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Quote from Sumsarr

Neither bat companion or vengeance are needed if multishot hits ~2,33 targets each time (which it easily should considering the cone).

Here is my take on the build, which I designed months backs:

http://eu.battle.net...YhQU!ceY!bbcZbY

The build looks good. I personally don't like grenade. It can be a pain getting them to hit targets but when they do it pays off. Also I would like to add that the original intent of the thread was to go with no generators. Please try to post builds that pertain to the topic at hand in here and not things that do not follow the scheme.

Also i seem to be a really busy man as of late. Way too many things are all happening at once. I will have to hold off on updating the first post until the official launch of the game. I would like to make this into a good guide for any DH that is planning on playing this way, as I do plan to play one like this, and I hope that everyone can understand this.

Quote from nothingtodohere

Quick question: I was looking at the math on the first post and azure mentioned there is passive hatred regen of 4/sec and passive discipline regen of 1/sec, does anybody know if this is still the case or have a source for these numbers? I haven't seen passive regen numbers anywhere else but maybe I'm just not looking in the right places. Thanks

This was in game data for the passive regen without any other buffs or gear. Bear in mind I have been away since patch 12 so it may have changed. Like I said I need to make some updates seeing that some things between the Templar and DH abilities were tweaked and nerfed so give me a little time to fix the numbers and make the appropriate changes to update this post to patch 15. I will most likely be able to get work done on this tomorrow seeing I have the day off.

Man I take a break from the forums, D3 and quite a few other games/forums for a few weeks to focus on classes and everything goes to shit. I should be active again sometime soon.

Quote from Simca

Rapid Fire, Multishot, and Strafe are all spammable, so I'd take Vengeance, personally.

Quote from ncoffey4

Would a +cold damage mod on your weapon count as slow or something else? It seems like it would be really too powerful if cold damage counted as slow when it slowed the enemy.

I don't think +Cold damage mods slow in Diablo 3, but I could be wrong. If it does count as a slow, that is pretty overpowered.

Cold is a damage type it only increases damage. I believe there is an affix that has a % chance to slow on hit but I may be wrong. I have not seen any evidence toward this in either direction.

Quote from Casanova

I've also taken notice on the comment regarding Cull the Weak and you are correct... but for a diffrent reason.
Entangling Shot & Strafe both have a slow effect. Also I doubt in co-op I would be the only person with slowing capabilities.

Strafe slows YOU not the enemy. You can move while channeling that skill but at 65% movement speed. It does not slow targets unless runed to do so.

I like what you are trying to do but I have a feeling it will not work in practice well. In order to get full benefit of Cull the Weak you will have to keep switching to Entangling Shot every two seconds to keep up the debuff. This does not sound like much but up around level 60 the average DH should have somewhere around 13 hatred generated per second. This is based off weapon affixes and the passive class regen. Switching off to a lower damage Entangling that often will generate way more hatred than you use.

When talking about Calrops. Yes they have a 6 sec duration however if you have to place them in the middle of combat you will either have to be running up to your target or away from your target. In either case you are loosing time attacking things around you. Suppose you use Strafe to back up while using Caltrops, yes you can do damage this way and still be on the move, Strafe however does not like to play nice about targeting particular enemies that are being slowed by Caltrops.

The idea of using Cull the Weak is nice for most builds when their main damage moves also slow, things like Elemental Arrow, but it seems when used with builds that try to use more exotic builds it becomes hard to manage. Why not just use another passive that guarantees the damage? Keep Entangling and Caltrops as ways to keep enemies away from you but instead of having to focus on getting slows down use them as utility. It may be 20% more damage but when it forces you to use lower damage attacks often, or move around than it will be much harder than you think to actually keep up.

Well to even get close to the amount of regen you would need to sustain this build type you need to be around 45+ beacuse that is when you get access to most of the runes that make these builds possible. Before then affixes on weapons and runes lock you out of this build archetype. Once you hit max level there are various routs to take. Completely passive ways will work at max level with good gear but so will the active ways that involve Prep or Screen. I really feel it is all up to personal preference. If you are a fan of one type of generator as opposed to another totally use that.

@Chippy Well my point about night stalker was that it was a chance on crit. It can be something like internal CD of x amount of time until it can happen again, or something closer to 10% chance to proc on crit. It does look powerful but like I said it is something that is hard for us to judge. Yes it can be as good as you said but the problem is that it can also be quite bad. The random part of the variable is the reason why I did not add it into the calculations.

Lots of those procs are handled in wow by ICD so that probably is not all too far from what they may have implemented here.

Also nice find on the vid of multi. I never noticed that it had such a good range. The last time we saw the spell it was highly range limited. It really makes me wonder why they have the rune that generates discipline on it in the first place. Even hitting 1 target is good enough to consider using multi over other attacks. If they never change multi and leave that rune, which they may put some type of limit on it sometime in the future, it looks highly overpowered when taking all the discipline options it opens up for any type of but not only these. I am kinda shocked that they would bump up the range AND remove the 6 max target off the rune. It may be the most useful attack in the whole skill sheet for us.

Edit: don't say sorry. The work you did is awesome.

Possible yes but I was only factoring things that were guaranteed we only know the rates of some hatred/disc returns on attacks. Night Stalker may have good potential but since we don't know the proc rate and the average crit level players will have it is impossible at this point to tell if it is a good passive for these builds or not.

Also my issue with multi is that it is very short range. 15? (b.net is down so I can't find the actual value) yards is short. I've had this exact convo in the monk forums about another skill that was 15 yard range that people were talking about as if it could hit anything on screen. Problem is none of them had access to the beta and this is far from the case. 15 yards is surprisingly short. For a DH who has absolutely no good means of damage mitigation other than avoidance and slows to get in close to use this sort of build will be highly deadly.

Where a wizard can freeze, armor and has damage absorption and the WD has several ways to reduce damage and heal we have two passives. One only works after 5 sec of damage and the other is based off of calt/spike trap. Problem is one is a yellow skill and caltrops drop at your feet not at the cursor location. By the time they reach this spot you would have already had to move away from the position. DH, unlike pretty much every other class, are very paper thin when it comes to defense. We are more of a glass cannon than a Wizard who is trying for the same sort of close in setup.

This is exactly why I say min/maxing is bad after a certain point. Yes you can get the numbers to say something crazy but in all reality what you have to do to achieve these numbers is very hard/dangerous. Even if you can justify to use this build you will have to spend quite a lot of time running away from targets to stay alive and thus lowering your damage.

Also I was trying to see how high one could get hatred regen to see if Cluster was spammable. There is no way I can see to do that it just costs too much. The next highest to spam is Impale and that is quite a good option in some of the higher end hatred generation builds (also costing half of what Cluster does has benefits)

@Chippy you really should take this info to a new thread. Not saying I don't want you here it is just a wealth of information being wasted in an off topic fashion. I know it all stemmed from a question about the builds but we keep getting so far off topic and I would like to at least try to stay on topic in this thread. I implore you to take this to a new thread and show the community the work you put into this! The math is honestly amazing and the datamineing you have done far surpasses my own, it really deserves its own thread.

You make a good point at the end of the argument. We are only very narrowly factoring in two types of stats when in all reality we will see 3+ affixes per piece of gear and these numbers will most likely balance out. I did not really take into account that the sample was a very narrow look into how only attack speed effected things. Though with this point it I would guess that my reasoning of saying changing your attack speed to fit the build will not change dps much when factoring in the additional stats. E.G slowing down your APS to allow for the skillset you have chosen to work or speeding it up to be more efficient with your hatred. Remember those are only small changes in attack speed and as long as you are under about 27 hatred spent per second you can make these builds work to some level of efficiency.

Edit: I only say 27 because this is the highest I have been able to figure with napkin math hatred gen per sec can get using this type of build.

@Chippy: Having a blah kinda night so it was mostly TL;DR however I did skim it and pick out something I kinda want to say to that. You did a good job pulling all of that together but I am kinda concerned by the conclusion of the sheer absurd attack speeds. 4+ APS? I have yet to see anything in any video go this fast ever. Not for any class at any level range. I have a distinct feeling the attack speed stat is NOT additive but something else.

Directly from the numbers in the beta. 7% and 6% on 1h xbows with 15% duel wield. In total that should be an increase on the standard APS by .448. Basically 1.6+.448 getting 2.05. THIS ASSUMES IT IS ADDITIVE. When i actually equip the gear it gives me only 1.97. There is either some amount of diminishing returns or nature (or some other relation we don't have an equation for just yet) that limits attack speed. I highly doubt that we will break the 3 barrier very easily even with duel wielding.

I tired saying before that we need to balance APS with our hatred generators. We know there are limits on how much disc and hatred you gen and use the real issue is the exact build you are using and the gear you have available to you.

I'm also surprised at your damage estimates. They look way too unbalanced (I mean come on relative % diff for them ranges all the way down to 43%? ). I have a feeling you have something way off in your calculations if these relations are so far away from each other. If I was a game designer, and to be honest I am in college for it, I would take one look at those numbers and go back to the dev team and have them rework the numbers to balance it out. There really should be no reason to gimp players so baddly for using 2 1h xbows. Especially when that is the main weapon the design of all of the artwork and themeing is based around.

Looked at the post Exitium. The numbers check out but what I would like to point out is that no weapon is slower than 1.1 APS and this is with no +mod for APS. Remember that you will spend more as speeds go up but, aside from multi, only gain the same amount of disc and thus a fixed amount of hatred over that same time.

What I'm going to do when I get home from class is to compile a list of attack speed ranges that can be used with different hatred generators. This will give a better idea of how fast you can get with different options to help with efficiency issues people may have when building this type of build.

Quote from chippydip

Quote from azuresky808

Yes improving discipline returns can help, but you can only use hatred so fast. If we assume you have an attack speed of 1.3 you will end up using 260 hatred every 20 sec. I only use 20 sec because that is the length of time to get the discipline to use Prep. Over this 20 sec we can assume that you have a natural regen of about 10 based on gear. Prep generates 125 hatred. Overall you generate 325 hatred and only spend 260 of it. This is why I say Prep is over kill. Trying to get even more regen for either resource at this point is pointless. You have no way to burn off the extra hatred unless you are in a special case where spamming something like Strafe or Cluster Arrow is a good idea.

If for example you want to get more damage out you can switch out Prep for the Companion(Bat) you will generate less hatred but also have more damage output on top of freeing up discipline to use on other things like Vault of Sentry.

That's all well and good if all you want to do is spam an attack skill, but what if you want to do other things like Vault around a lot, drops lots of Caltrops, go invis all the time with Smoke Screen, or try to keep Shadow Power up as much as possible for 20% leach and 65% damage reduction? Even if you can get enough passive hatred regen and a slow enough attack speed to not need Prep, you are still limited by your natural Discipline regen. Multishot lets you get so much more Discipline than you could get any other way. Perhaps this is a different build--max Discipline defensive/utility that just happens to not require hatred generators, instead of a no hatred generator build that just happens to generate a ton of Discipline for defensive/utility use--but either way, it seems like a great way to build the DH.

Well yes that is the point but the original argument was that improving discipline would give more dps. Getting more disc for other things like Vault/SP and other survival options is a good idea and I see where you are going with this. Just remember the original question was if boosting your disc regen would effect your dps.

Yes improving discipline returns can help, but you can only use hatred so fast. If we assume you have an attack speed of 1.3 you will end up using 260 hatred every 20 sec. I only use 20 sec because that is the length of time to get the discipline to use Prep. Over this 20 sec we can assume that you have a natural regen of about 10 based on gear. Prep generates 125 hatred. Overall you generate 325 hatred and only spend 260 of it. This is why I say Prep is over kill. Trying to get even more regen for either resource at this point is pointless. You have no way to burn off the extra hatred unless you are in a special case where spamming something like Strafe or Cluster Arrow is a good idea.

If for example you want to get more damage out you can switch out Prep for the Companion(Bat) you will generate less hatred but also have more damage output on top of freeing up discipline to use on other things like Vault of Sentry.

Quote from nukewarm

Am I misunderstanding something here? Preperation[Punishment] gives you all the hatred you could ever use. It seems like these builds should focus on Discipline replenishment, so that you can pop Preperation whenever you want to. Multishot seems to be the winner here.

You did miss something. It gives you too much hatred! Unless you have some crazy attack speed you can not use all the hatred you get with Prep. This assumes you have +hatred regen affix on weapons of course. If you look at the math in the post you can generate almost 10-13 hatred per second at level 60 (assuming 2 of the 3 affix are present) while using only 11-16 per second (assuming something around 1.1-1.6). Getting an extra 125 hatred every 20 sec is way more than enough to sustain the difference in hatred generation and spending.

Discipline replenishment is not as important as you might think and in all honesty it will become quite overkill quite fast. This is also why most of my builds do not rely heavily on passives to get discipline. Generating too much hatred from discipline pretty much means you put too many skills/passives toward hatred regen because now you have wasted potential. (I also did the math for trying to get Cluster Arrow to be spammable... It is not possible without other means of generation like Gernades).

Edit: The old builds I had up used multi to fuel disc regens only because I did not factor in the affix from weapons. The affix is so powerful for these builds that the focus now should be on what attack speeds can be supported by the different means of getting hatred back. I will go so far as to say that from the looks of the math one could feasibly generate a little over 22 hatred per second. This is absurd! Assuming one were to put all their eggs into one basket and do this they could easily use these builds with 2 1h xbow and not just the suggested 2h builds that I posted. I have yet to do all the math out and post this build, something I plan to get done after I put up the charts on attack speed.

@Chippydip: I get that having different modifiers at different speeds will change dps. Making an already fast weapon faster does not do much, especially after the fact that APS is not liner, and the opposite is true for 2h. I was just trying to point out that 1h xbow and a quiver may not be a bad choice depending on your current stats. If you are very unlucky and are all decked out for APS and have the choice between 1h+quiver or 2 1h you may see better results with a quiver depending on what you have available. I understand the math I was just playing the Devils advocate and showing an in game example that proved a reason to use a 1h bow and quiver even though you stated that nobody should want to use one since the math points to 2 1h being better.