I’m back after a long time 
Have you managed to beat Lokaar or Gladiator using this gear? I’ve managed to take out 3 quarters of Lokaars’ health but don’t have the patience to go through to the end after 40 something attempts and I lost count of how many hours I spent running and kiting (I restarted the game every time I died), those damn ranged burbon clones are annoying.
Only two things left for me to finish - Port Valbury and Malmouth itself (not taking the secret(s), Mog and Rava). Got 380+/380+ Vitality Damage/Decay Bonespike dagger but I guess I should aim for perfect 414/414 or at least 400+ Vitality with Chaos (can’t remember how did I get this number but seems plausible). I’ll post my toon some time later just to show how far you could go playing self-found taking this beautiful build as a starter, if I’ll find some relic on my shoulders… I’d be so happy with Living Armor recipe but no luck so far (hope this little rant would help).
Is there any particular reason why you don’t keep Spider in your devotion tree instead of dropping it and then picking up Hawk to get the greens? Thanks.
As an aside, I’m into Ultimate now. The build plays really nicely. The only road bump I’ve run into is the Mogdrogon quest in Act 5. The second phase of the boss at the end of the dungeon beat the hell out of me in Expert mode.
@Trudel, thanks! Glad you’re having fun levelling. I agree, it’s the fastest/easiest character I’ve leveled so far.
@Nightmare, I haven’t yet. Been playing other games recently, but I imagine I’ll get back to Grim Dawn eventually. And yeah, of the attempts I did have a while back, it is super annoying and takes forever to get his health down (with the faction only gear; I’m tempted to use a few upgrades I’ve found to make it a little easier, but I kinda want to do it “pure”).
@Bykot, grats on your progress. I’d love to see how your toon turns out once you’re through everything.
@buddhabunny, you need Spider early on just to unlock points to get later better devotions. Once you have enough extra points, you can unspec it. Spider only grants some flat OA/DA (and takes a lot of points), which is not bad, but the +%OA and +% crit dmg scales better, especially with better gear. Also, Hawk costs a lot fewer points, allowing you to spec into other helpful constellations.
Dumb question, does % damage ever trump % vitality? At least at the 50 lvl the tool tip on DPS can be misleading with the different abilities, and curious if there was a break even (e.g. 15% all damage vs 40% vitality)
I’d say pure Vit > all damage. Yes, the tooltip numbers might look tempting, but you have a few sources of Vitality resist reduction here - Will of Rattosh, Spectral Wrath and Curse of Frailty (Vulnerability part), so reduced Vit resists plus full-Vitality damage combined goes better than all damage buffed with (much) lower RR. Besides, you might accumulate much bigger % Vit damage than % all Damage (my bonespike is 395% VD now iirc). I think the best tooltip for checking damage changes would be on Wendigo’s Mark (purest Vitality base available).
Have you tried using the relic sacrifice with this build? The ability looks pretty strong, 100 health loss per second doesn’t seem too hard to offset with your regeneration and your massive amounts of life leech. To that end, have you tried incorporating the dying god constellation for more offence?
Also what other relics have you tried/are using now?
Havent played in a while.
Will pick up the addon and play this build later.
Post to find the Thread again 
I’ve started with Gluttony, then switched to Mortality, for the endgame I’m aiming at Impurity (+1 Necro Skills, a bit defensive) or Necrosis (OA and debuffs). I’d better cheat Rovers for Sacred Talisman than use Sacrifice since talisman gives a bigger boost for zero price (and Sacrifice is half-useless being melee-oriented imho). And still, +1 Necro relics just show a bigger Ravenous Earth damage increase than any reasonable + %damage relics (well, I might be wrong with 500% from the talisman tho).
Hope you dont mind if i ask some “basic” questions:
There is %Vitality damage - thats obviously cool, usefull and works
and there is % Vitality decay (that is on almost every % vitality damage item anyway)
Is this usefull too? (guess: no)
RE deals a bit of poison damage - but we dont really scale it? So its not really usefull?
RE and most proccs can “miss”? Thats why we scale OA i guess.
Every offensive spell here has Vitality damage as a main part, so we’re stocking up any VitDmg and using any Vitality Resistance debuffs. Otoh there’s too few of Vitality Decay sources so we’ll skip that as being not really important.
Same with RE Poison part - although it’s a big part in RE, VitDmg is a main part of every spell in use. Yes, it won’t hurt to have some +%Poison Damage but that’s not the thing you should hunt for. Guess there might be poison-based RE caster but that’s quite a different build.
OA isn’t only about hit or miss, it’s a crit chance too, and the more you have - the better. Having at least 2,5k OA/DA is supposed to be a standard nowadays, having 3-3.5k is something very well built and geared, and everything higher is debatable due to cost/efficiency.
Hope Cerulean wouldn’t mind me mewing here.
Actually, I’m very grateful that you’re monitoring this thread and answering questions, Bykot.
Bykot’s answer is good. To add to it a little, this is a vitality focused build, so yes, RE does some poison, but it’s best to focus on one damage type to focus the build (and for us, that’s vitality). Also, just for general knowledge, every damage type has a direct damage (DD) version and a damage over time (DoT) version. For vitality, that’s vit% (DD) and vit decay% (DoT). Another example is physical% (DD) and internal trauma (DoT).
And yes, OA is there to have a reasonable crit chance on higher level mobs.
Really like this guide for a beginner, wish there where more guides like this, with so much detailed info.
So far made it to lvl 90, with a few deaths do to stupidity
got some luck with finding a few pieces of corruptor set early on.
WAS wondering if the dreadwalker set would be good for it (have 1 piece so far)?
These faction items is pretty good, Uroboruuk’s Guise and Dark One’s Gift looks attractive too tho I don’t even know how much time you should spend in game to get one full. I’d stick to greens until having a full Dreadwalker (for +2 Necro skills), according to Grimtools it’d be good (but not game-breaking good). 4-pieces Uro will do too, and DOG… well, it’s tricky to get. It’s up to you really, cause that’s beyond the point of Cerulean’s great guide.
How does the interaction between a “on attack” and a curse work?
You link CoF to wendigo - so i guess its a 15% chance to procc everytime any of my spells hits the cursed target? or is it 15% everytime i cast the curse?
Devotion skills proc only from the bound skill, so WM procs from CoF cast and then every CoF tick. Other spells won’t trigger WN no matter what.
Technically CoF is a curse (since no damage) but it’s counted as attack. My guess is that was made for counting CoF as a source of aggro, back in the days I was able to play summoners without drawing aggro at all, it was kinda cheesy.
Thank you.
How often does a curse “tick”?
Every second.
Ok, I’ve played around with Steam cloud and (finally) here’s my toon in his current state. Every piece is self-found, some are far, FAR from desirable but works more or less. Main campaign is done, killed Kuba twice on Ultimate (took long) and Moose-whatever in SoT (nearly facetanking). Ancient Grove’s last boss was a pain for sure, tons of hp, hard melee hits and fireworks all around. I’d better do Valburry for farming.
A huge field for improvements, to be honest.
Grimtools link
UPD: Moosey got his revenge with stun/freeze-locking my toon plus lucky meteors bombardment - an unusual precision with at least 3 shards, really. Cheating bastard. Otoh I had Myst.Beronath, Reforged and Myst.Leviathan this run, guess I had to pay. As an obligatory rant - still can’t get a few relic’s recipes and/or anything useful from Alkamos. Not that I’m complaining.
Are the ultimate Levels of Ravenous Earth not that good?
I have a lot of gear with +RE skill (RE level 21) and a weapon with -RE cooldown/duration right now and really enjoy it.
Is the scalling not good enough later? (im only level 54…)
Getting more “shards” on RE seems to be extremly strong and getting the cooldown down to 1,7 seconds seems to be a real strong DPS boost.
Why, they’re great. I’d stack more but finding a worthy MI takes a lot of farming, and when it comes to blues/purples, it might be tricky to balance the resistances, OA/DA, armor and HP. Goddamn puzzle.
You can’t beat a lucky rolled Bonespike tho, Vitality damage, +2 RE levels and -RE cooldown is OP. I even dreamed about dual-wielding those… but that’d destroy my relic slot.
