For no particular reason, I’d decided this season would be “hard core or bust”. I’d previously taken a non-seasonal crusader to paragon 250 or so hard core, so it seemed like something new to try and I had bit of experience at it…
Long story short, I’ve had three different characters make it near level 70 just to die right at the “finish line”, so to speak.
This time, I decided I would take it really slow and just stay on Hard difficulty until I hit level 70, period.
For a change of pace, I also decided to run bounties instead of rifts, if only to build up a few cube mats so I could cube some of the legendaries I’d saved from the previous masters of my current Crusader, may they RIP.
In one of the bounty caches, at level 15, I got a Death’s Bargain. This is pants that turn your life-per-second rating into an “aura of death” at the cost of preventing your normal life regen. Normally, I’d toss a “monkey’s paw” sort of gear into the vault or even just salvage it, but I figured, level 15 was easy enough to level back up, so, why not? It would be good for a laugh.
Turned out the joke was on me!
Part of it is that at level 15, my Crusader’s native life-per-second is only like 40, and the pants come with a rating of 33 built-in, so it almost doubled it. Part of it is that “hard” difficulty is barely difficult. Either way, what I expected was that things might take some damage but my Crusader would have issues keeping his health up.
Instead, everything that got near me exploded. It was quite ridiculous, actually. Even with Elites, all I had to do was run in circles around them until they died. I didn’t need to push any buttons unless I just really wanted to clear out a crowd. It was like I was using some super thorns build with “thorns” that had a radius of 10-15 feet around me.
Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m not suggesting this pants is better than, say, Pox Faulds or something else that does a similar job. I’m just amazed that something I’d always thought of as “bad” turned out, instead, to be “good”.
Now, I’m having to resist the urge to push my difficulty level up a couple of notches just to see how far it actually is “good”, heh. I’m sure that as my Crusader levels up and that 33 life-per-sec on the pants recedes into smallsville, that the overall effectiveness of the pants will decrease substantially. In the meantime, I’ve started favoring life-per-sec on the other bits of gear I pick up and I’m enjoying the ride while it lasts, lol.
I’ll definitely be putting these pants back into the vault for the next apprentice Crusader to equip.