Leapquake and Whirlrend

If you have been around this blog for any length of time you will know that I sorta have a thing for Diablo 3. It is easily one of my favorite games of all time. On what is effectively a three month interval I drop everything that I am doing and allow myself to get wrapped up in the seasonal madness. This began on Friday and as is our tradition Grace and I did the early grind together with Byx who has of late become our regular third. Topping off the party was Grace’s husband that we lovingly refer to as “the Kraken” for reasons that won’t make sense. We actually lasted considerably longer than normal and made it to just shy of 60 before sleep finally claimed me. Unsurprising to anyone, Grace managed to grind out the rest of the season before sleep claimed her.

We actually had a significantly more structured approach to this year and we completed a challenge rift in an attempt to get a bit of a boost. I crafted a two handed mighty weapon and it thankfully turned into Fury of the Vanquished Peak, which provided a nice boost to Seismic Slam damage, but also was a required cube item for the final build. This season the Haedrig’s Gift set is Might of the Earth and as a result I built into the Seismic Slam build which involves hopping around the map and each time you do so you drop an earthquake and then using a significantly buffed Seismic Slam to do the clearing. The build ended up significantly more powerful and more quickly than I had expected in part because of that early cube item get.

My goal for the season however was to build out a Whirlrend build, which involves a specific combination of items that effectively lets you spin forever and each time you touch something apply multiple stacks of rend that tick down instantly dealing all of the damage at once. I love the build in part because it is mindless and doesn’t require any timing for finesse. It is the perfect build for farming Rifts and Bounties… which I am going to have to do a significant amount of this season to get the Avarice conquest once again. The only challenge I am running into is that the Might of the Earth build above just has a higher potential right now for clearing. Whirlrend is fun, but at least at this very moment it feels EXTREMELY squishy as in the GR60 range a pack of anything that throws a projectile can effectively end my day.

The challenge that I ran into even trying to make the Whirlrend build work, is that I was missing a number of key items… items that were not dropping at all. The biggest of these was the Ring of Might, and after some reading I found out that the easiest way to get one of these is to do Kadala’s blood shard lottery on a low level Barbarian… level 8 to be specific. As a result my second seasonal Barbarian was born, and sure enough on my third ring bought from Kadala I picked up that Ring of Might. Had I been following a guide more closely it probably would have had me pick up this item early on, but regardless it worked.

The next key item in my cross-hairs was picking up Ambo’s Pride a legendary Mighty Weapon that makes your rend apply all of its stacks at once. I was having zero luck getting this either through the lottery or through converting rare mighty weapons. Doing some more reading it is apparently available at level 29 and at that level the drop pool is significantly smaller. This meant that I needed to level my baby second barbarian so I ultimately ran a round of bounties and that was effectively enough to get it. I proceeded to attempt to gamble and rare convert on my level 30 Barbarian and the luck was not with me. However in one of the runs farming bloodshards to try another round of gambling I managed to get the drop effectively negating leveling up to 30.

The core problem with Whirlrend is that it really needs way more paragon points than I currently have, or at least way more perfect items than I managed to acquire. For now I am probably going to shift back to Might of the Earth Seismic build because while it requires a lot more work, I think I can probably make more progress in knocking out the remaining steps n the seasonal journey. I need to pick which of the set dungeons I am going to master, because quite honestly this is the thing that trips me up pretty much every season. I am bad at set dungeons, and I hate being on a timer… so I pretty much avoid doing them until they are literally the only thing I have left in the season. I’ve already solo’d my GR70, but I have yet to step foot into a set dungeon. I guess I need to buckle down and figure this out.

Secret Mission Update

On Friday I wrote a bit about a Blaugust secret mission I am working on. I still need eighteen bloggers who are willing to do some shenanigans with me. Essentially I am working on something and all it requires is that you:

  • Have a Blog or Vlog
  • Are Willing to Make a Post on a Specific Date

If I can pull this off it will be really cool, but I don’t want to go into more details publicly right now. However if you are interested in helping me with this drop me a line on any of the various contact means you might have. Comment section of the blog, twitter, facebook, discord, or whatever other contacts means you might have for me. I have some documentation ready to go that I will share with you if you choose to accept this nonsense.

3 thoughts on “Leapquake and Whirlrend”

  1. Add me, too. I probably will have to do it on the day, though – or at least post it manually then. I have yet to get a pre-scheduled post to publish at all, far less on time. It looks simple enough in Blogger but I seem to be doing it wrong.

  2. Does that specific-date-post have to actually be written on that very day, or can it be written beforehand and scheduled to be published that day if time doesn’t allow anything else?

    If it’s the latter count me in.

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