Spike Traps Demon Hunter BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

The build incorporates a mixture of the Natalya's Vengeance and the craftable Aughild's Authority and Captain Crismon sets, taking five pieces of the main set and two of each of the craftable. You will tie their bonuses together with a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube to attain their valuable 6- and 3-piece bonuses, respectively. Conveniently, the Natalya set does not have shoulder, bracer, or belt pieces, which constitute tha majority of the craftable sets. Thus, an example distribution would be to take Aughild's Power and Aughild's Search for the Aughild set, Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle and Captain Crimson's Thrust for the Cpt. Crimson set, and then Natalya's Sight, Natalya's Embrace, Natalya's Touch, Natalya's Reflection and Natalya's Bloody Footprints for the Natalya set; in a setup like this, you will attain all the necessary set bonuses.

With Ring of Royal Grandeur taking up the jewelry slot in the Cube and one of your ring slots necessarily taken by Natalya's Reflection, one of the options to fill out the remaining jewelry slots is an all-out offense combo of Squirt's Necklace and Convention of Elements. The amulet is a glass cannon staple, greatly multiplying your damage dealt and balancing it out with an increase in damage taken. The ring applies a strong but short-lived elemental damage buff, rotating between the elements available to your chosen class. The 4-second uptime of each elemental buff enforces a deliberate playstyle, where you try your best to detonate your traps during the element matching your chosen Spike Trap rune. An alternative to these highly glass cannon-oriented choices is the Endless Walk set, The Compass Rose and The Traveler's Pledge. Their power balances between damage reduction while moving, and increasing damage when standing still — a decent choice for the Natalya trapper build, which ducks and weaves with Smoke Screen Displacement in preparation of the fight, and then goes into stationary Spike Trap detonation mode (see this build's skills page for more information).

As your weapon and off-hand, you will wield the combo of Dawn and The Demon's Demise. Dawn is a Demon Hunter class staple, cutting up to 2/3rds of your Vengeance cooldown and allowing for permanent uptime of this valuable buff with a modest investment in Cooldown Reduction (i.e., a perfect 65% roll of its legendary bonus allows you to roll as little as 36.5% Cooldown Reduction on your gear). Needless to say, try to perfect Dawn's legendary bonus as best you can. The inclusion of your other weapon, The Demon's Demise, in this build is quite straightforward. This is a Spike Trap-dedicated legendary item that detonates the traps you have laid out twice, and greatly amplifies their damage.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Spike Trap % bonus on the shoulders and chest. Get Lightning elemental damage on both the amulet and wrists (maximum of 40%), Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 50% and 500%, respectively), and Area Damage of 130%+. Rolls-wise, this build also requires a small investment in Cooldown Reduction for permanent Vengeance. Just two rolls — on your Shoulders and Off-Hand, for example — should suffice in most cases, since you gain a sizeable chunk of extra CDR from Paragons, and the Cpt. Crimson set bonus. This should easily bump you up to 40%+ CDR, allowing you to transition from a Flawless Royal Diamond in your helm to a Flawless Royal Topaz (to ease the strain on your resources).

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool between 700-800k; dropping as much as you can for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. The build struggles a bit with sustain, and you can partially remedy that with a Life per Hit roll on gear (i.e. on the bracer), or optimizing secondary stats for Life per Kill, as well as Pickup Radius and Health Globe Bonus synergy.

All augmentations on gear should be done with your main stat, Dexterity.

Note that the stat suggestions below portray an ideally rolled item with stats listed in relative order of importance. The first four of them are main stats, and the latter two — secondary stats. If your item lacks and is unable to be rerolled into the primary stats outlined below, especially for a stat higher on the list, strongly consider its replacement. Perfecting Secondary stats is mostly a case of hyper-optimization and is not a case for discarding an item, except where noted.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random. For this build, we recommend aiming for the Vengeance Sanctification, which adds the following power to your build:

• Vengeance Sanctification: Casting Vengeance unleashes a barrage of rockets that deal damage equal to a percentage of the maximum life enemies possess. The number of rockets fired increases over 30 seconds. Elites and Bosses receive less damage per rocket.

Use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). In the case of this build, a good candidate for Sanctification is Natalya's Touch, which is present across all variants of this build.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

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.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally this is done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, but if your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that you cannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simply subtracting your roll from the 25% max.) After that dump as much as you comfortably can into Dexterity, but feel free to invest into Vitality if you feel yourself lacking in toughness.

In the Offense section, max out Cooldown Reduction, Crit Chance, Crit Damage, and Attack Speed in that order. In Defense, prioritize All Resistance, then Life %, then Armor, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Area Damage and Resource Cost Reduction first, and finish off with Life on Hit and Globe Radius.

Bane of the Trapped is a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. You have multiple ways to proc the gem in this build, most notably with the slowing effects from Caltrops and Echoing Blast.

Zei's Stone of Vengeance is another separate damage multiplier you can add to your overall DPS, with its range-based amplification easily maxing out with the considerable distance you can keep between yourself and the enemy in this CC-heavy build. Its level 25 Stun proc is just icing on the cake, adding another source of safety and Bane of the Trapped procs.

Introduced in Season 4, Bane of the Stricken occupies a firm spot in your jewelry sockets during highest end progression. Building up your damage multiplicatively in prolonged fights and with a level 25 bonus specifically targeting Rift Guardians, this gem is designed to assist AoE heavy builds in whittling down the massive RG health pools.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting the highest available level of Emeralds in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally, these will all be Flawless Royal Emeralds as soon as possible. As you grow in Paragon (bulking up Dexterity in the Core section) and aim for higher tier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Diamond. There is no specific breakpoint where you do that; the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack of toughness impede your progress. Since you will be aiming for permanent Vengeance, slot a Flawless Royal Diamond in your helm for the extra Cooldown Reduction early on; once you comfortably break over the perma-Vengeance cooldown barrier from gear alone, you should swap the helm gem out for a Flawless Royal Topaz for the resource cost reduction. In your weapons, use a Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

With set piece distribution that heavily locks down the itemization of the build, you will be forced to use the Spike Trap-dedicated 2h croossbow Chanon Bolter in the weapon slot of the Cube. Its legendary power Taunts enemies to your Spike Traps, luring them to the epicenter of your AoE destruction — but more importantly, provides another massive damage multiplier to your main damage dealer.

Trag'Oul Coils are another Spike Trap-dedicated legendary, tucked away in the Cube due to the rigid distribution of set pieces in most of your armor slots. Its legendary power greatly speeds up the process of setting up your trap nests, and adds the additional charges of the Scatter rune for free.

As previously noted, in order to attain the 6-piece bonus of the Natalya set and the 3-piece bonuses of the Aughild and Crimson sets, you will have to use the Act I bounty cache legendary Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

The recommended follower for this build during solo GR progression is the Templar for his powerful healing and survivability boons.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

You have two valuable legendary potions in the build; either slot Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid to break up Waller affixes, which potentially ruin both your damage output and escape options, or a Bottomless Potion of the Leech for the extra life sustain through the temporary Life per Hit bonus.