The Tantrumdin

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A Median XL guru... a true book of knowledge
The Tantrumdin

By suchbalance


"Die you fools..."



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INTRODUCTION


The Tantrumdin is an Unholy Bow wielding Paladin who deals the damage of a glass cannon, has the tankyness of a Barbarian and the flexibility of an Assassin. We make use of the open skill Tantrum, found on crafted and rare bows, to dish out massive damage while staying mobile and utilise its multi-hitting capabilities to trigger devastating spell procs, enhanced by our innately high spell damage.

This guide has a vast amount of content and is a lot to read. Persevere and you will create a character who is capable of soloing the entire content Median has to offer with affordable gear and minimal respecs, while being fun to play! Here are some more reasons why it is worth your time:

  • In-depth tutorials to every single Uberquest. These focus mostly on boss abilities and how to counter them. The aim is to teach you how to become a better player and give you transferable knowledge, which will allow you to complete them with other characters as well, rather than attempting to use rare equipment or cheap exploits to succeed.

  • Videos for every hard Uberquest. The vast majority of these are in normal speed to allow you to better see what is going on. In addition I have recorded a "random" kill for each boss. That is, I have not cherry picked flawless speedruns where nothing goes wrong to make myself look good. You will see attempts with multiple deaths and several fuck ups so you can get a better idea of what the fights are really like and how to recover when things go wrong.

  • Itemisation theorycraft. Where you will learn how to select optimal gear for any character conditional on the skills you would like to use.

  • Vast amount of miscellaneous bits of knowledge on the mechanics of Median XL, while remaining accessible to total beginners.






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SKILLS

Tantrum
The attack skill around which our build is based. It deals 1/3 of your weapon damage in a small, fast hitting, stationary cloud around your feet. Each time you attack with the skill you create a new cloud, which can stack on top of old ones. The duration of the clouds increases with more soft points into Tantrum, affected by the initial level on your bow and also all + All skills modifiers you have. This skill is only available on crafted bows and an entry level bow runeword.

Vindicate
Our innate skill. A moderate area of effect curse on enemies, who when slain provide you with increased life regeneration and enhanced weapon damage for 10 seconds. While the bonuses start out small, they rapidly increase as you level up. At max level you are looking at 292% EWD and 6.3% max hp regeneration per second, which is a massive amount of healing that when combined with Tainted Blood will make us nearly impervious to non-lethal damage.


Unholy Wicked Tree

Tainted Blood
A long duration buff granting Posion resistance, Total character defence and life regeneration. Every soft point increases TCD by 15% and Poison Resistance by 5%. Every hard point provides increased life regeneration, but there are diminishing returns. This skill is the cornerstone of our defences and thus will be maxed out fully.

Mind Flay
Shoots heavily damaging lightning bolts. We will not be casters, so we only need a single point here as a pre-requisite. Nevertheless this skill will come in handy against some Uber bosses and can help deal with mobs we do not wish to stand toe to toe against.

Symphony of Destruction
A buff which envenoms nearby targets with a highly damaging poison over a short duration. Soft points in this skill reduce the time between the envenoms. This is a great skill that gets boosted massively by our Uber Skill and as such we will be putting enough points (depending on current gear) to reach the minimum delay which is 1 second.

Slayer
Summons a stationary demon apparition, up to a maximum of five, which targets nearby enemies with bolts of magic damage. This skill is a synergy for Mind Flay, but as we are not a caster build we will use it as a one point wonder to supplement our damage when needed.

Stormlord
A passive which grants a massive number of attribute points. It increases both with soft and hard points, but the former is a diminishing increase while the latter provides increasing returns. This skill enables us to have enough strength to equip the heaviest armours without investing a single point there. Furthermore due to the hybrid nature of our build we benefit from Vitality, Energy and Dexterity. Thus we will max this skill out in order to extract as much benefit as possible.


Unholy Shadow Tree

Vessel of Judgement
Long duration buff, which targets nearby enemies with bolts which deal physical damage. Early on this skill will carry our damage until we can outfit ourselves with some quality Tiered Uniques. Late game we will put a significant number of points here as it deals significant damage and provides some range to our offensive capabilities.

Euphoria
Short duration buff which grants elemental pierce in all elements to the paladin. The amount increases with soft and hard points, and the latter also add a duration increase. This skill is crucial for honing our offensive capabilities, we will place enough points depending on gear to make enemies highly vulnerable to our attacks.

Life and Death
This passive augments our Vessel of Judgement enabling it to target more enemies at once. Because the number of targets increases with soft points we will leave it as a one pointer.


Demiurge
This skill grants us big attribute bonuses, which increase by 100 to all attributes per hard points, for a short duration. While under its effects we will also reanimate unholy avatars which deal significant damage via their punisher ability. This is a good ability, but unfortunately comes with an extremely long timer lockout during which we lose our mobility from Divine Apparition and it also has a very short duration. As such we will only use it as a pre-requisite.

Scourge
Summons, which are immune to poison, have high hp even with a single point invested and come in high numbers. We will use a single point here to provide us with meat shields when necessary.


Reward Tree

Divine Apparition
Unlocked after hitting level 90 and completing the Ennead Challenge. This is a short range teleport that freezes mobs on the whole screen upon arrival, with a 3 second cooldown. One point is sufficient to provide us excellent mobility.

Blessed Life
This passive is our reward for completing the Black Road Challenge. It grants 2% Physical Damage reduction per hard point (up to the 50% cap) and flat physical damage reduction and increased apple healing rate per soft points. This is a skill that will make us incredibly resistant against physical attackers and spells. We will always place enough points here so that we are at the DR cap.

Superbeast
Unlocked at level 90. Transforms the character into an unholy avatar, granting him superhuman attack and cast speeds and a massive bonus to spell damage. This bonus increases with soft points but diminishes rapidly. Therefore we will only allocate enough points to reach a certain breakpoint.







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LEVELLING


Hatred:

This character is slow to level naturally until the mid 40s when you reach Mephisto and can farm him for Arcane crystals. If you are familliar with the game feel free to use your preferred Paladin leveling method, otherwise read on. Median XL is a completely new game built on top of the Diablo 2 engine. As such there will be many novelties you will discover along your journey. The first time a new concept is mentioned in this section it will be highlighted in blue and links to the appropriate page in our Documentation for in depth information (like so).

To start with make sure you read the Median statuette in your inventory. The levelling progression does NOT include the Maggot Lair in Act 2 and the various levels in Act 3 which used to contain the organs of Khalim. The Horadric Staff now drops in the Claw Viper Temple Lvl 2 and a completed Khalim's Will drops from the Council in Travincal.

With the above in mind, right click the Signed of Gold to add 1500 coins to your inventory. Then go to Gheed and keep refreshing his gambling stock until a spear becomes available, or a Holy Lance if you have more patience. Buy whichever appears first and head out to the Blood Moor. Make sure to hotkey your Vindicate curse and start using it to heal up and become comfortable with keeping it active. After you level up put your first point into Retaliate. This will enable you to easily clear out the moor until you get to level 5.

Once you do it is time for the Level Challenge 0. If you have over 1000 gold you can purchase a Mystic Orb from Akara which increases your maximum damage by 10. Put it in the cube with your spear and click transmute. Now head over to an area of the moor that is cleared, and preferably within the attack range of a Quill Rat. This will make killing the challenge boss easier as the spines from the rat will constantly strike us and enable the Retaliate nova.

Transmute the statuette by itself in the cube and cast the newly available skill to summon Volrath. He is protected by a circle of traps, which grant him immunity. Kill all the traps first and then focus on Volrath. You must do this while running in a circle and avoiding the rotation death spiral which is an instant kill. After you have succeeded take the charm and chipped gem he drops and transmute them together for your reward.

Then go to the Den of Evil and clear it out. From here on progress through Act 1 until you reach around level 23, which should be just before Andariel. Throughout this time keep putting all your stat points in strength and skill points into Retaliate, Vessel of Retribution and Rapture. Stay out of any side zones whose names are in red text. Those now contain uberquests, which are meant for high level characters and not part of the normal levelling progression. Keep a look out for any short war bows that might drop and pick one up if it does.

After you reach Tristram and kill Griswold he will drop a Gift Box. This can be transmuted in the cube for a semi-random selection of tiered uniques. Our future build does not make use of most of these so you should only rerun this area enough times until you obtain a Tier 2 Godhead.

After level 21 and when you have an Ort rune you can make the Amok runeword in your short war bow, which will give you access to Tantrum. Runewords in this game require only a single rune in the last socket of the item. If there are more than a single socket, the rest must be filled with jewels. From here on until level 90 your skill build will involve maxing out VoJ, TB, SoD and Stormlord, 10 points Life and Death  and all leftovers in Euphoria. For stats go half energy and half vitality. Some str and dex might be necessary sub level 60 in order to equip bow and gear, orb random equipment pieces with +2 str/dex for this and/or socket Shael runes. After you create the bow use the stat & skill reset from Akara to respec.

Your play style from now will be to buff yourself with Euphoria, SoD, VoJ and TB. Curse enemies every 10 seconds with Vindicate and kill them with Tantrum. Early on before we have our tiered unique gear our damage will be carried by VoJ and single target from SoD.

Once you get to Act 2, you should farm some Grubbers outside of the city gates or socket any leftover runes into throwing weapons from Fara and sell them back to her for gold. You should purchase a magic pair of gloves from either Fara or Charsi and then make them into a honorific item. Orb them with all resistance until they require your character level and keep doing so until you get +60 all resistance at level 30. Capped resistances are very important starting from Act 2 onwards.

Keep progressing through the game up to the Seat of Hatred. When you get to Mephisto, you should farm him until you have 6 arcane crystals. That should take approximately 7-8 runs and you should keep any of the tiered uniques that drop and are part of our early game gear. Hopefully you will get either Jitan's Kamon, Auriel's Halo or Deadfall as a drop, which will reduce the time you have to farm. If none of these items drop then gamble the tier 3 base items from Alkor and then use the unique creation recipe. With these three items you tantrum will start dealing significant damage and the levelling process will accelerate considerably.

As you continue through acts 4 and 5 start upgrading the above three uniques to the next tier when you can equip them. Sometime prior to facing Baal you will reach level 50. At this point it's time to backtrack to Act 2 and the Twin Seas zone, in the Halls of the Dead, where the Level Challenge 1 takes place in the Tran Athulua uberlevel. This is a big level which contains numerous archer amazons. They have high accuracy and deal heavy physical damage. As such we should make sure that we have sufficient defence to be able to tank their attacks. To such an extent make sure that your Jitan's Kamon is tier 4, orb it up to lvl 50 with enhanced defence and socket it with Ith runes.

As you enter Tran Athulua kill the pirate and pick up the Sunstone of the Elements. Then Explore the level until you locate the three Amazon priestesses, who when killed drop a sunstone of ice/fire/thunder, which must be cubed with the sunstone of the elements within 30 seconds of killing the respective priestess. Note that if you die while you have the coloured swirlies around your character, you will not be able to carry out the above recipe and must retry killing that specific boss.

After the challenge is completed go back to Act 5 and kill Baal. Before we move on to the next difficulty however we should head over to the Spider Forest waypoint in Act 3, where the Ennead Challenge takes place in the Kurast 3000BA uberlevel. This zone features a myriad of different skeletons who are protected by totems granting invulnerability aura. Dodge the skeletons or blink past them and kill the totems to remove their shields. You must seek out the three necromancer bosses at the corners of the level, who drop class charms. When an Eye of Divinity drops pick it up and cube it with a jewel to complete this challenge. Depending on your luck this will probably push you close to level 60.

While running the level keep your eyes open for rare amulets and pick one up. They will be item level 60, which means you can reroll them with oils of renewal until you get one with +2 all skills and chance to cast Doom on kill. When the above is completed it's time to move on to Terror.


Terror and Beyond:

In Terror your resistances get penalised so make sure that they are capped before heading out of the encampment. The journey through this difficulty is exactly the same as the last difficulty except that enemy stats scale rapidly after each act and also there are different challenges and Minigames. Regarding the latter they are located throughout the acts and you should take a look at the next section for information on them.

Progress through the acts by following the early game skill build and make sure to go back to the Valley of Snakes when you hit 90 for the Level Challenge 2. This involves the Binding of Baal uberquest which requires you to create a Book of Summoning. This is done by purchasing 3x[Victim's Hearts] and 3x[Sacrificial Candles] and then transmuting them together in the cube. Then go to the valley and use your newly acquired Dark Summonning skill. Prior to doing so you should spam tantrums under your feet and precast scourges and slayers. Tal rasha and his minions cast spells which pierce your resistances so you will have to either dodge them or create two honorific items and get them to 155 fire/lightning/cold resistance. Once all the minions are dead Tal Rasha will become vulerable. Finish him off and then cube your class charm with any perfect gem.

Also now that you are level 90 you get access to the reward skills - Divine Apparition for mobility and Superbeast, which will massively boost your attack speed and also the damage of any spell procs you use (more on this later). Now that you have access to nearly all your skills you should start following the skill build listed in the below Early Game section. Keep progressing through the acts while upgrading your gear until you defeat Baal. You should be around level 115 at this point and now it is time for the Black Road Challenge.

Scroll down to the uberquest section for tips on the bosses/levels in which the trials take place. Before attempting the Trial of Knowledge make sure your early game set is complete, orbed to the maximum and fully socketed. If you are having troubles locating the bosses, see this Fauztinville Map. For the Trial of Blood we will lure the Ice and Lightning priestesses to the same spot and then kill them at the same time. Refer to the following Tran Athulua Map by aahz. During this trial do not buff yourself with Symphony of destruction or Vessel of Judgement as these may accidentally kill the bosses while you are kiting them to the correct spot.

After this is done you have completed all the challenges! All that is left is to finish off Terror difficulty and the minigames. Then you will be ready for Destruction. Most of the regular content there should be familiar from the previous difficulties, but you have many uberquests to conquer.






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MINIGAMES


Witch Queen: MO a piece of jewellery with a Daystar summon. Then go to the bottom level in the countess tower. Use said summon near witches to get them to pounce it and thereby moving them out of your way. Repeat this process to clear a path to the Countess' chamber from witches. Then lure out and kill some minions, making sure to dodge the deathstrikes under your feet. Once that is done and you have the swirlies, cube your class charm with an Eth rune.

Crowned: Find a witch in the Rocky Waste and lure her outside of town with your trusty Daystar summon. Then summon a Daystar inside its pounce range. If you don't see the sparkles go into town, run back to the palace and then go back out to rocky waste - this resets the witch. Keep trying until your Daystar gets the sparkle - it might take a dozen trys or so. After it does, summon another Daystar and then run in to cube your charm with a Thul rune while the Witch's pounce is on cooldown.

Mirror Mirror: Do a few Baal runs in Terror, without using SoD or VoJ so that he does not die too quickly. Keep spamming Scourge on top of him, which will lead him to produce more adds. Once there is a large bunch kill them off with Tantrum and go back to spamming Scourge. When you get the swirlies TP to town and cube your class charm with a Lem rune. This is easier if you do it in early game gear, but it still might take a couple of runs.

Veteran Tokens: You can find these mobs in: Act 1 Jail Levels; Act 2 Canyon of the Magi; Act 3 Travincal and Durance of Hate; Act 4 River of Flame; Act 5 Worldstone Keep. Note that they have a buff during which they gain high amounts of avoid making them unkillable. So when they turn transparent drop back and wait for it to expire. After you have collected a token from each act cube them with your class charm for a bonus.

Act Boss Tokens: Every boss drops their respective token on Terror and Destruction. You have to collect one from each boss and in addition two more from the same boss and cube them together to make a skill point token, which you can eat a maximum of 3 of. I suggest for the repeating boss token that you kill Diablo on Destruction as he often drops at least one sacred unique. For example: Dogma of Suffering + Dogma of Pain + Dogma of Hatred + 3x Dogma of Terror + Dogma of Destruction = Skill Point Token.






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EARLY GAME BUILD & GEAR

Stats: Half in dexterity and half in vitality.


Skills:
  • Wicked Tree: sMax Tainted Blood and Stormlord. Enough points in Symphony of Destruction such that when prebuffed with the Yul staff it has 1.1 seconds delay between blasts. 1pt in others.
  • Shadow Tree: Enough points in Euphoria to enable you to pierce 100% in all elements. Should be around 17. Remainders in Vessel of Judgement and 1pt in the others.
  • Reward Tab: 1pt Divine Apparition, enough points in Blessed Life to reach 50% damage reduction. Enough points in Superbeast to reach ~230% spell damage when prebuffed. Should be around 7.
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Breakpoints: 86% IAS for a 4 frame attack animation with a Short War Bow. 86% FCR for a 4 frame cast animation. 200% FHR for a 7 frame hit recovery animation.


Gameplay: Weapon switch and prebuff yourself with SoD, VoJ, TB and Euphoria. Kite and kill enemies with Tantrum. While using this skill with superbeast it is important to hold down the mouse button to attack instead of clicking. Otherwise you won't be able to take full advantage of the attack speed. If you have over 375 apm, feel free to ignore the previous comment.

Keep cursing enemies with Vindicate every 10 seconds, use Divine Apparition as a gap closer versus ranged enemies  and utilise Slayers for mobs you simply cannot approach in melee safely, such as the Krakens in the Triune. See the below video for general gameplay and early game character performance.







Gear:


You will make your first Amok around lvl23, and keep remaking this runeword as you find higher tiers of the base bow which you can equip. Once you get around the end of Terror you should make a Double MO version of this. See appendix on how to make a proper weapon runeword. Orb it with Crushing blow, Life after each kill, Attack Rating, Enhanced Damage. We are using Short War Bows, because they make it easy for us to cap our attack animation and the physical damage loss compared to slower bows is negligible.

At max level you will need to gather all types of shrines in order to make a decent craft. I repeat: USE ANY TYPE OF SHRINE TO HAVE BETTER ODDS. This is reasonably easy in Terror Fauztinville, where a full clear nets around 70 shrines. Do 3 full clears, while collecting all the shrines in Vessels to save on stash space. Then start crafting, by taking a rare Sacred Short War bow dropped in Destruction and cubing it with a single shrine until it expires. After you have found a bow which fits the above requirements, bless it by cubing it with an Abandoned Shrine and an Arcane crystal. Then use a Blessed Oil of luck from the Special Box in Terror. Finally Orb it with crushing blow and then any remaining space with attack rating and enhanced damage in that order. Socket with perfect rainbow stones.




The modifiers and stat budget on this piece are simply incredible for it being a tiered unique. The flat elemental damage and guard tower procs will carry our dps early game, the singularity proc will aid corpse recovery and the damage reduction will help us reach the cap. Orb it with Enhanced defence until the 350% cap, and then elemental pierce and FHR. Later you should reroll this item until you have good flat elemental damage rolls.




Great offensive stats due to a truckload of flat elemental damage. This is our second big dps item in the early game. On the defence front it has nice resists and paladin skills, but its downside is the lack of defence. Orb it with elemental pierce and then FHR. Later you should reroll this item until you have +3 skills and good flat elemental damage rolls.




During levelling roll a unique quiver once you get some spare Arcane Crystals. You will most likely get the Locust hive. It's arrow proc is a nice damage boost and more poison length reduction is always welcome. Orb with magic find and elemental pierce.

Once you get to max level you should try to roll his big brother - the Hanabigami. The stats on it are nothing short of incredible. Once you make this bad boy, you will keep it until the end because it has everything we need. Good spell procs that work with our spell damage bonus from Superbeast, high FRW to compensate the lack of Rapture, big flat elemental damage and resistance pierce. The downside is that it is rather rare, so it may take you many failed attempts at creating it. Because this is essentially an endgame item that is readily available from the early game, do not orb it with anything yet. You will make the decision what orbs to use when in midgame gear.




When you get to Act 2 Hatred, sell all apples you own and make these honorifics by cubing a pair of magic leather gloves from a vendor with a sacrificial candle and a victim's heart. Then start orbing them with all resists to cap them as you level up and then dex and str to help with equipping your other items.

When you get to Act 1 Terror, farm Griswold until you get a Special box which gives you a high rune. Then downgrade it to a Pul with the cube and make the Kali runeword in a pair of tier 6 gauntlets. They are not amazing, but give a nice skills boost and a decent proc on kill. The maximum fire resistance is also very helpful for early uberquests. Orb with FHR and elemental pierce, leftover space can be Magic find.



There aren't any outstanding boots for us while we are levelling, so grab yourself a Lionpaw which give a nice attribute boost to help equipping our other items, decent defense and some hp. Orb them with enhanced defence and resistances that you lack.

As soon as you get a pair of Sacred Greaves in Terror or Destruction, reroll them until superior + lucky with at least 80% Enhanced defence. Then orb with 10xEnhanced Defence mystic orbs and socket with 2% vit / 2% dex and flat life/FHR/resists rare jewels. These boots will provide much needed base defence for our TB to boost while we are in early game gear, buff duration reduces the tedium of buff recasting and the vitality bonuses translate into plenty of hp.




Awesome on kill proc, which does both high damage and has a nice defensive effect because it slows enemies and reduces their attack rating. Crushing blow is our great substitute to physical damage and resists and uninterruptable attack are always helpful. Orb it with enhanced defence until the 350% cap, then FHR and FRW.




Decent proc which adds to our dps. Massive stats and life boosts which synergise nicely with our attribute placement, high life total and supermaxed Stormlord. Orb them with 15% thunderhammer on kill and use the remaining space to cap leftover pierce or add poison length reduction.




I suggest you use an amulet with an ilvl of 66 or more, which should start dropping in act 3 Terror. Reroll with oils of renewal until you have at least the necessary stats. The doom curse adds a nice source of flat physical damage to our attacks and synergises with the singularity procs on our rings. MO with thunderhammer on kill, resistance pierce.




Make this in any staff as soon as you find a Yul rune. Then put it in your alternate weapon slot and prebuff your VoJ (only for duration), Euphoria, SoD and Tainted Blood. Reroll this runeword until you get +8 to all skills.






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ITEMISATION

Fundamentally every single character in Median is a certain set of skills attached to some character model, with different animations and stat values (for example how much life is gained per point of vitality, how much block do you have naturally etc). To that extent any build is simply a subset of those skills which have a good synergy between each other. You select your equipment along the same principle. By looking for items which have synergy with your your chosen skills. Let us examine our Tantrumdin equipment as an example of this practice.

Firstly our main attack skill. It deals 1/3 damage in a very rapidly hitting cloud. What this means is that every single damage source that you apply through your weapon will be at 33% efficiency by default. So how do we choose what damage to focus on? By selecting sources which can reach more than 1/3 efficiency and those who work well with the mechanics of the ability.

Examining the above statements we can easily rule out stacking physical and magical damage. Paladins have no innate way of increasing the efficiency of those sources so they will forever be at baseline efficiency. However because every single Tantrum cloud hits ~ 25 times per second, it makes crushing blow a viable substitute for physical damage. This is because it deals 1/16 of an enemy's health in physical damage every time it is triggered, regardless of your weapon damage. Clearly then stacking up to 100% crushing blow is a very good idea, because a single cloud has the potential to reduce the health of ANY enemy with 0 physical resistance to 20% in a second alone!

Moving on to the elements, we can see why they are the best damage sources for our attack skill. We can pierce enemy resistances in EVERY element to the -100% cap very easily thanks to our Euphoria skill, which provides a whopping ~60% pierce all in the endgame. This means that the elemental damages - fire, lightning, cold and poison - will apply at 2/3 efficiency. However of those four, poison damage is the weakest because of how it is implemented in the Diablo engine. Whereas the other three elements apply their value at 2/3 efficiency for every cloud hit, the poison damage simply applies a higher dps in its range.

To make this easier to understand consider an example in our mid and endgame helm - the Rotundjere runeword. One of its affixes is: Adds 250-1500 poison damage over 10 seconds. What this means is that every time your Tantrum cloud hits an enemy it rolls a random number between 250 and 1500 and then deals that damage over 10 seconds. If on the first hit it rolled 800 and on the second hit it rolled 1500 and on the third 600, then it will do 80dps for the first frame and then 150dps for the next 250 frames (10 seconds). This is because it only refreshes the poison damage if you rolled a better value. So in essence, the multi-hitting nature of Tantrum ensures that the poison damage on your gear will always apply in maximum value. However this is still negligible compared to the damage dealt by the other elements. Assume for a moment that you are cursed and that the fire affix on the same item always rolls its minimum value: 250. Both sources apply at -100% enemy pierce, so the poison deals 4 damage per frame and the fire deals 167. Of course there are items with much better poison damage affixes, but in general the dps of the poison damage affix does not come close to that of the other three elements.

OK now we know we should be stacking 100% crushing blow and as much flat elemental damage as possible to have synergy with Tantrum and Euphoria, but what about our defences? Consider the defensive aspects on our skills. Tainted blood provides ~1.2k Total Character defence and heals your full life over ~ 22 seconds. Blessed life provides up to 50% damage reduction and ~ 350 flat damage reduced. Vindicate heals your full life over ~ 16 seconds.

Because we have such a high defence multiplier, spending mystic orb space or choosing items based on how much defence multiplier they give is a waste. For best results we must raise our base defence. This is the sum of the defence on all our armour pieces. As such having a chest armour, helm and belt with high defence is important because it will get multiplied massively by TB. We do not focus on having high defence on gloves and boots because these pieces have much lower base defence values. As you can see our mid and endgame items feature runewords in those three key slots. What makes them best is that not only do they give great offensive affixes, but the base items can reach ~ 100% Enhanced Defence from superior and lucky alone. Then we can orb them for another 150% ED before we put the rune in, which allows us to modify the defence of these "highest defence giving" slots by around 600%!

Moving on we see that both TB and Vindicate heal our full life over X seconds. What this means is that we will get more life regeneration the higher our maximum health is. This leads us nicely to our final question: how to allocate our attributes? Unlike most builds, the Tantrumdin has three viable stats. Dexterity increases our attack rating and provides a small amount of physical damage. Energy increases the damage of all spell procs on our gear and also our VoJ, Mind Flay, Slayer and SoD. Vitality gives 3 life per point - this is the joint highest value in the game only matched by Barbarians.

As such we can see that increasing vitality should definitely be one of our priorities because not only does it give the maximum health increase possible in the game, but also it provides great amounts of health regeneration through the aforementioned skills. Dexterity, while giving only a small damage increase on the character sheet is in fact very important because our damage would be useless if we cannot hit our enemy. I will not bore you with the maths behind Dexterity vs Energy, but you can take my word for it. At this point it is worth talking about our passive skill - Stormlord. The attribute increase it provides counts as base stats. This means that any "bonus to attributes" affixes will take its value into account and are hence very valuable. A corollary of this is that Bonus to vitality (hence increased max life), Bonus to dexterity (and as a consequence bonus to AR) affixes on gear are very important. This is why we chose our jewellery items (Hive on amulet gives energy too), and you can see how the above affixes are present throughout our early and late game gear.






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BASIC UBERQUESTS

All of the following are very easy to complete as soon as we reach Destruction. Consult the documentation to see where they are and make sure to get some charms as you progress through the final difficulty.

1. THE BUTCHER: Summon some Scourges and then summon the Butcher. While hitting your Scourges, he will occasionally spawn a pentagram. Once that happens blink behind it so that your summons will come with you and the Butcher will follow into it. Then hit him with Tantrum. Repeat a few times until he is dead. Make sure not to let all your Scourge die as we are in very close range to the boss while hitting him with Tantrum and we cannot tank him at this stage of our character development.


2. INFERNAL MACHINE: Presummon Scourges before entering. Run in a wide circle around the room, while leaving Tantrums behind you to clear most of the elites. Even at this stage we are tanky enough and have sufficient resists to survive the elites if we do not get swarmed. Then head over to the machine and stack a few Tantrums on it. As soon as you do make sure to move / blink away, because when struck it may retaliate with a deathstrike, which is lethal if not dodged. Depending on what random resistances the boss spawned with it may die very quickly or more slowly. Repeat the above process a few times in the latter case.


3. CREATURE OF FLAME: Enter the dungeon and clear out the familiar and all the Astral Guardians, while dodging the Creature’s energy beam. Once only it is left, go to a sheltered spot from its attacks and use dark summoning to spawn an Astral Guardian next to yourself. Toggle running mode ON. This sets your defence to 0 whenever you run. Proceed to circle the Astral Guardian. It will hit you and grant you the invulnerability buff (you will hear a distinct sound when this happens). While buffed run to the Creature and spam Tantrum on its face. After a few seconds retreat to the dark summoned guardian to obtain the buff again. Rinse and repeat.


4. BINDING OF BAAL: Exactly the same as LC2. If you want to do it while tanking their attacks, craft a TU6 pair of honorific gloves and boots, MO them up to 155 fire/cold/lightning resistance and socket with perfect ambers/onyxes/bloodstones. Otherwise simply heavily stack Tantrum flowers and summon Tal Rasha and his minions on top of them. Then kite with Tantrum until minions are dead. Afterwards surround Tal Rasha with Scourges - Symphony of Destruction and Tantrum will make quick work of him.


5. DEATH PROJECTOR: As you enter the proving grounds, turn immediately to your right up the narrow corridor leading north. Follow this corridor and you will eventually enter the large room where the Death Projector and the Mechanics are. Hang out there for a moment to get the Mechanics to follow you and then lure them into the long passage, while being careful to avoid the laser. Once they are at the passage, lose them there, go back to the entrance and then move to your left. Before going to the Projector’s room through that way, make sure to put a TP down in case you need to recover your corpse. Then go to the projector and make sure you are comfortable dodging its death beam – it always spawns from the south-east – exactly like LC0.

Once you are, slowly approach the narrow passage where you lured the mechanics in order to attract one or as few as possible back to the projector. Once you do this it will lose its immunities and be killable. Finish it off with Tantrum. Note that it has a chance to trigger an alternative direction beam when struck. Because Tantrum hits a massive number of times per second this will happen quite often. When it does the beam will be moving counter-clockwise and starting from the top left side of the Projector. Therefore the best position to stand and Tantrum the Projector on is the top right. When the alternative beam comes, dodge it by blinking across, take a TP to town or simply recover your corpse.


6. KHALIMGRAD: As you enter Divine Apparition across the wall to the nearest Avatar. Run in its melee range and kill it with Tantrum. You can explore the level further if you wish, making sure to dodge the punishers shot by the stationary towers and to keep killing mobs as this will keep all enemies vulnerable. Otherwise you can just remake the game and repeatedly kill the closest avatar until the charm drops.


7. ASSAULT ON MT. ARREAT: Make sure to have Scourges summoned and Tantrum & Slayers precast, before you start this one. This is similar to the Binding of Baal except that all enemies have physical attacks instead of spells. Summon the boss on top of the Tantrum flowers and then kite and kill remaining minions. Once only the boss is left keep distracting him with Scourges and finish him off.


8. BAAL: Grant one of your rings the RIP modifier by cubing it with a catalyst of Destruction and an arcane crystal. Then keep running in wide circles around the Worldstone Chamber and kite him with Tantrum. Avoid running into the lights that Shardspawn leave on death as they debuff you with a very high amount of extra physical and magical damage taken on subsequent Shardspawn hits. Do not use summons here also as this will cause more Shardspawn to appear and potentially overwhelm you.


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MIDGAME

Stats: Half Vitality, Half Dexterity.

Skills: Same arrangement as in the Early game. However now you will be able to reach the minimum 1 sec timer on SoD and thanks to the high number of Paladin Skill afixes on our gear you will have more leftover points to distribute in Euphoria and VoJ.

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Gear:


Same as our early game craft, but now do not settle for anything but the top 2 procs. I also recommend you to have at least one of the optional stats, with the flat elemental damages being the best. The way to craft this bow is to start rolling a separate rare Short War Bow, so this way you can keep using your old one until you get a better one. Orb with 15xCrushing Blow, remaining space with life after enemy kill and 1-2 AR orbs if you failed the Lucky upgrade and got no AR from the abandoned bless. Socket with perfect rainbow stones as before.




Every single affix on this chest piece is perfect for our build. It requires 6 fire runes, which are easy to obtain when you dedicate some hours to farming the sewers. This is simply an outstanding armour for us, incredible defence (make runeword in a 100% ED + Gothic plate and MO 10xED orbs in before runeword as usual), 10% DR, big flat elemental damage and ancient blood. It's a barbarian passive that gives +1 to maximum skill levels and a big  % boost to maximum life. On my midgame gear paladin it equates to 3k hp. We are using a Gothic Plate because we do not want to suffer the additional 10% velocity hit of using an Ancient Armour.

I want to spend a moment talking about the proc. It is a curious stat, which is supposed to be a downside since when you take damage from ANY source you have a small chance to teleport randomly. However I have tested this chest in nearly all uberquests and have come to the conlusion that 1) In the vast majority of cases where it matters, the proc is an UPSIDE rather than a downside because it provides protection against many otherwise deadly spells (Kabraxis balefire, Triune Kraken breath etc). 2) In all other relevant scenarios the proc  is 50/50. For example in duncraig, if you get hit by poison bombs or walk along fire patches you might get teleported back into a barrel. However it is equally likely that you will be teleported out of a sticky situation and remember that when you arrive you stun all mobs around you.

In most low risk situations however, outside of uberquests, it is a downside since the proc does nothing to protect you because enemies are harmless anyway. So here it will merely be slowing you down. Prime examples are Fallen Shamans with their multihitting fire walls on the way to Duncraig.




Massive flat elemental damage, paladin skills, high defence, some attributes and TTAD are just icing on the cake. Even the mana after kill comes useful when we get our Void charm. This item is also relatively easy to obtain, requiring a Krys rune from Toraja. Make it in a 100%ED Hundsgugel, MO with 10xED orbs and put the runeword in. Socket with rare jewels with 2%vit and 15%FHR as a requirement, but other useful stats are flat life, FRW and magic find.




Same quiver from the early game, but you should now try and get a lottery upgrade on it by cubing it with Azmodan's heart and persevering whenever you have spare crystals as the upgrade grants 100% magic find - a substantial bonus. Orb this with stats that you are missing on your gear, usually this will be elemental pierce.




(The above item tooltip only displays the stats which are relevant to us). Flat elemental damage and a big chunk of FHR are the main advantages of this pair. Other useful stats are the Fire spell damage, because it buffs the procs of our boots and our quiver; open wounds is helpful against purify bosses;  we also get decent defence, FRW, and good stat bonuses. Orb these with ED to cap and then prioritise hitting the speed breakpoints. Socket with rare jewels with 2%vit and 15%FHR as a requirement, but other useful stats are flat life, FRW and magic find.




Amazing proc that coupled with our high fire spell damage melts all non fire immunes in its radius. You also get to add some flat fire damage and fire resistance. Essentially with these boots we keep the best part of our early game Nephilim runeword (the 25% bonus to vitality) and sacrifice around 2k flat defence in order to boost our offensive capabilities nicely. Orb with ED until cap. Socket with aforementioned rare jewels or if you have already reached all speed breakpoints go for Lum runes instead for farming.



Yet another great and easy to obtain runeword. Requiring a Ghal rune from the easily farmable Fauztinville. We get awesome huge flat elemental damage, skills, all resists and a sweet chunk of attributes. Not to mention that when you make it in a 100% ED Plated Belt and orb 10xED before putting the runeword in you end up with a ~7.5k defence piece that will greatly boost our total defence rating. Socket with aforementioned rare jewel.



The flat elemental damage, skills and resists are good as always. The main benefit of this amulet is the Hive buff, which adds 25% of our base Vitality to Energy (around 240 free stat points in energy on my paladin) boosting the damage of our spell procs and also shoots poison clouds at nearby enemies which deal ~30k poison dps. This synergises nicely with Tantrum as we already have to get close to enemies anyway. Just do not forget to add it to your prebuff routine for the extra duration.



Same rings as our early game, but now make sure you have the maximum attribute roll on each. Orb with thunderhammers, poison length reduction and defence.



A very nice prebuff weapon, make sure to have a good roll with either +11 or +12 all skills and socket it full of Nih runes. Other weapons with +12 skills can act as a decent substitute and if playing on realm a Nef-Xis staff runeword is also a good choice, but you lose out on buff duration.




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EASY UBERQUESTS

All of these are easily doable once you have assembled the early game gear set from this guide. Do not forget to properly socket and MO all your items up to the level cap. If this is your first time trying some of these you may die or fail repeatedly - do not get discouraged it will take you some attempts to get used to the particulars of each one. Note that the order in which all the Uberquests are listed is the one in which I did them with my Paladin. Within certain tiers bosses can be interchanged.


9. LEGACY OF BLOOD: Socket perfect bloodstones in your uniques until you have 95% fire resistance. Bartuc summons Blood Golems which cast an Immolation Bomb on death, the resists will protect you from it. The bomb itself looks like an open chest and is spawned under your feet as you kill a Golem - moving away will also significantly reduce its damage.

Summon your Scourge, spam Tantrum, precast Slayers and summon Bartuc. The boss only becomes vulnerable once he uses his Wychwind ability (looks like purple flames on the ground). Spam Tantrum on him, keep replenishing your Scourges and stay away from the purple flame patches. If all of your Scourges die go downstairs to the Tower Level 1. There you can resummon them and keep a TP open to recover your body if you die.

Trophy: 15% TCD. Low priority, farm it only if you are bored.


10. AKARAT: Go outside the entrance to the Kabraxis uberquest. Presummon a few Scourges, spam Tantrum, precast slayers and summon the boss. As soon as you do run directly down towards the entrance of Rathma Square in order to avoid the hammers flying at your face. Once you are out of their range the minions should die within the next few seconds. Then run in avoiding any residual hammers and finish Akarat off if he is not dead. Most of the times however, he will be instantly killed as soon as the minions debuff him thanks to the incredible damage output of a stacked Tantrum.

The reason we summon only a few Scourges is because otherwise the boss will have no room in which to spawn his minions, which will lead to either 1) you being stuck in the knockback from dark summoning and dying from hammers or 2) boss spawning along your escape route and you dying from hammers.

Trophy: 5% max HP & mana. High priority, make sure to farm one.


11. AZMODAN: Go in the reliquary with your Scourge army and take a second to notice if there are visible enemies at either of the doors, to your left or right. If there are, then take the other free one. If upon entering you get slowed by unseelie curse then the map density is rather high and the chance of failure is very high.

Once you enter the bigger room hopefully there are no or very few enemies there, but we are tanky enough to handle most elites apart from Unseelie Dames and Trap Rat fire.Then move slightly south to get vision of the central chamber where Azmodan is. This will cause him to walk over to you. If his central chamber is somewhat empty feel free to blink on his head and kill him - he has very low hp.

On the other hand if all along your route there have been many elites and Azmodan's room is also full of them you should blink to one of the outer corners of the Reliquary. Then keep running along the outer walls until you encounter monsters that are not shielded by the golden immunity aura. Kill them, open a TP just in case, and then slowly lure more in the safe zone until you thin out the way to Azmodan.

Trophy: 150 max HP & mana. Medium priority, farming it is worth your time.


12. KURAST 3000BA: This Uberlevel features three types of skeleton enemies - melee, archers and mages. They are all protected by totems which cast a wide area immunity aura, which makes enemies look purple while they are under it. In order to clear the area we must dodge the skeletons and rush totems either by running up to them, or blinking on top of them and killing them so that we can kill the enemies they were protecting.

There are three Necromancers at different corners of the level. They cast a curse on you which blocks your potions from healing you. So make sure that your Tainted Blood and Vindicate curse are active to keep yourself alive. They also cast Gamma Field when you are far away (looks like a green puddle under your feet), which you should move out of as soon as possible. In melee range they cast a damaging Poison Flash, so once you get near them and cast several Tantrums, feel free to move away in order to avoid the damage. Keep killing the Necromancers until you get your charm.


13. ISLAND OF THE SUNLESS SEA: We have plenty of damage to kill everything in our way here. The only thing you have to be wary of are the magic damage missiles, that look like golden apparitions, fired off by the revellers in your general direction. Dodge these as they deal high amounts of magic damage.

The first boss, Malic, fires slow moving homing projectiles at you which will kill you on impact. These are very hard to dodge at the close quarters required to kill him with Tantrum. So clear out all the trash surrounding him and cast a few Slayers in range of him. They will knock him back against the edge and keep him stunned in hit recovery. When this happens run up to him and kill him.

The second boss, Lucion, grants everyone else around him an invulnerability aura. Once you get to the invulnerable mobs, lure them a few at a time with Slayers out of range of the aura and kill them. Eventually Lucion will come. Kite him with Tantrum and he will die quickly enough, just be careful to not get hit by his melee attack as it is very strong.

Important Charm: Add up the minimum and maximum values of the flat elemental damage rolls. An average roll is 978. Try to get at least 1050 flat damage and -13% enemy resistance pierce.


14. LORD ALDRIC JITAN: Summon him inside the temple with all your Scourges and a spammed Tantrum like usual. Then run out of the temple entrance. Lure out remaining minions one by one. When only Jitan is left keep resummonning your Scourge and re-entering through red portal until he walks in melee range of them without casting Fortress (those transparent looking towers that shoot arrows). That is your queue to go in melee range, and kill him by spamming Tantrum on him.

Trophy: 25% EWD. Low priority, farm it only if you are bored.


15. TRAN ATHULUA: This level is unchanged from when you did it in Hatred for the first level challenge apart from there being more Amazons and them casting Arrowside occasionally on death. This trap is not that dangerous to us, thanks to our good defence and capped damage reduction from Blessed Life. However you should not tank a full duration of it because it hits a very high number of times.

The key to doing this Uberlevel is to kill Amazons while always keeping mobile so that you dodge the on-death procs. This can be a very lucrative place to farm if playing on single player, thanks to the unique drop bias. To get a better idea of the gameplay take a look at my Uberlevels showcase video.

Trophy: 5% DR. High priority, make sure to farm one.

Important Charm: Add up the minimum and maximum values of the flat elemental damage rolls. An average roll is 603 Try to get at least 650 flat damage and 14% maximum life.


16. BULL PRINCE RODEO: After summoning him run in a wide circle around a square section to protect yourself from the cows. Aim to stay approximately 1 screen away from the boss and stack as many Tantrums as possible before the boss pounces on you again. To that extent make sure that you are always to his left or right, because in those cases the knockback from his Hoof Stomp attack will always knock you away from the stampeding cows and thus protect you from the one shot death.

For the stats on the charm, prioritise the Vitality and Dexterity rolls. However the most useful rolls are those which grant a useful reanimate such as Void Archon, Serafiend, Destroyer Shaman etc.


17. JUDGEMENT DAY: Go to the Inner Cloister, spawn 5 Slayers and summon your full Scourge army. Then cast Dark summonning. The edyrems + Uldyssian which appear are all untargetable, cast Divine Apparition and Tremor. The latter is a spell which shakes the screen and takes away a proportion of your current HP, similar to Static Field in LoD. Thus as long as the edyrems are attacking your summons you will not die even if you are at 1 HP.

Occasionally when attacking Uldyssian will call forth an angel avatar to "aid" him in battle. This can be either Malthael or Imperius. They both have the same abilities - homing physical damage missiles which deal low damage, Beacon (nuclear bomb that instakills - you will hear the warning if this is cast) and Sacred Armour when they get low.

Simply keep replenishing your Scourges and run in a circle around the battle casting Tantrums. As soon as an avatar spawns drink a health potion and if it is not instantly dead, run up to it and kill it. Then pick up your charm and go back to town.

Trophy: 5% to all attributes. Medium priority, farming it is worth your time.


18. RATHMA SQUARE: Presummon your scourges before you enter, the boss is located directly opposite the entrance. Walk over to the wall in front of you and divine apparition over it. Then keep spamming Tantrum and walk through the arches until you see the boss. He dies rather quickly, but try not to get hit by him as he has a bladestorm attack that deals heavy damage. Try for a decently rolled herb with at least 100% bonus to attack rating.

Trophy: 10% Uninterruptable attack. Low priority, farm it only if you are bored.






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TRICKY UBERQUESTS

Can all be done with the early game gear, but may require several attempts if you are not familiar with them. Midgame gear will make your life a lot easier.

19. QUOV TSIN: Make t6 honorific gloves & boots with 155% fire, lightning and cold resistance by combining all resist MOs until the cap and then individual resist MOs. Fill any remaining space with Damage reduced by 2 MOs and socket them and the rest of your gear with Perfect Onyxes, Bloodstones and Ambers until you have 95% max resistance. Equip rare rings with +1 all skills and -15elr and orb them for another 15% pierce and 15% lightning spell damage. This way you should be on at least 140% lightning pierce. Afterwards clear out the stony tomb and summon the boss.

He casts a trinity beam at you, but with the above preparations we completely negate its damage. He also teleports around when struck and emits highly damaging poison clouds. Try to dodge them, but if you get hit drink a potion and you will be fine. Use your Yul staff for this boss and simply shoot him down with your 1pt Mind Flay until he dies.

Trophy: 15% spell damage. Low priority, farm it only if you are bored and be sure to use a proper caster gear set in this case to kill him faster.


20. CATHEDRAL OF VANITY: Replace some of your sockets, but not the ones in the chest, to reach 95% lightning resistance. Once you enter summon some Scourges. Your goal is to lure Inarius and as many nuns into this starting room as possible. So do a victory lap around the benches of the cathedral, return to the small room and keep spamming Scourges and gathering them on yourself via Divine Apparition until the boss and some minions are inside.

Then blink down, behind the northwest pilar, and open a town portal. Then run to the altar and next to the crystal ball and start casting Tantrums while running in a circle to avoid the death lazer. Depending on its random resistances it might die very quickly or more slowly and might even get one shot by SoD. If you die the mobs will be around the ball and away from your portal, so resummon and corpse recovery is doable. Once the ball is down proceed to finish off the clerics, Inarius and the rest of the minions. Line of sight the boss on death as he has a damaging Fortress proc.

Then do a dark summoning in the cathedral and start kiting the "butchers", in order to dodge their attacks and deathstrikes on death.

Trophy: Useless stats. No need to farm.


21. BELIAL: First of all make sure that the Icy Cellar map has a solid middle, somewhere you can teleport around and dodge Belial’s burning novas, and be shielded from his crucifies (rat swarm erupting under your feet). If it does clear the level. If the boss is already there remake the game, otherwise you won’t be able to control the ratfinks and it will make this a lot more frustrating. Make sure to have a RIP modifier on one of your items. This way the boss is only targeting you and we have a lot more control over his movements and this makes the fight more predictable.

If the map is suitable and no boss is spawned, then go to a corner, away from the entrance and start summoning. Once Belial pops run like hell towards the middle. Then spam Tantrum at your feet and wait for the boss to arrive. From here on the fight proceeds as follows. You spam Tantrum at your feet and wait for the boss to blink on you. Once he does you divine apparition around the corner of the solid map middle to dodge his Burning Nova. Then keep spamming Tantrum, when the next blink comes the boss will cast Crucify instead, this is less dangerous so you can stand your ground for a couple of seconds before blinking around the next corner. Repeat this until he is dead. It is most important to dodge the burning nova, but if you do get hit instantly TP and try to go to safety. Make sure to farm at least a 400+ hp charm.


22. TORAJA: To obtain the charm upgrade we will utilise some knowledge on how Lillith’s AI works and the layout of the level. As you enter, blink over the fence to your north. Then keep spamming Edyrems and Scourges with your RMB and going near the Celebrants who have their shields down to kill them with Tantrum/SoD. I suggest rebinding Edyrems and Scourges to two keys nearby, such as Z and X because it is much easier to simply hold your right mouse button down and cycle the summons this way.

Advance like this to the north very slowly, hugging the fence taking on very few mobs at a time. Eventually you will reach the end of the big enclosure you were in currently. There is a small corridor and Lillith’s room is over the next fence. Stand back and keep spamming your summons at the entrance of the corridor. After some time you will see that your Edyrems will now be tanking Morlus instead of Celebrants, this means you are on the right track keep spamming your stuff.

Eventually (after 2-3 minutes) Lillith herself will walk from her room to the edyrems to melee them. Be sure to be far away from her so as to not get hit by her abilities. Once you see her simply target her and spam Edyrems and Scourges. She has barely any hp so when she drops her immunities she dies extremely quickly. Either cast Slayers on her or run in and kill her with Tantrum. Then TP home to upgrade your medallion.

You will need to farm this level for a bit in order to get a Krys rune for our mid/endgame helmet. This is very tedious and will involve multiple clears of the level. Another way to farm it would be to lead Lillith to the wall across the room the red portal is in so that she keeps summoning Morlus that you kill over the fence. A third way to get the rune is to clear the level and then go to the western corner. There you can use Dark Summoning to spawn Celebrants and trap them in a corner with your summons, while SoD one shots them. Pick the least tedious method for you and get that Krys rune eventually.


23. JUDGEMENT DAY UPGRADE: The method is exactly the same as the one you used to obtain the charm. However in order to upgrade it you must kill both Malthael and Imperius within 30 seconds of each other. This will take some tries until the odds are in your favour. The avatars themselves summon more untargetable Edyrems, which leads to more frequent Tremor casts so eventually you will not be able to replenish your life.

Therefore make a new game and run around the Scourges who tank the Edyrems while spamming Tantrum as usual. When the first avatar spawns and dies, make a note in your head which one it was. Then repeat the process until the next avatar spawns. If it's the one you need, kill him then go to town and upgrade your medallion. If not then still kill him as you might get a trophy drop and then remake the game. This ensures that you will never be overrun by too many Edyrems, but slightly lengthens the time it takes to obtain the upgrade. A good trade off for doing this quest in early game gear.


24. GHOSTS OF OLD BREMMTOWN: We have good damage and good defence, so this Uberlevel is a lot easier for us than for glass cannons. Simply follow the route I took in the "Uberlevels showcase" video and make sure to always stay inside your Tantrum flower to avoid nasty surprises. When you are at the corners of the road there is always a risk of larger than normal packs to pounce you. Therefore always reveal those spots by summoning Scourge. Hugging the walls so less spirits can attack you at once is also a very helpful idea. Once the dragon is down TP and cube your class charm with a crystal.

It might take you a few tries to do this still, because the main difficulty comes in moving fast enough to kill the dragon in time, but not so fast that you uncover huge packs of spirits and get killed. Thankfully the size of the Tantrum flower is a perfect guide for this and as long as you properly stack them and move along their edges you will be fine.


25. THE UNFORMED LAND: The enemies in this level deal only elemental damage and have extremely high resistance pierce. This means that stacking resistance to neutralise their attacks is infeasible. You have to dodge the projectiles and close in the distance between you and the elementals with Divine Apparition. However what makes this uberlevel easy to farm for us is that we have 25 Scourges, with big life totals who constantly regenerate. So as long as you keep 20+ of your minions around you at all times they will serve you well by tanking all of the elemental missiles, which leaves you free to kill elementals.

You need to farm this place at least until you get 6 unknown skulls and 6 fire stones. We need this for our mid/endgame chest armour.

When you get to the entrance of the next level, lure the witches away from it with a summon. The hidden fortress features the boss Terul, some Goliaths which cast Banish on you when they die and untargetable ratfinks like those in the Belial encounter. As you enter this level, the boss is directly opposite you. So blink down to him and avoid killing the Goliaths so you do not get cursed. Get in the boss' melee range, so that he is less likely to use his abilities, spam some scourges and stack Tantrums on him until he is dead.

It is necessary to maintain open wounds on him as he has a high innate hp regeneration. Thankfully Tantrum hits an incredible amount of times per second, making this solely doable with the Butcher’s tooth if you have a high enough attack rating. Around 30k+ should be sufficient. Regarding the Trader’s chest and how to cube it: The most important stat from it for us is Vitality, but we do not want to lose dexterity in the process. So cube it 10 times with an amethyst, then 40 times with a ruby. Combine the +vit and –dex values. An average roll is +50. I would keep it if the result is +80.


26. DUNCRAIG: I suggest you attempt this after you at least upgraded your chest to the Hellfire plate as it will make your life easier and the charm itself is not that amazing.

Take a look at the maps in the documentation and hunt the minibosses. Dodging barrels comes with experience, so don’t expect a death free time. The main tip for avoiding them is to constantly keep moving forward in big areas and only retrace your steps after all the Slain Souls are dead. In the small rooms spam Tantrum at your feet until the cooldown of Divine Apparition expires and then blink at the edge of your screen to avoid explosions. Sometimes you will teleport and there will be a barrel throwing soul right next to you. This means that the explosion will come in two seconds and hence you cannot wait for your divine apparition timer. In this case it is safest to open a TP and go to town.

The only tough spots are teleporting into small areas because you are very likely to be on the receiving end of melee attacks straight away which can put you in hit recovery or kill you. Here is where having the Hellfire Plate is awesome, because it boosts our defence to well over 400k and can sometimes get you out of a tight spot by blinking you to safety. Other miscellaneous tips are to always teleport into a corner where you can see no monster lights and presummon some scourges before teleporting.

Once you have the ring, I suggest trying to kill Assur on the old map as there he is in a much larger room which gives you more space to manoeuvre. Orb one of your rings with a single Daystar summon Mystic Orb. They are immune to fire and can tank Assur's spells indefinitely. So simply spam cast them on his head and purify the boss in the mean time. Occasionally he will pounce and kill them. Make sure to respawn them to distract the boss as soon as possible and take care to avoid any Flamestrikes that might have been cast at your feet. Because we have no innate way to open wounds from ranged either wait a while and purify Assur 4-5 times to kill him, or wait until there is no Flamestrike on the Daystars, run in quickly cast a Tantrum and run away.

Trophy: 10% overall speed. Medium priority, farming it is worth your time and quite easy as you will be farming this zone a lot anyway.


27. THE TRIUNE: I suggest making the Hellfire Plate before attempting this level as the high defence will protect you against the attacks of the Primal Clay and the Archons and the Blink on damage taken can save your life if you run into a Kraken's beam attack. There are three types of enemies on this level. Primal clay which melee you and occasionally proc shower of rocks. Archons which have a bouncing physical attack. Krakens which have a shortrange but extremely damaging beam spell.

The first two enemy types are no trouble thanks to our high defence and capped damage reduction. The Krakens however pose problems because getting in their melee range with Tantrum is dangerous and they also tend to stay in one spot so it is hard to lead them into the Tantrums yourself. To that extent use the range of SoD and cast Slayers on them to kill them. If you have space to dodge you can also blink behind them, cast a Tanturm and run away, because they have a slow turning speed so it takes a while for them to align their beam with your character. For a gameplay example see the "Uberlevels showcase" video.

Kill the cow mini boss to get the book – you will need it in your inventory to kill Arihan. Once you get to the messenger skip him and go inside the palace. Find Arihan – he casts a curse which sets your hp to 1. He only melees so let him chase you to the palace entrance while charming him so he stops cursing you all the time. At this stage it is good to re-equip your Jitan's because the blink proc on the hellfire plate is more of a nuisance than a help here.

Once near the entrance, refresh your charm and approach the messenger. Try to dodge his burning volley of course. He will soon summon bats and teleport you around at random. Leave the TP vortex asap by blinking out of it, make sure not to re-enter it, and find Arihan. If he is not in range of the bats, wait for the charm to expire so he attacks you, charm him and lead him closer to the bats being careful of getting one shot. As soon as Arihan spots the bats he will run in to attack them and once they are dead move on to the messenger who is shooting at him. From here on your job is to maintain the charm and the green aura on Arihan, by dodging the messenger’s missiles and still being in range of their duel. Corpse recovery is easy as long as you have your TP on a safe spot and charm Arihan as soon as you enter. Just don't forget to re-equip the book if you die.

Trophy: 50% mf. Really good trophy, but I would suggest only farming it when you are good enough at the boss to not get frustrated and have spare time.


The video unintentionally shows how you can screw up, by dying when Arihan is inside the palace and not clearing the boss area from all trash mobs, and then recovering.





28. FAUZTINVILLE: I suggest that you first obtain the Hellfire Plate and the Rotundjere helm before farming this level to make the process easy. You need one Taha rune in a throwaway pair of gloves so that you can get +1 max skills "prebuff" and one Ghal rune for your midgame belt.

There really is not much in terms of strategy to clearing this. We have good damage reduction and defence and capped FHR, but the "mobs attacking you constantly from all sides" element means that Tantrum is not able to spread your damage to the vast number of targets efficiently and so we will never be as fast as the best Fauzt farmers, although we can clear with ease in decent time. Make sure your tainted blood is always up, because if it falls off and you pull a big pack you will die. Other than that keep refreshing your Vindicate and eat an apple if it drops for that extra healing.

In addition this is the best place to farm shrines in and a full clear can net you around 70 on average. When trying to improve your bow from midgame to endgame quality you should be grinding here. This is also the best place to farm jewellery for an extra incentive.


29. VIZJUN: This and the following uberquest require creating a few pieces of gear with the idea of boosting your defence to a higher number than usual. So the first thing you want is any Sacred Ancient Armor, which you need to roll as a base for the Dragonheart runeword. Make sure that the chest is superior and succeeded on the lucky trial recipe, by ending up with at least 80% ED in total. Then apply 13 more Enhanced Defence mystic orbs and proceed to put the runeword in. Secondly you should craft the TU6 Angel Star. This weapon has a celerity proc on struck, but mainly it has magic resist which you will need for later so it is best to create it now. Thirdly you need a shield with high defence. Find a sacred Crown Shield as a base in order to make the Wall of Fire runeword, by preparing the base item the same way as above.

As for the other slots feel free to make use of any high defence pieces, while ignoring the offensive stats. For example if you already have the midgame helm you can stick with as it has a high defence. For boots keep your Nephilim runeword from the early game; for a belt your midgame Ahriman runeword is fine and the same goes for gloves.

Then you should respec and put half of your stats in vitality and the other half in dexterity. Smax blessed life, Tainted blood and stormlord and put 10 points in Rapture. 1 point in the other holy influence skills and divine apparition. Enough points in SoD so that when prebuffing it casts every 1.0 second and remainders in superbeast.

Make sure that you still have your FHR breakpoint covered and go to the entrance. Summon some scourges to provide initial cover and enter. Your job is to run around the robots, using Divine Apparition as an emergency button if you get surrounded, and make your way to the MCS. Then you need to purify it, grab the Schematics and go to town. You should keep your bow and quiver on switch so that if there are many enemies around the MCS, making it hard to purify, you can take them down. Beware of nuclear bombs around the control system if you are too slow in purifying and grabbing charm. Make sure you get schematics with good dexterity and vitality values.

Trophy: Low priority. Farm only if you are bored.






30. KINGDOM OF SHADOW: Do this uber as soon as you have finished Vizjun, because we will use the same gear and skill combination. Once you get comfortable enough with running through the level it is better to use the unholy influence as Euphoria makes killing Juris Khan easier. One small difference is that when hit by zombies you get poisoned so a stacked resist of this element is helpful but not mandatory. If you are using the midgame gloves, swap their sockets with perfect turquises - those and the massive amount of resistance provided by our Tainted Blood will be sufficient. Do not buff yourself with SoD until you reach Juris Khan.

If you have never done this before I suggest doing a few runs on Terror difficulty first to familiarise yourself with the level, how to get to Juris Khan and how to kill him. This latter part is usually handled by our SoD, however you can also handle him with Tantrum provided that you do not stand to his south east when he dies, because he triggers a death spiral. You should jump in a TP to avoid it after he is killed.

The zombies on this level are untargetable and if playing on realm are essentially collision free. Thus you have to try and get good at dodging the packs while you run to the bridge as it is easy to get desynched when surrounded and killed if you realise it too late. As with Vizjun you should only use your Divine Apparition as an emergency button or when jumping over walls. Other enemies on the level are punisher shooting turrets with very low life, which die from SoD. If you get hit by them make sure to instantly drink a potion to cure the poison. Finally there are darkwardens that knock you back, have high hp and cast tremor on death. You should simply run past them and while on the bridge try not to blink near them.

Once you get to the bridge itself use summons and go to town to wait for your teleport cooldown in order to reach the end.

Trophy: 1 all skills. Medium priority, farming it is worth your time.






31. ATHULUA (OPTIONAL): Unfortunately the rewards from this boss are meaningless to us as we do not need Athulua's Blessing, because we already have sufficient attack rating, and Valkayrie's Prime is nothing special. However she does have a high chance to drop sacred uniques and dies rather fast, so is not a bad choice for farming.

She has four main abilities. She casts tantrum when you are in her melee range. Secondly, she can blink on top of you, leaving a wide circle around the location that deals damage over time and summons rats which have Tremor on death. Thirdly she has guided arrows which deal no damage but stun you for a long duration. Finally she has some sort of star encrusted arrow shot which does 4k damage with 25% PDR.

The challenge in this fight comes from keeping on the move so that you do not take much damage from her Tantrum and Sky siege abilities and not being in close proximity to rats when they die from our Tantrum. We have extremely high defence and capped DR with a lot of flat physical reduction thanks to blessed life, so we are ideally suited to taking this boss down. Just make sure to replace your Hellfire Plate with a Dragonheart as the proc causes an annoying lack of control in this fight.






32. KABRAXIS: Preferrably in your mid game gear, however the only really mandatory piece here is the Hellfire Plate, because it acts as an extra layer of protection against the boss' balefire spell - the green fire which deals heavy magic damage. Kabraxis' other abilities include summoning hordes of mostly harmless skeletons which serve as Vindicate enablers, casting bone prison on you, punisher barrage which you can counteract by drinking a potion, a lethal Broadside when you are close to him that you should always avoid and finally pouncing on your head when you get too far.

The strategy for this boss is to stack as many tantrums as you can on one spot and wait for the boss to blink on you. Then run away or teleport asap to avoid the Broadside. Afterwards keep spamming Tantrum and wait for the next blink. In the mean time you should do your best to dodge the Balefires, but our armour will mostly protect you from them.

After you have obtained the charm explore the level for the elemental mini bosses. The strategy for Fire, Ice, Lightning and Physical is the same. You go to their pillar, stack tantrums and then run away when it pops. Lure minions a few at a time to the corridor that surrounds the map and kill them there. Then run around the pentagram where the boss is to finish off remaining minions. Make sure that as you do you dodge the Faerie Fire/Hailstorm/Thunderstone/Broadside (when close). Then position yourself near one of the beams of the pentagram. As soon as the boss casts his spell on you, run in to the middle and stack Tantrums until you see the warning animation for the next cast and run out. For the physical boss you will have much less time as there is no warning to the Broadside.

The difference on the magic boss is that you will be using Slayers to kill all minions and the boss. He casts a death spiral, so once all lesser elementals are slain run in a circle around the pentagram while maintaining your 5 slayers on the boss' head. An average roll for the charm is +10 total max res. I would farm it until I get a +15 roll, since the boss drops very good loot.

Trophy: Random reanimate. Low priority, farm only if you are bored.





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HARD UBERQUESTS

Often require more in-depth strategy and take more practice to get used to.



33. ZORUN TZIN:

Gear required here is your midgame farming set, but replace the Hellfire plate with your Dragonheart. Everything else is unchanged.

The boss has three main abilities. When at range he can blink on you, casting a 6 directional instakill spell when he arrives, which has a safe zone in his melee range. He also has a spine spell which does no damage but summons untargetable, high physical damage dealing ratfinks. Lastly he can summon statues which grant him invulnerability in a big radius (at least a full screen away). These are immune to all themselves and can only be killed by being purified.

Strategy:
Take a look at the below screenshot, explaining the kiting route in the Hidden Fortress. Zorun himself is rather easy because as you can see from his abilities. His only high damaging attack is easily dodged by staying still for half a second when he blinks on you.


► Zorun Route



The biggest challenge here for us will be to manage the ever increasing ratfink numbers and to a lesser extent the statues while we damage the boss. The yellow circles in the screenshot are your two designated rat herding pens. After you kill Terul, make sure to traverse the entire level clearing it of Goliaths and herding all rats into the right side pen. Keep your TP at the green circle, in case you need to recover your body.

Then go to the red circle, summon Zorun and run away. You will be kiting the boss around the blue circle. Slow target can be helpful here as it will give you more time to damage the boss before statues start appearing. Thankfully our high defence and damage reduction make ratfinks relatively harmless unless in high numbers.

Every time the boss blinks on you hold your position and spam Tantrum until you see a statue. Then purify it and keep spamming. If another statue appears in the mean time, then use Divine Apparition to blink to the edge of your screen, move a few steps and wait for the boss there. Do not run as Tantrum on statues easily breaks the sprite limit and you will be unable to see and dodge the boss 1hko spell. Once you repeat this 3-4 times there will now be enough rats gnawing at your feet to make you herd them. Lose Zorun and relocate the rats to the pen that is on the opposite side of where you left him. Then use Divine Apparition to get back to the kiting route.

Before re-engaging the boss make sure to clear out the statues that you had spawned along the way. His heroic shield is quite tough so fight length may vary considerably.


Video in 1.5x speed.





34. YSHARI SANCTUM:

A love it or hate it uber. Be sure to set aside some time as it takes a while. I personally enjoy the enemy design and the progressive difficulty and density increase and the labyrinth is amazing. Drops here are actually among the best in the game per mob.

First Stage
Mephisto: Casts a knockback nova and summons perpetually resurrecting Veil Kings. The goal here is to blink on him and nuke him down as fast as possible. Tantrum will protect you in the case that Veil Kings do spawn because it will kill them before they are able to attack and prevent them from resurrecting with its high damage output.

Second Stage
Beware fast moving Shadow skeleton mobs, who will poison you on hit. A second hit is fatal.

Andariel: She has mostly poison spells so use a large group of scourges to surround her. Then position yourself so that your Tantrum is barely in range of her, but so that her Plague Avatars do not hit you. Then keep spamming Tantrum and topping up your Scourge counter, because if she is not surrounded when she gets low she will start to flee. If you are using the midgame gear unequip your Hellfire Plate for Jitan's Kamon for this boss.

Third Stage
Iron golems cast lifeblood when damaged, making them virtually impossible to kill so run past them.

Polar Worms are harmless on their own but beware their on death summons.

Diablo: Move around the edges of the boss room first, and lure the Chimaera one by one to the entrance. Their trinity beam and on death nova are lethal, so take cover when they die.

Summon a few fire immune Daystars to distract Diablo and nuke him down. He is not poison immune so SoD will help you make quick work of him.

Fourth Stage
Nothing here is really threatening to us, but try not to stand in the poison clouds shot by the worms too much.

Duriel: Stack tantrums and lure him into them. When he gets a successfull attack off he becomes immune to all, but we have high defence so you can simply hold your ground until he is dead.

Final Stage
Try not to stand near walls and dodge the fire attacking mobs.

Baal: summon a few scourges to distract him, keep him in the middle of the room and kill him with Tantrum.


Valthek: After you have collected the full boss set (Brotherhood of the Vizjerei) and the full mini-boss set (Brotherhood of the Horadrim) you are ready to equip all items and face the final boss of the Yshari Sanctum. Note that this may require more than a single run of the instance, typically at least two. As for the boss, use your Arcane Blast ability to clear trash, and holy bolt to damage Valthek when he blinks on you.

Valthek himself has two abilities – the first a fire nova which does no damage as long as you are far from its origin so keep mobile. The point of origin looks like a black Godsman Guard. The second ability is a multi-directional lightning bolt, which one shots you. Therefore keep moving and clearing godsman guards, holy bolt the boss when he ports on you and move to avoid lightning bolts, while drinking a pot to regen from the fire damage. Try to get a nicely rolled charm.


Full run minus the trash clearing. The Chimaeras near Diablo caused some fps drops, which is why you see me running around and going to town while it hopefully resolves.





35. ASTROGHA:

For this and the next Uber we will be respecing to unholy caster. This is because both of these bosses are rather melee unfriendly and also have teleport when struck which works badly when we use Tantrum due to their AI.

If you have never played this build, do not worry it's not very complicated. The skill build is smax TB, Mind Flay and Stormlord. 5pts in rapture, enough in Blessed life until you reach the 50% dr cap and remainders in Superbeast / 1pt in all else. For stats go half vitality half energy.

For gear any decent combination of sacred uniques you might have found while farming duncraig will do fine (such as the gear I used in the video), however the best gear set will consist entirely out of crafts. As such I will list the stats on crafted gear you will be looking for, because obtaining these items can be done just by farming Fauztinville Destruction or Terror for Ornate shrines. The goal is to reach -170% to enemy lightning resistance and then get the highest Mind Flay damage and defence possible.


► Crafted gear




The boss has only two abilities. He summons statues which belch out Darklings at a fast rate and disintegrate on their own after some seconds. These statues must not be touched by you because when killed they set your maximum hp to 1 and this leads to your death. He also casts a lethal Frozen Orb if there is an enemy in his melee range.

To kill him we need to take care of two things. Firstly we need the high lightning pierce and Mind Flay damage to ensure we can kill him in a few resistance drops. Secondly we need some way to survive the onslaught of the Darklings while we position ourselves to cast at Astrogha without breaking statues. To that extent keep five Hoplites with you. They will tank the little maggots for you and give you cover if you break a statue. Your defence should be sufficient (500k at least) so that the adds will not trouble you. Then simply position yourself such that you can fire off Mind Flays at the boss, without killing statues on the way. Reposition and resummon Hoplites if necessary when he blinks. DO NOT buff yourself with SoD or VoR for this boss. They cannot damage Astrogha and only serve to kill statues spawned near you and thus make the fight harder for no reason.

To make this as easy as possible, make sure to only summon Astrogha in long, dead-end, corridors where he cannot escape to small side sections of the Mausoleum and jam them full of Darklings. Farm yourself at least a 450+ hp charm.

Trophy: 5% pierce in all elements. Low priority, farm only if you are bored.


I buffed myself with VoR by mistake after I died and you can see why this is bad, statues spawned near me at the 2:37 and 3:03 marks were killed by it.





36. THE WRETCHED HIVE:

Navigating the Maggot Lair:
Use the gear you used for Astrogha, but replace some of the caster Jewels with Perfect Bloodstones until you reach 95% fire resist. Our Tainted blood will take care of the poison pierce of the regular enemies here and stacking max resist for this element is also unnecessary due to our high defence. Just don't get hit by too many punishers in the lowest level.

The first level of the Maggot Lair contains untargetable Ghost Worms and eggs, which block your path and spawn more creepy crawlies when killed. Just run around until you find the exit, TB + Vindicate regen will be sufficient to keep you at full life. The next level is the Maggot Depths. It features less of the unkillable bugs and some killable ones. Simply treat it the same way as the above and rush to the exit.

The first challenging part of this uber begins once you reach the Wretched Hive. Your task here is to locate Brachyceran – you will know when you reach him by the fire on the ground preceding his room. Eat an apple and traverse the level, killing everything in your way and keeping hoplites with you to tank punishers, until you find the boss room.  A useful tip is to never open any goo doors on the final level - they act as natural barriers and prevent maggot herds from following you around.

Afterwards you need to clear a reasonably wide section around his chamber from Ghost Worms. In order to do this we must lure them away. Because they do not move, but rather blink to your position this is only possible via leading packs of them into twisted passages and then using Divine Apparition to teleport out of their line of sight.


Brachyceran:
When you get to actually fight the boss without throngs of maggots gnawing at your feet you will realise he is rather easy. He has four abilities. Firstly he casts Lorenado, which does no damage to us thanks to our stacked poison resist. Then he has a fire Punisher Nova and a fire Keg Throw which deal no damage to us thanks to our 95% fire resist. Lastly every 5 seconds when in his sight range he will morph you into a maggot, which sets your fire resistance to -100 and there is nothing you can do about it. During this period of time prolonged exposure to his fire spells will lead to your death.

Keep five Hoplites around you at all times.The first time the boss sees you he will polymorph you. During this time, be sure to take cover from his fire spells and resummon fallen Hoplites. Once the morph expires, move in vision of Brachyceran. Keep him pinned down in his room and cast Mind Flays at him for around 4 seconds. Then fall back out of his sight range as the next polymorph is incoming. Repeat this process until he is dead. This may be rather quick or slower depending on the random additional resistances he spawns with. Don't forget to keep your buffs up if the fight takes a longer time because a lack of Tainted Blood will kill you very quickly.

On the below video the boss spawned with Magic Resistant (base +40% resistance) for me which is one of the worst random affixes. Your kill may be faster. I suggest to remake the game if the boss spawns with Magic Resistant + Spectral hit (+60% base lightning resist) OR Lightning Enchanted (+75% base lightning resist), because in these cases he will drop his lightning immunity VERY rarely.






37. STARTLED WITCH:

Gear required for this uber is at least 70% magic resistance, 100% Open wounds and at least 100k AR. Optionally 50% slow target is also helpful but not mandatory. To achieve the magic resist you need either SU Heavy boots or SU Diadem and craft TU Bone Shield, MO with damage reduced and vitality and socket with Perfect Rubies. For your weapon use the TU6 Angel Star we made for the Kingdom of Shadow, MO it with Attack Rating orbs and socket with Perfect Amethysts. To get 100% Open wounds a Ripstar ring + our midgame gloves will be sufficient. For our body armour use the Dragonheart we made for Ureh. The other pieces can be from your normal Tantrum midgame set.

Now we also need some way of applying open wounds from a distance. Because there is no WDM skill in the paladin tree that fits this description we will use Wyrd. This is a skill found on the Ring/Amulet Mystic orbs. It creates a nova type explosion wherever you click and has a cooldown which decreases up to 0.2 sec with soft points. Therefore take your Ripstar ring and orb it with +15 to Wyrd. Also slap some mana regeneration orbs on there. Then you need either a random rare amulet with +3 all skills OR the better choice would be the Athulua's Oracle TU amulet, because it gives a large bonus to attack rating. Orb the necklace with +15 to Wyrd and some mana regeneration as well and this will be sufficient to reach the cooldown cap.

In terms of stats, put enough points in dexterity to reach 100k AR. Depending on your charm rolls this should be around 250 points. Dump everything else into vitality. For skills, smax Rapture, TB and Stormlord. Points in Blessed life to cap, 10pts vor, leftovers in hoplites. Do not use suberbeast in this uber, it has a much slower FHR animation and Wyrd has a 5 frame cooldown anyway so the attack animation boost is irrelevant.

Go to the Nexus Bridge and seek out the witch… When you get to the World Nexus, scout out the four crossroads and the number of Witches present on them. You need a clean crossroad with the entrances to it being free of them too. If all of them are occupied, then remake the game until you find one that meets the criteria.

After you have found a suitable arena, it is time to go to the centre of the Nexus and wake up the Startled Witch. She has four main abilities: a red force wall which does no damage but pushes you back should you walk through it; green projectiles fired at you from a distance which deal heavy magic damage; a magic damage multihitting nova she casts if you are in melee range which instakills you if you don’t move away; and finally she can pounce you when you are too far away or when you damage her with a purify.

The strategy is simple but the execution is tricky. Keep all your buffs active, spam several Wyrds on top of the Witch's head and then purify her. Once the cooldown of the purify expires make sure to instantly hit her with Wyrd to maintain her bleeding. Use Hoplites to distract her and prevent her from spamming her spells on you instead. Then run after her when she blinks away and maintain the Wyrd/Purify activity described above. If she pounces on you make sure to get away as fast as possible to avoid death. Note that the fight takes a while as she has high hp.

With regards to the charm, and what trophy to cube it with – it all depends on your current and endgame setup you are aiming for. In my opinion the best charm for the Tantrumdin is made with the Uldyssian trophy - it gives 600-900 flat elemental damage and a 50% chance of getting a Destroyer Shaman reanimate. If you have already have farmed that reanimate on your Fools Gold/Harkon Crystal go for the Rathma Square trophy.


Boss fight is in double speed.





38. ULDYSSIAN:

Memories: You must defeat 30 mini bosses before facing Uldyssian in battle. Kite with Tantrum all who are not mentioned. A good idea is to spawn a single Scourge before you enter the new arena which gives you time to start kiting more comfortably. All of the memories can be completed both in Tantrum and in caster offspec and are in general equally difficult. The only difference is the Prime Edyrem - Baal. There the caster spec makes it much easier, because with Tantrum we are always close to the origin of his Trinity nova.


► Memories

Video is in double speed.




Uldyssian: Make sure to bring your Wyrd MOd Athulua's Oracle + Ripstar as you will need them for the second phase.

First part from 100% hp to 33%:

Boss chases you around the room. When he gets close, say half a screen away, he casts sacred armour on himself (looks like a beam of light on his head) for around 5 seconds. During this time he has 100% avoid, so if your OW falls off you can't reapply it unless the SA is off.

Using Tantrum, with a decent attack rating (socket Perfect Amethysts in your weapon instead of Rainbows for this boss), make a path of tantrums behind you while running in a wide circle, to make sure Uldy always walks on top of the flowers. This ensures that as soon as he drops his armor he will get wounded, even if he casts it a few seconds after again. This means that after you purify + OW him (you will see he starts to bleed), the only thing you need to do is hit him to refresh OW every 8 seconds and not allow him to get close enough to use SA. Slow target helps here but I did not use any.

You should always be paying attention whether boss is bleeding or not, so that if you fucked up and OW dropped you purify + reapply as soon as SA is off so you don't waste time. With some practice you should never drop OW here at all. I also recommend purifying him on cooldown as much as possible, when his armour is off, to speed up the fight.

Second part from 33% to 0:

Boss is using same AI as Baal memory. So when you get him this low he starts to run away from you very fast. The key here is to get him stuck in the "correct" spot. You should try your best to herd him away from the bottom right & left or top right corners, because there the shadows of the walls mean you can't see him.

So correct spots are either on the middle island or top left.

Once boss is in the correct spot the fight is similar to the old one - position yourself between the deathstrike rays, stack Wyrds on him and purify as much as you can. But there is a twist. He casts his SA from very far away. This means that you need to just barely see his legs so that you can keep purifying and OW. Then when the stun and knockback comes you need to make sure to get back to the same spot.

If you are closer than that he casts SA and you do no damage. If you are further away he starts to run away from the corner. So basically just have to maintain correct distance after knockback and keep him on the sweet spot.

Five minutes of the first phase in normal speed. Then the whole second phase in double speed. Actual fight length was 62 minutes.








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ULTIMATE UBERQUESTS

You are not prepared.



39. BROTHER LAZ:

Gear check: This is a purify boss, therefore we will require a dedicated gear set with an emphasis on defensive attributes. The stat caps you should aim to reach with this set are the following.

Firstly we need 100% OW so that we can reliably bleed the boss after a purify hit. This is achieved with the Butcher's tooth and the Ripstar ring.

Secondly we require 50% slow target. This will greatly increase the time we have to purify & hit Laz and as such is necessary for our survival. I recommend making a double MO bonus Void runeword in a Flail (longer attack range), and then orbing it as shown on the gear picture below. This gives 33% slow on its own. In addition we get 10% from our Triune charm.

Thirdly we need to reach our maximum speed breakpoints because this will give us more time to react during the fight. Those are 200% FHR, 60% IAS and 86 FCR. To this extent utilise the double MO space on your crafted pieces (belt, gloves and boots) to prioritise these breakpoints first and then fill remaining space to reach around 200% FRW and as much flat Damage reduced as possible. Note that because the superbeast morph does not have a blocking animation it uses the "get hit" animation when a block occurs.

Fourthly we must stack as much defensive attributes as possible. This means orbing runewords with Enhanced Defence prior to putting the RW in and using superior + lucky pieces with at least 80% ED. You will also be sMaxing Blessed life for the 50% Damage reduction cap, and as much flat physical damage reduction as possible.

Finally we need to make sure that there are no on attack/striking/death procs that do damage on our gear at all. The reasons for this will be explained in the enemies section. On kill procs however are fine, because they are not triggered by Mind Flay or Blood Thorns or meleeing Laz. Some of our charms have undesired procs themselves - the Crystalline Flame Medallion, Kabraxis' Soul, Cold Fusion Schematics and the upgraded Idol of Vanity. However going back to the Cathedral and obtaining a non-upgraded one is fine and very helpful as the 15% all speeds allows us to more easily reach the target breakpoints.

Below is my full gear set and also all the socket fillers. My defensive stats when I did the fight were 650k defence (up to 1.1M with Terror Strike), 50% block, 21k hp, 50% DR, over 500 flat damage reduction and around 800 LoSiM.



► Laz gear




Stats & Skills:
Half dexterity and half vitality. This ensures that we have a sufficiently high hp pool, and afterwards going for as much block as possible is superior. The skill build is smax Terror Strike, Tainted Blood, Stormlord and Blessed Life. 10 points in rapture , 1pt in all other holy influence and reward skills and leftovers in Hymn.

We will use Terror Strike + Blood Thorns to clear Groupies and Mind Flay to clear totems, but be very careful how you aim the latter as it travels a long distance and may lead to accidentally killing some totems near Laz if you are in a large opeb space. As for the boss himself, I suggest binding Terror Strike on the left skill button and Purify from Uldyssian's Sword on the right.


Enemies:
Groupies: These are summoned initially with Laz and also every time he blinks on you. As soon as they see you they will throw a dagger which does tri-elemental damage. This is easy to dodge, but in case you get hit we have capped resists so it's not too bad. Afterwards they will attempt to approach and melee you. Thankfully they are slow so are easy to outrun. If there are Groupies between you and Laz and he is about to teleport on you try to tank their hits with Terror Strike up in order to not waste more space in the Proving Grounds.

Black Hand Totems: These are occasionally summoned by Brother Laz when you are in medium range of him. The totems cast tremor when you get close (about half a screen away), which will leave you with barely any hp. Most importantly however these totems have almost no life themselves, so any attack will kill them. You should do your best to avoid destroying them, while you fight the boss, because they debuff you on death in the same way that Astrogha's statues do and they also heal the boss if he is near. This is the reason why we have removed all our procs. We do not want them triggering during the fight and accidentally killing a totem, which will lead to our death and may heal Laz.

Brother Laz: He has several abilities. Firstly he can pounce on you (he "sees" you from very far away), which triggers off a physical damage Retaliate nova and spawns Groupies. Secondly he can spawn Black Hand Totems as described above. Thirdly he targets you with Singularity when close and Deathstrike when far away.

Needless to say both Singularity and Deathstrike are lethal, so do your best to move when you see them under your feet. Due to our high defences and damage reduction we are nearly immune to the retaliate attack, so the only thing that can lead to your death are the above spells or tarrying too long near the boss and getting Tremored by freshly spawned totems.

The most important thing you will learn when you begin to practice this uber is not to panic. Panic is understandable here because the boss' AI will target you from a long range, so you are always under fire. But at the same time it is crucial to control the adrenaline and move just enough to dodge the Deathstrike and using all empty available space of the level as you kite.


The Execution:
First step is to respec, equip your gear and then make your way to the Proving grounds. When you get to the grounds, kill the Death projector using Blood Thorns. Then lure all mechanics to the bottom left corner of the level - the room marked with a green circle in the below screenshot.

Then open a town portal in the room directly above, near the yellow circle on the screenshot. Next go to the red circle and summon the boss. As soon as you do run to point B. Prepare yourself and slowly start inching back towards the room where you summoned. Brother Laz will then blink on you. Now here is something important to remember. Every time you begin the fight, or after a death, the first time Laz pounces you your only task is to land a melee attack on him - do not even think about Purifying him until he is hit and slowed. Note that because he has around 50% avoid not every attack you make will connect. Therefore I recommend that you play with sound ON for this boss, because you can clearly hear the distinct "whack" when your attack lands.

Okay now that you managed to hit Laz, you will kite him along the blue route (direction B-C-D-E-F). From this point onwards once you got him slowed the basic mechanics of the fight boil down to: purify, hit, run, dodge deathstrikes & singularities, repeat. So basically every time he blinks on you, you shoot a purify, then you attack him, then kite. Once you have successfully gotten the boss to bleed you should focus on simply hitting him with terror strike to refresh the DoT and not using purify, which enables you to use your Divine Apparition to escape tricky situations.

Once you approach point E along the route, your task between points E and F will be to lose the boss. If you have him properly slowed this should not be hard with our fast running speed. After this is accomplished, move to point B and retrace your steps along the route in order to clear out all Groupies & Totems that were spawned during the kite. Even if you die during this it is no problem as 1pt Mind Flay does enough damage to clear groupies even naked.

As you get closer and closer to the point where Laz last blinked on you get ready to repeat the above process, but this time reversing the route going in direction F-E-D-C-B. Remember that every time we begin the fight our only job after the first pounce is to get the boss hit and slowed. Only worry about purifying afterwards. With more and more practice you can modify your route to include more and more of the level. With sufficient practice it is possible to reduce Laz's hp by 50% per lap, requiring only 2 routes to kill him. However on your first kill you will likely require a lot more with many deaths in the process - this is normal. My best performance on the first kill was 1/3 of Laz's hp without dying.



► Laz Route




Corpse Recovery: So you managed to kite Laz for a bit and hopefully land some purifies and maintain OW during this time. If you get killed by the boss he will likely camp your corpse, so now the task becomes recovering our items while being careful not to kill any totems in the process. In order to do this we must lure Laz at least 1.5 blinks away from our body. So as you enter the TP, approach from the side of the route which is clean of Groupies and Totems until you get blinked on and die. Repeat this once more if necessary. Then go along the other side of the route and clear Groupies & Totems until you recover your body. Then clear out the remaining trash and inch towards the boss to renew the fight.



Again video from my Amazon guide, to avoid extra workload.Once you have the basics down you will see it is a lot easier with the paladin.






40. THE VOID:

This is a multi stage quest that culminates with a "Triune Boss" type encounter that takes some time getting used to, but it does reward the most overpowered charm currently in the game.

First you must assemble the sigil of the Seven Deadly Sins, by defeating as many mini bosses (souls). The void itself consists of 4 maps, which are accessed through the same entrance in Upper Kurast. One of the areas uses the Arcane Sanctuary tileset and is where you will be doing the final encounter once you have the sigil. Another uses the Kurast Docks tileset and is simply there to confuse you, having no other purpose. The remaining two maps use the Catacombs tileset and are the ones which you actually have to traverse in order to find the souls. Have a look at the below maps, I like to call the left one the "North map" (because you spawn to the north) and the right one the "South map".



► Void Maps




When you get one of the two "Soul entrance" maps, know that there will be exactly 1 soul that will be accessible through that area and this soul will be randomised each time. Make sure to check out all the teleport locations marked with stars in the above maps. So for example you can be in the South map and the only accessible soul is Sloth and the next time this map appears Sloth will not be available, but Lust will be instead.

There are two types of enemies throughout the maps. The first are Eternal Ghosts which shoot missiles of burn damage that reduce your hp to 1 and eventually kill you. They also have a weak heroic shield which refreshes about once per minute and occasionally teleport when struck. Kill them by distracting them with summons and if they are immune to all go to town for 10 seconds and come back. The other type are Darkspawn that come in either Physical or Poison immune varieties, have strong physical attacks and continuously respawn via the "moving chests" coming into contact with you or a summon. Tantrum clears these fast enough, but they will always be testing your defences by respawning, which encourages you to get a move on.


The Souls

Gluttony: Easy. Clear a square from the Eternal Ghosts and lure the soul there. He only melees so Summon a few scourges to tank him and stack Tantrums on him in the mean time.

Greed: Easy. When you get to his area ignore everything and rush to the center. He has a curse which sets your mana to 0 so you are unable to use any skills. Fortunately for us VoJ + SoD make quick work of him.

Lust: Easy. Same strategy as above. When you get this area summon scourges and rush to the big tree in the middle. There are untargetable zombies which chase you down like in Ureh so try to not get surrounded. Try to find the soul, which looks like Blood Raven and is hard to spot in the darkness, and SoD will take care of her.

Sloth: Easy. The soul itself is not dangerous. First try to clear out all Eternal ghosts in the vicinity. Then go to the soul and stay at the top left corner when you get there. SoD will kill Sloth by itself so all you have to do is keep replenishing your 25 scourges which will protect you from the on death trap. Boss has a low chance to drop the scroll so keep killing it for a bit.

Envy: Tricky. He is in a rather large and very dark area, which is inhabited by lots of eternal ghosts. He summons minions, which he can imbue with a buff that makes them cast Death Shards when killed which deal extremely high damage to you if you are nearby. He also has a burning nova like Belial and is constantly trying to get away from you, which makes him hard to spot in the darkness if he does not have any minions around him and he regenerates life.

There are two ways to do this, the first is to use your usual Tantrum spec and gear and clear out the whole area of Eternal Ghosts. Then Equip your Wyrd jewellery that we used for the Witch and Uldy and position yourself so that you are across a moat or on an elevated platform at a distance from envy. This makes him hover at the edge of your screen and keep spamming minions towards you. Once this positioning is achieved spam Wyrd on him to slowly kill him (he wont heal because of OW) and at the same time spam Tantrum at your feet to kill incoming minions before they get buffed.



► Positioning example




The second way is easier, but requires that you have good offspec caster gear with high damage and good defence. If you do then simply shoot a few Mind Flays on him and he will die.

Wrath: Tricky / Lame. The boss has an untankable ability that is paired with constant knockback on your character. Because we are unable to stack defensive stats to counter the ability and we lose complete control of our character movement once we are under attack, we will use Sacred Armour to survive. The boss will slowly kill himself as long as you do not die in the process, because this will heal him.

When you initially approach his chamber blink over the "hidden door wall" to prevent many Darkspawn from following you and interfering in the boss fight. Afterwards when you get to his room, turn on sacred armour and run along the south and then east edges of the room until you get to the north wall. Then open a tp and go back to town. From here on the strategy is as follows. Fill up one column of your belt slots with TP scrolls and wait for the cooldown on SA to wear off. Then cast SA, enter your tp, take a few steps along the north wall. Wrath will blink on you. During this time your job is to count in your head the duration of SA. When it gets low, open a tp from your belt and enter it. Repeat this process several times until he is dead.

Pride: Hard. This soul is only reachable through the area which contains Sloth. The passage can be either at the north west tip of the Sloth zone or the south east, basically exactly opposite of where you arrive. This gives rise to two map variants. The first thing you must know is that reaching the boss is a challenge in and of itself. Look at the below solved maps, where I have marked the easiest route to the goal. The maps contain untargetable entities which shoot highly damaging lightning bolts at you. With 20k hp it takes two hits from them to take you down. You need at least 600k defence and capped DR to be able to manage the run to the boss while Darkspawn are gnawing you. To this extent I would suggest respecing for more run speed through Rapture and equipping a shield with high defence. There is not much more to say here apart from keep practising the routes and lightning dodging until you reach the boss spawn, which is only 1/4 of the time. If he is not there remake the game.



► North map

► South Map





Once you get to his platform, and he is there, go to town and respec. There are two way to kill the boss. The easy way is possible if you have good caster gear, respec to full energy and smax MF, Stormlord etc. Enter the portal with hoplites and cast SA and spam MF on the boss until he transforms you to a chicken. Then go back to town. With good enough MF damage you should be able to kill him in a few goes.

The harder method is using your highest damage tantrum gear + OW support. And then making a tp on one side, running in with SA to the middle, spamming tantrums on a spot until the soul blinks on you and you get cursed. Then run to the opposite side of the room and exit via a new TP. Then repeat the process several times until he starts to flee. Afterwards keep doing the same. The trick is to always have your TP far away from the boss so that you have some seconds to run up to his face and Tantrum him before he debuffs you. Shamanka can help in both cases because a weapon switch will supposedly remove the debuff.

After you have collected all scrolls, cube them with the ring of pride. Now you are ready for the final battle!


Rathma v Mendeln

With your sigil of the sins, you must stand at the centre of the Arcane Sanctuary tileset map and cast the Mage Rage ability to start the fight. Note that there seems to be an invisible monster near the centre which allows you to use the skill. To this extent DO NOT use SoD or VoJ until you cast Mage Rage as they will kill said mob. Make sure to clear out any Eternal Ghosts beforehand too, but be careful not to cast Tantrums at the centre for the above reason.

The two bosses that will appear after some fireworks will fight each other and have the following abilities:

Rathma: Necromancer appearance. Has low health. His small model and/or higher avoid mean that he is less likely to be hit by the invisible burn missiles that are being continuously shot onto the arena. It is hard/impossible to control where he moves, but in general he tends to walk towards his target. His first ability is a Graveyard passive, which shoots a swarm of punisher bolts with extremely high poison damage when an enemy is near. Secondly he casts a wave of black slayers whenever an enemy is near. These black slayers deal nearly lethal damage to yourself and high damage to Mendeln. Thirdly he summons skeletons which will target and melee whoever is closest between you and Mendeln. Finally he casts a Starfall spell that deals extremely high damage to a wide area.

The black slayer cast seems to be unreliable, to the extent that whenever you place a summon near him (you should not place yourself near as it is easy to die to graveyard) he will often not cast the slayers instantly, but will first wait to finish his Scythe shaking or walking. At the same time the life expectancy of your summon is less than half a second because of the punishers. Still you should use Edyrem here, instead of poison immune Scourge, because the latter can go around Rathma when he is moving and cause him to shoot the black slayers in the wrong direction.

The Starfall ability is a bit of a mystery apart from the fact that it will always kill you very rapidly. During all my kills of this uber there are two things that I can say will for sure reduce your chance of dying to it. 1) Be over a full screen away from Rathma. If you can see Rathma and he casts the spell, try to instantly teleport out of its area because otherwise you will die very quickly. 2) If you are far enough away, staying still (if you can) or teleporting out of its radius is safest. Do not try to walk while the Starfall is in progress.


Mendeln: Cultist appearance. Has high health. His big model and/or lower avoid mean that he is highly likely to be hit by the invisible burn missiles that are being continuously shot onto the arena. It is easy to control where he moves, because he will walk away, in the opposite direction, from enemies near him. His first ability is Sacred Armour, it makes him invulnerable to all damage when an enemy is close to him. Secondly he casts a "Wyrmshot" of white slayers at you, even if you are far away. Those Wyrmshots shoot homing bolts with burn damage that lightly damage both you and Rathma. Thirdly he casts some sort of super speed buff on you from time to time.

Because of the nature of his AI, you should always control his position so that he is approximately 1 to 1.5 screens away from Rathma. This will make your job easier in hitting him with the black slayers. Furthermore you should always aim to stand between both bosses as this will cause skeletons to spawn on you instead of Mendeln. Otherwise the latter will use his Sacred Armour and will be invulnerable until you correct your position. Standing between them also ensures that the white slayers will keep hitting Rathma.


Overall Strategy: Your job is to try and get both bosses to kill each other at the same time. When Rathma dies he drops a blank version of the charm. To upgrade it you must make sure that once the first boss dies - with my strategy this will be Rathma - you kill Mendeln in the next 60 seconds and then pick up and transmute the charm in the cube while both the red and blue swirlies are on you. To this extent make sure to equip your trusty Wyrd MO jewellery as you will need open wounds to fine tune the hp of the bosses. Swap out your Hellfire plate for your Dragonheart and otherwise use the normal setup.

First however, I would like to discuss the change of tactics from the only other Void guide on the forum (Korcola's), which recommends you to shoot black slayers at Medeln until he is one hit from death. Then get Rathma extremely low, with the help of open wounds and then shoot Mendeln a final time while maintaining OW so that Rathma dies soon after.



► Strategy comparison and evaluation




Our strategy will be as follows. Firstly we hit Mendeln with black slayers enough times until he is one hit from death. Keep him at two hits worth of HP while you are inexperienced, because in this case it may happen that you walk close enough to Rathma by accident and kill Mendeln when you are not supposed to. Secondly, while you are shooting Mendeln, try to keep OW as much as possible on Rathma. Thirdly, when Mendeln is 1 hit away from death lead him as far away from Rathma as possible. Then go between them and keep refreshing OW on both bosses until Rathma's HP is half way between the "R" of his name and the opening bracket "(". Fourthly, afterwards leave Rathma alone go to Mendeln and apply open wounds on him until his HP is half way between death and the first open bracket of his name tag. Then go and kill Rathma with open wounds. As soon as he is dead run in vision of Mendeln, keep your distance, and finish him off with OW + Purify to supplement the damage from the traps.



Do ignore the random rage comment at the start of the video. My router caused the two previous recording attempts to end in failure and it got me a bit salty.





41. MARCONECROX:

I have only been able to kill him with a lame strategy. A legitimate kill could be possible but I was not able to roll a Tantrum bow with a high amount of slow target and so was unable to test an appropriate strategy. This section will be updated if I find a working strategy with the build before the ladder reset.

Nevertheless if you must have his charm respec to a caster and go full energy, maximum dps gear without any regards for defence. Then use the same tactic that you used for the Soul of Wrath - sacred armour and tp cycling. When his resistance drops and you damage him go to town as soon as the immunity is restored otherwise he will heal.






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ENDGAME GEAR


Bow: The best crafted bow will have the following modifiers. 25% CtC Arrow on striking, Tantrum, (161-320)-(641-960) fire or cold damage, Enhanced Damage +(301 to 350)%, successful Lucky Oil and successful Abandoned shrine bless.

Quiver: Hanabigami with a successful lottery upgrade.

Helm: Rotundjere RW.

Body Armour: Hellfire Plate RW.

Gloves: Demonic Touch. The Cataclysm proc and Death Projector reanimate provide superior damage compared to the 500 fire damage on our gauntlets. They also have nice defence and you save some skill points from the DR.

Belt: Nero RW. Path of flames deals incredibly high damage and synergises with Tantrum, because we get close to enemies anyway. The fire spell damage also works great for our Cataclysm, Lava Pit and Flamefront procs.

Boots: Toesie Warmer with a successful lottery upgrade.

Rings: Empyrean Glory. Direct upgrade with over double the value.

Amulet: Klaatu Barada Nikto with a successful lottery upgrade.

Prebuff: Also Blackened.

Sockets: Replace all rare jewels with On crafts, with 2% Vit, Flat HP, 15% FHR, 4 LaeK



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F A Q

- Valkyrie's Prime seems like a viable weapon option for this build, how good is it?
I have tested it extensively and yes it is viable but only as a farming weapon. The single target is much worse than the standard build. In terms of farming, the biggest speed/efficiency improvements are in the Cow Level (for levelling above 120), Unformed Land (faster movement between the spread out packs). All uberlevels under, and including, Fauztinville also experience good performance gains, but the ones above apart from the sewers do not. The bow performs much better if you have endgame gear, especially the prebuff from Blackened and Path of Flames on Nero.


- What is the tantrum gear used in the videos?
Midgame gear set listed in the guide + Blackened prebuff.

- What is the caster gear used in the videos?
Dead lake lady's sceptre, Veil of the Tainted sun blackguard helm, angelhost crown shield, sankekur's faulds full plate mail, ashaera's armour belt, nephilim rw greaves, lamha na draoithe gauntlets, +1 sk -elr, lsd, rings, black dwarf ammy.

- I don't have all the above items, can I still do the offspec bosses?
Yes. This was just a combination of SUs I had lying in my stash. It is far from best in slot caster gear. A full Ornate shrine crafted gear set will provide more damage and better defence.

- But you already have all the charms while doing the videos and I won't be able to do those bosses you showed without them.
Incorrect, most of the hard charms make very little difference because they mostly give + skills and this is a weak stat for us. The only thing that significantly alters the gameplay is the 2sec cd teleport. However on ubers where this could be an advantage I deliberately used divine apparition instead.

- I read your tips on boss X and watched the video, but I can't do it the same way. I just get one shot, help?
Carefully reread the text, especially paying attention to the boss abilities and how to avoid them. Practice harder. Play better.


- I have a perfect natasha's legacy lying around + BMRs and a tantrum cotw. Can I make a higher dps endgame gear set?
Yes. Make sure you sMax VoR. Damage will be way higher, but you will be squishier.


- I noticed a different item/MO/jewel on your picture/video than the one you recommend in the text, which one should I use?
The text is always correct and has the best recommendation. The reason for these discrepancies is that I have done the Ubers many times and can cut some corners with suboptimal gear due to laziness. I give you the best item combinations so that you have it as easy as possible while learning.




APPENDIX


A1: Guide to Making a weapon runeword

First step is to erase all modifiers from your bow, and make it into a base item type if it was dropped as magic or rare for example. To do this put these items in the cube and transmute: Bow + Catalyst of Destruction + any rune -> Base version of bow + Catalyst.

Now transmute your bow with an Oil of Enhancement two times to make it superior.

A. Next you will keep cubing it with oils of renewal, until it matches one of the following conditions:
- It has 50% + Enhanced damage and either none or 6 sockets
- It has a 45%+ Enhanced damage and 80%+ Attack rating bonus and either none or 6 sockets

Once one of the above is met, cube the weapon with a Luck Trial mystic orb. If the resulting item has added green text “Double mystic orb bonus”, then proceed to the next step (B). If not cube with an oil of renewal and go back to step A. Note that if the item has no sockets you can punch 6 holes in by using the Larzuk quest reward (once per difficulty) or cubing the bow with any 6 jewels.

B. Now that the base item is crafted, you need to lucky upgrade it. Go kill Griswald on Terror difficulty to obtain his Special Box. Cube the special box with an oil of Luck to get an Oil of Blessed Luck. Now cube your bow with this new oil and hope that it adds both Enhanced Damage and a bonus to attack rating. Only the enhanced damage bonus is mandatory, but if you are a perfectionist with free time you can reroll with an oil of renewal and go back to step (A) if you want a shot at both bonuses.

C. Next you need 5 jewels with which to fill in the remaining sockets.

Now we are ready to make our runeword. Put the jewels in followed by the rune. If the rolls on the variable modifiers are not high enough you can unsocket the bow by cubing it with 3 perfect gems and an Oil of Disjunction.


A2: Tantrum Mechanics

Throughout the guide I have been mentioning that a Tantrum cloud hits any target in its animation 25 times per second. This magic number was derived from a post on the old forums, where someone tested the number of on striking procs that occur within a certain time and "eyeballed" that the skill hits approximately 25 times per second. Me and others have been parroting this number for a while but clearly such tests can be very unreliable especially as no methodology was ever mentioned for this "experiment".

To finally put this matter to rest and add it to our collective knowledge base I decided to work through the missile chain of Tantrum from the cMXL files. Here is how the skill works in steps, to the best of my understanding:

1) You use the skill. It spawns an invisible, stationary Frozen Orb on your character. This frozen orb then generates two types of missiles: functional and cosmetic. The cosmetic are what you see on the client - the shrapnel cloud - and exist purely for visual purposes.

2) The functional missiles are created every 15 frames. Think of them as the invisible ice bolts of your frozen orb which spawn in a circle. The first "ice bolt" is spawned at approximately 107 degrees from your bottom right, the second at 214, the third at 321 etc. for the duration of the skill.

3) Every time one of the "ice bolts" hits an enemy it will burst into a nova of 64 invisible "arrows". These "arrows" deal 0.375 WDM, do not pierce and travel a short distance before despawning (approximated by the shrapnel cloud animation).


Now that we have an understanding of what happens behind the scenes, let's try to estimate the damage of the skill per second. The ice bolts spawn every 15 frames (D2 engine operates in 25 frames = 1 second remember) and in a pretty large angle - nearly 3 bolts to a full circle around the orb.

  • This implies that you will only be able to hit STATIONARY enemies with 1.67 bolts per second (from 1 Tantrum).

  • If you are kiting an enemy through the cloud it becomes hard/impossible to estimate because the number of hits varies depending on their speed and trajectory, so let's focus on the stationary case.

One hit from a frost bolt generates 64 arrows. And now for the hardest question of all: how many of these arrows hit the target?

Well clearly this must depend on the size of the model with which the frost bolt is colliding. From the files we can check that the models of all the "large" enemies (for example act bosses, claw vipers, quill bears, balrogs etc) occupy a 3x3 worth of space in subtiles. "Medium" enemies (e.g Slain Souls, Necrobots, Tran athulua archers etc) occupy a 2x2 and "small" ones (e.g. the pack, maggot eggs, flits, jungle snakes etc.) occupy 1x1.

From this image we can get approximations for the hitboxes in terms of subtiles. Because the size of the ice bolts is 1 subtile we can conclude that there is a limited number of places where they can collide with the hitbox. Then we work out the collision angle for all of these cases with some basic trigonometry. Since you cannot choose a collision spot in game we take this as a random event and hence average all the collision angles based on their frequency for the hitboxes.

I'll spare you the workings, but the result is that the collision angle for a "large" stationary enemy in your tantrum flower is 144 degrees and for a "medium" one is 115. Since a nova is a full circle and it consists of 64 missiles we can now work out the number of hits per second.

Conclusion: A large enemy, who is stationary in one tantrum, will get hit 42 times per second. A medium enemy, again stationary in a single tantrum, will get hit 34 times per second.




CREDITS


BrotherLaz for creating the best arpg out there.

Marco for making it even better and a million other things.

aahz, nomercy4you, ufoleet and Greg. Without TSW this game would not be nearly as enjoyable.

Quirinus for the great documentation.

Korcola for his Void guide and maps, which aided my learning process greatly.

Thank you for reading!





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Love the new look when I hover to the item image :clap:
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Of course.. the moment I get back on my tantrumdin and open up the guide, it gets moved here :D :mrgreen:
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Hello. This was the first build I played on this mod. On your guide you say it will take a few hours to farm the sewers to get the 6 fire runes for the hellfire plate, but I have been farming for about 16 hours and I have 2 fire runes and one unknown skull to show for it. I can clear the sewers in about an hour if I don't die, and I think my magic find is like 350% since I replaced deadfall with this special magic find belt and socketed with Lum. Are there some tricks for the sewers I am not aware of because it feels like this is gonna take 10 years and this is even worse than Toraja.
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hellgrind
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Magic find doesnt work on any runes, including elemental and unknown skulls. Also clear in 1h ? that's a loooong time. do you even have proper gear for it(focusing more on kill speed since it's useless to focus on def/res gear there).
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suchbalance
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1 hour is way too long. It should not take you more than 15 minutes in early game gear. Make sure to always keep 20+ scourges with you to absorb the hits. Keep vindicate on yourself and divine apparition on those elemental balls like a man.

Like hellgrind said, magic find doesn't work so keep your normal gear on.