Blessed Hammer Crusader Skills and Runes
On this page, we explain how to choose and use your skills when playing Blessed Hammer Crusader in Diablo 3. Updated for Patch 2.7.3 and Season 26.
Active Skills |
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Passive Skills |
Rotation
The playstyle balances between aggressive mobility (drawing stragglers into a
pack, finding good density and jumping in the thick of it) and static fighting
(immobilizing enemies and spamming Blessed Hammer).
Provoke will
alternate Wrath management duties with
Gabriel's Vambraces, in multi and
single target situations respectively. The cheap price of
Blessed Hammer
and the solid resource management already present in the build allows you to take
and liberally use a pure offense law in the face of
Laws of Valor
Critical.
While the Crusader is naturally durable, protection will be necessary:
Iron Skin for incoming damage spikes and
Akarat's Champion as an
overall damage and toughness buff. The final exotic ingredient in the build is
Falling Sword — a mobility tool with moderate damage capabilities,
it takes on a defensive role with the Seeker of the Light 4-piece bonus. As
incoming damage will be significantly cut down after using
Falling Sword,
make good use of the cooldown resets inherent with the set and cast it when
available.
Skills and Runes
Blessed Hammer is the primary spender of the build; empowered to a
competitive DPS level through the Seeker of the Light set and its dedicated
shield,
Guard of Johanna,
Blessed Hammer receives even greater
benefits from the holy rune
Limitless.
Blessed Hammer is also
the cheapest spender in the Crusader arsenal, made even easier to manage with
its companion bracers —
Gabriel's Vambraces. With these factors in
mind, you will be able to maintain your Wrath reserves despite the high attack
speed of this one-hander build, (see this build's
gear page for more information).
The other half of your resource management resides in your active skills;
Provoke is the Swiss knife at your disposal, the solitary Crusader
cooldown with inherent Wrath generation. It is also able to consistently keep
enemies in range with its taunt function and the frequent resets coming from
the Seeker of the Light set. To top things off, it offers a potent, percentage
based debuff from the
Too Scared to Run rune, reducing the rate of
incoming attacks and offering an easy proc for
Bane of the Trapped.
A minor source of Wrath restoration is added on top through the Crusader
staple Akarat's Champion, offering the modest 5 Wrath per second. That,
however, is not its primary function: it is taken as a sizable multiplicative
damage buff and as a protective juggernaut through the
Prophet rune.
Supplying you with a massive additional layer of armor and an invaluable cheat
death,
Akarat's Champion will alternate with
Indestructible to
keep you safe and alive.
The use of laws, party-wide constant buffs with a powerful activation effect,
is a signature of the Crusader class. When pushing Greater Rifts, your law of
choice should be the damage staple Laws of Valor
Critical; not only does its
attack speed passive bonus fit right at home in this cast speed-oriented build,
but its Critical Damage bonuses are a welcome addition to a shield-wearing build
that naturally hungers for the stat.
In Greater Rifts, sometimes even Prophet is not enough;
Iron Skin will serve as your second line of defense, cutting incoming
damage in half. With the freedom of movement granted by the
Falling Sword
resets from the 2-piece set bonus, you can consider the lengthier safety of the
Steel Skin rune in Greater Rifts. In high end GR fishing however, and
especially during normal rift runs, it is better to take the
Flash rune to make quick and precise adjustments to your position
(i.e. to make use of
Oculus Ring procs from the follower).
Patch 2.4 reinforced the place of Falling Sword into the build over
other mobility or utility options; besides the set-induced damage reduction,
Falling Sword also becomes a reliable source of immobilization damage
bonuses from the cubed
Hammer Jammers through the
Sacred Harness
belt. On top of that, proper use of
Falling Sword — right in the
middle of big packs, of course — will skyrocket your
Blessed Hammer
damage through the cubed
Faithful Memory bonus. Despite the difference in
elemental damage, the recommended rune for
Falling Sword during GR
progression is
Rapid Descent; when used against good density you will have
a new charge ready almost immediately, freeing up space for other cooldowns to be
reset via
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac.
This concludes the overview of the active skills, now let us look through the passives.
Passives
Breaking the traditional two-hander mold, the Blessed Hammer Crusader
benefits greatly from
Johanna's Argument —
and consequently, adopts
Fervor as a foundation passive. Reforging the
classic two-handed Crusader image into one of an attack speed and cooldown
reduction specialist, this passive will ensure you get the most of your long
timers and the Life per Hit on gear.
You can choose between Holy Cause and
Blunt as one of your four
passives; the former provides a smaller damage bonus but offers decent healing
against big packs of enemies, while the latter adds more than an item's worth of
skill % bonus to your
Blessed Hammers. Both options are viable, but
Holy Cause is the recommendation for high GRs.
Crusaders possess an excellent cheat death passive in the face of
Indestructible, invariably taken when pushing the boundaries of Greater
Rift progression. Operating on the standard 60-second cooldown, it sweetens the
deal with a 5-second window of invulnerability after the proc, a 35% damage
increase and a substantial Life per Kill boost.
Indestructible triggers
second in the chain of on-death mechanics, and is preceded by
Prophet
— essentially adding a third life while
Akarat's Champion is
active.
Rounding out the standard four choices, Finery is added as a balanced
source of both damage and toughness. Providing with a 1.5% Strength increase for
every socket of your gear, weapons and jewelry included, it amounts to a sizable
boost with an assumed average of 10 sockets across a well-equipped character.
Changelog
- 13 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 09 Dec. 2021: Reviewed for Season 25.
- 23 Jul. 2021: No changes necessary for Season 24.
- 31 Mar. 2021: No changes necessary for Season 23.
- 18 Nov. 2020: Reviewed for Season 22. No changes necessary.
- 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.
- 17 Jan. 2019: Information was reviewed and approved for Season 16 with no changes required.
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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