I feel that my stats and gear are at a real good place compared to how I was when I made that other topic about getting trashed at the beginning of Act 2. Since then I feel that I've progressed at a nice pace through about half of Act 2 (currently on getting dudes head). I know where I'm going with my gear, but I'm not sure what to do with my weapons anymore.

I recently picked up what seems to be a pretty good quiver because quivers with similar stats were selling for several million in the AH. However, my DPS had a pretty dramatic drop when I equipped it with my hand xbow. I did a little stat checking on bows and xbows and you could get a pretty cheap bow with over 1k DPS. I've only been using dual wielding xbows so I don't know how they make up for the lack of that extra critical hit dmg gem.

How do these 3 weapons compare for damage output on demon hunters? I've read different things on people swearing one way is better than the other, but I want to know what you guys have to say. I only need to upgrade my chest and legs before I start looking into new weapons.

After mid-Nightmare I never used anything but a Bow/Quiver combo.

@golguin: The theorycrafters have confirmed that for now when all other things are more or less equal bows are better than xbows and 1 hander xbows. Unfortunately I can't find the post right now but the gist was that the 15% damage from the archery talent outperforms the xbows 50% crit damage at similar DPS's. Unless you get a very good deal on a crossbow with a very high damage range you should stick with bows. Keep in mind that Blizzard may make some adjustments in some future patch since I know they prefer to give players choice (avoid having a single "best build").

@Nonapod said:

@golguin: The theorycrafters have confirmed that for now when all other things are more or less equal bows are better than xbows and 1 hander xbows. Unfortunately I can't find the post right now but the gist was that the 15% damage from the archery talent outperforms the xbows 50% crit damage at similar DPS's. Unless you get a very good deal on a crossbow with a very high damage range you should stick with bows. Keep in mind that Blizzard may make some adjustments in some future patch since I know they prefer to give players choice (avoid having a single "best build").

What kind of DPS am I looking for in a bow to surpass my current DPS with dual wielding xbows (stats in the pic)? I'm trying to stack critical hit damage and a bow and quiver don't seem to be great with that idea in mind. The bows I'm looking at with over 1k DPS, some dexterity, and 50 critical hit damage are running in the 10 million+ range. I got each dual wielding xbow for less than 300,000 gold and they seem pretty good.

I guess what I actually need is a good DPS calculator so that I know what kind of bow and quiver I need to look for to pass my current DPS.

Does anyone know of a good DPS calculator out there?

I too have stuck to the bow/quiver combo, I actually had higher dps with a crossbow due to higher end crit potential, but found I would die before I got off enough hits to kill. With the bow and quiver your default attack speed is higher, boost that a bit with gear and I found it easier to run around killing things before I'm dead. That said I have made it to the start of act 3 and am unable to kill elites fast enough, unfortunately time to gear up again, now if I just was able to sell my stuff I might be able to get somewhere. I will also say much of my progress was with help from my friend's monk meat shielding for me through the last part of act 2. I currently only have about 5k more dps than you and that was enough to start making progress.

I am not a DH but as far as I know 2H/Quiver is the best unless you are ready to spend over 100m gold.

@Solidsnak said:

I too have stuck to the bow/quiver combo, I actually had higher dps with a crossbow due to higher end crit potential, but found I would die before I got off enough hits to kill. With the bow and quiver your default attack speed is higher, boost that a bit with gear and I found it easier to run around killing things before I'm dead. That said I have made it to the start of act 3 and am unable to kill elites fast enough, unfortunately time to gear up again, now if I just was able to sell my stuff I might be able to get somewhere. I will also say much of my progress was with help from my friend's monk meat shielding for me through the last part of act 2. I currently only have about 5k more dps than you and that was enough to start making progress.

I don't know about the trade off in being able to survive and dealing more damage. I got in a team with another DH that had about 100k DPS, but looking at his gear he had very low res all and overall health. When shit hit the fan he'd die and I'd keep on living and dealing damage.

I don't know if its an issue of people simply not caring about the repair cost from dying or what, but that doesn't seem appealing to me.

Holy shit, I wish I had thought about dual wielding. But now aparently that isn't as good as a bow. What is the attack speed on the bow? I know the one handers do 1.6/sec and the crossbows do 1.1/sec

to simplify,its easier to buy one weapon than 2.

i ended up going with the bow, crit was never that high and i preferred all my attacks getting a bonus rather than a few.

@golguin said:

I don't know if its an issue of people simply not caring about the repair cost from dying or what, but that doesn't seem appealing to me.

This was less of a big deal pre 1.0.3, but it seemed as though many demon hunters felt the best way to clear inferno was to go pure glass cannon (especially before they nerfed nether tentacles). Gear with good damage and all resist and vitality is obviously expensive as hell.

To answer your original question, hand xbows are much more expensive than bows or xbows at similar damages so you're probably better off with a 2 hander/quiver. Since you're running with sharpshooter and probably archery I think you'd be best off with a xbow for the crit damage.

And here's a damage calculator I've been using, it's not 100% accurate, but it's pretty good: http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/ufwql/cant_tell_if_the_item_in_the_auction_house_is_an/

2h Xbow is only useful if you have high crit % or for certain builds, but is generally worse than the Bow for solo play because the slow attack speed makes it very difficult to kite effectively. Similarly, 1h Xbows are not as useful outside of specific builds simply because you're getting significantly less damage per point of Hatred. Since DH have passive Hatred generation and spend a lot of time running around not attacking, the ability to use your generator skills faster does not make up the disparity.

Of course at the end of the day it all comes down to player preference. I've tried numerous builds with numerous gear setups and personally, I can't imagine playing with anything other than a Bow.

I ended up buying a quiver (350,000) and 2 hand xbow (1.5 million) for a new DPS of 65k, which beat my old dual xbow combo at 44k DPS.

The decision was mostly fueled by an auction loss of a 837 DPS dual xbow with 189 dex, 170 vit, 57 crit damage, and 2.8 life drain for the price of 800k. I tried to outbid a dude in the last 3 minutes, but I went as high as 1.5 million and it closed on me.

But this new route does seem like an easier and cheaper way to increase DPS. It was hard to squeeze any more dex out of my current gear without a huge loss in vit and res all, which I wont do. I'm almost at the end of Act 2 and I don't really like those glass cannon DH running around with 18k and 70k-100k DPS. They are constantly dying on elites and they tell me the repair costs are essentially eating up whatever money they're making.

Wow man, your stats improved greatly since that last post. You jumped up DPS like crazy and resitances looking good too. I'll warn you, Act 3 hits like a freight train. I'm still working getting through that, I can't imagine what Act 4 Inferno is going to be like...

@Bobby_The_Great said:

Wow man, your stats improved greatly since that last post. You jumped up DPS like crazy and resitances looking good too. I'll warn you, Act 3 hits like a freight train. I'm still working getting through that, I can't imagine what Act 4 Inferno is going to be like...

From all the shopping around I've been doing it seems that my equipment has reached a point where I'll need to trade in survivability for an increase of DPS or fork over 10s of millions of gold for a slight increase in stats. I'd rather work on increasing the effectiveness of my weapons since it looks like my xbow and quiver have a lot of room for improvement.

@Bobby_The_Great: Well, it's a whole lot of getting one-shotted by shit that charges from off-screen. So TONS of fun.

@stinky: I surely agree with you stinky I would be glad if i get bonus, take it slow but make sure you are getting their.