[1.00.5] Templar Holy Nova Expulsion T400+

Overview

Templar based around using the Soulpurger set and Holy Nova to quickly apply many stacks of Expulsion, which deals damage based off your Thorns stat.Easy to play, all skills can be mapped to a single button, fast movement speed, extremely tanky.

Overview

Templar based around using the Soulpurger set and Holy Nova to quickly apply many stacks of Expulsion, which deals damage based off your Thorns stat.

Easy to play, all skills can be mapped to a single button, fast movement speed, extremely tanky.

However there are a lot of interlocking pieces required to get the most out of this build, including 5 true legendaries and 2 drop only lesser runes, so it can take a while to farm everything you need.

Capable of clearing up to endless Tier 500, but slows down a lot after Tier 400.

How to Play

Real easy. Map all your skills to a single key, and hold it down whenever you want to kill stuff.

At higher tiers (400+) you can use Taunt to drag groups of enemies into each other while you wear down the higher HP ones with the infinitely stacking Expulsion DoT. Not necessary but will help you clear a little faster. Moving Taunt to its own separate key can make this even more efficient.

You can use a Soul Warp codex or scrolls to move around if thats your thing.

Key Skills

Active Skills

Skills in order: Holy Nova – Taunt – Reprisal – Haste – Avatar of Life – Prayer

If you are going to put all your skills on the same key (recommended), its important to put them in this order. Skills that share the same key cast in order from right to left. Holy Nova needs the far left otherwise nothing left of it will ever cast. Then you want Taunt to always cast after all the buffs. Then you need to make sure that Prayer is cast first to lower the cool down of Avatar of Life (or it will wear off before its ready to cast again, and this can get you killed quickly), then Avatar of Life should be next to make sure it takes cast priority over everything else.

This is your primary skill. Has no cooldown so it can be cast as fast as your attack speed will allow. The actual damage from the tool tip is not important, your main damage comes from Expulsion / Soul Purge which is based on your Thorns damage.

You will want to have all 3 auras active at all times, provide huge boosts to thorns damage, attack speed, move speed, effect duration, and cooldown reduction. With the auras all active you will have just enough cooldown and effect duration, along with what you get from the equipment, to keep them running (as well as your ultimate) 100% of the time.

Your ultimate ability. The cooldown reduction is important, but mainly this is your survivability skill. With holy nova casting ~10 times per second you get a ton of heals from the 35% chance procs. The mana on hit is also important as it will keep your mana maxed out at all times. Running out of mana = you cant cast holy nova = death, as there are no other heals in this build.

Passive Skills

Every time you cast holy nova, this skill triggers another nova for extra damage. The nova from Expulsion is what deals all of our actual damage. Also due to a set bonus we have, each enemy hit by the Expulsion nova gets an infinitely stacking DoT that deals half the damage of the initial hit per second. With a lot of enemies stacked up on each other (because of Taunt), you can put dozens of these stacks on enemies per second.

This is where your actual damage comes from. Multiplies your thorns by a huge amount and adds that as base damage into the calculation for Expulsion. Also allows Expulsion to crit which is great since we have 100% crit chance.

Makes your thorns holy damage which allows it to benefit from your Holy Damage % stat.

Equipment

Items

One of three Soulpurgers set pieces needed. Expulsion is your main source of damage so triggering 100% of the time is huge. The increased movement and attack speed are also very helpful. Lights Aura is a drop only lesser rune and one of the biggest damage multipliers in the build. The 600% light radius interacts with the lesser rune augment on the chest armor piece and the Soul Purge passive from the Holy skill tree to increase your Expulsion damage by a huge amount.

Elementium is great to increase your total resist % which is then converted to health through the Heartstone greater rune on your accessory. We are already stacking as much shadow resist as possible since it boosts our holy damage as well.

Armor of Retribution lesser rune is from a Templar only legendary item, it interacts with Lights Aura from the helmet and the Soul Purge passive from the Holy skill tree to increase your Expulsion damage by a huge amount.

Staggering boots arent strictly necessary for lower tiers of endless, but there aren’t a lot of other useful options here. The rune effect from Lusombra’s Path is the important part here, as it gives you a huge multiplier to your holy damage % based off your shadow resistance %. This allows us to stack tons of shadow resistance on all our gear to fulfill many different needs – it increases our holy damage %, our total HP (when combined with Heartstone on the amulet), and because most of our base thorns total comes from our HP it also increases our total damage.

Balgars is used here primarily for survivability, you won’t take a ton of damage because most enemies will be stunned, and you don’t get much extra thorns from the staggered damage even when you do, but its second to none in terms of survivability so it gets the nod here.

The Heartstone greater rune is from a true legendary and absolutely critical to the build. It converts all your resistances to pure HP, and from stacking tons of shadow resistance and Elementium armor we have tons of resistance.

Second Soulpurgers set piece. The Nemesis less rune is from a legendary Templar only shield. Gives us base thorns amount for half point of hp/mana/damage. We will have very little raw damage and mana, but a massive health pool, which will give us a high base thorns amount.

First of the two set pieces we need from the Furious Retaliation set. Once again boosting our base thorns off our insanely high hp value. We dont have a lot of raw damage, so the three piece set bonus doesn’t add much value.

Talisman of Spines greater rune is from a true legendary and is the main multiplier for our thorns stat. Five of our six skills are aura/ultimate, so it gives a 750% bonus.

Second part of the Furious Retaliation set. Holy Expulsion is a drop only lesser rune, boosts our damage considerably as Holy Nova is the only damage skill we use.

Final part of the Soulpurgers set. Venereta is a Templar only true legendary. Holy Nova is considered a magic skill, and this rune doubles our attack speed with all magic skills. The 25% doublecast is helpful as well.

Enchantments and Gems

Shadow resist is the most important stat in this build. It boosts your HP, which boosts your thorns damage, and your holy damage %. So you’ll see shadow resist has been enchanted on every piece that will take it, and all resist on any piece that will take that. All gems for helm/armor/boots are also shadow resist.

There is enough crit chance and overpower to reach 100% of both, and enough cooldown reduction / effect duration to let you keep all of your auras and ultimate up at all times.

A few light radius gems are thrown in as well to further boost your Expulsion damage.

Attack speed reaches 272% with buffs up, which is almost maxed out due to the doubled attack speed from the Venereta rune on the sword.

Optional Alterations

There are a few ways to squeeze even more damage out of this build, but at the cost of some survivability.

1. Swap the block chance buff on the shield to critical hit damage. This will drop you from 85% to 60% block chance, though you can bring it back up to 70% by changing the 4th passive on the physical mastery tree to a block chance buff. Alternately you can swap one of your light radius gems to a block chance gem to get it back up to 80% (or do both to get it back up to 85%), but the loss of light radius cancels out most of the damage boost you get from the crit damage enchant.

2. Swap your boots to use Lusombra’s Path as the base, and use Critical Thorns as the transmuted rune on it (its a shared, drop only lesser rune). This rune gives a 30% thorns boost on crit, stacking up to 15 times. It’s a pretty decent damage boost, but the loss of 45% damage stagger is significant.

Making one or both of these changes can boost your damage a lot. Helpful for really blowing through the later endless tiers, but once you start getting up around T400 and beyond, expect to die occasionally.

There are probably a few general optimizations that could be made to this build by messing around with the enchants or maybe a rune/item combo I didn’t think of, so feel free to experiment. But be very careful messing with the cooldown reduction and effect duration as you will die pretty much instantly if you dont keep the ultimate Avatar of Life up at all times.

Skill Trees

Reprisal aura here and a few nice passives. The points in Slice and Sharp Steel don’t do anything for us, they are just there so we can get to Reprisal. Slice would be nice but we don’t have room for it on our skill bar. Use Soul Warp codex if you want a movement skill. Phantom Shield and Revenge don’t really do a whole lot for us, but there’s really nothing useful to spend our last few points on, feel free to play around with them if you want.

A few more helpful passives here for crit chance and attack speed, and those two alone give us enough points to get to the Haste aura.

Taunt is a great skill because of how Expulsion works, we do a lot more damage while enemies are grouped up on top of us. A few points need to go into the Intensity passive in order to unlock Loudness (taunt range increase).

This is our main tree, most of the skills and passives are pretty self-explanatory. If you wanted to take a few points from somewhere to play around with, Grace, Exorcism, and Sanctified are all pretty low value.

Not much to explain here. There are very few useful pickups outside the holy and class mastery sections. Most of what I’ve picked in those sections are mandatory to the build or the other options available provide zero value. Dump all your extra mastery points into health, you will need it to survive the higher tiers and its a lot more effective at boosting your thorns damage than dumping those points into thorns anyways.

Stats

Stats for reference, taken while all buffs are up (except movement speed on kill boost), at mastery level ~2150.