[1.1.4.2] Scion of the Abyss - Full Vitality AAR Warlock (SR65+)

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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The Build

Scion%20of%20the%20Abyss%20Character%20Sheet
With all permanent buffs, Hungering Void and Bloodfury. DPS shown is Albrecht’s Aether Ray.

Max Damage Setup

Obviously the Belt & Medal affixes are GDStashed, but you don’t need to do that as I show with the setup below.

Basic Barebones Setup

The build will perform with a base item (affixes can be anything) Lunal’Valgoth’s Girdle and a Rylok Mark of Readiness. Max out Wasting to offset the loss of inherent DA on the character.

Build Features

Upsides:

  • 100% Vitality AAR!
  • Great sustain
  • Full spellcaster gameplay
  • Build does not require specific affixes on MI items

Downsides:

  • Run speed is not capped
  • Can run into Energy issues (despite being an Arcanist!)
  • Build requires 5 items for full conversion
  • No kick-ass RED BEAM OF DEATH visual :frowning:
Build Overview

Here’s my idea of a Blood Mage in Grim Dawn! :slight_smile:

This is my approach to a build that I have never seen posted online (and I searched around for quite a bit!). Funny enough, it seems that the Decree of Malmouth is all the rage this week with a build from @Nery and another from @Valinov using this pretty rare scepter.

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions or suggestions! Feedback is always welcome.

Equipment Choices

Try to get maximum Aether to Vitality and Elemental to Vitality conversion and be sure to craft the Helmet & Amulet for Slow Resistance

Core Items:

  • Amulet: Conduit of Arcane Whispers. [24% WD to AAR, necessary resists]
  • Weapon: Decree of Malmouth. [~50% Elemental to Vitality conversion, Crit Damage, +%OA]
  • Belt: Lunal’Valgoth’s Girdle. [~50% Elemental to Vitality conversion, affixes don’t matter]
  • Off-hand: Mythical Skull of Gul’Amash. [~50% Aether to Vitality conversion, +%OA, Casting Speed, mods to SoC]
  • Helm: Mythical Abyssal Mask. [~25% Aether to Vitality conversion, -10% Vit RR to BP]
  • Chest: Mythical Heart of Yugol. [~25% Aether to Vitality conversion, tons of Health, 5% ADctH, tons of +%Vit Damage]

You could choose to use the Mythical Dread Knight’s Guard instead to get the conversion, however, they are more for a Spellbinder and I think the Mythical Bloodfury Spaulders are more helpful with Warlock. This build needs as much ADctH as it can to pass through that 24% WD on AAR, so the chest and shoulders are BiS in my opinion.

Supporting Items:

  • Ring 1: Mythical Signet of the Fallen. [Typical ring for Vitality builds with Casting Speed & -15% Vit RR proc]
  • Ring 2: Mythical Wraithstalker Band. [Casting Speed and +2 AAR are essential, but Mythical Cursebearer is an option if you go with Serenity Relic instead]
  • Shoulders: Mythical Bloodfury Spaulders. [Health, ~5% ADctH with the excellent Bloodfury proc giving lots more +% Vit Damage and Casting Speed]
  • Pants: Mythical Wraithborne Legwraps. [+%OA and +2 AAR are needed here]
  • Gloves: Mythical Aethereach. [Essential gloves in any AAR build]
  • Boots: Mythical Deadwalker Footpads. [Gives needed +2 AAR, but I hope these boots get some love in 1.1.5.0]
  • Medal: Rylok Mark. [SoC mod is helpful and prefix doesn’t matter, however, try to get of Readiness here]
  • Relic: Eldritch Pact. [Serenity is in too many of my builds and I wanted to use this after seeing @sir_spanksalot’s recent build #turndownforwhat!]
  • Movement Rune: Rune of Displacement. [No movement skill is needed for Devotion procs, so go with this one]
Devotions

Max Damage Setup:

  • Will of Rattosh > to Albrecht’s Aether Ray
  • Twin Fangs > to Bloody Pox
  • Raise the Dead > to Sigil of Consumption
  • Hungering Void > to Curse of Frailty
Gameplay

Keybinds:

  • LMB: Point to Move
  • RMB: Albrecht’s Aether Ray
  • Mouse Scroll Up/Down: Mirror of Ereoctes/Nullification
  • Keyboard 1: Curse of Frailty
  • Keyboard 2: Blood Pox
  • Keyboard 3: Sigil of Consumption
  • Keyboard 4: Rune of Displacement
  • Keyboard V: Blood of Dreeg
  • Mouse Middle Button: Bloodthirster

Standard procedure:

  • Movement rune in/out.
  • Debuff using CoF and BP, drop SoC.
  • Fire away with AAR, only refreshing debuffs and SoC when necessary. Try to maximize your AAR channeling whenever possible!
  • Use Nullification for offense and defense and use Mirror of Ereoctes when you are in danger.
  • Kite around your SoC if necessary.
Build Performance

Shattered Realm:

The build is SR65+, maybe higher. I only checked to see if it’s possible.

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Crucible:

I don’t play Crucible, so I’m not sure how it will perform. I am attaching the save file if anybody wants to take a stab at it. Since the build is SR65+ I imagine it can complete 170, but I’m not sure of the time and the buffs/banners required.

If anybody takes it for a spin and posts a video, I will attach it here and give appropriate credit. Thanks in advance if you do!

My Conclusions and Suggested Changes to Items

This build is pretty fun and fits the bill for what a Warlock should be in my eyes. That being said, it is very tough to assemble having a total of 5 needed items to fully convert AAR!

My suggestion would be to change the rarely utilized Mythical Abyssal Mask to be a Vitality AAR item with the following changes:

Move the +3 to Blood Pox and the -10% Vitality/Bleeding RR item modifier to BP to another item.

Add +3 to AAR with an item modifier to AAR to add Flat Vitality Damage as well as change 100% Aether to Vitality to AAR. Don’t forget the RED BEAM OF DEATH visual change too please! :slight_smile:

I would increase the casting speed on the item with the change to Vitality AAR as well to +9% CS.

With this change, the build would only need 3 items to convert the damage, one of which is a MI and the other is a low drop-rate Legendary. That would be manageable, but still tough to get the needed items.

Additionally, I think the Decree of Malmouth needs some Casting Speed…

Enjoy my take on a Blood Mage! :smiley:

Here is the character file, so people can try it out or take it for a spin in the Crucible: _Scion of the Abyss.zip (913.2 KB)

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Thanks to @thejabrixone for the build post template.

7 Likes
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loving this already!

May I make some suggestions?

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Feeback is always welcome!

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I had come up with a vitality aar build somewhere in a private message, but never got around to testing. I can’t even remember how it compares gear wise to yours. I’ll find it once I’m off work.

Nice build.

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if you’re gdstashing, use aleks pants for +3 to disintegration!!!

spectral wrath ring is also bis imo

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Thanks Valinov!

I just don’t have much time to play, so GDStash is for me. I really try not to use it though, so that’s why I put up the Basic Barebones build that doesn’t have affixes except of Readiness on the medal which isn’t really that hard to get.

Disintegration is tough to get on this character, but that should help some. Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll check it out!

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also, jsyk, single elemental conversion (e.g. the one on voidheart ring) is applied before tri-elemental conversion (e.g. the one on decree of malmouth)

so good call not using it!

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complicated fucking question man, and I don’t know everything about conversion.

But basically there’s your typical order of conversion:

  1. If I transmute AAR’s lightning to vit using clairvoyant’s helm, running 2x alladrah’s dagger isn’t going to make it fire.

  2. then there’s this weird tri-ele and single-ele conversion hierarchy take takes place if there are conflicting conversions occuring on the same level

e.g. if I were to use PoT3’s fire to acid conversion, and stacked that with murmur’s kiss conversion, i would get 100% fire/acid conversion.

Assuming that this spec is using blood orb, which has 100% ele to chaos, none of the fire will be converted to chaos since they’ve all been converted to acid.

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This was the result of 4 hours of testing @cinder, @hammyhamster1 and I were doing before @DenisMashutikov finally came in and cleared up all the doubts we had.

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I thought the layout looks familiar, turn out you use my template… :crazy_face:

Interesting take on vitality AAR! BTW, you should definitely use Alek pants for more disintegration, cursebearer ring as opposed to signet of the fallen because its RR is more reliable, also take the points from elemental balance and others and put it to BoD for more OA.

BTW, can’t see your devo now, but I suggest you to use wendigo proc in a vitality caster build such as this. Should make the build even more immortal.

On a second thought, wraithborne pants is better. Maybe something like this:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/O2G4azlV
Need to craft all for either slow res or stun res depending on what you want to do.

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here is the vit aar binder i theory crafted https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YVWOMwdV

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14

wow well done mate +rep

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Well done, Warlock is still exotic class, so nice job adding lil’ bit diversity.

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This build hasn’t been updated in a long, long time. Any chance for an updated one with the new gear being a possibility or updated old gear? Especially now that we have the FOA dlc out and things have changed quite a bit since 2019…This is of course assuming you still play. :wink:

I have a new build that I have been working on with the new/updated gear that focuses on AAR and Doom Bolt. My AAR has a Tri-Beam (Hidden bonus on several pieces of gear that add +1 to AAR beam). I am using two, but there is a total of five pieces. They just don’t all mesh well because of damage conversion conflicts on the gear. I can’t even imagine what a meme 5 Ray AAR would even look like!

I am def no master theorycrafter or anything, so I am sure it probably isn’t Meta Tier, at least not without some changes or suggestions. I am unsure about devotions, and my component and augments setup for sure. Maybe even skill point wise suggestions.

If you or anyone else has suggestions that would be great. I would like to keep the Tri-Beam pieces for sure though which is a medal and an Off-Hand.

Here is a link to the plan, I am at level 94 now in ultimate and haven’t done any crucible or SR runs to fully test it out yet. Just Totem farming and normal campaign. So far I have no deaths and nothing has even remotely been an issue.

I use AAR for trash mobs and have Doombolt on LMB for Bosses or just generaly quickly getting rid of most things in a general area. On Totems, I trigger, lay down AAR for a few seconds while the enemies are spawning. Hit the Doom Bolt as soon as they are up and attacking, which triggers twice with a 2-3 second cooldown. If anything is still alive, I hit AAR again for a second or two. IF anything makes it past that (so far nothing does) I hit all 4 of my spells at once COF/BOD/MOE/Null. If anything beyond that survived I would just repeat the process.

LMK what you think.

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Vitality AAR was always the damage type that nobody talked about and for good reason - it was terrible! I’ve moved on to other adventures in my GDStashing and meme-building ways.

I had made this into a Vitality/Chaos AAR/SoC build a while back until Z killed that with the Tainted Power Transmuter and Black Flame Set changes… #DeadBuild :skull:

If I were to remake this build today I would do something like this as a start: Warlock, Level 100 (GD 1.3.0.7) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator. It’s by no means complete, but I would have fun with getting 3 beams to AAR, plus SoC and a fully converted Vitality Devastation (because why not??).

Best of luck with your build and I’m glad you’re enjoying Vit AAR! :sunglasses:

18

Hmm, Interesting. I guess I can understand that. Well, thanks for the feedback. I like how my build seems to play, no idea how it will hold up long term. That remains to be seen. I may have to make some tweaks here and there. Your new build looks great too, though I am curios why SoC over Doombolt since Doombolt has such raw and devastating power? I hate that grimcalc doesn’t give you the damage for AAR so I can look at the difference in Damage between yours and mine without having to build yours or do (gasp, yuck) Math… :wink:

I at least appreciate you answering me back though. Maybe I will post my build on here and see what feedback I get from others, but not till I hit 100 which shouldn’t be long and definitely do some more testing. I saw the Sacred Plating component you put on yours as well. I don’t rmember seeing that in my inventory so I am definitely going to have to have another look and change up my components and augments if nothing else. Ha ha.

Have a good one!

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