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+9

Demon Hunter Death's Breath Strafe Speed-Farm

by last updated Aug 31, 2015 ( Patch 2.3 )
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Skills

  • Strafe
  • Rain of Vengeance Dark Cloud
  • Fan of Knives Assassin's Knives
  • Vengeance Seethe
  • Preparation Invigoration
  • Shadow Power Shadow Glide
  • Ambush
  • Archery
  • Blood Vengeance
  • Hot Pursuit

Items

More Details

  • Legendary Gems

    • Wreath of Lightning
    • Gogok of Swiftness
    • Taeguk

Kanai's Cube

  • In-geom
  • Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan
  • Ring of Royal Grandeur

Demon Hunter Strafe Death's Breath Speed Farm


The goal of this build is simple:


Incorporate Sage's Apogee into a class set with good speed farming potential.


The basic idea of this though is to have strafe at a very high move speed, with a bonus 20% from hot pursuit which should be almost always up, and another 25% from Wreath of Lightning, and to just do a massive amount AoE damage as you run by things. This is likely limited to Torment 6-8 to be effective, depending on the quality of your gear.


Note this is the only way to get a DH 6 set bonus and ALSO have the Sage's 3 piece bonus, via Nat's set (obviously the head/gloves/boots combo can be changed). Nat's is able to accomplish this because of the Ring and Hand X-bow, which both must be used.


Notable item choices and alternatives:


Bracers

  • Nemesis: Benefits the build by giving more elites to kill which procs in-geom and BotP, while also giving additional Death's Breaths.
  • Warzechain: Benefits by giving huge bursts of speed since breakables will be constantly breaking.

Off Hand

  • K'Mar Tenclip: Gives Drifting Shadow rune, which allows you to run a different rune on Strafe.
  • Valla's Bequest: Requires the skill to be Drifting Shadow, but gives a little better ranged AoE, I believe.
  • Calamity: I believe it has high damage potential, but I believe K'Mar can be higher if your rune choice fits your item build (e.g. stinging steel with very high crit chance).

The Cube represents the next layer of customization, and honestly, could probably have options as well. Here are my thoughts for each slot:


Weapon

  • In-Geom: The amazing 8-10 sec CD reduction gives you the ability to spam FoK, Vault on Demand for light density areas, and reduces the cooldown on Vengence/Seethe in addition to the just in case addition of Bat for 50 Hatred if you need it for some reason. I think this is the best choice.
  • Envious Blade: This could potentially do well, particularly with Stinging Steel rune on Strafe, giving that first hit an guaranteed pop. However this build is sort of built around many damage sources, not single first hit bursts. The Rain of Vengeance, Veangence, Wreath of Lightning, and FoK all come together to clear areas quickly, not just strafe damage.
  • Calamity/K'Mar/Valla's: One of these would give you one of the passives you were missing, which may be valuable in terms of damage output.
  • Schaefer's Hammer: Basically a second Wreath of Lightning.

Note that In-Geom and Schaefer's will be extremely unlikely to drop for a DH, for seasonal considerations primarily.


Armor

  • Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan: The classic Strafe / WW pants are clearly a good choice here. Bonus damage and increased resource generation while moving in a build designed to never stop moving.
  • Warzechain/Nemesis Bracers: You could take the other one if Hexing Pants are not available to you or you simply don't need the damage/resource generation.
  • Leoric's Crown: Double gem effect gives a nice CDR boost if you feel that you need that extra beyond In-Geom and OroTZ
  • Cindercoat: May be an option by switching to the Rocket strafe rune.
  • Gloves of Worship: 10 minutes is a long time for shrines. If you are doing chain bounties or speed running rifts there is a good chance you can keep up the shrine buffs permanently.

Ring


The rings aren't very flexible. You absolutely need RoRG and Nat's bonuses. Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac gives you the CDR you need to keep Vengeance uptime very high. But if you find Vengeance uptime to not be necessary or suiting your playstyle, you could try using Band of Avarice, with a Boon of the Hoarder for that extra, insane move speed bonus.

Paragon Priorities

Core

Movement Speed
Maximum Resource
Primary Stat
Vitality

Offense

Cooldown Reduction
Critical Hit Chance
Critical Hit Damage
Attack Speed

Defense

Resist All
Life
Armor
Life Regeneration

Utility

Resource Cost Reduction
Life on Hit
Area Damage
Gold Find

Paragon and Stat Priorities


This section will also talk about general priorities.


Paragon priorities are fairly straightforward. For


Core

  • Move speed - Self Explanatory
  • Maximum Resource - This gives you a little more breathing room in your strafing. Ideally you won't ever want to stop and this will help accomplish that if your resource gen isn't quite there. If you have no problems, skip it.
  • Primary stat - Self Explanatory
  • Vitality - Speed Farm builds need some durability, but should all be covered elsewhere

Offense

  • Cooldown Reduction - The build is very heavy on cooldown skills, so keeping those as low as possible is important. If you seem to have a lot of room on Vengeance / Prep in terms of them cooling down before they end from your gear, then skip this.
  • Critical Hit Chance - Most dual wield builds are heavy on CHD due to dual sockets. That makes CHC the better choice here.
  • Critical Hit Damage - Still it's always good.
  • Attack Speed - Not as important.

Defense

  • Resist All - the most tankiness per point for a dex character.
  • Life % - assuming you have a decent vit pool this also gives a lot of durability. If you're more relying on healing / LPH, then go armor instead.
  • Armor - Armor should be high between gear and mainstat.
  • Life Regeneration - Most of your regen should be based on LoH I think

Utility

  • Resource Cost Reduction - Any little bit helps, and this stat is usually good in a strafe build.
  • Life on Hit - Where your sustain should be coming from, along with shadow power
  • Area damage - Extra damage at some point
  • Gold fine - the only time you might use this is during vault runs with the rest of your party.

In general in the build I've listed CDR as the stat priority. However, the stat priority will really depend on your gear. If you have enough CDR that your vengeance cools down before it ends, and you can easily spam RoV every 5 seconds, then you don't need any more. Obviously. In addition to the CDR stat, the ORoTZ and In-Geom will also keep cd's low. If you are missing In-Geom, for example, the CDR stat becomes much more important.


Not listed but also very useful is Resource Cost Reduction. You can get to sustaining your Strafe with Only RCR, and you may need to balance the RCR and CDR to get the optimum levels in order to make sure you can sustain both aspects of your character.


Finally, it's worth talking about elemental damage. Not necessary, but a significant damage boost. The build could work as a variety of elements depending on your choices. Or you can use a mix of elemental skills. Most likely would be Lightning (you can use the lightning rune on FoK, along with Drifting Shadow), Physical (if you have K'mar Tenclip, you can use stinging steel and assassin's knives), or Fire (if you have only cindercoat for cubing you can use one of the fire FoK runes along with the rocket strafe rune).

Build Guide

This build should play like any other strafe speedfarm build in 2.3. It may be slightly slower than some builds which could free up slots without the Sage's set, but the sage's set is why the build would be useful in picking up double death's breaths.


The general idea is to just have a ton of aoe damage going off at all times. Those sources are Strafe, Wreath of Lightning, Vengeance, and Rain of Vengeance.


Strafe is the backbone of the build. It activates ORotZ quickly to keep your vengeance downtime low, and the build is more or less built around it. The rune is flexible depending on whether or not you run K'Mar Tenclip as a weapon or a cubed effect.


Fan of Knives: The skill works incredibly well with In-Geom. The cooldown reduction reduces its cooldown to nearly an effective 0 seconds, which allows for frequent spam. It's also one of those skills with no animation, allowing you to use it without interrupting Strafe.


Rain of Vengeance: Obviously the core of the Nat's set. The goal is to cast this once every 5 seconds. Between the Obsidian Ring and Nat's set this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish.


Vengeance: Provides extra damage, and fuels hatred for Strafe.


The last two skills I'm trying to figure out which is best. Currently I think Prep / Focused Mind (or Invigoration), and Shadow Power / Shadow Glide is best. You can keep it up 100% of the time potentially. That provides a significant permanent movement speed boost and a high degree of sustain. I think other options are:


Bat Companion: This is just for some passive hatred. It could potentially be swapped with Prep:Punishment. The idea is that while the active is obviously worse than prep, you may not have to use it with the 1 extra hatred per second combined with the Archery hatred gen, which when combined with Vengeance, you should be able to sustain Strafe. Not having another skill on cooldown allows ORotZ to be more effective in reducing the cooldowns of your other skills.


Vault: This could honestly also be Smoke Screen: Displacement for the huge move speed bonus and defensive aspects. If you are using vault, acrobatics is probably ideal since it will be the only way you use discipline.


Passives

I think Ambush and Hot Pursuit are self explanatory. High damage for initial burst is important. And Hot Pursuit is like another 20% move speed almost permanently. For the last two slots I think options are:

  • Archery - a crit boost and small hatred generation boost.
  • Bloody Vengeance - More hatred and disc gen from health globes can help sustain your resource cost.
  • Leech - If you are really lacking any sustain and need some, and are not running Shadow Power, this can solve your problems.
  • Tactical Advantage - If you are running a vault based build, this can give you a bit more move speed.
  • Awareness - If you are in a difficulty where you can foreseeably die, this is always an option.