Part Eight: The Spider Web Unravels

One of the great joys of playing Spyderman has been seeing how far I could take an underpowered variant build. This is something that may have been lost at times in my report writing, especially for those readers who might not have played Diablo 3 themselves. The variant build that I selected for Spyderman only had a single skill that did any direct damage, and that skill was a signature move intended to be used for mana generation, not monster slaying. With five of his six skills only carrying crowd control functions, and with none of his skills using mana at all, Spyderman was severely limited in his damage output. It was particularly difficult for him to deal with large mobs of enemies where his Corpse Spiders couldn't rely on the flashy area-of-effect abilities employed by less restricted builds. I had been unsure if he would be viable in Torment difficulty at all, and the fact that Spyderman was clearing out bounties on Torment XII was pretty stunning to me. This was much, much further than I had ever expected to get.

But there's a limit to how far a variant setup can be stretched before it begins to collapse under the strain. In previous Diablo games where the focus was mostly on survivability, the variant community was able to shepherd some extremely crippled builds to the end of the game by virtue of endless patience. Even if it might take half an hour to kill an endgame boss, that was perfectly doable so long as the player could summon up the patience and the requisite skill to survive a lengthy fight. In contrast, the challenge in Diablo 3's Greater Rifts comes from the 15 minute timer. If a character build can't muster up enough damage to summon and defeat the Rift Guardian within those 15 minutes, all of the patience and player ability in the world won't matter. I didn't know where the limits were for Spyderman in terms of his character build, but I could sense that he was getting closer and closer to reaching them. It was taking everything that I had to keep his juggling act ongoing and I was running out of additional tricks.

This was one of those few remaining tricks that I had left to pull. There was another jewelry set that Spyderman had been considering, this one known as the "Bastions of Will" set involving the two rings Focus and Restraint. When worn together, these rings provided a set bonus of 50% additional damage for the next 5 seconds when hitting with a resource generating attack along with another 50% additional damage when hitting with a resource spending attack. This was not the idea set for Spyderman since he could only use half of that bonus, the 50% for hitting with a resource generating attack. The "Endless Walk" set with the Compass Rose and the Traveller's Pledge was a superior set for Spyderman because it had a bonus of up to 100% extra damage when standing still for five seconds. Switching over to the Focus and Restraint rings would also force Spyderman to give up the Pandemonium Loop ring with its death explosions for feared target. However, unlike the Endless Walk set where I couldn't get decent affixes on the ring and amulet, I could get "OK" stats on the two rings in the Bastions of Will set, enough such that the penalties were relatively minor. I figured that I would give this set of rings a try after my next Greater Rift run and see what happened.

That Greater Rift was undertaken at a difficulty of 55, equivalent to Torment XII difficulty, and it was a pretty significant challenge. One tidbit that I learned from searching the Diablo 3 forums is the fact that the Greater Rifts are slightly easier than their equivalent difficulty. I had observed this empirically, for example finding Greater Rift 50 to be a bit easier than Torment XI difficulty, and it was reassuring to find that my impressions were in fact correct. Monsters in the Greater Rifts have about 30% less health than monsters at the equivalent difficulty level; this is apparently needed so that the health scaling lines up properly when there's more than one player in the game. Anyway, the net effect was that Greater Rift 55 was a bit easier than Torment XII difficulty in terms of monster health, such as the Blighter rift guardian above having 173 billion HP instead of the more standard 250 billion HP elsewhere in Torment XII. It was a good thing that this was the case since Spyderman finished the rift with only 3:14 remaining on the clock. While that wasn't exactly a photo finish, the margin for error was beginning to run out. It was getting harder and harder to complete the higher rift difficulties as monster health kept scaling endlessly upwards.

Part of my irritation came from the Paragon leveling system, which had been quietly stacking up in the background throughout Spyderman's quest. He had accumulated about 400 additional Paragon levels by this point and all of those additional assignable points made a big difference when combined together, particularly in the Offense and Defense trees. My annoyance came from the fact that Spyderman was only given limited options as to how he could spend those points, with the requirement that one fourth of them had to be spent in each of the four trees. This was problematic in the case of the Utility tree which had essentially nothing that Spyderman wanted. I mean, Area Damage was OK and I guess Life Per Hit was better than nothing, but Resource Cost Reduction was utterly useless for Spyderman and Gold Find wasn't much better. What I really wanted was to spend these 116 points in other Paragon level, especially in the Offense tree. Barring that, I'd rather put them all into Intelligence and at least get +5 Intelligence per level. Why did the game insist on forcing me to spend these Paragon levels in areas that I didn't want? Wouldn't the gameplay be more interesting if the points could be freely assigned anywhere? I made this same point earlier in my Reaper of Souls reveiew but it was really driven home to me with Spyderman, as many of his Paragon level ups were utterly pointless. This system could be improved so easily.

I did elect to switch Spyderman over to the Focus and Restraint rings after finishing that Greater Rift. I was able to keep his Intelligence and crit chance/damage about the same, at the expense of trading away some of his Vitality and decreasing his total life pool. This turned Spyderman into more of a walking glass cannon in exchange for additional damage. Note the printout above: Spyderman's first billion damage attack (1028 million damage) captured in an image. This was only possible with his Soul Harvest skill fully stacked while standing within the Oculus Ring but Spyderman was more than happy to see it. The boosted damage from the Bastions of Will jewelry set was enough to speed up the bounty hunting process and improve the clear time of Greater Nephalem Rift runs. While wearing the new rings, Spyderman completed Greater Rift 56 with a time of 4:12 remaining and then Greater Rift 57 with 4:39 left on the clock. (He'd enjoyed particularly good pylon luck on that run.) Then in the aftermath of one of those rift completions, Spyderman found a new Ancient legendary amulet:

Rakoff's Glass of Life appeared with Intelligence and two critical hit affixes. The fourth affix had a bonus to cold element damage, and I was hoping to reroll that into Vitality and then add a socket to the item via Ramaladni's Gift. Unfortunately that's not possible and this was when I discovered that Ramaladni's Gift only works on weapons, which required me to use that last affix for a socket. Therefore nothing was left over for Vitality on the item, and I had the option of gaining 14% Damage but only by giving away 9% Toughness. Since the name of the game was maximizing damage output, this was really no choice at all and I felt that Spyderman had to make the switch. I also lost the Hellfire Amulet's Zombie Handler passive, which I then reassigned to Spyderman by giving up the Jungle Fortitude passive in the process. On the plus side, his damage rating went all the way up from 1721k to about 1950k, woohoo!

On the negative side, Spyderman's health dropped all the way down to 1.1 million HP. Ummm, that was the same 1.1 million HP that he had been sporting back in Torment I difficulty. Spyderman was getting ready to enter Torment XIII difficulty and monsters did about 70 times more damage there as compared to Torment I - yikes. And yes, he had more overall Toughness from higher armor and greater dodge chance via the Gogok of Swiftness, but Spyderman wasn't *THAT* much tankier. He was rapidly approaching the point where he couldn't take a hit at all without his damage reduction abilities in place, relying on them plus his crowd control skills plus the life regeneration from the Hex skill to stay afloat.

Of course, that only worked when he could move properly. This was the scene that greeted me almost immediately after entering Torment XIII difficulty:

Spyderman died here but it was through no fault of my own. He entered onto the Battlefields section of Act Three and right away the framerate of my computer plunged down to nothing. It was a brief blip in my local Internet connection, the computer losing its connection to the online Blizzard server for about 30 seconds, but by the time that I was able to control my character again, Spyderman was already dead. This actually happened one other time earlier when I was facing Iskatu in Act Four, my local Internet connection died and Spyderman was dead by the time that it reconnected. This is exactly what I have no intention of playing a Hardcore character in Diablo 3, way too much time invested in these characters to have them die through some random Internet traffic spike. My connection is good but not perfect and one unlucky moment is all that you need to lose a character forever. This moment was especially annoying because one of the very rare Menagerist Goblins had appeared right when the Internet cut out and of course it escaped while I had no control over the situation. That was only the third one that I'd seen with Spyderman (he'd also picked up a succubus pet that I wasn't interested in using). Overall this meant three total deaths for Spyderman, only one of which I considered to have been my responsibility, back in the early stages of Act One on Expert difficulty. If the game lagged out and Spyderman couldn't move, there was literally nothing that I could do.

That was a bit of a rough start to Torment XIII difficulty and it never became that much easier. Spyderman could make progress through the various bounties for sure, and they now returned an impressive 16 Horadric Cache crafting materials when finishing a full act. That made it easier than ever to extract the remaining legendary items into Kanai's Cube and have some materials left over for rerolling legendary items. However, the biggest change from earlier difficulty levels was the constant set of danger that Spyderman found himself in. I'd been forced to trade away his defenses to keep up offensively with the ever-growing monster health, and it really showed here at this higher tier of opposition. His Spirit Vessel passive triggered frequently, as Spyderman was reduced to zero health more often in Torment XIII than in all previous difficulty levels combined. It was especially hard to get started in new areas, before Spyderman's various stacking buffs were in play. He was actually one-shotted by both the exploding plants in the Dahlgur Oasis and the fire traps in the Arreat Crater, if you can believe it. Without the 80% combined damage reduction from the Soul Harvest and Hex skills, Spyderman was totally helpless. He couldn't take a hit from even the weakest opposition without dropping into the critical range.

On the other hand, it was nice to get more legendary items and crafting materials than ever before. Spyderman was finding and salvaging enough legendary items that its was the Horadric Cache crafting materials that were the limiting factor in rerolling legendary items in Kanai's Cube, not the 50 Forgotten Souls requirement. It was also nice to defeat an elite mob and have three Death's Breath items appear as indicated above. Two of them were always guaranteed at this point and the third Death's Breath had 25% odds to appear. This was enough to somewhat offset the slow clearing pace caused by random goat monsters having 25 billion health as pictured above.

This was something completely new. While I was clearing out the bounties in Act Two, Spyderman stumbled upon a green portal in the Dahlgur Oasis. This was the entrance to the Arachyr set dungeon, which Spyderman was able to see by virtue of wearing the complete Arachyr set. (By now he had complete copies of the other three Witch Doctor sets as well which he had accumulated over time without making any effort to turn them up.) There is a set dungeon for each of the various class-specific item sets and they remain invisible to anyone not wearing the full set. I had probably walked past a bunch of the other set dungeons without even realizing it. With the Arachyr set being the core item build for Spyderman, he had to check it out and see what was inside.

It turns out that the set dungeons are basically puzzles. They task the player with completing various oddball tasks using the specific bonuses granted by that set of items. The Arachyr set asked Spyderman to lick 30 different enemies with the Toad of Hugeness from the Hex rune and to kill every elite monster while webbed by the Spider Queen and being bitten by Piranhas. This last requirement meant that Spyderman couldn't complete the dungeon at all, given that Piranhas was not one of his allowed skills. (It's basically the default skill that anyone else would be using with the Arachyr set.) However, even leaving that aside, Spyderman wasn't able to fulfill the objectives for a novel reason: he had become way too strong! Note that game difficulty has no effect on the difficulty of the set dungeons, which means that they always spawn at a certain fixed difficulty level. The skeletons inside had about 75 million health apiece, which was a far sight short of the 10 billion HP with which they were appearing here on Torment XIII difficulty. Even without tossing out any Corpse Spiders, the Spider Queen kept walking up to the enemies and killing them instantly with her webs! It was honestly hilarious even if it meant that the objectives couldn't be completed. Spyderman was basically a god here in the set dungeon, the monsters collapsing into dust as soon as he breathed on them. The rewards for completing the set dungeons are only cosmetic banners and "wings" that can be equipped onto your characters, both of which honestly look pretty terrible in the screenshots that I've seen. So Spyderman did not complete the set dungeon and went back to his regularly scheduled bounty hunting for the evening. Perhaps I'll come back and try to complete these at some point, perhaps not.

I did appreciate the feeling of power that came from being so much stronger than the enemies in the set dungeon. Spyderman could also get a similar feeling sometimes when attacking big swarms of very weak monsters:

Take these maggots in the Temple of the Firstborn from Act Two for example. They drop from the ceiling or crawl out from the walls in the dozens, and when Spyderman could get his Pain Enchancer legendary gem stacked up in the midst of the bunch of them (3% attack speed for each nearby bleeding enemy), his attack speed could get pretty insane. I managed to snap this image of Spyderman's character sheet when he had a whole bunch of bleeding maggots surrounding him, and the Damage rating had swelled to more than 4.2 million. This was more than double the non-boosted rate from back in town, with the Toughness and Recovery stats similarly inflated to absurd levels. Weak as these enemies were, Spyderman still needed to use the Horrify skill to keep them crowd controlled while his Corpse Spiders ripped through them. I also felt the lack of the Pandemonium Loop ring here with its fear-based death explosions. These were the situations where it had previously been most effective.

Another rarity that Spyderman experienced for the first time took place in the Realm of Fractured Fate in Act Four. When coming across a normal shrine, I saw that the text had been changed to read "Bandit Shrine". I was wondering what in the world that might mean, only to find that when I clicked on it, a half dozen Treasure Goblins popped out. This led to the amusing image above with goblins scampering in every direction. There was no way that Spyderman could catch them all, not with each goblin sporting around 150 billion HP apiece, but I think he did manage to get three of them before they escaped through their respective portals. Sadly, the Treasure Goblins were no longer that interesting for Spyderman due to his extreme lategame character setup. At best they might drop a legendary item, something that he saw all the time anyway. Or they could drop more gems that he didn't need, or roughly 300 blood shards... which was about the same as a normal trip through a Greater Rift at this point. Spyderman has basically outleveled the Treasure Goblins by now and that was another indication that he was approaching the finishing point for his character.

I was still avoiding the really dangerous bosses like Azmodan and Belial, which meant that Spyderman continued to see the unthreatening ones with bounties attached like Leoric and Cydaea. For whatever reason he also seemed to get Adria as a bounty objective over and over again, and although she was pretty easy to defeat, there was always a long march to reach her boss chamber that involved slogging through the Ruins of Corvus along the way. Here on Torment XIII difficulty Adria was sporting a cool 1.4 trillion HP, the first opponent that I'd encountered to exceed the trillion mark on health and reach 13 digits. The battle itself was no different than it had ever been, a process of dodging the little blobs of red goo on the ground while continuing to keep Soul Harvest stacked and Hex running while throwing out endless spiders. I timed how long this took and it came out right around three minutes in real world time, which would have been roughly about the Enrage timer for many of the other bosses. I interpreted this as Spyderman having just barely enough damage to get the job done.

I had been thinking about what might be a fitting way to conclude Spyderman's journey for some time now. The ideal place would have been to finish a Greater Rift with a difficulty of 70. That would unlock the possibility of finding Primal Ancient items for all other characters on the same account, and with Rift 70 equivalent to Torment XV difficulty, it would put Spyderman very close to the highest difficulty level available. (Torment XVI was the top difficulty at time of writing.) However, it had become more and more clear to me that Spyderman was going to come up short of that ideal finishing spot. Every additional Greater Rift level adds 17% more monster health, which means that going up 10 Greater Rift levels is roughly equivalent to adding five times the total monster health. Spyderman had already upgraded his key legendary gems (Simplicity's Strength and Pain Enchancer) to Rank 60 and Rank 50 respectively and couldn't get them much higher. He was basically capped out on items at this point, with the only real improvement coming from a potential switch from the Focus/Restraint jewelry set over to the Endless Walk set with the Compass Rose and the Traveller's Pledge. And even that would only take his bonus from +50% damage to +100% damage, and even that only after standing still for five seconds. Spyderman already was already leaning heavily on the Oculus Ring to get his damage into the manageable range, and I had stripped him of Vitality wherever possible to add more Intelligence, attack speed, and crit chance/damage. Yes, he could get stronger, but could he get strong enough to defeat enemies with five times the health that they currently had? And still clear a Greater Rift within the 15 minute hard time limit? That seemed extremely unlikely.

Therefore I resolved that finishing a Greater Rift with a difficulty of 60 would be a good stopping point instead. This would be equivalent to Spyderman's current Torment XIII difficulty level (with slightly less monster health as mentioned above) and it would be a fitting end to his quest. Torment XIII was the highest difficulty level for a long time until a relatively recent patch added three more difficulty levels up to Torment XVI. Now that's not an entirely fair comparison because those same patches also increased the bonuses on a bunch of items and added additional Kanai's Cube recipes like Caldesann's Despair, but the point still remained. This was a good place for him to symbolically bring his journey to a close.

Now Spyderman had to do the hard work of actually completing Greater Rift 60, which was no easy task. The opening room to this Greater Rift was one of the worst that I can recall seeing, a large open room with a double elite pack inside it. Spyderman was blasted down to zero health immediately with his Spirit Vessel passive triggering, and I had to play super carefully to avoid dying for real over the next 60 seconds. Obviously this was extremely bad in a situation where he was racing against the clock. With extreme care I was able to get his Soul Harvest and Swiftness stacks up and at that point Spyderman was off and rolling, but he had lost a lot of time in the process. And it wasn't as if he had been crushing his previous trips through the Greater Rifts; when I previously did GR59 a day earlier, Spyderman had finished with only 2:39 to spare. It was clear that his progress was approaching an asymptotic curve as he drew nearer to Greater Rift 60, with his time to spare shrinking at an ever faster rate. When this screenshot was taken about four minutes into the rift, Spyderman was still behind the hourglass line on the meter at the right side of the screen. He absolutely needed to be ahead of that line because it didn't include the time needed to defeat the Rift Guardian after the whole meter filled up. (Why no pictures of these daring battles? Ummm, a little busy not dying at the time!)

Fortunately Spyderman was able to make up ground over the next few minutes with the help of several useful Pylons. A Conduit Pylon in particular electrocuted its way through a big swarm of enemies, and a Speed Pylon helped turbocharge Spyderman's attack rate. By the time that he made his way to the second floor of the rift, I was reasonably confident that Spyderman was going to finish before time ran out. It was going to be relatively close though, and he wasn't going to have a lot of time left over afterwards. The Rift Guardian at the end was named Bone Warlock and he had 380 billion HP to chew through. He was encountered alone, however, and that made him easy pickings for the arachnid companions of Spyderman. It took about 30 seconds to eat through his lifebar and then the rift was finally cleared for good:

Spyderman finished with 1:25 remaining and earned the "You're Not The Boss Of Me" achievement in the process, which I believe was a result of defeating every possible different kind of Rift Guardian at least once. He did successfully finish the Greater Rift with no deaths, even though the Spirit Vessel passive had triggered on two different occasions. This whole Greater Rift had been a nerve-wracking affair, and I want to stress again that Spyderman had barely managed to summon up the sufficient damage needed to complete it by stripping away many of his defenses. His life globe was in a constant process of see-sawing back and forth during these fights, dropping down to a third or less under a series of blows only for Spyderman to get off Horrify or Mass Confusion for a quick breather and then see his health orb rapidly refill thanks to the Hex skill's massive life regen. The whole thing was like walking a tightrope without falling to either side, a constant high wire act of managing the cooldowns of all six skills and repositioning Spyderman for maximum DPS while also keeping him safe. It was a difficult, stressful process when trying to operate within the fixed 15 minute time limit.

Could Spyderman have completed additional Greater Rifts? Without a doubt. As I said this was a Greater Rift run that was somewhat on the bad luck side and lost a fair amount of time in the starting room. Spyderman could have likely completed GR61 and GR62, maybe even gotten as high as GR65 if he'd been able to complete the Endless Walk jewelry set with some better item affixes. And if someone was really determined to complete Greater Rift 70 with this character build, there are ways to brute-force that into happening. Spyderman could have grinded out enough legendary gems to upgrade all of his items with Caldesann's Despair and picked up 2000-3000 more points of Intelligence that way. Heck, he could theoretically have grinded his Paragon levels up to 2000 or something insane like that. After Paragon level 800, every point can be put into Intelligence and so adding a thousand or more levels of +5 Intellience each would be another way to get massively more damage. But for better or worse (mostly better), I'm not a nineteen year old living in a college dorm room anymore who has that much time to spend grinding a Diablo character. Spyderman was already getting pretty grind-tastic by this point in time, and the idea of spending hundreds of hours upgrading legendary gems for use in Caldesann's Despair or stacking up untold Paragon levels didn't appeal to me. The Blizzard client said that I had already sunk 94 hours into playing Spyderman and I was getting tired of his gameplay after all that time. This was the natural point where his character build came to a conclusion, and finishing with that nailbiting Greater Rift 60 run was a wonderful way to end on a high note.

Here are the full stats for Spyderman at the time that he concluded his journey. His natural in-town Damage rating had just crept over 2 million at the end, again at the cost of his health globe being no higher than it had been back in Torment I difficulty. Critical strike chance ended up at more than 50% along with crit damage coming in at 490%. This meant that on average each attack was doing about triple damage (half the attacks critically striking for six times normal damage). Cooldown reduction is deceptively low here at only 7% flat rate but with another 15% coming from the Gogok of Swiftness when it was fully stacked, which was nearly all of the time during combat. Also note the worthlessness of the life regen stats here in the extreme endgame: 10,000 life per second was almost meaningless in the context of the Hex skill granting 10% of max life (110k life) per second. It's just not worth prioritizing this stat when other skills can provide the same benefit without needing to give up value item affixes.

Thus the story of Spyderman comes to a conclusion. He never suffered a "real" death after getting caught early on in Act One, and I'm extremely pleased that I managed to get through a dozen different Spirit Vessel situations in Torment XIII difficulty without ever biting the dust. This was a character where I learned an immense amount about the Reaper of Souls gameplay, even more than I did from my non-variant Monk character Wang Kon who won't be discussed on this website. The character build for Spyderman was something that I had conceived all the way back in 2012, and it was immensely satisfying to see it play out in practice. Spyderman made it much further than I ever expected him to reach, all the way up to Torment XIII difficulty despite using a patently crippled offensive setup. My next character will have a less restricted build and I'm hoping that will be the one who manages to break through and conquer Greater Rift 70. But that's a story for another day.

As always, thanks for reading. I hope that you enjoyed the story of Spyderman and perhaps inspired you to try your own Diablo variants.