[1.0.0.6][Caster] Tanky Aether Ray / Devastation Sorcerer

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

EDIT: Post #9 has an update to the build where I change a lot of stuff around. I honestly should remake the build with optimizations and stuff but I don’t have time and wont be posting much more for a while.

The original build was made by Firebird109 here: http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46329

This is the 1.006 aether ray version of that build, with the modification of getting imp and time dilation. You can follow his leveling guide.

Thanks to Edisonian for helping me brainstorm.

Build and devotions: http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-VUvyRh

The stuff with 1 point in them are value points so your +1 to arcanist/demolitionist gear will buff them up. You can skill up the 1 point skills later on when you run out of stuff to fill up. Keep Mirror of Ereoctes at level 12 because it doesn’t scale past that.

Devotion Skill Choice:

  • Aetherfire(imp) on devastation. (it can proc on every dps tick)

  • Time dilation(Aeon’s hourglass) on canister bomb. (100% proc rate and refreshes its own CD)

  • Arcane bomb(widow) on Aether Ray.

  • Giant’s blood(behemoth), Turtle shell(tortoise), Healing Rain(tree of life) on permanent toggle abilities.

When levelling, get aetherfire, giant’s blood, and turtle shell first. Then go for arcane bomb and time dilation. Lastly, get tree of life.

If you new, it seems complicated, if you don’t have enough affinities then just get the constellations with no skills attached as they give tons of affinity. You will have to grab imp -> hawk/jackel -> giant’s blood to get enough Eldritch(green) affinity, but then the behemoth(giant’s blood) will provide 3 Eldritch and you can spec out of hawk/jackal. Yeah that part gets a bit complicated but you’ll make it xd.

Gear

Main Hand: Warpfire - Imbued Silver
Off-Hand: Aldanar’s Vanity - Riftstone(grants chaos strike skill, good for mobility)
Helm: Iskandra’s Hood - Sanctified Bone
Chest: Iskandra’s Vestments - Hallowed Ground
Shoulders: Iskandra’s Pauldrons - Silk Swatch
Gloves: Aethereach - Restless Remains
Legs: Wraithborne Legwraps - Silk Swatch
Boots: Golemborn Greaves - Mark of Mogdrogen
Belt: Phantom-Thread Girdle - Antivenom Salve
Amulet: Arcane Shard of Agrivix - Focusing Prism
Ring 1: Empowered Aetherlord’s Signet - Ectoplasm
Ring 2: Albrecht’s Duality - Ectoplasm (converts the chaos damage on the relic and medal to aether)
Medal: Black Star of Deceit - Ectoplasm
Relic: Agrivix’s Malice

Alternative Helm Outcast’s Secret (very hard to get)

Alternative Helm Empowered Nether Crown

Alternative Belt Soulbinder’s Chains

Swap out Ectoplasms for Corpse Dust if you have enough mana. Swap in an ectoplasm on the helm if you need more mana.

Augments

Weapons and offhand: Creed’s Cunning or Outcast’s Wrath if you don’t need mana.
Jewelry:Uroboruuk’s Path or some resist augment, such as Mogdrogen’s Sanctity

The rest of the augments don’t matter, just do whatever.

Swap out any augments or components you need based on your situation.


I can’t find any easy choice for boots so I will just defer to what other caster builds have chosen.

There are lots of other items that you can get but I think these are best in slot. But I’m sure I’m missing at least one very good item.

You don’t need any of these items, but you will get super strong with each additional item.

Synergy

  1. Devastation and aether ray both have insane damage and scaling with levels. There are many pieces of unique gear that boost these abilities. The downside to devastation is that it has a high CD. Aether Ray is single target, it doesn’t fire through many enemies like in Diablo. But it is HUGE single target damage.

  2. Devastation and Mirror of Ereoctes both are insanely good, but have very long cooldowns. The Aldanar’s vanity offhand and the Time Dilation devotion both reduce these cooldowns to almost nothing.

  3. Several items proc on crit / attack. Agrivix’s malice(relic), Aldanar’s vanity(offhand), Aetherreach(gloves), Black star of defeat(medal), Occultist’s Secret(helmet), Wraithborn Leggings(Pants), Arcane Shard of Igrivix(amulet).

Flashbang and Flame Touched from the Demolitionist make it more likely to hit and crit. Vindictive Flame from the Demoltionist spams out attacks that can hit/crit. Agrivix’s malice(relic) can hit and crit. Aetherreach can hit and crit. And so on. And all but one does huge amounts of aether damage.

Overall you can see these skills will be proccing an insane amount. If you get all of the BiS gear, all the trash mobs will die to procs as you walk, you wont even have to cast anything.

  1. Giant’s Blood(behemoth), Turtle Shell(tortoise), Healing Rain(tree of life), Blast Shield(Demolition mastery) all give insane survivability and have cooldowns. I’m not sure if Time Lapse/Aldanar’s Vitality lower these cooldowns but it would be great if they did.

  2. Almost everything does fire and aether damage. Arcane Bomb(widow), Aetherfire(imp), etc etc all get boosted by everything else. There are several -resist items and skills to amplify damage to an insane degree.

  3. Chaos Strike puts you in melee range and greatly increases mobility. Why do you want to be a melee range face tanker? Well that is for Vindictive Flame, Agrivix’s malice, and Flashbang. All these work better in melee range and boost your other abilities.

Before you get the items Agrivix’s Malice or Aldanar’s Vanity, there is very little point to playing as a face tanker.

  1. Once your Aether Ray reaches 22+ levels, you need around 200 energy regen per second to sustain it. Luckily, tree of life gives HUGE energy regen, especially at level 10. It gives enough energy regen that you may have to drop some ectoplasm for corpse dust (hp regen component).

Playstyle

Keybindings are preference but here are mine

Bind Chaos Strike to right click, flashbang to 1, devastation to 2, mirror to 3, canister bomb to 4. Bind aether ray to anything you want, I use E. And I have potions on R and T.

Chaos strike in, press 1,2,3,4 and spam your aether ray. Pretty much everything will die in a second. Bosses melt to aether ray and devastation. After everything is dead just chaos strike to the next group and repeat. All your cooldowns will be up. Very fast clear speed.

Why not Pannetti?

The original build was made by Firebird109 here: http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46329

This is the 1.006 aether ray version of that build, with the modification of getting imp and time dilation.

The reason I changed from PRM to Aether ray is that once you get time dilation, which he doesn’t have, your devastation will always be up, meaning you don’t need PRM for the AOE. Also, a major weakness of his build is slow boss fights. Aether ray really speeds up boss fights with little to no downside.

Both builds have gloves and pants that boost aether ray, which are somewhat wasted on a PRM build.

Overall, AoE stays the same while single target increases greatly. Defensive ability lowers a tiny bit but you have a lower cooldown on Mirror of Ereoctes so it sort of balances out.

The two spells share a lot of the same synergy and damage type, so it doesn’t make a huge difference which one you use.

2

Nice! Glad to see you posted this and happy to have contributed.

I hadn’t actually tried the AAR version yet, but I will do so! Sounds like single-target will be a lot easier.

3

Yes thank you for your help. The DPS change is like bosses become heroes and heroes become normal mobs xD.

The only thing it is worse at is when there are 3-4 heroes all at once, but that is with like zero gear.

4

This build looks interesting, but in some senses similar to the “Lasers and Explosions” from the build compendium thread.

The biggest change seems to be that you spend an extra 7 points on mastery and pick up blast shield for extra tankiness – do you think that you lose out on a lot of clear speed because of this?

5

I’ve been playing this build, evolved over from the Panetti’s Sorcerer build that he referenced. Let me chime in.

This build is different in a number of ways. In terms of playstyle, the most significant change is getting Time Dilation. That dramatically changes how this build plays, and allows one to chain cast Mirror for near invulnerability and Devastation multiple times an encounter. It’s a ton of fun and quite effective.

Also, I think this build is a lot better built than the Lasers and Explosions one. I don’t know if things were very different in a prior game version, but here are some specific points:

-Blast Shield is absolutely amazing for survivability, and coordinating with Mirror gives near invulnerability for the duration of a fight. Skipping it loses one of the best skills in Demo.
-The Lasers build has some questionable point allocations. Neglecting to max Devastation is baffling, as that is the best boss-killer this build has. Instead, the build maxes Reckless Power, which is not terrible but not efficient, maxes Fabric of Reality, which is terrible value and not worth it, and Iskandra’s EE which is also not that helpful aside from energy regen.
-The investment into Canister Bomb, Searing Light instead of Flashbang, and lack of Vindictive Flame are also questionable.

Overall, I would say this build has a similar concept but is far more effective. AAR, Devastation, Flashbang, and Blast Shield are all more effectively skilled, and the only thing really missing is a transmuted CT, which this build could easily pick up too if really desired.

You can easily swap between them more or less except for the mastery points, so I would say try both out with the lower Demo mastery points, so missing Blast Shield, and come to your own conclusion.

6

Overall, I would say this build has a similar concept but is far more effective.

Thanks for that :slight_smile: Maybe this build should be nominated to the build thread as well – the Lasers and Explosions thread has 20 pages of discussion, and I was surprised this one didn’t.

I’ll be trying it out !

7

That thread is ~1 year old…

8

That thread is ~1 year old…

That build is the first one in the Sorcerer list in the current build compendium thread. Being in a sticky will naturally drive traffic to it, one would think.

But we digress…

9

Hey guys I actually optimized this build a LOT, and swapped around a bunch of stuff, including the 2nd class. I don’t have time to remake the thread.

With the best possible gear, the new build has max resistances, 60k aether ray dps, 15.5k hp, huge health and mana regen. I got like double the health from dropping time dilation. The build ended up having more than enough single target and AoE dps, the problem was health.

Here is the arcanist/soldier: http://grimcalc.com/build/1006-ZSIpqc

I actually learned later on that item procs do enough AoE DPS that you actually don’t need devastation to always be up. You can just rely on a super buffed up aether ray and item procs.

It turns out that the disintegration mastery connected to aether ray actually gives like 10k dps even without +%vitality, so I maxed that.

Cleansing waters attached to flash freeze, arcane bomb attached to callidor’s tempest, aetherfire to devastation, dryad’s blessing to aether ray.

Blitz replaces chaos strike so you can get a different weapon augment.

Soldier gives more overall than demo but the off-spec doesn’t matter that much, demo or soldier are both good. Soldier gives way more HP, which is nice because life regen from tree of life and giant’s blood scales with total HP. Health potions, avatar of mercy etc all scale off HP. If you want an arcanist, you need high hp, hp is king. DPS is already higher than most builds so you don’t need to buff it up at the cost of HP.

I swapped one of the rings for https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/7863-Albrecht’s-Duality

It is good because it procs very often from all the damage sources, meaning you can have devastation up like 80-90% of the time. 5% doesn’t seem like much but it procs like every 5-10s. It also converts Agrivix’s malice chaos damage, which changes agrivix malice dps from like 15k to like 20k.

Head: Outcast’s secret

Offhand: Iskandra’s texts

Neck: Avatar of mercy

Main Hand: Wrath of the Ascendant (way better than wraithfire if not demo)

Here is a character screenshot:

Usually blitz is on right click but I wanted to show DPS.

Augments are

ALL ARMOR
https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/7553-Venomguard-Powder

https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/7552-Kingsguard-Powder

https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/7556-Mogdrogen’s-Touch

(Mostly used to fill in poison and pierce resistance)

WEAPONS/OFFHAND

https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/5845-Essence-of-Ch’thon
https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/5962-Outcast’s-Wrath

JEWELRY
https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/5923-Uroboruuk’s-Path
https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/5854-Mogdrogen’s-Sanctity

The build is fully optimized and I think the best possible build for arcanist, since every spell other than aether ray and devastation in arcanist is absolute garbage. They do terrible DPS no matter how you try to synergize things.

Health regen is 192 without any Tree of life, Drad’s Blessing, or Giant’s blood procs. When they proc all proc together, mana regen goes to 950 HP / second.

DPS on aether ray goes to around 80k when arcane will and fighting spirit are activated, and they have like 100% uptime.

DPS from items is like 30k.

Devastation DPS is 20k.

Then there’s aetherfire and arcane bomb which are always up.

I believe this build has the max combination of survivability and DPS possible for an arcanist.

I beat challenger with no consumable buffs and no spending tribute coins for buffs either. I could probably beat gladiator pretty easy if I used buffs, I haven’t bother to tho.

Killing the final boss on ultimate takes like 20s and you can just ignore everything.

10

Thanks for the update!

I could be wrong, but I think the 5% chance of CDR only applies to a skill when you cast that skill, not based on damage ticks in general.

11

Also, agree that other spells in Arcanist are underwhelming. Check out this build I made though: it uses Freeze Resistance reduction to apply OFF to most heroes/bosses, stacking massive Fire Resistance reduction and fire damage. Kills Mad Queen in 12s while chain freezing her.

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48587

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I think you mean component…and what’s the component change then?

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yeah I’m not sure either but it seems to proc a lot. I know aetherfire etc can proc on every tic of aether ray or devastation. Not sure if all items behave the same way.

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The component swaps to the other that gives aether aura. Lemme google. http://grimdawn.wikia.com/wiki/Wrathstone

60% aether damage is really good.

All the component graphics can be seen on the character screenshot. I don’t want to type them all out ><

@edisonian OFF is probably the only other amazing damaging skill in the arcanist masteries. It is so good. The only disadvantage is that super bosses are mostly immune but yeah it is a sick ability.

15

How is that devotion setup posible? How did you get the behemoth tree?

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Nice to see a few more AAR builds popping up. They haven’t gotten much love lately. My first character was build from Lasers and explosions so a bit bias in favor of them. Wolfoverclocked stated he was never much of a forum guy. He actually had several updates to the build that weren’t posted to that thread but could be found on his youtube channel. So information form that thread is definitely outdated (even the last one on his channel was for 1.0.0.5, but I’ve stopped checking). All the points in IEE is for the energy regen and it was needed for sure!! especially without speccing for the tree of life. Recent updates have helped with that.

It is funny, as most of the issues you have with his build, where all changed in his latest updates. It is vastly different from that thread. Actually goes to 50/50 to use hellfire mines and Duality rings to convert chaos to aether. Does use flash bang, and maxes devastation. These are part of the issues you run into looking at thread for builds originally designed for the release version of the game…

Even though OFF doesn’t really help much with bosses…well without the help of that nights embrace amulet, it is still an awesome CC skill and a screen clearer when paired with a high conversion warpfire.

I noticed your grimcalc still have 33 points left over. What do you spend them on? Also why waste a even one point in overload? You don’t need it to get elemental balance which should be soft capped for the 25% crit damage.

17

I’ll Second the request for your thoughts on your original build Deltrus :slight_smile:
I’m already a good chunk into the sorc build, not going to restart to go soldier, so if you have thoughts on your original plan, I’m all ears.

18

This is quite interesting I have to say…I never really considered soldier for a second mastery for an aether ray build but u seem to now what u r doing…I totally encourage u to write a new detailed post for this build for the compendium since aether ray builds there aren’r exactly super common and guys like me who love the skill but arent skilled/knowledgable enough to make their own build find resources a bit scarce.

Please clarify ur devotion path, ur recommended skill leveling sequence, how gear dependent u think that build is…etc etc…this needs to be compendiumed (yes that’s a word now)

19

behemoth rewards 2 points and requires 3. So if you put one point into crossroads for a chaos, you have 3. As an intermission, you just have to put points into something which rewards chaos, and then once you have behemoth complete, you just take those points out, and the behemoth is self sustaining.

20

My original build was really unoptimized. Look at my newer build for solder/arcanist and just put the soldier points into demo skills instead.

If you are demo, it just means you get 50 points in mastery, and put the rest of the points wherever you want. Use same devotions as the battlemage. Put points in flashbang, searing light, blast shield, vindictive flame. Maybe put points in nullification for sorcerer or arcane will or something. It is up to what you think is best.

Gear should be the same I think. I know wraithfire and aldanar’s vanity give +demo masteries but honestly +mastery gear for the off spec isn’t that great. Wraithfire can be used as a substitute though, it doesn’t make much difference.

It isn’t that big of a deal that you go demo, it just means slightly less HP, but you have flashbang and blast shield to offset that. Overall you will be more vulnerable to MASSIVE hits from bosses. Flashbang basically makes it so damage is more spiky, you can be hit 3x in a row or missed 3x in a row. On average you will have the same survivability. I believe searing light works on bosses but I’m not sure.

Honestly demo should be just as good. Soldier has slightly more damage and HP, while demo has more utility with the flashbang.