
Visions of Enmity – Top 3 classes to begin your next adventure
Introduction
This is my personal list of favorite classes to begin the next Season 29 – Visions of Enmity, based on the Patch notes (2.7.6) and Haedrig’s gift rewards. This guide is not intended for the mid-end season and only aims for the fresh day one/level 1 start.
Season 29 Start Date is September 15, 2023. (confirmed post here)
In case you are new to seasonal themes, you can check out my old video here where I show one little trick on how to get free bounty materials to ease your fresh start with a level 1 character.
Visions of Enmity – What’s New
New Solo Self-found Mode and Paragon Cap
In patch 2.7.6, including Season 29, players will be able to start the game in a new Solo self-found mode (with separate leaderboards), or simply SSF. This means, that you won’t be able to party with your friends or get boosted easily, plus there is no need to compete with bots in the leaderboards. The reason for that is obvious: bots rely on group play and gear. The host account usually has to babysit his bot, to make the first working build, and later to send him “conquering” Greater rifts for XP.
Paragon has also been reworked and capped at level 800 (at least for now). This doesn’t affect non-season play, though. You can also level beyond Paragon 800, as usual, and this XP will then transfer to your non-seasonal character.
New paragon stats now have a 200 points cap each, instead of 50. This means that you won’t be able to level up every single stat because the paragon points are limited 800 (the paragon itself is not capped – only the points). Blizzard said, that the idea of this limitation is to give players more flexibility for their builds and to make them choose points wisely.
Diabolical Fissures

Diabolical Fissures is the seasonal theme of Visions of Enmity. Players may encounter these portals whenever they kill enemies outside Nephalem or Greater Rifts. Inside these portals, players will find dozens of elites roaming around waiting to be slaughtered by players. And the portal leads to a series of small zones that you’ve probably encountered during the campaign. In the end, you’ll be rewarded with a chest that contains loot and bounty materials.
And that’s pretty much everything. No game-changers for your build, like Soul Shards, Ethereals or Altar of Rites, but just some random portals with loot.
Video Guide
Rank 7 – Barbarian

Might of the Earth is not the weakest build on this list, but it’s definitely the worst regarding playstyle, and it requires a lot of time to find all the necessary pieces to start dealing significant damage. If you are going to play with this set, prepare to press lots of skills and watch your buffs for most of the time.
It’s definitely strong for clearing large amounts of enemies, especially if you are going to play solo Greater Rifts, but aside from that, this piano build is very slow in regular rifts and bounties. You can charge or use leap to skip dense and walled areas, but it’s still not enough to compete with other classes.
To start dealing the actual damage, you will need to find several important items – Blade of the Tribes, Girdle of Giants, Braces of Destruction, Fury of the Vanished Peak, and probably Fjord Cutter. These items are for Seismic Slam. That’s one of many options you can use, and all these legendaries can ease your access to higher difficulties. And also don’t forget to find the Band of Might ring to reduce incoming damage, and Lut Socks for your mobility.
Overall, this starter set is fun, but it can be tedious for some of the players to maintain all the buffs. And it requires a lot of time to find all the required legendaries to start dealing damage. If your main goal is to push high-tier greater rifts, choose this starter set, if not, then moving on.
Rank 6 – Witch Doctor

Jade Harvester is a very capable set that can instantly kill elites and bosses with his Soul Harvest ability. But in order to achieve this, Jade requires some important items: Shukrani’s Mojo, Ring of Emptiness, Quetzalcoatl, The Furnace, Sacred Harvester and Lakumba’s Ornament.
The core of this set is to stack Haunt and Locust Swarm on every single enemy. After that, your Soul Harvest ability will pretty much one-shot your enemies. But as you might have guessed, this significantly reduces his mobility and the playstyle is not very user-friendly in general. It takes time to apply all these spells, and you need to get close range to cast your Soul Harvest ability. If the target is still alive, you’ll have to reapply all that until it’s dead. For these reasons, Jade is not very efficient in the Nephalem rifts or Bounties, but it’s surely playable in the Greater Rifts, where you have plenty of enemies and time to get to a high position on the leaderboard. If you still want to play this build and casually farm stuff, I’d recommend you to use Wormwood. It will automatically cast Locust swarm to surrounding enemies, and you’ll need less time to kill them.
Overall, this set can be really strong early on, especially against bosses and elites. As for the regular enemies, you’ll need to pixel hunt a lot , debuff them and apply Soul Harvest if you manage to stay alive.
Rank 5 – Necromancer

This starter set is much easier than the previous two combined. Grace of Inarius is pretty fast, deadly and tanky at the same time. There are plenty of variations for this set, but the Blood Nova spec can easily become your favorite in Greater Rifts, rifts and bounties.
Once you find Bloodtide blade, and Iron Rose, you can start dealing damage. For going Extra, you’ll need to find Funerary Pick, Krysbin’s ring, and Mantle of Channelling.
The gameplay is also pretty straightforward, you simply stack your Bone Armor and the swirling tornado will make the enemies vulnerable to your other skills, which is Blood Nova. The blood nova variation requires you to cast Siphon Blood to proc both, your weapon and offhand to deal the damage. And of course, since it’s a close-range build, we need Dayntee’s Binding for our survival.
As for mobility, and farming rifts in general, Steuart’s Greeves is the way to go. When you use Blood Rush, you will move extremely fast, and it also allows you to avoid dangerous situations or cut corners.
What’s more important is that you don’t have to press many skills or control your buffs. Simply stack your bone armor, curse enemies to proc the belt, and cast your primary ability which then will autocast Blood Nova and kill enemies around you. This is pretty much everything you need to know. It’s simple, fast, strong, and reliable. But If you plan to push high Tiers, consider switching to Rathma or Tragoul later on, as these sets provide much higher damage while staying away from enemies.
Rank 4 – Wizard

Firebird is quite flexible build and it offers 7 pieces instead of 6, like most other starter sets listed here.
If you are playing with this set, you can choose melee and attack enemies with Spectral Blades or use the deadliest variation with Meteors. There are several decent items that you need to find for this build: Smoldering Core, Grand Vizier, Mempo of Twilight, and Nilfur’s boots.
While this set can be squishy early on, especially without Halo of Karini, Firebird can melt your enemies pretty fast, and you gain 80% damage reduction when you cast Disintegrate. Plus this set reduces the cooldown for your Teleport ability which helps quite a lot to move to fast, skip enemies and provide more toughness.
I’d say that this set is very capable of doing nephalem rifts and Greater rifts, but staying alive can be a problem on higher difficulty levels. So the safest way would be to craft two Guardian’s set pieces, which provide significant damage reduction for our Wizard.
Rank 3 – Crusader

Invoker is a very spiky build that heavily relies on Thorns on your gear. This is super easy and fun build where enemies can be killed without doing anything, unless you are playing high-tier Greater Rifts. It’s a very tanky and strong build that can survive pretty much anything, especially if you are going to play Solo mode. What’s more important is that you don’t have to hunt for damage rolls: base damage, crit chance, crit damage? Forget about these stats. Your friends are attack speed, cooldown reduction, and of course thorns.
Speaking of the actual items, you’ll definitely need to use Aquilla’s cuirass, Akarat’s Awakening, Echoing Fury, Omnislash, Pig Sticker simply because of extra rolls and attack speed, Captain Crimson craftable set, Endless Walk and Convention of Elements to maximize your Thorns damage during physical rotation. Nothing else to add here. You can use your horse for extra mobility, hit enemies with Bombardment and keep spamming Slash till it’s dead.
Of course, Invoker is not very suitable for bounties or Rifts because of his indirect damage, it’s very tanky and strong build that can easily survive and you don’t need many legendaries to use this starter set properly.
Rank 2 – Monk

Sunwuko is a pretty fast and reliable set that can do pretty much anything, rifts, bounties, greater rifts, ubers, echoing nightmares – Anything, thanks to his Wave of Light ability that covers large areas and Dashing Strike with the combination of In-geom.
Plus Sunwuko opens many different playstyles. You can use Tempest Rush build, Wave of Light or Lashing Tail Kick. All these require many specific legendary items, but for the most efficient one you’ll need Kyoshiro’s Blade, Vengeful Spirit, Pinto’s Pride, Incense Torch, Crudest Boots and Tzo Krin’s Gaze. That’s quite a lot and it may take some time to make it work. And if you are struggling to maintain your Sweeping Wind ability, you can also use this belt called Kyoshiro’s Soul.
Aside from the amount of loot you have to find, this build is pretty straightforward. Your goal is to maintain Sweeping wind stacks, for an increased damage output. And Wave of Light or any other secondary ability will do the rest. Once you have all the items, including In-geom you can breeze through Greater Rifts and find much more loot than other classes over the same period of time.
And if you want to squeeze more damage and toughness, consider using Captain Crimson.
Rank 1 – Demon Hunter

Shadow’s Mantle is possibly one of the strongest builds that you can use within the first few hours. It’s extremely mobile, and deadly. And you don’t need many items to make things work. There are only two essential items for this set – Holy Point Shot, and Karlei’s Point which you can easily find if you roll yellow daggers in cube. As for defensive items, I recommend you to find Elusive Ring, Captain Crimson, Endless Walk, and Aquilla’s Cuirass. These items will surely save your demon hunter even on Torment 16. If you want extra mobility, here’s one more item for you: Chain of Shadows which removes Vault costs after using Impale.
This set is also very straightforward. You can equip your dagger, cast Shadow Power and one-shot elites, including bosses. But this may cause little problems. When you one-shot an enemy with Impale, you don’t regain Hatred which means, that you have to raise your difficulty, and as a result, increase your toughness. Finding this balance early on can be hard, but if you can move fast and maintain your hatred, you can reach Torment 16 as soon as possible and destroy high-tier Greater Rifts.
Overall, it’s super easy to make this set work. Shadow Mantle deals an insane amount of damage even with terrible gear rolls, and you can move pretty fast for free, as long as you have some Hatred.
Class table Performance (personal preference)
Time for the summary. I have provided a table below which shows what classes in general are the most efficient in farming and playing certain activities in Season 29. One plus (+) represents the possibility to run a certain activity and up to Three pluses (+++) for strongly capable classes.
This table is just my prediction of certain classes. It is based on their set performance, previous PTR tests, and leaderboards. This table may not reflect the actual S29 capabilities.
Class | Speeds | Meta Play | Solo Push |
Wizard | ++ | +++ | +++ |
Monk | +++ | + | ++ |
Barbarian | ++ | ++ | +++ |
Witch Doctor | ++ | + | ++ |
Demon Hunter | +++ | ++ | +++ |
Necromancer | +++ | ++ | +++ |
Crusader | ++ | + | +++ |
Some conclusions
This final Season 29 is clearly not intended for playing for long. The seasonal theme is not designed to give your character some ultimate powers, like Ethereals, or Soul Shards which affected the Meta and builds in general. This season is just a farewell message from Blizzard. You can either play or skip this Portal theme entirely and you won’t miss anything.
The first few runs throughout these portals will definitely bring you a piece of nostalgia (if you played Diablo 3 story of course). You will see plenty of story locations, fight plenty of enemies and receive plenty of loot. But apart from that, there is nothing else to see here. Completing the seasonal journey is still essential, as you get a beautiful pet and portrait, the rest is just optional.
Moreover, Season 29 locks you from getting plenty of paragon points. You can still get to a high paragon level, but you won’t receive more than 800 points (subject to change) to distribute. This means, that if you are a group player, who wants to push and compete with others, there is now one less reason to play.