Reaper of Souls Crusader Torment Build Update

Table of Contents

Now that we’ve had over two weeks with our Crusader, we’ve decided to update our build and progress as we continue marching onto the harder Torment difficulty levels in Reaper of Souls. Yesterday, the Crusader received many changes to the class, so now’s a better time than any to see what we’ve been doing with ours. Quite a bit has changed since our initial Crusader Torment Build was made, with gear upgrades plentiful as we aim to not only survive the higher Torment difficulties, but to slay monsters at a rapid pace. As it stands, our Crusader has 1.1-million sheet Damage with nearly 8.7-million Toughness, but there’s plenty more than what the sheet says.

We’ve overhauled our skills quite a bit since our initial Crusader Torment Build post

Skills

Let’s start off by taking a look at how we’ve decided to change our skills around. By taking advantage of the Blunt passive, we decided to swap out Smite for Justice with the Crack rune. Justice does a great job dealing damage while the Crack rune helps spread that damage out to multiple enemies at once. And despite the buff to Fist of the Heavens yesterday along with the nerf to Heaven’s Fury Fires of Heaven, we stuck with Heaven’s Fury due to the ability to spam it as a nice single target damage dealer. The Fires of Heaven rune allows you to use it as a Wrath spender rather than waiting on a cooldown. Blessed Hammer with Limitless remains, as does Steed Charge with Endurance – though that rune can be altered to your preference. Laws of Valor with Critical is still our favorite Law while we have decided to change the Condemn rune to Unleashed to make it easier to deal damage when we want to.

Our Passives have been overhauled quite a bit now, with Righteousness, Finery and Holy Cause joining the previously mentioned Blunt. Finery is an amazing passive once you start filling out your gear with sockets while Righteousness pairs up great with our attack speed to refill Wrath at a quick pace in order to unleash more Heaven’s Fury.

We’ve changed things around with our Paragon Defense point allocation

Paragon

Paragon allocation remains mostly the same with one noticeable change to the Defense category. With plenty more Armor (through Strength) and All Resists, we have decided to invest more points into Life Regeneration than Life. Now that our Crusader has ample damage mitigation, the Life Regeneration combined with Life on Hit and Life on Kill makes it survive much easier in higher Torment difficulties. In the Core tab, we still have maximum Movement Speed and the rest of the points into Strength while Offense has just enough Critical Hit Chance to reach the 50-percent mark. We scaled back the Attack Speed allocation to remain at two attacks per second while the rest went into Critical Hit Damage. Lastly, the Utility tab stayed with maximum Area Damage and the rest of the points in the Life on Hit category.

Our Crusader’s gear has changed quite a bit

Itemization

With two weeks of farming under our belt, it’s no surprise that our Crusader’s gear has been overhauled slot-by-slot. We’ll go through the importance of each piece and why we chose it for our build, and what we’re looking out for in terms of upgrades.

Helm

We decided to run an Andariel’s Visage with a buff to Holy skills damage and rather than rolling for Critical Hit Chance, we opted for a socket with a Flawless Royal Amethyst inside to boost our Life %. Since our Critical Hit Chance goal is 50 percent and we were able to hit it with the aid of Paragon points, we felt that having 23 percent more Life was better than the Critical Hit Chance.

Amulet

We got extremely lucky with our Amulet drop, rolling with 5-percent Attack Speed, 99-percent Critical Hit Damage and 8.5-percent Critical Hit Chance. We decided to re-roll the Strength main stat to 14 percent more Holy skills damage to further buff all our Holy skills. In this slot, you’d ideally look for the same stats even if they’re lower rolls.

Shoulders

We decided to go with Aughild’s Power for shoulders in order to work our way towards the set’s three-piece bonus. The two-piece bonus reduces ranged and melee attacks by seven percent, while the three-piece bonus reduces damage from elites by 15 percent while increasing damage against elites by 15 percent. Instead of All Resists, we opted to re-roll the stat for bonus Condemn damage.

Chest

We got lucky and scored a Blackthorne’s Surcoat with Strength, Vitality and All Resists, so we were able to re-roll it for three sockets. We will ultimately work towards the four-set bonus from Blackthorne’s with the help of the Ring of Royal Grandeur, which decreases the amount required for the set bonus by one.

Bracers

To pair with our Aughild’s Power shoulders, we crafted a set of Aughild’s Search bracers in order to get the two-piece bonus. Ideally, you’ll want Strength, Vitality (or All Resists) with Critical Hit Chance and Holy skills damage buff.

Belt

Here we obtained a Blackthorne’s Notched Belt with Strength, Vitality, Life and Armor. Once we get more Toughness, we could re-roll the Life % to buff our Justice damage.

Rings

Our rings are pretty straightforward, with rares currently until we can swap them out for a Ring of Royal Grandeur and a Stone of Jordan. One ring sports a socket with a damage stat, Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage while the other ring features a high Strength roll with Attack Speed, Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage. The reasoning behind having a socket in one of the rings is to have the ability to gem in a Diamond for more All Resists if we need a boost to our defense, along with taking advantage of the Finery passive.

Pants

Currently we’re running a fairly vanilla set of Depth Diggers with Strength, Vitality, All Resists and two sockets. We plan on replacing it with a piece of the Blackthorne’s set with similar stats. That will also complete our three-piece bonus and with the aid of the Ring of Royal Grandeur, we’ll be able to benefit from the Blackthorne’s four-piece bonus, which will make our Crusader immune to Desecrator, Molten and Plagued ground effects.

Boots

We were lucky enough to gamble Ice Climbers for our boot slot, which is a boon against Frozen. Fairly standard stats here with Strength, Vitality and All Resists.

Weapon

Ideally in this slot you’d have a Skycutter with a socket, Strength and a high Holy Damage roll. Attack speed would be a plus, but since we haven’t gotten lucky enough to get a Skycutter, we have decided to craft a Hallowed Breach axe with Strength, Attack Speed and socket. The damage roll could be higher resulting in more DPS, but we’re pretty happy with the one we’ve gotten.

Shield

There’s plenty of Shield options out there for the Crusader, but we decided to pair up our Hallowed Breach with a Hallowed Barricade in order to get the two-piece bonus: 100 Resistance to All Elements and 10-percent Attack Speed. For us, we opted for Strength, Critical Hit Chance and socket, while the Hallowed Barricade always rolls a bonus to Holy skills damage.

We’ll continue updating the progress of our Crusader build as time goes on, but hopefully this gives proof that one-handed builds are entirely viable for the Crusader. You can watch a video of it in action below along with a high-res photo gallery or our stats and gear.