DiabloFans

Hi everyone, I just posted some stuff on the official PTR forums and decided to share it here as well, in case you don't frequent those and want to get a little overview of what things will look like in the next patch. It's mostly aimed at the devs, but for the curious, it will certainly be good enough I assume. Feel free to comment and add anything I might have forgotten, or ask me about anything that's currently going on on the PTR. I'm trying to stream here and there but generally I'm really busy IRL so I just quickly typed some things and left it like that. Also, I have recorded and cut a short overview and two high GR runs with both UE and Natalya if you want to check those out.

Copy&Pasting from the US forums:

Short introduction:
This post consists of two main parts, general feedback and Demon Hunter feedback specifically. In the latter part, I will comment on the skill changes, new and old items and in the end I will conclude with a short overall impression of the patch. So far on the PTR, I have played on Torment 8 and above and have pushed 2 and 3 player rankings alongside Crusaders and Barbarians, up to tier 66. I have cubed about 35 items and tested most of them, and generally I have high end gear, gems, paragon as well as rank 1 experience in all brackets and seasons.

General Part

Kanai's Cube:
Amazing addition to the game, exactly what was needed. It elegantly solves many problems (such as the mandatory power creep, making unused items useful, stash space) and sparks new theorycrafting ideas. It also evens out the odds for finding the much needed ancient weapons, perfect ring slots etc., and generally helps to equip your character. All in all a pretty neat feature, only thing I'd like to change is the visibility of cubed legendary powers. Currently, if someone asks me to show my build, I press one button and they can see everything. For the cube, I need to open the inventory, then click details, then scroll down, and it's not even showing the icons but only the text of the legendaries in use. I'd like to see it in another spot, maybe add it to the bottom or right of the skill window, or to the bottom of the inventory.

Hellfire Amulets:
Perfect change. I have calculated that in 2.3, Hellfire farming efficiency will more or less increase tenfold, which is more or less what I think it should be. Out of my experience, I have crafted about 700 Hellfire amulets since RoS release, about 20% of those had a socket, and 2 rolled with elemental damage + double crit + good passive, and maybe 15 with mainstat + double crit + good passive. However, it's just not worth it to do that because the amount of paragons you could farm in that time would be much stronger, on top of you getting other perks like crafting mats, items, and generally having more fun, all of which created the huge problem we had with uber bosses in the past. With the current system on live, you should expect to craft ~1000 amulets in order to have a reasonable chance to get one with the elemental bonus and passive you need, which means approximately 150-160 hours with a high end setup (10h keywardens, 5-6h ubers per 100 amulets). With the socket change alone, you would be expected to craft approximately 150-250 amulets for that. This seems about what players experience when crafting Hellfires on the PTR (sample size ~400).
Here are some calculations I did before the PTR was up: http://puu.sh/iM1Ix/75c6e2dd28.png. I don't know the exact drop rates, but I will go with the last column here (100% KW, 150% Uber drop rates), where you would spend ~50 minutes farming KWs and ~200 minutes farming ubers per 100 amulets, netting 2,5 minutes per socketed Hellfire (compared to ~400 minutes KWs, ~300 minutes ubers, 35 minutes per socketed Hellfire on live). On T10 the bosses might not die instantly like on T6 but it will be very close to that, for Magdha and Uber Diablo it won't matter much because most time is spent on the shield / sequences, so 2.5 minutes might seem a little optimistic, but optimized parties will get close to that. With some slacking involved, 3.5 min seems reasonable, and that's exactly the tenfold increase in efficiency I was mentioning. In any case it's pretty cool that the focus has shifted away from the keywardens, am I'm really looking forward to crafting Hellfires in 2.3. If you only want to have one with mainstat instead of elemental damage, you should be good to go with 10-20 crafts, which means 1-2 hours. Other than that, spending 20-50 hours for a perfect gg amulet per season sounds exactly like what it should be. Getting an elemental Hellfire is not based purely on luck anymore, thus closing the gap between lucky and unlucky people a little, and generally evening out RNG in this game a little, which is always a good thing.

Trials removal:
Almost uniformly applauded by everyone, including myself. Very good to finally see them go, better late than never. However, in addition to the other changes made to greater rifts, it creates a couple of new problems:

Greater Rift gem upgrading:
I don't really see a reason why failed rifts should not reward gem upgrades. It will make running high tiers even less rewarding (in addition to the XP / loot problems), and more or less remove 1% runs from the game. Other than T6, bounties and speedfarming lower tiers, running higher tiers for 1% gem upgrades is a lot of fun and resembles high GR pushing on live the most, and I'd be sad to see them go. It's a nice change in the activities you do ingame, and is at least close to mindless XP farming in efficiency (in terms of expected damage gains per time invested). Other than that, it feels really weird to finish a rift and have no options to select. Since higher greater rifts are a lot less rewarding (per time spent) in general, gem upgrades should really stay. In the end, you still need to complete the tier you want to run -1 at least once anyway, so paragon 100 people running around with rank 60 gems or the like is not going to happen.

Rift fishing:
Without trials, fishing for rifts will rise to new dimensions. Even with the current system on live, people are fishing 100-300+ rifts for solo clears, and this problem will become even worse. It's not fun to open and close rifts after 1 minute (as soon as you can see it's bad), or leaving the game immediately after encountering a reflect pack. Certain builds or very skillful players can save their run through situations like this sometimes, but in general, that's how it works and it's not very engaging, be it for the player of for those watching. Actually completing rifts has to be rewarded in one way or another, or people will just fish all day. The same holds true even more for groups, which previously haven't really been fishing at all (due to lack of keys caused by huge trial RNG), and pushing groups was a lot of fun because every key was precious (even failed ones for gem upgrades), and as a streamer even more so (since people like to watch that stuff and see if you can make it). With the system on PTR, group gameplay will become much like solo gameplay in terms of fishing if there are no incentives to not leave the game immediately. This has to change, otherwise we will spend more time in the menus than anywhere else.

Leaderboard profile snapshotting:
Honestly, I don't see many good reasons behind this change, and so far I haven't gotten an answer or seen any blue comments on this. While it may seem good at a first glance, it's likely to spawn an even more secretive behavior when it comes to new builds. People that theorycraft new things and manage to get a top ranking because of that will be completely ripped off, since now anyone can just go and take a look, fish a couple dozen rifts and beat it. Before, a lot of guessing and testing was involved for those who wanted to reach the same rankings, giving away the group / class setup usually was good enough to get people thinking. Also, it is very likely that high end solo and group players will just start failing their rifts on purpose to keep new builds hidden from the public until the last couple of days of the season. Other than that, the culture in random groups might evolve into something like "go copy r1 dude or you won't get invited", and additionally it will keep many casual players from testing their own things with the cube, because everyone will tell them "it doesn't work, look what top players use", effectively decreasing build variety and theorycrafting efforts across the board. It's not like top players generally don't share their builds, but sometimes they decide not to, or to wait a little, to actually get something out of their efforts. It also leads to the next point:

Greater Rift reward structure:
Through all of the seasons, there have never been strong incentives to run high greater rifts. While it's certainly fun to push oneself to the limits in solo or groups, it's usually the worst you can do in terms of farming efficiency. Even if you can consistently clear very high end tiers, the loot and bloodshards you're getting are almost worthless in comparison, and even XP is dragging behind. After a couple of test runs in a 2 or 3-man groups with highly unoptimized setups it seems like the new XP / speedfarm meta will shift to more or less tier 55, which means another ~10 tiers increase over last season. On the other side, it seems like the highest potential rift clears will be more or less what they are like on live for groups, meaning that the gap between farming and pushing has become significantly smaller, yet completing farm runs is several times quicker. At the very least, blood shards should scale indefinitely the higher you go, and the 1% gem upgrading should be put back in place.
Other than that, I'd also like to see season ending rewards for everyone on the leaderboards. It doesn't need to be a big thing, maybe a banner reward, or a new / recolored frame, or just some other minor vanity item that sets them apart, and then have it scale up a little bit (like top 1, top 10, top 100, top 1000). People shouldn’t become obsessed with the leaderboards, but just a small recognition would be nice to see. Like, anything.

Paragons:
Somewhat in relation to the last point, something needs to be done about the Paragon problem. It's fun to level up and know that your character has become just a little bit stronger, and people that play more should get something out of it. However, in the long run, it's not fun to compete with people that have 20-30% more dps with equal gear just from having more mainstat. This easily amounts to an advantage of 2-3 tiers (+1 tier is +17% monster hp, however you don't need 17% to go higher because of walking, setting fights up, pylons etc. From my experience, having about 10% more dps is enough to be the exact same rift on the next tier). In the end, the reward of playing more is also more and better loot drops, and generally becoming better at playing the game, which are factors that the paragon count alone doesn't reflect. It's probably a difficult issue to solve, since general changes to XP farming will apply to everyone, so if anything, this will change in the next expansion rather than a simple patch. Nevertheless, I think it should be addressed at some point, maybe by capping the mainstat gain (not paragons themselves) after a certain point, so that people wouldn't constantly feel bad when not farming XP like crazy (since it's the most rewarding way of progression, and with the changing speedfarm meta, even more so).

Greater Rift balancing:
The usual suspects (unburieds, zombies, etc.) are still too rewarding. With the changes to crowd control, everyone will just fish for easy melee rifts when pushing. Fishing is okay to a certain degree, but it shouldn't be the main part of getting a ranking, so better balancing is still required. Some map types are still very bad (biggest offenders are Westmarch Heights and Repository of Bones) and could need density buffs or reworks. In addition, it would be great to see more "environment effects", like those zombies coming out of the walls in Halls of Agony, or the return of at least a few destructible objects in greater rifts which could be used as a tactical advantage. Playing around these kinds of things while still dealing with all the monsters and elites running around would make for even more engaging gameplay. Also, pylon spawns need to be fixed. It's good that the pylon mechanics / exploits I explained in season 2 got fixed, however the new mechanic is clunky and feels very frustrating sometimes. Some map layouts just don't have enough pylon spawn locations to actually let you spawn at least 2 pylons, and even when you get a decent map you never know if you lost pylon no. 3 or 4 due to the "fix", or if they just didn't spawn. Adding more spawn locations to "bad pylon maps" should be an easy solution to truly fix the problem in 99% of the cases.

On another note, I think the unavoidable damage route is just fine, but reflect damage has become an even worse problem. It was bad before already since many builds had to chance to deal with it at all (due to delayed damage output, like Ball Lightning and Rain of Vengeance), now you never have a chance to actually shoot at reflect packs because there's always one monster which has the buff. The reflect damage needs to be heavily nerfed, or entirely removed. This affix has been causing issues and requiring reworks since vanilla, and it's just a very unpleasant mechanic in the game which should just not exist. I'm not entirely sure what we are intended to do against it after patch 2.3, I was running 300 million toughness in tier 60-65 and got totally obliterated within one or two attacks whenever a reflect popped up. At some point I was even running the new leech passive in addition to that but it barely made a difference. I'm not sure how this is going to work in tier 70+ (which is probably what the end of season rankings are going to look like for most solo leaderboards, and close to 80 for groups). My toughness was overkill for the tiers we were running, most of the time I was even surviving several hits without proccing Awareness, but reflect still remains an instakill. The same goes for the Crusader (Alkaizer) and the Barbarian (Empyrian) I was running with, both of which had even more toughness than me, and they could barely touch reflect either. Link to VoD: https://youtu.be/0Ru8j1YfnSo [Note to Diablofans: Same as above]

Rift guardian rebalancing:
It was about time.

Elite affixes:
I think reflect damage is considered a "known issue" already, so I'll focus on other affixes here. The nerf to Jailer makes survivability a lot easier, paired with a little tankiness to survive Thunderstorm it seems like it's in a good spot, however I'm unsure about very high tiers (75+). So far I didn't have a chance to test those, but it should be good enough to survive at least one hit even on high tiers. The changes to the Waller affix were much needed, I haven't really had a situation where I was getting completely stuck so far. Also, I noticed a lot of Missile Dampening packs, it seems like their prevalence got increased, which is a good thing. It's one of the more interesting affixes that you really need to play around.
Other than that, I'm sad to not see any new affixes in this patch. With the CC changes, I was hoping that this opportunity would not go unused. Just adding 2-4 new affixes would definitely keep things fresh a little in the greater rifts. Things like Arcane Enchanted and Poison Enchanted are perfect affixes that make fights interesting, give us more of those!

New Torments:
From my experience on the PTR, the new Torments are too unrewarding to compare to the lowers. You are significantly slower in T9 and T10 because you have to trade movement for dps, and so far the x2 experience multiplier compared to T6 doesn't really bring it anywhere close to greater rift farming. Same goes for the bounty caches, they should award a little more on T10, considering that splitfarming will be a lot less efficient and it will be very difficult to find people who can do that efficiently.

Demon Hunter Part

Skill changes

Spike Traps:
Reading this in the patch notes, I was really excited about this change. Playing Spike Traps was a lot of fun back in vanilla, but the skill has been completely forgotten after the heavy (unnecessary) nerfs in 2.0. It would be even better if we had a set dedicated to this skill, the items to work with it are already there. So far, it seems like the developers' intention is to use Spike Traps with Natalya, as it is the only set that buffs all of your damage. The flexibility of Natalya is remarkable and helps a lot with creative builds, however the Crashing Rain (~8000% wpn dmg every ~1.5-2s) affix just outshines anything you could potentially come up with, including the Spike Traps. The damage on the runes is a joke, and the effect of the cold rune is worthless with the CC changes. At least the lightning rune looks cool (both aesthetically and tactically) but it seems even weaker than the rest. So far, it seems like only the new seasonal weapon can save the Spike Traps.

Numbing Traps:
Well okay. Didn't seem like much of a problem to keep it up permanently anyway, but it might help a little. Numbing Traps also seems like a very strong passive to use in group play, but we just don't have reliable ways of proccing it currently. If the new Spike Trap weapon is not going to work for high end groups, we would have to settle with cubing the Helltrapper to make the passive work, or take something like Sentry on one of our precious active skill slots, both of which are very unreliable mechanics, which is especially bad for defensive skills like this. Maybe it's time for the Guardian Turret again.

New Leech Passive:
With all the incoming damage in greater rifts now, a healing passive sounds pretty good. It's scaling well, and the choice of making it scale off life per kill fits the theme. Nevertheless, if we consider the slots with can roll life per kill, we can see that its power is very limited: Jewelry, weapons, chest, belt, pants. The last three might be the best candidates to get the stat. No one is going to reroll a secondary on a Hellfire amulet, so getting it there is almost out of the question, same for weapon slots (UE needs discipline, Natalya likes it too, and rings are incredibly difficult to get right on the primaries alone, rolling the secondary like that on top of it is incredibly RNG as well. Assuming a high end main DH, it seems likely that it's going to be the 3 armor pieces and one lucky roll on the jewelry, which would make for ~26,000-31,000 life per kill, subsequently scaling the passive to ~37,000-41,000 life per hit (including the 18,700 baseline). Since we want to run a lot of toughness, and the best way for DHs to get toughness is ancient vitality on a couple of slots, we will probably be sitting at 700-1000k life, which means we would need 20-25 attacks to refill our life, or ~6-8 seconds. That sounds fairly decent and in line with other classes' healing capabilities. If we could outheal reflect with it, I'd take it, but it's nowhere close to that. With ~200m toughness I was hitting myself for 100-150k per reflect of Multishot, which has a proc coefficient of mere 0.18, procs again from the rocket, and in case of Dead Man's Legacy even four times per attack, effectively twoshotting me in tier 60+. In any case, it feels weird to craft a Hellfire amulet just to get the Leech passive, when instead I could get something like Single Out or Ambush, but generally it seems like something I would consider using, depending on how necessary recovery will be at the high end. It would be great if good players could set themselves apart by lowering toughness and recovery to push their dps without being forced into heavy tanking builds due to reflect.

Other Skills

Shadow Power:
Since we focus on surviving incoming damage now, Shadow Power becomes an interesting choice again, but it's not quite there yet. Night Bane and Shadow Glide have sufficient utility for low end content, Blood Moon and Well of Darkness could need slight buffs. In the end, most will probably go with Gloom anyway, like always. I think it would be a good idea to give the skill a baseline Illusionary Boots effect. Even with Shadow Glide, we are significantly slower than Smoke Screen – Displacement, and definitely slower than any Vault rune, and taking two defensive skills doesn't really fit into many builds right now. It would fit the theme and would not be too overpowered, but it would let us skip a monster here and there if we really need to. On top of that, adding in a small baseline effect of the Gloom rune (or maybe even all runes, which could then be heavily improved by the corresponding choice) like 15% damage reduction would probably good enough to make other runes interesting for high tiers.

Vengeance:
Seethe should be baseline. It's the only rune that is ever used, and even then it's very little return on investment with the incredibly long cooldown. In case we don't get a set to go with this (really cool) skill, a couple of buffs certainly won't hurt.

Multishot:
Honestly, I don't know why the runes didn't get a proper rework when UE was introduced. The only viable choice for basically anything is Arsenal. Cold is used here and there for Iceblink synergy (e.g. Ball Lightning builds), but in general all of the other runes are trash. Now that UE and especially Multishot are going to be used so much, I'm really disappointed to see no changes at all to this skill. Maybe even rework Arsenal a little and make the skill deal more damage to 1-3 targets, or make an item like that (like Nilfur's). Right now, Arsenal is doing 360% + 600% weapon damage against 1-3 targets, which is just miles ahead of any other rune with their 360% / 460% only. Arsenal is a really cool and balanced rune, but I'd like to be able to choose the other ones to if I decide to go for some utility, or make them have some other effects. There's much being done about the single target problem, but without a rework, we will always use Arsenal and only Arsenal, all of the other choices are pretty much worthless (apart from maybe Torments where you could oneshot stuff with Full Broadside or something). Anything that alleviates the single-target problem would certainly help, and maybe let us take a look at the other runes. Nevertheless, a rework / buff to all of them (minus Arsenal) would certainly help.

New Items

New Multishot Bow:
Really well-crafted addition to the set because it solves many problems at the same time. Perfect! Vaulting is sufficiently cheap to be able to keep up with the group and retain enough mobility in T6-10, so Danetta's are not required, and it lets you dodge many things in high greater rifts without losing too much damage as well. Spamming low-cost Multishot is fun, with the added attack speed bonus you feel like a machine gun. With its high RCR and legendary effect, it will obviously become the go-to choice for Multishot, but overall the power level feels adequate. Nevertheless, I was expecting to see a weapon like this for Cluster Arrow, not for Multishot. A weapon tailored for Cluster Arrow that is good enough to bring M6 back to the table would be a nice addition, as right now it seems like the Multishot bow will also be the best weapon to use if you intend to run M6. I'd like to see M6 being viable, and after a full season of not playing the set, it's definitely time to bring it back, maybe in S5.

New Generator Belt:
Works well for Multishot / Cluster Arrow builds, the 3:1 RoV Natalya cycle and whenever you run a resource-heavy build in general. Refilling hatred becomes a lot of fun with the added attack speed, and the bonus damage might spark some new build ideas (like the Buriza + Hungering Arrow build in 2.2). However, so far it doesn't work with Kridershot. This is probably intended, as lightning UE is a very strong build, but without perma CC and the new reflect damage in place, it's seriously falling behind compared to other options, and Blizzard should consider making it work in synergy with the bow. Other than that, it feels weird to use it in conjunction with the Multishot bow, which adds 40% attack speed for that skill, but when switching back to a generator you only get a 30% boost. The numerical dps difference wouldn't be too huge if the belt was set to 40% as well, or at least able to roll that high, and it would definitely smooth out the Multishot playstyle a lot. Maybe set both items to 35%?

While we're at it, I'd really like to see generators being useful besides "regenerate most hatred possible", which is also the reason why so many people run Evasive Fire – Focus. With the new cc changes, we have the perfect opportunity to bring more utility to some of the generators, and maybe keep only 1-2 pure dps runes on each. Most Hungering Arrow runes could need a rework, and if all the generators would be buffed to 5 hatred baseline, people might consider running utility runes over pure 6-7 hatred runes. At the very least, buffing the proc chance on Bola Shot – Bitter Pill is in order, given that the reason for its weakness is long gone. Also, I don't understand why Bola Shot – Freezing Strike scatters in such a huge cone, it was perfectly fine back when it was still a poison skill. Skills like these or Cold Grenade or Evasive Fire – Hardened are exactly what we need, if they weren't regenerating so little hatred.

New Generator Bracers:
Much needed item with the new changes to perma CC and the focus on survivability / tankability. It really helps to keep the DH alive, and combined with the new belt, options like Reaper's Wraps become less required anyway. Currently the bracers feel a little too mandatory, but if there are no plans to further increase DH survivability in any meaningful way, they seem to do the job well. Nevertheless, again it doesn't work with Kridershot so far. Even if the Ball Lightning builds shouldn't become mandatory for pushing (which I hope they won't), it should work with the Krider effect, otherwise this bow will probably be completely forgotten, and most build opportunities made possible by the cube will go to waste.

New Spike Trap Hand-Crossbow:
While we don't have access to this yet, I'm not sure what to think about this new crossbow. Of all the sets we would have to go with Natalya to actually get anything out of Spike Traps, and Natalya heavily relies on smooth RoV cycling (which also does crazy amounts of damage). I'm not sure how the Sticky Traps will behave in the end, numbers-wise it seems at least worth trying depending on exact mechanics (e.g. will the Sticky Traps jump back and forth indefinitely between two targets? I can't imagine that, but it's more or less the kind of power level we would need), but I have a feeling we are going to be disappointed.

Old Items

Embodiment of the Marauder:
This set could need a couple of buffs. In the end, it will all come down to Cluster Arrow anyway, since there is not really a point in running Multishot or Elemental Arrow with it. It just feels and looks so cool when you have 5 sentries shooting Cluster Arrows at your enemies from all directions. In any case, it's far too weak. We need one extra passive and the quiver effect, and then also the Ballistics or Grenadier depending on rune choice. Also, the Boar Companion doesn't even come close to the UE or Natalya damage reductions, but considering the pets can tank for us a little bit, that should be fine. Seeing one or two new items that go along with it would be awesome (maybe a Tall Man's Finger like item which lets us build one monstrous sentry that follows us around like a tank?)

The Shadow's Mantle:
I'm disappointed that we have seen no rework of this set. Patch 2.2 brought sweeping changes for basically any class because of the new set, instead Demon Hunters get basically nothing. While it's true that we have been blessed in the past, seeing that this one is not getting reworked honestly surprised me. The legendary items we're getting are cool and feel well balanced already, however they don't offer entirely new playstyles, they rather just fix things (like hatred and survivability). After seeing the changes to Spike Trap, I was hoping that the Shadow's Mantle would go along with it. Or, given the name of the set, I was hoping to finally see a melee / knives / ninja oriented set for the DH (maybe even let us wield a special dagger in the offhand with it). Or maybe a reworked Shadow Power + Vengeance set similar to Akkhan's.

2-piece weapon set reworks:
While many other classes have seen their weapon sets reworked, Demon Hunters have not been touched, but that's fine. Danetta's has its uses and should not be changed. It's not top tier GR stuff, but it's used for everything that requires you to be quick, and is generally good utility, especially now that we have the cube. However, seeing new weapon sets in the future would be amazing: Why not Bow + Quiver for example?

Chanon Bolter:
I haven't tested it specifically, but I was told it does work even after full DR on crowd control. Not sure if this is intended, but since it has its own cooldown, it makes sense, and actually the diminishing return affect it would make it completely useless anyway. Since the game has become very fast-paced, especially in groups, the cooldown on the taunt could be reduced a little to bring more group utility to the table.

Wojahnni Assaulter:
Neat idea, but there's nothing to support the item. It could work just fine with Natalya, at least in the old perma CC meta, if it could produce some kind of overlap between the attacks. Maybe increase the maximum stack size slightly and let them drop off by 1 per second instead of removing it all after moving. This would let us cast RoV and dodge things here and there while keeping the damage high. Other than that, the Rapid Fire skill could need some baseline AoE effects (maybe make the pierce baseline), but the Bombardment rune should do fine if there should ever be a buff to this weapon.

Omryn's Chain:
I really like this build since it has been introduced, but it's just plain useless. High greater rift pushing is the only sufficiently slow-paced environment it would work in, but it needs some offensive capabilities for that. I think adding a random rune effect either on the affix or on every proc would make for a good idea. Or, what I like best, is having it cycle through all the runes: We would get the 80% slow, followed by the 2sec immobilize, followed by two pretty much worthless runes, and in the end we get the precious 10% crit chance. After that, it starts anew. Since Natalya doesn't really want to use Vault and UE loses damage doing so, it seems like a balanced choice that would make for interesting itemization and gameplay decisions.

Envious Blade:
It's a really fun item to use (cube) and could potentially spark many cool speedbuild ideas, if it only wasn't that clunky to use. The fantasy of having a really strong first strike against an unwary enemy has something to it, but in actual gameplay, it's just not really working out. Especially in parties you always have someone damaging the enemy, like a support running in front of the group, and then it's at 98% and the effect won't work anymore, or you have a random environment effect damaging the monster, or you wolf companion hits it once, or it gets damaged by a random tick of Wreath of Lightning etc. If the threshold was set to 90% hp, it would definitely increase the viability of the weapon / cube effect.

Shi Mizu's Haori:
We have seen a full season of exploiting this item (100% crit Monk in trials) already, and before that it has never been and after that probably never will be used again. The mechanic is very cool but far too clunky to use, I suggest to change it to directly scale with hp, e.g. starting at 100% hp you gain 5% crit chance (so that actually dodging and surviving doesn't feel incredibly unrewarding), and then scale up to +50-70% the closer you get to zero hp. I'm sure a change like this would open up a lot of interesting build choices for basically all classes, and breathe some fresh air into the armor slots department, which usually is dominated by Cindercoat, Hexing Pants and the like.

Odyssey's End:
With a free Calamity for everyone (thanks to the cube), the 20-25% damage boost is far too low. I think changing it to 30-35% would make using the Entangling Shot sufficiently rewarding and at least make people consider it over Calamity. It only works on 2-4 targets for a very small time frame with only one specific skill, while Calamity is applied on everything on the first hit with any ability and lasts for basically the entire fight without needing you to think about it. Buffing the bow is definitely justified.

Rimeheart:
This weapon needs to be reworked. Freeze is basically banished from the game now, and even considering a permanently frozen target the damage is atrociously low. I suggest to make it work with chilled targets, or tie it to casting a cold spell instead.

2h Crossbows:
All of the special crossbows could need a buff, especially the Hellrack. It's a very exciting effect, and with the CC changes, things like this should be promoted a little by bypassing the crowd control resistance, and maybe adding a useful damage effect on top of that.

Reworked Izzucob:
Well, it's better than nothing, and at least adds something to a previously worthless weapon, which is always a gain. It might fuel some knive-heavy build fantasies along with the Sash of Knives, so I guess it has its uses, and might be a cool item to find in low end content.

Oculus Ring:
Other than on followers and some support classes I have never seen this item in use. If anything, it should proc on hit, not on kill, and then have a sufficient uptime. For solo, it's just too weak, even if we could have it for 100% of the time, however for groups it might become viable, and would enable semi support / semi dps roles.

St. Archew's Gage:
I was toying around with this item a little bit, thanks to the cube. I'd really like to make use of it, however its one-time-only mechanic is super clunky and just plain terrible. We need a way to reset the effect in long fights, similar to the Molten Wildebeest gem, I wouldn't mind seeing a nerf on the amount absorbed to compensate.

My overall impression of patch 2.3 so far

I think the game is heading into a good direction. Farming content is going to become a lot more fun with Kanai's Cube and more class diversity, and high end greater rift pushing is a lot more engaging and challenging than before, especially in groups. Removing RNG from item drops is also a very good idea to even out the competition and prevent frustration from unlucky players. The crowd control changes will shake up group play and will require further rebalancing of the rifts and especially the reflect affix. In any case, high end content should be more rewarding to narrow the gap between speedfarming and pushing, and rift fishing needs to be addressed.

Demon Hunters specifically seem to be in a fairly good spot right now, but will probably be a lot more difficult to play than most other classes. As such, they should be rewarded for doing well by being able to dish out good dps and bringing sufficient party buffs. Depending on what the devs want the solo and group end-of-season clears to be like, I think DH is neither undertuned nor overtuned right now. Natalya seems to fall behind UE a little bit with the new Multishot bow, but it will likely remain a viable endgame choice competing with the set, we'll have to wait for a fix to Leoric's Crown and the new Spike Trap weapon. Depending on changes to the new generator items, we might also see lightning again, and M6 is still far behind. In any case, group play has a much higher skill cap, both in terms of survival and dps. For the latter, cycling Focus and Restraint, Taeguk, Convention of Elements and possibly even Hexing Pants all at once is lots of fun and really requires you to be on your toes, I'm looking forward to doing that on live.

As usually, I'm not going to bother with farming too much on the PTR, since it just takes too long and takes away from other things I could to on live or IRL. It would be much easier if we could just get all the items from Kadala with a 100% legendary rate and infinite blood shards or something. Still, I want to push solo and groups a little more (which is difficult enough at 250ms latency), and I will report back again at a later point, probably after we have seen the next iteration of greater rift changes and the new S4 items.

Hey everyone,

last night Empyrian and I rose up to the challenge to try the very unusual combo of Barb + DH in 2 player. The main difference to the regular Wiz/DH + WD/Crus setups is the missing permanent CC both during the rift and for the rift guardian, which makes for very exciting gameplay because it requires a completely different level of coordination during the runs. One thing that many people complain about is the need for perma CC to be able to reach high rift tiers in groups, and this may be a first look at what things will be like after it will finally be removed in patch 2.3. Obviously many more things will change (as we will probably also see a rebalancing of damage taken inside GRs, as well as massive power creep to make sure we can go higher after the patch than we can do now, and obviously all the new class sets and items), which will make things completely different in the end. Nevertheless, both of us can only encourage everyone to go and try out some unusual combos like this, it's a lot of fun to play, and a very refreshing experience in general.

Even if it is not top notch, I guess that ~tier 60 can be done with basically any class combination in 2man (this one was pushed to 63 already by DutchFreak and Xemio on the EU servers a couple hours later). Considering that the top clears will probably cap out at ~68/69 this season, this is likely not going to be rank 1 material, but it's certainly viable to push into the mid 60s. We only did a couple of runs and in almost all of them we (could) have spawned the RG with a couple of minutes left, going for a more aggressive setup (e.g. running fire RoV instead of cold) will tremendously shorten fight duration in easy rifts, and in the end you can always gamble for a Stonesinger + Power Pylon and kill it off in 2 min even at tier 65 or something. We're definitely looking forward to push higher at a later point and see where we will cap out with it.

Both of us streamed and recorded the run, so you can watch it from both point of views. Enjoy: Barb PoV | DH PoV

Barb Profile | Empyrian's Livestream

How to reroll 10 CDR on your Natalya weapon: http://www.twitch.tv/wudijo/c/6826889

Too bad I can never use this flawless roll, it's just a vanity 3600 dps item now

1. 15% Strafe damage rolls are almost irrelevant and will improve your overall dps by probably less than 1%, definitely not recommended to go for for anything that could potentially require some toughness (T6 + speedruns), but recommended for anything where you get oneshot (T60+). Also, I would rater roll +100 dex instead of +15% Strafe damage if you have the choice.

2. Zero toughness in high GRs.

3. I use UE with a 3.1 Krider in speedruns over a 3.4 Balefire.

4. Mortal Enemy -> 0,5 x 4 x 5 + (3-4 Krider affix) = 13-14 Hatred per Immolation Arrow. IA has a proc coefficient of 50%, which procs once upon impact and four times from the ground effect. Obviously you only use it when you have low hatred and generally only cast it on targets that will survive longer than 1-2 seconds, so mostly 1-2 yellows, 1-2 big whites and the RG throughout a 2-3 min run. You don't want to cast MfD all the time because you will lose damage due to spending too much discipline, but you will become the ultimate RG killer (after the very underused Bash Crus).

5. No. Read the TL;DW again.

Quote from Alien2k12»

So a question from my side, because I dont get the "meta" of using 2-hand weapons.
The problem I have is I play mainly solo or with a friend, but whenever i join a group everyone tells me I should use a 2-hand weapon.
[...]

Since your question seems to be resolved, here's a tip: Hover over "fire damage" in your extended character tab and you will see the damage numbers including your elemental bonuses.

Quote from Alien2k12»

So I did a little of math myself.

[...]

It's not that easy. First of all your rockets deal 600% because of Ballistics, and I assume you are talking about EF (Evasive Fire) instead of ES (Entangling Shot). Having a quicker weapon will change your cycle because you have less of an impact of passive hatred regen or skills (like Vengeance and Bat), so your EF:MS ratio is slightly increased. Something to keep in mind is that EF does not pierce, so this will only work if your targets are standing next to each other and can be hit by your generator all the time, however the damage it does usually is very little. Also judging from your APS numbers, I assume you have 6% attack speed on your bow - something you generally don't want to have on a bow. Nevertheless, your conclusions are correct: The Balefire will deal more damage - even more so given that fact that you didn't include elemental bonus (and a lot of other bonuses) for your Multishot.

4p Tier 72

Our 72 clear from last night - due to various reasons it was very unexpected. There's only one word to describe this rift: Disgusting.

For those who are curious, the setup is the same as in our Tier 68 3-player run, however I was playing at the 3.0 instead of the 2.5 breakpoint (due to Voodoo + Slow Time).

If you also want to open a rift like this, follow our ritual:

• Step 1 - Put in the key
• Step 2 - Cast: Piranhado, Voodoo, Mass Confusion, Anathema, Judgment, Shield Glare on the obelisk
• Step 3 - Have someone (Avoid) afk and autocancel the invitation
• Step 4 - Put in another key (IMPORTANT: Streamer Buff)
• Step 5 - Have the afk'ing player (Avoid) troll the stream chat RIGHT BEFORE accepting. Timing is key
• Step 6 - ???
• Step 7 - Profit.

On a more serious note: Blizzard fix pls.

Enjoy the run!

Party's profiles: WD | Crus | Wiz

Quote from Grge»

i feel Dark Cloud rune is too weak compare to other runes even weaker than Shade, but i havent really tried speedruns yet, so i cant really say much.
i guess its not too bad if mobs are tightly stacked.

1 thing, does Dark Cloud stack on top of each other? always felt as if it didnt

With the old Natalya set we had a buff icon for Dark Cloud, which stacked up to 5. It still definitely stacks, but I'm not sure if it goes higher than 5 now since the icon is gone since 2.2, however this will only ever be a concern during channeling pylon, and even then the Crashing Rain outweighs any potential damage loss.

Quote from Manel171»

So... Krider UE is the only choice to do 40+ grifts?

No, and I added a note in the video of what I would recommend when running UE without a Krider: Evasive Fire and Vengeance - Seethe.

If that's all

UE vs. N6 in Tier 45 Speedruns

Hey everyone,

since I got quite a couple of questions about this on my stream lately, I decided to record this guide to speedrunning lower GRs as a DH. It's a little demonstration of the advantages and disadvantages of the two Demon Hunter sets Unhallowed Essence and Natalya's Vengeance and how they compare in Tier 45. I go over the two different setups including skill, gem and item choices, compare the two sets to one another and also show 4 runs of each set in different group setups along with some commentary.

Enjoy and feel free to share your experiences with some group setups I have missed here

TL;DW - Both sets are almost equally strong and shine in different group compositions. For UE, mastering survival is key, while for N6 mastering damage (RoV cycle and Crashing Rain) is. When running with only 2 dps classes, UE is preferred because it brings better RG damage, when running with 2 DHs specifically, having one of each seems optimal. It's generally a good idea to stack some vitality on items to avoid deaths, and to run a difficulty that allows ~2.5 minutes clears on average.

3p Tier 68 (Crus / Wiz / DH)

I figured I'll just post this here as well. Just after trying out Natalya in groups for the first time the night before, we decided to use some of the leftover keys for 3-player and went with an unusual setup, dropping the WD for a second dps. The potential of having two dps, along with all the mutual damage buffs of Tal Rasha and Natalya makes for a strong combo that 1 dps + 2 support groups might not be able to compete with at the high end, especially considering the ridiculous amounts of hit points the rift guardians will have at 70 or higher. Until this point there are very few teams that actually use double dps in 3-player, my guess is that soon the WD will be completely dropped in favor of another dps for most teams. The damage potential is just a lot higher, not many buffs are lost (since the DH brings about 60-65% additive bonus) and not everyone has enough keys on 70+ to actually fish for Stonesinger with one dps, so this seems to be something worth looking into for those aiming to compete in 3-player.

Most of these runs were still fairly unoptimized, as both Avoid and me had to get used to this playstyle first, yet the runs were quite successful nevertheless. Even now we definitely have the damage to clear 69 and 70, however we only had one key to try it after climbing our way up to 66 / 67 / 68. Still, we had a lot of fun during the runs, especially Avoid rose up to the challenge to fight Raiziel on tier 69 with unprecedented enthusiasm, which I included an extensive bonus clip of in the end

Noteworthy changes to my setup compared to my last group runs are the fact that I used only one CDR ring and went back to Rocket Storm for more consistent N2 procs. For this group specifically I dropped Archery for Night Stalker and Preparation - Punishment for Marked for Death - Contagion, since there was no other DH to provide the buff. I was running out of hatred fairly often, however with some practice I tried to synchronize it with the 30sec timer of Marked for Death and then just regenerated at the same time I had to replace it. Gems used were BotT, Zei's and Gogok.

Party's profiles:
Crus | Wiz

@Frajs, yes it is bugged, and I use RCR on shoulders again.

Quote from Crzdr»

Wudijo

Calamity or Balefire (for N6 - Fire Build) ? Many top rank are going for Balefire.

Also could you take a look on my gear to see what can a I change (besides +1 cdr on gloves, +3 ROV dmg on shoulder, +1 Rov DMG on chest, CC on restraint) ?

http://us.battle.net/d3/pt/profile/lie-1851/hero/60205269

Balefire is strictly better for solo, for groups it depends and I went with Calamity last time. Other than that, there's not really much left to improve on your DH apart from the things you mentioned, and they don't really have huge of an impact anyway. You can get better shoulders by crafting Corruption maybe. Hellfire might be helpful if you don't want to rely on a Flavor of Time drop.

Quote from arlee89»

Finally got a ancient Balefire that rolled with 9% dmg was wondering if I should roll the min/max or roll the fire dmg higher?

Your Balefire is almost perfect. You can't reroll fire anyway, just go for the damage roll and try to get closer to the maximum. GZ

4p Tier 70 (Natalya PoV)

Hey everyone,

you might remember my post from two weeks ago where I was talking about my experiences with Natalya in 2-player. Last night we finally stepped it up to 4-player as well (first time this season for me), I was running Natalya along with Empyrian on his UE lightning DH. We managed to end up at rank 3 EU with this setup and there certainly is still a lot to improve dps and rotation-wise. Thanks to our ZEcret opening ritual we got an incredible Silver Spire map and cleared it with a very good time. All in all our runs were really successful even though I was almost completely inexperienced with Natalya group play and also experimenting a lot. We beat tier 69 4 out of 5 times, got very close (less than 1min over time) on 70 another 3 times after this run, and also almost managed to do a 71 (which was pretty much done already but unfortunately Erethon suddenly decided to charge us during the fight).

I was testing different setups and settled with a 2:1 cycle including 1 double tick of Strafe (perfect CDR rolls on everything sans amulet), putting me at ~62% CDR. Gems used were BotT, Zei's and Gogok. I chose to use a Hellfire over Flavor of Time for the extra passive (Archery), which helped me out with hatred regen a lot and brought some extra dps. I was not using RCR on shoulders, I only had 10% on the Calamity and stacked some area damage instead. After finishing our runs I was experimenting a little more and dropping one CDR ring for more dps might actually be a possibility, as I was usually getting another Strafe tick at the exact moment RoV became ready anyway. I'm also not entirely sure about the Demolition rune on Strafe as I was not using a damage roll on my offhand and sometimes suffered a little bit from the delayed effect of the grenade explosions, so going back to Rocket Storm might be an option. Depending on how well I managed to execute the cycle I was running out of hatred once about every 1-3 min.

In general, I think it should work just fine with another Natalya DH or Wizard in group, as our nonseason friends have recently shown in 3-player. The main advantages seem to be that the Natalya AoE synergizes very well with the Crusader's ability to stack monsters very tightly on top of having slighty higher damage output on most rift guardians, however it loses a little in huge AoE situations with very big pulls. It's definitely exciting to see that the two sets are so close to each other and at the very least it seems like a competitive alternative for those that don't have a perfect Kridershot and Meticulous Bolts. An Ancient Natalya's Slayer is a lot easier to get (especially since it always rolls %dmg, so you only need to get decent values and roll whatever it has to CDR), and generally you will get a couple of Calamities or Balefires along the way, which also don't require rare rolls at all.

My group members' profiles:
DH (Lightning) + Livestream | WD | Crus

Quote from Broodax»

FWIW - when you do get to a write-up, I think the mechanics of Strafe and how it interacts with Nats is going to require a lot of explanation. I see a ton of questions in chat on battle.net about how much CDR is needed, and they are usually responded to by uninformed answers about needing very high CDR and no relation to attack speed at all. I don't think the community really gets it.

[...]

Good point, indeed I am working on something, but it takes a while and most of the testing is not very easy to do. On top of that, I'm mostly busy with catching up ingame right now, since I have little time to play currently, but I plan on releasing something ~2 weeks from now. I'll definitely include your suggestions.

Quote from Boozie»

I have a 3421 DPS Izzuccob with 12 disc and 1.5 Hatred Regen that I've already rerolled/gifted. Is there any point in crafting arcane barbs to replace it? My understanding is that I won't be able to get 5% more dps on it. Likewise, should I bother gambling for a better 2H at all?

If it's still relevant: Izzuccob does not benefit you in any way, and Hatred regen on fast weapons is not doing that much. I'd suggest to keep gambling 2h since you want to have a Kridershot anyway. Your 1h should still be comparable to a very good Arcane Barb though.

Quote from Autocthon»

Quick sanity check on math. Double hit on X% life bar should result in an effective life reduction of (X/2)%. That is a 50% quiver should reduce effective life of enemies by 25% and a 60% quiver should reduce effective life of enemies by 30%. With that metric the 59% quiver should be granting 5.6% DPS from its legend effect over the 51% quiver (1-.255)/(1-.295). How do you estimate a 7+% increase off the legend effect (the maximum possible increase should be ~7.5%)?

With regards to a bow needing 5% DPS over a crossbow how do you make that conclusion? Are you using the flat damage spikes as a metric or... /curiosity

It's not that easy because the time where you have double damage from the DML affix is spent faster, which effectively decreases it's benefit. Look at the formula again and you will see it.

As for the comparison about bows to crossbows, you have to keep in mind that I used max dps rolls on all weapons and then Bows turned out to be ~5% better than Crossbows, but they also have ~10% higher dps. This is where the 5% rule comes from, and only applies if all of the other stats remain unchanged.

Quote from timoseewho»

is Thundergod's Vigor viable for the lightning build at all?

Yes, it's very close (within 1-3%) of a WH. Ancient TG should be more or less equal to nonancient WH.

Quote from IcehawkOS»

To preface, I'm running fire/Calamity with Ballistics, Para 500ish and care primarily about group play not solo.

http://www.diabloprogress.com/hero/icehawk-1433/MasterTruck/61338611

Let me know if you think I've done something dumb

Regarding Ambush - when using DML wouldn't its relative value go up due to the boost in DPS off the top to hit the DML breakpoint? Can the two procs overlap, IOW can I get the ambush buff to apply to a DML double strike if the first shot takes from >75 to <60? I *believe* DML can proc itself if the first hit drops below 60 then it will give itself the second hit, you don't need to be hitting with the first shot at that 60 breakpoint.

RCR's value? Wudijo has it everywhere yet when I've swapped in a piece of gear or two it just doesn't seem worth the loss of straight DPS to hopefully get one more MS off. Am I missing something here (like do you need a metric ton for it to be worthwhile)?

What about Bat vs Wolf? Solo vs Group? I have tried both a LOT and still can't really decide - overall DPS is higher with the wolf, and in group it's hard to pass up on the buff BUT the bat does help a bit with hatred management. Still I can't help but think it adds maybe one MS to the cycle and surely that isn't worth losing the wolf's buff?

You can get the double strike if you oneshot the mob below your DML treshold, but Ambush will not apply to the DML proc then.

RCR doesn't have a lot of competition other than on gloves. For all the other slots you just go for damage stats anyway.

Bat vs wolf should be close, I haven't done the exact numbers on that but might add it to the guide. For groups, I'd certainly choose the wolf. Keep in mind you have very little CDR, so wolf uptime will be ~30-40% best case, and don't forget about the passive regen from bat.

Quote from DrWho345»

Let's try and put your advice to the test

What do you suggest for me, to increase DPS

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/DrWho345-6124/

Wow, half of your gear is unrolled, this almost seems like a troll because everything is an obvious choice^^

Shoulders, armor to RCR

Gloves, allres to RCR

Focus, vit to CHD

Amulet, avg to CC

Pants, skill to armor

Boots, Multishot to 15

Helm, Multishot to 15

Weapon, xp to disc

Quiver, HA to Multishot

Also, craft new bracers or reroll to fire, craft a hellfire soon and keep gambling 2h weapons if you don't have a perfect Krider, or try to work on your Natalya gear.

Quote from timoseewho»

Quote from DrWho345»

Let's try and put your advice to the test

What do you suggest for me, to increase DPS

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/DrWho345-6124/

not play Marauder's

I lol'd

I'm still holding down Strafe, but I time it in a way that I get the first tick of the second Strafe cycle (which is 4, so 4+1), then cast my Evasive Fire, and so on. Since it seems like you cannot cast less than 3 ticks you don't lose that much time to go for 5 instead and proc your N2 bonus twice.