Invoker Thorns Crusader Speed Farming Variation

The Invoker ThornsCrusader deals with regular Rift farming decently all the way through the highest Torments, making it a viable build for the task. 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.

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
Slash Zeal Steed Charge Draw and Quarter 1 Laws of Hope Wings of Angels 2 Iron Skin Flash 3 Bombardment Barrels of Spikes 4 Akarat's Champion Prophet
Passive Skills
Heavenly Strength Iron Maiden 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.

In speed farming, mobility is a much bigger consideration for Thorns Crusaders, since you do not have the AoE clear of the more conventional farming builds. You need to keep up your Laws of Hope Wings of Angels up at all times, and zip from one elite pack to another to trigger In-geom's CDR resets. Keep up your set-based damage reduction by casting a manual Bombardment at least once every 20 seconds. When in need to cross greater distances, simply mount up with Steed Charge.

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.

• Slash Zeal, Steed Charge Draw and Quarter and Bombardment Barrels of Spikes will remain in your active skill lineup from the progression build. Use Iron Skin Flash for extra mobility.
• When speedfarming, the additional durability of Laws of Justice or extra attack speed of Laws of Valor will be overkill, so you can safely swap this slot out for the movement speed buffs of Laws of Hope Wings of Angels.
• Akarat's Champion Prophet is an omnipresent self-buff in both versions of the build.
• The majority of passives from the progression build are too valuable to ignore; you will keep Heavenly Strength, Iron Maiden and Finery.
• In speed farming where damage is of lesser concern compared to mobility, you should take Long Arm of the Law for the improved uptime of Laws of Hope Wings of Angels.

You will largely keep the gear pieces from your Greater Rift progression setup. When it comes to armor sets, you will still use the 6-piece Invoker and 3-piece Cpt. Crimson bonusеs, using 5 pieces from the former and 2 from the latter and cubing a Ring of Royal Grandeur to complete their power. The playstyle shifts into heavy use of Steed Charge for mobility, so you can use the Norvald's Fervor set — Flail of the Charge and Shield of the Steed — to great effect in T16s.

The notable differences are in the jewelry slots, where you can make some adaptations to complement T16 farming. Instead of the slow-and-steady Endless Walk set, you should use a combo of Squirt's Necklace and a Physical damage Stone of Jordan — both of which will provide a consistent damage bonus suitable to bursting enemies down. Your second ring should be Rechel's Ring of Larceny, which has a Fear-based movement speed proc and comes with an innate Chance to Fear on Hit roll, essentially proccing itself.

Note that former favorites for the jewelry slots in T16 — like Nemesis Bracers, The Flavor of Time, and Avarice Band — can now be equipped on your Follower, and their bonuses "Emanate" (meaning, their effect applies to you as well). Obviously, you should consider fitting these pieces back into the build, if you are farming T16s in a group.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Crown of the Invoker	Strength Socket Vitality Life per Hit or All Resistance Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Shoulders	Burden of the Invoker	Strength Cooldown Reduction All Resistance Vitality Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Torso	Aquila Cuirass	Strength 3 Sockets Vitality All Resistance Thorns (Important Secondary Stat)
Wrists	Shackles of the Invoker	Strength Physical Damage Life per Hit Vitality Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Hands	Pride of the Invoker	Strength Cooldown Reduction Attack Speed Life per Hit Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Waist	Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle	Strength Vitality All Resistance Life % Thorns (Important Secondary Stat)
Legs	Captain Crimson's Thrust	Strength 2 Sockets Vitality All Resistance Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Feet	Zeal of the Invoker	Strength Vitality All Resistance Armor Thorns (Important Secondary Stat)
Amulet	Squirt's Necklace	Socket Physical Damage Cooldown Reduction or Attack Speed Strength Thorns (Important Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Ring #1	Stone of Jordan	Socket Cooldown Reduction Life per Hit or Attack Speed Strength Thorns (Important Secondary Stat)
Ring #2	Rechel's Ring of Larceny	Socket Cooldown Reduction Life per Hit or Attack Speed Strength Thorns (Important Secondary Stat)
Weapon	Flail of the Charge	Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Cooldown Reduction Attack Speed Increased Damage vs. Elites Strength Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Off-hand	Shield of the Steed	Strength high Block Chance Cooldown Reduction Increased Damage vs. Elites Thorns (Important 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: Attack Speed and Cooldown Reduction: Get as much Attack Speed as you need to hit the 7 frame attack speed breakpoint in your sheet, and spend the remaining points on Cooldown Reduction. By a rough estimate, this can be achieved with a 1:2 distribution of Paragon points between Attack Speed and CDR.
• 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.

Both Bane of the Trapped and Boyarsky's Chip remain universally desired damage amplification gems for Thorns Crusaders across all forms of content.

When doing speedruns, health values will be a significantly smaller barrier, diminishing the value of Bane of the Stricken; you would do well to replace it with 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 a and Follower-worn Avarice Band.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Bane of the Trapped Boyarsky's Chip Boon of the Hoarder
Helm	Flawless Royal Diamond
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Ruby (Damage)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Topaz (Thorns)

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

In regular Rift farming, the pace at which you kill elites facilitates the use of the most potent source of cooldown reduction in your weapon Cube slot — In-geom. As long as you fuel its power by regularly bursting down elites, it will practically ensure permanent uptime of all of your important cooldowns.

With the changes in Patch 2.7.3, the Invoker set now gains AoE capabilities that were previously absent from the set. To capitalize on those changes, you will be using the Omnislash belt, which will give Slash a 360 degrees effect around the character. Note that the removal of the former favorite for the slot, Belt of the Trove, necessitates that you use Bombardment on your bar.

In order to mix in the Raekor set with the craftable Captain Crimson set, you will need a Ring of Royal Grandeur: a cache legendary ring from Act I bounties, to tie the two set bonuses together.

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 preferred potion for this build is Bottomless Potion of the Leech due to its Life per Hit bonuses, which synergize perfectly for the high attack speed and sustain-through-attacks playstyle of the build.

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.