Blessed Hammer Crusader Speed Farming Variation

The Blessed Hammer Crusader deals with regular Rift farming decently all the way through the highest Torments, making it a viable build for the task. Note that the deliberate pace of the build (due to the necessary inclusion of Falling Sword), makes lessens its effectiveness compared to other T16 builds.

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Blessed Hammer Dominion Falling Sword Part the Clouds 1 Laws of Hope Wings of Angels 2 Iron Skin Flash 3 Provoke Too Scared to Run 4 Akarat's Champion Prophet
Passive Skills
Fervor Blunt Long Arm of the Law Finery

When you are speed farming regular rifts, parts of your playstyle will adapt to the lowered challenge and focus more on speed and utility.

Throughout the farming run, the Hammerdin should keep up the Blessed Hammers rotating around them, transporting themselves between packs with a combination of Laws of Hope Wings of Angels and Falling Sword. Akarat's Champion and Iron Skin should still be applied on cooldown, and Provoke will remain part of the rotation as an emergency Wrath restoration pop.

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 cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.

• If you transition Blessed Hammer into regular rifts, it is advisable to swap Limitless away for Dominion — the orbiting hammers are very convenient in clearing trash as you move between elite packs.
• In speed farming, the damage you need for an individual enemy pack will be significantly less, allowing you to shift away from Laws of Valor Critical and focus on speed and utility with Laws of Hope Wings of Angels.
• In regular rifts, where Sacred Harness can be replaced by Goldwrap, you will need to take Falling Sword with the rune Part the Clouds — the 2-second stun will proc Hammer Jammers instead of Sacred Harness.
• The remainder of your skill lineup — Provoke Too Scared to Run (Wrath restoration tool), Iron Skin Flash (auxiliary movement skill and protective value) and Akarat's Champion Prophet (your strongest self-buff) will remain unchanged between specs.
• Fervor and Finery will remain part of your passive lineup. You can also bring slightly more damage to the table with Blunt; the loss of Holy Cause's healing should not be impactful in farming content.
• If you do not feel threatened by the difficulty, you should replace Indestructible with Long Arm of the Law. This change will ensure you have permanent uptime of the Laws of Hope Wings of Angels movement buffs.

The vast majority of the Hammerdin-specific items will remain unchanged during speed farming. You will still be taking advantage of the full set bonus of Seeker of the Light set, incorporating all 6 available pieces according to your best rolls. The trio of Johanna's Argument, Guard of Johanna, and Gabriel's Vambraces are too valuable to pass up in this build, so they also remain locked in place.

It is worth noting that in the limited challenges of regular rifts, both the Endless Walk set and Convention of Elements greatly diminish in usefulness. A better jewelry split is a Holy damage Stone of Jordan (for the permanent damage increase), and Avarice Band (for the synergy with Goldwrap and Boon of the Hoarder), as well as Squirt's Necklace for an additional damage multiplier in the build (the former favorite The Flavor of Time can now be equipped on your follower and its power will transfer to you via the Emanate mechanics).

This scaling damage increase and damage reduction from the Cpt. Crimson set (used in the GR progression build) will be redundant in regular rifts, where you can get all the protection you will ever need via Goldwrap.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Crown of the Light	Strength Socket Critical Hit Chance Blessed Hammer % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Shoulders	Mountain of the Light	Strength Cooldown Reduction Area Damage All Resistance Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Torso	Heart of the Light	Strength 3 Sockets Vitality Reduced Damage from Elites Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Wrists	Gabriel's Vambraces	Strength Critical Hit Chance Holy Damage % Life per Hit or Vitality Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Hands	Will of the Light	Strength (replaced by Area Damage at High Paragons) Critical Hit Chance Critical Hit Damage Cooldown Reduction
Waist	Goldwrap	Strength Vitality All Resistance Life % Life per Kill (Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Legs	Towers of the Light	Strength 2 Sockets Vitality All Resistance Life per Kill (Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Feet	Foundation of the Light	Strength Blessed Hammer % Vitality All Resistance Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Amulet	Squirt's Necklace	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Holy Damage % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Ring #1	Avarice Band	Socket Critical Hit Chance Critical Hit Damage Area Damage Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Ring #2	Stone of Jordan	Socket Critical Hit Chance Critical Hit Damage Area Damage Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Weapon	Johanna's Argument	Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) High Weapon Damage Strength % Weapon Damage Life per Hit or CDR Stun on Hit (Secondary Stat)
Off-hand	Guard of Johanna	Strength Crit Chance Cooldown Reduction Blessed Hammer % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)

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 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: 200 points.
• 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.

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.

Bane of the Trapped remains a universally desired damage amplification gem.

During speed farming, Gogok of Swiftness will be a protective overkill and should be replaced by Boon of the Hoarder. The latter is a high utility gem that feeds you practically infinite gold, gives you a massive short-term speed boost while picking it up, and synergizes excellently with the worn Avarice Band for a sizable speed boost, and the cubed Goldwrap for near-invulnerability.

Since monster health is much more tame in the standard difficulties, you should also replace Bane of the Stricken with Bane of the Powerful for the consistent, easily sustained damage increase. If you overpower content so much that even Bane of the Powerful is unnecessary, you can consider using Wreath of Lightning for the extra speed.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Bane of the Trapped Boon of the Hoarder Bane of the Powerful Wreath of Lightning (alt)
Helm	Flawless Royal Diamond
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Ruby (Damage)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

The Kanai's Cube selection is largely locked down due to important passive bonuses for the Hammerdin build. Both Faithful Memory in the weapon slot and Hammer Jammers are hard to replace due to DPS value, and Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac is one of your few sources of steady Akarat's Champion resets.

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.

The recommended follower for this build during standard rift farming for keys is the Enchantress due to her numerous utility bonuses, allowing you to smooth out your speed runs even further.

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.

The preferred potion for this build is Bottomless Potion of the Leech due to its Life per Hit bonuses, adding some much needed life sustain to the build.