As I usually do, I was theorycrafting builds and thinking about which one I’d like to do play next, and the question that I often find asking myself is; “Is it viable self found?”
What are, in your opinions, the best self-found builds?
Note: By self-found I do not only imply ‘only gear found by the character being used’, but also not(or sub)-optimal; it is unrealistic to think that we find all the epic gear we need on a single character(at least for me… my drops suck!).
Right now I’m following Squibs Retaliation Warder and I have to say that it is pretty damn good; I never died from combat, only when dicking around too much in aetherfields.
It does amazing damage, and all bosses are easy to kill(even if they take a long time) thanks to the extreme tankiness and survivability.
Actually it’s not. I play this game with no trading, no cheats, no aether clusters, no health potions (after Elite) and not even a shared stash. To construct an optimal G5 build you will need around 4 days total play time if you know where and how to farm efficiently. Crafting things like a Badge of Mastery with +5 to the skill you want will indeed drive you nuts. However, what matters in GD is the journey, not the end.
Short-answer: If you hate grinding, the best “self-found” builds will be those that have the highest degree of support in terms of gear and devotions. More explicitly, builds that revolve around pets, vitality (i.e. vitality conjurer), bleed and fire/chaos damage (i.e. pyromancers).
I would strongly recommend you to follow the Tri-element Saboteur guide on the forum if you want a fast leveling self found guy.
It has good clear speed, good mobility (135% MS with a gap closer) plus very tanky. Most of your gears during leveling phase can come from faction vendor. Your best set of weapons are guaranteed to drop, free of charge. A lot of your BiS gears are craftable, and some of them can be replaced by low level Epic just fine. It is playable by 1 hand too! (if that is to your liking).
I found casters to be least item dependent unless going vs certain nemesis or bourbons but you need to play kiting game except vit conjurer which is just facetank and facroll but with low dps
Best self-found build is hands down the reflect warder. You can start ultimate without a single legendary and most of the epics used are fairly common drops, you can even work it with mostly greens.
My CDR spellbreaker build works rather fine self found, and I cleared 100% of the content except for a few nemesis/Edge of Reality with it without optimal gear. Some fights may turn into “Run around spamming Blade Spirit to let it burn stuff down”, as happens vs Moo (Just can’t risk sitting in his face for more than 3-4 seconds due to being a caster focus, and not having enough armor/physical resistance to tank him. Notably, I did just get a gear upgrade after my last fight vs him, should make it go fairly faster for when I can afford to go all in on him when Mirror is up).
Bonus points, the most valuable aspects of gearing it can easily be done with either crafted gear (Infact, the BiS amulet is a double rare amulet, but is easily replaced for suboptimal stuff by just about any amulet with CDR, with an epic being the secondary BiS due to having a high CDR value and +1 all Nightblade skills), or vender gear (Only a single legendary is better on it than a Elite Rovers Winter Codex, for example, and that is counting it having a perfect CDR roll to boot, as you can just easily farm for a perfectly rolled Winter Codex, you can’t depend on that for a Tome of the Arcane Waste).