Leoric's Crown: Drop / Farming / Explanations

Leoric's Crown increase the effectiveness of the gem socketed in it between 75-100%, making it the highest source of the respective utility stat possible on gear (up to 25% Cooldown Reduction from Diamonds, up to 25% Resource Cost Reduction from Topazes, up to 46% Life from Amethysts, up to 81% Gold Find on Emeralds and up to 8% Bonus Experience from Rubies). Note that due to the wide range of the legendary bonus, perfecting Leoric's Crown is a high priority for builds that utilize it for endgame.

How to farm Leoric's Crown?

Like most Diablo 3 items, Leoric's Crown is generally found by random chance as you farm: killing monsters and looting chests, corpses and other containers. Unlike the vast majority of items however, Leoric's Crown can be targeted by killing The Skeleton King in Act I for the first time in Campaign mode, for a character as low as level 5 and as high as level 65. Note that this will yield a Leoric's Crown with stats appropriate to the character level, making the guaranteed drop unusable for endgame. It will, however, be completely fine during the 1-70 process (even when outleveled, as it is usually done in low difficulties); its powers will also be perfect for extraction in Kanai's Cube, since item stats are disregarded by cubing. If your build requires a well-rolled level 70 Leoric's Crown, you can vastly improve your chances of finding one with the following steps:

Increase difficulty — Increasing in-game difficulty also improves your chances of obtaining legendary and set items. 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.
Farm in a party — Grouping up is universally considered the best way to farm in Diablo 3, due to the scaling Magic Find bonus for every additional player in the game. With monster health not scaling proportionally to player number and player's ability to share drops when partied up, the result is a significantly faster and efficient way to attain and divide loot.
Farm rifts — While campaign mode is fun to experience the story and bounties are important for materials and certain bounty-exclusive legendaries, the best content to do when your goal is strictly to obtain the item discussed in this article are regular Nephalem Rifts. These normal rifts offer a higher legendary drop rate than bounties, scaling with your selected difficulty. If you are looking to strike a balance between experience (for Paragon levels) and item gain, the second best content are Greater Rifts.
Spend shards at Kadala — Gambling the blood shard currency (obtained from the Rift Guardians in normal Nephalem Rifts and Greater Rifts) at the Kadala NPC in town gives you an exclusive chance to target a specific equipment slot. With realistically about a dozen legendary items per slot, this reduces the RNG pool significantly, and is regarded as an excellent way to target class-specific Offhand items (shields, quivers, orbs, mojos) due to their low price. Gambling offers a 10% chance to roll a legendary, regardless of Magic Find stats or difficulty settings. Note however the difference in Blood Shard price between slots, as it affects the efficiency of gambling for that slot: 25 for Armor pieces and Offhand items, 50 for Rings, 75 for Weapons, and 100 for Amulets. Leoric's Crown is a head armor piece gambled at the lowest price of 25 Blood Shards, marking it as an efficient item to gamble for.
Upgrade rares — You can transform Rare (yellow) items to random legendary or set items of the same slot with the Upgrade Rare recipe in Kanai's Cube. The Hope of Cain recipe (1 rare item, 25 Death's Breaths, 50 of white, blue and yellow crafting materials) will chew through your crafting materials, and is generally used for build-defining, class-specific weapons. Leoric's Crown is a cross-class common legendary item, marking them inefficient as a legendary to Upgrade Rares for. Nevertheless, Leoric's Crown can be obtained through this method and it can be considered for endgame, if your particular build requires this item perfected with specific, uncommon stats.
Gamble with a low level alt — While a good number of legendary items will not drop before level 70, the majority are gradually introduced to the loot table prior to max level in order to spice up the leveling process. You can look up the level at which a certain legendary starts to drop by visiting its battle.net page and looking in the upper right corner (the Requires level: X field). You can then utilize a strategy of leveling an alt up to, or to a minimum of 7 levels below, the listed required level. Since Blood Shards are shared between characters, you can farm up Blood Shards on your main, and spend them on the low level alt to further minimize the gambling item pool. Note that this strategy will yield an item with stats appropriate to the low level alt, making them extremely subpar for endgame. This strategy is mostly used for low level requirement, build-defining items whose powers are extracted in Kanai's Cube, since item stats are disregarded by cubing. While Leoric's Crown is introduced to the loot table at level 1 which makes the low level alt strategy extremely potent, obtaining it through a targeted kill of Skeleton King in Campaign mode makes this gambling strategy mostly unnecessary.

Where and when to use Leoric's Crown?

Leoric's Crown is a universally useful item for leveling, speed farming and endgame progression. Players of all classes and builds can and should turn to Leoric's Crown if they care to optimize their 1-70 leveling process, because slotting the highest available Ruby gem for a bonus to Experience easily overshadows any stat considerations on the helm.

Leoric's Crown is also frequently added to endgame builds, particularly ones that are heavily reliant on Cooldown Reduction. It is worn in all support builds, as well as builds based on the Legacy of Nightmares jewelry set — since they replace set armors completely with various synergistic legendary pieces. When used in armor set-based builds, Leoric's Crown is added via the armor slot of Kanai's Cube.

Leoric's Crown is generally associated with two things: faster experience (for leveling) and improved skill and resource maintenance (for endgame). When using Leoric's Crown, you can refer to our synergistic items list to find other related items that enhance or work well with it.

Leveling sets — The crafting plans for low-level sets like Cain's Fate ( Cain's Memory, Cain's Robes, Cain's Sandals and Cain's Scribe) and Born's Defiance ( Born's Heart of Steel, Born's Impunity and Born's Searing Spite) can drop from bounty caches, which makes the completion of all bounties in an Act a detour to be considered during the leveling process.
Leoric's Signet — This ring uniquely provides a percentage bonus to experience when worn, and is added to the loot tables early on when leveling, making it an attractive piece for the 1-70 race.
Aquila Cuirass — Due to the restrictive requirements of its legendary bonus, this armor often needs the support of Leoric's Crown to refresh resource-restoring cooldowns, or to ease spending through resource cost reduction.
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac — When striving for the lowest possible cooldowns in the game (in support builds, for example), Leoric's Crown is taken with Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac for a combo that pretty much nullifies downtimes.
Gogok of Swiftness — This is the only legendary gem to offer Cooldown Reduction among its bonuses, and is another frequent addition to CDR-centric builds.