Build Guide
Rotation
The build is built around your Convention of the Elements rotation and each element has a different purpose. Phyiscal/Lightning rotation are meant for scouting and building density if you are already at your spot. Cold rotation is for your last decision of what spot you want to stack up mobs for your Holy rotation. Fire rotation is for Grouping everything with a couple of Cyclone strikes and attack 3 times with Way of the Hundred Fists. Holy is for doing all your damage with Mythic Rhythm up hit Blinding Flash and then hit Seven Sided Strike and do all the damage. It is OK to let your rotation go into the first 2 seconds of holy cycle. Just make sure you do it a little earlier next time to make sure it helps keep your holy cycle in line.
- Lightning: Scout/kite
- Physical: Scout/Kite
- Cold: Decide final spot for grouping/kiting
- Fire: Setup (Cyclone Strike/Mythic Rhythm)
- Holy: Damage (Blinding Flash/Seven Sided Strike)
Skills
Cyclone Strike
Cyclone strike is your primary ability to build density for your Seven Sided Strike. With Cyclone strike you will need to watch that it does not consume your Mythic Rhythm, Mythic Rhythm does not show on your bars but it's there don't worry! Mobs will DR after two uses of this so be careful when you are using it and use it during fire rotation preferably. Mobs can be hit by it even if they're clipping edges and will put them on DR. If you play support your lessons from playing that will come in handy.
Way of the Hundred Fists
The only rune acceptable is assimilation because of the damage it can provide. Every rotation you should aim to get at least 20 stacks or more of this.
Seven Sided Strike
With Seven sided Strike the only time you will be using it is during Holy rotation. This is because with the 42% cooldown reduction it will be up everytime the holy rotation comes up. The rune's Fulminating Onslaught AOE is not very big and as such having mobs grouped up as tight as possible is needed. This can mean even skipping elites because they are too big (with the exception of last mob of avenger affix).
Blinding Flash
Explanation for this is simple. You use it to buff the damage of your Seven sided Strike. Although you CAN use it for defensive purposes if you will have it up again in time for your Holy cycle.
Dashing Strike
Your mobility spell/avoidance ability. You will use the blinding speed rune to give yourself increased dodge. Dodge completely negates the damage. You will always want to keep at least one stack of this for emergencies. DOES NOT consume Mythic Rhythm stack.
Serenity
You will use this during your fire rotation to keep you alive while you are building your density for your upcoming holy rotation.
Passives
- Beacon of Ytar
- Mythic Rhythm
- Near Death Experience
- Harmony
- Relentless Assault
Beacon of Ytar and Mythic Rhythm are mandatory as Beacon provides the cooldown reduction needed for the build and Mythic Rhythm is 40% multiplicative damage. These are mandatory and cannot be swapped for anything else.
Near Death Experience and Harmony provide defensive passives and are safe picks. I would pick both of these if you are lacking paragon and augments or feel you still take too much damage. I feel of the two Near Death Experience is the best option.
Relentless Assault provides 20% multiplicative damage, this is half of Mythic Rhythm.
The best combo for low gear and paragon would be Harmony and Near Death Experience while Relentless Assault and Near Death experience for when you are almost all augmented and over 1,000 paragon.
Rares/Elites
For rares and elites most affixes are safe for this build because of how much time you will spend being invulnerable. The only real bad affix is Orbiter because of the large amounts of damage and the worst being wormhole. Wormhole is the worst affix because it can totally ruin your rotation by putting you out of position during your holy cycle. This affix can be worth a skip unless you think the density of the mobs around it are worth the chance.
At higher greater rifts you will end up skipping a lot of rares because there is not a lot of density around them. It is preferred to kite rares to white packs if you have already damaged them. You will never stop to kill a rare if it is above a certain amount of health. The only time you should stick around to kill rares is if you can kill them in a single holy rotation. Eg. So if you are near the exit and a rare won't die in a single rotation it is probably best to just go to the next floor.
Maps
The positioning of the maps in their tier do not reflect any position within the tier. You will always want a battlefield of eternity/Sand Map with Eternal woods can be close to these tiers it is not considered Excellent tier due to the fact that it has a ton of things that can cause LoS for your Cyclone Strike.
Excellent tier
- A5 Battlefield of Eternity
- A2 Sand Map
- A3 Festering Woods (Green Woods Map)
Good tier
- Eternal Woods Map
- A2 Vault
- A2 Archives
- A4 Spire
- A2 Spider Cave
Medicore Tier
- A5 Malth map (Only if you get a lot of platforms)
- A1 Halls of Agony (Only if you get lots of open areas)
Bad tier
- A5 town
- A3 Barracks (This is generally bad but can even go up to good tier if you have a short with lots of open parts)
Garbage Tier, just leave
- Sewars
- ALL CAVE MAPS THAT AREN'T SPIDER CAVE.
Mob Types (wip)
Excellent Tier
- Coven (cultist, summoners, Zealot, Conjurors. thrall)
- Accursed/ghouls
- Lacuni Slash (although dangerous they can stack very well)
- Armoured destroyers
- plague carriers
Good Tier
- bugs
- undead (unburried, zombie, mothers, aboms)
Bad tier
- Large melee mob (Armaddons, Executioners, sand dwellers,oppresor)
- Morlu (all of them suck and they can heal)
- Bogon
- Fallen
Garbage Tier
- Mallot Lords
- Ranged mobs (Goatmen spearmen, Guardians, hell witch, Goatmen shamans, Seraph, Guardians)
- Lashers
- Golgors
- Hellhide Tremors
- Horned Charger
For progression the website below shows sets monsters appear in and what their percentage is worth. Set 41 is probably the best set as you can stack the mobs very tightly for Area Damage.
http://warpath.eu/ms.html
Bosses
To be honest all bosses are fine with the exception of Ember, Blighter and Bloodmaw. Blighter just does a ton of single target damage and you have to move away so you can't stack stricken up on him fast. Blighter because of the single target damage and he can can do his normal tentacle attacks which can help prevent you from attacking. And Bloodmaw. He does a frontal cleave which can 1 shot you and jump around.
Although not all bosses but some bosses you will just be sitting around or running away waiting for Holy Cycle. This is what I have found to be the best because it will help avoid being 1 shot by some of the rift guardians. You will do your typical fire/holy rotation Serenity > Mythic Rhythm setup > Blinding Flash > Seven Sided Strike rotation.
Some of them do not hit hard but will spawn adds you will need to keep these mobs close to the boss so you can get them with your Way of the Hundred Fists and build more stacks.
Try and hit bosses as much as possible to help build your stricken stacks. The boss damage is pretty good and much higher than expected.
Also try and let your mystic allies tank everything. This is very key in helping build stricken stacks because you can then safely melee bosses from behind.
Ideally you'll want a power pylon on the boss depending on your timing in the rift best time to use it would be after a couple rotations so you can get stricken stacked. Assuming 2-3 minutes of on the boss I will pop the power with 1 minute left, although this can be risky as it makes it so you will have to play cautiously because missing a power pylon cycle with some bosses with adds can be really devastating.
The best bosses are Erethon, Raiziel. These two bosses you can face tank (even up to 90+) and just sit there stacking Stricken.
Pylon
Speed
Speed Pylons are very good for helping to kite or to be used to help skip floors. When taking a speed pylon you gain a knockback which helps make it very easy to help skip mobs. I found this to be very helpful to get more mobs because you'll be able to run between your main group of mobs and more you're gathering. This pylon excels when you are already ahead or the rift is dense allowing for more density to be kited.
Channeling
Channeling for this build is not very strong but it can have added survivablity. It can also fill the roll of a speed pylon in helping kite and for skipping floors.
Power
Not very strong for killing trash, as you should be able to easily kill whites, and not the best for killing elites this is best used for the boss where you can stack stricken very easy. In the boss section I talk more about the Pylon but it is very good for the boss and should be saved unless you are confident you need it to get to the boss in time.
Conduit
Very strong for killing trash and elites. About 2-3 ticks will most small/medium sized white trash and does massive damage to elites. I find it is best to kite three or more elites to a conduit damage them a bit and then pop the conduit to finish them off. This pylon is easily the best pylon for clearing trash and should be used only when you can get multiple elite kills or a very large amount of whites.
Shield
Shield pylon is an ok pylon as it allows you to build density for 3 rotations in one spot. I find it is very good when facing lots of elite packs, although you may not kill them all within the shield being able to dps them down is still very good for progression if you can kill them latter.
The Ideal rift will contain a Power at the boss spawn, a conduit for multiple elite kills and large amount of white trash and a third that is up to your liking.
Speed Clear and Theorycraft NOT TESTED.
If you want to play this build but for speed clears I would suggest playing Uliana's with Madstone speed build variant. A few pieces of your gear will already be augmented from your normal build so it'll be easier to play. I do not know how fast Uliana's can speed clear but t11 should be no problem.
If you must play the Inna's/Uliana's for speed normal rifts my suggestion would be to replace your rings with Focus And Restraint and use a Hellfire Neck with a damage passive. You would also use Flow of Eternity or an In-geom in your cube. You would also replace esoteric for Bane of the Powerful. Swap Mythic Rhythm out as well. Below will be a list of acceptable passives. THIS WILL NOT BE AS FAST AS OTHER BUILDS AND WILL BE SLOW COMPARED TO THEM. I HAVE NOT TESTED THIS. Stat priority would be CDR(On as much as possible, replaced AD on gear for CDR) > CHC > CHD without Convention you will be spamming Seven Sided Strike more Often. If you wish to keep Endless Walk Set you can use Stone of Jordan over Convention.
Passives These are tiered
- Beacon of Ytar
- *Harmony (can be replaced for more damage)
- Unity
- Determination
- Momentum
- Relentless Assault (if you swap cyclone strike to wall of wind)
Skills
- Blinding Flash - Faith in the Light (Can swap this out for Exploding Palm - Impending Doom
- Cyclone Strike - Implosion/Wall of Wind (only use if using Relentless Assault on neck/passive)
- Dashing strike - Way of the falling Star
- Serenity - Ascension/Instant Karma/Peaceful Repose/ If in a group Tranquility can be nice
- Way of the Hundred Fist - Assimilation
- Seven Sided Strike - Fulminating Onslaught
Your answer is literally the within first 2 sentences dude.
@FunkMonk
I've seen somewhere someone did a 95 with this build idk what their paragon/gear is like but I am up to GR 90 now and my gear is still bad.
Hey can you give me advice about my character please. I created it in the last 3 days, just began the season this week.
https://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/jipi1472-1859/hero/88894110
A lot of the gear looks fine. But you need a socket in your traveler's pledge.
looks like you just need to just get ancient gear. You'll want to look for gloves that have CHD over the AD. though.
Gear I would focus on using mats to upgrade would be
Weapon (need ancient) > Compass rose > Convention (look for over 190%) > Traveler's pledge > Gloves > Chest (need secondary resist) > Helm > Shoulders > Bracers > Belt
Hi there!
Is defenitely a nice and original build and thx for adding all the details. They really help.
What about using mistic ally instead of blind flash/serenity just for the active effect? You are healed to full everything gets stunned etc... you can still scratch some more damage with it for the active effect if you time it with CoE.