Nuke Phantasmal Blades run is up. Will get to savagery tonight. I think after I finish doing each class excluding Oathkeeper (since Oathkeeper is so obviously easy across the board) I will do a follow up for each of them to 30.
edit Shaman videos for savagery 1-15 and 15-30 will be up tonight.
@EvilGinger the shaman lvl 1-15 video is up. I decided to run through warden and cronley after that so the next video is still processing since it’s over 2 hours long. But I show Shaman lvl 15-26. I put my skills in sub-optimal places and I still do fine.
You’ll notice that I start to struggle a bit around the Warden, but shortly after that I unlock my wendigo totem and then the game becomes a BREEZE. If I had spent skill points more optimally in the first place it’d have also been much easier. Spam Primal Strike is the way to go for a while.
Greatly appreciate it. Learned a good bit about the build, and have no regrets that I cheated and farmed for iron and gear to sell, and farmed for components and pots. And spent a ton of iron buying both as well, lol! That was a fun watch. Thanks again. Someday I’ll learn to play this game. Maybe. Maybe not. As long as I am still having fun after another ~600 hours. 
That’s not cheating. It’s only cheating for the sake of my demonstration in this thread. I was just showing off how even when I hamstring my own strategy by going non optimal routes I can do vet.
For savagery it’s usually best to just start spam primal strike and swap later. 2 handed is better than 1 handed early on. Rushing wendigo totem is very powerful now. Maxing devouring swarm straight away can carry you to level 30 ish as well. Making sure to break crates and open chests is very important in vet. You can see in the vids that some drops helped a lot.
Hi all,
I deffinitely don’t consider myself a pro player. But I wanted to give a new Veteran a try, just to check it myself, not to leave it unchallenged. I must agree, the begining was hard. But with time and deaths I learnt to pay attention to animations (I found out they give a significant amount of info about incomming threats). My biggets trouble so far was clearing Arkovian Undercity level 3 with many mobs and 2 Skeletal Gargantuans that immobilized me. With a limitted space to kite them it was a bit frustrating. But the more I play, the more I learn about the game actual mechanics and I learnt to like the channenge. I’m not in a hurry, I gave myself all the time I can spend on GD to deal with it. If getting to Elite will take me month or 2, doesn’t matter. Why to hurry? With the pace I took and the approach I learnt to enjoy Veteran from “omg how could they” went all the way to “let’s give it a chance” and “It’s 100% enjoyable”.
Sorry for a long post, just wanted to express how I feal now, when I found out stuff I used to be ignorant to.
I haven’t read all of the posts but what about grasping vines? (sorry if already mentioned)
Did act 1-4, lvl 1-40 veteran with rune of kalastor Inquisitor with no lokarr set, no xp pots in HC today. It took me ~5h 7min. My personal conclusion:
1a) it should be the preferred mode for new players that wanna have a challenge right from the start of the game (and now they get rewarded for that with 10% xp, yay!). I’d advise all new players to try to learn the game in veteran.
1b) it also provides a smaller difficulty jump from veteran/normal to elite than the jump from normal to elite, which makes elite less frustrating for new players (assuming they weren’t frustrated with veteran, in which case they can sti just untick and go back to normal)
2) it’s still useless for speedlvling
@EvilGinger the savagery second video is up and in it you can see how things get harder because of the bad choices I make, but then get infinitely easier with wendigo totem. I definitely recommend checking it out around the warden fight and then skip to when I start using wendigo totem to see how powerful it is.
PRM video is being uploaded, link already in OP but should be available in a couple hours. So far this little thread has been super easy. Where are the whiners now?
Also, I’ve decided not to do soldier or oathkeeper requests because if you can’t figure out how to faceroll with those classes you don’t deserve to win 
@thejabrixone @iOnlyPlayPetBuilds I’ll do grasping vines shaman after I finish the next 2 videos. I don’t have huge hopes for it but I don’t think it’ll be too bad.
I’ve uploaded drain essence Necro and Stun Jacks is currently being processed and should be available in 2 hours from this post. So does anyone feel I should take any of the above builds to level 45?
So far they were all fine.
I feel like the rules are a bit restrictive. Hypothetically if a new player struggled because of no AoE or points spread out too much then surely they could learn and try a different approach. I just recently started a fresh defiler on HC veteran. I went stun jacks to lvl 7 then respec into explosive strike. It’s on twitch but against the rules?
Another cheap trick to speedrun this is to simply ignore the first boss and troublesome monsters (e.g bwc demo skips wightmire rift battle and all fire res monsters) come back at higher level to cheese win faster. Focus on xp and come back later is the best bet for weapon damage skills like FS. Discord cadence may be fastest way for that skill given enemy armor is a nuisance early on.
If you want to break the rules you can. I mean, I said once you get to 50 in your mastery bar, anything goes since the point should be proven.
The rules are restrictive so that I or we can prove that even under restrictions that make certain builds harder, veteran is still perfectly manageable. That’s the point man.
I’m not going to be holding anyone accountable to the rules. I think I’ll make a note in the first post because of your reply though, that the rules only apply to myself.
edit necro and demo link fixed
I like that the monster damage went up, but I think they are a bit too tanky… Considering that you have to replay the whole game again on Elite, I just wish they toned down monsters HP so we can level up faster, but keep the damage so that you have to be mindful of resistances/positioning.
I wouldn’t be against some general hp tuning down in veteran but even more threatening enemy skills. Otherwise so far I think it’s alright. Some people enjoy the slower experience after all but like you I prefer more danger with not as great a speed loss.
I think it is only the boss/hero that could do with less health, and it is only the first 15-20 levels that needs to be less of a slog. I think around 15% less health for hero and Warden should have about 20% less. The character I started yesterday was using Righteous Fervor and the Warden took so long in phase 2…
I agree. Honestly, I felt that the Veteran mode wasn’t too bad… Only to maybe the unprepared upon visiting Silth Island unaware that there are some powerful nasty Heroes waiting for you out there 
Oh idea… Show off the level 11 Warden Kill on Veteran 