Akkhan Condemn Crusader Skills and Runes
On this page, we explain how to choose and use your skills when playing Akkhan Condemn Crusader in Diablo 3. Updated for patch 2.6.10 and Season 22.
Active Skills |
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Passive Skills |
Rotation
Your strategy when playing the Condemn build is to stay indefinitely in
Akarat's Champion form through the Akkhan set and Cooldown Reduction,
continuously spam
Condemn to keep your main AoE damage going at all
times, and maintain your intense resource costs with
Unstoppable Force,
Provoke and
Slash. The latter is also used to keep up the
generator requirement of
Focus and
Restraint. Mobility is a
key part of this playstyle that excels in mass clearing of trash mobs for its
Rift progression; stopping in place not only lowers your damage output due to
the diminishing returns on CC as it lessens your control over monsters, but can
potentially expose you to unbearable amounts of damage. Moving in irregular
curved patterns should become second nature, and
Illusory Boots will
prevent you from ever getting stuck.
Skills and Runes
The primary damage dealer of the build, Condemn, takes on a crowd
controlling role with
Vacuum, easily drawing monsters within the range
of your destructive AoE. Needless to say, in high progression environments this
skill can expose you to a lot of danger as well, easily grouping entire screens of
enemies on top of you. The lesson to be learned with
Condemn is to always
be on the move and on the lookout for big packs of trash enemies to fuel your
progression, while elites are to be killed as collateral damage and even outright
avoided, if they have unfavorable affixes (such as Electrified, Reflect Damage,
and to a certain extent Fire Chains).
Your stalwart source of protection is found in the signature Crusader steroid
Akarat's Champion. Once you reach the comfortable 56% CDR threshold, you
can maintain
Akarat's Champion form indefinitely. While it increases your
damage multiplicatively by 35% and supplies you with 5 Wrath per second as a base
effect, the skill also takes on a defensive role through the tanky
Prophet rune. Supplying you with 150% additional Armor and a free life,
this skill will keep you safe and alive in high Greater Rifts.
In Greater Rifts, sometimes even Prophet is not enough; you can
easily bite off more than you can chew with a misplaced
Vacuum, and at
times you just have to facetank an affix or a Rift Guardian in hopes to
progress.
Iron Skin will serve as your second line of defense, cutting
incoming damage in half. With the
Illusory Boots equipped for Greater
Rifting (see this build's gear page for more
information), your freedom of movement is guaranteed and you can take
advantage of the lengthier safety of the
Steel Skin rune.
At a hefty 40 Wrath per cast, Condemn will quickly deplete your Wrath.
Thus, a significant part of the build is dedicated to either mitigating the
costs, or replenishing your reserves.
On the cost mitigation front, we have Laws of Valor. While the Attack
Speed buff of the law has limited utility outside of faster
Slash swings,
it becomes invaluable for the 50% resource cost reduction of the
Unstoppable Force rune.
Lowering the resource cost can only get you so far, however; eventually you
will have to regain Wrath, and that is accomplished in a threefold manner. We
have already mentioned the passive Wrath regeneration of Akarat's Champion;
it is bolstered by both a cooldown and a generator skill.
Note that a Season 22 alteration of the build also requires modifying skills
— you need a Norvald's set trigger, which you will find in
Steed Charge
Draw and Quarter. Normally, this slot would be taken by
Provoke — a Swiss knife of a skill that is the only Crusader
cooldown with inherent resource generation. It has a way of keeping fleeing
enemies nearby with its taunt function, and added utility on top with
Too Scared to Run. This rune turns
Provoke into a powerful,
percentage based debuff with an excellent uptime. Good monster density in Greater
Rifts further emphasizes the value of
Provoke, and you would be hard
pressed to find a competing source of Wrath; you could only ever consider
Shield Glare with
Zealous Glare for the hard crowd control of the
Blind effect.
Finally, a generator makes its way into the build as the third pillar of
resource management. All equal in Wrath generation and proccing Focus
and
Restraint, you get to choose by their utility. Two options stand out:
the Armor stacking
Slash
Guard and the healing
Smite
Reaping, so
pick between them according to your needs.
This concludes the overview of the Active Skills, now let us look through the Passives.
Passives
Heavenly Strength is a signature Crusader passive, allowing you to
wield two-handed weapons in one hand, and have a shield in the other. This
The Furnace-wielding
Condemn build is no exception.
Finery is another Crusader staple, adding 1.5% Strength for every
socket across your gear, including weapon and jewelry. Assuming an average of 10
sockets across a well-equipped character,
Finery amounts to a decent
boost of both damage and toughness.
In order to maximize your damage and add sustain, Holy Cause should be
added to the passive mix, since it synergizes elementally with your main damage
dealer and has a healing side effect. Its base 10% damage buff is also important
to a build that can make good use of any DPS not reliant on AoE situations.
Long Arm of the Law doubles the duration of the active effects of Laws and
ensures near-permanent uptime of
Unstoppable Force or
Wings of Angels. Aided by this passive, you will have an easy time
maintaining spam of Condemn during the prolonged fights of Greater Rifts, and the
valuable party-wide speed buff in regular Rifts. If you want to go a safer route,
you cannot do wrong with
Indestructible, Crusader's cheat death passive.
Since
Indestructible procs second in the chain of on-death skills, with
Prophet taking priority, this results in a nice juggle of your survival
skills, and the almost constant availability of a buffer between you and death.
Season 22 Modification
Changelog
- 18 Nov. 2020: Revised skill recommendations for Season 22.
- 30 Jun. 2020: No changes required for Season 21.
- 12 Mar. 2020: No changes necessary for Season 20.
- 19 Nov. 2019: Guide revised and updated for Season 19.
- 22 Aug. 2019: Skill recommendations have been revised for Season 18.
- 15 May 2019: Guide was reviewed and approved for Season 17.
- 17 Jan. 2019: Information was reviewed and approved for Season 16 with no changes required.
- 31 Oct. 2017: Made Holy Cause the fourth passive and Indestructible a variant for that slot (was previously the other way around).
More Crusader Guides
Builds from Other Classes
Farming Guides
This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.
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