My Favorite Diablo 3 Builds and Plans for Season 29

I have been playing Diablo 3 religiously since the disastrous launch of vanilla D3 and Deckard getting killed offscreen by a butterfly. After the expansion and seasons became a thing, I have loved this game and the variety of builds and itemization it brings, even though it's a much more casual experience compared to other ARPG's, which I also love. D4. PoE, and Last Epoch will eventually take over my play time for D2 and D3 which have been my primary ARPG's for the last decade. 

Credit: Diablo 3 blizzard.com

For Diablo 3 season 29, the final new season in the franchise 😔, I will be playing wizard. Wizard is the first class I ever played in D3 so it's a got send off to the franchise for me. However, I've played every class multiple seasons as outlined below: 

Crusader: 5 seasons 

Monk: 5 seasons 

Wizard: 4 seasons

Barbarian: 4 seasons

Witch Doctor: 4 seasons 

Necromancer: 3 seasons

Demon Hunter: 3 seasons

With all that said I wanted to break down my favorite build for each class. These will not necessarily be the best builds but are still viable and fun. Keep in mind top end builds vary depending on the season but any viable build can clear any season journey. I'll be using Icy-Veins build guides as the closest guide to how I usually build my characters, although I always use my own builds that vary slightly from the websites and ladder ranks.

• Crusader - Akkhan thorns bombardment build: This was a tough choice but the downside of the hammer build (the one I want to like more), the mobility of the hammer crusader sucks in D3 and this game is all about speed. The Akkhan bombardment build is literally sprinting around on a horse non-stop dragging enemies and dropping bombs from the sky. This is a very trivial but fun play style. 
• Monk - Sunwuko's Wave of Light build: Monk has 3 really good top tier builds with mystic ally, wave of light, and tempest rush. I enjoy all of these but my favorite season was when Sunwuko wave of light was top tier. In that build you got to drop flaming bells that exploded on packs of enemies. It was really fun and a lot less boring from mystic ally (where the summons do all the work) and tempest rush (where you hold down one button and run around). 
• Wizard - Tal Rasha's Meteor build: Wizard is tough because there's been some good builds, but most of them were newer and centered around legacy of dreams. Firebirds was my go-to most often but I dislike how disintegrate specific it is. Tal Rasha's got big lately because you can essentially spam meteors non-stop and it's fun to watch the destruction. 
• Barbarian - Might of the Earth Leap Earthquake build: Barbarian has a lot of fun builds, especially Raekor's where you can just zoom around shoulder charging non-stop. However, I always enjoyed the Might of the Earth play style where you leap from pack to pack summoning an earthquake and slamming enemies. It's a very fun build with lots of AoE damage. 
• Witch Doctor - Arachyr's Corpse Spider build: Witch Doctor has a lot of the same features with spirit walk, soul harvest, locust swarm, piranhas, and voodoo. However, there's 3 builds I've enjoyed with zuni's darts, jade harvester, and mundunugu's stand there while spirit barrage does the work for you. However, Arachyr has the right amount of ease and mechanics to make it feel like you're still doing something while your queen spider destroys everything you throw your jar of spiders at. 
• Necromancer - Rathma Army of the Dead build: Necromancer was added as a mini-expansion which brought the highly sought after minion, blood, and bone master that witch doctor wasn't quite good at. My favorite is controlling an army of skeletons and occasionally summoning hoards of them. 
• Demon Hunter - Unhallowed Essence Multishot build: Demon hunter actually has a cool variety of builds from arrows, to pets, to turrets, to daggers. I don't think there's a DH build that I don't like but by far the best to me is the multishot build where you can clear the entire screen by spamming a fan of arrows in front of you. 

In summary Diablo 3 has 3-6 viable builds for each class which brings over 20-40 different build combos to try out. Between the easy leveling, raining legendaries, the seasonal journey every 3 months, and build variety; this is why the game has been so popular for over 8 years. 

Season 29 Visions of Enmity: I'm looking forward to playing demon hunter this weekend and beating my final seasonal journey in the game. The seasonal mechanic looks fairly basic as enemies randomly spawn portals and portals within portals to kill increasingly harder enemies for more loot and xp. This feels like the old PoE mapping system where you can do a map within a map (I think it was the old way Kirac's missions worked). 

For the season I will always run the challenge rift first to get the crafting materials and currency. 

I then focus on leveling first and ignore the journey. For leveling I often change difficulty and run rifts at the maximum possible difficulty I can handle, upping and lowering it as I go. I will use a makeshift build based on whatever legendaries I can find, as well as anything Kadala drops for me based on the shards I get from the challenge rift. 

I then craft a 2 handed weapon for my class that has level requirements -20 so I can cheat with damage and jump up into higher torment for quicker XP. That's because you're doing level 70 dps at level 50. 

The first thing I focus after hitting 70 is getting the Kanai's cube and then focusing on the seasonal journey. 

I want to get haedrig's gift as soon as possible so I have a full 6 piece set to make a build around. This season for demon hunter is shadow's mantle, which is my least favorite set for DH, but I'll make do with it. Keep in mind there's a seasonal challenge to solo rifts using 6 different sets so you'll want to collect all of them and their corresponding legendaries that make them good. 

Another hint is to utilize nightmare essences to satisfy getting 3 gems to 55. For some reason the game counts completed essence of nightmares as leveled legendary gems, so as long as you can get 3 essences above 55 (super easy barely an inconvenience) then you will satisfy this requirement. 

I am super hyped this season because they got rid of my least favorite challenge, mastering a set dungeon. You have no idea how many times I rage quit day 1 when this journey milestone got in my way. 80% of the set dungeons are incredibly annoying to master and there's usually only 1-2 sets per class that are worth trying without wasting your time.