My pursuit of more Uber Uniques has been quite fruitful. Deciding to take a small break from the leveling grind of another character, I decided to switch back to my old reliable Necromancer to see if I could yield anything. With 14 summons, I didn’t expect much but was thrilled to see The Grandfather drop from a Duriel run.
I knew going into this season, I wanted to try and farm out a few Uber Uniques. I managed to acquire a Ring of the Starless Skies early on and crafted a Shako. Tonight, I received my third Uber Unique in the form of The Grandfather. This was high on my list just because my old Barbarians like the Upheaval and HotA ones could’ve used it at some point. Right now, it’s a bit of a moot point just because there aren’t a lot of high end builds that use it as Tempering has made normal legendaries far more valuable. Still, I figured it would be a nice trophy if anything else.
And I mentioned that I am leveling more characters. Already, I’ve acquired 6 Resplendent Sparks, the 6th from my Heartseeker Rogue, who hit level 100 today. After her, I decided to try another Necromancer build in the form of a Bone Spear minion summoner. The idea of this build is that I wanted to do something off meta that looked fun and could use a few uniques that I normally don’t use in the form of a Deathless Visage and Mendeln Ring. Oddly, I’m using neither at the moment just because I didn’t have any low level spares. But I might eventually just get back on my main Necromancer and farm Lord Zir for a while to see if I can grab one of those Mendeln Rings.
Early on, the leveling was rough as Bone Spear is terrible at earlier levels because of the size, accuracy you need and high Essence cost. Once you acquire Bone Mages though, the skill ramps up quickly and you can discard Bone Splinters (which probably you might take beforehand). Now, I haven’t tried the Deathless Visage with Bone Mages just yet so I’m curious how it’ll feel compared to normal Bone Spear. One major difference in this build is scaling skeletal mages’ ability to fire twice. Now, I think you use do this through doubling Bone Spear’s chance to fire/split twice instead. This makes a huge difference because of the post-PTR nerf to the rate of fire that Bone Mages would do (right now, it’s every 6th cast I think).
With the Mendeln Ring, not only do you get your Bone Spears critically hitting more frequently, they become empowered and explode. I’m probably going to have to sacrifice my Ring of the Sacrilegious Soul to fit the Mendeln Ring (I’m using the Bone Spear aspect on one of the rings) but I’m thinking this should aid in boosting up my AoE. I’m not sure how good this build will be for bosses. Certainly, for the higher end bosses in the Pit and ladder bosses, this setup might not fair too well. But it is a novel one.
If this build turns out to be a turd, I’ll convert it to a proper shadow minion summoner build. I’m less inclined to play that version just because it’ll feel too similar to my main of this season. But I’d prefer this character to be more accurate of an S-tier character. The only thing I’m missing supposedly is a Tyrael’s Might from converting fully over on this new character once everything gets into line. Speaking of Tyrael’s Might…
Since I’m aiming for one more Uber Unique, my goal is to try and craft a Tyrael’s Might. I figure that I might try this Trample Lightning Storm build I saw DatModz use. I have most of the basic gear (i.e. the uniques) and probably all the Aspects. The only thing that I hear would make this build really stand out is a Tyrael’s Might. It’s not going to be a Pit pusher but just something I wanted to try and collect my 8th spark of the season. I debated whether I should craft a Tyrael’s Might or Doombringer for my Thorns Barbarian and ended up deciding on a Tyrael’s Might (when I do). I mean I still have my Doombringer on Eternal so getting a Tyrael’s Might on season would allow me to add to my Uber Unique collection.
Now, the real question is after this Druid, what’s next? Monday, Blizzard will put out a major balance patch that mostly boosts various skills, aspects, etc. So I figure outside of the change to the Holy Bolts elixir, I will either see more gains or one or two new builds emerge. Right now, the two that are going to be actually game changing are a Flay Barbarian and another one for an Andariel’s Puncture rogue. The Rogue build doesn’t seem appealing just because I’m honestly not thrilled about the idea of farming for another Uber Unique while Flay is meh to me. Sorcerers really aren’t seeing anything great come up except for some damage reduction while Druids may finally fix their Boulder builds. But I can’t tell if those Boulder builds will be any good and worth playing. I did enjoy my Werenado Druid but I can’t see myself playing another Druid right after finishing up a 2nd one for a season.
The only other thing that might be semi-appealing is a Rend Barbarian just because I acquired a Grandfather. I did see Whirlwind Dust Devil barbarians getting a significant boost but for that I might as well just switch my Double Swing Barbarian since it’s effectively the same thing. It’s still not S-tier but Double Swing apparently dropped in Tiers for some reason on Maxroll. My guess is that Double Swing simply is too squishy even though it’s a real fun build to play. One thing that makes a huge change is Rage of Harrogath. This becomes a difference maker in damage reduction it seems and I’m starting to see a lot of builds coming up use this item. However, the bossing doesn’t seem terribly good with Whirlwind barbarian compared to Double Swing so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how this turns out.
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