So over the weekend I rebirthed my Crusader and leveled him to 70, and then worked my way through the chapters until I got all six pcs of the Invoker set. Until that moment I had been using a hodgepodge of a justice/blessed hammer build that was doing pretty good, but seemed to top out around GR21 or so. I had all greens and legendaries already, but with the 6-pc Invoker I decided to try out a thorns oriented build. I'd never bothered with a thorns anything in D3 before, it always seemed like a crap stat to me.
So I changed to a punish/bombard build, with steed, ancients, and a law plus ironskin. I changed out the emerald in my weapon to a topaz, because hey why not? After it all I had something like 80,000 thorns damage. I went into a regular rift at T3 just to see how this build fared, and HOLY MOTHER OF GOD everything just dies around my feet! I'm liking a walking wrecking ball!!! I climbed all the way up to GR31 where my build became something of a glass cannon, still killing quickly but I die fast too.
Upon scrutinizing my build, I decided that I needed to trade offense for defense. I changed a few passives to improve survivability, enchanted some pieces to to trade CC and CD for toughness, because as I understand it thorns doesn't benefit from either CC or CD. I've never purposeful shunned crit anything before in D3 but MAN did that feel refreshing! Found myself an Aquilla Curiass (+50% def with full wrath) along the way and decided that since my wrath was never going empty at all, why not use it?
Went back into a GR31 and things went much better, I still kill like a force of nature but I am much, much more survivable now. Going to push it tonight to see where I top out at now. My build is far from optimized too, still need a lot of pieces and enchanting, but damn this Invoker Crusader is fun to play!
