Diablo 3: Experimentation with Gear as a Demon Hunter

I decided to try another little investment in my demon hunter by grabbing more DPS gear. Mostly, I focused on critical hit chance, critical hit damage and attack speed. The net result was a significant reduction in effective hit points vs massive gain in damage. Just to see how I would fare, I decided to start on Act 3 with Siegebreaker.

The upgrade in DPS was quite noticeable as I was able to 1-2 shot enemies in Inferno. However, I was getting 1 shot myself quite often. In essence, I became a glass cannon. In watching LastHopeForRaoha’s videos, I noticed that he has a different spec than mine. Mine is centered around defense but more on the active mitigation end. His is more passive mitigation. However, the chief thing to note about what he mentions in his video is that he focuses on survival.

Part of the problem with the switch up in gear for me as a massive loss in EHP. My health went down almost 10k and I lost a lot of things such as physical damage reduction or life gain. While I could kill enemies quickly, large packs would just destroy me.

Of course, this was all solo. I’m wondering what the difference would be with a group where I would have a tank taking more aggro away from me. I might have to adjust the spec as well but I feel that the spec works far better with defensive gear.

One thing I did when upgrading was checking out top demon hunters to see how they geared. Of course, they might have far more gold than me so every little point would help overall. Also, they might have more stats on their gear than the ones I sought. As a result, I’m probably missing out on a lot. The top DPS demon hunter on softcore is a guy in Korea who has over 500k unbuffed DPS and still reasonable EHP. In examining his gear though, I realized that everything he has is top notch. So that probably contributes a huge amount to his overall effectiveness. One has to wonder if he plays in a group too to be effective with those stats and on what monster power.

At any rate, I’m going to continue playing around with my gear and spec to see what combination is effective for me.

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