Demon Hunter Active Skills

Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Active Skills

Demon Hunter active skills are broken down into three distinct categories. While they have been overhauled a couple times late in the game’s development cycle, the final list is a nice balance of heavy duty ranged attacks and carefully plotted avoidance tactics. Here are the skills you’ll have to choose from and what decisions you might choose to make for each of them.

Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Active Skills – Hatred Generator

The majority of your casts will be related to Hatred, which is very similar to Mana or Fury in that you need it to cast your spells. That said,  you don’t need to get hit by anyone to generate Hatred. You simply need to mix up your Demon Hunter active skills and stay alive:

• Evasive Fire
• Impale
• Bola Shot
• Entangling Shot
• Grenades
• Spike Trap

All six of the Hatred Generator abilities are available before you reach level 20, so you’ll want to have them in place early. I like Impale because it opens attack sequences well, especially if you end up playing Hardcore and use your stealth readily. Entangling Shot is also a good attack while Evasive Fire is useful due to its doubling as a Discipline ability.

Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Active Skills - Hatred Spender

There are nine Demon Hunter active skills in the Hatred Spender branch of your build but I recommend you select only 2-3 at the most. You’ll need to offset these spenders with generators as well as Discipline abilities to stay alive:

• Hungering Arrow
• Rapid Fire
• Chakram
• Elemental Arrow
• Fan of Knives
• Multishot
• Strafe
• Cluster Arrow
• Rain of Vengeance

Which Demon Hunter active skills you choose will depend largely on the type of player you want to be and your build. Some of these attacks, like Rain of Vengeance have high Hatred costs and long cooldowns, making them less effective in PvP but great in PvM, especially co-op.

Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Active Skills - Discipline

Last on the list of Demon Hunter active skills is Discipline which consists of the abilities that use Discipline, which is tasked with keeping you alive.

• Caltrops
• Vault
• Shadow Power
• Companion
• Smoke Screen
• Sentry
• Marked for Death
• Preparation

Each of these has its uses, and I don’t recommend you have more than 2 of them in your build because you need the Hatred skills to maintain your DPS, but Smoke Screen is incredibly powerful if you are in PvP or high level PvM and need more survivability. Sentry will be immensely useful as well in maintaining range from enemies, while Marked for Death is incredible for AoE builds and Co-Op. For those with heavy Discipline builds in Hardcore or PvP, Preparation is a good selection, though it does have a 2 minute cooldown and you sacrifice a Hatred generator to get it.

Learn more about Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Active Skills from Diablo 3 Secrets.