Build Guide
General Playstyle
Unhallowed Essence is one of the easiest sets to play in the game. Multishot hits a huge area and can basically oneshot 1-2 screens. The idea is to find the first elite pack in a rift and get the In-Geom cooldown reduction rolling, after that you should have no trouble to keep Vaulting infinitely with the low Preparation cooldown. In-Geom will also make Smoke Screen free with basically zero cooldown, which greatly improves survivability. Make sure to keep up the Focus (one generator cast every 5sec) and try to pick up most gold and all health / progress globes, which should be very easy with Avarice Band.
Build (Cold vs. Fire MS)
In previous seasons Multishot - Arsenal (fire rune) was generally considered the best, though that has changed. What makes the Wind Chill (cold rune) superior is the its slow effect is applied before the damage is done (unlike Thrill of the Hunt or Iceblink for example), and this means you can fully benefit from the Cull the Weak (20%) / Bane of the Trapped (~40%) multipliers on your first attack. If you combine this with Ambush (40%) you will almost certainly bring every monster below the Dead Man's Legacy treshold (50-60% hp) and hit it twice even on the first attack, which will usually result in a oneshot kill on basically any trash monster and sometimes even on elites, something that the fire rune fails to do consistently when the rockets are not hitting the targets you want. Counting the AoE component alone, cold will do roughly 60% more damage on the first attack compared to fire, and this is not even considering the added bonus of 15% crit chance you get from Wind Chill, which makes these oneshot-crits much more consistent. Generally you can expect to only need ~half the amount of attacks to deal with most stuff in a rift, though you will spent a couple more seconds on the RG and occasional elites here and there.
Items
Full UE set with Yang's + DML, F/R and Harrington for more damage, Nemesis Bracers to cut time spent in rifts. Obviously the crit stats and cold damage are preferred, after that stack CDR (first priorty) and RCR (second priority). I suggest to run Vitality over Multishot damage on the helm because we have a lot of additive damage buffs already anyway. The preferred amulet would be a Hellfire Amulet with cold, chd, cc, socket, as a fifth passive I suggest Single Out, Sharpshooter or Hot Pursuit. The Dead Man's Legacy quiver has been reworked and now rolls with up to 100% Multishot damage, a huge buff to the set. The 4piece (from 20 to 60%) and 6piece (from 15 to 20% per discipline) bonuses got buffed, too, and Vengeance now increases our damage by 40% as well.
Variations
There are some things you can change once you get stronger or in case you dislike parts of the build. For the cube you could run Dawn in the weapon slot and only use 3 CDR items, which will ensure 100% uptime of Vengeance. In the armor slot you could switch to Pride's Fall for more consistency, Goldwarp for toughness, Warzechian Armguards if you have trouble keeping up or Leoric's Crown when you're in full endgame gear (paired with a topaz you can get quite a chunk more legendaries). In the jewelry slot you could run Convention if you're too weak, or Obsidian Ring to help with cooldowns.
There is an option to replace F/R with SoJ and Nagelring when you are strong enough to kill everything like that anyway, like that you'd never have to spend time casting a generator and could squeeze out some more magic find, too.
I definitely would not recommend to run UE in high Greater Rifts because the set is just far too weak to compare, but if you want to do it anyway, the cold variation should work fine in groups, fire would probably still be the preferred choice for solo. Just stack a little more toughness and replace the movement speed / utility stuff with more damage.
I'll be playing this for a while-pretty good!
Do you think the cold rune may be superior to fire for group pushing? The 15% added crit chance debuff on mobs seems compelling.
Also, a friend suggested this variation on Unhallowed which I think has the potential to be the strongest variant in the game:
Run Endless Walk set allowing for Stone of Jordan. Ideal rolls +Cold Damage, + Elite, Socket, +10 Discipline, roll mainstat off for Crit Damage. Cube Convention. The lack of Crit Chance on the ring would be more than compensated for by the +15 from Wind Chill, and you get 200% more multishot damage and up to 30% Elite Damage. I assume you would drop Ballistics for Ambush and Thrill of the hunt would not be needed either?
Yep, EW + SoJ is a nice combo that is also the strongest for the Impale setup. For lower tiers below 80 you can definitely run M6 / UE without too many problems, after that you'll have no chances against ET wiz anymore. Cold is definitely recommended for groups
Thanks for the reply. Do you think the crazy power of ET wiz was intended? It seems odd that yet again we have one class/build that dominates all others (aka static charge in 2.3). Also, can you confirm whether the Windchill rune is a a debuff that all members of the party benefit from (+15% crit chance) or is it just for the hunter that procced it? Cheers, and btw I have always very much appreciated your deep analysis of the DH class.
Wind Chill works for the whole party. I don't know if the ET Wiz was intended as it is, tbh it's a major fuck-up either way. If it was intended, their notion of fair balancing is far off. If it wasn't intended, it raises serious doubts about their capabilities as developers because everyone saw that coming from miles away.
Big fan of your posts, have used a lot of your builds over the last few updates.
Why use Vault and Smoke Screen in the same build for t10? I'm lost why you would need smoke screen to increase survival when you have vault. Don't you want wolf companion for the dmg bonus?
Wolf adds very little with the huge bonuses from Harrington + DML. Smoke Screen ensures you can loot molten elites immediately and also you can play very aggressively on arcane / mortar packs. You also almost never lose Pride's Fall if you cubed that.