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.
Hi,
These are my first hours on the H-Bomb build. I’m playing it in NS with a parangon 4500ish Crusader, and I have a few questions:
- Should I keep a pylon for the Boss in order to benefit from AD, or should I rather avoid clicking a pylon, so that I can stack Stricken faster? Out of habit from playing PhalCon, I clicked the Shield pylon once there was 75% left on the Boss in my first gr 136 with this build, but the mobs that spawned from the pylon didn’t seem to help, quite the opposite actually… So I’d say… no pylon unless it’s a Power pylon? Or maybe any pylon, but only after having stacked Stricken much longer… but if so, what would the tipping point be?
- Also, do I have to synch up my Potion with my Belt of the Trove? On Maxroll, they say so for the LoN Bomb build, but they do not specify for the H-Bomb. I guess that the answer is yes, and that’s why Harnor does it at 0’15 in the video above, right?
- I recently found a primal perfectly rolled Andariel’s Visage. I suppose its better than Leoric’s Crown, as long as I have enough CDR not to miss any rotation, right? (You can see my setup here: Nikookaburra#2952 - Communauté - Diablo III Idk why it doesn’t show my jewelry as I am currently wearing it… so you can also check out my profile on the EU leaderboard at rank #15 in the NS No Six Piece Set leaderboard.)
- Finally, not really a question but it’s my first time stutter-stepping, and I am amazed at players doing so with Blessed Hammer on their left click. I just couldn’t do it like that, and I put Blessed Hammer on my right click (and Force Move on the mouse wheel). And even so, it feels quite bad on my middle finger on the Boss as one has to continuously sttuter-step… Maybe it’s because I’m using a vertical mouse… or maybe I should just get myself a hand gripper for Christmas, Idk! ^^
Anyway, very interesting build to play! Many thanks to its creator! 
No, no need to use a pylon for boss. The hammer (with Stricken gem) stacks damage so fast that a solo boss is arguably a faster finish.
Yes, always! Anytime you zone or end up away from mobs, when you resume combat, you should perform a new synch as well.
Yes, once your cooldowns are suffcient, Andariel’s becomes superior as it both, provides attack speed and extra elemental damage.
Razer and Corsair gaming keyboards, for example, let you assign a stutter step to any key on your keyboard, so you are not stuck using the mouse wheel. This removes the awkwardness of scrolling the mouse wheel up and down.
Je vous en prie. I appreciate the complement.
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Hey Harnor,
May I ask you 2 questions about the H-Bomb, following the patch notes?
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If the Illusory Boots become irrelevant due to the node “Revelation: Gain passability”, what are the new BiS boots for the H-Bomb? The Ice Climbers give “Immunity to Freeze and Immobilize effects”, but I imagine that we won’t not need those either as we will have “Omen: Gain Immunity to crowd-controling effect”, right? (and we do not need them to reverse Stone Gauntlet effect as we have enough coolred, right?) Does it mean that any boots is BiS?
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Also, what about potion managment? Are we supposed to use the potion as soon as we can in order to trigger one of the 3 potion effects, or is it better to use the potion only to synch up the potion with the Belt of Trove? (Well, now that I am writing it down, I suppose that both can managed together - it may be messy, though ^^ -, but I’ll still ask for my piece of mind…)
Hello Nikookaburra,
I am semi-retired from D3 at this point, but the Altar of Rites changes certainly are keeping me around the forums and may yet get me to do one last victory lap in the game.
Now onto your questions - and very valid questions they are - here are my thoughts at this time:
RE Boots: At this moment I am sticking with Ice Climbers as my choice…for a simple reason, which is the 10% damage reduction from Cold attacks! The Cold ground effects, in particular, tend to be difficult to spot when the mob density is high. Having an extra dampening shield against such damage is definitely valuable. If I come up with an alternative, I will certainly update this thread for you.
RE Potions: My short answer is that you want the benefit of both the potion powers and the CoE synch. Things become a bit more potion intense here (or “messy” as you put it), however. While potions reset every 30 secs, the CoE cycle runs in 16 sec increments, so 32 seconds is the real cycle timer for potion consumption, if you want maximum benefits. Once the patch goes live on NS, I will see how that works out for me and update this thread.
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That’s perfect! I have a bad roll on my Illusory Boots, while I have a pair of primal perfectly rolled Ice Climbers - I am not even going to have to reroll them!
That’s very clear!
Many thanks for both your answers!
I hope that you won’t leave the game for good, and that we will still see you suggest new builds to the community! It sounds quite likely to me that there still will be balancing patches going forward. Who knows, maybe that we will even see some mecanical changes, and not just numerical tweaks… Fingers crossed! 
As for me, for now I will gather my courage to do some more Sir William runs, so that I can sacrifice my SoE when the Altar is here. I have done 210 runs so far, but I haven’t been lucky…
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Sorry, what are Sir William runs? Also, what is SoE, please?
Sir William is the very rare mob (a Unique Cuddle Bear) that you need to kill in Whimsyshire in order to get the Rainbow Portrait (the only cosmetic I am missing, if I am not mistaken). You can access Whimsyshire at will thanks to the Staff of Erd… oups, the Staff of Herding, I mean! (SoH ofc, not SoE - my bad! In French, a “h” at the beginning of a word is always mute, so not only is it “difficult” for me to pronouce the sound “h” properly in English, but it seems that I even have trouble “thinking” this sound ^^).
Maybe that it’s more appropriate to call these Whimsyshire runs, Idk…
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Well, based on the new patch notes and the player feedback which is coming from the PTR, you are unlikely to have to sacrifice your SoH. It now appears that we have been mislead into believing that the Altar of Rites will be a feature in NS play. As things stand currently, however, it seems that it is only a permanent feature in Seasonal play. This effectively means, that the only changes to NS are nerfs and meaningless power tweaks…as Blizzard’s penultimate act of dismissal to D3’s long-term player base.
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I’ve also read about that, but it seems that there is still hope:
Fingers crossed!