The answer to your question is how much money do you have?
The strategies you've laid out aren't gear strategies, it's an issue of what you can afford. If you can afford DPS + AR + MF, that's strictly superior to anything that takes one of those out.
If you're wondering what you should be going after, just ask yourself:
1. Is stuff dying fast enough? If not, get more DPS.
2. Am I dying too much? If so, work on survival (this isn't just AR, it also includes armor and vit and life on hit, or just getting better at not taking damage)
3. Am I clearing really comfortably? Get more MF.
To me, Magic Find is something you increase after you've reached a certain killing efficiency. Getting 100% MF doesn't help you if you end up taking twice as long to kill things, or spend too much time being dead and running back. The best way to get more items is to kill more monsters. Once you've gotten to a point where you're killing pretty efficiently, then it's time to start looking at improving your drop quality.
Where are you playing? Is that DPS after Sharpshooter is stacked or before? If you have 34% crit on your gear, sharpshooter isn't doing much for you, I'd take steady aim instead.
The advantages of the Crossbow have more to do with the hatred efficiency rather than whether you have a lot of crit or not.
If you're using Multishot or Cluster Arrow, you'll get way more damage per shot using an Xbow over a Bow, you'll generate resources a bit more slowly via your generators, but that's less of an issue the higher your passive regen is (like if you use bat).
The short of it is that the DPS number on your character sheet is not the only thing you should care about.
The tooltip also doesn't mention this, but Smoke Screen breaks all forms of CC and makes you invulnerable for the duration. That's where the real value is, not in the invisibility.
There are tanking builds for the Demon Hunter that can stand still if that's what you're looking for. They work by using Life on Hit gear combined with Caltrops - Jagged Spikes. Depending on how tanky you want to be, you can fill the rest of your slots with whatever you want.
15k health is your problem. Unless you're really good at avoiding damage, you're going to get 1 shot by just about everything with that amount of health. There are demon hunters that do that (especially pre 1.0.3), but it's not easy, and it can be very frustrating. You also need really high DPS to pull off glass cannon effectively, so that you can kill stuff before it has a chance to one shot you.
Get your health up, and you'll find it much easier to survive.
There isn't a best build. Diablo is a game about experimentation, so find a build that works for you and enjoy. Since you didn't link your actual builds, I can't give you feedback on them. As a basic principle, if you find you don't like a skill like grenades, swap another skill in and see if you like that better. You don't have to take grenades just because you take the grenadier passive for cluster arrow.
Action Bar Skills:
Hunting: Companion/Bat Companion.
Devices: Fan of Knives/Hail of Knives.
Hunting: Preparation/Backup Plan.
Defensive: Smoke Screen/Displacement.
Passive Skills:
Tactical Advantage, Steady Aim and Archery.
I'd say that an effective build needs a good single target skill, a good multiple target skill, and an escape tool. Honestly, I'd say you're lacking an effective AOE skill. Fan of Knives does great damage, but since it has a cooldown, and requires you to put yourself at risk in order to use it, it's not great for clearing stuff. It's a great skill, it just doesn't fulfill the AOE role in your build. It works perfectly well as a utility skill, however.
What it comes down to is that it takes an awful long time to take stuff down when you're only hitting one at a time, and Hungering Arrow and Impale are both single target skills (yes, technically HA can hit more than one target, but only one at a time, and only if it pierces. In other words, it does the same amount of damage against a single target as multi target).
If you want to keep FoK, I'd say to drop Impale for Ball Lightning, Frost Arrow, Multishot - Fire at Will, Cluster Arrow - Looking for Bear, or whatever you feel like using. I personally use Multishot right now. Impale and HA are both great skills, but if they're your only damaging skills, I think it's going to be tough unless your DPS is ridiculously high.
The economy is driven by the players who play the most. The people who got through inferno first were able to make a killing selling the level 63 drops. Now that a lot of the gold exploits are closed, the players who didn't get the chance to ride the wave have to deal with the prices established by those who did.
Anyway, what you're looking for is high-end rares. You're looking for items with good rolls in at least three stats. If you can get 4-5 good rolls in good stats, you've probably got an item worth millions.
Set items and legendaries don't actually sell all that well unless they're partcularly good rolls or are particularly sought after items (justice lantern, stormshield, andariel's).
My advice to you is to hold off on purchases until you can make large upgrades. Buying small upgrades frequently turns into a huge cash sink, and you end up with less stats/gold spent than if you'd pooled it and bought a few large upgrades instead.
I guess for me what it comes down to is that what was happening with IAS and Nether Tentacles pre-patch is that it basically created only one gameplay style, which is really bad for the game long term.
I honestly don't think Blizzard is going to nerf every powerful build that becomes popular, so long as they aren't so powerful that they dwarf other options. Take the Barbarian builds, for example. The Run like the Wind rune for sprint is turning out to be a really effective means of generating rage, and doing damage safely. There's several builds out there that use it to keep Wrath of the Berserker up constantly. Was that the intended use of the skill? Probably not, but they didn't nerf it in 1.0.3 because it's not so powerful that it's the only option for Barbarians.
Blizzard does want players to experiment and find builds that feel awesome and overpowered to play. As long as there's choice out there, and room for experimentation, that can happen. But pre-patch 1.0.3, it wasn't Demon Hunters were stuck stacking IAS and using NT for basically everything.
TL;DR Blizzard isn't going to nerf every build that becomes popular. They will only step in and nerf builds and stats that restrict player choice.
Nightmare is still pretty easy, you can pretty much take whatever skill you want. However, naturally, this depends greatly on your current gear.
In Inferno, almost all Monks run with these spells:
preferred Generator, usually Fists of Thunder/Thunderclap or Deadly Reach/Keen Eye
Sweeping Wind/Bladestorm or /Cyclone, depending on crit chance
Serenity/Ascencion or /Peaceful Reposte, depending on Life on Hit
Breath of Heaven/Blazing Wrath
Blinding Flash/Faith in the Light
Mantra of Evasion/Hard Target or Mantra of Conviction/Owerave, depending on survivability from gear
Commonly used passives include
Seize the initiative (must have)
Resolve
Transcendence (can become useless depending on gear)
One with everything (only good, if you set up your gear around it)
With what you have here what is the point of Transcendence when it doesn't really seem like you have much for Spirit Spending?
You can always just refresh your mantra for the 3 second bonus, or spam it if you just want the heal from transcendence. And since all your defensive cooldowns have spirit costs, it's just handy to add a bit of healing on top of their other effects.
Kripp is a competitive gamer. It makes perfect sense that his suggestions for improving the game involve developing player competition further.
Just keep in mind that not all gamers are competitive. I played a lot of D2, entirely single-player (not Open Bnet, no hacked items, no character editor). I never once got a character to level 99 (my highest was 82, I think). Those of you who have said the ladder system is the ONLY reason Diablo II survived for so long are completely missing it.
Gamers have many motivations for playing the games they love, you cannot assume everyone else wants the same things you do from a game.
Now that said, I don't think his suggestions for the game are bad things. Some of them I don't agree with (the gear nerf compensated by a base stat buff), but I understand why he's coming from where he's coming from. Diablo has never been a series concerned primarily with player skill. Diablo has always been a franchise about items. That's just not a perfect game for someone who prides themselves on their skill.
But the champion and PvP levels idea could be a great way to reward gamers looking for those systems without impacting the gamers who don't care about those things.
Champion levels in particular I like as an idea. If you set it up so that Champion EXP is only earned from killing elites, and only when at 5 stacks, and players have even more incentive to be out in the world killing elites. It provides yet another incentive to be out in the world, and gives you motivation to continue gearing your character so that you can kill elites faster and progress faster.
If we count ONLY archery passive I could agree that Xbows are the best end game cos I have 45% crit and crit easy can be done 50%. But if we take a look on a bow with cold dmg the math going little bit diffrent cost you got 15% from bows, 20% from steady aim than your dmg is calculated and cult of the weak is counted at last for 15% over the slowed mob than you can use HA with Devoult and the dmg become unbelivable high I am able to crit with HA for 240k dmg and also to slow the target my NT crits for 100-150k and also slow the enemy. I have attack speed 2 per sec. The damage with X-bow with cold dmg is less I tryed this with better X-bow than my bow. For Hand crossbow there is no good Hand-crossbow with cold to test.
Well firstly I didn't say I thought Xbows were the best endgame. In fact, I think for most players Bows are probably best. At your crit level, you only need 75% crit damage from gear to push you into bow territory, which can be done with a single gem pretty easily.
Let me see if I understand you: you're saying that if you have a weapon with cold damage, and you're using culling the weak, that the cold weapon is better? I mean, I guess that's true, but it has nothing to do with archery. As I said in the original post, the bonus from Archery is only one part of what you should consider when gearing, but if you want to know what weapon is going to give you the best bonus from archery based on your current gear point, the chart tells you that. I think that's useful information, because if you're shopping for a weapon, you might want to know which weapon type is going to be best for you based on your current gear.
If you already know you want a cold damage weapon because you plan on using Culling the Weak, then comparing equivalent DPS cold bows to cold Xbows shouldn't make a difference. If you have testing that indicates otherwise, please share.
"we want players to make overpowered builds and find overpowered items". What a freaking joke that was, what an incredible lie. Anything that is remotely "overpowered" gets nerfed the moment blizzard gets their little stat sheet for how the players are manipulating the game they made. "we don't want players to feel like strong builds will get the nerf bat" my ass.
Builds, plural. When one skill is so powerful that using anything else is pointless, that hurts the game. Nether Tentacles was too powerful. It was at the same time the cheapest, most damaging single, and most damaging multiple target skill.
As for the IAS nerf, that hit all classes, not just Demon Hunters. IAS was way too strong. 15% IAS on a single slot was so good that it was basically required. That hurts item diversity and choice.
If you want to give up on the game, feel free. But there are plenty of Demon Hunters out there who have modified their gear and/or builds and are still having fun with the game, even more so for many players.
There's no doubt in my mind that the 1.0.3 patch was a good thing for the game, demon hunters in particular. There is more build discussion on this board now than ever before, since before 1.0.3 the discussion went like this: HA, NT, SS, Prep are required. Defensive stats don't matter because you won't be able to take a hit anyway, so just learn to dodge.
In the short term, sure it sucks to have to change your character a bit. But long term? Having one viable playstyle is not a good thing.
its transform to :
((1-x) + x*y))*1.15 = ((1-x) + x*(y+0.5))
Try to solve this, your result must be y = (-0.15/x + 0.65) / 0.15
This true graph, your y = ((-0.15/x)+ 0.5)/.15 - wrong.
As i say, y - full multiplier before Archery. And x - crit chance. For example my DH has 167% = 1.67.critDmg and 41.5% = 0.415 crit chance.
Since we're using different values for what critDmg means, our graphs are going to be different. It's not that mine is wrong and yours is right, it's that they're coming from different values.
As you can see, it's the same curve, yours is just 1 unit above mine, which is exactly what we'd expect given what the critDmg variable stands for in our respective formulas.
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The strategies you've laid out aren't gear strategies, it's an issue of what you can afford. If you can afford DPS + AR + MF, that's strictly superior to anything that takes one of those out.
If you're wondering what you should be going after, just ask yourself:
1. Is stuff dying fast enough? If not, get more DPS.
2. Am I dying too much? If so, work on survival (this isn't just AR, it also includes armor and vit and life on hit, or just getting better at not taking damage)
3. Am I clearing really comfortably? Get more MF.
To me, Magic Find is something you increase after you've reached a certain killing efficiency. Getting 100% MF doesn't help you if you end up taking twice as long to kill things, or spend too much time being dead and running back. The best way to get more items is to kill more monsters. Once you've gotten to a point where you're killing pretty efficiently, then it's time to start looking at improving your drop quality.
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If you're using Multishot or Cluster Arrow, you'll get way more damage per shot using an Xbow over a Bow, you'll generate resources a bit more slowly via your generators, but that's less of an issue the higher your passive regen is (like if you use bat).
The short of it is that the DPS number on your character sheet is not the only thing you should care about.
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Get your health up, and you'll find it much easier to survive.
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I'd say that an effective build needs a good single target skill, a good multiple target skill, and an escape tool. Honestly, I'd say you're lacking an effective AOE skill. Fan of Knives does great damage, but since it has a cooldown, and requires you to put yourself at risk in order to use it, it's not great for clearing stuff. It's a great skill, it just doesn't fulfill the AOE role in your build. It works perfectly well as a utility skill, however.
What it comes down to is that it takes an awful long time to take stuff down when you're only hitting one at a time, and Hungering Arrow and Impale are both single target skills (yes, technically HA can hit more than one target, but only one at a time, and only if it pierces. In other words, it does the same amount of damage against a single target as multi target).
If you want to keep FoK, I'd say to drop Impale for Ball Lightning, Frost Arrow, Multishot - Fire at Will, Cluster Arrow - Looking for Bear, or whatever you feel like using. I personally use Multishot right now. Impale and HA are both great skills, but if they're your only damaging skills, I think it's going to be tough unless your DPS is ridiculously high.
My stats are almost identical to yours, and I'm running this build for Act I farming :http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/demon-hunter#aQZXVT!aYe!aacZbZ
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Anyway, what you're looking for is high-end rares. You're looking for items with good rolls in at least three stats. If you can get 4-5 good rolls in good stats, you've probably got an item worth millions.
Set items and legendaries don't actually sell all that well unless they're partcularly good rolls or are particularly sought after items (justice lantern, stormshield, andariel's).
My advice to you is to hold off on purchases until you can make large upgrades. Buying small upgrades frequently turns into a huge cash sink, and you end up with less stats/gold spent than if you'd pooled it and bought a few large upgrades instead.
0
I honestly don't think Blizzard is going to nerf every powerful build that becomes popular, so long as they aren't so powerful that they dwarf other options. Take the Barbarian builds, for example. The Run like the Wind rune for sprint is turning out to be a really effective means of generating rage, and doing damage safely. There's several builds out there that use it to keep Wrath of the Berserker up constantly. Was that the intended use of the skill? Probably not, but they didn't nerf it in 1.0.3 because it's not so powerful that it's the only option for Barbarians.
Blizzard does want players to experiment and find builds that feel awesome and overpowered to play. As long as there's choice out there, and room for experimentation, that can happen. But pre-patch 1.0.3, it wasn't Demon Hunters were stuck stacking IAS and using NT for basically everything.
TL;DR Blizzard isn't going to nerf every build that becomes popular. They will only step in and nerf builds and stats that restrict player choice.
0
You can always just refresh your mantra for the 3 second bonus, or spam it if you just want the heal from transcendence. And since all your defensive cooldowns have spirit costs, it's just handy to add a bit of healing on top of their other effects.
0
Just keep in mind that not all gamers are competitive. I played a lot of D2, entirely single-player (not Open Bnet, no hacked items, no character editor). I never once got a character to level 99 (my highest was 82, I think). Those of you who have said the ladder system is the ONLY reason Diablo II survived for so long are completely missing it.
Gamers have many motivations for playing the games they love, you cannot assume everyone else wants the same things you do from a game.
Now that said, I don't think his suggestions for the game are bad things. Some of them I don't agree with (the gear nerf compensated by a base stat buff), but I understand why he's coming from where he's coming from. Diablo has never been a series concerned primarily with player skill. Diablo has always been a franchise about items. That's just not a perfect game for someone who prides themselves on their skill.
But the champion and PvP levels idea could be a great way to reward gamers looking for those systems without impacting the gamers who don't care about those things.
Champion levels in particular I like as an idea. If you set it up so that Champion EXP is only earned from killing elites, and only when at 5 stacks, and players have even more incentive to be out in the world killing elites. It provides yet another incentive to be out in the world, and gives you motivation to continue gearing your character so that you can kill elites faster and progress faster.
0
Well firstly I didn't say I thought Xbows were the best endgame. In fact, I think for most players Bows are probably best. At your crit level, you only need 75% crit damage from gear to push you into bow territory, which can be done with a single gem pretty easily.
Let me see if I understand you: you're saying that if you have a weapon with cold damage, and you're using culling the weak, that the cold weapon is better? I mean, I guess that's true, but it has nothing to do with archery. As I said in the original post, the bonus from Archery is only one part of what you should consider when gearing, but if you want to know what weapon is going to give you the best bonus from archery based on your current gear point, the chart tells you that. I think that's useful information, because if you're shopping for a weapon, you might want to know which weapon type is going to be best for you based on your current gear.
If you already know you want a cold damage weapon because you plan on using Culling the Weak, then comparing equivalent DPS cold bows to cold Xbows shouldn't make a difference. If you have testing that indicates otherwise, please share.
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Builds, plural. When one skill is so powerful that using anything else is pointless, that hurts the game. Nether Tentacles was too powerful. It was at the same time the cheapest, most damaging single, and most damaging multiple target skill.
As for the IAS nerf, that hit all classes, not just Demon Hunters. IAS was way too strong. 15% IAS on a single slot was so good that it was basically required. That hurts item diversity and choice.
If you want to give up on the game, feel free. But there are plenty of Demon Hunters out there who have modified their gear and/or builds and are still having fun with the game, even more so for many players.
There's no doubt in my mind that the 1.0.3 patch was a good thing for the game, demon hunters in particular. There is more build discussion on this board now than ever before, since before 1.0.3 the discussion went like this: HA, NT, SS, Prep are required. Defensive stats don't matter because you won't be able to take a hit anyway, so just learn to dodge.
In the short term, sure it sucks to have to change your character a bit. But long term? Having one viable playstyle is not a good thing.
0
Since we're using different values for what critDmg means, our graphs are going to be different. It's not that mine is wrong and yours is right, it's that they're coming from different values.
Here's a chart with both your formula and my formula: http://fooplot.com/plot/db7rv3v5xb
As you can see, it's the same curve, yours is just 1 unit above mine, which is exactly what we'd expect given what the critDmg variable stands for in our respective formulas.