5001

The set dungeons are all essentially puzzles. You need to figure out what the puzzle is and how best to optimise gear and set up correct skills for it. if you approach them from that angle, they are not so bad. If you approach them that you should just be able to rock up in your set items and whatever skill set you are rocking and get it done, you will be disappointed.

The Roland’s dungeon for example pretty much requires full-time steed, which means you are going to need the flail/shield combo, which many people will not be using as their primary. Besides that, the Invoker dungeon (and likely most others) is certainly be gated behind a certain DPS threshold as well. I could not do Invoker until T8 clears was easy mode.

Basically they are designed so you may have to do some farming and put some thought into modifying your build to complete them. The good news is there are now guides detailing the path of least resistance for each dungeon, so they work is done for you if you don’t feel like doing it yourself!

Some of them still reportedly suck balls.

5002

Funny enough, the path of least resistance for a non-trivial number of them is “party up, and let your friend do all the work”. Terrible design all-around that I hope they address in 2.5.

5003

Actually yeah, I just heard that yesterday. Only the person instigating the challenge gets the credit, but you can bring friends, meaning much like the rest of the game, it is possible to be assisted or carried by a group.

5004

Well, I can do t10, but not gracefully. It takes forever to kill anything and I die a few times. I found a belt that sends bombardment every 6 seconds, which helped me be a lot less squishy, but I’m kind of grasping on what I can do to improve this build.

5005

Is your profile up to date?

5006

Had a pretty great night on my Thorns crusader last night. I’ve picked up some more of the pieces (chest, belt, amulet)for the build I’m following on Icy Veins and am down to needing the Compass Rose, Justice Lantern and Pig Sticker. Plus I found a couple Invoker pieces with better rolls. Where I started out the evening being able to eek out T8 runs with a death or two, I can now plow through them without much trouble. Going to give TX a try tonight and see how it goes. I also decided to give the set dungeon a try last night seeing how I was surviving better and I managed to pull it out with about 20 seconds left. I also had no idea that you needed to kill off everything and spent most of the last minute rushing back through the dungeon as best I could to find the last mob I had missed. Then rather than go to bed I noticed that I was almost done with the next seasonal step so I did the the ones I needed to unlock the next. I don’t think I’ve ever had this much fun with any build in any Diablo game.

5007

You still got a bit of work to do! ;)

Gear Re-rolls:
Helm - life per second to resist all
Shoulders - life per second to resist all
Amulet - extra gold to thorns
Gloves - reduced resource cost to skill cooldown
Chest - life after kill to thorns
Bracers - physical damage % to skill cooldown
Ring 1 (JL) - armour to skill cooldown
Ring 2 (CR) - crap with no primary stat - need a better one, but re-roll damage to str or re-roll reduce control impairing to skill cooldown
Belt - reduces physical damage to thorns
Pants - increased gold and to life after kill or chance to slow
Boots - OK, a better ancient pair with resist all would be nice, but for the moment re-roll for maximum str (up to 650)
Weapon - crap with no primary stat. Need a better weapon, but for the moment re-roll area damage to str.
Shield - increases justice damage to skill cooldown or socket for ruby

Weapon Preferences
Anything less than 1.5 attacks per second is too slow. Any ancient sword or dagger is generally the go with socket, str, attack speed, life on hit, skill cooldown, thorns (more or less in that order of preference). Attack speed and life on hit will massively help to keep you alive, but just as importantly, fast attack speed stacks more damage with the Invoker 2 piece bonus! The more attacks you can apply in a two second window the more stacks of +25% damage you get.

Legendary Gems
Replace Mirinae with Bane of Trapped or Bane of the Stricken
Get some more levels on that Boyasky’s chip pronto (if you can GR40 (T9) you should be able to get it to 35 with little drama for another 4-6k+ thorns).

Skills
You don’t need Provoke anymore, replace with Akarat’s Champion/Prophet or Bombardment/Barrel of Spikes. I prefer Bombardment for TX, Akarat’s for pushing GR.

Passives
Replace Fanaticism with Fervor - gets you the increase attack speed and cooldown reduction
Lord Commander seems good if you roll with Bombardment instead of Provoke, otherwise Finery will be worth another 1000+ str.

Cube
Replace Thunderfury with:

  • Offense - The Furnace, Hack, The Mortal Drama (only if using Bombardment/Spikes)
  • Offense and Defence - Blood Brother
  • Defense - Sublime Conviction, Salvation, Ivory Tower, Coven’s Criterion
    Replace Illusiory Boots with Heart of Iron, otherwise they are not a bad choice. HoI will be worth an additional 18k thorns though!
    Replace Countess Julia’s Cameo with Convention of Elements (the resist all changes above should help with arcane mitigation) - CoE is easily best in slot for taking down champ packs. It will take a little practice but keep an eye on the indicator above your skill bar and time your skill procs for the physical rotation. The damage you will do is stupid.

All that is going to result in more thorns, more strength (from which actual thorns damage scales) and more skill cooldown (for more skill rotation). With the Justice Lantern, Belt of the Trove and Aquila’s Cuirass, your damage mitigation for TX should be fine, but the above chances will help to fix your damage output.

5008

I liked the Invoker Set Dungeon. Beat it on the first try with a bit under a minute to spare. Was worried I missed a couple monsters, but somehow I got them all. Plenty enough spears to eat. I was at about TX at the time, so bursting down the elites with iron skin up was no problem.

Punish or Provoke?

5009

I haven’t enjoyed my wizard in years, no matter what I tried I couldn’t find a build I liked playing. Until a few days ago: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Mjolnir-1981/hero/6681894

Soo much fun. A true paper cannon, but let me get 200+ archon stacks and everything dies in 1-2 seconds.

5010

Sorry, don’t need Provoke anymore!

5011

Helm, shoulders, Bracers - No ability to swap life per second to resist all. Only options are Life, Armor, Life per hit, Critical hit chance or increased damage to Punish, etc.
Amulet - I’ve already swapped in a socket, so no other changes
Gloves - No skill cooldown, but did get resist all?
JL - check
CR ring - already re-rolled to get socket
Belt - check

Played a few rounds, got a new weapon, and clearing t10 pretty easily now. Mucho Gracias for all your tips!

5012

Sorry my bad, if an item has resist ‘something’ as a secondary, you can’t re-roll a primary for resist all. I swear I checked them! I’d probably put some more life on hit where you can on those first three. Life on hit would be preferred over life per second as you tend to hit more than once/second and are stacking it elsewhere anyway. Punish damage wouldn’t hurt either.

Resist All is fine on the gloves, if there was not a CDR option, it is going to be a good option next to str, vit and LoH.

The Doombringer is nice, not actually a bad weapon for the build with the phys damage. Much better than previous now it has a str affix!. You could re-roll either the vitality or fire damage to something else. Counter-intuitively, re-rolling the fire damage is actually best as your thorns damage does not scale with weapon DPS. Probably roll for either attack speed or CDR or perhaps life on hit if your stacks elsewhere aren’t mitigating incoming damage. As mentioned above though, have some mats handy because rolling out of a damage affix can take some time.

5013

So I’ve been half playing my Thorns Crusader and half playing my LoN Burning Locusts Witch Doctor. The Thorns guy is tough, but the WD kills stuff mostly by breathing on them.

One question on the WD: since it’s LoN, I need Ancient items for all my slots. My strategy has been to gamble blood shards to get the exact piece I want, then reroll them in the cube. Is there a better way to do this? The frustration is that I don’t just need Ancient items, I need Ancient Mask of Jeram, Ancient Theo & Tasker, etc. I feel like it’s going to be a ton of work to do this at the rate I’m going. Right now I’m just using whatever Ancient odds and ends I can find lying around, so it’s not optimal.

As for the Thorns guy, any advice for him? I just switched to using Provoke since I have the Vo’Toyias Spiker shield (prior to that I was just using the ability that gives you more armor, but my issues revolve more around slow killing than me getting killed). I’ve been gambling to get an Akarat’s Awakening shield but no dice so far.

5014

LoN builds are a ton of work - that’s working as intended. You’ve probably got the fastest way to do it, especially if you have a fast bounty build. I kinda hate bounties and the xp/hour is miserable compared to [greater] rifts if you care about that, but ymmv.

5015

I also forgot to ask… If you reroll a Hellfire Amulet does the passive change or not?

5016

Last I checked you can’t reroll Hellfire jewelry.

5017

Well that makes sense but… Crap, more work to do!

5018

I’ve switched my Invoker Crusader over to LoN Bombardment to try it out. I have ancients in all slots but one. Not the ideal ancients, and some of the rolls are poor, but I believe it’s better to stack ancients rather than a non-ancient that works better for the set.

5019

Bleh, too many diamonds! Rubies or GTF…oh wait…hardcore! Paragon 560+ hardcore…

Carry on , good sir!

I assume you had a more or less ancient invoker build, how have you found the LoN so far in comparison?

5020

I’ll report back in a couple of days. :) I’m mostly grouping with another Crusader (who has also been running Invoker and is also now flirting with the idea of switching over from Invoker to LoN Bombardment) and 80% of the time a buff Barbarian.