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

Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.

On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.

With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:

• Core: Movement Speed: 200 points.
• Offense: Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points so they are as close to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the two stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet. For bow-and-quiver builds (or dagger-and-quiver, in this case), this is usually achieved with the full 200 points spent into Critical Hit Damage.
• Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Demon Hunters, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and All Resistance (to complement the naturally high Armor stat of Dexterity-based characters).
• Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.

In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:

• Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the 3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season. If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its implementation. The available pieces are Guardian's Aversion (Wrists), Guardian's Case (Waist), and Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
• Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set ( Focus and Restraint) and Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
• Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e., Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%. Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.

• 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

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.