Welcome to my first (and hopefully not the last) guide for Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. The build I’m going to introduce here focuses on Unity, one of the new passive skills in RoS.
The core skills of this build are:
Unity
Mystic Ally: Fire Ally
Mantra of Conviction: Collateral Damage
Why Unity?
All of the new monk passives buff your DPS. Among them, Unity is the most straightforward. It works as long as you have a group with you. I find Momentum to be too gimmicky and Mythic Rhythm too conditional.
How does Unity work?
As you can see, it buffs your DPS by 5% per ally while also raising their damage by the same amount.
The damage of your ranged attacks is based on magick, so you’ll want your magick stat to be as high as possible. At +5 per level, the Sorcerer vocation offers the highest Magick growth from levels 10-100, as you can see in the table below.
Charged staff attacks (AKA Focused Bolt and Magick Agent) buffed with Holy Boon or Holy Affinity are effective against almost all of the enemies in vanilla DD. Take advantage of this exploit to plow through your foes. The only monsters that you’ll have to look out for are Grigori, who is weak to Dark, and Magick-immune golems.
Note that the Holy exploit does not work very well in Bitterblack Isle.
Adepts play a more prominent part in Mass Effect 3. In contrast to the supporting role that they got in the previous game, biotically-gifted individuals are not limited to taking targets out of cover and placing them in the line of fire. Reduced cooldowns allow them to use their powers more frequently and biotic detonations are easier to set up. Given the right upgrades and squad members, you’ll find yourself winning fights without firing a single shot.
The table below lists all of the available Adept powers for Commander Shepard. The asterisks after the name of the power indicate my rating for it.
Blizzard opened Ruby Sanctum this week so it’s time for another strategy guide. Let’s focus on the final boss of the raid, Halion.
Phase 1
Like any dragon boss, Halion has a cleave and a tail swipe so you want to stand on the side of one of his hind legs and DPS from there. He will put a debuff on a random raid member called Fiery Combustion. The best way to handle it is to run and head for the outer wall, then wait for someone to dispel it from you (you can use Cloak of Shadows to remove it yourself). The reason behind this is because there’s a secondary effect that you don’t want to spread to the raid. Running to the outside wall minimizes the chances of doing that. Watch out for Meteor Strike as well. There’s a visual effect that looks like a ripple of fire that indicates where it’s going to drop. Avoid it, then stay out of the fire that spreads from it.
At 75% HP, he’ll go to phase 2.
Phase 2
Welcome to the Twilight Phase. Give your tanks a couple of seconds to pick him up (Tricks if it’s up, of course), then DPS the boss. The debuff to watch out for here is Soul Consumption. The same strategy applies; if you get it, run to the outside wall, have it dispelled (again, Cloak works), then resume DPSing.
The second thing to watch out for here is that there are two orbs orbiting the outside wall. At some point you’ll get a warning, followed by the appearance of a purple beam connecting the two orbs. This is the Twilight Cutter. Regardless of how might think of the color purple, this beam will kill you if you stand in it.
At 50% HP, Halion moves to phase 3.
Phase 3
There are now two versions of Halion, one in the physical realm (phase 1) and another in the twilight realm (phase 2). Your raid leader will you which phase to go to but the point here is that both versions have to have the same amount of HP as much as possible. So if physical Halion is at 48% HP, twilight Halion has to be the same or very close to it. Otherwise, he’ll regenerate. He retains his abilities in both phases, so aside from watching his health, both groups have to deal with the debuffs, the meteors and the cutters.
