Nerd Culture Podcast

Welcome to my Barbarian spec – Bottle Fury

Click here for the spec!

This is the perfect combat medic build for a Barbarian. This build is designed to heal itself, and party members, while constantly dealing a massive amount of damage to enemies. For this to work the Barbarian will need a fairly high critical hit chance but the reward is very well worth it.

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I present to you my Demon Hunter spec – Missile Storm

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This spec is all about throwing damage in every direction, and it does its job well! This spec will have your Demon Hunter firing rockets in every direction to take down its enemies. The main thing to keep in mind is to keep an eye on where your enemies’ locations are, so you can take full advantage of Steady Aim.

Evasive Fire will help the Demon Hunter keep their distance from enemies, especially along with Vault tagging along with it. To further increase survivability, Blood Vengeance allows the Demon Hunter to gain more of their resources whenever they heal, which means more Vaults and Evasive Fire back flips.

It is easy to guess that the real meat of this build is Ballistics, since four of the six abilities all launch rockets. Sentry should be one of the first abilities that is used for a battle, so that way you can start to getting to a total of three turrets (due to having Custom Engineering) to allow for a massive amount of damage on your enemies.

Positioning is the key for this build. Strafe excels at manoeuvring enemies into a position, especially that of a cluster, which is hugely beneficial to your Hunter. Speaking of clusters, Cluster Arrow can deal massive amount of damage to a group of enemies. Not only that, but four rockets will also come out of this attack, dealing further damage.

Lastly, under the most dire of circumstances, Vengeance can be used to take down all threats in an area. Along with the powerful rockets that are fired from Vengeance, the Seethe rune will also help to build additional hatred to fuel strafing to gather enemies, and then launch a devastating Cluster Arrow.

The greatest aspect of this build, is that no matter where enemies go, the rockets will always find them. This prevents any wasted attacks and ensures a lot of damage to any enemy in the area.

Credit: Art by Deiv Calviz

This build deals lightning damage to as many enemies as possible, and in practically every situation perceivable!

Click here for the build!

Usually when I create these builds, my goal is to make sure that I can hit as many possible enemy ‘formations’ as possible. Meaning whether enemies walk at me from a straight line (coming toward me), surrounding me, herding toward me, running from me, or even hiding behind something. This spec can hit ALL of them without any problem and has a chance to stun them to boot!

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Here is a tanking Crusader build: Fire Wall

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/crusader#aZSdfi!YUhV!acZcYa

This build raises all defenses and punishes those who want to pass through them. With this spec, the Block is like its Hot (block 100,000 damage in 10 seconds) achievement popped on the 1st group of mobs (at level 64)  within about 3-5 sec (had a level 60 shield so it only stopped a maximum of about 4,000 per hit). The best part, is right when that achievement popped, all of the enemies were dead, due to Punish-Roar. This causes all blocks to deal 45% weapon damage as fire to all enemies within 15 yards.

This is one of the main AoE damage methods of this build, but it has several more tricks up its sleeve. Whether enemies are up close and personal or are a fair distance away, and group of enemies fall quickly to Blessed Shield-Combust, due to its 33% chance to cause a fiery explosion  on its original target and its 3 ricochet victims. Plus, if you have recently hit something (doesn’t have to be an enemy) your Punish effect increases your block chance, which further increases the damage of your Blessed Shield. Then, if you want to close the gap between you and that group, or just have a single target, Shield Bash will be your next choice skill (which also gains more damage from having an increased block chance) since it deals 550% weapon damage.

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This is my Monk build Spirit Bomb.

This spec is actually possible as of level 48 but is detailed as a lvl 70 due to Mythic Rhythm (as the 4th passive skill).

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/monk#UeYXjQ!dbci!YZbYbZ

I recommended a 2 handed weapon, and if you have any Paragon points, I highly suggest reducing casting costs and increasing your maximum Spirit (core and utility sections).

This spec constantly replenishes your massive quantity of available spirit and then releases it en masse with several explosions of light in all directions for a lot of damage. The main source of damage is Wave of Light, which costs 75 spirit. Since Monks normally have a total of 150 spirit, this would mean that only 2 castings are possible. However, this is where everything really starts to get fun for this build!

We will start with the Passives on this spec, since they are highly important. Exalted Soul automatically increases your spirit maximum by 100, giving you a total base of 250 spirit along with 2 spirit every second. Next, The Guardian’s Path will give you a bonus 35% to all spirit gains and Chant of Resonance gives additional spirit every second and reduces the cost of your Mantra ability by 50% (in this case the mantra grants you a protective shield for survival purposes).

The next part of the fun is the spirit generation. Your Way of the Hundred Fists generates 12 spirit for every hit plus an additional 40% chance to generate an additional 6 spirit (both of those numbers are base, since I’m not adding the bonus from The Guardian’s Path). Then, if you really need more spirit, you can use your Breath of Heaven, which not only heals you, but for 5 seconds after using it also gives your Way of the Hundred Fists a boost to 16 spirit for every hit. Plus, if you are surrounded by enemies and are low on spirit, your Blinding Flash takes enemies off of you for 3 seconds and gives you 7 spirit for every enemy that was blinded. This in conjunction with Mystic Ally’s activated ability which grants 100 spirit to the monk.

Using all of these skills, I have been able to perform a total of 8 consecutive Waves of Light which is a total of 600 spirit used up out of my character’s maximum pool of 258. That’s a 232.5% of my maximum spirit pool all used within about a 6-10 second period!

If you happen to be traveling alone, I recommend using the Templar as your follower, so you can get his level 20 ability Inspire, which grants an additional 10% spirit generation.

All in all this spec will keep your spirits high and your enemies in pain!