Diablo 4: Season 15 Gear Inching

I feel like I hit a wall in #Diablo4 in Season 15 with my gear at the moment on my Storm Strike Druid build. The character has done reasonably well and can do the T10 Capstone Worldstone dungeon fine but it still feels a little sketchy here and there. I did a few corrections to the gear and learned a thing or two about how the set bonus works but in the end, I decided to start a new character.

Before delving into the new character, let me describe a few things I ended up fixing. The biggest issue was that I had screwed up the initial Transfiguration on his amulet. So I managed to find a decent amulet that I was able to craft to an ideal state. Although I had to remove the GA, it did start with a reasonable base. The frustrating part came when I had to Enchant the Vulnerable Damage Multiplier affix which cost me an ungodly amount of gold. Luckily, I’m sitting at over 6 billion so it was more about time consumption especially when I accidentally rolled over the affix without realizing it. But once I got the ideal state, I was able to correctly get the Overcharged Aspect as well as give it one additional Transfiguration which landed a lame 2% item quality increase. I mean I guess it’s not indestructible and the overall amulet is better than the previous one so I win there. Lastly, that allowed me to replace my boots with my other ones which had Ghostwalker, which gives me back my Unhindered state.

Further progress allowed me to do a Pit 100, which would allow me to enter T12. My general laziness simply has prevented me from moving forward with that though. I’ve heard mixed things between T10 and T12 in terms of loot so I don’t know for certain if my loot would improve as opposed to being able to do content quicker with less sketchiness. Also, I’ve been pushing my Glyphs towards 100 where I’m around 85 on average. So it’s not bad just tedious in general.

The real two items that I’ve been seeking are a Mythic Seal and the Torch. For whatever reason, Blizzard decided to make these Capstone dungeons a flat difficulty depending on your Torment. I’m honestly not a fan of this just because it makes farming lower tiered versions pointless and you’re not given many options. But on the plus side a patch went out earlier to correct the Secret Coin bug so it might be worth giving these dungeons a try. The only issue is that the drop rate for the splinters are really low so it makes doing them very tedious especially the Diablo boss/lair.

At any rate, I just ended up getting bored of the repetitiveness of things (which again makes me hope they’ll consider keeping this season’s content itself just because it’s actually decent and people are enjoying themselves) and decided to try out a Necromancer Minion build. I’ve done a lot of these builds in the past but with the major overhaul to various systems and gear, I figured it might be worth checking this class/build out one more time.

A few major changes I noticed immediately was how you do not start off with any minions whatsoever. Instead, both Skeleton Mages and Skeleton Warriors lower on the tree where I believe you need level 3 for Skeleton Mages and level 4 for Skeleton Warriors. Because of the Runewords for this season, I took my shield and chest piece and crafted a Stealth and Spirit to start. In addition, I added sockets to my pants and chest so I could use some of the non-seasonal runewords like Spirit Wolves and War Cry. However, I kinda goofed when it came to invoking Spirit Wolves since I used Nagu to try and generate Offerings. But that would’ve worked only before the Season 13/Lord of Hatred revamp. So I ended up changing those around to make them useful.

Also, I crafted another Insight for my Necromancer as I have a generous amount of spare seasonal runewords. The big one that I guess is being used for the higher end build is Infinity which gives you Druid’s Cyclone passive at level 29 and a Sorcerer’s Chain Lighting at level 26 when you kill an enemy. I think the real bonus though is making Close Enemies Vulnerable. Now, I can’t craft this item just yet (missing Ber) but this item alone seems quite cool. In addition, the build guide mentions using Enigma, which is famous in D2 in providing Teleport while this one also gives damage reduction. Now, I can craft an Enigma but will wait until I’m in Torment to do that for this character.

At least for now, the build is really fast. I’m using a lot of movement speed buffs, including the one from Stealth and another one that gives you more movement speed for summons. So those things make the play style speedy and I can zip through most things and destroy early content quickly. I don’t really want to use the Whisper Cache leveling method just because getting the season reputation thing going is annoying. Also, I enjoy just seeing how this build performs. I stopped for now just because I was getting tired but I’m in the upper 30s just from a quick run through.

I’m going to try getting this build to at least T10. I suspect this will be an excellent build for bossing but terrible in area content like Inferno Hordes. I want to see if things change with some of the gear updates like Infinity. Enigma itself will be a pretty big game changer also the fact that builds no longer are as tied to Iconic Mythics as they are now called. My only real worry is how squishy this build will end up being based on what I’ve read. I’m also debating about a Rogue build like Dance of Knives. My only hesitation is that you need two separate setups to handle bosses, which I still think is silly. But we’ll see.