Pylon Mechanics & Usage

We oftentimes talk about paragon, gems, augments, gear, mobs, and maps influencing GR success. And of course things like skill, knowledge, and experience (who directly relate to each other). One particular aspect that is often glossed over - though it's easy to learn and also easy to master - is pylon mechanics (and how to use them). I'll compile my knowledge in this thread and would like to ask top players (if any of them read this thread) correct my mistakes; hopefully this will be helpful for all players in the upcoming Seasons, as Pylons seem to be in a relatively stable spot and no changes are to be expected. If you're a super lazy reader and just want a grossly oversimplified summary of dos and don'ts, skip to here.

• 1. Prologue: History
• 2. Detailed List of Pylons and Effects
• a) Channeling Pylon
• Conduit Pylon
• c) Power Pylon
• d) Shield Pylon
• e) Speed Pylon
• 3. Pylon Mechanics and How to Use Them
• The Dos and Don'ts

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1. History

But before we start, let's take a quick look at the history of pylons. In the first season, it was all about one pylon, especially in solo GRs: the Conduit Pylon. Pylons were spawned right after the creation of the map, and since many classes (especially barbarians) relied on having a Conduit Pylon for the rift guardian, players just scouted the entire rift (easy with Furious Charge) to check if there was a Conduit Pylon. If not, remake game; if yes, kill mobs depending on how good the rift was. This caused lots of frustration and went so far as to people declaring their "highest non-pylon GR clear", as if using a pylon was some kind of cheat. The community asked for pylons to be removed from GRs or at least the Conduit Pylon to be nerfed. Blizzard as usual said "we don't nerf, but buff everything" - which they attempted on the PTR for 2.1.2. Nevertheless, even after buffing all other pylons, the Conduit Pylon still remained too strong and was nerfed at the very end of the 2.1.2 PTR. Over time - and depending on the meta - pylons still remained powerful, but not as "broken" as in Season 1. Especially the Conduit changed from being scaled on player damage (Season 2-3) to a fixed GR scaling (Season 4+). Overall, you can find all pylon changes that were ever mentioned in patch notes (after season 1) compiled together here:

Also, pylons were a big mystery for many many players until Wudijo published this video. Lots of stuff covered in this guide will be "obvious" to players who have watched this video, and he deserves all the credit there is. This guide is meant to re-iterate on this and expand it where I see some potential for elaboration, and also offers a text guide (because that's what I do). Maybe he or someone else will put this incoming wall of text into a nice little video ;-)

2. Detailed List of Pylons and Effects

There are five pylons currently in the game. For each of them, I'll detail their effects and add some notes on when to use them (and when not to); much of this is common knowledge, but maybe some of you will find some new info you didn't know before.

a) Channeling Pylon

• Duration: 30 seconds
• The cooldown reduction granted is 75%
• For the duration of Channeling, your spells do not have any cost associated ("free casting"). Exceptions: skills that drain all resource as a means to increase damage (e.g., Boulder Toss, Arcane Meteor).

The use of this pylon varies a lot depending on your build. For Energy Twister solo runs in S5 this was by far the best pylon, as it allowed for maximum Twister stacks even on a single target boss. Those single targets might've taken 5 minutes to kill without Channeling and 20 seconds with it - that's how powerful it was! For a build that is not capped by resource nor cooldown reduction, it has very little usefulness. In that case, think about what other benefits you can get - for example, a LoN DH might be able to spam Smoke Screen which makes it possible to pull very aggressively, or if you use a movement ability (Dashing Strike, Teleport, and so on) you can use the Channeling to quickly skip a "bad map". For a LoN Bombardment Crusader, who deals the main damage during the physical CoE cycle, the biggest benefit is to stack up Stricken, as the additional Bombardments will deal less damage - make sure to not "waste" a CoE cycle by spamming Bombardment and have it on cooldown when physical comes back up.

Conduit Pylon

• Duration: 30 seconds
• The damage does not depend on player's weapon damage, but scales with GR level.
• The lightning strikes switch between targets and attack the same target less frequently, but it has only a limited number of strikes.
• On average, it seems like there are approximately 5-10 Conduit lightning strikes per second (very roughly from a video analysis).
• UPDATE: No buffs/debuffs/player damage affects the Conduit damage. The damage of every lightning strike is 610248.7×(Min:0.4 - Max:0.5)×GR Life Multiplier (source).

A Conduit Pylon can be very powerful when used correctly, but it can also be wasted if used without proper preparation. The player/group should know beforehand what mobs are easy to kill and try to use the Conduit in a situation in which the used build/group composition might struggle. For example, in the S5 group meta (Energy Twisters) trash will die relatively fast, and elites will be killed faster as long as they are surrounded by trash to proc area damage. Once all that trash is dead, killing elites will take a long time. A Conduit Pylon does the opposite: killing lots of trash will take a lot of time, since the beams will cycle through all the trash. Therefore, the Conduit should be used to "finish off" elites and champions, but not before most of the trash is dead.

The opposite is true for single-target builds, such as certain WD specs or the potentially powerful Season 6 Frenzy/Thorns barb. Single elites will melt easily, but large groups of white mobs will take too long to kill. Here, the yellow elites should be killed off, and Conduit can be used to clear a dense room of high progress white mobs.

In any case, oftentimes a little bit of strategic thinking is a good idea before taking Conduit. In a solo game, hit ESC and think a second or two of what to do next ("should I go back and finish the two elites I left on the last floor?"). In a group game, communicate (if possible) before taking it, also to make sure everyone pays particular attention to staying alive and everyone has their cheat death proc available. Pairing Conduit and Shield is a good idea for that reason! Interestingly, a Conduit Pylon is actually the most useless pylon in one very specific instance: for the rift guardian when in a group with an Energy Twister wizard. The Conduit effect will kill the adds spawned by Nemesis Bracers, which are crucial to have in this particular setup.

c) Power Pylon

• Duration: 30 seconds
• Increases damage by 400% (which means you deal five times as much damage)

Power Pylon is usually best kept for the Rift Guardian. "Why", you might ask? Well, it gives you nothing but a very big damage boost, so you want to make sure that for the entire 30 seconds of the duration you can deal damage and not waste any time or resource during the duration of that pylon. Also, as for any pylon you don't want to die; if you want to maximize the Power Pylon on a bunch of elite packs, you might pull too much and get killed by 10+ deadly elite affixes. Overall, if you're relatively close to spawning the rift guardian (e.g., over 80% progress) you might consider keeping it. More on "how to keep pylons" in section 3.

d) Shield Pylon

• Duration: 60 seconds
• Grants immunity to all incoming damage and control impairing effects (note: the Wormhole affix is not covered by that, same as for barbarian's Ignore Pain and other CC immunitizations).
• A portion of incoming damage is reflected - this applies to monster's hits, not elite affixes. Running through plague pools will not damage the elite.

This pylon is best paired with other pylons, as it allows you to be absolutely ruthless when killing enemies while under the effect of a damage-increasing pylon such as Conduit or Power. If you are not in desperate need for this pylon, it might be a good choice to save it (e.g., until your cheat death procs). Also note a few small drawbacks about this pylon: First, in very large pulls with insane density it can cause lag. So especially on hardcore this pylon can in extreme edge cases become lethal! If your game has shown signs of lags before, be careful here (not so much an issue recently). Second, this pylon prevents a wizard from getting any Illusionist procs (as you don't take damage at all). In a cave map this might mean that you might be blocked quite often if you rely on Teleport and have no Illusory Boots. Third, when running Shi Mizu (e.g., on a LoN DH) and you take a shield pylon, taking any health globe, using a potion, or gaining a paragon means that you won't get the Shi Mizu debuff until the pylon runs out, essentially making your damage abysmal. Maybe you can make it without...?

e) Speed Pylon

• Duration: 60 seconds
• Increases movement speed by 100%
• Increases attack speed by 30%
• You gain an effect similar to Illusory Boots, being able to go through enemies and walls spawned by the Waller affix; in addition to that, you knock enemies up in the air while running through them.

Many people forget about the attack speed portion of this pylon - so ask yourself if your build benefits from it and whether you want to use the pylon because of the movement speed buff (to skip a large portion of a rift) or because of the attack speed (e.g., to have more procs on a rift guardian and/or stack up Stricken faster). Also, if you are pushing GR records and you decided to keep a few pylons, a Speed Pylon can be very helpful to quickly go to all the other pylons and have several effects combined.

3. Pylon Mechanics and How to Use Them

Okay, now to the meat - pylon spawn mechanics.

• In every Greater Rift, you get 2-4 pylons that spawn based on progress percentage.
• The percentage at which those spawn are not fixed but random (e.g., you could have a super odd distribution of no pylons until 80%, then one at 88% and one at 96%). Highly unlikely, but possible.
• No pylon can spawn twice; if you had a Conduit once, you can't get it again, but you can get any other pylon that you haven't seen yet.
• There is a small chance for a progress-unrelated pylon, spawning before any mob is killed.
• Every map has fixed pylon spawn points - you should memorize them whenever you see a pylon. Some maps have more spawn points (e.g., Aranae's Spider Cave) and some have very few (e.g., Repository of Bones/Plague Tunnels). Here's an example of a Spider Cave with spawn points, some discovered and some undiscovered, and two spawned pylons.
• Once the rift guardian has appeared, no pylon will spawn anymore (i.e., stop scouting as soon as the RG has arrived). A small caveat: sometimes pylon spawns at the edge of the "fog of war", so you might scout just half a screen in each direction to be sure (example here).
• You can lose a pylon spawn if you don't discover spots. This was done to prevent the early Seasons' exploit of discovering an entire map, killing 90% progress, and then get multiple pylons next to each other.
• If you have been granted a pylon spawn (based on your progression), the pylon will appear on the next spot. Before killing any more mobs there is no point in uncovering any other pylon spawn points!

In your mind, you should picture the pylon spawn mechanics as follows: you have an internal "pylon charge". With every mob you kill and every percent of progress in a GR, there is a chance that this charge gets activated. At this point, if you go to any pylon spawn point, the game will use the charge and award you with a random pylon. The charge "decays" after a certain amount of percentage (it cannot be stored indefinitely).

Now, we talked about keeping pylons earlier. As previously mentioned, sometimes a pylon has the biggest effect on a Rift Guardian, or is even required for you to be able to clear a certain rift. In that case, you might decide to keep a pylon (especially Power or Channeling) for that. If a pylon spawns close to the entrance of the first level, you should leave some mobs behind; once you get to 90% or more you port back to town, go back to level 1, kill the remaining mobs and spawn the RG. Don't kill too much stuff on the first level - if you only have mobs for 1-2% progress left you need to get to exactly 99% before porting back, which can be difficult! Also, if you can, leave other pylon spawn points on this area undiscovered; it increases the chance to get an additional pylon next to the Power Pylon here at 90%+ when you come back. Remember: A Power Pylon can shorten the Rift Guardian fight by up to 2 minutes (best case), so if going back takes you 30 seconds or even one minute it might still pay off. You can see a great example of pylon spawn awareness and usage, especially for the RG, in Blatty's GR98 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpOzddfc5Ag

As an example, here's a spider cave map of a rift that I did recently: http://i.imgur.com/ZJB8zhL.png

I went to the first area and found a pylon. If you want to save that pylon for later, you should try to find the "exit" and not discover all the corners, as every corner in those spider caves can have a pylon spawn point. If you find the way that continues the rift, make some progress, and come back later, you have a chance of getting another pylon here. That's what happened in my case - I cleared all the top parts of the map and found the exit, but instead of going to the next level, went back to the bottom right corner and found a pylon right before spawning the RG. Potentially triple pylon! It's not as easy on every map, but by playing more and paying attention to pylon spawn points you'll learn them over time. They're the same in GRs and Nephalem Rifts, so also pay attention to where pylons appear in your Torment rifts.

The Dos and Don'ts

So... after we've covered all the basics and groundwork, how do we actually use this knowledge in Greater Rifts?

• You get 2-4 pylons based on random percentages of progression in a GR; no pylon twice.
• After making some progress (e.g., every 5 or 10 percent) check for a pylon spawn check exactly one (and only one) pylon spawn point.
• Don't take pylons too quickly but try to maximize their effect (top groups oftentimes try to pull 4-5 elite/champion packs to a Conduit Pylon).
• If your build struggles to kill elites, make sure to kill as much trash as possible *before* taking a Conduit Pylon.
• In a group, have one person as a dedicated pylon "scouter", and optimally let him wear Nemesis Bracers (if you want yellow elite packs).
• When you're close to spawning the rift guardian, think about saving pylons. Depending on your build, some pylons are much more useful for the RG fight than in the rift (exception: Conduit Pylon which is basically always more useful prior to the RG).
• Leave some mobs behind (about 5% progression if possible) when you find a Power Pylon close to the entrance; you can port back at 95%, enter the rift at the stone next to Orek, kill the trash, and spawn the RG next to the Power Pylon on level 1.
• Don't discover too many pylon spawn points at once - it limits the amount of spawn points you can check after you've killed some mobs (especially on Spider Cave maps).
• Quickly discover pylon spawn points on a map where you don't want to spawn a pylon (especially: Hell Rift, check the top before killing mobs).

Anything else anyone can think of? Leave a comment!

Acknowledgements

• Obviously, a huge thank you to Wudijo for his guide - most of what I know of pylons I learned from his video.
• Minon brought up a good point of explaining the pylon spawn points a bit more, so you got a Paint picture in return
• Thanks to Nomadante from Reddit who pointed out the Shi Mizu interaction as well as the strange out-of-screen spawn in Dunkelvieh's video.
• lolz4 pointed out that wizards' Arcane Meteor might still consume your AP when under the effect of a Channeling Pylon.
• A great thanks to zbyxzh on Reddit for finding out that nothing (not even elite damage) affects Conduit, contrary to what was assumed before, and for even figuring out the exact numbers!

Oh good point Minon. I'll add some pictures to that in a bit just to explain on one map.

Edit: Okay, added this here - http://i.imgur.com/ZJB8zhL.png and a short explanation that goes into a bit more detail. Is that what you were asking for? I know that a video would be so much better, but I simply don't have the knowledge+time to make a video, so a cheap Paint picture has to do the job.

Actually, good point. Why create my own video if I can just link to Blatty's clear ;-)

Regarding the Arcane Meteor, I'm not sure if they changed that... I think they changed a few small details about how Channeling works with those spells. Can't really test that right now, I'll add a remark that there might be exceptions. I also don't know if Channeling+dash monk is "fixed", where it's basically sometimes bad to pick up Channeling when running with the Thousand Storms set. I'll just add a brief disclaimer, thanks.

Quote from Autiwa»

About channeling pylon. If I remember correctly, when playing my reakor barb, I could use boulder toss (that normaly depletes completely your ressource) without any change to my ressource (still full).

Maybe someone can confirm (or not) this fact.

Yeah it's the same as with Arcane Meteor... I've rephrased that again to be more clear that it does not harm skills that take the amount of resource spent as an indicator for how much damage they deal.

UPDATE: Contrary to what was assumed before, Conduit Pylon is probably not affected by elite damage - so the diamond in some support character's weapon in Season 5 was pretty much useless, at least if it was for this particular purpose. Thanks to zbyxzh on Reddit who not only found this out, but also reported the exact numbers of how to calculate the Conduit Pylon's damage!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/4ftahd/pylon_mechanics_and_usage/d2g5p5o