Diablo 3: A Fifth Slot Proposal and 6 Sample Builds

After losing the 4th slot in Kanai’s Cube, I know various people had mourned or continued to urge for bringing it back, myself included. Instead, we ended up getting two additional slots for legendary powers through the revised Followers and Emanate on items (mostly armor). However, the main changes there felt more static as most people currently are using Nemesis Bracers and a Flavor of Time in solo play, which still leaves a gap in power for group play. With that in mind, I propose a way to not only bring back the 4th Kanai’s Cube slot, but adding a 5th slot, in the spirit of the Ring of Royal Grandeur season, by creating a Bounty Cache legendary slot.

While the Ring of Royal Grandeur is certainly one of the most sought after legendary power effects, especially for Kanai’s Cube, it does not apply to Legacy of Dreams nor Legacy of Nightmare builds. To even that aspect out, I think a good compromise is taking the lesser utilized Bounty Cache legendary items’ abilities to make a more niche pool of effects. In that manner, there can still be some room for variance not just for LoD or LoN builds, but builds that may want to use say Pride’s Fall for resource cost reduction or another rarely used, but potentially useful item from Bounties.

To demonstrate a few build ideas, I wanted to take a few well known builds and augment them through adding the generic 4th Kanai’s Cube slot as well as showing how a bounty cache 5th slot would appear (note that these do not account for Season 24 Ethereals):

• Demon Hunter Gear of Dreadlands – Right now, my GoD build uses a Dawn and Fortress Ballista with the The Ninth Cirri Satchel in the weapon cube slot. My ring slot is occupied by an Elusive Ring while my armor slot uses Depth Diggers to maximize the generator damage. The Bounty Cache slot would use a Ring of Royal Grandeur so I could equip the Mantle of Channeling on my shoulders and the 4th slot could get either a Valla’s Bequest or a Yang’s Recurve for speed farming in using the resource reduction.
• Crusader Akkhan/Invoker Bombardment – The base build is described here. The key is in being able to keep Norvald’s Fervor but moving the Ring of Royal Grandeur into the 5th slot in exchange for a Convention of Elements, Justice Lantern or Unity for a Jewelry slot. The main addition to smooth out this build is using an Akarat’s Awakening in the 4th Cube slot to help bring down the cooldown problems with Akarat’s Champion and Bombardment.
• Zunimassa’s Haunt with Dagger of Darts – I sketched out a Season 24 version of this build here but you have to remove the Ethereal for how a modified version would look. Basically, the Ring of Royal Grandeur goes to the 5th slot and I would take a Ring of Emptiness in it’s place. The build gets a small change in skill by using Locust Swarm with Pestilence rather than strictly depending on the cooldown of Piranhas for applying the bonus damage from the set. The 4th slot will probably go to Tasker and Theo to improve your pets’ attack speed.
• Wizard Typhoon Hydra – A previous version exist here. It also mentions the 4th slot already by employing an Aether Walker. That alone would cure the horrible slowness of this build. The Ring of Royal Grandeur can be moved to the 5th slot, but I think a Pride’s Fall would add a nice quality of life improvement since you will be spending more resources with teleport.
• Barbarian Wrath of the Wastes Whirlwind – I have a basic one setup here. The main change would be to move back Bul-Kathos’s Oath as the main weapons and cube Ambo’s Pride since you won’t have the Ethereal here. You could go for a Ring of Royal Grandeur in the 5th slot which would allow you to wear the Hexing Pants of Mr Yan or Mantle of Channeling. And the generic 4th slot would be either The Furnace or Messerschmidt’s Reaver, depending on what you need (with The Furnace for pushing and Messerschmidt’s Reaver for speed farming and keeping your cooldowns up). You could swap War Cry! for Battle Rage: Sword to Ploughshares and Ignore Pain instead of Sprint.
• Monk Patterns of Justice Tempest Rush – I don’t have a build guide up yet. But the main build will be a 5 piece version with the Ring of Royal Grandeur in the 5th cube slot and Captain’s Crimson Trimmings for Belt and Pants. Balance will be in the cube’s weapon slot, a Won Khim Lau for the main hand slot. Now, I see a few variants in this build. First would be using Kyoshiro’s Soul for quality of life and a boost to Sweeping Wind (not really necessary) and used in the cube slot, Vengeful Wind would be the off hand weapon. The armor slot would be a Mantle of Channeling. For jewelry, Unity, Convention of Elements and Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. Another version would avoid Captain’s Crimson Trimmings and keep the Kyoshiro’s Soul in the belt slot and use either a Mantle of Channeling or Lefebvre’s Solioquy in the shoulder slot. This will give quite a bit of damage reduction and damage improvement.

Obviously, most of these builds end up using the Ring of Royal Grandeur, although I did show how a Pride’s Fall can come into the picture. LoD builds obviously wouldn’t be as dependent upon a Ring of Royal Grandeur and would probably use something like Pride’s Fall, Pauldron’s of the Skeleton King for a cheat death or Illusory Boots.

The biggest point here is to increase the flexibility of builds by bringing back the highly desirable 4th Kanai’s Cube slot and hopefully making use of more Bounty Cache item effects available. I might jot a few others down once I have more build guides up. But the ones I listed above are a few I’d love to see make use of two extra abilities.

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