Demon Hunter Solo Build – Hell / Inferno

This is a completely different approach to playing the Demon Hunter in hell difficulty than I have taken in my other guides. This is a user submitted build: “Evasion Fire is the next Demon Hunter nerf!  Use it before we lose it!” There seems to be as many ways to play the Demon Hunter as there are random affix combinations in Hell and Inferno. Please take a look and let me know what you think!

Here is the build: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/demon-hunter#fRdXVS!eYT!bZcZbc

This a soloing HELL build.

Primary – Evasion Fire + Covering Fire

  • Best hatred regen and damage combo – 125% and 4 hatred regen
  • Backflip keeps you away from fast mobs while being able to keep up damage
  • Firing is instantaneous, there’s no missile travel time
  • Covering Fire has a wide conical spread so you can hit multiple targets and moving targets easily

Secondary – Elemental Arrow + Frost Arrow

  • This is your ranged AOE and CC
  • 170% damage and 60% slow for 10 hatred
  • You normally won’t be spamming this, except in the initial pull

Hunting – Vault

  • Movement is extremely important for getting away from avoidables, positioning, and escaping walling elites and AOEs
  • Also great for when you’re cornered by enemies, it allows you to move past them
  • Trail of Cinders adds extra damage, but any rune could be viable
  • With the backflip from Evasion Fire, I don’t normally use this more than once

Defense – Smoke Screen Lingering Fog

  • With the rune, this was nerfed to 3 seconds but it’s still useful
  • Only way to break jails
  • 3 seconds is still long enough to drop aggro, reposition, and get back in the fight

Hunting – Preparation with Battle Scars

  • Useful for when your health drops too low
  • This keeps you alive and gives you a lot of endurance in long elite and boss fights by making kiting very viable.  If you can kite the enemy for 45 seconds, you can heal and get back in the fight

Devices – Spike Trap Scatter

  • This is where a lot of your damage will come from – 275% AOE
  • Great for kiting and pulling enemies
  • High hatred cost is offset by the fast hatred regen with Evasion Fire
  • You will have hatred because on most elites you won’t have time to spam Frost Arrow
  • You drop your traps where your mouse is, so you can throw them very far making them very effective

Passives

Archery – DPS increase

Steady Aim – 20% damage is nothing is in 10 yards of you.  Evasion Fire backflip is 15 yards, so this will normally be in effect

Sharpshooter – this may seem like a waste, but trust me, this is amazing.  The stacking bonus resets 1 second after you crit, so for that 1 second, all of your attacks use your current critical strike chance.  Where is key is in stacking your attacks.

The initial pull should be something like this:

  1. Drop traps
  2. Ice Arrow Spam
  3. Evasion Fire when the mobs close in on you

From here, it’s a matter of kiting, using SS and Prep with your Spike Traps and Frost Arrow to slowly drop those hard elites.

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.

Leave a comment

30 Comments.

  1. This sounds really cool. I’ll give it a try on my DH. I got stuck at level 40 in Inferno. Fights were too tough and it is very possible that my build sucked.

    • Darth Solo impossible to be at level 40 and in Inferno make sure you know what you are talking about and what area you are in game you will be in Nightmare as Hell requires level 50 and Inferno requires level 60 and Diablo killed on Hell Mode!

      Normal > Nightmare > Hell > Inferno

    • DarthSoloFails

      Lol @ Darth Solo being a noob :lol:

      • Ahh give him a break, it gets confusing. It’s not his fault the creators decided to call the second hardest difficulty hell, and the hardest difficulty inferno (which is just Italian for “hell”… how imaginative), meanwhile nightmare is only the second difficulty, which is odd because nightmares are, quite literally, far more real than hell (in that people actually experience them)… its true… look it up.

        • If this game was based on reality or acctual events you would be right but this is a game where the world humans live in is a realm inbetween heaven and the hells, whereas Hell is a “reality” and the worst place to be in and an Inferno would be the place in the hells where you would be constantly covered in blazing fire.. the naming makes sence if you just think about it dude, especially since the difficulty levels in D2 was: Normal, Nightmare and Hell…

    • level 40 in Inferno? I’m confused. Right now, there are level limits. You must be level 25 to play Nightmare, 50 for Hell, and 60 (I think it was) for Inferno. Are you sure you’re not exaggerating how far you are in Nightmare difficulty?

  2. Awesome build! I ran this from Act 2 HELL until Diablo and killed him with it!!! It was a hard fight and switching skills would have made it easier, but I didn’t want to lose my NV stacks.

  3. Two thumbs up for this build.

    Takes about 20min or so to get used to it, so don’t give up at first.

    There is a small bit of room for debate, particularly for Elemental Arrow and Vault.

    Elemental Arrow burns your hatred, which you need to lay traps, so you only really use it once or twice during a fight (adds maybe…2% total damage???…not much in any case). The survivability factor is heavily outweighed by Smoke Screen and Evasive Fire in almost every situation. I haven’t thought of a replacement yet but perhaps something like Mark of Death instead would give more overall damage.

    You should rarely ever use vault, except on certain boss moves like dodging Belial’s Arm Smashes or Diablo’s Fire Breath, and very very rarely to avoid getting out of an elite’s wall trap. I’ll keep this for now though, as the survivability and control it provides is hard to replace. I recommend Acrobatics rune to save on Discipline, because again, you rarely use it, and similar to what the OP said – if you do use it, you won’t need to use it twice in a row.

    The rest of this build is mandatory for sure.

  4. “Defense – Smoke Screen Lingering Fog

    With the rune, this was nerfed to 3 seconds but it’s still useful
    Only way to break jails
    3 seconds is still long enough to drop aggro, reposition, and get back in the fight”

    It was nerfed from 3sec to 1.5sec with rune.
    The reason why the tooltips still says 3sec is because the label (3 sec) is being shown from the client side, where the value (1.5 sec) is from the server side.

    So the tooltips will first update in the next client patch.

    //Six’

  5. UPDATE – I’m using this build in Inferno now and have found 3 things work better on the super elites in Inferno:

    Swap Ice Arrow for Screaming Skull – Elites in Inferno barely get slowed, so snares aren’t very useful for them. Fear is very powerful when it hits as it moves the mob away from you, giving you more time to reposition.

    Swap Sharpshooter for Tactical Advantage – This is key for kiting and also has synergy with all the abilities in this build. The DPS loss from Sharpshooter is minor by the huge increase in survivability. Repositioning durring Smoke Screen is super easy now, and you can Vault and run out of aggro range to escape.

  6. I found this build pretty cool hands down on this.
    But I run out of Discipline really fast and usually die when i encounter 4 blue mobs who can wall up or who are melee teleport…Not sure what to do…

    • I had the same issue. The way I deal with it now is to vault straight towards them instead of going backward(unlikely to hit a wall). If that failed again, SS you way out and start placing traps.

  7. This is pretty much my DH build except I use Rapid Fire with High Velocity as a secondary, it cuts through just about anything. Also, putting Focused Mind on preparation really helps since it restores more Discipline (unless yours is over 45). My mindset is pretty much that if I’m hit I’m dead anyways.

    I prefer throwing the bat on to restore Hatred but that’s just me; I guess if you’re soloing the trap would be more useful. Mark of Death is also extremely helpful. Throw on Mark of Death for mobs and Mortal Enemy against bosses. The great thing about Mark of Death is that it’s useful soloing as well as in a party – it helps everyone.

  8. usualy there is no time for rapid fire, i still like impale with stun, hungering arrow with explosion on crit hit, and those angry birds with knockback,it just giving you chance to hold away monsters and easy kill single elite, but i just dont fight jumping elites solo.

  9. till lvl 60 shield with 100 dex and good resist all was usefull

  10. If you’re still in Hell I too recommend Tactical Adv in place of Sharpshooter and Focused Mind in place of Battle Scars for Prep. Movement boost after Evasive Fire? One or more Smoke Screens? Yes plz ty. I generally don’t need the heal when I prep as badly as I need to use multiple disc. moves to escape.

    Pre-55 Stampede works fairly well without a cost besides cooldown in place of Spike Trap Scatter.

    I spam the heck out of Frost Arrow. It’s really low cost damage and the slow is certainly nice.

    An awesome build, though no matter what your choices.

  11. How do you use two hunting skills and two defensive skills? How is it that you get around using the primary skills at all? I’m totally confused, this looks like an awesome build, but I can’t figure out how to move evasive fire to my primary mouse button, since it is a device skill.

    • Pheonix, it’s Elective Mode. It’s in the Options->Gameplay. Enable it and you’ll be able to configure your build more so than before (:

  12. I meant devices, sorry.

    • , I’m not really sure how much story there will be in the final game. I know they’ve meoenintd cinematic events that seem to bridge the Acts and that there is a beginning and opening cutscene to bookend the story But, I think the majority of the story is going to be given via interactions with the quest NPCs, instead of the story-centered nature of Guild Wars (even though the stories in Guild Wars have ranged from terrible to okay).I also agree that the flexibility present in Guild Wars colors a lot of other games and expectations. I have no problem with static skill trees (GW is the exception in that rule) and I know they are looking into adding the ability to respec your class. But the flexibilty of changing skills inside towns ala Guild Wars won’t be here.I’m still on the fence about it, leaning towards wanting to play it, but I’ve put in a lot more hours agree with pretty much everything you’ve said, though.

  13. I find that Frost Arrow just doesn’t hit enough mobs to be an effective AoE.
    I’m trying out Lightning Ball but I’m not sure if it’s much better than post-nerf NT.
    And Prep with backup plan is a decent option. Timing low disc with low health is hard. If you’re using it low heath and high disc is kind of a waste. More smokescreens keep me up.

    • “Timing low disc with low health is hard. If you’re using it low heath and high disc is kind of a waste.” I mean this with Preparation and Battle Scars rune. :???:

  14. OMG! thanks! this changed my game from Dying AL THE TIME to not dying.. cant believe I have not tried evasive fire before hehe.. GREAT!

  15. I love ur build, literally a carbon copy of my inferno solo build. Very sustainable. Everyone says that backup plan prep is mandatory but the prob is that it’s not garunteed. Ive found that if u can get ur max discipline up to 40-50 and use battle scars it balances nicely. The only difference is I use rain of vengeance wih dark cloud. For those extra tough mobs that run ur resources and cd dry the fire and forget damage over time can be lethal. It chews boss health bars away and wipes those annoying small guys. It auto- locks also so if u vault or smoke screen through a pack it will lock onto all of them. Also costs no resource and the extra time lasts almost half of the cooldown so ur downtime is alot less. I switch off elemental arrow for multishot with fire at will. High damage massive aoe. Which can b substituted with a cold damage weapon.

  16. Awesome build, just what I needed . ty

  17. Thank you. Ill surely change a thing or two to suit my need but it really helped me out a lot. I’m only on nightmare and I already got problems. Obviously I was trying to stay too close to the fights. But I never thought of an evasive + traps combo. I’m lovin’ it!

  18. I don’t understand how to use Evasive Fire as a primary weapon when it’s under “devices”….how do I use Evasive Fire as a primary weapon (left click)?

    • Darla, it’s Elective Mode. It’s in the Options->Gameplay. Enable it and you’ll be able to configure your build however you like.

  19. Go to Options…Gameplay. Enable Elective Mode.

  20. Whats wrong with demon hunters these days. sharpshooter is lame your always going to be shooting something solo so you dont need it. find gear to stack your crit chance to around 40+ with a rapid fire quiver crit chance all you need to do is vault into poeople…yes into them and unload with the homing rocket rapid fire and balistics. every sedond hit will be a crit.

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