Multiboxing Crusaders

[Devile]

I didn't touch this class for a long time, mostly because of all the negative feedback I heard about them, but I gave it a shot a yesterday and they have quite a few "multiboxing friendly skills". I was able to do T1 with just crap gear I had lying around and the first stuff Kadala gave me.

Right now I'm using this build:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...Rf!gaVS!cbYYYb

Using Steed Charge for now cause I can't stand how slow they walk with a 2 hander. Once I get the Hellskulls for all my Crusaders, I'll switch to Condemn or Shield Glare. At first try I had them all with 5m or so toughness and 400k+ dps which was more than enough to do T1 easy. Laws of Valor Critical in a round robin gives me permanent 100% crit damage and 15% attack speed for the whole party. Resolved is also in round robin which gives me 100% crit chance which is so OP. That skill alone allows me to forget completely about crit chance in items and focus on other stats.

Crusaders don't benefit much from Attack Speed, so that's another stat I don't look in items. Meaning that all the crap gear I've been salvaging can be extremely useful for a Crusader and also I can get stupidly high toughness without much effort. I'm stacking only Lightning Damage, Crit Chance and Cooldown reduction. All the sudden, all those Mempo's and Andariels I've been salvaging look pretty damn good

On my second day my Crusaders have around 10m+ toughness and can clear T2 easy. I'm starting to reroll items to get Fist of the Heavens damage and it just melts everything, and I'm not even using decent weapons, just yellows with 2200 dps only. I'm aiming for SCHAEFER'S HAMMER on all of them. I don't think it will be hard to faceroll T4 once I get decent weapons and shields. My plan is to get enough CDR to the point I can round robin Laws of Valor Critical and Laws of Justice Decaying Strenght without downtime. That will give the party a HUGE bonus in dps and toughness at the same time. Haven't done the math yet, but prolly around 60% CDR should give me enough buff uptime. Also, with enough CDR, I don't need to round robin Judgement in all 4 Crusaders, just 2 of them and have maybe Shield Glare in the other 2 so I cast those 2 skills at the same time in combo.

I'm really enjoying Crusaders right now. It's really taking away all the frustration I get from getting that amazing item that didn't roll the perfect stats I needed. With this build, there's a good chance that item is very good for one of my Crusaders. An amulet with 100% crit damage, armor and 15% lightning is just crap for all classes but for this build is amazing since I can reroll that armor into STR and do a crapload of damage with it. Not BiS but very good.

Obviously not everything is good. The biggest problem I've found is mobility. If u get slowed by something, its just unbearable. They literally stop moving. Besides that, moving from pack to pack feels like it takes forever. I might add a monk to the mix to speed up things, and since they dont really have tougness issues, I don't care about pulling firechains and electric packs. Or just try another skill to leap/run out of those tricky situations. Wallers can be a pain in the butt too. Wrath generation is a little bit annoying but guess is just a matter of getting used to the class and new playstyle, or I'll just get Reaper Wraps.

I'll prolly use Reaper Wraps with Aughild's, Born's and Captain's sets. If I go with Condemn Vacum and no monk, then Strongarms for sure. I'm pretty sure I'll be over 20m toughness in no time. There's a lot of potential here.

[dancook]

Thanks for the write up

[Mamut]

Just got my crusaders to 70, hope to give em a solid go next weekend. To ease the pain of the slow movement i have Laws of Hope/Wings of Angels on round robin.

I wonder how long it will be before I can gamble up 4 http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/hellskull

A guildy got his last night and went bananas lol.

Edit:

Forgot to mention using one with Laws of Valor - Answered Prayers to keep a 3 stack of Nephalem glory up. That boosts them all to 20% movement which helps some.

[Ishar]

Just got my crusaders to 70, hope to give em a solid go next weekend. To ease the pain of the slow movement i have Laws of Hope/Wings of Angels on round robin.

Seems like you could mix valor/critical and hope/wings to make this a speedier team overall, once you got sufficient CDR. Wouldn't be quite 100% up time on wings, though. Probably not worth dropping critical for Wings though, unless you are massively OP for the difficulty level. Might be good for farming, though.

I think I'm going to focus on this team now. I can seamlessly mix in a monk if i choose, later.

Edit: nevermind; I had a brain fart. You could have 3 crit 1 wings and pop wings when your not fighting to make getting to the next clump faster.

To expand on this idea a bit; if you bind 'wings' to the same key as 'force move' then you can use it in combat to reposition (where 'move through enemies' is really important and the shield effect of hope can't hurt) as well as to speed up moving to the next group (if you are like me, and always force-move anyway out of habit...). This is possibly what Mamut meant when they mentioned hope/wings.

As a final thought, you don't need as much CDR to do 3/1 as you do 2/2. Though doing 2/1/1 is probably attractive later on anyway (since 50% uptime of decaying strength is better than nothing.)

Now I can't wait till I get enough CDR to zoom-zoom. hmm. Tempting to just deal with 75% uptime critical in favor of zoom-zoom. LOL.

[Ishar]

My plan is to get enough CDR to the point I can round robin Laws of Valor Critical and Laws of Justice Decaying Strenght without downtime. That will give the party a HUGE bonus in dps and toughness at the same time. Haven't done the math yet, but prolly around 60% CDR should give me enough buff uptime. Also, with enough CDR, I don't need to round robin Judgement in all 4 Crusaders, just 2 of them and have maybe Shield Glare in the other 2 so I cast those 2 skills at the same time in combo.

It seems like your saying Justice/Decaying increases DPS, and I don't see how. It would massively boost toughness, though.

An alternative is to your plan to do judgement/shield is to use judgement/mass verdict. Seems like doing judge/mass + judge/resolve in round robin would be nice; since it'd concentrate enemies for your fissures. Of course you'd have to sacrifice another slot to shield glare, though. You could do a similar thing though, with Emblazoned shield. Or simply swap those two out for another skill. (there are a couple of decent low cooldown dps abilities like heaven's fury/ascendancy or phalanx/bowmen.) Or round-robin consecration with those two slots, maybe, for some extra toughness and in keeping with the whole ranged motif.

Edit: Did the math, (well wrote some quick and dirty code). I assume partial seconds are disregarded. (e.g. 5.6 second reduction is actually a 5 second reduction).

My math says 56% CDR to round robin laws with two characters. Apparently, you can round robin with 3 chars at 40% CDR, which is also the point at which you can combine judgement/shield; again, per my math. Apparently at 70% CDR you don't need to round robin judge/shield, and at 78% you wouldn't need to round robin anything. Those last two are probably not attainable though. My math might be wrong of course.

Also worth noting that you can round robin shield glare 3 characters pretty much out of the box(3x4=12). Judgement is pretty easy to get down to 3 as well. (6x3=18).

[Ishar]

Edit:

Forgot to mention using one with Laws of Valor - Answered Prayers to keep a 3 stack of Nephalem glory up. That boosts them all to 20% movement which helps some.

I got tired of editing my other post; lol. There's also Nephalem Majesty if you want to sacrifice a passive. It seems like (at the end of the day) mixing justice (for the passive and 50% active) would be better than mixing in nephalem orbs. Hmm. On the other hand, they add damage too...

[Devile]

It seems like your saying Justice/Decaying increases DPS, and I don't see how. It would massively boost toughness, though.

I didn't say Justice, I said Laws of Valor Critical and Laws of Justice Decaying to have 15% AS + 100% crit dmg (DPS) and 60% reduced damage.

Did a quick change to my build and holy shit, what a HUGE difference. I went from T2 to T4 without adding more toughness or considerable DPS:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...Rf!gaeS!abaYYY

I can't believe I'm doing T4 with literally crap gear (i still have dex/int items). At this point I have no doubts I'll be able to do T6 without problems once I get the proper gear. Switching to Unstoppable Force made a huge difference since now I'm able to pretty much spam Fissures while before I could only cast 3 and run out of Wrath. White mobs just disappear after 2 casts and elites dont stand a chance once I pop Provoke. Even Extra Health packs melt quite fast. All that goes hand to hand with Wrathful passive which heals nicely once I get all those Fissures on top of the pack.

My CDR sucks right now (around 20% or less on most). Haven't worked much on it. I'm mainly farming shards with my TR monks on T1 and then gambling with my Crusaders to get shields. Then farm a little bit with them on T4 to get more souls to start crafting Aughild's and Captains. Also need to farm Malthael for the Reaper Wraps.

I'm not even at half way where I want to be with these guys, but it's working surprisingly good. I'll aim for 50% CDR and see how well I do. I got my first Schaefer's Hammer today with horrible roll but whatever, it was better than the Standoff sword I was using. Once I get my CDR goal, I'll throw a ZDPS monk into the mix and see how it works. I think I can do T5 but that will be pushing it since my toughness is around 8m now cause of the passive change.

[Pazgaz]

I went a different path. I gambled and got Jenkangbord on all 4 crusaders for more Blessed Shield bounces and now trying to get Gryfalcon's Foote to make it cost 0 wrath.
When spamming blessed shield on all 4 it looks crazy! Screen is full of shields and with shatter rune which causes them to split into 2 smaller ones it's even crazier

[Ishar]

I didn't say Justice, I said Laws of Valor Critical and Laws of Justice Decaying to have 15% AS + 100% crit dmg (DPS) and 60% reduced damage.

Did a quick change to my build and holy shit, what a HUGE difference. I went from T2 to T4 without adding more toughness or considerable DPS:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...Rf!gaeS!abaYYY

Ahh, I misinterpreted what you said. That makes sense. Also tried out that build for a bit last night; its awesome.

I went a different path. I gambled and got Jenkangbord on all 4 crusaders for more Blessed Shield bounces and now trying to get Gryfalcon's Foote to make it cost 0 wrath.
When spamming blessed shield on all 4 it looks crazy! Screen is full of shields and with shatter rune which causes them to split into 2 smaller ones it's even crazier

I imagine so; though that'd be awfully gear dependent. Still, something to gamble towards.

Though, speaking of gear-dependency, I wonder if a thorns-based build (e.g. invoker et al) would stack? Probably not terribly well, though I wonder if unity (the ring) damage would trigger thorns effects. Probably not. Round robin provoke as well, but that's probably trying too hard. Meh, might be fun to collect at least one set for a mixed team, at any rate.

[Devile]

I already have 1 Jekangbord and eventually will try it but I don't really wanna build around something that might get nerfed. If it doesn't get nerfed in 2.0.5 I may go that way, tho I don't like the lack of single target damage. I'm still gambling for shields only to get all of them so I can try different things. Smart loot is not really working for me right now. I'm not really getting much stuff for Crusader. Guess having to many Wizards and WDs doesn't help. I've rarely got any class specific item and the only set stuff I get is Blackthorne's which I'm close to have full sets for ALL classes in my 4 accounts!. Got a few Invoker pieces which IMO sucks.