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As a Demon hunter, I'm getting some trouble at nightmare difficulty, not big deal but i'm worried that it'll be even harder at high difficulties.

I tested two combinations of attributes but my damage is still quite low, and I die quite easily. the combinations were:

  • Vitality + Dexterity
  • Attack Speed + Life on hit.

I don't know if I'm doing it in the right way or not. How can I improve?

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TL;DR: Invest in a good weapon, and dex/vitality for the rest of your gear; use the auction house to your advantage.

I found that high-ish vitality was the secret to success for nightmare (on my monk, so take my tips w/ a grain of salt). Also, farming the auction house for some choice items really helped.

Going into nightmare, I had a very damage-focused item set, and had maybe 2k health. I was dying left and right!

After investing pretty heavily in a great weapon and dex/vit gear, I had my health up to about 8k, and was able to breeze through the rest of the difficulty.

My tips are mostly focused around searching the auction house.

General AH searching tips:

  • Set a maximum buyout of 10,000 gold or so. There's always a ton of great deals; this also filters out everything that's bid only.
  • Always set filters when searching.

Invest in a good weapon:

  • Weapon power seems to stair-step every five levels, so find one that's got a minimum level requirement at the nearest multiple of 5. (e.g. if you're level 32, get a level 30+ weapon)

  • Focus on whatever stats you like on the weapons; As a demon hunter, I'm guessing that you want attack speed and dexterity.

  • You might want to spend a bit more (25,000 gold buyout or so); but check the cheap ones first, people often don't have a good understanding of the current market's prices.

Decking out your armor:

  • Filter to vitality, dexterity (and optionally something like gold find or magic find)

  • If you get 5+ pages of results, try raising the minimum amount of dexterity to reduce the # of results

  • Don't forget that each gem slot can effectively be a good 20-30 dexterity (mid-tier gems are cheap!)

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    With that buyout you may find some good deals, but the really great weapons (typically for nightmare or harder) are around 25-50k. I've picked up several items worth 100k or more for about 30k. The filters are a good thing to focus on though, especially when you know exactly what you want. – Chris May 21 '12 at 19:50
  • Yeah, good pont - it's probably worth raising the cap for the weapon. But IMO it's not worth spending too much more for nightmare mode items; you're going to still out level them pretty quickly – Nevir May 21 '12 at 19:53
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    Very true. I only felt the point should be raised since at the very end of Nightmare I picked up a 320 dps crossbow for 50k that's gotten me through most of Hell. Willing to drop some extra coin can be extremely beneficial in the harder difficulties! – Chris May 21 '12 at 19:56
  • In the Filter to vitality, dexterity (and optionally something like gold find or magic find) part, should I focus more in VIT or DEX in this case (getting both, should I pick 80 vit and 40 dex for example? or 80 dex and 40 vit?) – Michel May 24 '12 at 15:58
  • It really depends on the overall spread of stats that you have across all your items; generally, just having some vitality is good enough if you have it on most/many of your items. Hell & Inferno require quite a bit more health to be successful. Aka, I'd actually just search for 40/40 and then compare the rest of the stats on the items – Nevir May 24 '12 at 16:58
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I would go with Vitality + Dexterity.

I had about 5k hp in Nightmare and was dying constantly. By the time I got to Diablo I had upped it to about 13k and my playing was considerably less, well, dead. Vitality is extremely important to any class, despite whatever the primary attribute(s) may be. Once you get to the harder difficulties having health is a definite necessity.

A combination I've recently discovered that goes well with Dex + Life on Hit (assuming you already have decent hp) is taking the Sharpshooter perk and some assorted +crit chance/damage, resulting in very frequent crits and essentially constant healing.

Despite attack speed not having a cap (as far as I know) and life on hit being very useful, you don't output nearly enough damage to sustain the damage Hell/Inferno enemies output. It's better to be able to take a few hits and escape than get (nearly or straight up) one-shotted by normal mobs later on and slowly regain health. However if you play a lot of co-op this may be more successful, although you would have to make avoiding damage a priority, which would detract from your damage output.

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