Diablo 3 Season 26: Echoing Nightmares

Tomorrow at 5pm PST starts season 26 for Diablo 3. Unlike past seasons I won't have the time to blow through the season journey overnight but I do plan to play it this weekend some and hopefully get through it within a couple days. 

My witch doctor is next up in my season rotation to play and I plan to run the Haedrig's gift set (Zunimassa's) through till the end. Zuni's is an S-tier glass cannon build utilizing fetishes and poison darts. 

While leveling I'll do what I always do and use a makeshift build utilizing the skills of whatever random legendary items drop. Once I get 4+ pieces of Zuni's though I'll start to transition to poison darts. There are a couple very key pieces to this build that will make it tough to fully transition to unless I get lucky with RNG. 

My build will utilize builds found on Maxroll.gg and Icyveins.com. There's no need to deviate from these builds as they utilize all the key skills and gear you need to reach max DPS with this build. I will utilize fill in items as needed until I get all the key items though.

The season journey for me usually relies on the following steps: 

1) With your rebirthed or fresh hero created, run the challenge rift first for extra materials.

2) Run regular rifts at the highest possible difficulty you can complete. Typically you jump between hard-expert-master difficulties. Note that enemies hit harder and take less damage about every 10 character levels. Generally you out level your gear doing this so it gets much slower to clear rifts of higher difficulties until your gear catches up to your character level, thus the jumping back and forth.

Do this until you hit a point where you can craft a level 70 weapon with ilvl reduction on it. Make sure it's a 2 handed rare item and don't re-roll for ilvl reduction until you get one with % chance to do something in one of the secondary skill slots. Always re-roll the stat that's opposite of that one because it gives you the best chance to roll ilvl reduction.

Once you can equip this 2 handed lvl 70 weapon at a lower character level, then switch to T3 rifts immediately. As things get harder to kill, slowly lower yourself back to T2 then T1 until you hit character level 70. 

3) Ensure you spend blood shards on Kadala while leveling to get specific items that drop at these levels. 

4) At level 70 target your season journey to get your Haedrig's gifts. You can look ahead at next steps to maximize efficiency so you can set the difficulty you're capable of completing and doing all season related journey items that are at that difficulty and below it. Ensure you start 

5) Equip full Haedrig's gift set and start your end game build. Keep doing seasonal journey items. Occassionally you'll have to run extra rifts and bounties to stock up on materials required to make progress.

6) The hardest part of the season journey is largely the seat dungeon mastery. I usually make 1 attempt at this once I have my Haedrig's gifts all done. If I fail then I simply save this checkbox for last because it's so much easier once you have your end game build going.

Note: Season 26 adds a new end game activity called Echoing Nightmares. I plan to play this only a couple times to get the item required to augment an ancient. This saves me from wasting a level 50+ gem to augment an ancient which is required as part of the season journey. 

Guide to Echoing Nightmare: use your best rift busting build and strategy. However, there are 4 one time use pylons in this place. Ensure you only grab them at key times. My plan is to grab each one around 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% overwhelmed statuses so I can spread them out to help when necessary.

Follow up after finishing the season: 

This may have been my fastest season yet. Easy conquests and really good builds available for all classes in haedrigs gifts. It took me 2 days of game time and I was done. 

Overall the seasonal mechanic was boring and avoidable. The drop rate to get the keys to enter is near impossible. My friend got 0 in the entire seasonal journey and I got 2. However, you're able to get credit for leveling 3 gems to 70 if you don't use them until you have 3 of them. 

I learned that Zuni's poison dart build isn't that good anymore. It's very glassy and you have to stop to setup your DPS which makes you vulnerable. I was able to solo up through 80 on it but it's not as fun to play as Arachyr's which is top tier. 

Also DH and Monk need nerfs because they are super easy to play and can push Grifts easily. Other builds and classes need buffs.

Lost Ark Playthrough & Leveling/Honing Guide

I don't want to make too much of a long article here but would like to explain my path to T3 on my main and alts and provide some lessons learned along the way so let's jump into the path from a newborn player all the way to the end game (Luterra to Punika). 

Step 1: Choose a character. 

Keep in mind this doesn't necessarily make this character your main but preferably choose a class you think you'll enjoy. You can tryout each class in Trixion at the start to ensure you're good. I chose Gunslinger and have enjoyed the different style of gameplay compared to metered classes. If you enjoy playing support then I recommend Paladin, Bard, or Gunlancer. If you're into DPS then Sorceress and Deathblade usually top the charts.

Step 2: Beat the main campaign until you hit the T2 barrier post Shushire. 

Getting through the campaign took me a little over 15 hours but now that I understand the game my advice is only do main quests. By focusing on purple/blue/orange (not yellow/green/pink) quests you can make it through the entire campaign through Shushire in about 10 hours. You can always go back to clean up side quests on your primary character or on alts. 

Once you beat Shushire you will get your first set of Tier 1 gear which you'll need to hone to 460 before you can advance to Rohendel. Honing is a time gated process unless you pay to win (p2w), but even then it's limited. Now that materials in T1 and T2 are worth 1 gold each you can choose to spend a little gold if you want to speed up the process but it's not necessary because there's a ton of materials available through side quests, island adventures, dailies/weeklies, and welcome challenges.

Step 3: Use your 2 power passes on 2 new alternate characters (alts).

While having alts is "optional" the game is designed for free to play (f2p) players to utilize alts, which helps speed up vertical and horizontal progression because it helps bypass the daily/weekly time gates that are character bound. FYI your first Power Pass will be the adventurer's path. This will give you a ton of loot and xp and is a very shortened version of the main campaign. Ensure to do the tutorial challenges too for extra materials. All in all it took me 40 minutes to finish this and get my first alt in T1 gear. Your 2nd alt will simply advance to Vern with the Power Pass. 

Ensure you setup both characters song of return to Vern castle and then setup their bifrosts on Una's daily points of your choice, although I recommend targeting dailies that give honing materials, most importantly shards and stones because you will run out of these after your main advances to the next tier.

Step 4: Start leveling your Stronghold Lab

This is extremely important because you can unlock cheaper honing for alts once your main hits specific ilvl checkpoints. This makes getting your alt characters honed up much faster. I focused my Stronghold daily on Lab upgrades and Dispatch missions (2 each per day on average). Keep in mind Dispatches don't have to be 100% to do them. Rewards are scaled based on your % so if it's 50% then you'll get half the rewards and a lower chance at bonus rewards. 

Note that you'll need materials for leveling your Stronghold and you're also limited by action energy. The game will give you action energy consumables so be sure to use those when you run out. For materials I usually farm any ore and trees I come across as I'm naturally progressing through the game but a few good spots are Lakebar for ore and Lullaby Island for uncontested ore and trees. You can always change channels in the upper right corner to a less populated area so others don't steal your nodes. Fyi you do not need relics, meat, fish, flowers, or mushrooms to upgrade your Stronghold but upgrading these will come in handy in the end game.

Step 5: Start Honing your "main" to Rohendel

Please refer to my daily checklist post here for help on understanding the different dailies and weekly lockouts available. Note that Chaos Dungeons and Guardian Raids are the best daily sources for materials. All unused gear can be broken down for additional materials. Ensure you do not open "tradeable" or "roster bound" items until you're ready to use them. Once you open a bag/box/package it will become bound to that character. This is how I lost out of thousands of T1 mats for my alts because I didn't know this. Shards are also character bound once opened even though they appear in the account bound currency tab which is very misleading. 

Note, you can skip a day or 2 of dailies if you need to. The game will save up missed days and grant you double loot per run. Therefore, if you miss 2 days of guardian raids on a character then did 2 of them you would get 4x the drops. However, since the daily lockout is 2 runs per character I recommend running these every 1-3 days or you'll lose out on loot. 

Chaos dungeons are super easy and fast but guardian raids can be a pain so my recommendations for Guardians are Urnil or Chromanium for T1, Dark Legoros or Lava Chromanium for T2, and Armored Nacrasena or Igrexion for T3. These guardians are my fastest and most consistent clears with matchmaking. 

Ensure you're trading roster bound items to your main until your main is out of T1. Ensure you don't open items that are tradeable or roster bound until you need to use them for honing. This ensures your leftover mats will go to your next alt and so on. 

Other honing material sources are island adventures, which I highly recommend doing, unique events like Naruni races & Graid event, the auction house for gold, pirate coins merchant, bloodstone merchant for guild progress, pvp vendor if you pvp a lot, daily repeatable quests on some continents, and Mari's shop for blue crystals.

Honing is tricky but I want to explain a few key things. 

1. If you find a better piece of gear you can use the Transfer page to transfer your already honed gear onto that new piece. This will take the ilvl/honed lvl of the old item and place it on the stats of the new item. Careful in T3 because you will lose your tripods in this situation if you don't do tripod transfers first. 
1. Also incredibly important and worth noting is you can hone your old level 15 T1 gear into your new T2 gear to gain your first level for free.
2. Do not use your chance increase stones until you hit level 12-13, depending how many you have. Ideally you want to keep your hone chances above 50% in T1 and above 40% in T2. Ensure you don't have any leftover bound stones once you hit lvl 15 on all pieces so ensure you plan out exactly how many you have and divide it up per hone.
3. Check the Artisan energy gauge if you've failed a piece multiple times. If adding a stone to your hone gets that gauge to 100% then you're guaranteed to succeed. I can't under estimate how important this gets at the end of T2. Level 13-15 in T2 is a painful grind and artisan energy is your friend.

Step 6: Continue the Main Quests through Rohendel, Yorn, Feiton, and Punika

Rohendel: You will have to play through Rohendel which is a 2-3 hour quest line. Once completed you have to hit ilvl 600 to head to Yorn. This means all pieces of gear are level 15 on avg (note: this means all pieces are level 15 or maybe you get your weapon to 14 and run out of red stones but have extra blue stones so you get an extra armor piece to 16).

Yorn: This is the start of T2. You won't be able to do T2 activities until you beat Yorn so ensure you don't waste your dailies until Yorn is done. Yorn is about 1-2 hours to beat so I recommend blowing through it and then doing your dailies after so you can finally equip your T2 gear. Then focus on honing to ilvl 960 to proceed to Feiton. 

Feiton: This is probably my 2nd least favorite zone behind Shushire. Once you hit 960 you can do this story. The story will take 2-3 hours. Note: traveling from Rohendel to Feiton ensure you navigate the open channel. If you veer into the hazardous waters your ship will probably die. This is the last T2 zone so ensure you hit 1100 before proceeding to Punika and any T3 content. At this point the grind from 960-1100 is painful so you'll want to maximize dailies, island adventures, and your alts to get to Punika. It might take a week or 2 to close this gap depending how much you grind and how much you're willing to spend on the auction and Mari's.

Punika: At 1100 you can do Punika. Ensure you beat this story before doing any T3 content. Punika takes maybe 1-2 hours and is a fun zone. Once you beat Punika you can run dailies and other T3 content to get your T3 gear and start honing. My only advice is to be patient in T3. The goal is to get your main to 1385 to unlock T3 honing upgrade in your Stronghold so your alts will have the catch up mechanic. Note it isn't important to hone past this right now until new content gets added. I also suspect AGS will up honing rates to help players catch up.

There you have it. All in all the main quests are about 20 hours worth of content buried behind 2-3 weeks worth of time gated game play to get to the highest ilvl necessary to play all current content in the game. The most important thing you can do is take your time and enjoy the things in the game that you like while avoiding things you hate. If you focus mainly on honing/vertical progression then you'll burn yourself out fast. 

If you have questions you can reply to this thread, or hit me up on discord utmastuh#3349. I'm also happy to carry anyone through content if you're struggling. Please also checkout my Youtube and let me know what sort of content you'd appreciate there as I'm just now getting back into updating it. 

My Lost Ark Checklist

Someday I might find time to put together some leveling and playthrough guides for Lost Ark as reference, but now that I'm into the current end game, I thought I'd share my spreadsheet I use on a daily basis as a reminder of things that I can do in the game outside of general exploration.

Weekly Resets: 

Daily Resets: 

This is simply to serve as a reminder of everything you can do in a day/week. However, it's by no means a must. You can easily create your own in word, excel, or anything with tables. I can also provide mine online if asked. 

Note I also track which Una's dailies I'm doing on specific characters because their bifrosts are set accordingly. 

Edit: Allegedly a feature similar to this checklist will become available in game starting in May. We'll have to wait and see what it looks like.