All day I eagerly anticipated getting home to get my hands on the new patch. Originally, I thought about hitting the gym but it rained so it pretty much provided me with a reasonable excuse to head straight home after work. For the most part, I had been reading about the patch through forum posts and watching streamers thus far, with a few moments of getting into the PTR. Despite a great of negativity, I still felt that the patch had some real high hopes for me.
The main things I wanted to try out the most was the barbarian and wizard. While I did manage to give my barbarian a shot, I did not do much with my spare wizard, mostly because I haven’t decided which direction I’m going to end up playing him. That said, I want to focus on my first impressions of the new Immortal Kings set and how I’m using it.
So far, I’m still missing a piece of two to make the Immortal Kings set work with the 6 set bonus. Originally, I had been combining it along with the Might of the Earth set to do a Leapquake style barbarian with permanent Call of the Ancients. With the revamping of the Immortal Kings bonus, I can still do permanent Call of the Ancients and get near permanent Wrath of the Berserker up using my current gear. Call of the Ancients is used in conjunction with the Enforcer gem to increase their damage while I use Seismic Slam to generate Fury.
Unfortunately, while this build can do T6 better than before, the main thing it suffers from is Fury starvation. Seismic Slam eats up Fury fairly quickly and even with War Cry, Unforgiving and Animosity, you still will find yourself standing around doing nothing, either waiting for Leap to come off of cooldown or something else to help generate more Fury. I do use Reaper Wraps to devour Health Globes for resource regeneration, but it still does not provide enough reliable Fury generation to make Seismic Slam an easily spammable skill.
So in the end, I ended up abandoning the Leapquake set and switched over to a Raekor’s 4 piece set up along with my 4 pieces of the Immortal Kings. I do remove Boon of Bul-Kathos because Immortal Kings helps reduce the cooldown fast on Wrath of the Berserker. But to make this work, I still need to generate and spend enough Fury to maintain this buff. So what the Raekor’s 4 piece bonus does is provide good and fast clears of densely packed mobs while Seismic Slam does some clean up and provides a way to help keep Wrath of the Berserker up at a reasonable level. Furious Charge helps generate Fury so you exchange between that and Seismic Slam. One thing I do is employ Weapon Throw to generate some Fury when Furious Charge and Seismic Slam cannot be used.
Now, one thing I’m dearly missing is a good set of boots. So I’m thinking about trying a few different things with this build. One is to wait until I can get the Immortal Kings boots then swap out my Maximus for the Immortal King’s Boulder Breaker to get the full 6 set bonus. Or I could go for Raekor boots and switch the shoulder piece to a Vile Wards for extra damage using Furious Charge. Of course, the build does suffer without the Wrath of the Berserker bracers (which have been taken out for the moment) but there’s not a lot we can do at the moment until the developers figure out what to do with them.
At any rate, both builds are T6 capable but they still are far from optimized. I still need to farm out the Immortal Kings remaining pieces and collect more of the Wrath of the Wastes set (in which 2 pieces already dropped for me). However, that’s just a matter of time and I wanted to give other things a try in the meantime.
The other class I checked out was the Pet Doctor with the Zunimassa build. My build was based on the Rhen’ho Flayer build. Prior to 2.2, the build was very spammy and weak compared to other high end builds. But even with the 4 set bonus and change to Fetish Sycophants, I can already feel a monstrous different in power. Probably, the biggest change is that Fetishes are being summoned more frequently with the 15% adjustment to Fetish Sycophants. Another major aspect is that my survivability has improved greatly because of the 4 piece bonus. Having that 4 set bonus allows me to get rid of my dependency on having a Tallman’s Finger and reallocate that spot for Zunimassa’s Pox (eventually I will find yet another ring but I choose this in case I manage to find another piece to have the 6 set bonus).
In addition, I got rid of Zombie Dogs altogether and now am using Acid Cloud in anticipation for the 6 set bonus. Right now, I am using a 2 piece Blackthorne’s set but the plan is to eventually move away from that in favor of either a Witching Hour or some other critical piece of gear (most likely the pants slot for Zunimassa’s). Either way, the playstyle felt more effective, less spammy and much smoother, which are all pluses en route to the 6 set bonus.
I want to eventually give the Carnevil Build a try since I have a good Dagger of Darts and the mask. But I need to do some research on the exact gear requirements on top of those to make that build work. Nonetheless, I did read about the very high level greater rifts people are handling with that build. So it does seem exciting.
I am more focused on my monk at the moment. I managed to secure a far better rolled Gungdo Gear bracers with perfect critical hit and lightning damage. So now with that, I can begin focusing on looking for something like the Sunwuko Shines amulet (which I think is going to be a horrible pain). At any rate, I’m pretty close to the ideal basic gear for my monk and I’m quite satisfied.
I can safely say though that I really am motivated at the moment and am looking forward to getting more of the gear to experiment with additional builds. It’s going to be a very exciting patch that opens up a ton of game play and some level of creativity.
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