Akkhan Condemn Crusader Speed Farming Variation
Greater Rift Speed Farming
The Akkhan Condemn Crusader can deal reasonably well with Greater Rift
Speed Farming, covering the whole battlefield in Condemn detonations,
while zipping through the Rift with
Laws of Hope
Wings of Angels. We have
solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you
want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.
During lower tier Greater Rift farming, the balance between defense, damage, and utility can be shifted to favor the latter two aspects of character building.
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Passive Skills |
Adapting Rotation
When you are Speed Farming Greater Rifts, your playstyle should at least partially reflect the circumstances by focusing on massive pulls, generic bonuses against enemies, and chaining pylon effects.
Similarly to its GR progression counterpart, the GR speed farming Condemn
Crusader needs to stay in Akarat's Champion form at all times, spamming
Judgment left and right to ease the
Condemn decimation
inflicted by their
Phalanx
Bowmen summons. You should be able to
oneshot pretty much any enemy pack with a single detonation of
Condemn
Unleashed, and fluidly move between packs with
Laws of Hope
Wings of Angels (for short distances), or
Steed Charge
Endurance (for long distances).
Adapting Skills and Passives
Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Ability to burst down enemies quicker takes precedence.
- With your greatly increased speed, you will be zipping from one pack to
the next, reducing the usefulness of the greater reach of
Condemn
Shattering Explosion. In its place, use the immediate explosion of
Unleashed for precise, on-demand devastation.
Phalanx
Bowmen are still the summoned backbone of your damage, and their unrelenting barrage of arrows will produce the most
Condemns-per-second you can hope for.
Judgment is necessary for the Akkhan set to function and maintains its place in the build. You are granted all the runes from the 2-piece bonus (hence the unruned recommendation above), and should use the skill indiscriminately against enemy packs throughout the rift.
- You should alter your Law of choice from the resource-oriented
Laws of Valor
Unstoppable Force to the party-wide movement speed buff of
Laws of Hope
Wings of Angels.
- You have a call to make on using
Focus and
Restraint; if you need their damage multiplication, keep the generator (likely
Justice
Sword of Justice) from the main build. If you do not, swap the Generator out for
Steed Charge
Endurance as suggested above. Mounting up allows you to cross great distances in a short timespan, which is useful in certain Greater Rift layouts — occasionally sprawling and bereft of enemies.
Akarat's Champion
Prophet is an omnipresent self-buff in both versions of the build.
- Your passive selection remains unchanged from the progression build:
Heavenly Strength,
Long Arm of the Law,
Lord Commander and
Finery.
Adapting Gear
You will still be taking advantage of the full 6-piece set bonuses of Akkhan, as well as the 3-piece set
bonus of the Cpt. Crimon set — for its additional Cooldown- and Resource
Cost Reduction, as well as the scaling "damage dealt increased by CDR" and
"damage reduced by RCR" bonuses. The two sets should be supplemented by the
usual line-up of displacement-based damage buff from Strongarm Bracers
(triggered by
Judgment
Mass Verdict),
Phalanx-related
legendaries (
Unrelenting Phalanx and
Warhelm of Kassar), and the
Condemn weapon,
Blade of Prophecy.
The differences from the GR progression build can come in several forms, according to your needs and preferences:
- As mentioned above, you can drop the Generator skill (and
Focus and
Restraint as a whole) for the additional mobility of
Steed Charge
Endurance. As a result, you should use a Holy damage
Stone of Jordan and a
Convention of Elements as your two rings.
- Early on in character progression, when your Paragons are still low, you
can make use of the craftable 3-piece Guardian's Jeopardy set, which doubles
your main stats (Strength and Vitality, in the Crusader's case). This is a
great early progression boon, and is achieved by equipping
Guardian's Aversion,
Guardian's Case, plus the usual RoRG in the Cube. Complement them with
Stone Gauntlets for another massive defensive bulwark, whose downside is completely negated by the CC immunity from your permanent
Akarat's Champion.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
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Head |
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Shoulders |
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Torso |
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Wrists |
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Hands |
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Waist |
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Legs |
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Feet |
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Amulet |
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Ring #1 |
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Ring #2 |
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Weapon |
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Off-hand |
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To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.
Season 29: Paragon Cap
Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.
On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.
With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:
- Core: Movement Speed: 200 points.
- Offense: Cooldown Reduction and Critical Hit Damage: Allocate points
so you get over the breakpoint for permenant
Laws of Valor active effect (67% sheet CDR), and then distribute points to get as close as possible to the desirable 1:10 ratio between the Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage stats, as displayed in your Character Details sheet.
- Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Crusaders, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and All Resistance (to complement the naturally high Armor stat of Strength-based characters).
- Utility: Resource Cost Reduction: 200 points.
Season 29: Gearing Considerations
In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:
- Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe
for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a
decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the
3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from
equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season.
If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other
craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its
implementation. The available pieces are
Guardian's Aversion (Wrists),
Guardian's Case (Waist), and
Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a
Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
- Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of
The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and
The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set (
Focus and
Restraint) and
Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another
Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e.,
Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%.
Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.
Adapting Gems
Bane of the Trapped and
Enforcer remain universally
desired damage amplification gems.
Since monster health is much more tame in lower Greater Rift tiers, you
should also replace Bane of the Stricken with
Bane of the Powerful
for the consistent, easily sustained damage increase.
Slot | Gems |
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Jewelry | |
Helm | |
Torso and Pants |
|
Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
You will maintain the entire Cube line-up from the base Greater Rift
progression spec. The weapon Cube slot still needs to be taken by your worse
rolled item between Frydehr's Wrath and
Unrelenting Phalanx. The
armor Cube slot should be occupied by the pet attack speed multiplication of
Tasker and Theo. Lastly, in order to maintain the 6-piece bonus of
Akkhan and 3-piece bonus of the Cpt. Crimson set, you will need to keep a
Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry Cube slot.
The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.
Follower
The recommended follower for this build during solo GR progression is the
Enchantress due to her cooldown reduction buff from
Prophetic Harmony, as well as the
Focused Mind attack speed buff.
For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.
Legendary Potion
Waller affixes are problematic for Condemn Crusader builds, since they
greatly limit your opportunities to maneuver from one pack to the next, back
and forth, which is the general playstyle of the build. As such, our general
recommendation for your legendary potion is the
Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid, which allows you to break through Waller
affixes. Alternatively,
Bottomless Potion of the Diamond is a
straightforward addition that simply layers a short All Resist protective
coating after drinking (All Resistance is the preferred form of mitigation
stacking for Strength-based characters, since their mainstat scales Armor
already.)
Changelog
- 13 Sep. 2023: Added Season 29 Paragon Cap and Gearing recommendations.
- 22 Feb. 2023: Added Season 28 Altar of Rites recommendations.
- 26 Aug. 2022: Guide reworked for the Akkhan set changes in Season 27, and added Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
- 13 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 09 Dec. 2021: Added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 23 Jul. 2021: Added S24 Ethereal recommendation.
- 31 Mar. 2021: Minor revision of equipment and follower recommendation added.
- 18 Nov. 2020: Revised equipment and Cube 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: Reviewed for Season 18.
- 15 May 2019: Guide was reviewed and approved for Season 17.
- 27 Jan. 2019: Revised the speed farming variant to an improved setup.
- 31 Oct. 2017: Updated variant to adapt to the changes in the rest of the guide.
More Crusader Guides
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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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