Spike Traps Demon Hunter Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Spike Trap Echoing Blast Strafe Drifting Shadow 1 Shadow Power Gloom 2 Smoke Screen Displacement 3 Caltrops Bait the Trap 4 Vengeance Dark Heart
Passive Skills
Cull the Weak Numbing Traps Custom Engineering Ambush

The crux of this build lies in setting up big enemy pulls into your Spike Trap nests, which is quite doable thanks to the strong displacement effect coming from the Natalya 4-piece bonus. You will draw the attention of various monster groups near advantageous open areas of the map, and then go into a basic rotation of: 1) placing Spike Trap on top of one monster group, then 2) comboing Caltrops and Strafe in quick succession to draw the enemies in one tight "pixel pull", and 3) repeating the process for all nearby monster packs. This forms one massive pull, which greatly benefits your Area Damage stats.

Once the pull is set up and showed down from your Caltrops, stack 10 Spike Traps (your maximum — more and you simply overwrite the oldest) on top of the pull, and detonate them with the use of your Hatred spender. The preferred Hatred spender for the job will be Strafe, due to mobility this skill offers — innate passability through enemies, as well as unhindered runspeed via the rune Drifting Shadow. Note that due to the Natalya set 2-piece bonus, enemies will take double damage from Spike Trap if they are affected by Caltrops. This means Caltrops Bait the Trap (6-second base effect, doubled by Custom Engineering) should be spread across the engaged group of enemies well before the Cold cycle of Convention of Elements (4-second effect), which is the brief period when detonating your traps will deal the most damage.

With the assistance of Dawn, Vengeance should be kept up at all times for the formidable damage increase and damage reduction it provides. With the restorative properties of the Natalya 2-piece bonus, you should also not have any trouble sustaining another defensive effect — Shadow Power Gloom, which is otherwise very taxing on your Discipline. You should also make regular use of Smoke Screen Displacement — both to dodge incoming hard hits with a second-long invulnerability period, as well as the massive movement speed burst from the selected rune.

The main damage dealer and focal point of the build are the Spike Traps. Through the Natalya set bonuses, Spike Trap loses its resource cost, recharges immediately upon use, and attains additional crowd control and damage reduction properties. On top of that, the Traps' detonation even restores Discipline, enabling the frequent use of utility skills. All of that is augmented by a massive layer of damage bonuses — upfront on the initial blast, then a stacking one for each consecutive explosion from the detonated chain reaction. The rune choice is quite straightforward — you should simply take the hardest hitting rune, the Cold-based Echoing Blast. Additional items like Trag'Oul Coils (free Scatter rune effect, faster deployment, damage multiplication), Chanon Bolter (Taunting effect, damage multiplication), and The Demon's Demise (doubled detonations, damage multiplication) propel this skill well into endgame viability.

As previously mentioned, Caltrops are another vital piece of the puzzle; enemies affected by them take double damage from Spike Traps and in turn, trap detonations displace enemies to the nearest set Caltrops. Time their use to the cycles of Convention of Elements for optimal results. The preferred rune for the skill is the Crit Chance-boosting Bait the Trap, which augments your damage while you stand in its effective radius.

In order to trigger the Spike Trap detonations, in most cases you will have to use a Hatred spender. And for most cases, we recommend Strafe for the purpose; the skill innately offers passability through enemies while you use it, which is a vital boon to a build that lacks Vault. The preferred rune is Drifting Shadow, as unimpeded movement speed is another crucial part of the agile combat style of Demon Hunters.

A trio of strong defensive skills will bear the brunt of your protection. The staple steroid skill of Demon Hunters, Vengeance, is included not only for its baseline 40% multiplicative damage increase, but also the 50% damage reduction of the Dark Heart rune. Smoke Screen will be there to fall back to whenever you expect a large, sudden spike of damage, as it renders you untargetable as well as invisible to surrounding enemies for a second. The skill will double up as a movement speed boost from the rune Displacement, so you can use it to skip unfavorable fights, or simply to move great distances quickly within a GR level. Another decent rune choice is the restorative Healing Vapors. Lastly, Shadow Power is a protective cornerstone for Demon Hunters due to the rune Gloom; unlike Shadow set-based setups, its effect is not permanent in this build, but you should easily be able to afford its hefty Discipline consumption through the built-in Discipline restoration of the Natalya set.

Cull the Weak is taken for the multiplicative damage increase against Slowed or Chilled enemies. Conveniently, your main damage dealer Spike Trap Echoing Blast has a built-in proc for this passive. On top of that, your Caltrops and follower will also slow your enemies, ensuring the constant uptime of this passive in any situation.

While you solo push and farm, Ambush will be a great addition against single target, higher health enemies like Champions and Rift Guardians. Its 40% bonus damage against the first 25% of the target health pool is multiplicative in nature, allowing you to chew through the first quarter of the fight very efficiently.

Coming quite naturally to a trap-reliant build, you should take Numbing Traps for the consistent 25% damage reduction on surrounding enemies.

Custom Engineering is the dream passive for the Trapper playstyle — doubling the duration of your Caltrops and Traps, and increasing the maximum number of Spike Traps to 5.