Recently, I managed to obtain a very powerful Ancient Calamity for my Demon Hunter and found a near perfectly rolled Spines of Seething Hatred quiver. In turn, I had been mostly running a Chakram build for low level stuff. However, because I already had a Bombadier’s Rucksack, I wanted to give the Evasive Fire build a try to see which one I prefer. This blog will describe my opinions and the pro’s and con’s of both.
The biggest thing about the Bombadier’s Rucksack being used in conjunction with the M6 build is the synergy for doing immense amount of damage with your generators and certain spenders. In switching over, I saw myself critically hitting for 200 million a pop and basically bursting down everything with Multishot: Arsenal. I can definitely see myself doing even more damage in higher greater rifts using something like Cluster Arrow: Loaded for Bear where the burst against elites will make a huge difference.
However, Evasive Fire as really doesn’t hit for that much damage, even while your sentries are up and you end up losing damage from firing Chakrams from your sentries while you’re waiting for your hatred regeneration to get back up for Multishot. Also, in situations where you might fight elites with nasty affixes, you cannot easily hide in a corner and fire off Chakram at walls to blindly down your enemies.
On the other hand, Chakram has its own set of issues. The biggest one that I’ve noticed is that Chakram has pretty poor response when it comes to firing from your sentries. I do not know if this is a bug or intended. According to several forum posts, sentries supposedly will not fire your spenders if your enemies are too close. I have noticed that even when this may not be the case, Chakram at times remains unresponsive whereas Multishot feels more consistent in terms of firing from your sentries.
The real difference between the two that I’ve seen is that Chakram feels better for overall sustained damage where you can blindly fire from a safe distance. Evasive Fire builds main benefit is to act as an interim before finding a Kridershot, which behaves similar to Chakram, except that you can use it in conjunction with your Bombadier’s Rucksack while dishing out nice Frost Arrows for CC and damage. Otherwise, Evasive Fire seems to act better in a great burst role for groups.
Another issue I encountered is dealing with needing more cooldown reduction for Evasive Fire style builds where you need to plop down 2 more sentries fast. I’m not entirely sure if the sentry “buff” with the Marauder’s set is influenced by distance from your sentries. The details for how the mechanic works feels a little sketchy, which is why I prefer the older style better. In general though, I found myself maintaining pretty high damage overall even if I could only lay down 2 sentries nearby at a time. Most of the times where cooldown reduction felt to impact the situation were near the entrance of a floor to an area as you have practically have to recreate your sentry fortress.
On the other hand, I think that for Greater Rifts, Bombadier’s Rucksack with 5 sentries pretty much is a must have. I still need to evaluate Cluster Arrow vs Multishot a bit more. So far I really like Multishot for the area damage. But my gut feeling is that Cluster Arrow in group play can make a huge difference in taking down elites. However, the inaccuracy of Cluster Arrow and high resource cost make me believe that Cluster Arrow is better mostly for single target, especially Rift bosses. Again, the main thing is to experiment and figure out which play style is better suited for you.