Related: Shoutout (again) to @sharaleo for the incessant banging on the crit drum. Spending what you need to craft the initial set of mainstat + crit gear and socketed jewelry speeds up a fresh 70’s progress SO MUCH.
The higher I get with it, the more it’s starting to feel kind of like the exploding blast wizard build I goofed with for db farming a couple seasons ago. Like at the beginning of a rift or during annoying empty patches I am in real danger of being one shot, but once I get the mages rolling everything just explodes. That’s around T11 or so, but damage wise I could likely go to 12-13 I just can’t survive long enough.
I have had bad luck with jewelry and want to stick with it until I get the endless walk set because I think that will help a lot, but I’ll definitely dip into another set or two after since I have most of the other ones stashed now.
The bonuses on the sets are massively powerful. It’s about those bonuses more than the base items. I’d consider switching back to the full set long enough to farm up one of the others, if you don’t like Rathma. One of the other sets is tailored to the blood abilities iirc. Farm those up. Once you hit a certain difficulty…T6, maybe? The set items drop pretty regularly.
Firing off AoD every 30ish seconds is pretty darned fun, imo.
If I liked Revive better, sure. But without much else in the way of pet damage boosts yet, it seems like running Corpse Lance instead is better. Suppose I could give Revive another shot and see how it goes, but man, so many maps have stupid chokepoints where already a bunch of my minions sit around polishing their bones instead of murdering things.
Been meaning to try and do some tests with revive, like remove skeletons from my build and make sure revive actually procs the set bonuses from Rathma. I like using them, though, just because I get so tickled to be running around with enemies like sand dervishes or nagas, etc
Revive was really fun for a while on my non-seasonal guy with the Pestilence bonus that fires a corpse lance every time you consume a corpse. Eventually chucked that for Devour so that I didn’t have to run a generator though, and stopped playing him when I couldn’t stand how badly Pestilence sucks compared to other 6pc setups.
Lol, at 70 I’m still using bone spikes with the first rune. It’s just so bloody useful to stun things whenever you want.
Running Singularity with 4pc Rathma, I used Siphon Blood with the rune that doubles Essence gain if you’re at full life (and Grisly Tribute passive). That worked pretty well.
Now with Grim Scythe I just charge into the middle of packs, drop a Mage, Scythe 2-3x for piles of Essence, drop another Mage, and proceed from there.
Getting a nicely rolled ancient Convention of Elements was not the worst thing that ever happened to this guy either.
I’m sure CoE is great. It just seems so…fiddly to me. I feel like I have enough to do without keeping track of what bonus is up.
I mostly try to just time it for AoD or if I’m Corpse Lancing a nasty elite or rift guardian. Otherwise I just do my thing, and occasionally everything explodes.
Ugh, nah. I’d have to change up my skills to match the Rathma set just to get a set that matches the other skills I actually want to use. Not an enjoyable use of my time at all. That’s what I meant about it being a whole lot less fun at high levels for me.
Speaking of which, I decided to empower a GR26 rift (since I could manage GR27) and give it a go. I never made it past the entrance of the rift before I was slaughtered, and that’s with using a potion and having the passive that prevents death working for me. Not sure what happened aside from having the largest mob I’ve seen descend upon me in the first couple seconds of the rift, and whoever the elites were they were pounding me with my two weakest resistances (poison and cold). I resurrected and left the rift.
So I died. I can count on one hand the number of times that has happened to my character builds over the years. I play standard like I did my HC build, so not dying is a goal of mine. Death really took the wind out of my sails (especially considering I deliberately reduced the GR just to check out the empowered version). Still, it was about as far as my Necro was going to go without a lot of farming/grinding, which I tend to avoid, so it was an enjoyable enough ride. You guys that put so much time/effort into a build blow my mind.
Time for something else until S12 rolls around.
Fair enough. For the next season, I strongly suggest picking a class where the free set synergizes with how you want to play, if possible, it makes a huge difference.
Again, it’s a good suggestion, it just doesn’t match how I play. I don’t set up my build ahead of time but rather make my decisions for the class as I go. I think it’s best if I just go in understanding that GR25-30 is my end-game. The game is obviously designed around exactly the idea that you have to construct a build that matches the equipment you want/get (I think there’s a load screen tip that says exactly that), so I’m not feeling too put out by it not giving me the option of going my way. I got a massive amount of gameplay time out of both the PC and PS4 versions of D3 and if I stop today and never revisit it I have no regrets.
You don’t have to plan an entire build or anything like that, but if there’s a particular ability you know you like or don’t like, let that guide you. For instance, I’ve been waiting for the crusader set that has the hammer skill to be the bonus set to make a crusader, because I know I want to use that skill. Conversely, if you hate that skill, it would be a poor choice to pick a crusader if that set were the bonus.
Woot: gambled a Jesseth shield!
SamS
6199
Up to Chapter IV and after I killed Diablo easily on T1 I thought it would be no sweat to bump up to T4 to take out the keywardens, oof - was immediately taken out by a trash mob of goat men.
You can get away with a lot at T1. At T4, you’re going to need to have a semi-optimized build.
The difference between the tiers is non-trivial. You’re talking 4x the health and 3x the damage to go from T1 to T4. Have a look at your critical stats. You should be rocking close to 50% crit chance and 3-400% crit damage. Make sure all your gear is level 70.
What do y’all run gem-wise with Rathma? I don’t have the full set of gems yet anyway, but right now it’s Enforcer (duh), Bane of the Powerful, and Mutilation Guard.
Icy Veins guy does Trapped, Zei’s, and Enforcer. Seems kinda trivial one way or the other. Anyone have strong feelings?
Welp, my seasonal WD (70/90 at the time) bit it. My own fault; I was in a GR23, which should have been fine, but I foolishly went into a cul de sac, and while I destroyed the elite pack that I was fighting, I neglected to notice that 1) my cheat death passive had already proc’ed, and 2) right after that I was just this much too close to a molten enemy’s death explosion…
I was running a build I may try again, though, even if it was not totally finished. It relied on Haunt and Soul Barrage (is that what it’s called? the names are weird), plus the pets, with Necrosis from Helltooth and the Haunt bonus from Jade Harvester. It was pretty wild, as it required no real targeting and pretty much worked on its own, pretty effectively.
Well, when I wasn’t playing like an idiot at least!
Kadath
6204
OK will look into those, never heard of them
