Part Seven: One Ring to Rule Them All

I finished up the previous page with the discovery of the legendary gem Simplicity's Strength after finding nearly every other legendary gem first. This was a critically important item for Spyderman's overall character build, one of the few remaining ways for him to boost the damage of his Corpse Spiders skill by increasing the level of the gem. Simplicity's Strength started out at Rank 0 and Spyderman would need to complete a number of Greater Rifts to rank the gem up to higher level. It would get a damage bonus of 0.5% with each addition rank as well as unlock its secondary property at Rank 25. For the immediate future, I would be spending Spyderman's time in the Nephalem Rifts to unlock more rift keys and then complete more Greater Rifts, with the goal of leveling up Simplicity's Strength as quickly as possible.

I also increased the difficulty level up to Torment XI in the process. This was the perfect time to up the difficulty again, both because Spyderman had proven that he was easily able to deal with the preceding Torment X level, and also because Torment XI difficulty would guarantee the appearance of two Greater Rift keys at the end of every standard Nephalem Rift. You are always guaranteed to get a single Greater Rift key at all difficulty levels, but Torment XI is the first time that a second one also reaches 100% chance to drop from the Rift Guardian. Aside from that, Torment XI difficulty brought the standard increase of 120% more monster health and 40% more monster damage that I had been accustomed to seeing by now. Even the weakest normal enemies had 2 billion HP by now and elite mobs could easily have ten times that amount or more. Fortunately the additional 25% damage from the new Simplicity's Strength gem offset some of that increased monster scaling, if not all of it.

As I mentioned above, Spyderman spent some time running through Greater Nephalem Rifts to upgrade Simplicity's Strength. By paying to empower the rifts with extra gold, he could get as many as five ranks on the gem with each run through a Greater Rift, and he could pick up two Greater Rift keys from each standard Nephalem Rift venture. The leveling up process for the legendary gems works on an odds-based system. After completing a Greater Rift, the spectral figure of Urshi grants 3-5 chances to upgrade a legendary gem. (The base number is three chances, plus one chance if your character didn't die in the Greater Rift, plus one chance for paying to empower the rift.) The odds to upgrade a legendary gem are based on comparing the difference between the level of the Greater Rift and the level of the legendary gem. If the Greater Rift level is 10 points higher than the gem's rank, the odds are 100% for the upgrade to succeed. At 9 points higher the odds go down to 90%, and so on until reaching the point where the Greater Rift level is 0-6 points higher than the gem's rank, which all share the same 60% odds for success. By contrast, if the legendary gem has a higher rank than the Greater Rift level, the odds for a successful upgrade start at only 30% and very rapidly drop to 0%. The overall pattern is pretty clear: the player can upgrade legendary gems up to the Greater Rift level but can't really go any further than that.

The system also makes it pretty easy to upgrade legendary gems at Greater Rift levels much lower than what your character can currently finish. For example, Spyderman could complete a Greater Rift of level 15 (roughly equivalent to Torment III difficulty) and still easily get 100% upgrade odds on the maximum of all five gem ranks: GR15 = 10 points higher than Rank 5 on the new gem. It can be pretty hilarious to drop down that far in difficulty level and see stuff like a single Corpse Spider jar killing an entire elite mob. I ended up doing most of the Greater Rift runs at level 40, which was well below Spyderman's current power point but also a high enough rift level to have worthwhile Paragon experience and potential legendary item drops. It didn't take too long to get Simplicity' Strength up to Rank 25 for the 37.5% increase to Corpse Spider damage. This also unlocked the secondary property of healing Spyderman for 4% of max health with each spider toss. Between this new property and the massive healing on Spyderman's Hex ability, he seemed pretty set on life regeneration.

After leveling up the new legendary gem, it was back to hunting bounties for a bit. Spyderman had accumulated a series of legendary items while completing those rifts and I needed additional Hordric Cache crafting materials to extract them into Kanai's Cube. Fortunately on Torment XI difficulty he was all the way up to 12 crafting materials per complete set of bounties, double the number yielded back at the initial Torment difficulties. The picture above was taken in Leoric's Manor in Act One, and it captured the bloody explosions from the Pandemonium Loop legendary ring taking place in real time. This was the item that caused enemies slain while Feared to detonate for 800% weapon damage and cause other nearby enemies to also become Feared, thereby causing a potential chain reaction throughout an enemy mob. Groups of weak monsters like these skeletons were the perfect time to make use of this ability, and Pandemonium Loop helped Spyderman make much better progress against swarms of enemies.

I felt confident enough in Spyderman's current setup to take on some of the act end bosses with Enrage timers like the Sigebreaker Assault Beast. This is one of the three major bosses from Act Three, with attacks that are largely based around charging towards the player. The Sigebreaker Assault Beast will also pick up your character and toss him or her around like a rag doll, which was amusing for Spyderman to see since his Corpse Spiders would continue attacking while their master was helplessly dangling in the air. This boss likes to summon a bunch of minions into the fight, and that was potentially a source of danger for Spyderman since he only had limited control over what his spiders would attack. I could toss the jars at the boss but it's still difficult to deal damage with any kind of precision with the Corpse Spiders skill. Those little critters will often run off and attack secondary targets whenever they happen to feel like it. As a result, this was a bounty that I tended to avoid pursuing due to the danger of the Sigebreaker Assault Beast reaching its three minute Enrage timer and then becoming impossible to defeat. Spyderman proved to be up to the task on this occasion, albeit requiring a stress-inducing 2:30 of real world time to complete. I didn't plan on coming back again any time soon - this was a little bit too risky.

I also need to highlight the difficulty of getting started in new areas and the extreme importance of Spyderman's Soul Harvest stacks. I've mentioned a number of times before how Spyderman was effectively playing the role of an on-hit stacking DPS character, with attack speed being such an important stat for him. He was much stronger once he could get his full 15 stacks of Swiftness from the Gogok of Swiftness legendary gem (for both the attack speed and the dodge chance) as well as his 10 stacks from the Soul Harvest skill. When Spyderman first started out in a new area without these stacks in place, he was severely lacking in survivability. This screenshot here was taken at the start of a bounty hunting expedition in Act Four. There were no bosses or elite mobs here, just your standard normal enemies. And yet Spyderman still hit zero health and would have died if it weren't for his Spirit Vessel passive skill, which revived him at half health and then went on a subsequent 60 second cooldown. Spyderman had been caught without having the Hex skill running (an oversight on my part, and still not in use in the screenshot above!) which meant that he didn't have its 50% damage reduction and massive health regeneration in play. He also had no Soul Harvest stacks yet, and recall that Spyderman was getting 6% additional damage reduction from each stack of Soul Harvest. When combined together at max stacks, Spyderman was getting a total of 80% damage reduction from those two skills. Take them away and subtract his health regeneration, and he was a total sitting duck.

Even understanding the math of how this worked out, it was a bit weird to experience it in practice as a player. With all of his various stacking abilities in place, Spyderman could calmly walk into the middle of a raging battle and suffer little to no damage. He had all of that damage reduction plus his life regen plus lots of crowd control ability to keep him safe. Horrify and Mass Confusion both worked wonders to stop big groups of enemies from attacking him, plus Spyderman could run out of anything truly nasty with his Spirit Walk skill. However, he absolutely needed to keep all of these various stacking abilities in effect or else he could quickly find himself in true damage. Forgetting to recast Hex constantly or allowing the Soul Harvest stacks to reset could both lead to dire peril. I sometimes felt like I was keeping a bunch of plates spinning in the air at the same time.

This was a milestone for Spyderman: extracting his 100th item into Kanai's Cube and seeing the achievement pop up at the bottom of the screen. While I don't care about the achievements in this game and largely ignore them, it was still pretty fun to get some kind of recognition for extracting so many legendary items into the cube. Spyderman had passed the halfway point in terms of total legendary items that could be extracted and he was closing in on hitting the 2/3rds mark. The vast majority of these unique properties were things that he would never use under any circumstances, but it was still entertaining to collect them and I couldn't help myself from doing it. I couldn't live with salvaging a legendary item that had a non-extracted property, it just felt too wasteful.

I had saved the Spider Queen's Grasp for the 100th item extracted into Kanai's Cube for its symbolic appeal. Sadly this was not an item that Spyderman was ever able to use despite its apparent usefulness with the Corpse Spiders skill. He absolutely needed to have the Sacred Harvester as his equipped ability via Kanai's Cube because it was what let him go up to 10 Soul Harvest stacks, and the odds of getting an Ancient version of the Spider Queen's Grasp to use as a weapon were pretty low. Besides, what Spyderman needed wasn't more crowd control in the form of a slow effect on his spiders, what he needed was more raw damage to keep pace with the continued scaling up of monster health. This was why he could never remove the Ditch Diggers pants from his second Kanai's Cube ability either, as the +100% damage that it provided to his Corpse Spiders skill significantly outpaced anything else that could be equipped in that slot.

I had been running the Ring of Royal Grandeur for a long time in the jewelry slot of Kanai's Cube, as it allowed Spyderman to pick up the full Arachyr set bonus with only five items equipped. This changed when Spyderman turned up an Ancient version of Arachyr's Claws, the last item that I'd been missing in the set. Unfortunately this was a pretty bad Ancient item in the gloves slot, spawning with no Vitality and two weak affixes (life per second regeneration and chance to deal 10% area damage on hit). I rerolled the life regeneration into attack speed at the Enchantress but couldn't do anything to get Vitality onto the item. Note the comparison to the much better Ancient Helltooth Gauntlets in the screenshot above, with the non-Arachyr gauntlets having 2% more Damage and 11% more Toughness. Ouch, that was a painful switch to make!

So why make the change at all? Well, by adding the sixth and final item in the Arachyr set, Spyderman was able to drop the Ring of Royal Grandeur and pick up another jewelry item via Kanai's Cube. My choice here was the Oculus Ring: chance to create a ring of focused power on killing a monster, with 85% increased damage while standing in the area. That bonus damage seemed like exactly what Spyderman needed to keep pace with scaling monster health, even if it meant giving up a better item in the process. At the very least, I figured it could't hurt to test out the new ring and see how it worked in practice.

Here's what the Oculus Ring looks like when used in combat. Whenever an enemy of any kind was killed, a golden circle appeared on the ground somewhere within the immediate vicinity of where that monster was defeated. It could appear in any direction and Spyderman found that one of the drawbacks to the Oculus Ring was that the circle would often appear right in the middle of a huge swarm of opponents. The ring would last for exactly five seconds and a new ring could not appear until the first one dissipated. Unlike what the item description said, there was no "chance" for the ring to appear: it would always appear after a monster was slain if there wasn't already a ring previously on the ground. (For example, it was pretty amusing to see the ring appear after defeating an act end boss or a Rift Guardian.) The damage boost from standing inside the ring was no joke either, with the 85% bonus visibly improving Spyderman's killing power. The net result was that the Oculus Ring became a key component of Spyderman's overall gameplay. With each new encounter, he would try to get a single monster kill and then race for the glowing circle to take down the rest of his enemies, often popping Spirit Walk to reposition himself within the wild melee. Although the circle thing was a little bit gimmicky, Spyderman couldn't afford to turn up his nose at it. He needed any additional help he could get.

The addition of the Oculus Ring was enough for me to increase the difficulty level once again, this time up to Torment XII. Now the monster health was truly getting to the point of absurdity, with even weak zombies encountered in the depths of the Halls of Agony having 5-6 billion HP. The beefier Hulk monsters that accompanied them had about 22 billion health, and again, these were only the normal opponents and not the bosses. Sometimes the fights could get pretty crazy at a Cursed Chest like this one, with Spyderman completely unable to move unless he activated his Spirit Walk ability. As bad as this might look in the picture above, he was in no danger at all despite being crushed up against the wall. The Mass Confusion skill was in effect and very few of these enemies were actually hitting Spyderman, with the minor damage that they were inflicting easily overridden by the Hex and Soul Harvest damage reduction plus heavy life regeneration. There was one bad sign here, however: note that Spyderman had only killed 18 of the 100 enemies as the timer began to run out. This was an indication that his damage was quite low for Torment XII difficulty. I could collect the bounties with some patience and careful play but Spyderman wasn't exactly flying through these areas.

After completing a cycle of bounties for Horadric Cache crafting materials (now up 14 materials apiece here on Torment XII), Spyderman went back into the Nephalem Rifts again to upgrade his legendary gems. This is the standard pattern for endgame characters, using the bounties to collect crafting materials and gold, then using the gold to empower the Nephalem Rifts where legendary items are more likely to drop and legendary gems can be upgraded. Then back to the bounties again for additional crafting materials and gold, rinse and repeat endlessly. This particular trip through the Greater Nephalem Rifts had a special significance for Spyderman as he was able to complete Rift Difficulty 50 for the first time, and with a healthy 5:11 left over for good measure. Rift Difficulty 50 corresponds to Torment XI difficulty and reaching this higher plateau meant that Spyderman's socketed legendary gems could be raised to higher corresponding ranks. With three more Greater Rift runs I had managed to get Simplicity's Strength up to Rank 40 for a nice bonus of 45% additional Corpse Spiders damage. Ten more gem ranks would get that up to an even 50%, although getting much higher than that might be tough to achieve.

Here's a little tidbit for endgame characters that seems nonsensical for lower level characters. There's something called the "Book of Cain" in town that identifies all legendary items in your inventory simultaneously. Normally your character right-clicks on a legendary item and its properties are revealed after three seconds of channeling. Your typical character who only sees legendary items with great rarity has no use for the Book of Cain. I legitimately didn't understand the purpose of this thing when playing earlier characters: "why wouldn't I just click on the legendary item to identify it?" But with Spyderman approaching the extreme lategame, he often found himself getting multplie legendary items at once. This was particularly common after completing a Greater Nephalem Rift where all of the legendary items would appear simultaneously at the completion of the rift. In the screenshot above from the Greater Rift, there were six different legendary items on the ground, for example, and another six legendary items in the inventory of the immediate screenshot above. It's tedious to click on these items and ID them one at a time, and therefore the Book of Cain really does serve a purpose in saving time. Spyderman was also at the point where most of these legendary items were being salvaged into Forgotten Souls, and it helped to have a way to check them out quickly before handing them over to the blacksmith.

The Greater Rifts have a different focus as compared to the older Diablo games. The focus in those games was typically on survival, defeating bosses without being being slain. The penalties in those games were generally associated with dying. For example, it could be very difficult to recover your items in the original Diablo after suffering a death, and Diablo 2 added the Hardcore game mode as well as experience loss on death for non-Hardcore characters. The Greater Rifts in Diablo 3 change up the gameplay by not particularly caring about character death (aside from losing out on one legendary item upgrade chance) and instead imposing the 15 minute time limit. This turns the gameplay into a race against time and therefore heavily incentivizes the maximization of character DPS over survivability (outside of Hardcore mode, at least). It also allows for the creation of gameplay mechanics like the Protection Pylon, which literally makes your character invulnerable to damage for the next minute. A shrine bonus like this wouldn't have made any sense in the context of the previous Diablo games, but in the Greater Rifts where killing speed is the overriding priority, it's not even one of the better pylon benefits. My favorite was the Conduit Pylon pictured above, which caused yellow streaks of lightning to shoot out of Spyderman and hit all nearby enemies. Having good luck with pylons could shave off a minute or two from a Greater Rift run and introduced an element of randomness to them. It also made for some impressive visual spectacles, and I had a great deal of fun racing into the middle of an enemy mob with a Conduit or Power Pylon and seeing everything drop dead in a matter of seconds.

Amongst the endless piles of useless items too weak to be equipped, occasionally something truly worth having popped up. Spyderman found a legendary dagger named the Envious Blade, and not only was it a legendary item, it had also rolled as Ancient with some highly useful properties. Envious Blade had faster attack speed than Spyderman's current weapon and a very nice +10% damage affix. After removing the Flawless Royal Emerald from Spyderman's current Sky Splitter weapon to get a fair comparison, it was clear that the Envious Blade would be dealing about that same +10% damage. But of course, the big flaw of the Envious Blade was that it didn't have a socket and therefore couldn't add an emerald for the all-important +130% crit damage. This meant it was no good as a weapon right?

Fortunately that wasn't the case. Spyderman had turned up a very rare item known as Ramaladni's Gift which has a one-time use of adding a socket to a weapon. This is a purely additive property and does not take anything away from the weapon in the process. (Unfortunately it only works on weapons and not on anything else; I later tried to use another Ramaladni's Gift to put a socket into a ring and nothing happened. It's unclear to me why the developers won't let this work on other non-weapon socketable items.) This was therefore a total no-brainer after adding a socket and I made the switch over to the new weapon. I actually used the Enchantress to reroll the poor Intellience stat on the Envious Blade, from the starting 839 (min possible is 835) up to about 975 (max possible is 1000). Spyderman's total DPS rating increased from 1415k with the old weapon up to the pictured 1570k with the new weapon. Even if the unique property of 100% crit chance against full health opponents was probably weaker than the Smite procs on Sky Splitter, this was still a major upgrade.

Here's a crafting recipe that only sees use for endgame characters. The Law of Kulle recipe allows players to reroll the stats on an individual legendary item, with the main purpose being to reroll a specific item as Ancient to get the benefits of the higher stats. It's difficult enough to find any Ancient item for each equipment slot, and much harder still to get the Ancient classification to appear on a specific desired item. I was using the cube recipe here on The Traveller's Pledge amulet, part of a jewelry set that I was hoping to adopt for Spyderman. Along with the Compass Rose ring, this set provides up to 50% damage reduction while moving and up to 100% extra damage while standing still. It takes five seconds for both bonuses to charge up, and Spyderman spent enough time standing in place tossing out spider jars for this bonus to be very worthwhile.

The biggest problem was the fact that I didn't have particularly good stats on either the Traveller's Pledge or the Compass Rose items that I'd turned up thus far. I was hoping to reroll the amulet and get an Ancient version of the item, and I'd swapped over to gambling nothing but rings in the hopes of finding an Ancient version of the Compass Rose. The Law of Kulle recipe has the extremely expensive requirement of 50 Forgotten Souls (!) as well as five each of the Hordraic Cache crafting materials. This particular reroll did not pop up as Ancient, no surprise there since the odds are only 10% for that to happen, and I would have to keep looking if I planned to make use of this item set. There were limits to how much of that I was willing to do with Spyderman, however; I wasn't going to spend endless hours grinding out rerolls to get the most ideal setup possible. I'd probably give it a couple more tries and see if I could get lucky.

I also wanted to highlight the last Kanai's Cube recipe, the one that takes the most time and effort to set up. Caldesann's Despair will augment an Ancient item with additional stats. It only works on an Ancient item, and it requires sacrificing a legendary gem in the process. The player picks out an Ancient item along with a legendary gem and three Flawless Royal gems corresponding to one of the four basic stats. The basic idea is that the Ancient item receives 5 points of one of the four basic stats for each rank of the legendary gem sacrified. For a Rank 50 gem as pictured here, that would be 50 * 5 = 250 points of the associated stat. I wanted to add Intelligence and therefore I included three Flawless Royal Topazes into the cube. Strength would require rubies, Dexterity would require emeralds, and so on.

The big tradeoff for this crafting recipe is the legendary gem. It takes a very long time to level up those gems and using Caldesann's Despair forces the player to start leveling up a new legendary gem all over again. The gem that I would be giving up here was Mirinae, which had been Spyderman's trusty companion for ages on end. It had been eclipsed in usefulness here at higher gem ranks, however, with Pain Enhancer now the more useful item. The big problem with Mirinae was the slow nature of its damage, with the Smite effect going off at a three second interval or occasionally on Spyderman's melee attacks (much less than 15% of the time due to the proc coefficient). This was great at lower gem ranks but had fallen out of favor with the passage of time. Spyderman could instead switch over to Pain Enhancer and get 5000% weapon damage (at the same Rank 50) as physical damage on every critical hit, plus 3% additional attack speed for every monster affected by the gem within 20 yards. Since Spyderman had about 50% crit chance at the moment, he would easily apply Pain Enhancer's bleed effect to every monster and pick up more of the all-important attack speed property in the process. Once I had Pain Enhancer up to Rank 25 to unlock the secondary attack speed property, it was time to make the switch and give up Mirinae for the cube recipe.

The Envious Blade clearly displayed the 250 Intelligence granted by Caldesann's Despair afterwards. Fortunately this is not a one-time deal, and if I were to upgrade a legendary gem to Rank 60 or 70 later on, I could use the same cube recipe again to override the same weapon with a higher stat bonus. Of course that would require completing dozens of Greater Nephalem Rifts to level up another legendary gem, and I doubted that I would have the patience for that. This cube recipe is therefore very much a lategame toy for the super grinders to play around with, the individuals who will spend hundreds and hundreds of hours on an individual character. That probably would have been me if Diablo 3 had come out 15 years earlier so I'm not exactly throwing shade here, just mentioning that I can't sink that much time into gaming any longer. The stat gains are far from irrelevant either, as using this cube receipe on a Rank 70 gem in all 13 inventory slots would result in 350 * 13 = 4550 more points of Intelligence. Spyderman's total Intelligence at this point was just over 10,000 and he could therefore pick up a major bonus from heavy use of this recipe. (And that's just taking legendary gems up to Rank 70. The maxed out players have completed Greater Rifts as high as level 145.) In a nice sign, Mirinae immediately dropped again from my next Greater Rift completion, back at Rank 0 once again. I could theoretically level it up once again and continue the cycle endlessly.

Finally, I had picked up another very rare legendary amulet in the form of the Star of Azkaranth. This item grants the wearer complete immunity to fire damage, in much the same way that I had found Countess Julia's Cameo earlier which had the same property for arcane damage. There's one major boss where this property comes in handy: Urzael, who uses damage almost entirely fire-based in nature. I had frequently stepped lightly around this boss due to his high health, heavy damage, and short Enrage timer of three minutes. However, Spyderman could now swap away from the Oculus Ring and switch over to the Star of Azkaranth in his Kanai's Cube jewelry slot, making this battle a complete breeze. Spyderman was able to stand in the middle of the fire hose and actually heal in the process! Urzael's damage wasn't completely attuned to the fire element, and Spyderman did have to step out of the way when the fallen angel launched one of his big jumping attacks. Nevertheless, this was an easy boss fight and I planned to rotate Urzael into my list of doable bounties going forward.

Between the Oculus Ring and the new switch over to the Pain Enchancer legendary gem, Spyderman was starting to feel more comfortable on Torment XII difficulty. How much longer could he keep this going though? Unless I wanted to keep grinding out Paragon levels forever, Spyderman was starting to run up against the limits of his character build. This was the topic that I was forced to confront head-on in the next chapter of his journey.