[1.0.0.4] Tri-element Saboteur 2.0 - A (mostly) craftable build. 15sec madqueen etc

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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new version for AOM is here:
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63814

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Update 8/2/16: Full Revamp in place. Killed Madqueen in 6 seconds, dummy in 24sec with Version 3.0. Older update: Solo’ed Ultimate Mogdrogen in 10min, see below.

This is a DW firestrike build with extremely low gear requirement designed to have very high survivability and also able to kill fast. Ideal for a beginner’s first speed farming character. Most of the gear is either craftable or substitutable, there are no mandatory set bonuses.

New in 3.0: Took Most’s suggestion about elemental balance rings back in my old saboteur thread many moons ago (i swear that guy’s like the clairvoyant, he was also the one that suggest legion firestarter), I have also added wrapfire to convert the flat cold damage on the set ring proc into fire. effectively giving us about ~100 flat fire dmg during the proc, which is up half of the time. Imagine what 100 flat pierce dmg does for a blademaster, this is what those do for us plus all our dmg is LMB so even more. Warpfire also converts the large of amount of flat cold dmg on execute to fire.

In the new setup, with procs up paper dps goes to 111k (about 80k without procs), and procs are up around half of the time. the thing is we kill so fast many bosses drop during 1 proc + 1 blastshield lol. since we stack alot of flat and %weapon dmg, execute hits very hard, hit for a ~500k execute on dummy with a support. OA runs a bit low at ~2500. but wrapfire proc stacks with flashbang giving a -310 DA debuff. our effective OA around 2800, which seems sufficient since our crit dmg isn’t super high.

resist reduction comes from thermite mines 46 + wrapfire 25 + elemental storm 30 + solaels 20. for a total of whupping -121 fire resist.
Defense is very strong with maxed flashbang/blastshield, ~1.8k armor 90%+ absorb. ~20% phys resist. and easy swap of mark of divinity without losing much dps should u desire a fail safe proc. with 2.1k DA + chariot as well as nearly 50% chance for enemies to miss due to flashbang+shadowdance. I ran the BoC with 50% chaos resist, didn’t even drop low.

[v1.0.0.4]Video: 6sec mad queen kill - still had my shard of beronath in wrapfire has about 2% more dps with it

[v1.0.0.4]Video: BoC run - sharzul a bit slow as he has shitload of fireresist

[v1.0.0.4]Video: Saboteur solo ultimate mogdrogen 10mins. no consumables. Guide on this fight here.

Grim calc + devotions: http://grimcalc.com/build/SoTtUiw

With +5 demo, and +1 nightblade. +1 searing strike from relic

Searing strike at 7 is a nice place to avoid diminishing returns.
Blade shield at lvl 10 is generally enough to make us unkillable during its duration, i didn’t think maxing it is necessary.

I’m undecided about whirling death. The current setup, AOE a bit low but still sufficient - see boc vid. a low lvl whirling death is actually a DPS loss on a single target, so u either go 8/8 or 0/8. u can remove points from static strike to max whirling death and a few more in shears if u want more AOE. more testing needed, feedback welcome.

I’m still not sure how good ulzuin’s torch proc is, if we lose it we can get viper for a bit more OA and the 20% ele resist reduce, which is strong due to us having so much -resist, undecided now, more testing needed, feedback welcome.

1 point in blackwater cocktail and its transmuter is optional, for -25% physical dmg vs bosses, initial impression is that dps is so damn high its not necessary, but if u want this probably take points out of static strike.

Gameplay:
LMB: Fire Strike (devotion ability - elemental storm )
RMB: Shadow strike (devotion ability - solael’s witchfire)
mousewheel up: pneumatic burst
mousewheel down: Flashbang (devotion ability meteor shower , can also go to amarastas quick cut for longer boss fights)
middle mouse - heal pot
keyboard 1 - Thermite mine
keyboard 2 - optional Blackwater cocktail
keyboard 3 - bladebarrier <-- i use this so rarely its almost not worth the point
execution - devotion ability raise dead
chariot devotion ability to any self buff

throw a couple thermite mines at the enemy pack then shadowstrike to the middle, drop a flashbang and go to town with LMB. Against hard hitting bosses, optional to keep up BWC for -25% physcial dmg debuff, u only need to cast this about once every 8sec or so. recast flashbang every 5 sec. and shadowstrike every 4sec, keep all ur debuffs up shadowstrike isn’t mandatory and mostly optional if ur lazy.

Thermite mines are pretty reliable against bosses and only need to be cast once in the fight since they last 60sec, unless they die to AOE, so watch for the pillars of fire and make sure they are active near the boss.

Shadowstrike due to being on CD and a quad attack due to nighfall+dw, has very high chance to proc even low %devotions, thats why we bind solael’s witchfire to it to proc it immediately upon engaging and let it spread. Do note, that u should refresh SS every 4secs against bosses to keep up the debuff.

Shar’zul Tips: He has buttload of fireresist so his slower than other bosses, keep up BWC and flashbang and he’ll only hit you like a little girl espeically with mark of divinity setup. just facetank and spank.

Mad queen tips: I thought about using mark of divinity but in my 1st and only run that i recorded she died during 1 blastshield more or less so w/e.

Mogdrogen tips: see above in vid section[/SIZE][/COLOR]

Gearing:
Vendored items - spawn with different roll every game, make sure u keep remaking to get the best roll - u can also buy two copies of a good roll.

Most of this gear is craftable as indicated.
Noncrafted gear is not essential and easily substituted as we don’t need any specific set bonus to function.

Wrapfire is good but if u dont have it just go with 2 legion daggers it’ll be fine still.
You can swap to Mark of divinity for more survivbility due to the +3 flametouched on it, u don’t lose that much dps from going it from blood sigil.

Pants: i’m using bysmiel pants with some OA on it. i think BiS is either bysmiel or dreeg sect. if you don’t have these, you can stick with empowered legplates of valor as a nice defensive option.

Head:Mark of infernal truth prismatic diamond (craftable)
Shoulders: shoulderguards of justice silk swatch
Chest: Chest guard of justice kilrithians shattered soul
hand: Handguards of justice consecrated wrappings
Leg: Bysmeil sect/Dreeg sect pants scaled hide. (look for OA/resists as priority on these)
Relic: Ulzuin’s pyroclasm - ideally with +1 brimstone +1 searing strike
Weapon #1Elite Legion Firestarter Black legion vendor - imbued silver or shard of beronath or coldstone or oleron’s blood + creed’s cunning
Weapon #2Warpfire enchanted flint + creed’s cunning
Ring #1: Ruby of Elemental balance crafted corpse dust + survivors ingenuity
Ring #2: Sapphire of Elemental Balance crafted corpse dust + survivors ingenuity
Neck: Empowered Essence of Beronath crafted, dread skull + kymon’s will
Belt: Ulzuin’s Torment crafted, antivenom salve
Boots: Golemborn Greavesmark of mogdrogen
Medal: Mark of Divinity craftable, +arcane spark
Medal: Blood Sigil of Ch’thon +arcane spark

Can swap ring / weapon augments to fix chaos resist.
For resist enchants on body pieces, adjust according to ur gear rolls.

Leveling guide:
see post #2

Static strike: “O’ ye foolish Elemental Balance rings, I once thought I was immortal too, but do ye not know that the Nerf Dawn shall descend on you with the fury of a thousand Zantai’s?”

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Leveling Guide:

note: If its not your first char - make sure to buy 2x reputation bonus scrolls for: black legion, rovers, devils crossing, homestead.
general difficulty progression: lvl 1-50 in veteran - of course u can also choose normal if want easier. lvl 50-66ish in elite. lvl 66+ in ultimate. if its your first char, stay in elite until 70 where you can farm some reputation to put resist augments on ur gear at lvl 50/70.

Always choose Kymon faction over death virgil.
Do NOT open with firestrike or DW.

(if you do not have a searing ember at lvl7 you can vendor for it, craft flintcore bolts at lvl 15, again if not enough searing ember u can do some vendor runs)

lvl 1-15:
Go Demo, pick up a initially 2hand rifle if you can. or use any weapon otherwise. if you are having trouble, buy a white 2h rifle from vendor.
use fireblast ability from searing ember starting at lvl7 its super strong. Rush straight to canister bomb and max it. After maxing canister bomb, max flametouched. and put points in vindictive flame until its lvl 11.

lvl 15-40:
use offhand + 1hander, preferably with +firedmg / cast rate
at lvl 15, put a flintcore bolts in your offhand, and enchanted flint in your mainhand for the aura.
now you can use the super OP greater fireblast ability from flintcore bolts. use this ability + canister bomb all the way until lvl 40.
Once cannister bomb is maxed put 1 point in improved casing and max demo mastery. put ~4 points in blastshield for now. 1 point in temper 1 point in ulzuin’s wrath.
Then put points in ulzuins chosen. and optional to max grenado + high impact. otherwise put points in nightblade until you can can unlock belgothian’s shears.

put some ectoplasms in gear, if its ur first char, you can farm those at the spined cave in A2 - the ghost things
In the meantime, save some DAGGER type weapons with base damage being fire , additionally %fire or %elemental dmg preferably, even better if it has ias or flat fire dmg.

lvl 40-50: (at this point if you be mostly done with quests, grind exp in BoC, the obsidian stone guys give huge exp)
respec to firestrike, max firestrike and brimstone, a point in searing strike. 1 point in explosive strike for now. put 1 point into Dualblades and 4 points in belgothians shears, 1 point in pneumatic burst and starting going deeper in nightblade until you reach breath of belgothian+shadowstrike, get 1 point in these, then get pneumatic burst to lvl 10. 1 point in a flashbang and searing light for now, then max explosive strike. After these, more points in nightblade and grab 1 point in phastmal armor, and put 5 points in amarrastas quick cut + whirling death when possible, and work slowly toward execution. putting a point in bladebarrier and few more in flashbang/searing light.

put enchanted flint in one dagger for the fire aura and if you have, a haunted steel in the other one. if no haunted steel use an imbued silver.

lvl 50-75:
at lvl 50, you become a god. Buy two Legion firestarters from black legion vendor - keep remaking the game to get best rolls, you can buy two at once. If you have twink gear, equip now, otherwise you can shop for some lvl 50 faction stuff if you like.

important components at this point are corpse dust in rings, dread skull in neck/medal if available. scaled hide in leg+shoulder. sanctified bone in helm/chest.

Resists to focus on when lvling are : vitality,poison,chaos.
on gear: look for ones with good armor/hp/resists. on rings/neck/medal look for attackspeed/OA/%fire or flat fire damage. make sure you have attackspeed on gloves, vendor run for one if not.

at lvl 60: equip ulzuins pyroclasm its fairly easy to craft.

at lvl 70, buy two Elite legion firestarters as per post #1
at lvl 75, obtain all the crafted gear if you haven’t

Devotions:

  1. Start with a point in green/purple
  2. hawk
  3. owl
  4. scholar’s light, then refound the points in purple and green.
  5. rhowan’s crown - elemental storm bind to greater fireblast and later firestrike
  6. chariot
  7. put a point in red, then get jackal (why does this look like a dragon?)
  8. solaels witchblade - bind to shadowstrike
  9. viper. this will unlock revenent. complete revenent, then you will be able to refund points from viper. You should now have the 8 reds you need for the completed build. bind raise dead to one of the dw abilities.
  10. get oklain’s lantern
  11. Lastly get ulzuin’s torch. You can choose to go all the way to meteor or use the last 2 leftover points in spider for chaos resist or -insect dmg. bind meteor to flash bang , dw proc MAY be better for boss. but flashbang is better on trash for sure.
  12. last point in yellow for hp.
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Great build jajaja

My commando was nerfed last patch and I couldn’t think of any way of making him better. I didn’t even know about this sword -.- it’s the answer to all my problems lol so thank you!

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Nice build, glad someone else likes their pure element weapons :stuck_out_tongue: I am working on something pretty similar, but chaos/fire. Too bad more daggers don’t have attack speed

edit: “tri” element :slight_smile:

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RMB: Shadow strike (devotion ability - solael’s witchfire)

Is it not you have an error ?

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Try two Grim Fate as your weapons, it is pretty funny to kill one mob and see the rest of the screen chain-explode.

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Does mark of divinity proc no matter what or can you still be one shot ? Or say if you get hit to 40% hp then again and die ?

If I die on my chars I delete them so I would prefer not to risk it otherwise :slight_smile:

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Just like every similar proc (Tinker, Avatar of Mercy, etc. ) a sufficiently high crit will kill you without activating it.

Here’s the deal: all these defensive procs on low HP are good vs. shotgun bosses like Valdaran or the Mad Queen. Tehnically speaking they can never kill you with the Mark of Divinity, because their damage does not come in huge single bursts, but separate projectiles with independent chances to crit.

Iron Maiden or Fabius (with the Notched Bone), on the other hand, can straight up deal even 22k damage. Therefore…no proc ! This happens only on characters that have low DA, though - and this is not the case here.

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Thanks for the info :slight_smile:

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after being murdered, jesus is back again.
Well done Jajaja once again :stuck_out_tongue:

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Thank you jajaja for the new build, new build looks easier to gear.
Can you make another grimcalc link without + skills? Sorry kinda noob here, basically i will calculate the skilss -4 in demo and -1 in nighblade?

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ty, well technically static strike didn’t come back to life, we are just a believer in fire now :cool:

ya daggers are great for fire builds due to how strong oklain’s lantern is and how conveniently accessible it is on the path to ulzuin’s torch

added to main post.

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I’m wondering which Blacksmith buff would be the most appropriate for this build…?

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Curious why you would want such a thing in a build that isn’t too far from being pure fire :stuck_out_tongue: Physical damage is a tiny part of our damage that would be a <1% dps increase and our base armor is highish which does make Angrim’s armor % bonus useful, but it’s not very useful when you have 1600+ armor already sooo fuck Angrim.

Ideally you would want a well rolled element resist via Duncan on one piece + bleed res rolls on all the other craftable shit which you get from Horrus the necropolis smith. That would be pretty great if you could get all that, would take a lot of mats or a lot of luck w/o cheating though

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Is the grim calc guide valid? Somehow I don’t have as many points as he has. Maybe lower static strike? Also, in the Nightblade tree: There’s 0 points in Nidalla’s Hidden Hand. Don’t you need at least one point to connect the rest of the tree?
Sorry, I’m a noob. Maybe I’m overseeing something :stuck_out_tongue:

Btw, which is the best farming method for this build? Still Fabius? Haven’t played since last patch (the nerfs killed my motivation, since the Tri-Sab was my only char). I remember Fabius loot also being nerfed?

P.S.: Sorry for bad english -.-

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Jajaja, using your actual devotions I have 4 points left.
Why not putting them into Tortoise and its efficient Turtle Shell?

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Because with this build Jajaja insisted in the fact that we have to “keep up BWC for -25% physcial dmg debuff”, so this type of dmg might be of an interest otherwise, what’s the point of this sentence ? :slight_smile:

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There’s an issue here, -13 points on Grimcalc so you’ll have to save those points :

  • Flashbang at 1 instead of 6 = 5 saved points
  • BWC at 1 instead of 5 = 4 saved points
  • Thermite Mine to 9 instead of 13 = 4 less points
    = 13 saved points and a valid Grimcalc.

Also, using your actual devotions I have 4 points left.
Why not putting them into Tortoise and its efficient Turtle Shell?

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The GC is wrong in that way, I redid my sabo a lil bit ago to match this and noticed as well. His devotions are right though not sure where you are getting these 4 imaginary points from lol

I feel really good that instead of making this build and getting my 1st good build up I made a dw melee pyromancer cause I’m obsessed with trying to find off the beaten path builds right now :stuck_out_tongue: My build is ~exactly the same except I do less damage, but am also quite literally unkillable cause of wendigo mark/aspect. It’s too bad there is no way to squeeze more OA out of this setup would be so sexy if you could have more oa

It’s probably not worth here, but on my pyro I was using master spellblade in one hand which is pure chaos dagger that gives -25ish reduced all and was lucky to get abyss suffix for 22% reduced all and 1/5 of 27% reduced damage. Surely huge dps drop to take this straight up, but if we are willing to lose chariot you could drop ele storm and get flat fire damage from magi and extra nodes elsewhere I think. Have any idea how much fire res sharzul/fab have? Abyss suffix could be pretty nice if we are pushing them fairly negative.

edit #2: Pretty sure hellfire mine is worth one point? Seems closeish looking at firestrike breakdown but I’m pretty sure it is D:

The GC without skills is kinda fucked, see Aguilar’s post for explanation. You do not need hidden hand, one point in dual blades allows you to take anything down the top line you could take only execution if you wanted to etc

Best farming is debatable I think. Fabius is less likely to drop quality loot, but he is still easy/fast to find and kill with build like this. Twin falls hive spam, steps/moosi hunt, and Fabius are top 3 imo

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current setup has very low chaos %, even if i switch to chaos weapon so probably not worth for this setup. i did mess around with an alternate setup involving adding abominable might - i think i drop chariot for it or something. it would give alot of flat and % chaos dmg. but the legion firestarter has a very strong proc since the 2projectile shotgun effect makes it better than stormheart proc on single targets. same reason why i skipped the point in hellfire mine since the chaos part is so low.

if u dont want to try the master spellblade version i suggest taking abominable might. would be interested to know tbh, if u do end up trying it - i dropped abominable might due to having a great ability to attach it to since u have to deliver the kill with it. its a really cool proc concept tho.

as far as sharzul resist, as a reference. my WH kills him in 10sec, kills madqueen in 15.

my sabo kills madqueen in 15 as well and sharzul in 20+ sec despite all the -resist.

fabius has 90 fire resist as of pre resist change. not sure about now, but its definitely higher than average as i kill him noticeably slower than my wh as well with madqueen kills being roughly equal suggesting relatively even dps othewise (unless madqueen has a bunch of acidpsn resist…)