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| Natalya my Demon Hunter |
The screenshot above shows my demon hunter who just reached inferno. Haven't really bought anything much from the auction house for her and just relied on the drops of the game. At first glance (ignoring the barbarian character which was my friend's character when he used my account to give Diablo 3 a try), it seems that the demon hunter class has more damage compared to the wizard. True enough, my wizard never had 31k (31,000) DPS when I reached inferno (I think I only had 10k damage). This is primarily due to the passive abilities of the demon hunter which increase the critical rate of the demon hunters by a lot and we all know critical scales well over time and towards end game Diablo 3. Similar to the wizard, I believe the demon hunter class also uses kiting in order to defeat monsters and champion packs easily. Looking at my demon hunter's skills, I have hungering arrow (any rune is fine here but I think I use devouring arrow rune), elemental arrow (frost), preparation with (60% health heal), caltrops (torturous grounds), smokescreen (lingering fog) and vault (tumble). All of which have their special uses here and there depending on the enemies and champion packs that I face. For the hungering arrow and elemental arrow, these two are usually my spam skill in order to slow monsters and beat them to a pulp. I use my preparation mainly when I face reflect damage bosses or when I need a free heal (hooray for saving potions!). Caltrops are generally used for immobilizing boss packs which greatly makes kiting easy enough for me to be half asleep while still doing it right. Smokescreen is my lifesaver skill or last resort and only used when severely in trouble or trapped in walls or things like that. Finally vault is the multi-purpose dodge move (especially useful against frozen affix mobs) or movement skill I spam when I need to walk long corridors or fields without monsters.
As a demon hunter, killing normal monsters are fairly easy and stress-free and I believe this will continue given enough time invested in farming for gears. Most of the time, all regular monsters die before they even get close for me to be wary of their presence. Regular monsters also include those savage beasts or woodland trees in Act 1 inferno which gave my wizard back then a tough time bringing them down. Additionally, demon hunters have high dexterity stat so I generally dodge quite hits before taking damage compared to my wizard who usually gets hit all the time. However, unlike the wizard with a high intelligence stat, demon hunters take more damage when they are hit which generally could translate to getting instantly killed by an attack (note: intelligence boosts all resistances and damage for wizard).
Now we move to the interesting part which is dealing with monster affixes. Using my demon hunter, most non-threatening champions die with the basic elemental arrow and caltrops spam. I barely run out of discipline when doing this and I can kite in this state forever unless I run into other issues such as sneaky monsters. Compared to using my wizard (hydra and blizzard), caltrops and elemental arrow spamming are more controlled as I can target the monster that I would like to be trapped or damaged by my skills. In addition, the massive critical rate given by the passives simply destroy these champions faster than my wizard. On the other hand, when my demon hunter deals with threatening champions (usually includes a combination of the following affixes: vortex, teleportation, waller, mortar, extra fast, invulnerable minions, reflect damage, shielding, fire chains, molten) requires a lot of concentration, and perhaps perfect play. Unlike my wizard, I cannot afford sloppy mistakes for my demon hunter when facing these packs as it will result to certain death (as a wizard, most of my sloppy mistakes never lead to death so long as I have enough health and force armor on). Furthermore reflect damage champions are quite a pain to deal with when using my demon hunter simply because they reflect quite a big chunk of damage like nearly 1k damage whenever I get a critical hit on them (when I am using my wizard, I generally have little issues regarding reflect damage champions as most of the damage is negated once I use diamond skin with crystal shell rune). On the brighter side of things though, my demon hunter has better escape skills such as vault. Comparing vault to my wizard's teleport, vault is more spammable and less buggy than teleport. Vault has no cooldown and so it can be always used when I need it unlike teleport which requires my wizard to get hit for the illusionist passive to trigger and reset the cooldown of teleport. .However, as a downside to vault, I cannot use vault to escape the walls created by waller champions. The only way I generally get out of tight spots as a demon hunter is using the smokescreen skill which is very decent for escape and repositioning. As the biggest downside though, it costs a lot of discipline and I generally run out of it fast (even with the preparation skill) when I use smokescreen against waller champions and as a result, without any form of damage mitigating skills (like the force armor for wizards), I get killed. Despite having downsides, another good thing about smokescreen is that it allows the monsters to change their targets when I use the skill which usually results to my demon hunter getting my much needed distance away from the monsters. Much like my wizard, I don't really have problems with crowd control even against illusionist champions as elemental arrow, hungering arrow and caltrops generally do as much crowd control as blizzard and hydra. Finally, I would like to give a spotlight to the preparation skill of the demon hunter. This skill is generally one of the best skills I found in the demon hunter's arsenal and something that cannot be matched by another skill in the wizard. I generally use the discipline refill when I run out of discipline and only seldom use the heal part of the skill. Most of the time, the heal part of the skill is only useful on reflect damage mobs as almost every hit can kill my demon hunter (probably because I got low gears). There is nothing more annoying than running out of arcane power on the wizard and suddenly failing to use teleport which results to death. As a demon hunter with preparation skill, I generally avoid deaths that are caused by insufficient resource that happens on my wizard when teleporting too much evading the champion packs.
Summary (this is of course a summary in contrast to wizard):
Demon Hunter
Pros
-more DPS even without good gear, perhaps more DPS comparing wizard and demon hunter even with best gears.
-more spammable escape, dodge skill (vault)
-good repositioning skill (smoke screen)
-can stop monsters from overrunning your positioning which is sort of impossible for wizards as hydra and blizzard would just slow them down and not really block them from going to your position (caltrops skill with torturous grounds)
-free potion skill (this is if you use preparation skill with 60% health heal)
-instantly refills resource (preparation skill)
Cons
-requires perfect play and positioning when dealing with threatening monster affixes (I generally am 1 hit kill in act 1 inferno)
-lack of fail-safe skill (lag spikes and wrong clicks will kill you more than a wizard with force armor)
- dodge chance is still just a chance (if you don't dodge the attack you may die)
-no free resistances (given by intelligence gain)
Generally speaking, both classes have their pro and cons. Both classes also use the same tactic when dealing with champions/elite packs which is kiting. Most of their difference is in their ability to escape and their raw strength in terms of doing damage with or without gear. As such, I believe neither class is way superior than the other but it depends highly on the playstyle that one prefers.
Thanks everyone and again have fun playing Diablo 3.
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