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@ ZultonB Before you enchant anything always look at your options. Look at all the options. There is a "?" (question mark) next to the each option when you drop your item in the enchant box. The options only really change between Primary and Secondary stats, they will just swap in the stat that you would be re-rolling.

If you want to do what phuzi0n states, that is fine by me. The builds are filled with cookie-cutter recipes. They work, just read any comments below them for added insight. I wrote all the stuff because you were making huge mistakes in your re-rolls. I wasn't telling you what you were doing wrong per se. Everybody makes mistakes before they have a full understand of how do things. But if you follow those builds you have to have the gear. You don't so, I don't know how you are going to follow a build without the gear. I spent a good amount of time writing that stuff, because regardless of what build you use, if you don't understand itemization in D3, you will progress very slowly. Somebody recommended you use Pain Enhancer. Ok, great. How will that help you? I've used most of the gems and Pain Enhancer is my experience isn't very good for DH. The Tox Gem is much better because you get a 10% damage buff and your entire party gets the buff. The only time PE is better than Tox is because of the Element. PE damage is physical so, if you have physical bonuses, this could be better. Again this is itemization. There would be synergy with PE over Efficacious Toxin if you using physical Rune and you have Physical bonuses on you bracers or amulet. This is the point to the wall of words I posted. People were telling you things, but, they weren't explaining why your mistakes were keeping you from progressing. You requested the full explanation, so, I tried to be thorough. Wishing you the best of luck with your drops.

@ZultonB Gorok's assessment of your gear is correct, however I tend to think his communication is directed at you without stating an obvious criticism that goes unstated. This being that you seem to lack that basic understanding of itemization of the pool table.

So let's go over a few things. Blizzard has taken a direction that 6 piece sets are the new end game. A lot of the sets with 2.2 have been reworked or added at the 6 piece level, so like it or not this meta-game that will get your the farthest. This is the direction you should be headed towards when you get drops. Focusing on Critical Hits as your damage buff is the best way to determine if you gear is worth keeping or salvaging. Having said that Weapon's are your most important piece of gear regardless of the Armor set you will use.

Okay so what does all this mean? What is itemization, and how does it affect my build and my character's performance.

Let's go over weapons because it is the most important thing. There are very few weapons that matter. Mostly they are just a bunch of damage stats so Ancient is most desirable because they roll 30% more damage than non-Ancient, but there are a few exceptions. The exceptions have to do with the 8synergy that you can get from their legendary affix. You have a Calamity equipped on you non-Seasonal DH, this is one of those weapons that matter. This weapon casts the spell Marked for Death without a rune on anything that gets hit. Why does it matter? Well, in general MfD will buff damage for all players in your party, so it is a very desirable spell as monsters will die a lot faster once they are marked. This spell and the Companion Wolf howl are the most significant damage buffs that DH can bring to a party. So the synergy is obvious. This stupid weapon will work with any build. Given that it doesn't cost resources to cast the spell with this weapon, makes it very special. You don't have to put one of the most powerful skills on your skill bar, freeing you to put another skill in it's place. You can of course, put the spell on your skill bar to add a rune, but, for the most part you don't need it. I state this because the rune that most people use is Contagion because it spreads the mark for free making it very efficient. Well, you are casting it for free, so it doesn't much matter how efficient you are. The second most used rune is Mortal Enemy which does the following: "Attacks you make against the marked enemy generate 4 Hatred." This is worded very specifically, notice that "hits" is not used. Rather the word "Attacks" is used. While not used a lot by DH, there are ways to do Damage over Time (DoT). You are using the Tox gem, this does add a DoT over 10 seconds. Pain Enhancer does too, but over 3 seconds. So if the word "second" is used in the DoT description, it will "tick" every second. Each tick is considered an attack. So if you DoT a pack of monsters that are marked, you will generate a lot of Hatred very fast. Enough about Calamity, but, since you have a very good one, I thought you should be aware of its capabilities. I will state that it doesn't have +Discipline on it, so the weapon won't be useful in an Unhallowed Essence build, but, most people are using them in Natalya's builds so that doesn't matter. The other weapon that matters is Kridershot, it considered Ultrarare and drops are very low, this is also true of Calamity. But, it allows Elemental Arrow to be used as a generator. EA is not a great spell if it costs resources because it has to be casted a lot to be most effective. But as a generator, the spell becomes more than useful because it does a lot more damage than any of the Primary DH skills that are normally used to generated Hatred so it can fuel other more powerful spells. But the real power is that EA is free to cast so it can be used without constraints, so the Lightning Ball build becomes feasible. There is one other weapon that is worth mentioning. This is the Balefire Caster which always drops with a Fire Elemental Damage bonus. Elemental Damage is usually limited to your Neck and Bracers, so it provides a slot with additional Elemental Damage. There are a lot of other weapons that do "things" but, these three items are special, because they add significant damage to your build by just equipping them. The Balefire might be something that you should be looking for since it, like your Calamity is a 1 handed weapon, so if you can dual wield with both these weapons you will have a very powerful build. For a Strafe/RoV Natalya's build you don't even have to have an Ancient Balefire. I'll explain this next when I go over what people mean by "itemization".

Itemization has to do with the stats that roll onto your equipment. In particular, you want synergy between your stats. This synergy is the build. The most important stats in general have to do with Critical Hits. The reason for this is because it is the most synergistic of the stats that can roll on your items. By its nature it is works as synergistic bonus because it is determined by both Chance and Damage bonuses. With this in mind, a 1:10 ration of CHC:CHD is optimal. You might ask "Why this is optimal?" Well it has to do with simple multiplication. Given that have a choice of equipping an items with 10% CHC and 100%CHD or an Item with 9% CHC and 110%, the effective damage bonus of the former is 10% (.10*100%) and the latter is 9.9% (.09*110%). The effective damage of items with 11% CHC and 90% CHD is again 9.9% (.11*90%). So now that you understand the 1:10 ratio, how do you use the ratio? Well, it's a rule of thumb. It's hard to get perfect and to be honest, if you follow the rule exactly, you potential for damage will actually be reduced. This is actually because it is possible with buffs from teammates and your skills (equipped spells) that you can have over 100% CHC and it is not currently possible to get near 700% CHD even with a dual weld setup. So true optimal is to max both CHC & CHD which will be closer to something like a 60% CHC to 550% CHD ratio. Still 1:10 ratio is useful when you have to decide between the two on re-roll. Let's look at Rings which can roll both CHC & CHD. Rings can roll with max 6% CHC and 50% CHD. There is no doubt, you want both. But if with Focus and Restraint, if you don't have both rings equipped, you lose a lot of damage, so, wearing one of these rings that doesn't have both stats is better than the best rolled Stone of Jordan that can roll with Elemental Damage, CHC, CHD, and Elite Damage. The damage is that good. F/R set bonus is a 225% damage multiplier if you keep the very modest stacking of the ring buffs active. SoJ will give you maybe a 160%-175% multiplier depending on the rolls and your other equipped gear. So looking at the ratio 6%:50% we see that 6% CHC will get outperform 50% CHD when we add it our other gear. So given the choice, it is normally best to roll CHC onto the ring over CHD. But if your overall CHC:CHD is leaning heavy with CHC all ready, it might be best to roll CHD. Mind you, you can away re-roll for the other stat if things change. This can happen if you get a Witching Hour (50% CHD), an Amulet (100% CHD) or if you decide to dual wield. The other reason these 2 stats are important is because they roll on most items and stacking these stats will get you most damage by far over anything else. They don't roll on boots, pants, chest, belts or shoulders, but everything else can have 1 or both stats. Witching Hour is 1 exception where a belt has CHD. Critical Hits Stat are universally important to any build if high damage is the desired build, but, there are other stats that important to specific builds.

Specific build will require different itemization. The most powerful skills in D3 are either limited by Resources or a Cool Down. Obviously, the most powerful builds employ these skills. So depending on the type of build it will be most beneficial to have either Resource Cost Reduction (RCR) or Cool Down Reduction (CDR) stats on your gear. Examples of Resource Spending are Cluster Arrow (used a lot with Marauders) and Multishot (used a lot with Unhallowed Essence) these both use Hatred, when you run out of Hatred, you have to generate more Hatred until you can cast the spell again. Reducing the cost of Spending skills allows more casts of the spell from full and reduces the amount of time required to regenerate another cast of the spell. Examples of Cool Down spells are Companion, Vengeance, and Rain of Vengeance (RoV). So reducing the Cool Down will also do the direct opposite thing and increase the up time (or availability) of the spell. Ideally, you can reduce the Cool Down to end before or just after the duration of the previous cast ends. With Nat's the set has built in devices to reduce RoV cool down, so stacking CDR past 100% up time of RoV would be better itemized with some RCR to decrease the cost of another spell like Strafe. Items like Cindercoat reduce the cost of specific resources like Fire skills. Other items like this include the Gloves Magefist (Fire, as well) and Frostburn (Cold). Cindercoat is special because it also add a Fire Damage buff. So depending your build, stacking these stats will increase the availability of your most powerful skills.

Specific Legendary items add further Legendary itemization that add very specific affixes that synergize well with other skills. Specifically the belt Crashing Rain is the 7th equipped piece of Natalya's, Bombadier's Rucksack for Marauders and (currently seasonal) Dead Man's Legacy for Unhallowed Essence. These 3 items add a considerable amount of damage to the Set Bonus, so the synergy is very obvious. For non-Seasonal either dual wielding with a Balefire Caster or equipping a Holy Point Shot will add Elemental Damage where this bonus is not usually available with UE. For UE, damage is modified by the amount of current Discipline so having a higher max is desirable. Max dex can be added in 3 slots with current items as a secondary stat. Those 3 items are weapon, cloak and quiver. So for seasonal, it's really hard to get a very good Dead Man's Legacy. Quivers can roll with bonus on every damage skill for a DH. So, you want something like MS damage, +12 Max Discipline, 60% threshold for MS double hit, 8% RCR, +20% Attack Speed, 10% CHC and Dexterity. The big problem is that the MS because of the inherent rolls of quivers in general almost never have MS Damage on them and that Legendary affix is considered a Secondary stat so it further restricts the chance of +Max Discipline. So, your best DML might be end up with CDR on it because you had to roll for either MS bonus or Max Discipline.

TLDR: Itemization will help your build if you know how to synergize the stats of the items and set bonuses. You should know at a glance what the best stat to re-roll on an item would be and instantly know if it is better than your current gear.

You only have 1 of 7 pieces and you need 6 for the full set. Aside from that, the build isn't that strong without the additional belt Crashing Rain. So you will need at least 6 more pieces.

The game is all RNG regarding what you get for drops whether from Kadala or kills. If you want to get a set up faster, do the Act 1 bounties to get a Royal Ring of Grandeur to reduce the set requirements by 1. This will allow you to mix and sets until you get a full 6 piece set.

It's good that you have a plan, but, the drops will dictate what builds you can employ. This is my advice for a somebody at Paragon 38 and new to the game. Kadala is good for filling open equipment slots. You want Legendary items in each slot. If I had to suggest a single slot to equip, I would say gloves or Chest. Chest for a Cindercoat because it most the flexible item when you are starting out. But since you have a Nat's Chest, go with the gloves. Gloves have the most offensive stats and you want CHD, CHC, Dex and RCR or CDR on them.

Another thing, upgrade your gems evenly. You can put 5 into your chest and pants, fill them up. It is way better to 5 lower quality gems than it is to have 1 upgraded gem and empty slots. The increase for upgrades incrementally is small compared to the amount of gold and gems required for these upgrades. That being said, you want a boon of the hoarder and a broken crown. Without these items, it will be very hard to fully upgrade your Emeralds to max. A maxed gem is 81 of the lowest level 70 gems. So you will need to collect over 400 of these in total. And it will cost about 10M gold for each slot so, about 50M gold. The two items I mentioned will help. You can only get boon of the hoarder by killing goblins, so kill everyone you see until you get into the vault. Yes, if you do this evenly you might have to unsocket them. But, this can be done for free when you are starting out. Salvaging an item will return your gems to your inventory. So when you get legendary pants you can unsocket the gems during the salvaging of your Yellow ones. You will probably go through a bunch of pants before you finally settle on your end game ones, so you should be able to do this as you get the Emeralds to upgrade. The other thing is that Unsocketing may seem like a huge amount when you are starting out, but, it is a small fraction of the cost of combining the gems for the upgrades. But, while you are starting out only unsocket when you can replace all the gems to save some gold. You made a mistake with your chest by not socketing them evenly. Right now you have a gem that is of higher quality than the other 2. It's a legendary set piece, so salvaging is not likely. But if you want to replace the 2 lower quality gems with better ones, the you will have to pay to unsocket the higher quality gem at a premium. You will have to pay a lot of gold to remove a gem that you will just socket without getting any upgrades from it. This is also why you should upgrade evenly. So if you ever have to do this again, I recommend you move that gem to you pants, so that you can salvage your most expensive gem out of the sockets. Once you get a boon of the hoarder it won't matter about the unsocketing cost, but, until then, gold will be very short until you finish with the gem upgrades.

If you can get Strongarm Bracers with knock back as a secondary, you can get some added bonus damage if you switch your MS to Suppression Fire.

You should be asking Kadala for a better helm with Vit, CHC and EA. Don't roll off CHC as it is better of the 2 especially since you have high enough CHD. You just want both bonuses. Your gear is very good, it just need optimization and upgrading the Helm is easiest one to get because it always rolls with socket. You would get the most out of a better quiver, but, quivers are also the most affected by RNG because they can add bonus damage for every offensive skill. Right now you have 2 useless stats. If you could get one slower travel speed with EA, Max Discipline and and only 1 useless stat, it would be a big improvement. I'm trying to get a better quiver right now and you get a lot of ones that just can't be rerolled without a useless stat. So go for the Ancient Helm. There aren't many DH only helms outside of the sets so, this isn't too hard. This isn't the case for WD, Monks, and Wizards. WD have masks, Monks have Spirit Stones, and Wizards have Hats. The only good DH helm is Pride's Fall and it's not in the Drop Pool.

For higher Greater Rifts, I prefer Singled Out. Ambush is really good if it you are 1 or 2 shotting things. After that it loses value. I'm guessing you are playing multi-player because I don't see a skill that will proc CtW or BotT. So you would be close to 100% CHC if you have some support on the GRG.

You could try Golgok to get more balls out and increase uptime of Wolf.

At this point you want to find better gear. Speed clearing both lesser and greater rifts. Since you are 1 shotting in T6, you should have no problem doing lesser ones. You're best chances for upgrading is to do full clears because of the increased drop rates in rifts. When you get half of your set Ancient you should be able to clear Tier 35 fast. Some people leave after they get there shards. I don't think this is efficient because you have to wait 30 seconds to reset, so I prefer to keep farming at the higher drop rates rather standing around in town. At that point where you can efficiently farm shards in greater rifts. If you're playing groups you can probably do this now. UE starts out a bit slowly with your progression compared to Marauders. This is because you have to throw extra paragon at your speed. So a really good Krelms Belt can be useful if you want to shift Paragon over to Dex. Keep the belt even if you get a Witching Hour. It will always be useful for T6 rifts.

Upgrading gems should be a priority. Upgrade to find your limits in Grifts. Where a Red gem in your Helm for the XP. Grifts will use the multiplier from your gear. For T6 the gem will be additive to the base 1600% increase, it's multiplicatve in grifts. If you are pushing Grifts you may want to switch to purple for survivability.

While you are farming T6 rifts open every chest for blue items. You will need as many as you can get for crafting. Farm yellow items but if you run out of space in your inventory make room for the blue ones. You get a lot of yellows for doing grifts so you can get most of the ones you will need from there.

Quote from SlyqqWillsn»

taeguk
would be another option if you are fine with holding the stacks.

How do you hold the stacks when spending decreases your DPS? Golgok should be used to increase the quantity of balls. This will also pretty much give you perma wolf bonuses as CD will be reduced by Golgok as well. The other gems should be BotT and Zei's. If you want the 10% CHC bonus you have the option to stand in a caltrop for that. If the the monsters are locked down this is probably your best option. Mind you if you have 400% CHD this is a 40% overall bump to your DPS. Ambush gives you that, but it stops when the monsters hit 75%, the caltrop lasts until the monster dies if you keep replacing the caltrop. With slow ball you don't need hatred generators, so your skill bar can be Caltrops, Invigoration, Wolf and Vault. Of coarse you can swap out Caltrops for MfD if the other DH isn't equipping that skill.

The problem with CoE is that if you are going straight Fire, it only works 25% of the time and it's not hard to keep F/R up all the time. F/R is 125% bonus (typo above) 1.5*1.5 =2.25. So even maxed CoE with buff on average 50% which is even with one ring on F/R. But Hexing pants can't compete with the other ring. But if you'd rather not break your strafe channeling don't use it and accept that you are giving up damage.

Night Stalker is a good passive if you are using a 1-hander especially when you are using a maxed out Golgok. Your quiver has all the right stats, except the Legendary Affix. I would look for a better quiver. All your gear is itemized correctly for stats. They just aren't the best rolls and a lot of them aren't Ancient. The Mystic either hasn't been visited enough or she and Kadala hate you. Not sure what they are talking about regarding your xbow. For EU you want RCR. If you were running Nat's CDR is better. You should craft better bracers. Ancient aren't hard to craft and a higher percentage from Globes would help you with hatred. I would get rid of Ambush if you are doing higher Grifts and go with Cull the Weak. You are obviously procing it somehow for BotT. I'm guessing your templar.

Your follower is freezing stuff for you, so I would drop Golgok and use Iceblink. Freezing doesn't proc CtW or BotT, but you do get a 10% CHC increase with the freeze. I might be wrong there. I don't know that monsters can't be both slowed and frozen. They probably can. Iceblink will also chill with your EV casts. You might want to upgrade it to 25 to test it out.

Source is the escapist.

You have 1.5% to gain in CHC. If you have 500% CHD, you would gain 7.5% increase in overall damage. This is over double the calculation above for the +Discipline. 6% with 400%. But if you don't have RCR I would get rid of Vit.

Buy the Deluxe Digital Edition upgrade for 20 euros.

You will get 3 more slots. Problem solved.

Turn on monster health bars. Thud is a violation of the users agreement and can get you banned.

I don't think they need a T7. They just need to rebalance. T6 was created before Legendary Gems. Once you get your gems upgraded to Rank 25 it's too easy. You just one shot everything. They need to make it relevant. But if they up the monster health and damage they should also bump the XP from 16x to maybe 20x. No change in gold is necessary as it's irrelevant after Boon of the Hoarder.

Your gear is pretty good. Kind of surprised that you don't have an Ancient Helm. Oh, well, keep gambling, just make sure you get MS and CHC on it. I would go with Iceblink over BotP. You'll get more procs on BotT. Also Steady Aim is good, but Cull the Weak is better. I'm not sure about using MfD Mortal Enemy. I would either go with contagion or use a more reliable way to get hatred up. Could be wrong there. I see you've got a solid Haunt of Vaxo, so I'm not sure how your clones are are spreading MfD. If you aren't spending any Discipline, it's probably a good choice. You can get away with Wolf companion in groups, but bat in Solo is better considering you can't use Preparation Punishment. I would roll RCR onto you Restraint. At Paragon 600, you will get better value from more Spending than the slight buff from the Dex of a Ring. There is also no reason not to have Ancient Bracers since you can craft them. But, you will need a lot of Arcane Dust for that. They are 72 AD to craft. So to get a decent one expect to craft maybe 30 sets, so you will need close to 2500 dust.

Don't forget when you make your final push, swap out your Helm Ruby for a purple stone.

Good luck with your bet.

I don't understand this whole conversation. Nat's is strafe build. It's not glass cannon. In fact, it about as melee a build as a range class can expect. How is swirling around in the middle of monsters different from whirlwinding? This is all I see from Barbs. So it's fine for Barbs, but when another class does it, it's glass cannon? The fact of the matter is that Nat's does little damage. Your are arguing the wrong point. It's not the frigging set bonuses, it's the stupid belt that does all the damage. You get a free 4000% weapon damage monster to stack on top of the set bonuses with Crashing Rain. So if there is a point to be made, it's that DH kept their belt, but, Barbs lost their bracers. Here is where the problem lies. But, nobody tested the belt for this build in PTR. Everybody tested Unhallowed Essence in greater rifts. They tested the double damage quiver or how the lightning build would work with UE and the Bastions of Will ring set. So the belt slipped by. The only thing that was tested was speed clears. They were doing really fast T6 runs with Nat's. But then again, so were Monks with dashing strike.

The Barb bracers were all that was tested in PTR. People were whirlwinding with every set. It didn't matter which set you used, the common item was the bracers. So what else are the Devs supposed to think other than they are in fact over-powered? The new WW set wasn't even the best WW build. Barbs put the spotlight on it and it got pulled, meanwhile the belt went unnoticed until 2.2 went live. If you want to blame anybody, the stupid way Blizzard implemented the PTR is to blame. Everybody wanted it to be over, so they could get their items on the live server. So the season was shortened and PTR was shut down over the weekend, then Tuesday the bracers were pulled from the drop pool.

So what is the solution for barbs? Nerf the DH belt? That makes barbs better, how?