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Build Guide

Update: GR55 cleared a few days(a week maybe?) ago. Playing less, catching my breath before the next leveling/gearing/solo push.

Hello, I am Inexorable#1212 and I am sharing with you my Lightning Sweep Attack build. I was the first player on NA SC Seasons to clear 50, 51 and 52 with this build, have successfully cleared GR tier 55 in Season 3, and have had a number of very close calls on 54/55/56 but have not made enough attempts given limited keys currently. I've maintained top 10 Solo Crusader rankings for both Season 1 and 2, as well as multiple 50+ clears in Era 2 and 3.

A couple notes on this build before I get into skill choices and some playstyle tips: This build excels at clearing large packs of enemies and any Rift Guardian that spawns additional monsters/copies itself(Hello Stonesinger.) Past a certain point in your own Greater Rift progression you will hit a point where going single-target on a guardian, Perdition for Example, is simply not going to result in a win no matter how much time you have left on the timer. For this reason, this guide and the choices contained within are focused on Rift Guardians that spawn adds/clones of themselves.

Skill Choices

Sweep Attack - Trip Attack: The core skill of the build. Don't leave home without it. Lightning Damage, 50% stun chance on hit, decently large area of effect.

Akarat's Champion - Prophet: Our main emergency cooldown button. Amazing toughness boost, increased damage, increased Wrath regeneration. Oh yeah, also heals us to full if we die and triggers before Indestructible. While there are other runes for Akarat's Champion, I wouldn't ever use them under any circumstance.

Law of Valor - Unstoppable Force: Our big wrath-saving skill. Note the lack of Long Arm of the Law in the build, so this is only up for 5 seconds at a time. This is fine, although we will bleed wrath slowly while fighting only one target and Akarat's Champion is on cooldown. If this is truly unacceptable, you are welcome to swap Holy Cause for Long Arm of the Law and start stacking a bit more resource cost reduction on your gear, although I do not recommend it.

Steed Charge - Draw and Quarter: Our first pulling and movement ability. You move fast, you drag a few enemies along, you even do a little bit of damage to them. Only lasts for 2 seconds, but can drag yellow elites the entire time. Line of Sight and terrain obstacles will break the pulling effect, so this takes a little practice to use effectively. Note that you can drag an elite with you and hit it once the steed ends to refresh your Taeguk stacks.

Iron Skin - Flash: Mitigation and movement. When you take damage while this rune is active, you gain a 60% movement speed buff for 4 seconds that also lets you walk through enemies. You can more easily get out of ground effects and balls of enemies that have you completely surrounded, plus reposition yourself so that you can keep more stacks of Denial up while Sweeping. Steel Skin is acceptable, but not preferred.

Condemn - Vacuum: The second pulling ability. Draws in enemies from up to 20 yards out toward you from all directions. Does a little bit of damage too, although not a lot. The pull effect works while you are moving, so you can move in a small circle and effectively extend the range of the pull.

Passives

Indestructible - I do not think this needs an explanation.

Heavenly Strength - See above.

Finery - Large damage boost, also increases armor from the extra strength it provides.

Holy Cause - Some people love Long Arm of the Law for this build. I do not. Groups of trash, and add spawns on bosses will provide us with plenty of Wrath while Law of Valor helps stem the Wrath bleed-off. Akarat's Champion can help maintain Wrath during the times you are only sweeping one target.

Potential 5th Passives if you choose to use a Hellfire Amulet: Wrathful(Needs some Health Globe Bonus secondary rolls on gear to really be effective. Still good.), Vigilant(The life regen is largely irrelevant and not noticed, the extra 20% non-physical reduction stacks with Esoteric Alteration.) Long Arm of the Law(Because sometimes you don't want your Wrath globe to be low and also due to a lack of other good passive skills for Crusader).

On Vitality, Life% and Healing Stats

Extra rolls of Vitality, and Life% do increase your toughness. In fact, they're usually the best ways to get that toughness number really high. However, they do absolutely NOTHING to reduce the amount of damage you take. Healing Stats(LoH, LpWS, LpS, LpK even) all heal a set amount. None of these stats scale particularly well with any other stat we have, save for attack speed. Life per Wrath Spent actually scales inversely(gets worse) with more resource cost reduction on our gear. My philosophy is to stack more resist all, reduced damage from elites/ranged/melee(in that order) in order to make our sustain from healing that much better. Additional HP from Vitality/Life% is useful, however, when you are trying to stack enough HP to survive spikes in incoming damage, although some of those spikes are simply too high no matter what we do(Looking at you, Perdition and Perendi).

Life per Hit scales surprisingly well with our 3.00+ Attacks/second. Assuming a 35k+ roll on your Flense and paragon points invested into life per hit, we can easily heal 120k+ health every second from Life per Hit alone. Add in a little bit of life per second from Paragon and Templar and now we add another 15k health every second. These numbers don't change much and can vastly prolong how long we can stand and fight any particular rift guardian. Life per Wrath spent on the Flense and possibly even from the Wrathful passive will increase these numbers even more, although I wouldn't choose either of those as the first source of healing.

Gameplay

First off, positioning is critical to maximizing the amount of damage you get out of this build. Try to always be hitting multiple enemies, 5+ is of course ideal. As little time as possible should be spent hitting one enemy as we will be bleeding wrath out as well as doing rather poor damage overall. We have Condemn and Steed Charge to bring singular/smaller groups of enemies to other groups of enemies. This is the single biggest factor in determining how quickly you can clear a Greater Rift, and what tier of Greater Rift you can clear with your gear and skill with this build.

Elite affixes: Thunderstorm and Frozen Pulse hurt. A lot. No matter what. Xephirian Amulet negates Thunderstorm, Talisman of Aranoch negates Frozen Pulse. Frozen Pulse, however, can be avoided before it does any damage to you. Thunderstorm cannot, but we should be able to get out of it after only taking 1, maybe two hits. Fire Chains can be avoided by careful positioning and enemy control. This build is great at letting you do both while still doing damage. Reflect Damage is either awful or a non-factor for you, the difference between the two being whether or not you have a healing stat on the Golden Flense. Frozen hurts. It can and will kill you at points. See Amulets in the Item section for a bit on Talisman of Aranoch. Poison Enchanted/Plagued, again, either awful or amazing based solely on whether or not you are using a Mara's Kaleidoscope, which I recommend usuing. Mortar can be deadly if caught out in the open. If you have Iron Skin, or Akarat's Champion layered on top of Iron Skin, or are hitting 5+ enemies with Sweep Attack for good mitigation from Ancient Parthan Defenders, you're good to go.

If you have Life per Wrath Spent on gear: Don't reactivate Law of Valor on packs of 3+ enemies. You don't need the wrath savings in those situations AND you get a massive boost to your healing from this stat in those cases.

EDIT: Convention of Elements goes through 4 elements for us. Holy, Lightning, Physical, Fire. While fightning rift guardians, time your Akarat's Champion activation with the start of a Lightning cycle. It'll go Lightning, Physical, Fire, Holy, Lightning and Akarat's Champion will wear off at the END of the second Lightning in that cycle. This method will net you a few billion more damage over the course of each Akarat's activation.

Rift Guardians

Any Rift Guardian can be killed by this build. It's a matter of how long and how frustrating it will be for you. For this build guide we are focusing solely on guardians that spawn adds, as these are what we will need to see to be able to clear Greater Rift tier 55 and above.

Stonesinger is still the best. The one-two swing combo can very easily kill you. The trick is to jump out for the first punch as the second does not hit very hard at all. Rocks falling also hurt. Don't stand in those. This boss actually gets easier and goes down faster as each clone spawns. Practice the Stonesinger Dance. Perfect it. Clear rifts.

Hamelin/Binder/Bone Warlock - These next 3 are all similarly challenging. That is to say, they aren't. With a Mara's Kaleidoscope you can stand inside Hamelin's Ratnado and become immune to death for the duration. Frequently spawning rat adds, although smaller in number, keep the damage numbers high and your Wrath globe full. Binder's adds are less frequent although more come at a time and with larger HP pools. Her frontal cone spike attack is PHYSICAL, and can kill you. With Mara's, the poison balls don't hurt at all anymore. Bone Warlock only spawns adds infrequently at first, although growing more frequent as the boss fight progresses. Don't hesistate to use Steed Charge and Condemn to bring them to the boss, especially after teleports. Adds galore during the final 25%.

With a Mara's Kaleidoscope, any other boss that spawns adds is still fairly easy with the exception of Ember. Ember still hurts. Fanatics hurt, Fallen Shaman can end up very far away and still raining fireballs on you. This boss is pain but still easier than any other boss that does not have adds.

Voracity/Choker(without Mara's): Without Mara's.... you're going to hate these two. They might not even be worth killing at that point.

Thank you for bearing with the very large walls of text, but this should hopefully cover a lot of questions that people may have around the build. I will maintain this guide for the duration of Season 3, and update for Season 4/Patch 2.3 should anything change for this build. Any additional questions can be added in the comments below.

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