How do I not die to a Rift Guardian

[Szkocik 0]

As the title suggests, I've run into a small problem, doing my Greater Rifts.

I had my build (Condemn Akkhan Crusader) complete, could do 60's effortlessly, so I thought to myself, hell, I should unlock Primals to try to optimize my build, right?

Every time I try to do that, I feed like a f*****g r****d  my "main", since I play on Hardcore. I've run into this several times, f****d up my main last season, which completely discouraged me from playing hardcore then, and now with S15 I did the same f*****g thing AGAIN.

Now you guys might probably call me an idiot, or just unskilled, but I'd really like to know, how to actually properly approach The Guardian, so I don't feed my THIRD attempt at Hardcore this season.

I've looked but there are no actual guides (or I haven't managed to find one) that explain how to approach such fights properly.

I've watched a few high clears for Condemn Crusaders on YouTube but that introduced even more confusion than I've previously had.

As I close, feel free to call me s***t at the game, because I probably am since I have to ask such stupid questions AND I've died the same way like 5 times by now.

SEND HELP

[Knutsanity 15]

I won't be a lot of help. But I'll keep my eye on this thread. Just got my 5th hardcore Neph up, on t5 now. It's a crusader, so far not a tonne of drops, but I had the   Frydehr's Wrath waiting for me at lvl 70 :), so it looks like I'm doing the condemn build off the start. 
 

Love hardcore. Seems most want to stay at a lvl where they can 1 shot the easy little enemies. Me and my buddy prefer to keep it decently hard, which helps us keep our defensive tactics and awareness up IMO. Up to lvl 6 GR's with the new crusader. All 5 actually, 2 can do T7, 8, or 9. Looks like t13 is practically Impossible without amazing useage of skills, in proper rotation. I'm not there yet, so I don't know for sure, but Imagine if you followed the build they have, as much as it looks promising, it's a build that puts you right into harms way. So Life per Hit, having most of your items as ancients might be incredibly necessary. Obviously some RG's are different than others too. Just killed my awesome barb against Ghom, on T7, when I had no business dying, just got impatient backing off, he was close to death, got stuck on something at the top of the screen while my buddy was at the bottom, so I couldn't move away, and of course his poison is everywhere after a couple minutes. EVERYWHERE. The best advice for RG's so far to me is resistance. Most RG's have crazy magic, so it's seems a safe bet to me over Physical damage which is also easier to escape IMO. 

They may need more specific information on your gear. You can link your exact character onto here so they can look at it. There is also suggestions in the build guide for rotation of skills as well, which might be very key, and suggest which attributes to prioritise for their builds as well. But you probably knew that, so I assume it's about your gear not quite being ancient enough, and or with good enough roles for t13. They'd help let you know which attributes to try and re roll, and whether or not they think you should be able to compete with what you have.
 

Edited October 31, 2018 by Knutsanity

[Szkocik 0]

As I've said, I had this top tier Condemn Akkhan Crusader.

How did I die that time? Doing my primal unlock, my Rift Guardian was Blighter, and even with full resist all gear, 2 death blocks (Indestructible and Prophet rune from Akarat's Champion) AND Esoteric Alteration level 50 couldn't get into melee range without getting one shot. I tried to play around death block resets but just being in Blighter's melee range was too much. You can see the problem here since to get stacks from Focus and Restraint and Guard rune for slash and to get damage from Condemn I have to get relatively near the Guardian. And it's not like I can proc off trash, since all trash disappears the very moment the Guardian spawns.

I've managed to get him down to 50% but then he frenzied and it seemed like "do or die" kinda thing, where I obviously f*****g died.

I could run 60's in like 4 minutes with 0 effort and no death block procs, it was pretty good and my build was complete (it was pure solo too so I've had a fully geared templar with BiS gear for him).

I'm assuming that what you do in such situations is just reset the rift, and try again for a better guardian, but that seems r******d, since it's only level 70, I mean, how hard can it be, right?

Edited October 31, 2018 by Szkocik

[beebsu 0]

Personally I don’t reset rifts based on the type of mobs I encounter or the rift guardian, that being said I’ve died multiple times this season to Perendi and the succubus trash.

I tend to stack all resist, damage reduction, Crit Chance and Crit Damage, but my barb didn’t have shit for life regen across the board until after I cleared 70 and got a better belt with life per fury spent, and I also didn’t have band of might at the time either, so all I can really offer is know whatever RG’s move set you encounter, like for Blighter, just move around him to avoid his arm puddle shit.

[tzxAzrael 2]

g.rift difficulty is a non-linear advancement, just like torment difficulty.

 

every 5ish levels roughly doubles the difficulty. T13/gr60(ish) is like 2.1 million % hp and 29000% damage.
gr65 would be approximately 5m% hp, and maybe 35k% dmg?
gr70 would maybe be 10m% hp, and 45k% dmg?

i'm guessing, because there's no officially published difficulty charts past T13, which can be read off of the difficulty selection screen.

 

but the TL;DR is... you can't safely make a 10 level jump UPWARD in HC GR's unless your minions are literally capable of soloing the level you're currently at.

 

try it in SC to see how it compares. the difficulty is the same, it's just that HC has slightly better drops, and a "bit more severe" death penalty.

[fragilemachinery 0]

I haven't played Condemn in a few years so I won't comment on that particular build, but I will say that with maybe 20-30 hours of playtime this season I can comfortably farm GR 80+ HC in a shield build, and I've been top 100 ranked on the solo crusader board early in seasons.

In general, you don't want to make giant GR leaps like you did, going 60-70.  A 10-level jump like that can easily take you from "I can speedfarm this" to "i'm struggling just to survive.  In general, when I'm progressing a build past t13, I like to bump up by no more than 2-3 levels at a time, and I pay pretty close attention to how the build feels against normal white mobs and elites.  If you're popping your cheat death cooldown more than once a rift, that's a good sign that you may want to back off until you either get some upgrades or enough backup gear that the risk of dying doesn't bother you.

In general though, somewhere around GR70 is where gear optimization starts to matter, and where a lot of unoptimized builds start to run in to problems.  If you weren't already running double unity with an invulnerable follower, that's a good place to start because it literally doubles your toughness.  You'll also want to make sure that you have enough cooldown reduction (56% for Akkhan builds) that Akarat's Champion is up permanently. Also, follower optimization in general is often overlooked, and they can be a surprisingly good sources of CC even though they mostly do negligible damage.  I prefer a templar with thunderfury + wyrdward (for lightning stun procs) and a Frieze of Deflection with high block chance (blocks freeze), but there are lots of options.  Finally, make sure your legendary gems are good and leveled up.  

So, once you get your toughness up to a reasonable level, and you have a follower helping you out with extra stuns, really the only thing that's left is to learn the patterns of all the bosses so you don't take avoidable damage spikes (potentially like trying to tank straight through the AOE damage of the Blighter that killed your last character).  Really though if your gear is reasonably good, at GR70 you should still be able to burn them down without a long drawn out fight.  

[Szkocik 0]

Okay guys, I've managed to get my crusader up to speed again, it's looking like this: Crusader level 70 Hardcore Seasonal.

Is this good enough to go for the 70 grift unlock? If not, what should I try to improve? (I think my main hand and off-hand are pretty trash but seems ok? I'm trying hard to recreate top runners from the leaderboards with my setup.)

I'm going nuts here, and I don't want to YOLO again, please help me guys.

[Nabhalem 0]

small steps  in gr60 - 65, get more confidence and better loot. you should be able to do gr70, but unless you dont feel safe doing it - you are probably going to die there ?  

my suggestion is to grind your gems bit higher. around lvl70+ atleast before going there!

its always YOLO on the HC ❤️

[Pyrrhus 0]

An ancient weapon would help a lot.

[Szkocik 0]

A quick update: I've managed to beat level 70. As previous poster suggested, I started to crank up the difficulty by 2 starting from 60 until I got a good grip on damage. For my primal unlock I ended up getting a pretty good set plus a good guardian so it was quite easy. Had to get a few ancient items and gem bonus strength, but once I got that I managed to climb by 2 levels at a time, and for my level 70 I got good pylons too, so it was a cakewalk even with my dogsh*t weps. Thanks to everyone who replied with helpful comments!