Here’s something to stir up the monopoly of the Phalcon build on the Crusader leaderboards. My equipment and skills are shown at the end of the video. Enjoy!
–H
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Please indulge my curiosity:
- The class set for Blessed Hammer works with Falling Sword; what is the motivation of abandoning this set-up for one with Bombardment?
- Why all the – what I will call – stutter stepping? (What purpose does this serve?)
- How is this stutter-stepping achieved?
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The short answer: the Hammerdin, or Seeker of Light build, is really poor when it comes to damage. But…the Blessed Hammer combined with Thorns clears GR150 . Blessed hammers here are basically zero damage. Weapon damage stat on my flail is dropped in favor of AD, for example. It’s the combination of low resource circular motion of the hammers to match the Bombardment areas around the crusader and conjunction with the Zodiac ring to reduce cooldowns, that make the hammers ideal. And the Brute Force is the rune of choice as, thanks to the rune, the hammers frequently explode early on, thus returning your wrath cost entirely, if you are wearing Gabriel’s Vambraces as well. Additionally, the Johanna’s Argument flail doubles the attack speed of the hammers. This combines superbly with Bane of the Stricken gem for damage stacking.
Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan give 25% damage increase when moving and increase resource regeneration as well.
There are three ways to do this.
The first one is built into the game and involves scrolling your mouse wheel (force move) while holding Shift (force stop) to cause the stutter step effect. That act of scrolling the mouse wheel up and down is super uncomfortable in practice, however.
So I recommend method two. Gaming keyboards these days allow you to set macros. In your D3 (in-game) options, set a key of choice to force move, then in your keyboard macro settings assign that button to continuously repeat when pressed. Then you hold Shift (to power stop) and, when pressed, the repeat macro causes the stutter step.
Method three (a poor men’s version of method 2). Before I got a gaming keyboard, I actually wrote my own mini-script to handle this. I will be happy to post the code for you, if you need it. You drop that script into your Notepad app, then convert to a .bat file and you just run the file to activate. You can, likely, also google stutter step script for D3 and find something online.
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The main reason to use blessed hammer as the spammer is in conjunction with the zodiac ring in the cube, which you see mentioned at the end of the linked video. This decreases cooldown time when a resource spender is used, which leads to more bombardment uses. This reduction is on top of CDR and the reduction from blocking attacks and having the akarat’s awakening legendary shield effect.
You don’t get such an effect by using a primary skill in the same skill slot like “punish”, even though it does provide block chance (for more cooldown resets) and is good at single target stacking of stricken.
S28 crusaders have way more CDR once they get an empowered shrine proc from their altar potion. Combine this with 50-60% CDR from gear itself and the “lord commander” passive, and you can comfortably get a 6-7 sec cooldown on bombardment in S28 using the typical “punish” build for LOD bombardment, once you get the empowered shrine potion proc.
Of course you can further enhance this by using the H-Bomb build with hammers and zodiac in seasonal. I gave up on my seasonal LOD bomb build around GR 135 because the dependence on good maps, good trash, good elites is just absurd relative to most builds.