Natalya’s set is probably one of the best sets for speed farming lower Greater Rifts and other content from around T6-T8. Even without Kanai’s Cube, there’s a certain gear combination that you can use for doing a starter farmer build. This blog post will go into the gear, basic skills and gems for this farming build.
This set will not resolve around Bastion of Will the way the higher damaging version of this set does. Instead, this build revolves around pure speed through a combination of gems, resource management, cooldown management as opposed to high damage. You still can do high damage but will probably sacrifice some because of certain gems and the lack of Bastion of Will.
First, you will want the head, cloak, weapon, ring and boots from Natalya’s. You will employ a Ring of Royal Grandeur since you will probably want a combination of the Hexing Pants of Mr Yan and a cubed Cindercoat. With these two items, you should be able to have near unlimited Strafe using the Rocket Storm rune for Fire damage.
In addition, you will want to use two pieces of Marauder’s with the shoulder and glove pieces. You use these along with Companions so you can have some defensive buffs, instant Hatred regeneration via the Bat and your Ferrets (which I will go into a bit later). Also, you, of course, need the Crashing Rain belt for the burst damage via Rain of Vengeance.
Another piece of equipment that I like to use is the Kmar Tenclip. What this weapon does is provide the Drifting Shadow rune with Strafe. Here, you will have two runes from Rocket Storm and Drifting Shadow. Drifting Shadow will make you VERY fast while Strafing and Rocket Storm will help your Hatred cost for Strafe be reduced in conjunction with the Cindercoat that you cube.
You will probably want to employ Reaper’s Wraps for resource regeneration. Because of this, you will want to choose Blood Vengeance as your passive. While your Hatred should be pretty high most of the time, the main reason to take Blood Vengeance here is to keep your Discipline high as often as you can.
Your Discipline comes into play by using Smoke Screen: Displacement. Rather than using Vault for your defensive cooldown, you will use Smoke Screen: Displacement as both a movement modifier and for some damage reduction. You don’t need to spam Smoke Screen since you naturally will be fast through Strafe. But it helps a great deal when moving through areas in addition to avoiding frozen and other pernicious affixes.
To keep your Discipline high, you also will need to Preparation: Focused Mind. You will burn through Discipline quickly if you spam Smoke Screen and run out of Health Globes to help regenerate your Discipline. So to make Preparation work more frequently, you also need cooldown reduction.
For that part, I like to cube the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac since your Strafe is a spender that helps reduce your cooldowns. To further help reduce your cooldowns, you can cube an In-Geom so that your cooldowns are reduced by 15 seconds after killing an elite pack. In this manner, you can also have optional cooldown reduction on your weapons, shoulders and gloves or go for resource reduction depending on your needs.
For your amulet slot, you have a lot of freedom. Ultimately, you’ll want a quadfecta aiming for a Hellfire Amulet or damage immunity one. I would favor Blood Vengeance, Archery or Hot Pursuit for the passive.
What about legendary gems? My three choices are Taeguk, Wreath of Lightning and Boon of the Hoarder. Taeguk in general is one of the best gems for this build since you’ll be pretty much holding down the strafe action. So you should build up a hefty number of stacks with Taeguk, thus increasing your damage with Strafe as well as keeping your armor up high. Wreath of Lightning is mostly used for more movement speed buffs as is Boon of the Hoarder. Here’s where Ferrets helps because with Boon of the Hoarder at level 25, you gain movement speed when picking up gold. While you can use Profane Pauldrons for the overall increase in pick up radius for health globes, your Ferrets will be able to aid you in grab out of reach gold to help maintain your movement burst.
Skill-wise, I already touched on a few. For your Rain of Vengeance, I like Dark Cloud just for the AoE type of effect since you gain defense while RoV is active. And many people use Vengeance with Seethe for additional damage and Hatred regeneration as a cooldown. Much of the playstyle involves just keeping your Strafe up while waiting for Rain of Vengeance to come off of cooldown. With both In-geom and the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, you’ll see RoV up pretty frequently as well as your other cooldowns.
For passives, I use Blood Vengeance, Archery and Hot Pursuit. Blood Vengeance fuels your resources in conjunction with your Reaper’s Wraps. Archery helps maintain your hatred since you’ll dual wield hand crossbows. Hot Pursuit again keeps your speed up very high since you’re constantly hitting enemies via Strafe. For the 4th one, you have some flexibility. I went with Ballistics which is used in conjunction with Rocket Storm from Strafe. You could go with Tactical Advantage for even more burst movement with Smoke Screen. Ambush also can be used but you have to remember that this is a movement build rather than a high damage build.
So why use this build? The main ideas behind this build are Bounty and Keywarden farming. You can clear distances exceptionally fast and even do full clear normal rifts in a span of 5-10 minutes tops. The damage is consistent and very burst oriented. On T6, you can melt things down with a single shot of Rain of Vengeance. So doing non-progress boss fights, this build is just insane.
Because of the slight dependency on Boon of the Hoarder, this is not an ideal Greater Rift build. If you do want to do a quick gem leveling build with this, you can swap out Boon of the Hoarder with Zei’s Stone of Vengeance. Also, you could get rid of the Marauder’s pieces and use Profane Pauldrons for improved pick up radius.
What I like most about this build is that it’s really fun because of the speed. If you manage to hit a speed shrine, it’s just crazy fast. I could also see this as a weak non-greater rift support build for farming. It’s definitely going to be a great split bounty build just because of how fast it can clear areas as well as hunting keywardens. The main weakness I’ve seen with this build is the occasional downtime when you lack monsters or density because of its reliance on gold or health globes for constant movement. In that situation, you end up eating your resources up quickly, especially Discipline and may have to burn a cooldown or two to keep your resources up a bit. In those cases, you might end up dropping your Taeguk stacks. In general, you shouldn’t because of the combination of the Hexing Pants and Cindercoat, but it’s just something to be aware of.
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