Part Three: Not So Tormented After All

Spyderman resumed his journey in the aftermath of defeating Diablo at character level 69 on the cusp of hitting the leveling cap of 70. I mentioned at the end of the last section that I planned to move onto the endgame content once he hit that mark instead of going through the entirety of Act V. There didn't seem to be a lot more for Spyderman to see or do here in Master difficulty, and I was genuinely curious about how he would handle Torment difficulty where a lot of additional content would unlock. All of the best endgame items won't appear unless your character is playing on Torment I at a bare minimum, and the designers truly seem to believe that everything prior to that point is basically a tutorial for Diablo 3. It's weird to me that they consider the entire campaign to be a tutorial but that's the game that they've designed.

I ran through the first area in Act V, the urban streets of Westmarch, while taking Spyderman up to level 70. I enjoy the look and feel of these narrow passageways, as well as the exploration of the Pandemonium Fortress at the end of the act; the swamps in the middle portions are significantly less interesting. This particular image is a rare shot of the Mass Confusion spell casting animation in action, with a huge spectral voodoo mask appearing briefly to charm the unfortunate monsters caught in the skill. The circular radius of the spell is just visible when looking closely, and all of Spyderman's undead opponents seem to have been either charmed or hexed into little pigs. That's the whole idea behind Spyderman's setup, use crowd control on the enemies while his spiders do their thing. The spiders were dealing about 130k damage per bite when not critically striking, with the normal non-elite monsters having about 3 million HP at this point. (And yes, the numbers being so enormous in Diablo 3 is really stupid. It gets much worse later on in the Torment difficulties too. Why couldn't they have limited themselves to numbers that weren't absurdly high?)

When Spyderman hit level 70, he unlocked a whole bunch of new features present in the Reaper of Souls endgame content. I'll start by covering the Paragon levels:

These are the additional pseudo-levels that can be earned endlessly after hitting the official leveling cap. I had already picked up 93 of them while playing my non-variant Monk character earlier, and I had refrained from assigning any Paragon skill points for Spyderman until he reached level 70. (There's nothing to stop this, and you can godmode new characters through the early stages of a game by dumping 1000 Paragon skill points into their build if other characters have previously unlocked them. Paragon levels are shared across all characters on the same account.) I praised the existence of this system in my Reaper of Souls review, and it's definitely nice to be able to assign points into different choices once again. Everything in the Offense tree would be great for Spyderman to have, and I ending up picking Attack Speed because it came out highest in the damage comparison when I checked the different options. However, the gameplay forces your character to assign exactly one quarter of the Paragon points into each of the four trees, which is really stupid and limits choice for no reason. Why did I have to put Paragon points into the Core and Utility trees, which had almost nothing that I wanted? I would have put everything into the much better Offense and Defense trees if I could. In other words, while this does represent a step forward for the gameplay in terms of allowing player choice, there's still too much forced hand-holding here.

This was the skill setup that Spyderman had settled on after playing his way through the full campaign. I've discussed each of the six active skills in detail previously, and the new passive skill slot that unlocked at level 70 was used on Confidence Ritual for its extra damage output. This probably would have been a better choice than Zombie Handler in earlier stages of the game, as I found the higher damage output to be noticeable afterwards. I'll also mention the two runes here that I didn't go over previously. The Languish rune for Soul Harvest added a function that increased Spyderman's armor rating by 10% per stack and slowed the enemies caught in the skill's radius by 80% for 5 seconds. This was extremely powerful and by far the best of the Soul Harvest rune options, not only granting more survivability from the extra armor but also adding some soft crowd control to the active use of the skill. Finally, I had selected the Frightening Aspect rune for the Horrify skill, which granted 50% additional armor for 8 seconds after using the skill. This was handy for tanking through melee opponents who tried to jump on top of Spyderman: he'd be using the terror effect anyway, and now picked up some additional protection at the same time.

Reaching level 70 unlocked the possibility of crafting new weapons and armor that had a level 70 requirement, which of course is true for all of the best stuff in Diablo 3. The first task, as always, was finding a better weapon. I picked out the legendary two-handed mace named "Sunder" from the Blacksmith and rolled up a new weapon. Now strictly speaking this wasn't fair because I was using some of the crafting materials from my Monk character for this Sunder recipe, stuff that you need to complete bounties in Adventure Mode to unlock. However, I was seriously concerned about whether Spyderman would be viable in Torment difficulty and figured that it wasn't cheating too much to craft exactly one weapon with materials that Spyderman would be able to procure for himself in short order.

The resulting weapon was a major improvement and serves as a good comparison of a pre-level 70 non-legendary weapon to a post-level 70 legendary weapon. The base damage was higher, the added fire damage was higher, and the Intelligence/Vitality boosts were also close to 50% higher than the previous weapon. Sunder also brought a unique property in the form of "33 percent chance to sunder the ground your enemies walk on when you attack." In practice, this was a small area-of-effect (AOE) attack that sometimes created cracks in the ground underneath the feet of opposing enemies. It did not appear to happen 33 percent of the time in my experience, which I believe was due to its AOE nature (these effects proc less often according to the developers). This is also a great screenshot because it captures Spyderman's core stats just before entering Torment difficulty: 184k Damage, 6 million Toughness, and 174k Recovery. Note that he had exactly one legendary item equipped on his character at this point in the amulet slot. Every single piece of his gear was going to need upgrading in order to survive on the next difficulty level.

Fortunately, as I wrote at several points in my Reaper of Souls review, the expansion grants players lots of tools to do exactly that. I started out by taking the new legendary Sunder weapon over to the Enchantress to reroll one of the affixes. I had noticed that the weapon came with "reduces all resource costs by 9%" on it, an affix which was completely wasted on the manaless build employed by Spyderman. This Witch Doctor had no resource costs at all! Therefore I could reroll that affix and get something that would actually be useful, albeit at the steep cost of requiring a Death's Breath and (especially) a Forgotten Soul for each reroll. Death's Breaths are a crafting material dropped by elite monsters, with a higher percentage chance to drop as the difficulty level increases. They are needed for almost every kind of endgame crafting and always run in short supply. Forgotten Souls are even rarer, never dropping normally from enemies and largely being obtained by salvaging legendary items at the Blacksmith. Obviously you aren't going to salvage (i.e. throw away) legendary items very often and it's very difficult to accumulate this particular crafting material.

Of course, crafting materials are ultimately there to be used for crafting, and I was happy to use them here to upgrade Spyderman's weapon. The list of what could potentially be rolled in this weapon slot was provided off to the right hand side of the Enchantress, and the first such roll gave me a choice between keeping the 9% resource cost reduction, switching to 8% cooldown reduction, or adding a socket to the weapon. I picked the socket option and put my best Ruby into it, adding +220 damage to the mace. This was a "Flawless Imperial" class of ruby, the third-highest tier behind Royal and Flawless Royal at the top. I would need nine of these Flawless Imperial rubies to combine together at the Jeweler to get a Flawless Royal version, and Spyderman was a long distance away from that. One other note here: for higher end builds, an Emerald would be a better choice because it adds enormously to critical strike damage (I think the Flawless Royal Emerald is +125% crit damage). However, I actually tested using my best emerald against my best ruby, and the ruby did more damage for the moment. This was something that I could always revisit later on.

Spyderman also unlocked Kanai's Cube by virtue of reaching level 70. I thought that I would have to go and find the thing again in Act III's Adventure Mode, but nope, it looks like Kanai's Cube is also bound to the player's account and shows up automatically upon reaching level 70. Kanai's Cube allows the player to equip three different legendary item properties directly onto their character: one in the weapon slot, one in the armor slot, and one in the jewelry slot. These are the same unique properties displayed in gold text on the legendary items, like the "33 percent chance to sunder the ground your enemies walk on when you attack" that we had just seen on the new Sunder legendary mace. Obviously this allows the player to have multiple versions of these unique properties in play at the same time, one on the actual weapon and another from a different weapon via Kanai's Cube. The tradeoff is that in order to get these unique properties into the cube in the first place, a legendary item has to be sacrificed plus a bunch of crafting materials expended. This particular cube recipe requires one crafting material from each of the five Adventure Mode bounty types; a full rotation of every bounty would yield enough crafting materials to melt down six legendary items into the cube. Of course, you only need to salvage a legendary item one time into Kanai's Cube and then it's saved there forever for all future characters. This is something that Spyderman would be spending a lot of time doing, accmulating crafting materials from bounties to add more legendary items into the cube. (I can't avoid the Pokemon "collect them all!" mentality even knowing that most of them will never be used.)

There were several familiar faces reappearing in terms of what Spyderman chose to equip from Kanai's Cube. For the armor slot he happily went back to the Sash of Knives belt from earlier, which had been a fantastic addition to Spyderman's setup until it became too outdated. Spyderman did a ton of auto-attacking and the knife-tossing unique property of that belt synergized beautifully. The amulet slot similarly was happy to pick up Countess Julia's Cameo for renewed protection against Arcane Enchanted monsters. In the weapon slot, I picked the unique property of a weapon named Fire Brand which had 50% odds to toss out a fireball when attacking. This was less useful than the Sash of Knives because it did not pierce through enemies, and it was something that I would be looking to replace as time went on. I also highlighted here some of the stuff that Spyderman would love to find: The Spider Queen's Grasp was likely his ultimate weapon while Depth Diggers could potentially double the damage dealt by the Corpse Spiders (via switching over to the Blazing Spiders rune that causes them to generate mana). These were tantalizing possibilities for the future.

With all of these upgrades in hand, it was time to enter Torment difficulty and begin hunting some bounties:

The goal in Adventure Mode is not to follow a linear path from one area to the next, but rather to leap around across all five acts hunting down different bounty objectives. The bounties all invariably involve the same thing, namely hunting down some kind of monster and killing them; even the bounties that are nominally about saving or protecting an NPC always come down to more fighting in the end. This is Diablo, after all, not a true role playing game. In the screenshot above, note the bounty objectives listed on the right side of the screen and the glowing yellow arrow on the minimap making it impossible to get lost. The game truly does assume that the player is a drooling idiot sometimes. Anyway, Spyderman had run into one of the Keywardens here in the Garden of Hope, optional side bosses that have a chance to drop a key which will unlock another fight with additional side bosses back in Act I. There are some unique crafting materials needed for Hellfire Rings and Hellfire Amulets that can only be derived in this fashion. I noticed that the damage from Spyderman's critters had nearly doubled as a result of upgrading his gear, with the spiders now dealing about 200k damage (450k damage on crits). Can you see the 2130k damage on the Oppressor enemy at the right side of the screen? That was from a knife tossed out by the Sash of Knives; the knife itself is just visible at the extreme edge of the screenshot. While it might seem like the Sash of Knives was doing way more damage than the spiders, keep in mind that each Corpse Spiders jar released four spiders who would each attack several times before vanishing. These static images don't do a great job of capturing how many spider bites were landing constantly on opponents, several per second at a minimum. The spiders were still doing most of the damage in fights.

Later on in the same area, Spyderman saw the first major Witch Doctor set item drop for him. There are four of these sets designed specifically for the Witch Doctor and a similar number for the other character classes. This was the Helltooth set, which was a pretty good fit for Spyderman if not the ideal choice. Strictly on their own, these new pants were an upgrade over the rare item that Spyderman had been wearing. (Don't be thrown off by the unimpressive numbers at the bottom of the screen, that was comparing the rare item with socketed gems against the new item with no socketed gems. The new Helltooth Leg Guards were much better.) More interesting though were the set bonuses, which increased dramatically at 2, 4, and 6 items in the set. The initial set bonus from having two items would cause enemies hit by Spyderman's primary skills (e.g. Corpse Spiders) to be afflicted by Necrosis, causing them to be slowed and take 3000% weapon damage over 10 seconds. Wow, that would be pretty amazing! The final set bonus for getting all six set items would increase the damage of primary skills by 9000% (!!!) for 15 seconds after casting Wall of Death. That was a disallowed skill and this wasn't the ideal set of items for Spyderman, but it does provide a sense for the absurd bonuses granted for completing these sets. It's actually a failure of game design because super endgame characters essentially have to choose between one of these sets if they plan to be viable, resulting in Reaper of Souls not having character "builds" so much as character "loadouts" as CelticHound has called them at Realms Beyond. For the moment, all of that lay in the future. Spyderman didn't even have two set items yet, much less six of them.

My next big item find was a set ring named Focus, albeit not from a particularly interesting set. (Sets are intended for armor in Reaper of Souls, not weapons or jewelry.) This ring had double the Intelligence and Vitality bonuses of Spyderman's previous non-level 70 rare ring, and it was an easy call to switch over to it. However, it also had an empty socket present and I decided to use that spot for a legendary gem named the Gogok of Swiftness. There are only about two dozen legendary gems in Reaper of Soul, and they are fairly easy to get. A new one drops each time that a Greater Nephalem Rift is completed successfully. They first appear at Rank 0, and each time that a Greater Nephalem Rift is cleared, the player has a chance to upgrade their legendary gems to gain 3-5 Ranks depending on the conditions met. Reaching higher ranks of legendary gems requires completing higher levels of Nephalem Rifts; in other words, you can't spam the easy Difficulty 1 rifts and get endless upgrades. All legendary gems unlock a secondary function at Rank 25 and getting them to that point is a major goal.

I only had four legendary gems unlocked on this account from my previous non-variant Monk character, and the most useful one for Spyderman seemed to be the Gogok of Swiftness. This legendary gem granted a Swiftness passive that added 1% attack speed and 0.50% dodge chance with each stack, up to a maximum of 15 stacks. Each rank of the gem increased the dodge amount by 0.01 per stack, which would need an awful lot of ranks to be noticeable. I was mostly interested in the Gogok of Swiftness for that attack speed boost, as Spyderman was heavily dependent on attack speed. Each individual Corpse Spiders jar didn't do much damage and it was the ability to toss them out in vast numbers that made up in volume what was missing in quality. This was very similar to doing an on-hit build in League of Legends, and Spyderman was essentially picking up his Rageblade here.

I hadn't known quite what to expect from adding the Gogok of Swiftness to Spyderman's setup due to my lack of familiarity with legendary gems. It ended up wildly exceeding my expectations, with the bonus 15% attack speed drastically increasing the rate at which Spyderman hurled his little pottery shards. Look at the damage rating in that screenshot above; with no Soul Harvest stacks and no Swiftness passive running, Spyderman's Damage score was 290k. With both of them fully active, his Damage rating was 391k! That was fully a third more damage, and with extra Toughness to boot as well from the Swiftness dodge stacks and the extra armor from using Soul Harvest and Horrify in combat. Spyderman was comfortable taking on big mobs like this and cutting them down in relative speed. While he wasn't quite at the level of my non-variant Monk character just yet, he was getting into the general vicinity.

Other gear upgrades followed as Spyderman collected additional bounties. He found a new rare belt that had higher Intelligence and Vitality along with a very useful +15% damage for the Corpse Spiders skill. He was probably the only Witch Doctor in existence who was pleased to have that affix pop up! Spyderman also came across a Gem Hoarder variant of the normal Treasure Goblin and managed to slay it, resulting in a windfall of gems: 23 rubies, 16 topazes, 15 emeralds, 12 amethysts, 11 diamonds, and then 5 more Imperial versions of various gems on top of that! That would help out on the long slog towards Flawless Royal versions of those gems. Eventually Spyderman wound up with a bounty asking him to defeat Malthael, the boss at the end of Act V, so let me display what that looked like:

I was deliberately avoiding bounties that involved slaying the big bosses because most of them have "Enrage" timers on Torment difficulty, whereby they become essentially impossible to kill after three minutes of real world time. I wasn't confident yet that Spyderman had the damage to defeat them before time ran out. Malthael was different, however, as he has a massive health total and no Enrage timer to worry about. Malthael deals very high damage and the danger in this battle comes from him killing your character, not time running out. (Still kind of think that every boss should be like this, but whatever.) Malthael has a bunch of different attacks, from charging the player to releasing wispy clouds that present an area hazard to an ultimate red-colored sweeping attack that hits nearly the whole arena. The picture above showcases Malthael doing his bullet hell move, shooting out dozens of glowing blue projectiles that create a maze of passageways to dodge between. This attack is much easier to avoid at a distance, and fortunately this was one place where the excellent range of the Corpse Spiders allowed Spyderman to stand back and toss at a safe distance. I'll also mention the cracks in the ground that were caused by the Sunder legendary mace, and the teeming mass of spiders doing their best to chomp at Malthael's feet. It took a long time to get through the 742 million HP on the boss, but Spyderman made it work eventually. He did not end up facing any close calls in this boss fight, and that encouraged me to take on future bounties against other act end bosses. If Spyderman could handle Malthael, he would probably be OK against the likes of Magla and Ghom.

The legendary ring Rogar's Huge Stone was the next item upgrade that Spyderman found. Much as it would be cool to say that this was dropped by Maltheal after the previous battle, it ended up coming from an unrelated elite group in Act II. I wanted to highlight the comparison here because it ably demonstrates the difference between the Vitality/Intelligence boosts on a rare item and a legendary item, both rolled at character level 70. Note that the stat gains were about 10-15% higher on the legendary item, which is why endgame characters will eventually end up with gear entirely consisting of legendary and set items. (Set items are essentially legendaries that happen to be part of a group with a shared benefit for wearing them together.) The additional Vitality was enough to tick Spyderman's lifebar above 1 million HP for the first time. I also captured a picture of Spyderman's stash with his growing collection of gems and about a dozen legendary items put on storage. I planned to salvage their unique properties in Kanai's Cube once Spyderman could collect the relevant crafting materials, although he kept finding more and more legendaries in the process of collecting the bounties! It was a bit of a treadmill effect, although far from the worst position to be in. Finding legendary items is inherently fun and rewarding.

I mentioned before that Spyderman had come across a Gem Hoarder variant of the normal Treasure Goblin, resulting in a whole bunch of gems dropping together when he managed to hunt down and slay the thing. This was the aftermath of a successful fight against a Blood Thief goblin, which leaves no items behind but instead drops massive numbers of blood shards. There were well over 200 blood shards on the ground here, and Spyderman couldn't pick most of them up by virtue of having hit the inventory limit. (This starts at 500 blood shards and goes up as the player clears higher levels of Great Nephalem Rifts.) Blood shards are used as the currency for gambling in Reaper of Souls, a mechanic that returns almost unchanged from Diablo 2 aside from using this unique type of money. Select out the item type that you want to gamble from Kadala and cross your fingers for something useful. Most of the gambles come out as rare items, with the occasional true dud magical item and occasionally the hoped-for legendary or set item. The odds of getting a legendary/set item appear to be somewhere around 5-10%, not great but something that will show up reasonably often. If you're gambling a base item type that has a smaller number of legendary/set items, the odds are a lot better to find a specific item eventually.

That was the logic that I decided to employ here. I needed to try some gambles to empty out Spyderman's inventory and avoid having the blood shards sit on the ground unused. I decided to go for a "Mojo" item type, the off-hand item specific to the Witch Doctor class that they can use in place of a shield. There aren't a lot of different mojos and therefore if the item rolled legendary it would be guaranteed to be something useful. This time luck was with me and a legendary appeared almost immediately:

This item was Shukrani's Triumph and it rolled with a series of fantastic affixes. There was a huge boost to base damage, a big increase to Intelligence, a massive boost of +10% to crit chance (really, really good) plus some cooldown reduction and extra life recovery from health orbs. Best of all, this was a mojo with a useful unique property: Spirit Walk lasts until you attack or until an enemy is within 30 yards. That sounded like a lot of fun, the chance to run around in skeleton form indefinitely while out of combat. The only problem was the fact that this was an offhand weapon and Spyderman would need a one-handed weapon to pair together with it. His current Sunder weapon was a two-handed mace as you might recall. Shukrani's Triumph therefore went in the stash for safekeeping right now, awaiting another weapon to pair with it.

I've changed my opinion of the gambling mechanic in the short time since I wrote the Reaper of Souls review. It's legitimately useful as a way to turn up additional legendary and set items, although one does have to be selective about where and how to use it. Gambling for weapons is typically a bad idea, as the player can only choose "one-handed mystery weapon" or "two-handed mystery weapon", and that could be just about anything given how many different weapon types there are. Gambling is far better used for armor where the specific armor slot can be rolled until finding something useful. Jewelry is also a good choice since there aren't a lot of ways to find rings and amulets in this game (far fewer crafting options for them than weapons or armor), although jewelry is more expensive to gamble and there are a lot of potential legendaries that can pop up there. Overall, I find myself seeking out blood shards now and wanting to gamble for more items, as opposed to largely ignoring this mechanic as I did previously. It's a nice addition to the gameplay.

Spyderman gained a few more paragon levels while finishing up with his first round of bounty collection in Torment difficulty. He ended up with six more of the standard endgame crafting materials, one corresponding to the set of bounties in each act: Khanduran Runes (Act I), Caldeum Nightshade (Act II), Arreat War Tapestries (Act III), Corrupted Angel Flesh (Act IV), and Westmarch Holy Water (Act V). This gave Spyderman enough materials to extract the power from six legendary items, which I had queued up in his inventory over to the right. Note that destroying these legendary objects in Kanai's Cube to extract their power also had a cost of five Death's Breaths apiece, one of the many ways that the Death's Breaths are needed for most everything in the endgame. Spyderman converted over a series of legendary items that seemed like they might be useful later on, including the Ring of Royal Grandeur which allowed set items to function with one fewer item present (such as getting the six item bonuses with only five set items equipped). That seemed like it might come in handy eventually.

There are ten different crafting recipes in total for Kanai's Cube. One of the other ones that comes in handy is the option to upgrade a rare item into a legendary/set item of the same base item type. This is essentially a chance to get a guaranteed legendary roll of that particular item type, albeit at the somewhat steep cost of 25 Death's Breaths and 50 of each of the lesser crafting materials. I decided to try this with the Witch Doctor class weapon, the Ceremonial Knife, in the hopes of maybe rolling The Spider Queen's Grasp. The odds were pretty good, something like 1 in 8 of getting that particular legendary weapon. While I didn't get that specific legendary item, I landed something even better:

Holy cow, an *ANCIENT* legendary weapon! As it turns out, legendary items aren't the best item type in Reaper of Souls. There's another tier above them known as ancient legendary items, which are exactly the same in all respects except that the stat gains roll about a third higher on them. This was a rather lazy way to extend the hunt for engame gear since each legendary item has only 10% odds to roll as an ancient legendary type. (There's an even higher tier of item known as "primal ancient legendary" where the item rolls as ancient legendary and with the maximum possible value for each stat. These don't show up until players have solo cleared a Great Nephalem Rift of 70 or above, i.e. somewhere around Torment XV difficulty. Super duper lategame stuff.) Anessazi Edge was not the ideal weapon for Spyderman, not with a unique property involving Zombie Dogs and two primary affixes that weren't too useful in resource cost reduction and chance to inflict bleed damage. Nevertheless, this was a huge improvement over the Sunder two-handed mace, with the damage being comparable despite not including the legendary Shukrani's Triumph mojo that Spyderman would be able to grab in the other hand. I rerolled the resource cost reduction affix on Anessazi Edge at the Enchantress to replace it with a boost to Vitality, and similarly got rid of the mana regeneration on Shukrani's Triumph to pick up more Vitality there are well. The stat gains were clear: from 358k Damage and 11.4 million Toughness up to 405k damage and 13.1 million Toughness with the new setup. Better yet, Spyderman now had the fun of running around in town as a skeleton via his Spirit Walk, with the ability lasting until he re-engaged in combat. This was a weapon combo that I could live with for a long time.

I felt confident enough with these new weapons to take Spyderman out bounty hunting against the various bosses that included an Enrage timer. The one that I'll highlight here is Urzael, one of the three major bosses in Act V that I had skipped over encountering during the campaign. Urzael is somewhat unique for being entirely fire-based, with all of his various abilities blasting out fiery projectiles of some kind. He's another fallen angel according to the thin story of Reaper of Souls, and he carries around what looks like a rocket launcher in battle. This fight can be trivialized by virtue of equipping the legendary ring that neutralizes all fire damage, unfortunately not an option for Spyderman since it hadn't turned up yet. I was caught off guard by how much damage Spyderman was doing with all of his various bonuses stacked up, and this battle ended up being a lot easier than I expected. He had the five stacks from the Soul Harvest skill, the fifteen stacks of attack speed + dodge chance from his Gogok of Swiftness, the bonus damage from his various Kanai's Cube equipped abilities, and the higher base damage resulting from picking up a number of legendary and set items. In-combat damage rating was 523k with all of this stuff running, approaching triple what it had been when he first entered Torment difficulty. Urzael barely had time to recite his cliched dialogue before he switched over to his second attack pattern, then dropped to the floor. This was kind of shocking; I think Spyderman just wiped the floor with this guy using his kooky spider jars. Did I really just see that?

Spyderman found another set item while hunting bounties in Act IV, this time a pair of set pants. I was disappointed when Spyderman identified the object only to find that it was a second pair of Helltooth Leg Guards, the same set item that I already possessed. Unlike Diablo 2 where having a unique item prevented the same unique item from reappearing, Diablo 3 has no problem with multiple legendary or set items of the same type showing up. I was going to salvage this second pair of Helltooth Leg Guards when I realized that there existed a Kanai's Cube recipe for it:

This recipe will convert any set item into a different item from the same set. It is extremely costly in terms of crafting materials since it requires ten Forgotten Souls, and the designers decided to be complete jerks by stipulating that the resulting item could never roll as ancient. (Crafting, gambling, or upgrading into a legendary/set item each has the 10% chance for the resulting item to be ancient, but not this particular cube recipe.) Spyderman could use pretty much any of the resulting items in the set, he simply needed something other than double pants to unlock the Helltooth set bonus. The crafting recipe worked and he ended up with the boots component of the set, the Helltooth Greaves, which together with the existing Helltooth Leg Guards unlocked the initial set bonus. Now anything hit by Corpse Spiders would be affected by that Necrosis debuff, slowing them and dealing damage over time. It was unclear to me if Necrosis was inflicted with every recasting of Corpse Spiders or if it could only trigger on an opponent one time. Either way, the set bonus would provide 3000% weapon damage every second for ten seconds to any target hit by the spiders. Not 3000% weapon damage over ten seconds, 3000% weapon damage EVERY second for ten seconds.

Ummm, wow. That sounded pretty darn good. How would it function in practice?

I tested the new set bonus against the Butcher, the boss at the end of Act I. The result was an appalling slaughter as the big demon was completely ripped to shreds by this newly empowered version of Spyderman. The monster's "I eat your flesh!" text box couldn't even fade off the screen before the demon was left drowning in his own blood. Sheesh, I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this level of dominance! Spyderman wasn't just surviving here in Torment difficulty, he was crushing it. He had come a long way since starting out just a dozen Paragon levels earlier, with upgraded gear across the board and a series of powerful unique properties coming from his legendary and set items. It was clear that Torment I difficulty was little more than a joke at this point. Spyderman needed to turn up the challenge level and head deeper into Torment in search of greater obstacles. How far could he go while sticking to his variant restrictions? Now that it was clear that Spyderman was Torment-viable, I intended to see exactly how far I could take him.