Random Ability Demon Hunter - Final Thoughts

I finished leveling Friendly on the weekend.  The fifties were some very rough levels, as I discussed before, but none of them compared to level 54.  Basically there were no useful abilities at all and it was just left-click everything down.  On top of that I had just recently started Hell and the enemies had much more health.  Things were so bad that I got tired and crafted until I got a new bow that tripled my list dps and it was still a brutal slog.  It took about two hours to get through that level.

After that things stayed tolerable until level 60.  In particular level 56 had the Bombardment rune on Rapid Fire, which is pretty much exactly arcane missiles for 414%.  Why the Demon Hunter gets vastly superior version of a Wizard spell as a rune is a very good question, but not all good questions have good answers.

Demon Hunters have a lot of bad abilities.  It is hard to imagine anyone using Stafe or Multi-Shot.  Cluster Arrow was useful enough for leveling when the right click ability was very bad but there is little reason to use it if you have a choice in the matter.  Impale doesn't have enough punch for a single target damage skill.  Evasive fire seems pretty lame.

I went to look at the top demon hunter builds and confirmed that precisely the two skills I had pegged as overpowered were the most used skills - Ball Lightning and Echoing Blast.

Basically too much of the Demon Hunter is chaff.  A year into the game it's a pretty lousy state for the class to be in.  I will swear up and down that I think the quest for balance should be abandoned, but it should be abandoned in the name of fun.  Let us put sockets in our gear, give us gems with crazy effects, put in enchanting options to add to gear, give gear affixes that do weird things, and let people make crazy awesome builds.  All of that is fun.  An ability that does 265% to a single target next to a cheaper ability that does 438% is not fun, it's just a waste of space.

All that said, I'm not saying that Demon Hunter is a bad class.  If you just don't fill your bar with bad abilities they are probably fine.  But if you insist on using all the abilities they are crazy awful.