First Hardcore Inferno Belial Kill (by a Barbarian, too)

[Concillian]

That's just it though, Vortex is completely unavoidable for ranged classes, and when you are as fragile as the DH is and everything 2 shots you, it makes playing pretty pointless.

So why do people ask to make the game super easy by essentially removing all danger from vortex rather than asking for fixes to DH utility and defensive abilities so they don't get one shot?

This is what I don't get.

If you ask me, the root of the problem is that dodge is useless when 2-3 hits will kill you. Dodge is the defensive stat that DH get, and therefore DH will always have this issue unless you nerf damage from monsters to the point that every other class can go completely glass cannon. The defensive model of "classes with prime stat DEX get free Dodge for their defense" completely breaks down when you can be killed in fewer than 10 or 15 hits, and the game, quite literally, cannot be balanced with DH getting dodge as their only defensive component to their prime stat. Either the game will have DH being the easiest class or it will have DH dying to every pack with vortex.

If you ask me to fix this problem, I add some form of mitigation to DEX and virtually eliminate dodge as a defensive stat. It's only really useful in areas you completely outgear, so just get rid of it, it doesn't work, or at least significantly reduce the DEX --> dodge component of the stat and either make it add to armor like STR does, or resist like INT does, or half and half. It needs a mitigation component. Period. Full stop. The game cannot be balanced at the inferno difficulty level without it.

I would also buff natural armor and resist from prime stats, which reduces some of the NEED of resist all. Not a lot, you don't need much tuning here, a little would go a long way, I think the about 10% more mitigation than they have now, and this would lessen the need for the specific resist all modifier. I suppose they're going the opposite route by nerfing the monsters a bit, but I would have gone with increasing mitigation rather than decreasing monster damage done just from the psychological aspect of buffing characters is more "feel good".

Now with that design, you have a high DEX DH with a significant chunk of extra armor. The way the mitigation formulas work, that means that resist also becomes a significant chunk more useful. It's suddenly less of a chore to get to the point where they can take a couple hits, so people might actually do it. Right now the issue is that you need to pretend you're a tank barb to even take a couple hits. The design goal would be to reduce the need for full defensive and have mid defensive be semi-usable. From there, you need to re-work defensive abilities so they aren't all-or-nothing. Sentry should be able to take a hit for you, for example. Remove that god awful tether rune and make it more like the guardian familiar where sentry will take a hit for you once in a while.

Change shadow power to a defensive cooldown that increases your resists or armor by a large percentage. I mean, life leech is useless in a 1-3 hit scenario. DH need something to buy them a couple hits. This with the understanding that DH will have fairly low values and often need a big spike of mitigation, so I think this would be okay to be a really high incoming damage reduction. 60-90%, but this would probably warrant a cooldown as well.

I assume that vault can move a jail, but I've never played a DH. If it can't, it needs to be able to.

I completely agree that the defense gap between a DH and any other class is huge. Even Wizards and Witch Doctors get ~120 resist from gearing reasonably offensively, and they both have a few abilities to amplify resists and/or armor. The solution is not to remove all difficulty from vortex, the solution is to re-work the mechanics of the DH so one can actually survive. I mean, there are no DH mitigation skills outside of sentry with a 15% mitigation. Woo-hoo, that almost makes up for having no useful defensive value from your prime stat. This is where the problem lies... not in making the game EZ-mode.