Easiest build to push 150?

General Discussion
1

I’ve never pushed higher than 140 and this season seems like a good time to try it.

Generally, I don’t want to fish through 100 rifts just to try one run, if that’s a precondition I’m fine with staying at 140, but I’d still try to push as far as possible without too much fishing.

Now, here’s what I tried so far:

  • Shadow and GOD → fun, but too little damage, stuck at 140
  • Natalya and M6 → feels clunky and difficult, haven’t tried to push yet
  • H90 → seems fun, haven’t tried to push yet
  • Tal Rasha meteor → same, fun but haven’t tried to push yet
  • Rathma and Masquerade → felt clunky, I didn’t find a necro speed build for farming that was fun to me, so I stopped necro for now.

Before I invest the time in gearing up a new build, I try to find one that’s rather easy to play but deals more damage than GOD or Shadow. What do you recommend?

2

From the ones you mentioned above, Natalya playstyle is “strange”, but probably easiest to push a relatively easy 150. I’m considering that you already have gear for it.
I also did Tal Rasha meteor 150 relatively easily but had higher paragon already (Firebird is easiest GR150 for Wiz though this season).

If you don’t mind non-mentioned classes:
Crusader Akkhan is strong and relatively easy
Monk PoJ, but maybe even Tempest Rush Sunwuko are even easier - however, if you get Vesalius on high push, just leave.

I mention Akkhan and SWK mostly coz they use 2 crafted sets and they don’t utilize Squirts. I did GR150’s with SWK TR at P1450 and Akkhan around P1900 in just few rifts.

SWK clear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5guEb0v9cg

Akkhan clear:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZA7A1vkgSk

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3

Thanks, mate, this is helpful :slight_smile:

Yeah, I’m undecided about Natalya, I have rather good gear for it, but I’m not sure if I force myself to learn the play style which doesn’t seem fun to me rn. Maybe it’s more fun once I learned, tho.

Gotta think about Tal Rasha or Firebird, I have zero gear for both, not sure yet, Tal Rasha was fun the last time I played it, Firebird looks quite fun, too.

I enjoyed Akkhan many seasons back, I’d be up for it, but I need to make space in my stash :smiley:

Difficult decision, haha :smiley:

Thanks for helping with it :slight_smile:

4

I am going to give you both the most obvious answer but also my oppinion and personal experience.

Okay, most obvious is any of the S - Tier builds right now. If you visit maxroll.gg and go to pushing tier lists you can see the strongest ones there, but you can also deduce what is really strong by searching leaderboards in the game. Obviously a build that has 100 sub 10 minute clears is going to be stronger than one that has barely a couple of clears. However, some of the S-tier strongest builds aren’t the easiest to play, or require specific rotations and do damage in small windows, or they excel at one thing and suffer at another, etc. You usually mitigate this by practice, skill, paragons, good gear, luck on affixes of monsters, map design, pylons, soul shards (like the ring of fire), etc.

This season I decided to main Crusader and didn’t know what to play at first. Roland got buffed and seemed strong but is terrible at single target. Akkhan is probably the strongest choice, but also attrocious at single targets so rift guardian fight tends to make the gameplay boring for me. I had a relative easy time clearing GR150 with LoD Blessed Shield and Invoker thorns. I highly recommend the first, if you have the patience to farm all the gear as ancient/primals because it is a Legacy of dreams build. But it does everything great. It is tanky as hell, it clears screen fast, it is decent enough at killing the Rift Guardian, it benefits greatly from every pylon. It even doesn’t use the ring of fire soul shard which I don’t like but instead you use the attack speed and crit soul shard so it feels like you hero basically does all the damage and not some proc on the floor every 100 kills. It has very consistent damage, pretty simple gameplay and rotations, straightforward skills and buffs. To give you an idea of how strong it can become, I currently farm GR137 in 3 minutes and can clear whatever map the GR150 throws, pylons or no pylons. As for toughness, well I can tank everything, even molten explosions and arcane beams in GR150 and my followers cheat death procs once every 5 hours or something but I also have great gear and more than 30k main stat. The only donwside is it is a bit hard to gear because a) it is LoD so ancient/primals in every slot and b) it requires cooldown, crit, attack speed, area damage, every possible offensive stat. So some pieces are a pain to get as perfect. I am position 4 in EU leaderboards with LoD crusader but the other top 3 use a different LoD with thorns and bombardment which can is arguably stronger in a good map. And I never fished with it, it was just a decent map with 2 good pylons at a very good time and place. Check my profile and then click Europe region if you want to check what skills and items I use. The only changes that I make between farming and pushing is
a) gem for farming: molten wildebeest’s gizzard to protect the squirts amulet and for pushing: bane of stricken to take down the boss faster
b) Weapon soul shard for farming: death blow and for pushing: 50% more poison damage

Invoker on the other hand is a bit trickier, it deals tremendous damage in short bursts and very specific time windows. This has to do with the soul shard that allows thorns to crit, so basically you blind / stun enemies and then you go crazy on them but it only lasts a couple of seconds and then you have to wait for your rotation again. The thing is that monsters build up crowd control resistances after a few stuns/blind/freeze/etc and you have to reset their resistances. That said, if you are unlucky and spawn many juggernaut elites you can forget your push cause they cannot be crowd controlled hence you cannot crit them.

I also played GoD, Impaler, PoJ monk, and Inarius Nova this season. I couldn’t do GR150 with them, but that doesn’t say anything necessarily. Inarius and PoJ are considered among the top builds, it is just that I don’t find their playstyle that enjoyable so they don’t motivate me to push them to their limit. I aim to try again at some point with other classes and builds but so far I have a blast with crusader and my luck with primals keeps improving.

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5

I’ve done a 150 in 11 minutes at 1700 Paragon with M6 Multishot. I didn’t even use Focus + Restraint. You can just drop Sentries and Multishot while being virtually invincible. Using Enforcer gem means you can also gear out your follower with augmented gear to keep them alive and use the all skills relic.

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6

I’m gonna throw this out there…

I’m playing Nat’s this season. I’m far from the best players in this game but still when I last checked I was rank 9 on the DH Leaderboard and Rank 8 on the Nat’s leaderboard.

I did my first GR 150 this season at around 1800 or 1900 paragon in like 13 min or something like that. I can farm GR 150 now but I still have to get good maps, like Battlefields, Cemetery, Festering, or FoM, but I can do those with most any mob and complete in time with 2600+ paragon.

My build is a bit different than the other players use that are in the Top 10 in that I use Dawn over Nat’s Slayer and CoE, Esoteric over Gogok, and Sliver of Terror with attack speed and crit chance over Hatred or Sliver of Terror with the ring of fire power.

It’s a pretty easy playstyle since I can stand in the middle of big packs of mobs with ground affixes everywhere and just blast away with little fear of dying though occasionally I might have to move to get away from a Dark Berserker swing or reposition as the packs get smaller.

Any, I highly recommend my setup if you’re looking for something chill to play. The numlock trick eliminates any cooldown management if that’s an issue for you too.

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7

Yukos, thanks for sharing all of this, sounds indeed like LoD Blessed Shield is a super cool build :slight_smile: just need to think whether I’ll have the time to assemble it, I’ll also check your profile when I’m online later today.

Spagetto, KillerProc, thanks for sharing, sounds like both sets are way stronger than Shadow and GOD, with Nat probably being even better and I have quite good Nat gear - however only for the version with Natalya’s Slayer, on the other hand my M6 gear is only OKish, hm, currently I lean to learning how to play M6 better, it still seems easier than Nat. Probably I’ll just try them out a bit during the next few days.

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8

You can do whichever you prefer but I will say if your Nat’s gear is good all you really need to convert from the Nat’s Slayer version to mine is a decent Nat’s ring and a good Dawn. The Dawn could be handled with crafted Primal recipe but also, since you will have tons of cooldown reduction on your gear for the Nat’s Slayer Version you can get away with a less than perfect Dawn. One with 62% or 63% Vengeance cooldown will definitely be good enough.

The ring might be an issue but as long as it has either Crit chance or Crit Damage it should be good enough. Crit Dam is better since you can get crit chance from the Sliver of Terror.

That might be hardest part though. It seems to me that the attack speed/crit chance Sliver of Terror is easier to get than a Ring of Fire one but it could take a few tries to get one with a good affix. But if you can, try to get one with Damage Reduction vs melee.

But like I said, if you would prefer something Marauder, that’s okay. There is a Marauder in the Top 10 but he’s got 4000+ paragon. The other Nat’s player near me also have around 4000 paragon. Not sure if that matters to you though.

Definitely should do what you want. The point of the game is fun and learning to Marauder is a good way to do it. I don’t much like that set but it’s been one of the best sets in the game for a while now though it did get a nerf in the last patch.

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9

I think a lot of people are still stuck on Tal’s from previous seasons, but honestly, in my experience it’s honestly not the easiest wizard 150 this season.

I did 150 on 5/6 wizard boards (didn’t do Vyr’s) at under 2k paragon.

Easiest one for me was Typhon’s, actually. I know not everybody likes the playstyle, but it’s quite strong. If you haven’t pushed with it before, I’d recommend at least giving it a quick try to see if it’s something you like.

Firebird’s should also be very easy. Channel variant might be a bit rough at lower paragon if you don’t have the survivability, but the damage is very good. If you can manage to survive, it’s definitely the stronger variant. I actually played manual Flame Blades instead though, not as strong as the channel variant but still a fairly straightforward 150 clear.

Typhon’s and Firebird’s definitely stood out as the easiest of my 150 clears. Tal’s and LoD meteor weren’t exactly hard per se, but noticeably weaker than Typhon’s/Firebird’s this season from my experience. DMO wasn’t too bad either, although the RG fight was obnoxiously long. I wouldn’t recommend DMO for a easy first 150, you do need a fairly good rift in order to buy yourself enough time for the RG.

On wizard, Typhon’s or Firebird’s are definitely the way to go IMO. And Vyr’s will be by far the hardest 150 on wizard, so avoid that.

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10

Just throwing it out there that the Deathwish-based Firebird is also very easy to get good gear for. Four of the equipped pieces are crafted at the blacksmith, only two others have a variable-number legendary power (Deathwish and Convention of Elements), and Obsidian Rings of the Zodiacs are basically all the same.

11

NOT WITCHDOCTOR OF COURSE.

worst class for 30 seasons straight.

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12

Yout comment really now got me into making a wizard as my next class right now just to play Typhon.
Out of curiosity are you using the typical build with the same shards as in maxroll?

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13

Just checked out their build, looks like it, yeah.

There isn’t much to decide between with the shards, honestly.

The only shard really worth running in the weapon is the stacking pet damage Dregs of Lies (excluding a couple of super high end clears with the Archon variant that ran Anguish for the CDR I think, but just ignore that). For the helm there’s really only two choices, 100% damage Shard of Hatred or Ring of Fire Sliver of Terror. I found the power level was high enough this season that Shard of Hatred worked better for me, but if you are struggling a bit then Ring of Fire may help you get over the hump. Both are valid options I think depending on your paragon and playstyle. At high paragon, Shard of Hatred all the way, at lower paragon you could opt for Ring of Fire if you prefer.

Skill/gear setup I ran is basically the same as what maxroll has well, although I opted for IAS on shard instead of cold damage. Then I could drop virtually all the IAS off my gear for area damage instead and still hit the 24 fpa breakpoint. I think that’s actually slightly more optimal than the maxroll setup given big pulls combined with Black Hole: Absolute Zero (which dilutes the value of cold damage on the shard). You basically end up trading 25 cold damage (when you are already going to be at 125-150+% cold a lot of the time in good pulls) for as much as 60 AD (or potentially ancient damage range on rings).

Actually looking closer at the maxroll setup, it like theirplanner doesn’t hit 24 fpa breakpoint with Frenzied Shrine active from potion power. That is decidedly not optimal. Probably copied the non-shard setup and failed to check the breakpoints with Frenzied, they’d need one more IAS roll to hit 24 fpa with Frenzied active.

That’s getting into some pretty specific min-maxing and optimization though. And it can be quite difficult to get a stacking Dregs of Lies with IAS on it. Any stacking Dregs of Lies will work to start out. Otherwise yeah, my setup looks pretty similar to what they have.

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14

I haven’t pushed with Firebird myself yet, but when I looked a profiles on the leaderboard I saw several with area damage rolls on gear (offhand for example). It’s my impression that area damage doesn’t work with Firebird’s main damage source? Do you know anything about that?

15

Anguish gem’s poison explosions do area damage.

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16

Thank you for that detailed response!