Akkhan Condemn Crusader Skills and Runes

Table of Contents

• +Introduction
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Quick Reference
    • 2.1. Skill Setup
  • 3. Builds
    • 3.1. Gear Setup
    • 3.2. Legendary Gems
    • 3.3. Kanai's Cube
  • 4. Role in the Current Meta
  • 5. Reading Further
  • 6. ChangeLog
• ×Skills and Runes
  • 1. Rotation
  • 2. Skills, Runes and Passives
  • 3. ChangeLog
• +Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points
  • 1. Best in Slot Gear and Alternatives
  • 2. Paragon Points
  • 3. Gems
  • 4. Kanai's Cube
  • 5. Follower
  • 6. ChangeLog
• +Speed Farming Variation
  • 1. Speed Farming
  • 2. Adapting Skills
  • 3. Adapting Gear
  • 4. Adapting Gemming
  • 5. Adapting Kanai's Cube
  • 6. ChangeLog

General Information

Below, we explain how to choose and use your skills when playing Akkhan Condemn Crusader in Diablo 3. Updated for patch 2.6.1 and Season 14.

The other pages of our Akkhan Condemn Crusader guide can be accessed from the table of contents on the right.

Active Skills
Slash Guard Iron Skin Steel Skin 1 Laws of Valor Unstoppable Force 2 Condemn Vacuum 3 Provoke Too Scared to Run 4 Akarat's Champion Prophet
Passive Skills
Heavenly Strength Holy Cause Long Arm of the Law Finery

1. 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 lessens your damage output by denying you the Strongarm Bracers proc, 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.

2. Skills, Runes and Passives

The primary damage dealer of the build, Condemn, takes on a crowd controlling role with Vacuum. This rune choice not only procs the Strongarm Bracers, but also the Bane of the Trapped gem, further amplifying the damage potential of the build at the cost of a three second wind-up. 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 juggle nicely with the Indestructible passive to 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 in Kanai's Cube for Greater Rifting, 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.

The former is Provoke — a Swiss knife of a skill that is the only Crusader cooldown with inherent resource generation. It has a way of keeping fleeting 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.

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 Blade of Prophecy 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.

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.

In order to maximize your damage and add sustain, Holy Cause is the suggested final passive, 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. If you want to go a safer route, you cannot go 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.

About the Author

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.

3. ChangeLog

• 31 Oct. 2017: Made Holy Cause the fourth passive and Indestructible a variant for that slot (was previously the other way around).