Answering your questions out of order in a way that makes sense to me:
You assemble the starter build with the easy items. Then you farm stuff (see below) to find legendaries and replace gear when you have enough, and shift to an end-
Builds are a jigsaw puzzle of stats and resistances. If you replace one item, you will likely lose something you need and gain too much of something else. So I’d recommend replacing all/most gear in one go and ensure all gaps are covered then.
In the meantime just keep using the starter gear you assembled, it should be a more complete package.
This thread in general and in particular the amazing breakdown by @Ceno I link here are the best writeup I’ve seen on how builds are made and designed.
I hope it will make it a lot clearer what to look for in items and when tweaking builds.
Bounties are for farming faction rep. By the time you reach endgame, they are not at all required and won’t give you anything useful. Things to farm are:
- Monster totems - only when starting out, good for finding blueprints and legendary items, but not very efficient or interesting
- Crafting ingredients - You can never have enough Ugdenblooms and Aether Shards. Not very exciting but useful. You can design runs to collect them quickly.
- Monster infrequents - either for a specific build or in general, it can be nice to have a stockpile of some useful ones for future characters. There are also various rare legendary monster infrequents that drop from certain bosses, often in skeleton key dungeons. (For example: Morgoneth’s rings, the Nightbringer, Krieg’s Set) Those are worth collecting.
- Nemesis bosses. These drop good monster infrequents and rep items to help future characters, as well as legendaries. And learning to fight them and their attack patterns is VERY helpful for Shattered Realm.
- Skeleton key dungeons (tomb of the heretic etc) - Good sources of items and many of the aforementioned legendary monster infrequents, and also a nice transitional level of challenge before shattered realm. Nemesis bosses will also show up during them.
End game challenges:
- Secret bosses and Celestials - Clones of Bourbon, Mogdrogen, Lokar, Ravagar, Calagandra, Crate of Entertainment. Ravager and Calla are very tough and drop some neat items. There are also three variants of the ravagar to fight, though you’d need 3 different characters for that. Crate is very tough for many builds and drops mostly joke item.
- Speedrun shattered realm 30-31 - Best for farming gear, and also something you can optimise builds for
- Deep shattered realm 35+ - for the challenge, no real rewards, requires more focus on survivability
- Crucible I suppose, but you don’t have it and I don’t like it.
Note that Shattered Realm also drops green monster infrequents.
Final activity
- Start a new character. That’s what most people end up doing sooner or later. Shattered realm gets old pretty fast.
Oh, and one very important point:
You are looking at OLD guides, there is no SR75 anymore. Levels have been collapsed, 75 is comparable to the old 25, new SR 40 is equivalent to old SR90? 100? Something like that, I believe. (I was not around for the old shattered realm so don’t quote me on exact numbers, just remember that the top 20 build thread is balanced around SR30-31, nothing higher.)
This link is NOT up to date for the latest patches, things have changed a bit. But it does still attempt to answer the question you’re asking.
From the top of my head, changes include:
- Phys res is no longer as important. Armour is still helpful, though the range to aim for is more 2K-3K
- Much higher HP is recommended, 20K for anyone trying to facetank
- Much higher OA (3500-4000 on many builds, some even higher) and focus on crit damage is current meta, though the old recommendation of 3K OA will still get by.