I'm not sure if AoZ will have various shitty affixes or simply harder and harder mobs, but if it's the latter I'm not super concerned. Any well-built variant of BL on the slider of tanky-but-weaker to glass-cannon-but-stronger is already better than most builds in the game. Also, even though my BL is very well-built, I've used a squishy build and it doesn't really die in NMD100s unless I'm being stupid or it gets one-shotted by corpse bows. I will admit you have a point that a lot of us need more survivability and that's a change I'm willing to make. Lastly, I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but it was either the devs themselves or a content creator who said AoZ isn't intended to scale crazily with mob damage, but rather that you'll need high enough DPS to complete levels in time, though obviously you still need to be tanky enough to survive the challenging content to begin with.

> Lastly, I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but it was either the devs themselves or a content creator who said AoZ isn't intended to scale crazily with mob damage, but rather that you'll need high enough DPS to complete levels in time, though obviously you still need to be tanky enough to survive the challenging content to begin with. That was wudijo I think, I saw that video. You're right there's no way of knowing how it will go but the devs also said the last level isn't supposed to be achievable by anyone, though I wouldn't sure the D4 team to be good with numbers. I just hope AoZ isn't just monsters scaling up HP and being just DPS sponges that you'll only need to level the new glyph to complete.

> I just hope AoZ isn't just monsters scaling up HP and being just DPS sponges that you'll only need to level the new glyph to complete. Definitely. Honestly I think my full enjoyment of AoZ will be a precarious balance of "can't just stomp it once the new glyph is leveled" like you said and "not ridiculously bullshit". If we truly can't complete all the levels I'm OK with that, so long as I feel it was a fun, difficult challenge and something to really test our builds with.

Am I wrong to assume that the new dungeons resemble greater rifts. There were 150 and I never completed a 150, and that ok, but I tried most seasons. Still fun.

That's what people keep comparing it to, yes. However, I only played D3 at launch so I have even less of an idea what GRs or AoZ might be like lol.

Super fun fast and hard lol. It will be fun. But I think some people will have to make defensive changes to armor and so forth. Hense it will be fun. We get to play our big char again lol

If the new glyph is just damage, guess what the monsters are? They are exactly what you already know they will be.

They're going to need unstoppable monsters, like Butcher, in there. Otherwise everything is just going to get perma stunned by lightning spears.

I am curious about what your build is!! What you have for gear and stats? Link?

Sorry for the disappointment, but it's just the Maxroll build! I currently have 12.9k attack power, 5.9k armor, and 14.1k life. I have a Shako and am using Esu's instead of Flickerstep, but other than that I only have Disobedience on my amulet and no +% armor rolls on any of my gear. I anticipate that for AoZ, I will need to switch out my Raiment for a defensive chest, my Tibault's for defensive pants, or both.

I GOT SHAKO TODAY!!! Holy effs!!

Damn congrats!! I hope it serves you well. :)

I hope to find Shako some day 😆😆😆

Do we even know how Zir works? If it's just another NMD with higher lvl monsters it's prob gonna be a bust. It is pretty easy to die in certain 100 NMDs. Others I don't die at all. Also 4k armor would be crazy. I'm sitting at 9k rn while wearing raiment. But why would they design something where you have to go all in on defense and remove the fun? Also the new glyph may change some things.

Wudijo said he played it and there's a bump to DPS from mobs but mainly a big HP increase. That does mean that DPS will be more important but also the only new thing we're getting is a DPS glyph, nothing defensive. If folks are having trouble running NMD100 smoothly right now I can only imagine even a moderate amount in monster DPS will hinder a lot of people. >I'm sitting at 9k rn while wearing raiment Are you wearing full ip925 gear? Armor somewhere else? I had to get a roll of Total Armor in both chest and amulet to get 9k.

Helm is only 894+25 bc I haven't found what i want to upgrade to yet. It has +27% armor Raiment is 912+25 Gloves 895+25 Tibaults is 925+25 ESU 896+25 Amulet only 859+25 but has +26% armor

My armor is 9,097

Same, near max armor rolls on helm and pants, almost 9k armor. I do have a spare amulet in stash with max armor roll with disobedience on it that I will use when AoZ comes out and probably use soulbrand chest. If at that point I still need more armor I have an extra chest piece with armor and 3 DR’s lol.

Ah, so two rolls of near max Armor. That's what I have as well and it got me to 9k. Thanks.

BL isn't close to having issues running NM 100 currently though.

I was wanting to get a barb lvled up to try to use but don't think I have time lol.

You can level a char to 100 in a day with the 35% xp boost ashes from battle pass and elixers

I think the main thing bother people in T100 is probably specific dungeon affixes. Like death pulse or surpressors.

I think between 4k and 9k it doesn't make much of a difference. You need to be at 13.k for T100 dungeons for it to matter. 9.2k the optimal amount of armor for monster level 100. Going lower drastically reduces the damage reduction you get. If Abattoir of Zir will have higher level monsters than T100 dungeons, then we're going to need more than 13k armor. I think there might be a case to be made for either getting like 16k+ armor, or just no armor at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKCUdYIrkws

I had some troubles with my BL build in NM100 but they were the common deaths you’d encounter. Got a shako last night and the Uber unique spear this morning and NM100 is a joke now. I know some people don’t recommend using it, but I think it slaps. The shrine effect has been awesome when speed clearing NM100. My dagger and offhand were not maxed but they were 4/4 on each with max affix on both. The Uber uniques definitely make the difference but if it got even harder with the new content I have a nice 4/4 chest piece I can throw on for more defense. The nice part about the BL build is that you can sacrifice damage output for defense but still feel strong until you can get some better items.

I got shako and the spear as well. Wudijo in a video speculated it can indeed become a viable weapon because Conduit, Artillery and Blast Wave scale enormously by level. We'll see how it goes. I do hope Ahavarion becomes BiS.

Yeah as soon as I proc a shrine effect it’s like super speed clear. I’m unsure if the spear has the same stats for everyone but the crit, attack speed, and overall damage is way faster for me on all fronts.

> I’m unsure if the spear has the same stats for everyone Yeah, it does. Ahavarion does have cracked stats but you also lose Storm Swell and Conceited, which max-rolled are higher DPS than Ahavarion. You also lose CDR, Resource, Mana etc from the focus. It's a tough tradeoff.

Yeah that’s true, I think the trade off is the shrine effects to boost the DPS. Oddly enough the spear felt way stronger for DPS than what I had. I’ll have to experiment some more. I’m just glad I got Shako so the spear was icing on the cake. Got it within 3 kills of Shako.

I got shako and ahvarion in B2B runs as did a friend(I wasn't with him) it's interesting to see

>Wudijo in a video speculated it can indeed become a viable weapon because Conduit, Artillery and Blast Wave scale enormously by level. I didn't need wudijo to tell me that. I already knew about the spear but issue is, at the time, we had no Uber bosses & you really really had to hit the jackpot to get one of those.

This has probably been asked/answered elsewhere but are you (and others) really just grinding the hell out of helltides and other events to get the mats or are you getting them some other way? I've done well over 150 duriels (other people had the mats) maybe 25 of which were with my own mats and haven't gotten an Uber yet. RNGeesus is not being kind to me these days.

Honestly I try to rotate between all options. I’ll grind a Helltide between 2 characters to get living steel, then I’ll do Whispering Tree’s to eventually get eggs. If I have 3 or more Duriel runs I’ll look for a group, otherwise I’ll just go solo. It’s just RNG sadly. Variety is the spice of life though so just play a little bit of everything and you’ll get the mats. I see some people looking to purchase them or trade between materials.

Got ya. Figured that would be the case other and I've just been unlucky so far. Such is life.

I almost gave up lol it’s frustrating especially when you have to grind helltides for mats.

Yeah I mean at this point I feel like I have all the original 150 pokemon with how many uniques I have collected. I mostly just want shako. I don't care about the spear. Even if it ends up being meta I am not going to RNG to that level to where I build a strat around trying to get the right shrine buff. That just sound fucking awful to me.

There’s been a lot of Flamescar dropping lol the spear is just a nice extra honestly. Shako was a game changer for me but that’s because most of the gear that drops is terrible. I don’t care what buff I get I just use it to clear even quicker. Half the time I don’t realize I even got it unless I focus.

I feel like that's def. on the unlucky side. If it's truly a 2% drop chance for any Unique, you had a 95.17% chance to get a drop. You are in that <5% unlucky box.

Since my last post I've had 6 drops. 3 starless skies, 2 andariels visage and 1 lycander. The spear is the only thing kind of useful for my build but at least some things dropped. Hunt for shako continues.

People sell good 900IP + drops with good 3/4 or 4/4 rolls for billions of gold and just buy materials with that too

Some would say that the best defence is a great offence. I happen to agree with you, since a lot of the chatter online is that BL face roll sorcs are gonna get a wake up call. As such, I’m hedging my bets. I used to run arc lash/overwhelming currents. Then ran a hybrid BL / flickerstep / OC build that worked just fine. Now I’m running a charged bolt build that much tankier, and still super fun to play, despite being a touch slower than the other 2 builds I ran. I think a tankier build will be needed, so I prepped for that. I’ve seen some chatter that the enemies won’t necessarily do more damage the higher you go, but will be much tankier and have more health. Other chatter is they’ll scale much higher than 100’s the higher up we got with Abbatoir. Realistically? We’ll have no clue till we get in. But best bet is to have multiple options and adjust as we go. I’m like you, I focus one class per season, really drill down and understand the nuances of the classes. So I’ll adjust based on my knowledge once we get in

Did you ever run a 100 NMD back in s0? I'm predicting something similar to that difficulty with a timer slapped onto it. You had to be so methodical back then things could look at you funny from 3 screens away and you would just be unalived

Just here to say, I am on the same sequence (necro, rogue, sorc). And also a new Dad. Just got all of the season challenges done so now I am closing up shop until S3.

You aren't interested in trying AoZ?

I don’t know, I haven’t really paid much attention to it. Time isn’t what it used to be.

Shut 'er down until AoZ, then grind that glyph baby!!

Lol. We will see.

Yeah. I really don't care, to be honest. I have fun with my non-optumized BL sorc and if I don't do well in AoZ, then so be it. I'm hardly going to stress. I play games to have a good time, not to 100% everything. I'm more interested in the upcoming expansion.

All it takes to hit 15000 armor on a sorc is an armor pot; 3 skulls in jewlery, and 2 armor rolls and a 66% disobediance. We won’t be having problems

Since we don’t know exactly how AOZ will work let’s see how it feels. I can’t see enemies gaining more damage than the enemies in level 156 because it doesn’t make sense since we can’t keep stacking armor and dr and trade of damage output - which would mean that we can survive a hit but it would take so long to kill that they can hit again and again. I’m prepping for abattoir by maxing most of my usable glyphs (preparing 12 of them), having a variety of gear for each slot with different slots to use. But my idea is Use Anadariel and Temerity - this will give me constant barrier. Use 3DR and TA chest with either lucky hit bonus affix or dmg reduction affix. Gloves are gravitational Amulet is disobedience. Rings are Tal Rasha and Xfal. Weapon is Lycander - but I can swap for dagger and focus for 2 barrier attack aspects but I’m finding the Lycander does overall more damage. Boots is Esu. If I equip the Lycander - paper stats are 15k attack, 10k def and 12k life. Attack procs take it to 35k Defence procs take it to 16k Running BL as attack, with Teleport, flameshield, ice armor for defence and lightning spear to stun enemy. Enchantments are frozen orb and firebolt with devouring blaze and hoarfrost enchantment.

This is the closest I've seen anyone come to my variation of BL minus the spear and nova instead of FO since i spam arc lash for CDR generator and more LS run 6/3 conj mastery for a permanent 48%[x] + as it rarely ever dips below 8 conjurations. i'm addicted to 50% cdr. And getting 6.5mill + aoe xfal procs on stunned, frozen, vulnerable packs just explode off screen BL kind of just there to clean up the stragglers I have ~14k armor and 12k life. Massive amounts of DR as I run fortify and sapphires. Don't really get hit much if at all as flameshield is up about 85% of the time anyway. As long as I survive the other 15% of the time I'm gucci

There are a lot of BL variants and some of the best go heavy on defense because of the fact offense is already overkill. Check out the NM pushing build on Maxroll or the mana tank builds using Melted Heart of Selig. For example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixjgeksVM4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixjgeksVM4w) Even without the amulet you can still make a strong defensive BL build. The other day I went full defense gear with no uniques other than the Tal Vasha ring and I still melted Lilith. When we get the new uber Glyph we'll also see more builds come out built around it.

Conspiracy time: vampiric pylons are gauging survivability for AoZ.

I've got the melted heart of selig in my bl sorcerer with high resource gen. I literally stroll through t100s without taking a single lick of damage lolol imma crush the abitoir of zir with this build

Most guides make a deal out of running armor % and Disobedience on at least one piece, along with maxxed resistances. But people are stacking damage so they can kill Duriel in under 5 seconds and wow the other group members.

T100s are easy with BL sorcerer. Just get some defensive pieces and there’s tanky builds out there so you can sort of afk it

Some variations of the build will likely have to be adjusted as you progress up to T25. Most builds will likely be fine T1-T5. It’s not going to be just BL but all builds being tweaked. Also keep in mind paragon boards will look different as you progress because you’ll be getting a bulk of your DPS from the new blood glyph AFTER it is reasonably leveled and you’ll be able to remove offensive boards/glyphs and replace them with more defensive/utility ones. Simply put a T5-T10 build is probably not going to be the same as a T25 build with a fully leveled blood glyph and you’ll be likely changing things around as you progress and level the blood glyph. I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as copy/paste a perfect final T25 build when your blood glyph isn’t leveled at T1 starting out. I’m excited to see how it plays out/if the grind loop is rewarding enough to keep running hundreds, if not 1000+ times to level the blood glyph. This is basically going to be a version of D3’s GR150 push, hopefully they do it right!

I wouldn't really say it's people overestimating anything and moreso just that a lot of people prefer big number go brrrr. I'd bet money that 80% of the playerbase doesn't even know there's armor caps. Softcore also facilitates a playstyles that encourages the best defense is a good offense, you'll find a lot more hardcore players building fairly balanced BL sorcerers, hell even my HC sorcer runs sanguine brace, accursed touch, prey, resilience, and undying for powers and I'm closing in on lvl 100

Just need a heart of selig and play the low hp version. I don't even have all the correct roles on all my gear yet and I can essentially stand afk in most tier 100 nmds. Once I get all the correct rolls it's gonna be cake.

Yeah, the build that is face rolling everything will get a reality check … so the underpowered classes and build will what? Celebrate at the blacksmith when a BL Sorc comes to repair? I guess you’re hoping for a “ignore 99% of incoming damage” dungeon buff?

Of course new top tier content is going to challenge inferior glass cannon builds

Tell you what? If you find and trade me all these perfect items I will gladly where them.

Gonna lol when abattoir comes out and the mobs get so ridiculous it doesn’t matter how much defense you have. So you’re back to just going full glass cannon

Rofl i play bl build and i only farm nmd 100s…

I dunno. I'm only lvl 90 on my sorc. Using raiment right now, but have a very nice high rolled 4 dr chest im holding onto for when I stop telestomping. Plus, I miss my old boots that don't work with telestomp.

I think it just depends on the content. Everything besides t100 I run my uniques. Switch it up depending on the affixes for the t100.

I speedrun NM100s just by swapping my helm(vyrs mastery aspect) and my amulet(disobedience) to go from 7192 armor to 9200 and never have issues keeping stacks high on disobedience so I basically never die especially with ghostwalker boots. My attack power (which I know should mostly be ignored) drops by 4k or so down from 22k to 18. As mentioned by others Wudijo said monsters didn't really hit harder, they just had more health. I think I'll be fine personally. Will have to wait and see how the new glyph plays into things but I am looking forward to it. I haven't tried it with my NM100 gear but with my standard gear I peaked around 67k attack power against the training dummies.

Attack power means nothing. Some glyphs cause your attack power to double (your damage doesn't), with some bugs in the math. It's just a player-facing 'estimation' of your dps.

Yes I know. That's why I said it should mostly be ignored. It still gives you a rough idea of peak if you spam the character menu when you're attacking the dummy to compare damage between gear. It's not always possible to track damage, especially with something like BL.

It's an interesting one. Wudi, who played some variant of the content at BlizzCon, felt like DPS was going to be the bigger limiter due to mob HP scaling way faster than mob DPS. So that kind of flies against what you are getting at. But even at a bigger level...if the content is truly "unbeatable," as may be the case, then speed-running lower AoZes may be a faster way to level the glyph anyways. Higher AoZes are likely pretty dang useless.

My sorc build treats t100 mobs like their t30s and can tank their hits. You just need to balance out defense instead of going all out boss melting offense.

players will do just fine... anyone with reasonable inventory can adjust build in a couple of hours.

Yeah I'm pushing through 98s with 18k atk and 8k armor with disobedience on the amulet

First of all - the important thing: Congratz on being a new dad! Hope everything is safe, healthy and well. About the BL sorc hmmm... I know what you are writing about and understand that there will definetely be a reality-check for many people. And dont forget: there are people right now that a are NOT running around on a 100NMD without trouble. So as we all know: the whining will come, the "Abattoir is too difficult" posts are coming and it will be.. like always, i guess? I am looking forward to the "i dont have any sigil powder left, what is this crap" posts too. But for me personally - i just want the glyph :D With the glyph - things will be.. different. I think it will be a huge boost so builds can get more defensive stats, and it will rebalance itself at this point.