Approaches to improving gear once full build

[Subjective 2]

Hi all,

This season (S16), I have gone further than before in seasonal softcore. I have full gear for Barb HoTA build, level 65 legendary gems, and all the re-rolling optimisations I can do on said gear. Can do GR 82 with 9-10 minutes remaining, but am starting to die very occasionally (so can obviously push higher). I also have a Barb Whirlwind Wastes alt build which can farm T13 regular rifts and level 60ish GR no problem.

I am curious how best to start advancing my gear further. Do I just spam kadala and hope for ancient gear (is ancient the best gear?)? Or use the cube? Or something completely different?

Had a quick scour of the forums to find an answer / resource but came up dry. I hope this isn't too nooby a question and someone can point me to a good resource.

If it matters, this on the Nintendo Switch platform.

Edited January 24, 2019 by Subjective

[Guest]

The most important is an ancient weapon. You can use your ressources best by rerolling a weapon (not the weapon you use at the moment! Maybe you are unlucky and then you would have made your weapon worse!) until it is a (good) ancient one.

Ancient is not best, but primal. Chances of a primal item ware 1/100 - only one legendary items out of 100 will be primal.

If you reroll it in the cube you need statistically 5000 forgotten souls until you roll one primal. Obviously you can be lucky and need way less. Or you use 10 000 and still do not have a primal.

 

Most efficient is to farm a lot of greater rifts -> sooner or later you will have most of your gear as ancient. (then you can consider trying the cube for the last missing pieces.)

And you need to level gems up, that you can enhance your items. I'd only enhance ancient items. That will add quite a lot. (e.g. if you use a lvl 80 gem. You get 400 Strength. If you do this on 10 items you will gain +4000 strength!)

For both - farming and gem levelling - greater rifts are essential.

 

[RayShimley 5]

Ancient weapon(s) first as the previous poster said.  Also, be sure you have a spare Ramaladni's Gift to add socket to the ancient version so you maintain the extra stat line.  After that, I believe ancient Head, Shoulders, and Amulet offer the largest raw stat boost over their normal variations, so I'd focus on those next. 

I generally farm bounty runs using the shards to gamble for my set pieces, if I get a non-ancient version (an extra piece I can gamble in addition to the one I'm wearing) I use the mats I've gained from bounties to reforge until I get an ancient piece.  If you come upon another extra non-ancient set piece while farming bounties, remember you can convert it in the cube to the piece you're trying to gamble for.

This combination of using shards on Kadala and reforging will get you full ancient set pretty quickly.  Then focus on farming GRs to max out gems for use via Caldesann's Despair (as previous poster said) on those ancient pieces.

[Subjective 2]

  On 1/28/2019 at 4:07 PM, RayShimley said:

I generally farm bounty runs using the shards to gamble for my set pieces, if I get a non-ancient version (an extra piece I can gamble in addition to the one I'm wearing) I use the mats I've gained from bounties to reforge until I get an ancient piece.  

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Ah right, I haven't been using bounties for this. I only do them when I need more mats for cubing legendaries. I've been spamming normal rifts and GR for shards and set pieces, then rerolling and gambling off of these. I'll try the bounty route to see how it works out. I play solo so might not be as efficient as four players doing bounties.

[Guest]

Bounties is a fun alternative.

However, if you play solo bounties will take much longer (if you play in a 4-player group you are 4 times as fast. You complete one act - and each other player has completed another act in the same time).

That's why I suggest to join a multiplayer game for bounties. Personally, I have never played in a clan / party, whatever. But I always join a game to complete bounties. There is no need to communicate if you don't want to. It's like playing solo (everybody runs around alone), just with 4 times the Horadrim Caches :)

[RayShimley 5]

  On 1/29/2019 at 1:16 PM, WedgeAntilles said:

Bounties is a fun alternative.

However, if you play solo bounties will take much longer (if you play in a 4-player group you are 4 times as fast. You complete one act - and each other player has completed another act in the same time).

That's why I suggest to join a multiplayer game for bounties. Personally, I have never played in a clan / party, whatever. But I always join a game to complete bounties. There is no need to communicate if you don't want to. It's like playing solo (everybody runs around alone), just with 4 times the Horadrim Caches ?

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Yeah, I'd never even think of doing bounties solo, way too slow.  Definitely queue into public "bounties" game, always tons of them going at T13.  Like Wedge said, you can just mind your own business or chat if that's your thing.   As an added bonus you run into rainbow, menagerist gobs, as well as bandit shrines (common etiquette is to post these in the party chat before engaging so anyone interested can TP to your location).  

[Knutsanity 15]

I'm curious what others think of this. I'm only at like 880 paragon right now. So of course the best thing to do is find all ancients. After that paragon always helps you climb slowly. The caldessan recipe to augment ancient item in the cube is even better. Too me it's best to wait as long as possible for your first Caldessan. Once you are no longer progressing do your first, repeat process for each ensuing one. Maybe depending on which class and build you are, that first one is maybe only lvl 60 for 300 extra of your main stat or vitality. You would probably want to choose an ancient item you may keep forever, but not your best one you almost certainly will keep forever. Because as you keep maxing out your difficulty level and extra leg gems for the Caldessan, you will get higher and higher with each one. After all 12 you will likely end up cycling back to over write your first Caldessan or 2 with new higher level ones. 
This is my plan anyway, I use 7 different classes and haven't bothered to put full caldessan on any of them, and only have a couple close to having all great ancient gear to bother. But I'm getting there with my Thorns Crusader and should with my seismic slam /leap barb soon. My monk is close if I stick with the LoN WoL build, not so much if I go to the Sunwoku one. They all have a couple Caldessans and I have had to start around lvl 60 for 300 for the first one on all 3. My UE MS DH and my TR Meteor Wizard I think both have 1 or so. With the upgrade to sets now It may be better to wait til 65-70, but that of course depends on your paragon, talent and possibly team mates. That's what I'd like to hear from others on though. Because I beleive these are not additive. a 300 with another 500 put on later will just be 500, whether the same stat or not?

Some kind of spread sheet about paragon, ancients, caldessan recipe's and how far you should be able to get for each one on each build would be nice, to know how much work you have to do still improving your skill rotation talents, or whether it's your lack of perfect gear. Obviously a lot to ask, not even asking for it, but answers to this basic question about improvements, and answering about best efficiencies while improving is difficult. 
Caldessan recipe is best thing for improving quickly. It takes a tonne of gems. So of course never waste your puzzle rings, never waste the goblin portal. Have a money/ extra gem helmet (broken crown) build in the armoury, and hopefully save them for characters capable of doing that on T13, to take full advantage of those. If you are on hardcore like me, never die lol. Basically try not to waste leg gems and gems, especially with caldessans on ancients that are most likely to be replaced, by the time you get to your 8th one you will probably have it replaced by something better. Once you get to your 12th one, you may have all very very good ancients and primals with appropriate stats for your build. At that point replace your Caldessans worth 300 or close too with ones over 500. That's how I envision it. 

 1. Checking out build pages, if you want, wanting to figure it out yourself is cool too. 2. Ancient weapon with socket gift. 3. All gear ancients 4. Caldessan recipe's that hopefully aren't too wasteful, but don't wait forever.  5. All gear perfect for your build, high roll ancients. 6. Full Caldessan's and a few earlier lower Caldessan's replaced. 
Paragon is huge over time, but never worth waiting much for, in a chicken and egg sort of way it helps you get more paragon quicker to improve as much as quickly as possible. Just sort of let paragon take care of itself. 

[Knutsanity 15]

And sorry, but of course 1 or 2 or even 3 Caldessan recipe's on your build while you are grinding to get all ancients (which can be a very slow grind or not so much depending on luck) is an alright plan as well. I've settled for that on most of my builds, My Crusader and Wizard got all ancient gear incredibly quickly compared to the other 3 I've spent larger amounts of time on. The other ones had very slow luck, and the few ancients I got were quite good, good enough for the earlier Caldessan's anyway. 

[Guest]

You are correct. If you already have Caldessan on an item and you do another one the old one is owerwritten.

How high you want to go depends on how "serious" it is. Personally I used gems that were quite high, but not incredible hard to get. (between 70 - 80)

If you manage GR 80 e.g. it is too much effort to get the Gem to 82 or something like that.

[RayShimley 5]

Just my personal preference, but I start dropping Caldessan's on well-rolled Ancients as soon as I start plateauing GR for my current build (assuming I have majority ancient gear already following advice earlier in thread).  I usually max the gem to whatever GR I can do with 80% chance of success of upgrade.  At that point, even a 300 pt main stat buff (rank 60) on a single piece of gear is probably the largest single improvement you're going to get gear-wise.  Early on, when gold can still be tight, I'll drop the GR down to say rank 30 where it only costs like 7 million to run empowered and then bump it up to always be 10 levels above whatever rank the gem I'm upgrading +5 to keep 100% upgrade chance.  

That's just the strategy I've come up with playing mostly solo, and I usually only play until I complete Guardian.  Would be interested to hear input from others, especially people who regularly push 100+ GR solo.  My guess is a lot of those people are relying on guild groups to efficiently grind out gear, gems and paragon XP.