I reached all my goals of S28 and am not probably playing much the all time best season anymore due to D4. Solo pushing was nicest part of this season for me. With autopick of the materials, double bounty materials and extra legendaries from Kadala, it was possible to get quite good gear with very reasonable effort, and almost even keep up with the botters for everything except the paragon levels.
As my final goal was to get 10 solo 150 clears, here are some of my thoughts of them. Please feel free to share your highlights of the season too.
- Tal rasha (star pact / comet) - I played most of the season with Tal rasha due to efficiency, but for pushing it really lacked challenge. Like in all meteor builds, just tried to keep mobs in as optimal groups as possible and nuke them with area dmg. Solo time attack isn’t so fun. Instead, most fun was to drop Karini in group play and play glass cannon with some real danger. Otherwise in group play defeating lags was much more challenging than defeating mobs. My first solo 150 of the season was with Tals, but it still felt the least special of them all being too easy.
- Firebird meteors (comet) - A little boring after playing lots of Tal rasha. Mostly felt worse version of Tal meteors, but grouping mobs with teleport + disintegrate to thigh pacts gave it some flavor. Also was nice to get some minor challenge since Tal meteors was way too easy
- No set - counter archon meteors comet - Quite similar to Tal rasha and firebird meteors, but some difference coming from archon. 150 was easy, but the clear time depended a lot on empowered effect.
- Delsere frozen orb - This was quite hard to play. Needed a really good map, some stutter stepping + pulling elites trough the whole map. With some power potion effects could kill elites nicely. Getting fast clear time seems almost impossible even though for short periods it was possible to get progress fast. Took quite many attempts to get 150. Good variation between countless meteors runs - even though both are ranged, but keeping exactly correct distance and herding large mob groups was nice.
- Vyr - counter archon frozen orb: At start, I felt a litle hopeless to get this done, but all I needed was to learn to play it better and fish a lot. RNG affects this set much more than any other set I pushed. Once I did 80% progress in 5 minutes at first map, but couldn’t finish it due to next really bad map and one bad choice (not skipping it). Also constantly moving boss failed be a couple of times since this build cannot fit teleport but needs to keep 40y distance. Early Empowered season effect and good opening map are both mandatory, which meant a lot of fishing - sometimes slowly waiting for next potion effect. Other than fishing, this was actually really fun to play in good map. Anyway, I spent more than 100 keys and around 10 longer attempts at 150 to get this done. Best feeling of the season was to get 150 Vyr run done.
- Typhoon, with and without counter archon: First I cleared without archon. Took some time to learn how to position the Hydras. Couldn’t clear 150 before using time to learn it, especially how to position the hydras. Quite different from other wiz sets. This benefited a lot of seasonal passability and cc immunity. Counter archon I did afterwards. It needed more luck without seasonal power and lots of precision at timing, but had much more damage. There seems to be much better clear times than mine with lower paragon, so there would be much to improve with both luck and playing skills. This build gives some immersion of the player being the actual wizard, since there are lots of spells to do in exactly correct sequences for optimal performance.
- Marauder cluster arrow - I have played this a lot in previous seasons, but clearly I’m not so good with the build as I would hope: took a lot of effort and playing near the limits of my skills to get it done. I chose to play with Endless walk set, when many others had done it with Squirt’s neclace + Bastions of will. Seemed impossible to keep Squirt’s bonus up so much that it could complete with easy uptime of Endless walk. Or then I just didn’t like to fish the perfect map enough.
- Reakor boulder toss - I haven’t been playing barb almost at all and everything was quite unknown. Anyway, got to 145 really fast and struggled a little with the rest. I must admit I checked a couple of youtube videos before nailing a 150. Key thing was to pick my fights correctly, keeping nice pack of mobs to mash as often as possible and mixing Furious charge and boulder toss correctly. When I realized I shouldn’t try to knock mobs between every bolder toss I made it next run.
- Traq’s death nova - In short: Good toughness, lots of damage dealt to big groups, lots of problems with single target damage. Fun at start but soon this became a boring mix of trying to pull and kill all mobs as fast as possible and figuring special ways to kill final boss every single time. I knew the boss kill theory well but almost every time there was some problem with RNG or bad choice with pylons.
- Rathma Army of the Darkness - This was kind of interesting. Did 150 even faster than with Traq’s even though I felt I never really got a good idea of how to play it. In the end I got no idea why I sometimes killed things fast and sometimes almost not at all. Needed to spend a lot of effort to avoid death. Seems there would be lots of room for improvement since many played with much less toughness than me. For me the playing was just tring to do launch Army of the Darkness as often as possible to keep mobs CC’d and do some random amount of damage (+ wathcing coe cycle a little).