Diablo 3: Choosing A Starting Class in Season 7

Season 7 is coming on August 5th and with it starting from ground zero again. As with every season, it’s important choosing a solid starting character, especially for those planning to hit the season solo. Which character class will be the best for leveling in season 7?

My decision for choosing a starting character is based upon me playing solo, the leveling experience and the initial gear we’re given through Haedrig’s Gift. I’m going to assume that I’ll be alone initially so I’ll need a strong and engaging leveling class. The best two leveling classes I’ve found are demon hunters and witch doctors. While neither might end up being meta, it’s important as a solo player to push hard early on and find something that has good speed, reasonable damage and can take out masses of enemies out quickly. Both classes satisfy these requirements for me. Also, knowing which sets can push you far out is critical too.

The real trick to choosing a strong starting character in these seasons is examining the free set Haedrig’s Gift provides. In particular, the critical thing is the 2 set bonus because that will determine just how fast you can get into those precious higher torments for aiming at your real gear.

Season 7’s set rewards are as follows:

• Barbarian – Wrath of the Wastes
• Crusader – Roland’s Legacy
• Demon Hunter – Unhallowed Essence
• Monk – Raiment of a Thousand Storms
• Witch Doctor – Helltooth Harness
• Wizard – Tal Rasha’s Elements

Having played through each of these sets before, I have a pretty good feeling for how they operate and which ones would seem like a good choice as your optimal starter set. But I want to go over the two piece bonuses to do a side-by-side comparison first.

• Wrath of the Wastes:
  Increase the damage per second of Rend by 500% and its duration to 15 seconds.
• Roland’s Legacy:
  Every use of Shield Bash and Sweep Attack reduces the cooldowns of your Laws and Defensive Skills by 1 second.
• Unhallowed Essence:
  Your generators generate 2 additional Hatred and 1 Discipline.
• Raiment of a Thousand Storms: Your Spirit Generators have 25% increased attack speed and 100% increased damage.
• Helltooth Harness: Enemies hit by your primary skills, Acid Cloud, Firebats, Zombie Charger, Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Grasp of the Dead, Piranhas, or Wall of Death are afflicted by Necrosis, becoming Slowed, taking 1500% weapon damage every second, and taking 20% increased damage from all sources for 10 seconds.
• Tal Rasha’s Elements: Damaging enemies with Arcane, Cold, Fire or Lightning will cause a Meteor of the same damage type to fall from the sky. There is an 8 second cooldown for each damage type.

Based on these set bonuses, I feel that the two classes best for leveling will be the witch doctor and wizard. The witch doctor is a great starter class in general just because of the pet mechanics. Having pets is good for having some tankiness and being able to hit things when you’re not looking. The other thing is that Helltooth’s 2nd and 4 piece bonuses pretty much can propel you quickly into the first few torments, which in turn help unlock the 6th set piece gift. Also, the set gives you quite a bit of options for increasing your damage the minute you get the two piece while the 4 piece provides defense.

Wizards are less tanky but their set has 7 pieces, making it even easier to gear if you happen to pick up something in between. But the main idea with Tal Rasha’s Elements as a starter set is that like Helltooth, you have a reasonably good setup in getting extra damage via your meteors and then defense at the 4 piece bonus. Obviously, you’ll still need more support items like the meteor boots, but those don’t make as much of a difference until you get into higher difficulties. Your objective is mostly to get your 6 piece set bonus from the gifts (which ought to entail doing a GR20 solo) as quickly as possible to unlock more difficulties.

Now, the other sets can be used but some just aren’t that strong, especially for solo players. Unhallowed Essence is a great set overall but you really need the 6th piece and Yang’s Recurve before seeing any real gain from it. The 2 piece bonus doesn’t really up your damage much and functions more as utility. Discipline doesn’t perform well for Unhallowed Essence until you receive the 6 piece bonus.

Roland’s Legacy never has been a favorite of mine. I found it clunky and slow. The 2 piece bonus is pretty meh for the solo player and you really need a good shield and weapon to let this set shine, imo. Also, you don’t get damage reduction until later on so I find this set to be pretty weak compared to say the Thorns set.

Wrath of the Wastes was fun in the first two iterations but the nerf to Dust Devils utterly destroyed this set. The increase in rend damage really isn’t that great and the damage output is pretty sad compared to where it was. But the real reason, for me at least, in not choosing a barbarian to start is that barbarians are horribly painful to level. I prefer a class that is smoother and faster for leveling, which tend to be ranged classes.

Finally, we have Raiment of a Thousand Storms. The 2 piece set bonus is mediocre and the set overall has no defense. You rely on bracers and a weapon for that along with good reflexes to avoid damage. But that doesn’t make the set good by far. It’s still clunky and dizzying with the rapid dash mechanic. While it’s feasible that you can perform decently for a bit, you’ll still be forced to farm out more gear for stronger sets. Also, leveling a monk is like leveling a barbarian for me because it’s slow and painful.

Pretty much I think witch doctors look like the strongest starting class this season based on leveling and the set. I’ve already done Helltooth with a few variations and found the game play straight forward. It’s fairly strong up until you can switch to a Legacy of Nightmares build, but you should be accumulating quite a bit of ancient gear along the way if you’re dedicating your time to farming out other sets.

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