If you’re looking for power and clearing speed, this isn’t the character you’re looking for. Other builds do that way better. This character was designed for hardcore mode, and as such, my priorities for this build are: 1) Defense. 2) Double down on defense. 3) DPS. In that order.
If you’re looking for something with 30k HP, 5k armor, over 3k DA, resistances both with the maximum raised and overcapped, along with a block chance that can hit 100%, two healing devotions, plenty of life regen and lifesteal, multiple sources of damage absorption, and a couple of circuit breakers thrown in for good measure, you’ve come to the right place.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/DV97A5jN
I did what I could to avoid requiring stupidly rare MI equipment, and I somewhat succeeded. Sadly, I was short enough on chaos resistance to need some double rare gloves, but at least they’re crafted, not MI. Actually, I give preferential treatment to crafted gear in general since, not only do you benefit from Angrim’s % armor completion bonus, but by avoiding the game’s autosave (by closing the game from the task manager, loading from a previous cloud save, or something similar) you can avoid wasting materials in your quest to roll an above average copy of the item, or get that double rare you’re looking for. Although it can require some stubbornness, it’s still far less painful than hunting for a perfect MI.
Don’t underestimate the usefulness of that. Thanks to being stubborn about getting above average crafted gear, my character’s armor in game is nearly a full 1,000 points higher than the grimtools link says it should be–6102 vs 5265. Without temporary buffs active.
Pros:
-Nearly unkillable. Stay away from the Avatar of Mogdrogen, though. He’ll eat your face. Pretty much everything else, including the Ravager and Callagadra, are entirely face tankable.
-Definitely hardcore viable. I did it myself, after all.
-Crucible 170 with extra spawn capable.
-Many enemies in the Crucible that give other builds trouble are very nearly ignorable–ex double Reapers, Archmage Aleksander.
-Multiple sources of sustain prevents single point failure.
-Simple playstyle. For active skills, you have 1 attack, 1 movement, 3 defense, and 1 res reduction.
Cons:
-Retaliation builds in general suffer from being less effective against non-melee enemies. Fortunately, it isn’t nearly as bad as it was pre-FG.
-Damage, while better than you might expect given my near total disregard for it, isn’t great. It’s enough to outpace Van Aldricht’s stupid heal and shield, but not by a whole lot.
-On top of that, damage varies wildly depending on what buffs and random procs are up.
-Main attack is single target, which combined with the above gives the build a particular weakness to chaotic fights with multiple enemies capable of healing. The rougher levels in the Crucible are less about surviving a tough fight and more about overcoming a stalemate. At one point, I legitimately failed to realize I was being double Reapered because I was too busy chasing down some random Support elite.
-No ranged capability (Guardians are too weak to count), meaning fighting on damage terrain will hurt you worse than any enemy ever will.
-Leveling a retaliation build in hardcore is risky without good gear on hand from previous characters. Respeccing later is probably the safer option. That being said, the Perdition set and its Empowered version are common as dirt, as far as mid-level blue gear goes, anyway.
I’m not fond of the Shattered Realms, so I can’t say much about how I’d fare aside from I got the skill points from 25 easily enough.
Things I’m still looking to improve:
-More CDR. This build has a huge number of buffs, most of which are passively procced. More CDR is always better. I took Path of the Three instead of the otherwise far more appropriate Menhir’s Bulwark purely for the CDR, despite the fact that PotT hurts me by converting physical damage to acid. It might be worth swapping the amulet for a Mythical Azrakaa’s Sands, but I don’t have one of those, so I can’t test it.
-Building off the Sentinel of the Three set looks like you could get more and more consistent damage at the expense of worse RR if you rebalance the resistances. But again, I’m missing the equipment for testing.
-The build has exactly 0% skill disruption protection. Generally speaking, this character isn’t very skill dependent, so it isn’t a huge issue, but it doesn’t take much imagination to foresee a scenario where it comes at exactly the wrong time and ends up killing you.
-I’d really like to kill the Avatar of Mogdrogen, but I had to run away so fast when I tried I’m not even sure where to start.
