Demon Hunters: [2.1.2 PTR] Multishot M6 (No Generator)

Actives: Vault - Trail of Cinders Vengeance - Seethe Prep - Punishment Companion - Any Rune Sentry - Spitfire Turrent Multishot - Arsenal

Passives: Awareness Custom Engineering Ballistics Steady Aim

A 5th passive from Hellfire Amulet: Ambush/Numbing Traps/Cull of the Weak (Take which suits your situation best).

Gems: Zei's, Enforcer, and either Gogok of Swiftness or Effacious Toxin (Swiftness if you need the CDR boost, Toxin for the damage).

For the new M6 set, your sentries will now shoot your spenders as often as you cast them, and for every sentry you have active, the stronger your spenders become. With this in mind, we want to prioritize one thing: getting out as many sentries as fast as possible to maximize our damage. This leads us to stacking CDR. The more CDR, the faster you get your turrents out, the higher your damage output.

This whole skill set is relatively gear dependant, having CDR wherever possible is key. This includes your shoulders, helm (gem), gloves, quiver, belt (Vigilante), and even paragon points should be allocated to CDR first for this build. With CDR in all these slots (imperfect rolls), I sit around 41% CDR. Which gets even better if you use Gogok of Swiftness.

Now items aside from M6 pieces. Instead of T&T (which are useless for the new M6), Cindercoat is now BiS imo. The fire damage bonus and resource cost reduction just makes it mandatory for this build. For quiver, you still want to run Rucksack for the bonus 2 sentries you can set up, for even more bonus damage on your spender(s). Any bracer will work, as long as it has Fire %/Dex/Vit/CC. A crossbow would also be the best in this case as it will hit the hardest in comparison to bows/1h, and because of the fact that your sentries will no longer benefit from IAS. Optimally, you want High damage roll/10% Damage/Dex/Socket (+10% CDR if you have rgift).

I've only played a bit with this build for a bit on the PTR but it seems to be very effective. With Seethe, Prep, and Companion, you're able to spam Multishot as often as you'd like. With all the CDR you have, those 3 skills have very high uptimes. I chose Multishot: Arsenal over CA:LfB because Multishot is just way more cost efficient to spam and the area and distance Multishot covers is just disgusting compared to the small patch that CA will cover. And in most cases, Multishot is already sufficient to kill off trash mobs, rift guardians and elites. The only situation CA> Multishot would be the fight against Greater Rift 30+ guardians.

Thoughts and comments are welcome!

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Demon hunters: A Quick DPS Comparison on Steady Aim vs. Custom Engineering

To compare the two passives, I put together a DPS model that simulates a 180s fight on a single, elite target using the standard M6 cold build.

I modeled the numbers using my DH in particular, and assumed a CD time of 5s on sentry drops (due to CDR).

Additional assumptions would include: target being in sentry range 100% of the time, 100% sentry uptime, highest possible uptime on wolf companion activations, etc, etc (basically perfect conditions).

The results are as follows:

Spreadsheet link

Graph:

Ramp Up Period [0-20s]
This is the stretch of time when sentries are deployed in 5s intervals, the first being dropped at 0s.

As expected, Steady Aim comes out ahead with a 16% damage bonus over Custom Engineering. Resulting (in my particular case), a damage differential of a little over 500 million by 20s.

Steady State [15 or 20-180s]
The period of time from the last sentry drop to the end of the engagement.

After the fifth turret is dropped (@20s), Steady Aim's lead over Custom Engineering slowly diminishes at a linear rate, until it hits the break point at 40s. From 40s onward, Custom Engineering has a DPS advantage over Steady Aim.

• At 60s, Custom Engineering has a 3.0% damage advantage over Steady Shot.
• At 120s, Custom Engineering has a 5.5% damage advantage over Steady Shot.
• At 180s, Custom Engineering has a 6.2% damage advantage over Steady Shot.

In Grifts, I find it very difficult to have all five sentries up at one time, within range of my intended target. So I prefer to use Steady Aim due to the quicker ramp up, for faster clearing of trash mobs and elite packs.

Rift Guardian fights, and high density areas with abundant choke points is where Custom Engineering really shines.

In the end, I think that the numbers are so close that it really all just comes down to personal preference.

Here's some more tables,

Note: "By skills" includes Cull of the Weak (20%), Steady Aim (20%), and Wolf Companion (weighted value based on uptime, 8.75%)

Sentry DPS table w/ Steady Aim:

Sentry DPS table w/ Custom Engineering:

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Witch Doctors: Stay a while and listen: 92 Fetishes in Grift 40+

Introduction:
Since I browse the whole sub on a daily basis and like the awesome community here is it time for me to contribute some smut and keep you guys busy. At this point is the whole concept pure theory crafting and hasn't been tested yet.

The most common 4 man team for high Grifts consists of 2 DH doing all the dmg, 1 tank Monk for gathering up creeps and 1 tank WD to keep every creep locked down. My idea on the contrary is to have a 4 guys doing all dps with low toughness. The gear set-up is based on the highest solo pet build by Raijin with a few changes. I recommend reading it now since I will only discuss the differing set-up. Raijin was able to beat Grift 40+ solo with his set-up and I think that 4 of us can perform even better.

So why 4 pet WD?
We can move incredible fast: The combination of Rechel's Ring of Larceny and the Tiklandian Visage gives us a perma speed boost of up to 60%. The Illusory Boots enable us to run through every monster, this is like a perma spirit walk just faster! The combination with jaunt on top of that and we are able to run from elite to elite in no time. Screw map density, we don't care!

We can lock down every creep (except RG): Well known and no news here but the 24 yards of Face of Death is often not enough due to mean and horrible ranged attacks. But 4 guys with each 24 yards will enable us to cover the whole room no matter how big it is. Furthermore if one group member dies are the elites still locked down, hence resurrecting whilst our minions keep on fighting is not that difficult.

We have crazy single target dps: We skip every trash mop, screw them, we rather have them alive so we can fear them again in case we took a wrong turn and need to boost back. We solely focus on elites and killing them quick. Despite the fact that we suck at killing trash mobs anyhow are the elite kills more effective in order to beat the timer. And on top of that are we already very strong vs. single targets.

The Profile

Gear: Insted of Unity Rechels and travellers set/soj. Since we don't use the MoJ is the elemental dmg quite nice. A well rolled travellers set might be better though.

Skills: Instead of all 4 players using Jaunt might it be better if 2 use the Zombie Dog - Final Gift, since we all get the bonus from Gruesome Feast. This is quite some extra dmg, I get about 4.7k more Int!

Play style: Run Forrest run! If there is no creep to fear we use Jaunt to give us a 3 sec boost. This should be enough to find one to fear and give us the sweet sweet speed boost. As soon as we see an Elite pack do we use spirit walk again to reach them as fast as possible. They wont be able to cast anything since we approach them so fast and left our physical body before they see us. Everyone casts there fetishes next to them and spreads out a bit (depending on the creep density etc.). One BBV underneath the pack to give the fetishes the AS bonus, the other 3 BBVs wherever we are standing. After that we make it rain toads to get more fetishes. It might even be a good idea to split up in 2 groups. Each of us with one jaunt guy (to sprint forward and lock down the pack) and one zdog guy to quickly follow and start the health globe production. This way can we cover huge areas very fast and avoid that our fetishes block each other from surrounding/ hitting the same target.

Cons: Well we are no DH after all, not sure if our dmg output is good enough. Also the RG might give us a hard time. I would love to test this, a two man team could be enough for that. So add me in case you want to: RaphaFluffa #2887, EU SC Season.

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New Wizard (Experienced Player) - Some advice, if you will.

Hi Wizzies. I'm paragon 560, all of which on DH. After picking up some Firebirds pieces on DH (RNG) I decided to spend shards at Kadala to complete the set with some other lolRNG items I've accumulated.

I've scoured the sidebar, read every Bnet page of the Dot mechanics and read most of the posts in this subreddit. However, there's one or two things I'd like clarifying if you will:

Is there a be all end all specific variation of Firebirds? I understand that it's highly customisable based on your RNG, but if you could hand pick an optimum skillset and equipment - what would it be?

Secondly, wouldn't a two-hander (Furnace, Maximus) automatically mean more damage on your Dot, if rolled well? Or is Serpent Sparker/Sunkeeper FB Source equally effective?

Slow time - better to self cast and run Teleport with Illusionist or run Mirror Image for Slow Time proc?

How do you approach a pack of mobs? Elite or otherwise? From the few hours I had with the build today I casted Slow Time > Black Hole > Apocalypse > Teleport > Black Hole > Slow Time.

Any other tips that would help me out in transitioning from the repetitive Sentry spec, as I'm genuinely excited about playing wizard and the options available to the build.

Many thanks!

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"It seems like everyone in this sub wants the best gear, but doesn't want to farm for it."

This is an actual quote from a post I saw this morning. I see this sentiment a lot and I think it's both overly-simplistic and destructive. The truth is more nuanced:

People who play Diablo are happy to farm, but not to farm forever. Everybody has a different threshold for how long they are willing to farm without any seeing progress. No, your players can't expect upgrades every 5 minutes, but neither can you expect all your players to be Alkaizer. There's a sweet spot somewhere.

But, remember, when a system is entirely RNG, it's always possible that players will put in a bunch of time and see zero progress. Enough time with zero progress, and players quit.

You can shrug and say "RNG is RNG" or you can look for an opportunity to improve the game and make it more fun for more people. This is where the oft-reviled idea of "guaranteed progression" comes in. The thing is:

Guaranteed progression does not have to mean faster progression

You already see this with the "pity timer". The pity timer creates a minimum legendary drop rate for the unlucky. The vast majority of players never hit it, yet it exists.

Now, take something like the Furnace. If most players can expect to get one Furnace in every X hours of gameplay, Blizzard could create a crafting system that lets you gather special things and make a single Furnace after Y hours of gameplay (where Y is much greater X).

The point is that you're not getting loot meaningfully faster than before, but at least those long sessions without any special drops don't feel wasted. You know you made progress, even if just a little bit.

tl;dr - Stop saying people want handouts. Players already farm until they can't take it anymore. Guaranteed progression can provide rewards that keep people interested and playing without providing loot any faster than the average.

P.S. - You could make the argument that seeing a huge mountain to climb would scare people away. I don't buy it; I think people are more likely to get hooked by progression than scared by it.

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BlizzCon 2014 Weapon Transmog GIFs

Here is a bunch of GIF images showing a rotating shot of each transmog in case anyone is debating buying a virtual ticket for them. The screenshots don't really show them off well enough, so here you are.

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