TL;DR
Fastest setup I tried - very unreliable.
Most reliable setup I tried - barely a skeleton build, slow, and full of MIs.
Conclusions:
It’s pretty hard to create a Skeleton Ritualist that can clear 150-170 even once in a few tries with 4 buffs and banner.
Vitality Skeleton Ritualist is a meme build.
HERE WE GO:
I wanted to try to make a Vitality Skeleton Ritualist and thought I’d chronicle the incredible failures I faced when attempting to clear Gladiator 151-170. Every attempt I made was with 4 buffs and Banner knowing that I’d need every ounce of help I could get. Some of these iterations performed okay but in the end, nothing was even remotely close to being reliable.
Ultimately, the Witching Hour was not actually the best weapon for this build but it was depressingly close considering I was trying to make a vitality Ritualist.
My initial plan was to use the Corrupter of Souls set. I know that that is a bad starting point, given that Beastcaller’s Cowl is single-handedly better than the entire set, but I wanted to try. I used unrealistic Ritualist’s Wendigo Gaze of Caged Souls and Taskmaster’s Reaper’s Leggings of the Wild for all of this in hopes of improving my odds, but it was enough.
I do not use MoT because I am not sufficiently competant using it to even close to worthwhile.
A few general pain points I thought I’d mention:
- Larria: If skeletons are standing too close to Larria when she uses her nova skill, it will one-shot them. I’ve seen all 11 skeletons, with buffs, die simultaneously from her nova.
- Ekket’Zul: His fissure has similar impact to Larria’s nova. Any skeleton standing on top of it gets shotgunned and dies instantly (with buffs). In someways it’s better because it’s easier to predict/avoid, but it can also be worse because it lingers, and skeletons moving in that general vacinity will die very quickly as well.
- It is NEVER worthwhile to re-summon skeletons if you have any alive with buffs and fewer are dead than you will summon at once (i.e. you have 9 out of 11 and will summon 3 at a time). One buffed skeleton is worth more than 3 unbuffed
This list doesn’t include every minor variations I tried, but it’s most of them.
[ul][li]1st iteration[/li]This did pretty well until around wave 160, occasionally clearing wave 160 within 3.5 minutes. By that point, skeletons had started to die off, and by the late 160s, every single wave took 1+ minute of kiting and slowly resummoning, and surviving wave 170 was extremely rare.
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[ul][li]2nd iteration[/li]Since I spent a lot of time waiting to resummon, I tried swapping the Sovereign Ruby for Undying Conduit. Result? Worse than before. Even though I could now summon skeletons 4 at a time with a 6 second cooldown (increased from 3 with a 7.3 second cooldown), 90% of the time those 4 would be dead before the 6 second cooldown had expired, and so the loss of damage hurt more than the extra summoning rate helped.
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[ul][li]3rd iteration[/li]Was it even possible to summon them fast enough to be useful? I tried adding Theurgist’s Spectral Cown of the Wilds into the mix and maxing Undead Legion so that I could summon 4 every 2 seconds. Nope. The summoning animation itself takes ~1 second. By the time those 4 are on their feet, any nemesis would have killed most or all of the previous batch, and probably be attacking me by that point. Note that the skeletons had 80% resist without Crucible buffs to everything except Pierce and Bleed (which are higher than GT shows due to bonuses from Emboldening Presence and Oak Skin). The damage was pretty low, I know, but that doesn’t matter if you don’t have any pets to deal damage.
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[ul][li]4th iteration[/li]At this point I realized that my only hope was kill things before skeletons die, so I decided to give in an use Beastcaller’s Cowl, and used conduit so I could keep skeletons maxed. Nope.
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[ul][li]5th iteration[/li]I needed more damage, so I tried using Ruby instead of Conduit, letting Raise Skeleton sit at 25, choosing to stick with 2 Spiritbinder Glyphs instead of swapping one for a Wendigo Conjuring Seal since I was using both Wraiths and Primal Spirit. This was a significant improvement. Managing to clear 2 out of 6 attempts, and making it to wave 169 on another.
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[ul][li]6th iteration[/li]I noticed that once skeletons had lost buffs, the Primal Spirit was dealing most of my damage since rarely were many of them alive at once. I tried the Necrolord’s Gaze. Nope. The loss of damage and elemental resistance is too much to overcome.
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[ul][li]7th iteration[/li]Next I tried to use the equipment setup from #5 with a different devotion setup to include Shepherd’s Crook. For the first time ever, I started dying before my pets did. The pets survived pretty well though, and were killing things faster, so if I could get survivability up this might be a good devotion setup.
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[ul][li]8th iteration[/li]Back to the original devotion setup, but time to try other weapons. I decided to try the homeless leper’s version of the Witching Hour - the Spirit Cannon. High cuunning requirement, fewer skill bonuses, no pet speed or health bonuses, no flat damage, no RR, WAY less % damage. I know it’s only epic, good lord this is so much worse. Anyway, I tried it and it actually went a lot better than I was expecting, but at wave 170 I found myself kited with zero living skeletons for a minute or so before I died.
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[ul][li]9th iteration[/li]At this point I had to wonder, given the that I did okay with the Spirit Cannon despite it being is completely useless, maybe the Witching Hour would be effective here. Surely, on vitality Ritualist would outperform a chaos one, there’s no way Witching Hour would be more effective. Right? RIGHT??!? I completely respec’d into a conventional Witching Hour chaos setup with both Beastcaller’s and Skeletons, and it actually failed pretty hard. I tried a few variations of devotions, both me and my pets were too fragile.
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[ul][li]10th iteration[/li]Just because a conventional Chaos Witching Hour build didn’t work out, Witching Hour is still a lot better than any weapon I had tried so far, so I gave the same thing a shot using the same old vitality setup as before. This performed almost as well as similar setups using the Guardian of Death’s Gate. I find that a little depressing, but wholey unsurprising. The main downside was the lack of ability to sustain myself. The Guardian of Death’s Gate ADTCH is does a lot to keep me alive between Reap Spirit and Bone Harvest (but not enough).
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[ul][li]11th iteration[/li]Without the extra vitality conversion there is a lot more physical damage, so I decided to try respecing devotions a little to use Assassin’s Mark instead of Twin Fang. Apparently Twin Fang actually does a lot to help keep the skeletons alive, because this failed pretty hard.
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I tried a bunch of 1-hadned weapon + off-hand builds. They all did worse than the two-handed weapons, but at some point I tried using Dirge of Akrovia and found that with the Revenant around, I was able to much more consistently recover from having no living skeletons. I decided to revist the best of two of the two-handed builds to see if there was any improvement. I have litterally never played a build before where Dirge was an effective Relic choice, including when trying Vitality Cabalists, so I had discounted it.
[ul][li]Nth iteration[/li]Many skeletons died. I managed a 6:45 clear. Wow! Seemed to be a fluke though, as I could not repeat those results.
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I tried to replicate the results using the Witching Hour. It was a little faster on average until I died, most of the time.
At this point I decided to try Diviner’s + Skeletons, which I’ve had success with in the past on Occultist builds.
[ul][li]Diviner 1st[/li]This didn’t go very well.
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[ul][li]Diviner 2nd[/li]I tried using Blight Fiends instead of Totem and it seemed to be a lot better offensively, but pets were dying faster.
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[ul][li]Diviner 3rd[/li]Making a few other sacrifices, I took both Blight Fiend and Wendigo Totem. This performed pretty reasonably well. Some Skeletons died but overall it was smoother sailing.
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[ul][li]Diviner 4th[/li]I tried the non-Totem version again, using Unstable Anomaly. This was pretty successful again, probably the best yet. Somewhere close to 50% success rate of ~10 minute clears using 4 buffs, banner, and 3 double-rare MIs. Wow!
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[ul][li]Ugh iteration[/li]At this point I went back to the non-diviners builds to try to incorporate Blight Fiends. This didn’t work very well.
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[ul][li]Why do bother iteration[/li]Resigned to the fact that was not going to be able to keep skeletons alive, I decided to spec out of Twin Fang for Shepherd’s Call. This didn’t work either.
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[ul][li]Final iteration[/li]One last shot using the Witching Hour. Maybe the extra offense will save me? Nope. I give up.
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