Why no Litany of the Undaunted Builds? (patch 2.6.4)

[Knutsanity 15]

https://www.d3planner.com/576052848

Wave of Light LoN Monk

This monk, I got this build from another thread and tweaked it to my liking a bit. Died with a less optimised one a month or so ago. Got some of the main pieces back to try it again. Never had a cinder coat so imagine its lack of toughness means I should maybe squeeze aquila cuirass into the cube, and wear pinto's instead of nemesis, depending on just how good that resource reduction is, and with another passive option for spirit regeneration. Certainly the passive I chose and the Mystic Ally X2 gives you more than enough spirit per second to go for some time, and a lot of spirit back when you activate MA. So AqCu is viable, But I wasn't using a couple of the skills I chose here, and solid enough cooldown, to have defensive options and more often. Great dmg build, again comparable to competing sets. One of the games best skills, able to be spammed forever, X2 at a time while in epiphany, and enough manoeuvrability and dmg reduction (with cooldown reduction, cooldown skill dependant) to survive high levels with a game plan. 
My plan is to use epiphany when I need it, and if the fight lasts long enough, sit in the inner sanctuary in between epiphanies. Can't do both unless you can attack without aiming and teleporting everywhere while in epiphany. Dashing strike can help keep you safe as well. But I suppose like most builds, it isn't a tank and I'll have to be wary and active.

Edited March 7, 2019 by Knutsanity

[Knutsanity 15]

https://www.d3planner.com/830366136

I want to try this hammer of the ancients barbarian too. Interested to see how the attack speed, fury, aquilla cuirass thing works out. Tonnes of damage and toughness. Reliant on gaining the 25 fury back hitting the 3 or less with HotA I suppose. But the impact lessened by the cindercoat for the times you don't. Other fury generating options as well. Could consider another passive instead of fury generating if it's not needed. Could consider In Geom instead of pigsticker for extra cooldown and time in WotB
Would spend it's time around 90% crit.  100 in WotB... Yikes. 

Edited March 9, 2019 by Knutsanity

[CalamityJ 2]

After a few days, i finally had allmost all items to make a good comparision between Tal Rasha's and LoN for the fire dmg meteor build playstyle. Got all items in ancients except for the endless walk jewelry set with tal's, but no big difference here statwise cause of the crit hit and % on them. No swamp land waders for the LoN (ancient Depth Diggers). So pretty evened out for both setups, though missing a bit on extra fire dmg % in the LoN set, about 40% less than possible.

First LoN. You were right, Teleport is the superior way to go, Frost Nova is out. Wearing Ashnagarr's Blood Bracers and running Galvanising Ward and Illusionist passives gives a ton more survivability, better synergy with occulus ring on templar and moving while keep channeling. Running deflection rune with magic weapon and  st. archew's gage instead of Magefist gives 4 layers of shields which is incredibly strong together with slow time's 6 second stun. With Illusionist there is no real need for cooldown reduction time for slow time as well. So no evocation passive, and the gem in the helm should be the +23% life for synergy with Galvanising Ward. Other passives: Unwavering Will, Power Hungry and Audacity, on hardcore one of these go out for Unstable Anomaly. With paragon 900 and only +1000 intelligence from Caldesann on items, i can only beat level 97 greater rift. Maybe with some luck/good map 98 might work out as well, but 98 seemed after 5 tries too much. In damage output i just dont seem to get any further and takes 15 min till rift guardian, while in survivability i can hold out at greater rift lvl100 just fine.

Items: crown of the primus, mantle of channeling, hellfire amulet, ahsnagarr's blood bracer, LoN rings, deathwish, nilfur's boast, etched sigil, witching hour, depth diggers (should be swamp land waders), cindercoat, magefist (or st. archew gage)

With the Tal Rasha setup, wearing the Endless Walk set and either CoE of Unity ring, i can easily do greater rift 101 without breaking a sweat, and still have 3 to 4 minutes left on the timer. The damage output just seems to be better overall, and thus general killing speed.

So end conclusion: tal rasha's is just better overall, and opens a ring slot for either CoE or Unity. Maybe the 40 xtra fire dmg % is what's missing for the output, but with testing on the Magefist on/off it didn't seem to matter much.

Playstyle wise i have a slight harder time with Tal's because you need to keep up the 4 stacks of elemental damage type, but no real difficulty anymore after some runs. The LoN setup only has a slight advantage in repositioning a bit more easier towards the occulus ring with telefort and dumping slow time here and there, and just keep channeling. Though in attack speed tal's set is slightly better (when not positioned inside a time bubble with LoN) to keep up the taeguk, somehow, after teleporting, it seemed.

 

 

 

[CalamityJ 2]

Looking at the top on the leaderboards, the LoN set seems to fit better with an Archon and Arcane Dynamo playstyle along with Meteor.

[Knutsanity 15]

Makes sense. I was thinking with the proper EW to go with TR it would be better. Much better offence if you go with CoE and use it real well, for sure. And just as good of defence if you go with unity. Solo is different for sure. I don't try it often, but tried and completed a 99 solo with my LoN build with similar stats to yours, nowhere near ideal, I have a bit more paragon and a bit less from caldessans. So a bit more intelligence. Finished with 53 seconds left i think it was, but it was a bit of a fight that I couldn't have done a lot better. Not a great rift for pylons and enemies I guess, average to decent we'll say. The occulus on the follower is a neat idea. Sounds like it would go real well with the ranged channelling. I don't do much thinking about follower gear because I play with a friend and we don't branch off for solo's much, but It's a whole world of options I bet. 
So it sounds like it's about right to what I thought it would be. LoN almost as good and simpler. But with CoE being used properly, although way worse defensively without unity, it would provide opportunity for great damage bursts LoN can't compare with. I am satisfied for sure though. It's only a handful of levels behind in damage, easier for my feeble mind to use, safer for hardcore. Overall a nice success for LoN. 
Fire dmg is huge, it's own modifier right. I think it needs a solid 60% fire dmg and 45% or close to meteor dmg for this build. Usually you don't want much more or have room for much more fire dmg, but since with LoN you have all these options you wouldn't otherwise have for it, going for 80% fire dmg isn't really going over board or costing you other important stats. The pants, which there is no good other pants for anything other than primaries, is what I think is just that icing on the cake type of thing that has me thinking close to 80% fire (whatever you can get out of gloves, chest, bracers, pants). For non LoN builds for the most part you only have bracers another option or too, so going above 40% is not very smart, I would never waste an amulet roll on it. The crits and main stats roll too high not to want to take advantage of those. In this case though I'd take the extra options and try for 75-80%. 

None of my 7 classes are ready for endgame, and it's a very solid initial builder for all of them. There are very good, almost as good options as the competing sets, for all of them, that helped me get all my 7 guys up to GR 80+ well before the builds were optimised, or the other sets and their builds were viable for me. Now I've got my eyes on a couple other set builds for all of them, but LoN helped me through the dirty work at higher levels to farm higher amounts of legendaries and paragon. Has so many toughness options on the builds generally, that it probably kept me alive to be able get better set pieces and ancients with proper legendary abilities. My Leap/ earthquake/ seismic slam barb, EU Multishot DH and thorns Crusader are the only ones not wearing LoN for now lol. But I do have thoughts to try Condemn and Hammer of the Ancients with LoN. My buddy started a HotA LoN cold build today, was really good. Only at 83 but not at all optimised. 

[Valks 2,375]

Just as an update, Deadset's LoN Star Pact build is live and there are more builds coming in the future with LoN as the focus:

https://www.icy-veins.com/d3/wizard-star-pact-build-with-lon-set-patch-2-6-4-season-16

[Knutsanity 15]

That star pact looks scary! Very neat combo of gear, passives, skills and runes that all help the star pact do a lot more damage. Not for me, looks like it lacks toughness part of the time. I'd just die. But I bet those damage bursts are insane. Suppose I could try it with HoK and storm armour instead of CoE. But that would kind of defeat the purpose of the well timed bursts. 

[Knutsanity 15]

**Edit to my Garg witch doctor. https://www.d3planner.com/602139148   .... Seemingly much better. Note that if you replace taeguk with BotStricken the damage sky rockets on the simulation, but that's just the way it works. I'd imagine taeguk is way better for the whole rift until the RG. Adds some toughness too boot. But should you run into an issue of needing too kill the RG faster, more so than getting to the RG faster, that switch would be ideal. I'd imagine you need to hit the RG 20 or so times to catch up to the damage of taeguk at lvl 100, and need to hit another 20 times to make up for the lesser dmg for the first 20. So the RG needs to last 40 hits in order for BotS to be better than Taeguk, And that's only for the RG and Bosses. At maxed out GR lvls I suppose it's inevitably better. But not as much as it states on the simulator. Would like a second opinion on that. For tanking and channelling builds though, I'm not sure it's ever better. 

Was getting impatient with my build without the channelling, wanted more dmg fast, was going to change to Zunimasas but didn't know which gear I wanted out of all the channelling and pet stuff. This LoN can incorporate them all which is nice, don't have to choose between them. And with these changes comes closer to the dmg done by Zun/EW, I can get used to the playstyle change first, though I know I want to make that switch eventually. 

This LoN is turning into a nice set of training wheels for me since the update. Can play around with all the legendaries and builds and skills with an LoN version and get used to them before deciding which direction to go with sets. With some of them they are so good they are comparable with the set competitors and usually safer on hardcore, so I may almost never switch. 

Edited March 15, 2019 by Knutsanity

[dojiijii 0]

On 3/13/2019 at 7:22 AM, Blainie said:

Just as an update, Deadset's LoN Star Pact build is live and there are more builds coming in the future with LoN as the focus:

https://www.icy-veins.com/d3/wizard-star-pact-build-with-lon-set-patch-2-6-4-season-16

That's a tough one. I tried using the Fazula's/Swami combo for the post-Archon damage stacks, but I kept getting overwhelmed during Archon. Of course I was soloing, that would surely work better with a group.

[Valks 2,375]

On 3/23/2019 at 9:18 PM, dojiijii said:

That's a tough one. I tried using the Fazula's/Swami combo for the post-Archon damage stacks, but I kept getting overwhelmed during Archon. Of course I was soloing, that would surely work better with a group.

It is, very - it's an interesting playstyle, but it can definitely do well in solo too. AFAIK, a similar version is currently the top ranking seasonal build for Wiz at GR 128 or so. 

[Knutsanity 15]

16 hours ago, Blainie said:

It is, very - it's an interesting playstyle, but it can definitely do well in solo too. AFAIK, a similar version is currently the top ranking seasonal build for Wiz at GR 128 or so. 

Yeah I tried it out, should've gotten used to it first. Or at least played co op with my buddy first. I killed my long time wizard. Not a terribly difficult playstyle, especially with someone too distract them I'm sure. But getting used to it on a 98 solo my first time out was a bad plan. Lol. I did however notice it has real mean dmg potential. 20 trillion crits, and the build wasn't perfected with caldessans and great gear. That's without CoE. 

[Knutsanity 15]

@aaronsan Yeah I tried the twister variant. You know what I like it better than Meteor. It's tough to say with absolute certainty. But it appears to be slightly worse than meteor when only channelling for free spenders. But quite a bit better for the ease of spamming extras. It doesn't stop the channelling which is awesome. It feels so easy I even felt more comfortable finding appropriate times to strategically dump all my resources and lose the Aquilla cuirass for a while. When it's an option in tight spaces shooting at barriers and walls so the twister stays around the target area longer is not too hard as well.  It wouldn't compare to that LoN Star pact in dmg potential. But it's safety and ease and fun is great and I bet it can be good enough for well over 100 once fine tuned and perfected. 

Really enjoyed it, and because channelling doesn't stop, it's damage, it is just as good, and if you dump enough, I think better than meteor. However with Blood bracers, nemesis is no longer viable for me ? . But with the boots opened up ice climbers are a great addition. The choice between the better of your 2 sword options is nice too, for which to wear and which to cube. 

I died with 3 wizards in a row after not dying for 69 hours worth, so I have to rebuild my entire supply really. But I'll eat crow because your idea is my new game plan for the next one.