Right now, I’ve been playing a mixture of season and non-season. Quite frankly, the seasonal items aren’t enticing enough for me to really commit my time in developing a new character at the moment, although I am leveling a barbarian. Most of the patch 2.2 has centered around the new sets for the most part and pushing those newer builds, which to me has lowered the importance of Season 3 compared to Season 2.
I feel that at this juncture with all the new sets, people really need some time to digest the gear and play styles. Compare that to Season 2 where there wasn’t a lot of new items to define builds. Instead, that season felt more stable since we had a far better understanding of what to expect and how to prepare. The current season probably was released too quickly in some ways, especially when a lot of people were anticipating using the new barbarian bracers, which ended up being pulled at the last second. Things like that pretty much can ruin a season since it means everything still is in an experimental phase.
I do think that ending season 2 and pushing out the patch 2.2 was a good idea in terms of timing though. I don’t think that seasons should last that long at all, perhaps a quarter (hence the name “season”) at best. But I do think that the patch should’ve had more time for players to adjust to in terms of understanding how things would work.
For myself, I feel that the content in non-seasons is as equally compelling as season content, if not more. At the moment, I can achieve close to a near perfect build based on the non-season gear I can obtain. In my estimate, there’s only 3 pieces of gear that I think are really set defining in the seasonal area but they aren’t must-haves for one to exceed in non-seasons. If Season 3 last as long as Season 2, then you’ll have plenty to do while other people go for top on the leaderboards in seasons.
Regardless, I want to provide an update of what I’ve experienced thus far with the patch. For the most part, I decided to avoid my Demon Hunter in non-seasons. Much of the new gear really allows for greater playability and variety for all classes. If anything, the one major asset a Demon Hunter can provide is with the M6 set for creating Greater Rift Keys. That part really hasn’t changed in my estimate.
So I’ve been really pushing my barbarian, wizard, witch doctor and monk with some of the revised sets. I had been cunning enough to realize that hoarding is ideal in the world of Diablo as sets do receive retroactive bonuses. In my case, I kept a lot of older sets for the patch day. In turn, that allows me to not have to deal with the PTR in general.
So with the barbarian, the main thing I wanted to try was the Immortal Kings set. Ironically, as I was trying to get a few of the items I did not possess (because on occasion I did end up sharding), I managed to obtain a few pieces from the new Wrath of the Wastes set and some more Raekor pieces (also an ancient Maximus which makes my barbarian slaughter everything in sight). As a result, I started to experiment a built with a few builds to figure out what the best is based on my current gear.
Right now, I’m going with a Raekor 4 piece (with 5 piece bonus) and 3 piece Immortal Kings setup, using Fire as my primary elemental damage. Raekors are on my legs, boots, hands and shoulders while I use the belt, helmet and chest pieces for the Immortal Kings. Obviously, my big damage ability is Furious Charge with all the runes activated via the Raekors set while I can have permanent Call of the Ancients: Together as One and frequently up Wrath of the Berserker: Insanity. The way I can lower my cooldown for Wrath of the Berserker is using a combination of Seismic Slam: Shattered Ground and Weapon Throw: Balanced Weapon as a generator. Seismic Slam is a fire rune that works with my gear set up and Weapon Throw helps build up fury when Furious Charge goes on cooldown and I no longer can spam Seismic Slam. In addition, this combo allows me to do both a melee and ranged attacks. I use War Cry: Hardened Wrath for a burst of Fury too. This whole combination gives me defensive, Fury and pretty decent damage and easy clears on T6. The only other item that is of note is Reapers Wraps, which I use to help sustain my fury generation between kills.
For gems, I use Pain Enhancer, Gogok and Enforcer. However, I am considering replacing Gogok with Bane of the Trapped and I could up my damage some more with the Strongarm Bracers that will get proc’d through Bane of the Trapped, Seismic Slam and/or Furious Charge. Overall, I found this barbarian build to be incredibly effective for quick T6 clears. I probably am losing some damage by not using a Vile Wards and will end up suffering some loss of toughness without a more defensive bracers. But the nice thing is that I just don’t stand around waiting for Furious Charge to come off of cooldown, especially once I’m forced to move into a single target style play.
The other build I tried was Immortal Kings 5 piece with the Wrath of the Wastes 3 piece. It’s said that the 6 piece bonus from Wrath of the Wastes isn’t really worth much and that you can do far more as a Whirlwind Barbarian using the Immortal Kings set. I did an old school Whirlwind Barbarian setup that was similar to how most barbarians in Vanilla were structured. I used Whirlwind: Wind Shear for fury generation, Sprint: Run like the Wind for damage while the other skills were similar to my Raekor/IK setup. Unfortunately, I was far from optimized gear-wise when it came to this build so I probably couldn’t output the same level of damage if I wasn’t on experimental mode.
So the playstyle is very similar to the Vanilla whirlwind Barbarian setup. You pretty much just keep Wrath of the Berserker up, except this time with Call of the Ancients and start spinning at your enemies. While you do that, you invoke Sprint to output tornadoes around your enemies. The thing is that this build, while fast and fun, really isn’t high damaging, at least with the gear I have. It’s essentially a “channeling” style build and you end up burning through your fury quite quickly. However, your Wrath of the Berserker still doesn’t come off of cooldown that quickly so there’s moments where you’ll just slow down as Sprint and Whirlwind eat up your fury.
Another thing is that you’re supposed to use Rend with this build. I tried a different path just for old times sake so I didn’t see the numbers that convinced me that this would be the playstyle to go. Of course, one aspect is that I’m missing the ravamped Skull Grasp ring, which helps with Whirlwind damage and the bracers were removed at the last second. Lastly, the playstyle really is meant to go hand-in-hand with the revamped Bul-Kathos’ Oath which improves your speed and helps fury generation. Without those items, the playstyle feels pretty gimped. I do have the Rend belt that I’ve been saving but I heard double Rend really doesn’t do much so I’m just holding off on using it.
Of course, the real question is whether to go Whirlwind with Immortal Kings at all. I do think the 4 set bonus provides a great deal of hybrid capabilities with other sets. But if you end up going pure Immortal Kings, it’s hard to say which route to take. I will admit that I really like the Raekor + IK mix so far. I haven’t tried Greater Rifts yet with that build so it’s hard to say how it’ll perform. I do kinda feel that the build lacks a great deal of something else without really pushing hard and probably that something is the bracers which makes Wrath of the Berserker super awesome. Hopefully, they’ll fix that soon and reintroduce it into the game.
Next I want to discuss the Tal Rasha/Firebird build I’m using. Although I did toy around with my main Wizard using a Firebird 5 piece + Tal Rasha 2 piece, my main focus lately has been around the Tal Rasha 5 piece + Firebird 3 piece hybrid build. The idea behind the hybrid build some small survivability from the 2 set bonus with the Firebird set, some burst damage with the Firebird 4 set bonus, more defense from Tal Rasha’s 4 set bonus and pretty massive damage from the 2/6 set bonuses with Tal Rasha’s. I do use a Ring of Royal Granduer and a very well rolled Convention of Elements. I do employ a Serpent’s Sparkler and Magefist on top of that, although I don’t believe this setup is optimized. Most of my gear is fire focused and the high end Tal Rasha builds are going with the Meteor Boots and Focus/Restraint/Bastion of Will combos.
That said, this build practically destroys everything in T6. I’m using an Arcane Hydra, Blizzard: Apocalypse, Ice Armor: Frozen Storm and Electrocute: Forked Lightning to proc most of the damage. I really don’t have a “burst mode” with this build and my Ice Armor does force me to get into melee range to proc the meteors from its damage. That said, I generally haven’t had a need thus far to adjust what I have since I’m still farming for gear (I did find a Focus and Restraint but the rolls weren’t that great). Overall, the build feels more balanced in playstyle than the Firebirds one mostly because you remove Black Hole for Electrocute and aren’t Arcane starved as much.
On a related note, I’m starting to collect the pieces from the new Wizard set, Delsere’s Magnum Opus. All indications point to this set being crap unless combo’d with Tal Rasha’s. I did manage to pick up the helmet and chest piece and would like to give the combo set a spin. I believe the idea is to use 3 of the 6 pieces from Delsere’s to get the defensive and offensive aspects from Slow Time then have Tal Rasha’s do all the real damage. You get some level of CC from the Slow Time bubbles but you’ll have to sacrifice something such as teleport possibly for the extra action slot.
Next I want to talk about the Zunimassa set. The changes for Zunimassas is quite huge and I finally got my 5 piece to really push the set. I have to say the playstyle is pretty amazing and very fast pace. The main thing that has made this build work so well in my opinion is the change to Fetish Sycophants since you’ll have your fetishes summoned most of the time. Right now, I’ve been playing with two types of builds. One uses the Rhen’ho Flayer and the other uses the Carnevil/Dagger of Darts. With the Rhen’ho Flayer, you’re pretty much keeping up your fetishes most of the time. I use Haunt in conjunction with this build so that the fetishes do extra damage. Pretty much everything goes down really fast.
Carnevil is near the same level except that I find that the fetishes aren’t always up at 15 compared to the Rhen’ho Flayer build. However, the damage is pretty insane and you can blast through T6 easily. Just for fun, I did a Greater Rift 35 with the Carnevil build and died once. I didn’t even bother using double Unity. Again my gear probably is far from optimal but I can certainly see the potential.
I think the real thing is that I need to get a Belt of Transcendence. The important part of that build is that you summon a fetish every time you hit with a spender. For trials, that part is too important since you start with no fetishes at the beginning and have to build up for a while to do any significant damage. I got lucky in some way and found a pretty decent Witching Hour. However, the Belt of Transcendence sounds far more useful, especially for people who lack a Starmetal Kukri.
I think if you’re able to somehow get a Starmetal Kukri (or even better an ancient version!) you can eliminate Fetish Sycophant and possibly the Belt of Transcendence. The unfortunate part of this build is that you can’t go back to Tall Man’s Finger + Uhkapian serpent for more survivability. You would be forced to get rid of the Carnevil mask or the Mask of Jherom to make it work and that’s just too much of a loss from DPS.
Finally, I’ve been tinkering with my Raiment of a Thousand Storms monk. This build is pretty insane. I’ve heard a few ways to gear with this set, but I’m just using the stuff I had saved up while waiting for this set to become viable. Damage and movement-wise, I doubt any set, even Raekors, can catch up to the speed and nuking ability of this set. However, it feels very squishy and resource intensive. So while you can absolutely crush an enemy quickly, you suffer from small downtimes that also is related to vulnerability.
I believe the real cure to this set is to use the Spirit Guard bracers to provide some damage reduction. However, since those bracers are season only, I won’t be able to test out the full potential of this build until the season ends (at least with my girl). Also, I don’t know what the optimal weapon setup is. I’m sure you could use most weapons, including Jawbreaker (which used to be the weapon that really defined the build), I’m still undecided what to do with her. Currently, I’m completely lightning focused and her base damage is quite high. So I’ll have to see what weapon emerges as a top weapon for this build before aiming my sights on it.
I still need to do more testing with things like Natalya’s and Rolands as I have those lying around. But I need to do some research on what skills and gems to use as well as additional gear I might need to make those sets work.