…without crippling it, obvs. Basically, after outfitting a new alt that recently reached 70, I’ve found myself rather badly short on DB’s. So I figured my best bet was to try and fit two pieces of the Sage’s Journey into my most powerful character, in the hopes that he’d still be T16-capable afterwards, thus letting me easily rack up a lot more of them while just doing regular bounties and rifts.
My results have been… mixed. Original build was a modified ‘Bomberman’, with Deathwish+Etched Sigil and Vizier in the cube. Hergbrash’s Bindings kept me from running out of Arcane, and the Blood Bracers combined with both shielding-passives kept my Squirt’s Necklace buff up at all times - while Force Armor kept me alive when my shields finally failed. Shoulder and bracer of Aughild rounded it out with some nice all-round bonuses. I’ve been rather fond of it, really!
But fitting two pieces of armor in is… problematic. At first I dropped the Vizier and the Blood Bracers from the cube, replacing them with the Bindings and the Etched Sigil in order to thus make room for the Sage’s set, but I soon found that this left me highly vulnerable. Without the Blood Bindings, my shield failed constantly, leaving me frequently on the edge of death and without the 100% damage-boost from Wirt. Thus, my latest attempt involved dropping Aughild, replacing those pieces with the Blood Bracers and the Mantle of Channeling, which I’d never been able to fit into my build before.
Thus, I’m once again reasonably sturdy, but… between losing Aughild AND the Vizier, my offense has dropped precipitously, and it’s thus become a lot harder to kill enemies before they kill me - my strong offense HAD always been my most effective defense, after all. In particular, bosses are harder to take down by several orders of magnitude - where swiftly disposing of even the most powerful boss had previously been one of the biggest pros of my build. With my original build, even high-end GRift Guardians would fall within a handful of seconds, but with this, even a regular old T16 boss-fight turns into… well… an actual boss-fight, rather than an amusing diversion that ends within the space of a breath or two.
Any ideas or suggestions? Ways I could rearrange my setup to make it more effective? Or, failing that, other builds that work well on T16 even with the Sage’s Journey slotted in?
(Characters on EU servers, BTW, if you want to inspect.)