Disclaimer: This guide is the Season 27 Guide for the N6M4 Build which does not exist anymore due to the Natalya's Vengeance rework. For up-to-date Natalya guide, go to the Natalya Spike Trap Guide!
Historically Embodiment of the Marauder playstyle was entirely Sentry-based, dominating the leaderboards during Season 1 thanks to the auto-firing Sentries in combination with the "Slowball" Ball Lightning, before the set got reworked a first time for Season 2 so that Sentries would only shoot when you do.
Over the Seasons, the power creep brought progressively to the (6) Bonus unfortunately tore apart the original Marauder playstyle, to the point where Demon Hunters were dealing 98% of the damage themselves and Sentries would just produce visual effects.
However there was a workaround! N6M4 is a hybrid build that uses two sets at once, Natalya's Vengeance and Embodiment of the Marauder, giving us a Demon Hunter build where the entire playstyle revolves around Sentry. In this setup, our Sentries are doing all the damage, your job is to place them strategically and signal them to attack.
In Season 25 with the rework to Embodiment of the Marauder, N6M4 has become somewhat obsolete since that set produces a similar playstyle revolving around Sentry damage, going back to its roots. The main reason to play it is the solo push on the Natalya's Vengeance set leaderboard, but there are more powerful options for that.
This build is an Area Damage (AD) build, since Sentries, and most importantly Cluster Arrows they shot, can proc it. This build develops a completely unique playstyle with intriguing interactions (see Mechanics), where you become a tactician, deploying Sentries in strategic spots and letting them wreak havoc on the battlefield at your signal. The build, however, is slow-paced for Nephalem Rifts, Bounties or Solo Greater Rift Speeds where the GoD DH or Sentry Marauder win by a large margin.
Cool Visuals ✔ No Cooldown Dependency ✔ Unique Sentry-Based Playstyle ✔ Includes a Personal Petting Zoo ✔
❌ Slow and Clunky ❌ Limited Item Choices ❌ Low Single Target Damage ❌ Vulnerable to Crowd Control
Core Setup
Core Item Build
Items
Natalya's Vengeance set provides 60% damage reduction and 14000% increased damage to all skills and attacks.
Embodiment of the Marauder set lets Sentry fire Cluster Arrows together with you as well as automatically once around every second. Also we get access to all Companions, thanks to the (2) Bonus.
Ring of Royal Grandeur is necessary to get bonuses from both sets. You need to get 3 Marauder pieces and 5 Natalya pieces. That means you always have Marauder's Spines, Natalya's Slayer and Natalya's Reflection. The Chest should be Natalya's Embrace, because it can roll Hatred Regen. The other 4 items—Boots, Pants, Helmet and Gloves—can be any combination of 2 Marauder and 2 Natalya pieces.
Manticore increases the damage of Cluster Arrow by 300% and reduces its Hatred cost by 50%.
Bombardier's Rucksack lets us summon two extra Sentries and also gives +100% Sentry Damage, which applies to Cluster Arrows fired by Sentries. Additionally the quiver provides another 200% damage boost to Cluster Arrow.
Zoey's Secret, a complementary item to Embodiment of the Marauder set, provides 63% damage reduction.
Wraps of Clarity give another 50% damage reduction, a natural choice in a build that uses Generators.
Global Stat Priorities
N6M4 completely ignores Cooldown Reduction and Attack Speed. There aren't any important heavy cooldown skills in the build, and your damage output is mostly limited by amount of Hatred you can generate. For that reason we invest quite heavily into Resource Cost Reduction and Hatred Regeneration. Overall, your priority for offensive stats looks like this: Fire Damage > Sentry Damage > Cluster Arrow Damage > Critical Hit Chance & Damage > Hatred Regeneration > Resource Cost Reduction > Area Damage.
For toughness, it is business as usual: you get Vitality, All Resistance and if possible Life % on your Boots, Pants, and Belt. N6M4 usually doesn't get a lot of Vitality from items, because its normal spots are occupied by stuff like Resource Cost Reduction, Hatred Regeneration and Skill Damage. For that reason you will need to invest quite a few Paragon points into Vitality.
Since there is no Vengeance in N6M4, Crowd Control Reduction is an incredibly valuable secondary Affix to roll on both Rings, Amulet and Helmet as we are very sensitive to Hard Crowd Control effects and mitigating these will ease up our gameplay significantly. Make sure to get the Primary Affixes locked in before attempting to get CCR though.
Assembling the Build
1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cubeLegendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!
2. Gather the full Natalya's Vengeance set as well as Shoulders + 2 other pieces of the Embodiment of the Marauder set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If your last missing set piece is Natalya's Slayer or Natalya's Reflection - don't gamble for them! Instead gamble for a cheap and easy item, like the Pants, and once again convert it with Recipe 4. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.
Natalya's Reflection Ring of Royal Grandeur (A1 Bounties, Cubed)
1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Damage 3. Critical Hit Chance 4. Damage Range 5. Area Damage
Ring 2
Convention of Elements The Compass Rose
1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Damage 3. Critical Hit Chance 4. Damage Range 5. Area Damage
Bracers
Wraps of Clarity Nemesis Bracers
1. Fire Damage 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Dexterity 4. Life per Hit 5. Vitality
Amulet
Squirt's Necklace The Traveler's Pledge
1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Damage 3. Fire Damage 4. Critical Hit Chance
Belt
Zoey's Secret
1. All Resistance 2. Dexterity 4. Vitality 5. Life %
Potion
Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid
For breaking walls to pull enemies and increase DPS
Gems
Zei's Stone of Vengeance is the strongest DPS gem for a ranged build; providing us with up to a 80% separate damage multiplier.
Enforcer is the go-to gem for Pet builds, it gives a 60% separate damage multiplier to Sentries and makes our zoo of Companions extremely tanky.
Bane of the Trapped adds extra another 60% separate damage multiplier to the build. The bonus is activated by Sentry Polar Station and Spider Companion.
Skills
Sentry is the cornerstone of N6M4. Anything and everything you do is for the sake of your Sentries.
Cluster Arrow is our main attack. Loaded For Bear rune is used for its high damage combined with unlimited range.
Evasive Fire Focus is a Generator with the most convenient animation. N6M4 actually uses it for its intended purpose—to generate Hatred.
Companion is a must have for the build due to the Embodiment of the Marauder(2) Bonus.
Rain of Vengeance is necessary to activate Natalya's Vengeance set bonuses. Flying Strike is used for extra protection and battlefield control.
Vault Tumble is used to for mobility and to prevent getting trapped in monsters.
Passives
Cull the Weak is the strongest Demon Hunter damage passive, providing a 20% separate damage multiplier.
Custom Engineering allows us to deploy an extra Sentry, which amounts to +25% DPS, and also doubles their duration.
Steady Aim increases damage by another 20% if no enemies are nearby. A perfect fit for ranged build with a frontline.
Single Out gives a huge damage boost against the Rift Guardian, where we typically struggle due to not running Bane of the Stricken.
Other passive options can include Ballistics for rocket-based runes of Cluster Arrow, Tactical Advantage and Blood Vengeance for speedfarming, or Awareness.
Paragon Points
Core
Offensive
Defensive
Utility
1. Movement Speed1
1. Critical Hit Damage
1. All Resistance
1. Area Damage
2. Maximum Hatred
2. Critical Hit Chance
2. Armor
2. Resource Cost Reduction
3. Dexterity
3. Attack Speed
3. Life %
3. Life per Hit
4. Vitality2
4. Cooldown Reduction
4. Life Regeneration
4. Pickup Radius
1 You only need to put 30 points in Movement Speed (less if you have a roll on your Boots) as the 10% from the Ferret Companions counts towards the 25% cap. 2 Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 750,000 Life is recommended).
Follower
Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:
The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
Guardian's Jeopardy(2) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
With Enforcer equipped on the player it's much easier to keep followers alive even without an immortality relic. The 90% damage reduction counts for them, too.
Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.
Select Follower
T16 Enchantress
T16 Enchantress
For T16 we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives Cooldown Reduction, allowing you to spam your abilities more. Since this is T16 content, she’ll stay alive with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, Attack Speed, and a Cheat Death. Stat Priorities:Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress.
Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed.
Key Items:
The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
Nemesis Bracers: For extra Elites, Death’s Breaths and In-geom procs.
Avarice Band: For the insane pickup radius.
Ring of Royal Grandeur: To complete our sets.
Gloves of Worship: For 10 Minute Shrine Buffs.
Sage’s Journey: For double Death’s Breaths.
Cain’s Destiny: For 25% more Greater Rift Keystones.
GR Speed Enchantress
For Greater Rift we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives a wide array of offensive and defensive buffs. She’ll stay alive because we have Enforcer with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, and a Cheat Death.
Stat Priorities:Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress. Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed. Key Items:
The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
Nemesis Bracers: For more progression from Elites.
Oculus Ring: For 85% increased damage.
Blind Faith: To consistently blind the Rift Guardian, protecting our Mirror Images.
Ice Climbers: To make your follower immune to Freeze and Immobilize effects.
The Witching Hour, Tal Rasha's Relentless Pursuit and Cain's Destiny: For more Attack Speed.
GR Pushing Scoundrel
For Greater Rift Pushing we recommend this Scoundrel setup because of his mighty Night's Veil ability. If you gear him well with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard combined with our equipped Enforcer, he can stay alive without the immortality relic, allowing you to gain frequent ability uses with Slipka's Letter Opener.
Stat Priorities:Here our Scoundrel needs all the toughness he can get. Love your Scoundrel, give him good ancient items with lots of Dexterity, Vitality and some Intelligence augments.
Dexterity > Toughness > Attack Speed. Key Items:
The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
Nemesis Bracers: For more progression from Elites.
Oculus Ring: For 85% increased damage.
Unity: For 50% damage reduction if you're also wearing one.
Ice Climbers: To make your follower immune to Freeze and Immobilize effects.
Leoric's Crown and Cain's Destiny: For more Experience and Attack Speed.
Gameplay
Put your Sentry in strategic spots: at least one of them needs to be in the pull to proc Bane of the Trapped and Cull the Weak. The rest goes into spots with good line of sight or into corners where they have a higher chance to be facing the right way.
Alternate between generating Hatred with Evasive Fire and spending it with Cluster Arrow. You have two main objectives here. First, make sure that your Hatred is never full, that way passive Hatred regen is not wasted. Second, you need to have almost full Hatred and recently refreshed Wraps of Clarity buff at the start of your Fire Convention of Elements cycle.
Stutter step between attacks to avoid some of the incoming damage and to create more distance for Zei's Stone of Vengeance.
Use Rain of Vengeance every 10 seconds to keep up Natalya's Vengeance buffs. If you are still making the pull, throw it somewhere off the map. If the pull is ready, throw it right in to stop the mobs from walking at you.
Use Companion on Cooldown for extra Hatred and damage buff.
Hardcore
This build is decently tanky and you can play it in hardcore. Always use The Cloak of Garwulf and swap Single Out for Awareness. Be careful with your Vault; if you run out of Discipline you will have to wait 6 seconds before you can Vault again and can easily get trapped.
Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!
Variants
GR Solo Push
GR Solo Speeds
N6M4 Solo Push
Unfortunately N6M4 is not really good for anything except pushing. Having to move your Sentries all the time makes speedfarming impossible.
Concept We use The Cloak of Garwulf in the Cube for extra protection. While two more wolves don't look like much, they increase the damage reduction form Zoey's Secret from 63% to 81%, effectively being a x1.95 toughness multiplier. Our amulet is Squirt's Necklace. While we don't have any shields to protect the buff, it's still possible to get a few stacks here and there when the mobs are distracted by pets or frozen by Flying Strike. However, the main reason we take this amulet is the bossfight. Without Bane of the Stricken it can take a very long time on push tiers, and it's relatively easy to dodge all Rift Guardian's attacks and keep the 100% damage bonus.
Gameplay You want to park your zoo together with your follower somewhere in an open space. After that you need to attract the mobs from around you and make a pull. One Sentry goes inside the pull, the rest go in the spot where they will shoot into the pull, and preferably where they can "see" forward into the map. Sentries will attack the closest to them target, so you should try and avoid having stray mobs walk up to your Sentries.
Putting all Sentries into the pull is a fool-proof way to make sure that they shoot where you want them to, but it makes moving to the next spot more difficult. Do that when your pull is really big and you gonna spend quite some time killing it. You should stay outside the pull to maximize your Zei's Stone of Vengeance bonus and possibly activate Steady Aim.
Setups At high Paragon (4000+), when toughness is less of an issue, you can swap The Cloak of Garwulf for Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan. It's extremely important to never stop moving, because losing Hatred regen really hurts. But you should be stutter-stepping all the time anyway.
Conversely, if you are struggling with toughness, you can switch to Cold damage and use Cluster Arrow Maelstrom for extra healing. Also switch Single Out for Ballistics. This version is weaker but it's tankier and more consistent.
If you have too much trouble keeping your Squirt's Necklace up and you don't want to play around Convention of Elements, you can replace these with Endless Walk. But if you do so, prepare for endless boss fights.
N6M4 "Speed" Farm
If you absolutely insist on "speed" farming with N6M4, here's how you do it. It's not a well-suited playstyle for that and you are most likely better off with another build.
Concept We play ColdCluster Arrow and remove all Area Damage, replacing it with Cooldown Reduction, which is necessary to move Sentries forward. We also remove some toughness to fit in Reaper's Wraps. Finally, for our passives we take Cull the Weak, Ballistics, Blood Vengeance, and Tactical Advantage. You should farm a GR tier where you get most of your Hatred from Blood Vengeance and passive regen, if you have to use Evasive Fire a lot, you are going too high. You need to stack at least 10 Pickup Radius for GR farming.
Gameplay In speedfarming you just Vault forward, drop two Sentries when you see a pack of mobs, shoot Cluster Arrow 4-5 times to kill them all, pick up globes to refill Hatred and go to the next group. When you find an Elite, drop a third Sentry before you start blasting, and eventually the fourth. Don't forget to cast Rain of Vengeance every 10 seconds.
Setups If you're doing Nephalem Rifts, switch Bane of the Trapped to Boon of the Hoarder, Zoey's Secret to Goldwrap, The Cloak of Garwulf to Warzechian Armguards, Convention of Elements to Stone of Jordan and Cull the Weak to Awareness. When farming Nephalem Rifts in group, swap Reaper's Wraps with Nemesis Bracers and Stone of Jordan with Avarice Band.
Video Guide
S23 N6M4 GR121 Gameplay Showcase
Mechanics
Embodiment of the Marauder(2) Bonus
Companion gains the active and passive effect of all runes:
Bat Companion passively grants you 1 Hatred per Second and 50 Hatred instantly on activation, which is great as we are starving for resource.
Boar Companion passively grants you 20% to all Resistances and 10,728 Life Regen. On activation, taunts all monsters within 20 yards for 5 seconds.
Wolf Companion grants you 15% separate damage multiplier for 10 seconds on activation, which also works for party members.
Ferret Companions pickup Gold for you and provide you with 10% Movement Speed, unfortunately counting towards the normal 25% Movement Speed cap. On activation, trigger a screenwide Gold and Health Globes pickup.
Spider Companion attacks and active effect applies respectively 60% and 80% Movement Speed Slows on enemies.
With Zoey's Secret, you gain up to 9% damage reduction per companion, stacking additively. In combination with Embodiment of the Marauder(2) Bonus, you're getting a 63% damage reduction buff as you have 7 Companions. Adding The Cloak of Garwulf for 2 additional Wolf Companions can even buff this damage reduction up to 81%!
Embodiment of the Marauder (4) Bonus
Sentries fire a Hatred Spender when you do. Sentry always shoots towards the closest enemy within line of sight, regardless of the distance.
Sentry Damage on your items and Sentry Damage from the (4) Bonus are both their own separate damage multiplier for Sentries and Hatred Spenders they shoot.
Hatred Spenders fired by Sentries can proc Area Damage, but they cannot proc other effects such as Life on Hit or Hellcat Waistguard.
Hatred Spenders fired by Sentries benefit from Pet Damage like Enforcer.
The damage multiplier from Zei's Stone of Vengeance depends on the distance between the player and the monster at the moment of impact, the position of the Sentry is irrelevant.
The automatic attacks happen around once every second, or around 25% faster with Tasker and Theo equipped.
Sentries generally target the closest enemy, so they can easily get distracted by single enemies walking by. This is what makes positioning very important.
Multiple spenders can't be combined for automatic attacks, the sentries will choose only one of them (in the order of their Hatred cost).
Cluster Arrow fired by sentries has an infinite range as long as there is an unbroken line of sight between the turret and a target.
Summary
Ignore Cooldown Reduction and Attack Speed, stack Resource Cost Reduction and Hatred Regeneration.
Place Sentries in strategic spots.
Make sure you have Hatred for your FireConvention of Elements cycle.
Be careful on Elites with CC Affixes or Waller, don't neglect Crowd Control Reduction on gear.
N6M4 lets you play tower defense in Diablo III, how cool is that?
Credits
Written by Northwar. Contributions by Chewingnom. Updated by wudijo.
