[1.0.0.3] Inva's Poison/Regen Witch Hunter

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hi guys,

This is a poison and health regen-based melee build that is based around the concept of hit and run instead of face tanking. As you can imagine, the clear speed is therefore not going to be as fast as your usual burst damage-based build. That doesn’t make it any less fun though!

Playstyle is essentially:

  1. Curse from distance
  2. Shadow strike into mobs
  3. Auto-attack a bunch of times, enough to trigger an aoe attack
  4. Run away or blade barrier if you’re not able to
  5. Rinse, repeat

Grimcalc build/devotions
The goal of devotion-building is to:

  1. Grab Healing rain from Tree of Life
  2. Complete Behemoth
  3. Grab Acid Spray from Manticore
  4. Stack as much HP as possible
  5. Use spare points to get any resists that may be lacking

Character Screenshots

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That figure on the dummy is an average damage tick on crit…


HP regen with just Blood of Dreeg and Pneumatic Burst up


HP regen with above 2 skills + Giant’s Blood and Healing Rain.

Some videos…

  1. Kiting Fabius
  2. Example of ‘passive crit striking’

Gear
Weapon 1: Venomlash dagger + Shard of Beronath + Outcast’s Bastion
Weapon 2: Venomlash dagger + Vitriolic Gallstone + Outcast’s Bastion
Amulet: Black Gem of Dreeg (Dread Skull + Mogdrogen of Sanctity)
Rings: Judicator’s Signets (Corpse dust + Mogdrogen of Sanctity)
Medal: Undying oath (Dread Skull)
Belt: Bladebreaker Sash
Relic: Belgothian’s Carnage

Helm: Hood of Dreeg (Sanctified bone)
Chest: Vestments of Dreeg (Kilrian’s Shattered Soul)
Shoulders: Mantle of Dreeg (Silk Swatch)
Gloves: Viperfang Grips (Unholy Inscription)
Legs: Arcane Harmony Leggings/Pretty Great Pants (Silk Swatch)
Venomspine Greaves (Mark of Mogdrogen)

Augment objectives for the rest of the gear are just mix and match till you’ve got enough vitality/aether/chaos resists.

Gear-wise there’s alot of flexibility. I’ve used legendaries in this example as it allows for a benchmark of comparison since these are pieces of gear that everyone can eventually obtain. Undying Oath isn’t a must have if you have difficulty maxing out your ele resistances. For instance, Mark of Divinity grants more ele resists, HP as well as HP regen.

In addition, the Dreeg’s Evil Eye bonuses provided by the Shroud of Dreeg gear are quite irrelevant to this build. Gearwise, apart from the relic and the viperfang gloves, the rest can be replaced/improved by well rolled rares.

Ideally, I would like:

  1. Amulet: One of the + skill Beronath Ammys
  2. Rings: 2 Gollus Rings with a good prefix/suffix, ie Flat Poison damage & res/hp
  3. Belt: Thorn Girdle belt or good rare belt with HP, Res and Poison damage
  4. Armour with Flat Poison damage, HP and/or res.
  5. Weapon wise: A well rolled rift scourge slicer would be better than a venomlash

Defense
1. Hit avoidance
Yer an assassin Harry! You’re not expected to facetank. Try to diminish the number of hits on your character by relying on Veil of Shadow + Curse of Fragility.
2. Health Recovery/Regen
You’re not going to be a facetanking lifestealing character. As such, you rely on quick attacks to lay down your poison before escaping and relying on your health recovery (Blood of Dreeg + Pneumatic Burst) as well as health regen. If you’re in trouble, just use Blade Barrier.
3. Critical Hits
Critical hits have a chance to trigger Carnage (from relic) that will reduce your skill CDs, meaning that your recovery skills will be available to use much sooner. In addition, you have a chance to keep Healing Rain up continuously as it has a 10 second duration and a 12 second base cooldown.

Also, did you know that you don’t actually have to attack to deal a critical hit? Your presence alone (with veil of shadow active) allows you to deal critical strikes passively, thus triggering the crit strike procs. See this.

Offense
Because we’re not going to be bursting down enemies, we’re going to have to rely on reducing their resists so the overall DoT damage is higher. We achieve this by:

  1. Veil of Shadow + Night’s Chill
  2. Curse of Fragility + Vulnerability
  3. Acid Spray devotion proc

Active Skills

  1. Beronath Fury (Important as it allows you to link Acid Spray to it)
  2. Shadow Strike (Your distance-closer and reliable hit and run nuker)
  3. Blood of Dreeg (Keep it up at all times for the regen, res, dmg and def)
  4. Pneumatic Burst (Keep it up at all times for the regen and speed
  5. Blade Barrier (Save for potentially risky situations)
  6. Pause button. Be nice, I’m just too used to Alt-F4ing in POE HC D:
  7. Curse of Fragility (Your CC skill)

Passive Skills

  1. Solael’s (Attack speed, damage and some vitality res)
  2. Possession (Damage absorption and bonuses to everything)
  3. Veil of Shadow (CC passive skill, with free passive procs)
  4. Poison Aura (Moar DoT damage!)

The process of leveling can be made much easier by getting Slithtongues. Venomlash is a very low level legendary so you shouldn’t have to wait too long to use it!

2

Apparently I need 3 posts in order to post links/pictures/videos.

Here’s #3!

3

Welcome to Grim Dawn and good luck with your build. I am working on something similar, but instead i will try cold dmg as primary.

4

why do you kite? you should be able to facetank him.
maybe you should try golemborn boots.

5

Hmm. This all looks oddly familiar.

There are quite a few poison based Witch Hunter builds on these forums now, which is a testament to the fun-factor and effectiveness of that class combination, I’d say.

6

I play in HC, I always avoid facetanking whenever I can haha
Besides, facetanking kinda defeats the purpose of a DoT build don’t you think? One might as well play a burst damage build.

Hmm. Pretty good manners to promote your build in another player’s build thread I reckon.

Besides, with the skill tree being as rigid as it is, most builds based around a similar concept will end up being highly similar in it’s tree. What makes it different is the devotion tree, and there’s nothing similar about the 2.

My tree for instance focuses on regen and HP and thus does not need any potions and has a higher survivability as compared to yours, even though yours may have higher dps.

7

Alt + F4, Pausing or using any other method to avoid a character death is ultra cheesy, what is the point in playing hardcore then?

8

If you played POE u’d have gotten the joke!

9

I did, entensively. :slight_smile:

I still feel that it is a cheap way out. :wink:

10

ah HC, ok. that explains a lot :slight_smile:

11

fully agree :>

12

How did you go about gearing this?

I’ve been picking up loot as I go along, but it seems that a lot of people just look up BiS gear then magick it in by editing their save files.

13

Thanks for very nice idea on devotions - I’ve specced to very similar, but also picked scorpion instead of Targo and some else loosing some hp. I am running as saboteur though, it’s really fun for me and can just CC quickly with flash bang. Of course my damage is much lower - but with blast shield and this devotion spec is quite good.

This build seems to stack quite well with attack speed.

14

The same sherkhan from POE?

Weapon-based, I just look for slithtongues in each difficulty and level it from there.

In terms of armour, really anything goes, I just go for resists above all else. Gear is mainly shared and farmed from my farming char, a dual wield pyromancer, where I mainly kept legendaries instead of saving good rares (which was a mistake), as some of those rares would have been more useful than the dreeg legendaries (which mainly benefit casters).

You’re welcome!

15

Invalesco? Wow, broken game incoming! Good to have you about. Might try your build out. :3

16

---- ignore this