Demon Hunter Shadow Impale Build

The Shadow's Mantle set offers several viable playstyles revolving around the themes of high mobility and assassination. This Impale variant places and even greater emphasis on singling out and bursting down priority targets, an elite hunting playstyle that is geared towards Greater Rift progression. We also have group progression and speed farming variants that you can access by clicking the links below.

The basic skill setup of the Shadow Impale Demon Hunter is displayed below. Read the dedicated Skills page for detailed information on choices, alternatives and build customization.

Active Skills
Impale Overpenetration Companion Wolf Companion 1 Vengeance Dark Heart 2 Fan of Knives Bladed Armor 3 Vault Rattling Roll 4 Shadow Power Gloom
Passive Skills
Ambush Numbing Traps Cull the Weak Awareness

The required gear setup for the Shadow Impale Demon Hunter is listed below. Check the Gear page for detailed information on choices, alternatives, gemming, Kanai's Cube and Paragon distribution.

• Helm: The Shadow's Mask
• Shoulders: Aughild's Power
• Gloves: The Shadow's Grasp
• Chest: The Shadow's Bane
• Belt: Chain of Shadows
• Pants: The Shadow's Coil
• Boots: The Shadow's Heels
• Bracers: Aughild's Search
• Amulet: The Traveler's Pledge
• Ring 1: The Compass Rose
• Ring 2: Convention of Elements
• Weapon: Karlei's Point
• Offhand: Holy Point Shot

With this Season's addition of a 4th slot in Kanai's Cube as a theme, your ideal setup will be:

• Kanai's Cube 4th Slot: Elusive Ring

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

• Legendary Gem 1: Bane of the Trapped
• Legendary Gem 2: Gogok of Swiftness
• Legendary Gem 3: Pain Enhancer

• Weapon Slot: Dawn
• Armor Slot: Stone Gauntlets
• Jewelry Slot: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• 4th Slot (Season 33): Elusive Ring

In this section, we will briefly go over how to kickstart this build into reality; which items you should aim for with priority when farming and gambling, and what is their relative priority for the functioning of this spec. Note that these suggestions are exclusively aimed at getting you up and running into endgame farming, and might not reflect the gear you need to wear for high-end Greater Rift solo or group pushing. This section also assumes a fresh Season's start, which usually is the point where most players work on assembling their first build with a particular set.

If the Shadow set is part of the Haedrig's Gift for the Season, your simplest and most straightforward path to assembling the build is to complete the Seasonal Journey chapters up to Chapter IV. The Seasonal Journey chapters will gradually give you a complete class-specific set, giving 2-3 pieces for Chapters II, III and IV.

From the pre-game menu, choose and do this week's Challenge Rift. When successfully completed, this weekly event will grant you 5,1 million Gold, 475 Blood Shards, 370 Reusable Parts, 350 Arcane Dust, 125 Veiled Crystals, 35 Death's Breaths, and 15 of each Bounty cache material: Khanduran Rune, Caldeum Nightshade, Arreat War Tapestry, Corrupted Angel Flesh, and Westmarch Holy Water. This will allow you some early Seasonal leeway to extract and reforge items in Kanai's Cube, speeding up the assembly of this build with the items recommended below.

Having some materials at your disposal, either from farming or the Challenge Rift, is particularly important when you get duplicate pieces of your desired set. When you do, you can use Kanai's Cube Skill of Nilfur recipe (10x Forgotten Souls, 10x Death's Breaths, 1x Set item) to convert into another item from the same set. You should never salvage duplicate pieces of a desired set before you have it assembled.

In order to assemble a Shadow Impale Demon Hunter, you should do the following.

• Gather the full 6-piece Shadow set using the advice above, or by spending Blood Shards at Kadala. In order of gamble chance, you should spend for: Shoulders, Pants, Boots, Gloves, Helm, and Chest. A trick you can also use is to gamble for duplicate pieces with an easier gamble chance (i.e., Shoulders) and convert them into another piece from the same set using the Skill of Nilfur recipe in Kanai's Cube.
• Upgrade rare (Hope of Cain recipe in Kanai's Cube) Daggers to get Karlei's Point, which you might have lucked into with your level 1 crafts as per our Seasonal Starter Guide. This is a build-defining weapon that bolsters your damage and enables resource management for Shadow DHs.
• Gamble Quivers for Holy Point Shot, which also might have been your lucky gamble from a level 31 gambling session. This quiver produces the signature "shotgun spread" playstyle of Impale that encourages you to point blank priority targets to get all 3 hits on one enemy.
• Gamble Belts for Chain of Shadows; this item will greatly improve your mobility and will enforce an interesting shoot-vault-shoot dynamic in the build, so that your Vaults do not tax your Discipline too greatly. While gambling Belts, you can also stumble into Goldwrap, which is a cornerstone standard rift farming item that makes you nearly invulnerable as you pick up gold.
• Upgrade rare Hand Crossbows to get Dawn; its legendary power needs to be slotted in the Cube asap, as it will greatly cut down your Vengeance cooldown and, at the 37% sheet CDR breakpoint, will allow you its permanent uptime.
• Gamble helms for Visage of Gunes; this is a convenience item that you will eventually replace with Stone Gauntlets (but not before you get permanent Vengeance). It nets you the Dark Heart rune for free, and allows you to run the supreme resource gain of Seethe.
• Do Act I bounties to attain the act-specific Ring of Royal Grandeur from Bounty caches. This will be helpful either in completing the basic set bonus, or mixing other helpful sets in (Aughilds) as described in the Gear page. Bounties will net you the craftable set recipes to begin with, so you will be killing two birds with one stone. Bounties will also net you Avarice Band (Act III), another farming-oriented staple for most builds and classes, this one included.
• While largely undesirable due to high costs, gambling or upgrading rare Jewelry is also possible; Elusive Ring and Convention of Elements will both bring massive value to the build, with other standout pieces that can also substitute or be temporarily helpful in the face of Stone of Jordan, Squirt's Necklace, or Oculus Ring and The Flavor of Time for your Follower.