This post might seem really late in the game considering that patch 2.1.1 has been out for some time now. However, one of the things I’ve managed to accomplish is gear and try out all the popular high end builds as best as I could and try a few different play styles. Yes, this does mean I have legitimately leveled 8 characters to level 70 and 7 of them are reasonably geared for this write up.
Thus far, my main character has been a Demon Hunter who currently has BiS items for the frost-fire build. Initially, I went with a plain fire build as I sought after Tasker and Theos managing only to encounter two variants (one had strength and another horrible stat, which ended up becoming a sad mat). There’s some room for improvement at this point but pretty much I have very good equipment, can clear T6 in roughly 10 minutes and handle Greater Rifts of 27-28 with ease. I consider this character to be my crutch for all intents and purposes as the build is quite good for farming and leveling gems. I do hear that at really high level Greater Rifts, this build eventually suffers as a result of encountering issues of being flimsy still.
Fortunately, I had a secondary Demon Hunter who has been receiving various hand-me-down gear from my main. One of the things I kept around since the beginning was a very well rolled Helltrapper (prior to the introduction of the Ramaladni’s Gift) and a spare Meticulous Bolts quiver lying in my bank. Those along with a decently rolled Lightning Strongarm Bracers and Blackthorne’s Cross allowed me to sample the latest lightning Demon Hunter build. Unfortunately, I lack Tasker and Theos for her and a Witching Hour but I still gave the build a try.
The main idea behind the newer lightning Demon Hunter build is to use Elemental Arrow with Ball Lightning to slow down the attack and hit opponents multiple times, then triggering the trap aspect from the Helltrapper. So although you could only place down 3 sentries with Custom Engineering, the Helltrapper proc would provide a few extra ones along with Caltrops and Spike Traps at random without having you deal with the cooldown aspect of Sentry. But the reason why it does so well at very high Greater Rifts is that you end up having near limitless Smoke Screen that gets invoked with Nightstalker and possibly Preparation, allowing you to free up a ring slot from Unity to an SoJ and thus providing more damage benefits. You can then sacrifice more toughness for damage to progress higher.
While the gear requirement is pretty demanding, I found that the build itself does take time to adjust to. At least, on regular rifts, I found myself doing less damage overall (meaning taking longer to slay stuff) compared to my usual frost fire build. Now, part of that could simply be the result of missing a few key pieces, namely items that have attack speed on them (like my bracers and gloves). Even so, I have heard that others have found the build to be a little awkward at first. I’ve seen a few variations where the top Demon Hunters would forsake Nightstalker and Smoke Screen. I’m not entirely sure how they manage to survive though.
I would say that my next favorite/powerful character is my Wizard. For her I use the Firebird 6 piece (actually 5 pieces since she’s wearing a Ring of Royal Grandeur) with two pieces of the Tal Rasha set (giving her the 3 piece bonus), The Burning Axe of Sankis, Cindercoat and Magefist. In short, she stacks quite a bit of Fire elemental damage. Lately, I’ve been playing her in T6 group play, doing normal rifts. For the most part, she handles decently, doing her share of elite/champion pack slaying.
That said, I found the build to be a little unwieldy. The biggest issue is that the primary build involves Black Hole: Blazar. Because of the cooldown and positioning requirements, you feel that you aren’t contributing as much as you can, despite what the 6 piece bonus provides you. The build mostly revolves around snap shotting your Blizzard: Apocalypse dots and using Hydra: Mammoth to provide the bulk of the damage for the DoT. However, Black Hole can be fickle at times when it comes to positioning. Many times I found myself struggling to time and aim it at the correct place. If you goof up and miss, you have to wait a few seconds. Usually, by then someone else has killed your target and you’re left sucking up a couple of white mobs.
Again as with the lightning build that I’ve experimented with, this build feels that it’s missing some key pieces. In my case, I feel that finding a better 2-hander (namely a Furnace) and more items that help improve my CDR would make this build run smoother. I did see a better geared version of my character in a group play session and that wizard simply wasted everything in less than a second. When I inspected his gear, the main difference was having The Furnace. I’m sure he might’ve had a few extra pieces that exceeded my own but the reality simply was that he wasted everything in our path.
That being said, I think this is an easier build to bring up and farm T4’s on. Once you have 5 pieces and a Ring of Royal Grandeur, your DoTs will command most of your damage. With the correct combination of legendary gems that are leveled, you can burn through things in seconds. However, the biggest weakness outside of Black Hole is simply the Wizard’s squishiness. I found myself struggling somewhat to stay alive. Even with all the right skills and passives, my wizard’s health would easily drop and fast. The primary benefit though of playing a wizard is the distance factor. This build ultimately is a kiting build and handles low level stuff quite well. But I think it does have a lot of problems with regards to single target damage and thus would encounter various issues in solo play against bosses.
From there, I want to talk about the Phalanx/Stampede build. The Akkhan set is the first step in keeping up Akarat’s Champion. There’s a few other builds you can choose from with some key pieces. I ended up going with Phalanx/Stampede for a few reasons: 1) Early on I discovered the Unrelenting Phalanx crusader shield; 2) I’ve seen Alkaizer successfully do very high level Greater Rifts with this build; 3) It was a ranged build for what normally would be a melee class. Because ranged builds tend to dominate high end content, I decided that this was the way to go.
The build mostly consists of keeping Akarat’s Champion up so that your Wrath regeneration is increased. You forgo any generation capabilities except for ones on cooldown that either provide a boost of Wrath or reduce the cost of Wrath generation abilities. With enough CDR, you pretty much can keep Akarat’s Champion up 100% of the time and not have to worry about running out of Wrath.
Since Stampede is a knock back/stun effect, you can use Bane of the Trapped along with Strongarm Bracers with Physical elemental % damage to help boost your damage up beyond the normal critical hit/damage setup. It’s not as resource intensive as Heaven’s Fury using the Fires of Heaven rune and doesn’t do nearly as much damage, but having that distance does help somewhat in avoiding certain attacks.
Still, even with the ranged attacks, this build is pretty annoying both for you and groups with the wrong classes. The knock back pushes your enemies back like a tidal wave so anyone who requires grouping (like a Jade Harvester witch doctor) will absolutely hate this effect. The special effect does look cool but I found aiming the horses to be difficult with a lot of the terrain blocking my attacks. Sometimes I couldn’t tell what exactly had been obstructing me and simply wasted Wrath as a result. Also, your knock back eventually will push enemies off the screen so if you’re involved in a critical fight, you will lose sight of them unless you’re fortunate enough to back them against a wall.
The topper though was finding myself incredibly squishy despite the increased armor from the Prophet rune. My toughness would be boosted to over 26k yet my health constantly receded. My setup runs with almost no self healing so naturally against Reflect Damage types, I’m pretty vulnerable. Even without those mobs, I would still see my health drop for no apparent reason and that frustrated me the most.
I have seen a few other variations of the Phalanx build where instead of Stampede, people use Bowmen. There’s an item or two that allows for permanent Bowmen which might end up becoming a safer build since aiming Stampede can be pretty tricky at times whereas most pet builds feel slightly safer. I would try the Holy Shotgun build but I simply have never found the flail and shield that make that build work. Either way, I do think this is probably one of the easier builds to manage and get started on as a crusader once you obtain 5-6 pieces of the Akkhan set.
Next, I want to discuss the Raekor barbarian build. I did manage to get most of the BiS gear, except that many of the pieces I obtained were horribly rolled. Surprisingly, barbarians are pretty dominant in Greater Rifts. But for this build to work, you pretty much need near perfect stats on your gear, especially when it comes to CDR. The build revolves around Furious Charge and your luck in having a lot of mobs around. Without mobs, you need a lot of CDR to make up for the Merciless Assault rune that becomes activated through the 5 set bonus.
Some people call this Whirlwind Barbarian 2.0. Even with the basic gear, you can clear low level rifts pretty quickly since you’ll be charging from mob pack to mob pack. It’s a little awkward at first because you have to get used to aiming correctly at a point where you can “gather” enough mobs up. Although you can disintegrate weak mobs just fine, you pretty much want to treat your barbarian as something like a vacuum cleaner or mop where you’re gathering up mobs and disposing of them around you as you travel around an area. With enough mobs clumped up together, you can theoretically continue indefinitely.
Your real enemy are solo mobs because you won’t get much reset on cooldown for Furious Charge. I’ve heard that the ideal CDR is around 56%. Now, I’m not sure if this is without Paragon Points factored in, but a base 50% converts Furious Charge into a 5 second cooldown. The top barbarians that I’ve seen all have over 50% CDR base. Add another 10% from Paragons and any stacks coming from the Gogok of Swiftness legendary gem (with the top barbarians having level 50, giving any attack 1% additional cooldown) and Furious Charge almost becomes instant.
The problem I’ve found is that the gear to get to this point is really hard to obtain. Basic Raekor gear isn’t too difficult but finding a well rolled Vile Wards and Leoric’s Crown on top of getting a Furnace is the challenge. I’ve managed to roll two Vile Wards and both had horrible stats on them. My Leoric’s Crown is pretty mediocre too. In addition, you will have to figure out ways to survive, which is what made melee classes jammed for a while.
If you’re looking just to experiment and have fun, the build can be exciting and very action packed. The rotation is pretty simple and mostly you’ll be waiting for your other cooldowns to come up while you’re smashing things with Furious Charge. At the start, you probably will add a Fury Generator just because your CDR will probably be low. Once your CDR hits around 50-56%, you probably can (and should) switch that Fury Generator into another cooldown for survivability or speed.
Next, I want to talk about the Sunwuko monk. Before that, I will say that I had a very tanky monk to start. I began as a lightning build with 3 piece Blackthornes, Ice Climbers and 2 piece Aughild’s Authority. The build was pretty fun at the start and would give me a nice break from my Demon Hunter. I would share my Demon Hunter’s Unity and Ring of Royal Grandeur (until the buff to caches came) but often times my hand hurt badly from the intense spamminess of the build. He could do T3 without taking an ounce of damage but his damage output was so low that it took forever.
Eventually, I started to stumble upon the Sunwuko pieces and watched a few streams to figure out the best high end monk builds. Surprisingly, the monk is the only class that doesn’t really have a 6 set bonus that is popular/viable at higher levels. Sure, you can go with the Raiment of a Thousand Storms, but outside of novelty, I hardly see anyone using that build. Sunwuko wins out due to the 4 set bonus which provides a decoy that does an insane 3500% weapon damage when you spend 75 spirit.
Because you have so few pieces that are required to get started, there’s some room for flexibility in the way you structure your build. Beyond having 3-4 of the Sunwuko pieces (you should definitely get a Ring of Royal Grandeur for this), the only other real “requirement” is having a Daibo. Although any Daibo will work to trigger the 2 set bonus of increasing damage by 20%, most prefer the Flying Dragon. The Flying Dragon gives a chance for increasing the monk’s attack speed; more attack speed means more spirit, more spirit means spamming Sweeping Wind to instantly activate the explosive decoy. Another variant I’ve seen and used myself is Wave of Light (i.e. bells). I managed to acquire the Daibo that reduces the cost of Wave of Light and gave that build a try. Unfortunately, the damage output was mediocre since the reduced cost to Wave of Light factored into the 75 spirit expenditure formula. The other option I’ve seen is combining Sunwuko with Innes. However, the 3 set bonus from Innes reduces Sweeping Wind’s cost by 70, so that makes it counterproductive if you want to dish out a lot of decoys. Also, from what I’ve heard the mantras gained from the 4 set Innes aren’t great.
But the nice thing about this build is that parts of the gear are things you can craft from the start (given that you might have the recipes and materials beforehand). And most of the basic gear is fairly easy to get such as Depth Diggers. I found an extra pair of Ice Climbers and decided that being immune to frozen was worth it. Another variation would be to employ the 2/3 set bonus from Blackthornes to gain both increased damage to elites and reduced damage from elites. If you wanted a more tanky style, then you can go with the 4 set bonus from Blackthornes in having immunity to some ground effects.
Despite all this, the one item that I’ve found to be incredibly elusive is the Sunwuko’s Shines necklace. I’ve been trying to gamble this piece for a while now and have not seen it drop. Pretty much this piece can severely make this build since it’ll free up the helmet spot for the Eye of Peshkov. And that drives me crazy because I have one that has 50% CDR for Breath of Heaven. It’s not an absolute requirement but Breath of Heaven helps drive the uptime for your spirit generation so that you can dish out more Sweeping Wind.
I think this build is pretty fun although a bit spammy. No where near as horrible as the tankier lightning build I started with but you do have quite a bit of survivability and do some crazy damage while being up close and being pretty close to fearless. The flexibility in gear provides numerous opportunities compared to other builds so you definitely can see this one evolve.
Lastly, there’s the Witch Doctor with Jade Harvester. I’ve dicked around with this build a bit, giving it a test run in a few public games before relenting. I call this build the “suicide bomber build” because essentially you either get lucky in blowing up your foes or you die in the attempt. Again, this build is very gear dependent with the hardest pieces to obtain being the offhand and helmet. For myself, those were the last two pieces I picked up but the helmet lacked good rolls and didn’t have a socket while I’m still trying to figure out what to do with the offhand.
The Jade Harvester build is probably one of the toughest playstyles around. It’s not a spammy type of rotation but requires timing and placement. You pretty much need to put two DoTs up while under Spirit Walk, grab everyone together Piranhado then drop your Soul Harvest. Sounds easy? Ever play a bunch of public games and notice that usually its the Witch Doctor who keeps dying the most?
The build shines when you have tons of mobs around, kinda like the Raekor Furious Charge barbarian. But there’s a little more to keep in mind when it comes to the Jade Harvester build since the barbarian mostly is focused on targeting the group and possibly invoking Pain Suppression. It’s easy to miss a step in the rotation when the action is happening so fast and you need quite a bit of practice to go through the motion of hiding in Spirit Walk, putting up your DoTs, gripping everything together at the right spot and then planting your big finisher. I would say I often missed the market and only hit 1-2 of numerous targets or became overeager in spamming Dots and forgot to toss in Soul Harvest.
The build can become very unforgiving though because it pretty much requires that you kill as much as possible to recover your mana and reduce your cooldowns (most notably Soul Harvest). Now, what makes this build especially tough is that you’re essentially a melee fighter. You’re not really a tank with this build either because your job is to sneak in and sneak out. Against elites, champion packs and rift guardians though, you will face all types of ground effects. Since you’re very squishy, you end up seeing yourself die quite a bit if you miss your finisher or hit Spirit Walk at the wrong time. Against less and less targets, things get worse since you’re simply waiting for your cooldowns to come back up.
That said, potentially the Jade Harvester build can do the most upfront damage compared to other classes but you have to be precise to wield it correctly. I feel as though there should a legendary that allows Soul Harvest to become a ranged attack so you no longer have to sneak into the enemies. Maybe that item is a belt, a ring or amulet. Either way, without such an item, the Jade Harvester build becomes to unwieldy for really high Greater Rifts without significant mastery.
In my case, since I picked up both the helmet and the offhand, I want to see if the new gear will change things up for me. I did try T3 a few times on my Witch Doctor and found myself near death all the time. The offhand Uhkapian Serpent will provide some damage reduction while the helmet Quetzalcoatl will increase my damage output overall. Add the various gems I’ve been leveling and the Hwoj Wrap that I picked up and I would like to see if things improve.
Right now, I would say that my level of enjoyment in the game when it comes to classes pretty much follows the ordering of the builds I listed here. Demon Hunter frost fire builds really are the sweet spot for me. It’s the pinnacle of laziness, ease and doability. Wizards follow close up because of the range attacks but I believe that they serve best in groups rather than solo play. Crusaders with Phalanx/Stampede are in a decent place but I still find myself struggling in T6 due to some awkwardness with the way Stampede works. Monks are probably the best overall melee class at the moment, even though Barbarians are on top. However, Barbarians require just too much perfect gear to be competitive and feel like a fairly advanced class along with the Witch Doctor Jade Harvester build. Lightning Demon Hunters are still new to me and eventually I’ll get back to messing around with mine. But I do sense that I’ll require better and more specific gear to refine that playstyle compared to the more brain dead version of the frost fire build.
On the side, I’m hoping to eventually level another wizard, monk and witch doctor in the hope of trying a few alternative builds with the various gear I’ve picked up and kept inside my bank. I am putting together a Eyes of the Earth + Immortal Kings build barbarian that I’m itching to try. I kinda missed out on that build entirely before the Raekor build became immensely popular. But I wanted to check out the viability of a non-Raekor build just for fun.
For the Wizard, I have some spare Firebird and Vyr’s Fantastic Finery stored in my bank. I know that Archon style Wizards have major issues but I did see one person prior to 2.1 doing a Vyr build. With some experimentation I want to see if I could create an interesting style. With my 2nd witch doctor, I wanted to give the pet doctor style a try. I only have the helmet and would require insane grinding to get Tasker and Theos as well as the Starmetal Kukri. People have stated that Witch Doctor pet builds do not fare so well, but that’s mostly with regards to higher Greater Rifts. I merely want to try a non-Jade Harvester style build out. And for my other monk, I would hope to give the Rainment of a Thousand Storms build a shot. I do have a few pieces and I would like to see how it all plays out. Certainly, finding a non-Suwuko amulet will be easier as well as completing the last remaining items in the build.
At any rate, it still will take some time before getting the newer characters up. I plan to get a few Hellfire Amulets made with the hope of having some really good stats. Realistically, I don’t expect much but they would make for excellent leveling items in the meantime.
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