Demon Hunter Inferno Guide

Demon Hunter Inferno Guide submitted by not_a_haddok.

Gear

As many people have noted, the DH does not necessarily need to stack defensive stats in order to survive in Inferno. Being ranged and having a wealth of escape skills, it is possible (and in most cases advantageous) to hit hard and fast while avoiding hits at all costs.

This means that the most valuable offensive stats are Dexterity, Attack Speed, Critical Hit Damage and Critical Hit Chance, in roughly that order depending on your current build.

You can disregard Dexterity on your weapon, however: go for the highest DPS you can afford. If you can get some +Crit Damage on it too, great (this can be achieved with an Emerald in a weapon socket too).

In terms of defensive stats, there are three that stand out in my mind, and they are not what you might expect on other characters:

The first is +% Movement Speed. This will really help you both kite and avoid projectiles. The cap is 25%, and the stat only appears naturally on boots, with a 12% max. This can be increased to the cap by wearing Legendary items such as Lacuni bracers, etc.
The second is +Max Discipline. The glass-cannon DH really relies on defensive abilities to survive, and all of those abilities use Discipline. The most used ability is Smoke Screen, which costs 14 Disc to use. This is nearly half your base amount! By wearing an item with +8 Max Discipline, you can increase the number of successive casts from 2 to 3 (with Preparation this is 4 to 6). Furthermore, by maxing out your Disc (+10 on both cloak and quiver) you can achieve 4 successive casts! This will allow you a lot more flexibility in your defensive options and is something I really recommend to all aspiring DHs - it is not too expensive, either (I got my cloak and quiver for ~500k with decent Dex on both)
Finally, Cold Damage. Any kind of Cold Damage will slow enemies, which is infinitely useful for a ranged character.

Skills

I don't intend on running through the nuances of every available rune (there are other places to find this info) - simply my thoughts on useful skills:

Smoke Screen is pretty much a must-have in order to survive any non-trivial encounter. Most people use Lingering Fog (even post-nerf) because that extra .5 seconds often allows an extra few yards of escape or another heavily damaging shot. Also extremely useful for avoiding damage from Arcane sentries, Mortars, Desecration, Plague, fire floors etc etc etc. All rounder.
Caltrops aid kiting and damage-dealing (depending on your rune). I have found the most success with the Stun rune when in a fix, though others swear by the 80% slow for consistent ease of kiting. By loading up on crit chance, you can set down a 5-stack of traps with the damage rune and really nail a target: the crit chance is set when you lay the trap, not when it fires. This means that you can throw down five traps with 100% crit chance - and they proc often. The main difficulty is in getting them down at the right time and place.
Vault is a great escape skill and fairly cheap in Disc, particularly with the Tumble rune which is what I recommend given that all of the others are pretty useless.
Preparation is SS's partner in crime, allowing you essentially double your Disc in any one encounter. People debate the usefulness of runes, personally I use Backup Plan to make a third of my difficult fights that much easier, rather than being consistently slightly better.
Companion is widely used with the Bat rune for Hatred regen, but I find that in most cases I can regen all the Hatred I need through a generator skill, opening a valuable skill slot.
Marked for Death also has potential for Hatred-regen, but whenever I have used it, I find it a hassle - it's often easier and quicker just to fire another shot rather than add 12% damage to a single mob.
Impale can do serious damage with the +100% crit rune, but is expensive on Hatred.
Rain of Vengeance is a great offensive CC skill costing no resource with a decent CD of 30s. With Flying Strike you can stun even act bosses, which is extremely valuable and allows you to fire a few more shots off or retreat in safety.
Hungering Arrow is the primary of choice for a lot of DHs, given that it has the highest DPS of all Hatred generators with the Devouring rune. Combine this with the extremely useful homing-missile functionality (quite often I fire around corners or blindly towards the edge of the screen to wipe out mobs before they can touch me) for a great offensive skill.
Entangling Shot is the more defensive alternative Hatred generator, for easier kiting and more shots before the mobs can catch you. Cold damage on a weapon can mimic this effect without using this skill.
Elemental Arrow is great with Ball Lightning. Slow-moving projectiles that act as AoE and can proc multiple times on the same enemy, while carrying the original crit chance that they were fired with... Perfect.

The above covers all of the frequently used skills and why they're good. Now, onto passives:

Passives

Tactical Advantage is the first passive available and one of the best. Smoke Screen and Vault get a huge boost by increasing their primary ability: getting you out of trouble.
Steady Aim is essentially a free +20% damage boost if you play conservatively and keep your distance. However, the most difficult mobs are the ones that swarm you, so this passive is useless for them - this is my reasoning for ditching it in favour of TA.
Cull the Weak has uses on a slowing build, but gets edged out in terms of usefulness by a few other passives.
Archery gives a really nice damage boost, this time with no distance restrictions. In combination with Sharpshooter, the Crossbow boost can increase your damage hugely.
Sharpshooter is found on a lot of DHs. It is a lot more useful than it first appears, primarily because the crit damage is applied to projectiles and traps as soon as they are cast, which means that if you can fire 6 rounds of NT before the first one hits the target, all of those NTs have a 100% chance to crit, for every proc (can be up to 3 times on large bosses). Boom!