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DH Death's Breath Strafe Speed Farm for 2.4

by last updated Jan 13, 2016 ( Patch 2.4 )
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Skills

  • Strafe Rocket Storm
  • Rain of Vengeance Anathema
  • Preparation Punishment
  • Vault Tumble
  • Vengeance Seethe
  • Companion Wolf Companion
  • Ballistics
  • Blood Vengeance
  • Hot Pursuit
  • Archery

Items

More Details

  • Legendary Gems

    • Taeguk
    • Gogok of Swiftness
    • Boon of the Hoarder

Kanai's Cube

  • K'mar Tenclip
  • Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan
  • Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac

2.4 Death's Breath Strafe Farming. RROG + 2 piece Sages + 5 pieces Natayla's for 3 and 6 piece bonus + pretty much every movespeed buff there is = Several Hundred Death's Breaths per hour. You'll pick up a lot of rift keys and random legendaries along the way too. RoV and Vengeance up at basically all times.

Compared to a lot of other builds, its actually easy to gear for too. As long as you have the core pieces, (Nat5 + Sages2 + RROG), it functions quite well even if the pieces have really bad rolls. And several of the pieces are craftable! When I first tried it, i just slapped on core pieces I had lying around without looking at stat rolls just to get a feel if it would work, and it worked great in t7. Adding in the optional pieces and rerolling some stats, it plows through T10.

You need to equip Natayla's pieces and the Sages for the set bonuses. Any 5 nats and any 2 Sages. That means you need to use Natayla's Slayer(Wep) and Reflection(ring). The second crossbow and the rings you can mix and match equip/cube depending on what you have available.

Depending on your other gear, it efficiently clears T7-T8 w/o Dawn or T9-T10 with it. Not quite as fast as some other builds, but far faster than anything else with bonus death breath's from Sages. If you have more death's breaths than you'll ever need there's better builds for speed farming, but its fast enough that its worth using for general rift farming even if you have enough breaths "for now" just to build up a huge stockpile.

General Stats:

In general you want enough vitality/resist to not faceplant to the first thing that hits you in the torment level you choose. The constant movement of strafe + vault should keep you alive otherwise.

After that:
CDR (if running without dawn)

CHC and CHD are roughly equivalent, with about a 1:10 ratio.
Attack Speed (See note in build guide about attack speed/shrines/pylons)




Paragon Priorities

Core

Movement Speed
Maximum Resource
Primary Stat
Vitality

Offense

Cooldown Reduction
Critical Hit Damage
Critical Hit Chance
Attack Speed

Defense

Resist All
Life
Armor
Life Regeneration

Utility

Area Damage
Resource Cost Reduction
Life on Hit
Gold Find

Core:
Movement speed: obvious:
Maximum Resource: lets you bank extra hatred during seethe/downtime to carry you during dry spells. With dawn, you might not need it.

Offense:
If you are never running out of hatred, you can lower the priority of CDR. Once you reach perma-vengeance with dawn, you can stop putting points in it.

Defense:
After resist all it barely matters. You're farming death's breaths in T10, not pushing leaderboards. Adjust to taste.

Utility:
Area Damage is the default if everything else is working with whatever gear you have.
If you are having hatred problems, move RCR to the top
If you are having "slow death" problems, move LoH to the top.

If you're just faceplanting everywhere or having slow deaths and hatred problems, or its just taking forever, drop down a torment level till you get better gear rolls.

Build Guide

Strategy is basically the same whether you have Dawn or not, although its a lot more powerful once you have Dawn.


Strafe endlessly, hunting elites. Keep moving constantly for hexing
pants. Activate Rain of Vengeance and Vengeance on cooldown. Don't just
spam the keys when they are in cooldown, because you'll stop moving for
a moment every time you do which will mess up hexing pants. Most of
your damage will be all over the place, but to the extent that you are
targeting, prioritize elites, followed by big clumps of mobs so the
beast's from crashing rain blow them up.

When an elite pack dies
just strafe to the next one, ignoring normal mobs. Most of them will
die anyway, but don't stop until you find another elite unless a
legendary drops.


Run over health globes for more hatred
through blood Vengeance if you run low. If you are at full hatred, try
to avoid them so they'll be there when you need them.

Without Dawn: Efficient: T7-T8. Doable up to T9 or maybe T10 w/ MoC.

You
won't be able to keep Vengeance up full time w/o dawn, so you need to
manage your hatred with health globe pickups and prep:punishment. You
shouldn't ever go dry though. Basically leave health globes on the
ground if you are near full hatred to pick them up when you arn't, and
use prep:punishment if you get below about 30% hatred and no globes are
available.

Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac will help bring Vengance: Seethe and Prep up faster for more hatred, and wolf companion too.

If
you are really having hatred problems, sub bat companion for wolf
companion for extra passive regen and active restore. If you really
have to, you can also choose not to strafe while you run to the next
elite pack to passively regen hatred, but you'll lose random mobs
dying(who drop gold which procs boon of the hoarder runspeed). If you
are doing that, you might swap in bane of the trapped or bane of the
powerful for boon, just to make things die faster. if you do that tap
strafe every few seconds to keep up taeguk/gogk stacks and break stuff
to keep Warzechian speedbuff up.

As a last resort, use reaper's wraps instead of Warzechian, but you'll miss the speed.

With Dawn: T10(T9 w/o mantle of channeling)
You'll have near perma-vengeance:seethe so you'll basically never run out of hatred.

I still keep prep:punishment for the buffer but you could drop it for fan of knives, shadow power, smoke screen, or whatever else you like I find I don't need them. Remember you're cubing hexing pants and waring mantle of channeling, and most skills stop your movement/channel for an instant for animation which flips the switch on hexing pants and mantle of channeling momentarily, so most skills even if they give a little burst are going to be a net dps loss and/or more trouble then they are worth.

Strafe will be drawing mob's attention, procing the Nat6 bonus, picking off stragglers and keeping gem buffs stacked while near constant RoV + Nat 6 damage bonus + the damage bonus from Vengeance do the heavy lifting on the big baddies.

You can potentially also drop obsidian ring of the zodiac or some cooldown reduction at this point. I still like it as it still brings your cooldowns up a little quicker even the crazy reductions from Nat6/Dawn.

Could maybe drop blood vengeance even, but I have a great HFA with BV so I haven't tried it.

General Gearing/Stats:

If
you're missing a piece outside the core sets, don't worry, you'll be
fine. You don't even need good rolls on most pieces as minor playstyle
adjustments make it work with a lot of different gear. Play through a
rift or two to get a feel for what your gear allows, and push it up as
you collect more/better pieces.

Hellfire Passives:
Ambush or Steady Aim for more damage.
Tactical Advantage for even more speed when running to the next elite pack.
Leech for basically infinite health regen.

Awareness if you want to watch TV while farm and barely pay attention.

The immunity necks are just because they make you immune to big immobilizes like jailer and cold bombs. Being stuck in one in place really really sucks when you're wearing hexing pants and mantle of channeling. Really any decent amulet with a socket will do.

A note about frenzied shrines/speed pylons and attack speed in general:
Attack speed burns your hatred faster, but its impact on farming efficiency is negligible. Most things are just getting wiped out by Rain of
Vengeance nukes with Strafe mostly there for cleanup. In most cases you're probably better off just stacking some extra vitality or resist to make it less work to stay alive.

With the pylons/shrines, The extra attack speed is enough to run your hatred dry even with full hatred regen if you just keep strafe held regardless of whats going on. When you have one of these, just lay of strafe a bit unless you're actually fighting something.