There are many different effective early game builds, feel free to use what you prefer. For the purposes of this guide, Siphon Life into Decay has been very effective.

A very early talent tree is below.

Next I would put a bit into druid, to make survivability nice and Conjuration is always good. Blessing of the forest just makes fights that little bit smoother. We are nearing the time to convert (i overleveled slightly on this run)

Some useful uniques to grab as well. Worth noting, you do not need any of these to progress to actual Rapture, these are just in general always nice.

In case these move bosses, once you have finished a fight you should be able to see those items in your atlas for their location.

Lion Heart - Brutal Bone Knight (make sure you put +1 into Resilience from Paladin tree)
Reactive Armor - Brutal Gump
Auramancer's Stone - Normal Norrix
Iqsior's staff - Insane grand magnus iqsior
Shamanic Codex - Insane Iqsior
The Corrupted - Brutal Norrix
Obsidian Glory - Brutal Mirror

Your transition to Rapture should occur when you are at least level 30, and the Edge of Time (from beating Atiel Blackshade brutal). Brutal Atiel Blackshade also gives you access to Impure Globe (Beezt in Outer Courtyard), so you may want to wait until you have this too.


Edge of Time makes your rapture damage consistent and based on your Healpower, and without this we are relying on the enemy dealing damage to your shielded target. It also works great with other shields if you don't want to focus Radiant Heal like below.

Impure Globe is the item to boost your rapture dps through the roof. Until some of the Guardian uniques, this solo carries your build.

For other items, you want to focus on high healpower, shield effect (if it rolls), cast speed, and resists are always great to have. Your shield should be your main defense, so don't worry too much about health, but its still always good to have some for when you get hit between shields.

General fight strategy is to use Heaven's Melody, then Radiant Heal, and this should set you up with a very powerful shield on all. Use the Holy Shield skill for anything that slips through, and prepare to recast the combo when it comes up again.

Rapture works with essentially any shield, but my preference is using Radiant Heal combined with the talent Holy halo. Here is a fairly simple tree, grabbing some shield, some Radiant Heal boosts, cooldown reduction, and of course the main skills.

The Occultist portion should be gotten as soon as possible once you have Rapture as a skill. This 20 points enables the skill Demonic Contract, which is crucial for longer fights. Radiant Heal eats mana like nothing else, but its also a heal that now gives a shield on top, so this is the perfect thing to spam for regaining your lost mana.

Suggested skills to use are below

Resetting your talents is free, resetting masteries costs a little, but you will get plenty of mastery points so I would suggest only resetting talents. You can also save this siphon life build, and use either one, depending on the boss fight, if a certain fight is too hard. Resetting your boss fight will not end your hardcore run, restart or back to haven if you are scared of dying

A very important reminder, this is when you should go to Dining Hall and complete all quests, to get your extra item slot!

After this, just start working towards the Guardian tree, and keep an eye out for good gear along the way. You should get a feel for how the build is working, and there isn't any need to craft anything properly until Guardians.

One available immediately upon moving to Rapture is Meditation (from Droto Evergraze brutal), which turns your play into a more passive setup. The cooldown becomes 10 seconds, but you can also skip cast speed and the reduction of cooldown talents on the tree.

Another great option to pair with Impure Globe is Intervention (Atiel Blackshade Insane), this makes your % healpower double dip for a delightful deluge of shield

Thunder Torrent (Droto Evergraze normal) is also a great item to boost your lightning damage significantly. This is actually available pre courtyard, but its not useful until you convert to Rapture.

Angel's Tune is also good, (Lowmore, or any 'key' you use in Pandemonic Depth), I would honestly keep using this until super lategame, it is probably beaten by a perfect rolled rare, but its so good until then. I would not grind Lowmore or Abyss looking for it though, just keep an eye out. If you don't get it, its not needed for Guardians (and in this run I did not use it), just when you find it doing Infinite Corridoor don't forget it.

Special mention goes to Stone of Madness (Mump). It literally hurts your dps, but if you wanted to farm up sweet item quality 15 gear, this really helps reduce the farm. Its important to note, this is FAR from required, you can either farm them without it, or just wait till endgame crafting to max your item, and I did not use it in my most recent run at all.

The Guardians fight is the first roadblock of many builds. This build should handle it with ease, and there are also a few super good uniques to grab from these fights.

This is the point to start crafting your gear:

• Crit Heal Chance, combined with pure in heart shields, provides you the biggest shields possible, so this is your required augment. Later we will balance carefully to only hit 100%, but right now unlikely you will get there
  
• Other augments are optional, anything from healpower (flat or percentage), crit heal multiplier, or lightning damage.
  
• Cast speed is also okay, but later on you will reroll this (when you get instant cast radiant heal).
  
• Only upgrade these to tier 3, as getting to 5 costs significantly more (and you likely don't have the resources for this)

• On accessories should be Rapture Damage,
  
• On weapons Crit Heal Chance
  
• Armor enchant is optional.

Almost all the time, +5 quality is the best mutation. Try to get a negative that doesn't decrease one of our main stats (like healpower, or lightning damage).

Make sure to divine all your uniques as well.

If you are low on money, run the midnight outer courtyard on max chaos, as your best money option at the moment.

First fight should 100% be Lom the Reanimator, as he has two uniques we are looking for.
Once you have Apprentice's Compendium, I would remove any Cast Speed mods (and any talents you took purely for cast speed reasons).
Second fight Rusherrox, then Rush with Chaos (you should be able to handle this). Inevitable Fate is an improved version of Edge of Time, and makes those super shields deal incredible damage.After those two fights, complete in any order, and get ready for lategame


Below is a generic skilltree for guardians. This is FAR from optimised, may have more skill points than your build, there may be way better options, its literally just what I'd grabbed at this stage. Healpower focus more than anything really.

The build below is not optimal, you CAN get an even stronger build if you try, however this has taken my run to IC100 on hardcore without difficulty.

This does also involve learning how to craft your gear with cursed souls + malevolent keys, if you want more information on how to do so I would suggest joining the great Discord for Mini Healer.

Edge of Time vs Inevitable Fate very strongly depends on how you build. The below build used IF in place of Impure Globe (which some would call not even Rapture), but a strong case can be made for Edge + Globe potentially dealing more damage reliably.

Either way, Inevitable Fate starts to become unnecessary once the damage from enemies in IC gets hard enough. To check when you get rid of this for a good staff, just check the damage dealt after a hard boss, and once IF is very small proportion, just remove it. Up until IC100 I still found it useful (see screenshot of IC100 boss damage)

Below is my build, then my items used (Impure Globe and Inevitable Fate switch position if a boss is too slow, really only matters when enemy dps is just so slow that Rapture isn't doing its job). These items are far from perfect, and the talent tree far from perfect, but it will do its job. The Spirit Ritual skill on the skill bar is only there for Malevolent Keys, as the boss effect is straight degen (doesn't block from shields).

Almost all of the push to 100 IC was just angelic to start, then heavens melody into radiant heal, demonic contract to start the mana flow, then when the pure in heart shield about to expire, smite then radiant heal, spam demonic contract and heavens melody whenever ready. Cooldown timers work out perfect to have shield all the time, though sometimes bosses can damage you and kill your tank before fight starts (this is where block/dodge come into later IC)


Final boss, IC100 kill data below

For completing all Hardcore achievements, there are a couple that are 'difficult' to do, because of unique mechanics.

For Solaria & Lunaria, defeating in both sun and moon, either create a single target build (you will want one later, my suggestion is grab Ominous One + Righteous Might, build a semi simple chaos strike tree + blessing of forest), or do this early when your damage isn't a one shot.

For Sepitus destroying the crystal, same as above, you need a single target build, and you probably want enough dps + health to just semi-afk it safely.

Cassandra is easy, just unequip all items, but leave your Guardians + rapture build, you will easily kill her with no armor.

Mirror kill healer last is either 'luck' on using rapture, or you switch to your single target above. Should be easy enough

The below is a post from linkknil3 on Discord (join the discord its a great place to learn stuff), where has taken a Rapture build to IC800.

Video has him doing a floor, includes all his items and talents, etc. From his post:
linkknil3 — 28/07/2022
Patch 0.92

Rapture is broken in postgame. Try it if you like watching number go up. Depth 600 is absolutely not the maximum limit to this build, so just keep going if you want to- it's not like fights get any longer when you do this much damage. Build image link + general gameplay idea/tips in the description since I can't remove just one attachment and want there to be a video reference for how to play it- activate ascension, target the healer, and flash heal at the start of the fight, just to keep yourself alive. From there, spam divine mend, use ancient roots every time ascension is about to wear off, and use divine focus + divine mend for large burst shields. In longer fights, you may need to shield a little less often to preserve mana, but you can keep ascension up 100% of the time with a single +1.4s ascension duration enchantment.

Keep in mind, since your damage scales with enemy damage due to how rapture works, you will kill things at the same speed at IC depth 1 as at depth 600- don't be too surprised when you still take 10-30s to kill things at low levels.

Please look forwards to this getting nerfed in the future :Stonks:

After some intense discussions in Discord, it looks like Edge of Time (once divined using a divination orb) is actually pretty decent for your IC pushes, until probably the same time you would get rid of IF. The important thing is to ensure you are using Impure Globe if you keep using Edge of Time


The detail to be aware of for this weapon is that it will either take up a rapture rare staff slot, Divinity, or Angel's Tune, so you will need to make a call for what matters most here. Play around, see what works best, the build above that got me to IC100 isn't the highest dps Rapture build, its just a functional option.

In terms of Rapture damage, the thing to be aware of is IF deals damage based on the size of the overall shield, so big crit heals give big IF damage. Edge on the other hand deals its damage based on your healpower purely, so the size of your shield doesn't matter (as long as its enough to keep you alive).

Update 2022 07 30 - with a rapture build hitting 800 IC, thought good to have the additional piece on the end showing that this guides build isn't the only way to build, AND that rapture is most powerful build