GoD Hungering Arrow Demon Hunter Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. Gather the full Gears of Dreadlands set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Gears of Dreadlands set
2. The Ninth Cirri Satchel
3. Hunter's Wrath and Goldwrap
4. Depth Diggers
5. Nemesis Bracers, Warzechian Armguards and Wraps of Clarity
6. Convention of Elements, Elusive Ring, Stone of Jordan, Rechel's Ring of Larceny, Focus and Restraint

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Hand Crossbows to get Dawn, Fortress Ballista and Valla's Bequest
2. Bows to get Yang's Recurve
3. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace and The Flavor of Time
4. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Sage's Journey, Cain's Destiny, Guardian's Jeopardy and Aughild's Authority

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. It's better to spend your materials improving your set pieces, getting ancient weapon etc.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Dawn
• Fortress Ballista
• The Ninth Cirri Satchel

• Simplicity's Strength is the strongest DPS gem for Primary-based builds. It provides 100% multiplicative damage buff and a ton of recovery.
• Taeguk is a great offensive (up to 80% additive damage) and defensive (20% armor) choice for channeling builds.
• Bane of the Trapped is the third gem for optimal damage output, giving another 60% multiplicative damage against slowed enemies. You will mainly proc this effect from the aura and your follower.
• Other options include Boon of the Hoarder for T16 farming, Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard to protect Squirt's Necklace buff for Speed Greater Rifts, and Wreath of Lightning for maximum Movement Speed in Bounties. Since the build's single target damage is very high, Bane of the Stricken is not required to kill the boss even on high pushing tiers.

• Hungering Arrow Devouring Arrow is your main damage skill.
• Strafe is necessary to activate all the bonuses from Gears of Dreadlands set, and it also serves as your main mobility skill. Only two runes on this skill are relevant: Rocket Storm adds a little bit of DPS, Drifting Shadow a bit of Movement Speed.
• Vengeance Dark Heart provides 40% damage and 100% toughness bonuses.
• The last 3 skill slots are open and can be changed for a variety of defensive or utility options. However, almost every variant includes Smoke Screen — the strongest DH defensive skill that can also provide some mobility via the Displacement rune and Tactical Advantage.
• Preparation Focused Mind provides Discipline necessary to spam Smoke Screen.
• Finally, the last skill slot is usually another damage, toughness or Movement Speed buff. It can be any of Companion, Fan of Knives Bladed Armor, Caltrops Bait The Trap, Shadow Power Gloom or Shadow Glide, or even Entangling Shot for variations with Odyssey's End.

• Numbing Traps is a very strong defensive passive that can be used in almost any variation of this build, as Hungering Arrow Devouring Arrow procs it by default.
• Awareness, helps you out in tough times and saves you a death.
• Other options include Ambush, Tactical Advantage, Blood Vengeance, Single Out, Cull the Weak, Perfectionist for most purposes like farming or pushing. Choose what you need depending on your activity, all of these are decent options giving you damage, defense or utility.

¹ Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 800,000 Life is recommended).

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (2) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

The build is overall fairly easy to play once you understand the core concept.

• Keep your Momentum stacks (from the set's 2-piece bonus) high by attacking with your Hungering Arrow at least 5 times at the start of a run, and then refresh it back to 20 (maximum) whenever you reach 17. Like this, you will ensure the highest possible DPS and mobility from the buff.*
• Keep up Vengeance at all times to gain its damage and toughness buffs (activate once every 20 seconds).
• Pull enemies close together and position yourself nearby while channeling Strafe.
• Hold down Strafe at all times when you want to attack, and then press Hungering Arrow for individual attacks to gain Momentum stacks. Make sure you don't drain yourself of Hatred when no enemies are around (happens especially in Bounties and Nephalem Rifts when you have big empty spaces).
• Keep up your defensive buffs such as (Fan of Knives Bladed Armor, Smoke Screen or Shadow Power) as much as possible.
• When using Squirt's Necklace, play a bit more defensively to keep up the damage buff better whenever you are fighting easy enemies.
• In Greater Rifts (especially pushing), you can weave in manual Hungering Arrow casts as much as possible (around twice a second) between your Strafe ticks for more DPS after you have prepared a pull and are ready to attack. Only do this when you don't have any pulling/dodging to do at the moment.

* Momentum stacks are somewhat buggy and don't always give you the stacks even after you attacked. Keep an eye on your buff bar to see when that happens and shoot another Hungering Arrow.

The build is quite tanky for Demon Hunters and is a great choice choice for Hardcore players. You have permanent immunity to Crowd Control effects and high mobility to get out of dangerous situations with ease when you have to. Don't forget to use the Awareness passive at all times! Ambush is usually your weakest offensive passive so this is a good candidate to be dropped.

Important: When fighting Dune Dervishes (spinners) or Sand Dwellers you can easily oneshot and kill yourself from your barrage of Hungering Arrows. There is absolutely no way to survive an incoming reflected hit from your own attacks when these monster types use their abilities, so always keep an eye out for them. The first type can spawn as minions from Nemesis Bracers, so you will encounter them very frequently.

Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Due to The Ninth Cirri Satchel this skill will pierce up to 4 times, but is not guaranteed to do so when no enemies are in its path.
• The maximum travel distance is 120 yards total or 90 yards distance from the starting point.
• The arrow will periodically turn around and seek out a new nearby target.
• The Devouring Arrow rune adds a 70% damage increase stacking additively with itself that is multiplicative to the base damage (First hit = 100%, second hit = 170%, third hit = 240%, fourth hit = 310%, fifth hit = 380%).
• Devouring Arrow momentarily Chills the enemy hit with no duration, applying the Numbing Traps debuff. This Chill happens after the damage and does not activate Cull the Weak or Bane of the Trapped.

• Using Hungering Arrow will provide a Momentum buff lasting 4 seconds.
• There' a 5 second delay after the last application before the buff timer starts counting down.
• 5 successive casts will provide the maximum bonus (20 + 5 seconds).
• Each stack/second left adds 8% Movement Speed and 10% multiplicative damage for your Primary skills.
• There are some bugs that sometimes prevent you from getting a Momentum stack— just cast it again.

• Strafe will fire your last used Primary skill when it hits an enemy.
• This effect can occur once every 9 frames (game runs at 60 FPS, max. 6.67 procs/s).
• Rockets from Rocket Storm can proc it too when the Cooldown is ready (using that rune can increase your DPS by a small amount). The ground effect from Icy Trail can not.
• Projectiles generated from the set gain full effects of Hatred generation, Area Damage and proc coefficients.

Since Strafe only fires a Primary when it hits an enemy, rather when it spawns a projectile, its relationship with Attack Speed is complicated.

As a channeled skill, Strafe shoots projectiles at an accelerated rate. The main breakpoints important for GoD DH are:

• 10 FPA - Used for Crossbows without any Attack Speed rolls
• 9 FPA - Best for Crossbows with 1 Attack Speed roll or for Bows (you can have max. +19% Attack Speed including your Quiver, so you have to remove it from Paragon Points). When at this Breakpoint, you want to stay inside the pull for optimal Primary generation from the (4) Bonus
• 8 FPA - Avoid this breakpoint at all costs
• 7 FPA - Typical breakpoint for One-Handed/Dual-Wield setups
• 6 FPA - If you happen to get some Attack Speed on your gear with a One-Handed Weapon, you can consider this one, but it barely adds any DPS and can cause Hatred issues in speedruns
• 5 FPA - Don't try to reach this one, too much investment

Here is the table. The values given are ranges between one breakpoint to the next. Here we have a typcial dual-wielding character with 2.00 APS at the 7 FPA breakpoint, which ranges from 1.8751 to 2.1428 APS:

First, we consider the situation where each Strafe projectile hits an enemy exactly when it spawns (this actually happens when you are inside the mob's hitbox). Then the result is pretty clear: for Breakpoints of 9 frames and slower, you get a Primary on every tick of Strafe, and for faster breakpoint you get a Primary on every other tick.

You can see that at the 9 frames Breakpoint, you reach the theoretical maximum "Attack Speed" of 6.67 attacks per second. For that reason, you play this build in melee when you equip a Two-handed Weapon. With Hand Crossbows, there is no way reasonable way to lower your Attack Speed enough to do this and the waiting time between procs allows you to move around enemies more freely without losing much damage.

To calculate the amount of shots per second, everything gets a lot more complicated when you are not in melee range. Strafe still continues to spawn projectiles at a steady rate depending on your Breakpoint, but now each projectile hits an enemy after some delay. That delay is dependent on the distance between you and the closest enemy and that distance changes when you or the monsters move.

Because of that, instead of trying to spawn a Primary every X frames, you try to spawn it every X frames + small, essentially random, delay. Using Rocket Storm rune adds extra (quasi random) points in time where a Primary can potentially spawn, effectively increasing DPS by about 5% at all Breakpoints. All this randomness makes it impossible to predict how many Primaries per second will be actually spawned depending on your Attack Speed. The following results were obtained experimentally, by Strafing for a minute around 15-20 mobs and then counting all the Hungering Arrows fired.

Note, that for 6-8 frames Breakpoints, these values are higher than what you get when sitting on top of mobs, so to maximize your DPS, while playing with Hand Crossbows, you should stay outside of the pull. To increase your DPS further, you should also weave in manual Hungering Arrow casts as much as possible, around 2 per second. When done with the right timing, you will barely lose automatically fired projectiles from your (4) Bonus and improve your overall rate of fire.

If you are using Valla's Bequest, each Strafe projectile produces many moments in time where a Primary can spawn. With enough (20+) mobs around, this essentially means that you attempt to spam a Primary on every single frame, and that puts your rate of fire at 6.67 shots per second with enough density regardless of your position. In comparison to that, Buriza-Do Kyanon's legendary effect is a lot weaker due to its ICD and limited number of pierces. It provides less than 0.5% DPS increase.

In cases where you run with Bane of the Stricken things are equally complicated. When you hit an enemy with a skill that has greater than zero proc coefficient you apply a stack of Bane of the Stricken to them, and the gem itself goes on Cooldown equal to 0.9 divided by that skill's Attack Speed. Now in typical GoD build you have a lot of skills all hitting the boss at the same time:

• Vengeance cannons: a normal skill
• Vengeance rockets: also normal skill
• Hungering Arrows: a normal skill with separate x1.3 Attack Speed multiplier from Hunter's Wrath
• Strafe: a channeling skill with 4.0 speed coefficient
• Rocket Storm's rockets: a channeling skill with 2.0 speed coefficient

All these attacks hit the boss with high frequency and in completely random and uncontrollable order. For that reason Stricken/second values were also obtained experimentally to compare 2h and 1h setups:

• 1.54 APS (9 frames Strafe breakpoint): 2.24 stacks/second
• 2.08 APS (7 frames Strafe breakpoint): 3.25 stacks/second

On high tiers this produces much faster boss fights with one-handed weapons as your damage done rises faster than with slower Weapons. Luckily, this is not an issue anymore as Bane of the Stricken is not required to kill the boss in a reasonable amount of time anymore.

• Valla's will make all Strafe projectiles pierce - it doesn't add anything to the Hungering Arrow itself.
• Piercing projectiles can proc the 4-piece bonus again as long as the Cooldown is up (9 frames).
• In big density, you almost guarantee a 4-piece proc immediately when the Cooldown is ready.
• The overall DPS gain over wearing another random weapon is between 0% (single target) to 25% (high density).
• Valla's comes with one extra primary stat and an item-specific Strafe damage roll that can be removed (Strafe damage does not affect Hungering Arrow damage).

• Entangling Shot Heavy Burden lasts for 4 seconds.
• Hitting any enemy in the pull will slowly spread the slow effect to more and more targets nearby.
• The visual effect is not always displayed properly, but you can be sure that enemies are slowed after a while or see it from the slow animation at their feet.
• Refreshing the debuff on one monster of the chain will refresh it on all of them.
• If you lose the debuff, you will have to re-apply it to every single monster again.

• Gives a shield that stacks up to 10 times for a maximum of 30% of your total life.
• The shield lasts permanently and snapshots your Maximum Health at the time of application.
• Each time you attack you get at least 1 stack of the shield, however you often get more (sometimes all 10 at once), making this item significantly stronger than it appears at first glance.
• Taking damage without breaking the shield will protect the buff given by Squirt's Necklace.
• Keep in mind that your shield takes more damage with this setup as long as you have the amulet's buff.