Well, it turns out for me that it was 1569! Just did my first ever 150 and I am so stoked!
Could have done it earlier I guess with more fishing, but I don’t like to spend all day looking for the perfect rift!
Can’t wipe the smile off my face 
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Got my Wiz up to gr145 today, goal is 150 done before beta starts on Friday, playing my DH 99% of the time and geared the Wiz with bloodshards lol
And today was the day I did my first gr150! Now bring on D4
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I’m up to 148. Almost there!
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I’m guessing you’re doing HC?
SC. I can get through any of them without dying at all. I’ve been doing them over and over and my issue is that just I don’t finish in time. I wonder if I’m doing something wrong, especially with people saying that they are finishing 150 in 10ish mins with less paragon than I have.
Thus I’m hoping to get some pointers/corrections to finally finish this.
Looks like you have a farming spec on right now, so it’s hard to comment too much. But from what I can see, your gear is better than mine (better weapon, better gloves, better boots in particular).
Weakest piece by far is definitely your amulet. 56 crit damage is quite low. A non-ancient trifecta cold amulet (say 18+/80+/9+) should be a decent upgrade, at least 10% dps. I’d be focusing your materials on improving your amulet (I wouldn’t gamble amulets because they are too expensive, but you could reforge or upgrade rares).
That being said, an amulet upgrade is going to gain you maybe 0.5-0.7 tiers of damage, so that’s not really enough to put you over the hump.
You should try and bump your main gems up to 145+ if you can as well. It’s not a huge dps gain to go from 140 to 145+ on your gems, but every little bit counts. I suspect at this point you can easily clear 145 without failing, so you should bump your gems up to at least that point.
On to skills: not sure if that’s just your farming setup, but that seems like a sub-optimal skill choice.
Magic Weapon: Force Weapon should be Magic Weapon: Deflection. This is a big one. Even if you aren’t dying much right now, you’ll have a much easier time keeping your shields up with Deflection, and that means better Squirt’s uptime, which means more dps.
Then Black Hole: Absolute Zero isn’t bad, but I think Black Hole: Spellsteal is actually better in a lot of situations. Running Spellsteal means you get an Arcane stack from that, so you can swap Teleport: Calamity to Teleport: Safe Passage. Again, I know you said you aren’t dying, but more toughness means your shields break less and you will have better Squirt’s uptime for more dps. This one definitely isn’t a necessity, lots of people run Calamity + Absolute Zero. And outside of this season, that’s the superior setup.
But Spellsteal and Absolute Zero actually end up giving about the same dps bonus, at least for Tal Rasha Meteors, because you have about the same amount of DIBS as elemental damage with this build. (And if you have a trifecta cold amulet, Spellsteal actually gives a slightly bigger dps increase because you’ll have more baseline elemental damage than baseline DIBS). The big difference is in the duration. Absolute Zero has double the duration, so with low CDR Absolute Zero is strictly better because it has much higher uptime than Spellsteal. HOWEVER, this season we have Empowered Shrine, which is enough to give 100% uptime on Spellsteal once it’s active. So Absolute Zero is really only better until you trigger an Empowered Shrine, but once you do Spellsteal actually becomes a bit better.
I’d generally consider one of the following skill setups. You’ll run Meteor: Comet + Familiar: Sparkflint + Magic Weapon: Deflection + Storm Armor (can be Power of the Storm, or Shocking Aspect if you want better Karini uptime e.g. in HC) in every setup, the last two skills are the ones that will vary.
So here’s a few options for the last skill slot + teleport rune:
A: Teleport: Safe Passage + Black Hole: Spellsteal
B: Teleport: Calamity + Black Hole: Absolute Zero
C: Teleport: Calamity + Diamond Skin (Crystal Shell or Enduring Skin, maybe Prism if resources are rough but you shouldn’t really need it this season)
D: Teleport: Safe Passage + any arcane generator (e.g. I like Shock Pulse: Power Affinity).
In Softcore I ran setup A (Safe Passage + Spellsteal). In Hardcore I ran setup D (Safe Passage + Shock Pulse: Power Affinity). I didn’t use Black Hole in Hardcore because I wanted to avoid lag as much as possible, and running Black Hole will make the lags worse.
All that being said, I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with your gear or build. Except Magic Weapon: Deflection, you definitely want that. The rest is just kind of nitpicky, e.g. look for a better amulet, maybe try some different skill combinations for that final skill slot.
So it may come down to playstyle. You may be fighing stuff you should be skipping. You should skip any small packs of trash enemies, and if you can you should try not to fight lone yellow elites (at least not from full health anyway, you should still try to finish lone low health yellows off) unless you can combine them with another yellow or blue pack. Lone blue packs are generally okay to progress on, at least as long as it’s a mob type that doesn’t tend to scatter too much. If they scatter and you have to kill them one at a time, it’s going to be kind of bad, but if you can kill all the blues at once you should make (or at least maintain) time even on lone blue packs. If you get an open map, you should try and lead the packs on through the map until they die. Kill the trash around them and then kind of lead them on, slow march in front of them and throw meteors behind you and let them slowly follow until you can combine them with another pack. If you can fight 2 elites at once, you’ll make better time. 3+ elites at once? Even better. You can’t go too crazy with this because of the lag this season, but you should still be able to pull 3 packs without it getting too crazy as long as you’ve thinned out some of the trash around them.
Related to this, if you are having a hard time getting through rifts in time, is that mostly on mediocre maps? If you’re having a hard time, just farm up like 50 keys and skip all the bad maps (e.g. Caves, Keeps, Corvus). The best maps are the big open ones (Festering Woods, Battlefields of Eternity, Fields of Misery, Briarthorn Cemetary, Desolate Sands is okay too but it’s the worst of the big open maps), then there’s some more open linear maps that are still pretty solid (Act 2 sands map, Shrouded Moors etc.). Silver Spire can be quite good too if you get the big open one, but there’s the small variant that’s pretty bad so that one is hit or miss. There’s some other mid tier maps like Arreat Crater, the act 2 archive maps, Pandemonium and Temple of the Firstborn can be okay etc.
The really bad maps are the ones with small rooms, doors, and narrow choke points that prevent you from really making proper pulls, e.g. Keeps, Corvus, or basically any of the cave maps.
Since you are fighting the timer, just instant close anything you open that starts with Keeps, any of the caves, or Corvus. You don’t even have to fish a ton, just plug 5-10 keys quickly until you get at least a halfway decent starting map, and then go from there.
It’s much easier to drag elites forward and combine packs on the open maps, and fighting multiple packs at once will really helps you make time better. It’s nearly impossible to do this on the bad maps, so just skip them and open a new rift.
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Thanks a ton!
So, Squirts. Yes. That has been my BANE since the start. I’ve been rerolling and upgrading a ton over and over and have had pretty bad luck. I’ve even gambled them, but only because I’m not trying for other gambled slots atm. So I’ll keep trying for that.
My skills. What you see is a hodgepodge which is the result of looking up others’ profiles and experimenting with different combos. So it’s just a mix-and-match mess right now. I’ll definitely make the switches you suggested.
Where I think I’m lacking most is the gameplay style you mentioned. As someone who isn’t competitive in D3, I’ve never had to deal with selecting maps, mob types and/or who to fight and who to skip. So I’ll start working on that.
If you have passive suggestions, I’ll take any you have! Also, I have the option of either good rolled CoE or the Jordan’s that I’m currently wearing. Is there a preference when it comes to those two?
Sorry missed you yesterday. I should be home late afternoon (ET) if you’re cool with some more chatting.
Galvanizing Ward, Elemental Exposure, and Power Hungry are staples.
Fourth passive can be a few different things. I’ve been using Blur, Cold Blooded is also okay but not great because it’s additive damage. Unwavering Will you don’t really stand still long enough. Astral Presence if you are having a hard time with resources, but it shouldn’t really be necessary this season. Unstable Anomaly if you are dying too much. I’d recommend Blur, it’s a noticeable toughness gain. Cold Blooded just isn’t enough damage to really make it worth it.
Yeah that’s probably where to focus.
This video from wudijo goes over some of the best maps, it might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYhziK2czkY
It’s from before the new maps were added to the GR map pool so it’s missing some of the good ones like Fields of Misery, Briarthorn, Desolate Sands etc. but it’s a decent place to start.
CoE is significantly better, at least for pushing. SoJ is okay for farming say 3 min rifts where you don’t get a ton of value from CoE, but for pushing, CoE is 100% the way to go.
The best time to catch me on is sometime from 8pm(ish) to midnight(ish) ET.
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Thank you again!
Roger that. If you’re not out for St Patrick’s, I can be on tonight at 8.
I had a look at you helmet. Have you tried an amethyst? It’ll boost your shield a lot. I’m running Deflection and Prism (plus Blur) and I can see my shield often going way over my health pool when I check it just for fun.
I use an amethyst myself (using cold meteor) and I almost never go low on arcane power, maybe apart from spamming single rift guardian with meteors.
(I’m nowhere near 150 yet).
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Nope. I should be on a little after 8.
Another thing I noticed in your profile before I forget: you should definitely be running Stricken instead of Powerful.
The guys at the top of the board are running Powerful because they are blasting through for fast clears and presumably getting a Power pylon for the RG, but at 2k to consistently clear 150 you’re going to want Stricken. It’ll speed up the RG kill a lot, should be like 60 seconds or something.
With Stricken your goal is basically to stay even with the timer (or a little ahead) through the rift, get a Conduit or Power Pylon at some point and kill 2+ elites with it, that should get you far enough ahead to give you the 60ish seconds you need to kill the RG with Stricken.
With Powerful you need a much bigger lead to kill the RG, you’ll either need a really good Conduit or have a Power Pylon you can use for the RG.
Stricken should be way more consistent at ~2k paragon.
Amethyst is definitely an option. It’ll be totally fine through the rift, you definitely don’t need the topaz with 10+ enemies. But with amethyst you may have resource issues vs. the RG, especially with Black Hole instead of Prism.
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That was one of my next questions. Sounds good. My Stricken is leveled to 141 as well.
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A million thanks to TinneOnnMuin!!! <3
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Congrats on your 150, welcome to the club!
With your earlier comment about you running a hodge podge of different skills, why don’t you follow the maxroll guides? I was so surprised to read that about you haha.
Maxroll is a great go to resource for everything D3 related.
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Thanks! <3
I started out using maxroll all the way up until I started hitting a wall around 145-147. So that’s when I started looking at other people’s setups.
However, I think my primary issue was the rifts. I was just playing what ever came up. Once I set myself to what Tinne suggested (which helped some for sure), I started fishing for good maps. That allowed me to do 148 and 149 on the first try. Then 150 on the second try.
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Yeah that’s what I did as well and I’ve never done a 150 before. I didn’t even know you could quickly open and close a GR without having to completely leave the game and wait to reload. Saw someone doing it by talking to Orek. That made it so much easier to just wait until an open map spawned.
That feature is relatively new.
Very nice and helpful info overall TinneOnnMuin. About the gem in the helmet, most of the time I end up with the empowered shrine effect of the potion, and the gloves on the follower make it last for 10 minutes. So I think the amethyst is definitely viable. Unless extremely unlucky and don’t get the effect or get it very late. How large do you think your life pool should be? 1 million? Or is it an overkill? (Talking about hp without the shields)
PS. Congrats to Leviathan for the 150 clear!! Way to go!!!
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I think I had about 800k with a Topaz. 1m with an Amethyst is probably reasonable.
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