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 27 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. In the endgame, where you're testing this build to its upper limits, the limitless spam of your heaviest Hatred spenders from the Strafe Sanctification reigns superior. Thus, we recommend going for the Fire rune on Impale, Chemical Burn, and substituting Companion from the regular build for Strafe Rocket Storm to proc the following power:

• Strafe Sanctification: Strafe now casts the last non-channeled Hatred spending ability cast.

Note that in this Strafe-reliant setup, you should also use a Generator skill, and alter your playstyle to one resembling the GoD Demon Hunter setup — interweaving Hatred-generating shots in between your Strafe channeling. Drop Fan of Knives from the default setup for Grenade Cluster Grenades for that purpose. Replace the Stone Gauntlets from your basic Cube setup for the S27-specific synergy with Mantle of Channeling.

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 your main-hand weapon — usually Karlei's Point (although the Shadow set can now work with melee weapons, so other viable weapons include Echoing Fury for speed farming and Sun Keeper for Rift Guardian Killing setups). You can always sanctify Holy Point Shot as well, since it's present in all versions of this build.

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

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.