Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

I tried the blood set a little bit tonight. There's no cap on how high you can stack the damage buff, so it has some potential. The only real problem is there aren't many good ways to heal yourself via the Blood Cascade stacks. Blood Rush heals you 2% per monster teleported through. So, it works relatively well as long as density is good. But it's kinda clunky in playstyle, having to wait until your next big pack to teleport into in order to heal yourself from the damage from the last pack.

Devour with the 3% heal per corpse looks like it would be promising but it consume a stack PER corpse. I'm hoping that's bugged.

Both of these fall apart versus rift bosses. And neither take into account external damage taken. Blood Siphon *almost* works there but you really need to take the 6%/tick rune to make sitting there channeling worth it. Unfortunately, that also removes the essence restore, which you need for rift bosses because you can't use corpses or the reaping passive to restore essence.

Maybe the secondary items that complement the sets will help round it out. As it is right now, the blood set is pretty much non functional once external damage ramps up.

I tried the Bone Spear set earlier today. Play style seems fluid enough. Has problems right at the beginning of a rift because no corpse = no enhance bone spear, so your damage is shit. The set will definitely run into problems on higher GR bosses. The stacks cap at 30 and you can definitely cast that many on some longer boss fights. I hope they change the set from relying on corpses.

It is quite fun, however, to use Devour and the aura rune to see corpse lances being flung everywhere. Too bad the damage is shit. Maybe they should add corpse lance to the 6P bonus. It will definitely help with bone spear's poor ability to "spread" damage. Even with the teeth and shatter(best rune imo), your AE is still quite limited.

I haven't tried the bone armor set yet. Don't have high hopes for it since the damage bonus doesn't look that good and the tornado itself looks kinda small. About the same size as cloud of bats.

The pet set is easily the strongest. I'd be really surprised if the bone armor set comes close to it. For a pet set, it's not nearly as boring and frustrating as a WD's zuni or garg builds. You bypass a lot of the stupid pet AI by only using skeletons and mages with the contamination rune. So you can either tell the skeletons where to attack, or you're actively placing mages. The best part is no need for builders! Seriously, blizzard, drop this shit, nobody likes it. Through 99% of the rift, you get your essence back via devour and reaper wraps. And collecting globes is easy with the blood sucker rune on siphon.

Pro tip: siphon seems to tick immediately but the animation can be canceled much earlier than other builders. So even though it's only 15 essence, you can tap tap tap it much more over time. Works great for tossing one in between a couple mages to pick up any globes nearby.

The set might run into issues when rift boss hp eclipses 50k weapon damage(land of the dead), so you'll have to actually rely on siphon to get essence.

One last gripe: please please please do away with "long" cooldowns. I don't understand the point of 2m cooldowns. The longest cooldowns should refresh in between elite packs.

Reht said:

Bone is armor is fine so far, am running T6-7 with little issue (not sure how far it will go though) with a thrown together spec without optimizing my gear or mex level gems.

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I tried it out tonight. It's decent like the bone spear set but the pet set easily out does it.

Runes should not be used to make sets functional. Gift of Death severely gimps your dps. Contamination is that good.

I haven't had a huge deal with temporary mages, but I can see how it's annoying. I think they are balanced around Contamination and kinda suck otherwise. Think of them more as sentry turrets than pets.

4 piece bonus needs to last longer, 5s can fall off easily in higher rifts.

We're missing class specific belts, rings, bracers, scythes, and phylacteries. But yeah, the class is still quite rough. I think the corpse concept is a holdover from D2 and the way it's implemented now could use some work. Kill stuff and then kill more stuff with the previous stuff's corpses is fun, but it doesn't exactly fit into what D3 has become: move and kill. It's the reason why devouring aura is the best rune on devour.

A lot of the sets have stacking buffs which really needs to go. Shouldn't need to monitor buffs stacks, especially for the blood set. Short duration buffs are turrible too.