Demon hunter's struggle analized and how to fix it

The DH has a problem and it's DPS. And tbh, he needs too many skills to be able to survive too.

We all know of the disparity between sheet DPS and actual DPS. The most effective builds like CM Wiz, WW Barb and SW Monk do 5 to 10 times more damage than whats written in their Character sheet. Thats because they can use multiple sources of damage simultanously and have have abilitys that scale with crit/ias in other forms than just damage (spawn more SW tornados or spam more abilitys).

DH's closest build to that is the nade build (spam nades, lay traps, build turrets, ...). So, the skills would be there.

But here come the problems:

• The resource system. DH's have 2 different resources. This looks like a nice change to other chars, but it kills the gameplay. You need to watch both resources and spent too many skills and passives to be able to manage them. imagine if he only had hatred: Nightstalker... Enough said.
• The other thing is the regeneration of hatred. You gain 3 hatred per attack and the most effective skill per hatred spent is echoing blast, which gives you 825% WD after 10 attacks. Monks generate 6-8 spirit per attack and WoL:EW costs 40 spirit, so it gets you 829% WD after ~5 attacks. Basically, you get double the DPS off of resource spending abilitys, just because you can spam them more often.
• And the next point is the numbers (% Weapon damage). this number is low on the DH. i suspect that it's because he's ranged. but melees have had their MIT buffed and generally;
• the game has changed in a way, where ranged is no benefit anymore. You can't run and you can't hide and based off the skillset, it's harder for DH to chase down fleeing foes. You could say that the DH is designed to work in another game.
• As i mentioned at the beginning: DH has no viable options to have multiple dps sources and thats not because he lacks the skills (turrets, pets, flying strike, traps, ...) but because he can't use them cuz either the numbers suck or his resource system prevents him from doing so or he can't combine the necessary skills and passives to make it work because he needs too much stuff to simply survive.
• The evasion granted by dex can not compete with the res bonus from int and the armor bonus from str. monk doesn't suffer from it that much because he has passives to make up for that and is simply very powerful overall atm. Evasion is not reliable and it doesn't work on pretty much everything that kills you.

How to fix the DH? -Double the hatred generated by his abilitys and lower cd's on stuff like flying strike. I don't want to go into more specific changes, even though 90% of the skills/runes would need it. -Rework evasion (there are threads that go into that).

about me: i have a plvl 91 DH, a plvl 100 monk, a plvl 15ish Wiz that can farm MP 10 and a lvl 60 Barb with mediocre gear. i have over 1500 hours playtime, about 1000 of them on my DH. My DH has 300k dps and i tested pretty much every skill/passive combination that makes sense (even some that don't XD )

Posted in: demon hunter, discussion