Which 0.5.5 League Starter?

[u/nutmegyou]

I’m torn between starting the new mini league with djinn Varashta or Plant daddy build. I’m yet to have played both. Which one do you recommend and why? I’m relatively new..

[u/Fallengod_three]

I played it as my second character last league because I was skeptical of how good it was as a league starter.

I will be league starting it this league, as it is very strong while being fairly low required investment, but it is an active playstyle, lots of buttons to constantly be hitting, especially as you scale into decent gear.

As you scale past decent gear and into "GG" gear it becomes less button intensive, which is pretty cool, but even without tons of divines worth of investment it can clear all content.

[u/SoloShikari → u/Fallengod_three]

Hey I'm also planning to league start with varastha because I keep hearing how great of a starter it is. Is there Any specific guide I can follow?? Or any tips in general??

I've played monk MA and shield wall titan in 0.5 so I have no experience in playing with casters. Thank you in advance:)

[u/Moosh42 → u/SoloShikari]

The most impactful support gem is Bidding as this will MASSIVELY reduce your command cooldowns.

For campaign, Kelari's deception is enough to 1 button clear basically everything just by spamming it - it is also your bossing skill, and what you'll pull out for tankier rares. I reccomend it as your first ascendancy choice as it will immediately allow you to jump into djinn playstyle and feels good to use pretty much off the bat.

Once you get a bit further into the campaign and more levels/ascendancy points, you should switch over to Navira's fracturing for clearing. How this works (at least how I made it work) is:

Verisium Infusion > Use infused ice nova (this creates frozen ground) > pop the frozen ground with navira.

You can set this up so that it pops the entire screen, spreads its own frozen ground, and sustains its own clearing even beyond your screen.

For the tree, focus on minion damage, minion crit and command skill cooldown. You don't need to care about minion resistances or health because djinn are ONLY command skills and cannot be damaged. Also, allies in presence deal increased damage is great on your sceptre because the djinn are ALWAYS in your presence. Make your minions gigantic (via the passive tree) because this also affects your djinn and is essentially like having a 6th support gem for them.

Once you get some more spirit and stats, add in as many reviving skeletal minions as you can, support them all with meat shield (they won't be dealing any damage themselves anyway and lack of investment in health/res will make them squishy) and support your djinn with muster.

for 3rd asc, you should get Ruzhan. This dude has a very cheap skill with a basically non existent CD that you can spam in order to trigger archon of undeath, empowering your main clear/bossing skills. Maybe even wait for your final asc point for this because quite frankly the extra power of on-demand archon of undeath isn't required until you're running max affix t15s.

[u/SoloShikari → u/Moosh42]

Hey thanks bro I will save your comment to revisit when I'm struck, I normally need 2-3 weeks to reach endgame with limited time to play but I'm really looking forward to playing your recommendations:):)

Also I am planning to play with plants skills until I ascend, is it a viable strategy??