Horn of Gandarr was given great damage reduction utility last patch, and I felt that this underrepresented skill could use a bit of love. This build is the Grim Dawn equivalent of a Dutch Oven, trapping your opponent and then mercilessly tooting on them. This is best summarized as the “trap n’ toot” playstyle, but just trapping and tooting does not provide a large amount of DPS. Luckily, Shadow Strike (the slap) provides the needed single target damage to help kill bosses more quickly. Accordingly, the trap, slap, n’ toot build was born.
Grimtools
Build
The build revolves around stacking as much -cd for Horn of Gandarr while simultaneously attempting to stack flat pierce damage. Noctirn is a fantastic weapon to complement the Horn of Gandarr playstyle, but one downside is that the offhand is needed for Gandarr spam but it doesn’t have any pierce damage bonuses. A ring and boot slot are used for resist overcaps, so pretty much any item will fit here to fill holes in the build.
I went for Azrakaa in devotions because WoP is a decent enough proccer for this devotion if you cast it on multiple enemies. I also went for Harp because it’s a decent investment with high cd reduction. The rest of the devotion choices are centered around getting as much pierce damage and CC resist as possible.
It’s possible to play more offensively with points in Anatomy of Murder instead of Inquisitor Seal (this was my original version of the build), but maxing Seal helps mitigate this build’s health sustain difficulties. Since most of the build’s life leech is sporadic between shadow striking and casting Gandarr, having strong forms of mitigation makes this build much tankier between casts. Earlier version of this build also had Blade Spirit as a devotion proccer, but I didn’t notice much of a DPS change between 1-point Blade Spirit and no Blade Spirit, so I removed it. If you like having little spirit friends along for the ride, feel free to use them.
Gameplay
The gameplay is simple:
1. Trap - cast blade trap to hold the unwitting enemy in place
2. Slap - Shadow Strike to close the gap
3. Toot - blow them away with a fruity tooty from your holy horn
Don’t forget to cast WoP somewhere in there, and make sure that your Lethal Assault and Seal are always active.
Shattered Realm
Video of shard 75 8:40 clear
Given that this is mostly a joke concept, the build shines in SR. AoE damage reduction and Seal allow this build to tank multiple bosses, although Seal’s damage absorb falls off hard once the player reaches shards above 80. in the mid 80’s, camera aggro abuse is required to pull 1-2 bosses at a time. A full shard 85 boss fight is a bit boring because of this, but I’ll include a video of the tail end of a boss chunk just to show that it’s possible
Crucible
Crucible 8:04 Clear
Since a large portion of the forum community plays crucible (or is at least interested in it), I’ve decided to include crucible gameplay footage as well. This is my first time playing crucible in over 2 years, so my crucible skills are quite rusty, and the build is (expectedly) quite slow. Although the AoE and trapping ability is great for clearing heroes, most bosses highly resist trapping, and clear speed suffers because of this. A better pilot could push this build to about 7 minutes, but I would be surprised with a clear speed anything less than 7.
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Piano Build :) | Piano Build :( |
| versatile | slower |
| tanky | clunky |
Piano build is a pro or a con depending on who you are! I personally don’t enjoy a build unless I’m actively casting at least 4 or 5 things. What do I mean by clunky? Since this build casts a lot of skills back-to-back but only has a cast speed of about 150%, skills take a while to actually come out. For example, sometimes my blade trap doesn’t actually cast despite hitting the keybind; I’ll hit another button too soon afterwards, and this cancels the cast animation.
Special thanks to nobody, because nobody likes Gandarr enough to give a shit.
