull the weak, and swap out your miniconduit gem for bane of the trapped. Congrats you just got 40% increased damage for basically nothing.
If you are having problems living then there are a couple of things that you can do that will increase that nicely. First of all, change the gem in your helm to an amethyst which will increase your health a ton and you won't notice the slight increase to sentry drops. Also, dex classes rely on dex for armor and paragon/gems for resist. If you swap out your dex gems for diamonds it will boost your ability to live when you do get hit a ton at a minimal loss to your dps. You can also run with aughilds bracer and shoulder to gain 15% damage increase and nice damage decrease as well. I also prefer to go with the toxin gem instead of elite gem because elite gem is not active when you need it most and now that sentries stack it you can get 10% increased damage all the time for freebies.
There are lots of things to redo on your gear, but guessing on what you have rerolled you know what to do and are just hoping for rerolls to land.
There are some other things, but that is a lot to start off with.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Tyrean-1721/hero/51707672
Here is my hardcore DH as a comparison. I can do T6 rifts in about 6 minutes, and I can do grift 31 in about 11 minutes and could probably do higher completion once I get unity. DPS is there easily with my 650K sheet dps because of the way everything stacks up. 20% steady aim, 20% cull, 20% pet gem, 20% slow gem, 10% toxin gem, 20% calamity, 41% sentry, etc.. it stacks up quickly so you don't need tons of sheet dps to do realworld dps.
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I still run trapped, enforcer and hoarder though as my sentry DH is better at farming mats because I can run around and pick everything up while they kill stuff.
If you are still gearing out, the conduit gem is a pretty big increase, it just requires you to stand a little closer than you would normally later on. I also think the primary skill increase gem could be good if you use a krider shot, but that depends a lot on just how much you are using krider.