D3 S28 Crusader Fresh Level 70 Guide | 2.7.5

This season’s “theme” is the Follower buff + emanate items. I’m guessing it will be a permanent addition from after this season.

This mainly affects farming speed. While the follower buff skills make them more relevant in tryharding GR’s, it is by no means game-breaking.

Essentially, this season unlocks
NEW HEIGHTS FOR SPEEDFARMING

I highly recommend checking out our Follower Guide (Builds, Item, Skills etc).

REROLLING YELLOW ITEMS IS SUPER LEGIT, CHEAP, AND UNDERRATED.
Nicely rerolled yellows will carry you for a LONG TIME.

WEAPONS: For Roland’s, most of the time we will be using a crafted 2H FLAIL and CRUSADER SHIELD with the Heavenly Strength passive. Your crafted weapon should have stats like STR / VIT / LpH / LpWS / Socket. Anything else is meh right now.

Self-Healing note: Life per hit is amazing early game. Life per Wrath Spent is GODLIKE for Roland’s – but it’s a bit harder to obtain. LpWS appears ONLY ON Crusader Shields and FLAILS. So get either or both LpH and LpWS. As mentioned, theyre always great in the early game – but just great stats in general for Roland.

Crusader is a STRENGTH / ARMOR class. 
You get so much Armor for free – stack ALLRES instead!

Each point of strength gives you 1 point of Armor as a crusader. Since you have too much of it, it becomes diluted. ALLRES then becomes your premium defensive stat. Ideally, you DO NOT WANT any Armor rolls on gear – take as much ALLRES instead!

Belt: Is a huge source of defense. Main stat > VIT > RES/ARMOR > Life%. You’ll be surprised how a single item can give you a whole load of toughness on.

Rings and Amulet: You NEED socket on these to prep for legendary gems. Get any stat on these that you feel you’re missing. Feeling soft? Get defenses. Need DPS? Crit and mainstat. Feel free to roll “random helpful stats” on these for now, instead of the usual endgame CHC/CHD/MAINSTAT.

GEMS: For body pieces you’ll want Diamonds for ALLRES. Helm may vary (Amethyst for Life%, Topaz for resource cost reduction, Diamond for Cooldown Reduction) depending on your needs. Topaz on helm is my choice until you feel like you can handle the Wrath situation.

Fire% can be found on Bracers and Amulets. This isn’t really relevant in the early game, and only when you get your 6pc +.

Skill% (Sweep Attack%) can be found on Helm and Boots. Typically it’s safer to roll on boots but if you’re removing trash stats for it you can take it on helm too. Having it on both is great, at a cost to defensive stats. Just letting you know since you don’t need to sweat it for now, as you don’t need it to complete the early game.

OTHER SLOTS will be taken over by your free set pieces. No matter how bad they are stat wise, the 4pc bonus will heavily outperform any temporary yellow you can make. (Chest / Legs / Shoulder / Helm / Gloves). Just try to roll out the trash stats.

Hire Templaror any follower. Also get your Pet out to pick up gold for you.

Getting the “correct” stats beats getting the “perfect” stats for now. REMOVE USELESS STATS and get any USEFUL STAT for massive gains in power.

TLDR: Remove trash-tier stats like…

• Life Regen per second – absolute trash.
• Attack Speed – Usually an end-game refinement stat.
• Excessive Armor – Useless compared to Allres.
• Excessive CDR – Meh… it’s good but not really for right now.
• Unused Skill and Elemental % – literally useless.

For good early to midgame stats like:

• STR+VIT on most gear is okay.
• ALLRES in place of Armor for massive defensive gains.
• Life per Wrath Spent is godlike self-healing.
• Crit related stats for DPS.
• Life per Hit is great for survivability.

For clarity this box contains info and builds if you currently have 0 pcs of the Roland free set, going for 2 (you don’t have any Haedrigs gift bag, going for the first).

If you followed our leveling guide, you may be using the NO SHIELD 2-HANDER CRUSADER. I have TWO BUILDS for you to choose from: 2H No Shield and Shield.

Both of these builds are easily adjustable to accommodate any powerful legendaries you may have looted.

If you have a powerful legendary – edit the build to accommodate it if needed.

*Pressing Shift+J (PC) opens up your Seasonal Journey tracker!*

The entries in these early chapters are dead easy. The build above gives you a good balance of offense, defense and speed built in to help you breeze through this as mindlessly as possible.

Hard Mode on for Chapters 1 & 2. Clear through all the entries on Hard. Just up the difficulty to complete one Neph on Expert.

Don’t forget to level up all the NPCs in town. Completing your weekly Challenge Rift will help you get resources to do this easily, if you haven’t already.

When you’re done here, get your first free set from your mail, and proceed onward.

For clarity this box contains builds and info if you currently have 2 pcs of the Roland free set, going for 4 (you have the first Haedrigs gift bag, going for the second).

A cute synergistic build centered on abusing the 2pc Rolands (4 skills get the cooldown bonus), and lots of passive self-healing, and big “Wrath on Block” gains. Provoke essentially reads “gain all my wrath back”!

If you have a powerful legendary – edit the build to accomodate it if needed.

*Pressing Shift+J (PC) opens up your Seasonal Journey tracker!*

Difficulty: Although there are entries here that need to be finished on Master, you can still complete the bounty cache, if you haven’t already, on Hard. For the bounty, try to do the whole five acts as you’ll need to do this down the line anyway.

These entries are still on the easy side, so we can be a little lax with our build making as little sacrifices as possible to retain good DPS, Speed and some thought to defense. When you’re done with this chapter, collect your 2nd set of free set and let’s finish the next chapter for the remaining free gear!

Check the GR20 tab for an optional build update which focuses on defense.
The build from the previous tab works fine unless you’re dying way too often.

BUILDNOTES: Here we make sure to utilize the 4pc set bonus.

This build will be the baseline for all entries in this tier (Torment II, IV, and GR20) While this build may seem overkill for the Torment II entries, you may as well prep up for the harder parts of this tier.

Upgrade a Rare to Legendary w/ Kanai’s Cube:

Complete a Torment I Rift: This will be the minimum level you should be farming at should you need to do it. Increase if you can easily obliterate a rift. There’s also a “Kill a Torment II Boss” entry here which should be easy.

Complete any other odds and ends that you can, before proceeding to Torment IV.

Check the GR20 tab for an optional build update which focuses on defense.
The build from the previous tab works fine unless you’re dying way too often.

In Torment IV things get real. For many of the free sets, this place is the breakpoint wether your build needs help or not. And for S23 and Roland – DPS ain’t an issue.

• Kill Odeg – Keywarden in ACT I, Fields of Misery.
• Kill Sokahr – Keywarden in ACT II, Dahlgur Oasis.
• Kill Xah’Rith – Keywarden in ACT III, Stonefort.
• Kill Nekarat – Keywarden in ACT IV, Gardens of Hope 2nd Tier.
• Kill Specific Boss – Check your journal to see who it is this season.
• Keywardens maps have a key icon next to the waypoint. Purple arrows point you to their location after a short while once you’re in their respective map.

For the boss and all Keywardens – STRAIGHT UP RUSH TO THEM!
Ignore ALL TRASH and just beeline! Get it done ASAP!

You’ll really notice the if you’ve neglected your temporary yellow gear and rerolls. Hopefully you have powerful legendary to carry you (and even if you do), you will notice if you’ve neglected your gear. Refer to the very top setting up tab if you need help.

Either way, this is a good time to take a closer look at your items and get as many powerups and rerolls stated in the setting up tab above.

You have more… MORE… let me repeat MORE THAN ENOUGH DPS to clear this. The only way you’re going to fail is via repeated deaths. The build above STACKS defense to a reasonable degree. It maintains a rather crutchy Wrath-regen package via the passives, but you can drop them in favor of even more defense if you need to.

You should have an idea of how strong you are given the drops (or lack thereof) you’ve gotten. Be practical and don’t be afraid to shore up your build a little. If you feel a little weak – Do 4 quick Nephs, then do 4 GR10+.

The “ultimate” challenge gating you to getting your full six piece free set! The difficulty varies wildly on your class and seasonal set. As someone who has cleared with EVERY SINGLE SET AND CLASS WITHOUT ANY OTHER LEGENDARY without taking Pylons – let me tell you, they’re not all created equal.

As implied, these are the items that are core, or important, to your build. I talk more about how to obtain these later on – remember to keep these in mind always.

At the very bottom of this guide, you can preview what a good base template build is for items / skills / passives to get an idea what you’re going for.