Illusory Boots: Drop / Farming / Explanations

Table of Contents

• 1. What are the Illusory Boots?
• 2. How to farm Illusory Boots?
• 3. Where and when to use Illusory Boots?
• 4. What are the related/synergistic items for Illusory Boots, if any?
• 5. Builds That Use Illusory Boots
• 6. Changelog

Illusory Boots make the wearer ignore enemy collision, allowing him to move freely through monsters and disregard the dangers of clumping up dense packs near him. They have the added bonus of allowing the wearer to pass through the Waller elite affix, but will not make him immune to any other crowd controlling affixes, such as Frozen, Jailer or Vortex. Note that Illusory Boots only apply to monsters, and will not allow passage through actual in-game walls, ledges and destructible objects.

Illusory Boots fall into the category of bounty cache-specific legendary items. Acts I, II, III and V have a fixed list of legendary items that can only be obtained from the caches awarded for the completion of all bounties in said act. Instead of having its own set, Act IV has a chance to drop bounty cache items from all other acts — inflating the RNG pool and making it unfavorable if you want to target a specific cache legendary.

Illusory Boots are bounty cache-specific legendary boots from Act II, so the most efficient way of obtaining them is clearing all bounties in Act II, taking the cache reward from Tyrael and restarting the game. Note that the bonus bounty cache system (hourly rotation of acts for a second cache reward) should not be a factor in your farming, as it cannot drop the cache-specific legendaries like a regular bounty cache.

While the source of the drop is fixed, you can vastly improve your chances of finding Illusory Boots with the following steps:

• Increase difficulty — Increasing in-game difficulty also improves your chances of obtaining bounty cache-specific legendary items. Your chances rise steadily from Torment II onwards, rising to a guaranteed 1 cache legendary in Torment VI, and culminating at almost guaranteed 2 (185% droprate) cache legendaries in Torment XIII. Make a point to only bump up the difficulty to the highest you can handle while still being efficient — killing elites in less than 10 seconds is a good metric. This is especially important for cache legendaries due to the split farming tactic, explained below.
• Split farming — The so-called "split farming" tactic in Diablo 3 simply refers to grouping up with four other people — and then splitting up, each taking a bounty on his own (since bounty completion is shared). You can either split across bounties within a certain Act (especially if you intend to target a certain item), or split across all Acts, each taking an Act's bounties by himself (more common when farming crafting materials). Communicate your choice at the start of the game to prevent confusion. Make sure you overpower the chosen difficulty by a significant margin, and set it to a level where you are comfortable soloing monsters with health and damage scaled for 4 people.

You cannot (and should not waste your resources trying to) obtain Illusory Boots through methods meant for regular legendaries, such as: farming rifts, gambling at Kadala, and upgrading rares at Kanai's Cube.

Illusory Boots are an unassuming, but extremely powerful legendary item that only grows in value the later in endgame progression you get. When pushing GRs, your chances to climb the leaderboard come from maps that are very heavy on monster density. Coupled with the scaling damage in Greater Rifts, this results in an exponentially growing value of a legendary power that lets you decide the placement of fights. The use of Illusory Boots is close to non-conditional on support builds in groups, since supports dictate the pace and location of the whole group. Damage dealing builds that can take advantage of Illusory Boots (such as Legacy of Nightmares jewelry set builds) universally do so.

Illusory Boots are used in two major ways: for support builds and for Legacy of Nightmares builds. While the former take an amalgam of useful survival and utility legendaries with only tangential relation to each other, the latter build towards a specific playstyle. When using Illusory Boots, you can refer to our synergistic items list to find other related items that enhance or work well with it.

• Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan — These pants provide you with a substantial additive damage and resource regeneration bonus while moving, with the freedom to do so guaranteed by the Illusory Boots. These items synergize well in builds that do not stop while casting, such as Bombardment or Condemn Crusaders.
• Nemesis Bracers — These utility bracers spawn an elite upon taking a shrine or a pylon, with the considerable downside of spawning it right on top of the character. This can be outright deadly with immediate, highly damaging and positioning-sensitive monster affixes such as Electrified. Wearing Illusory Boots can help you reposition immediately and engage on your own terms.

To find out the list of builds on Icy Veins that use Illusory Boots, please consult our Salvage Guide.

• 06 Oct. 2016: Item article added.