When building my Demon Hunter, one of the easiest ways to figure out my goal was to look at snapshots of other people’s gear to determine exactly what stats I would need to obtain the DPS I wanted. Now before I get in depth on how to build a Demon Hunter to efficiently farm every Act in Diablo III with magic find, the most important tip I can give anyone is to use a spreadsheet. It’s an invaluable tool to determine what pieces of gear to get, and if the increase in DPS is worth it. The one that I personally recommend can be found here and is the most comprehensive one I have used to date when shopping. Its format is also great in theorycrafting on shifting crit hit chance from piece to piece, while tweaking crit hit damage to determine what pieces you need down the road. My initial goal was to have 175% base MF (no follower), 30% crit hit chance, 300% crit hit damage and 2,200 dex. But at the end of the day, I was going to be happy with 90K DPS without Sharpshooter – it’s about 174K with if you are wondering – since that is more than enough to efficiently farm any Act in the game.
First and foremost, the gear isn’t cheap. At all. Up to this stage, I did several builds for my Demon Hunter which I’ll summarize below. I was able to hit 80K DPS with steals on the auction house, but climbing to that 90K mark involved paying a whole lot of gold for the items. Up to a certain point, deals can still be had if you are willing to compromise on damage. But once you get into that top-tier group of gear, no one prices it so significantly that it’s considered a steal. For example, I had a set of boots that had +240 dex, +12% movement speed, and +11% magic find that I was able to get for 750,000. It was a complete steal. When I started looking for boots with a vit upgrade, it cost me 15,000,000. A steep price to pay for a few more points of dex and vit, but that’s how Diablo III goes.
I was one of those Demon Hunters that started playing the game dual wielding and stacking IAS gear. I got every Legendary I possibly could with IAS, and stacked the crap out of it. At one point I had hit 111K DPS with Sharpshooter a week or so into the game’s launch. Once I hit the Act II Inferno wall, I decided to start tweaking my gear to start stacking MF. I shopped for MF equivalent pieces of my Legendaries, which weren’t cheap, but I was able to shift my entire gear to include MF in every piece with a whole lot of IAS. I had hit 60K DPS or so and then the IAS nerf happened.
I had dropped to about 41K DPS, so it was back to the drawing board for me. The first thing for me to do was to get over the fact that I would never fire over 3.5 attacks per second ever again, so I decided to set my goal to be 2.00 APS. I dumped every piece of Legendary I could, minus my Andariel’s Visage (more on that below) and started rebuilding to the stage that I am at now.
Hit the break to see detailed screenshots of each piece of gear, why I chose it, and what I paid for it.
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