Drain essence is one of my favorite skills in Grim Dawn due to its insane lifesteal and Aoe. I made an aether and cold drain essence builds before so I wanted to try another version which is the vitality one.
Cons
Piano build that might not suit everyone.
It requires a lot of green MI items with good affixes to function properly which means it is not a beginner friendly build.
Damage is average 300k max.
a lot of monsters have high vitality resistance in the game which means you will not deal a lot of damage most of the time. ( sacrifice damage for sustain ).
Tips : craft for stun res. Do not level with drain essence as it requires a lot of energy. Level with sigil of consumption or ravenous earth as it is more optimal especially when you get the green MIs that support sigil and ravenous earth.
Conclusion : The build is very fun to play especially when you watch trash mobs get feared and confused by ill omen and bloody pox at the same time. damage could be higher with Leafmane trophy but I opted for the shield because I had energy issues. I hope that you will enjoy this build and see you later .
I made similar build, except I went for Drain Essence/Sigil hybrid with Skull of Gul’Amash. Main reason - you drop Sigils and they stay on the ground for a duration so you can channel DE without interruptions, unlike Doom Bolt which needs to be cast every 3s. Because of mods on off-hand and scepter Sigils deal decent supplementary damage, too.
I also removed all greens, except medal and weapon (replaced them with Heart of Yugol chest, Girdle of Stolen Dreams belt and Boneweave Leggins). I will probably switch to MI legs (resistances are a bit tight) if I drop a good double-rare but for now legendaries are better for me.
Because of aether->vit conversion on off-hand I’m able to use Bloodfury Spaulers which give me almost 100% uptime on +150% vitality damage and +14% casting speed.
I also ditched Vigar’s Hunger because its mods for Drain Essence are pointless since you are immortal as long as you are casting. I’ll probably pick it up again once new patch hits since it will get some mods for Siphon Souls and it might be worth to get it for another vitality decay proc. But for now, I’m using weapon damage Conduit for Drain Essence which gives me ~30k dps in character sheet with only permanent buffs (without hungering void and bloodfury).
Drain Essence has a rough Act 1 but as soon as you finish it you can farm your shield and chest. Medal is early in Act 3. So you get a decent amount of pieces before you even complete main campaign. 2 important pieces of gear are in the same location, too.
Energy issues are solved with Ectoplasm and Scales of Ulcama devotion.
But this is just me - I dislike leveling up with one build and then switching because I use campaign to get comfortable with a character and train muscle memory. I like my build to become “online” as soon as possible (preferably, right after act 1), even if it’s not optimal to do it this way.
Overall, good attempt. Casting speed seems to be low and I don’t like Doom Bolt at all (interrupts channeling too often). I gave up on MIs (except two but weapon can be shop-farmed and medal matters only for mods) because I’ve got all necessary legendaries before I was able to get MIs with relevant bonuses. Green chest and legs are probably BiS but I think Gul’Amash > Spectral Shield (unless you are going for retaliation build) because of casting speed, mods to DE and energy regen.
i’m a crazy person and love vitality drain essence so i’ve been playing a variation of this build that opts for the sigil vs doom bolt as @thaeril recommends, and uses the devotions from Epic Compendium of Epic set Builds - #95 by MergosWetNurse because i wanted scales, dying god, and rattosh
i’ll post a grimtools link after i finish leveling it and get it a bit more optimized. i agree that it’s possible to level with drain essence (but maybe don’t try to kill kyzogg with it, that was excruciating). it’s a bit squishy before you get the ascendant source and some of the endgame devotion procs.
sorry for the thread necro but there isn’t a more recent drain essence cabalist build that i could find on here
still missing endgame pieces like the helmet, amulet, and pants, but this char is able to take on most nemeses comfortably and can clear shard 50 on SR. the lack of freeze duration reduction makes moosi a complete pain in the ass. hilariously though this config has so many procs that i was able to survive entirely off the life leech from those while being stuck frozen from his stupid ice summons for 5-10 seconds at a time lol.
i don’t have a component in my helm atm because i don’t want to waste the rare mats for something i’m going to switch out.
i like lifeblaze for shoulders over dread knight; the temp buff from bloodfury spaulders is also really nice but i don’t have enough spare resists to swap out for that. i was using necrosis prior to impurity and i like that debuff more than ill omen, but needed the aether resist and plus skills from impurity. probably going to switch to bloody pox as my secondary debuff vs ill omen once i get the abyssal mask since that adds RR to it.
for devotions i’m wondering if i should tweak my blue and yellow constellations to take turtle, there are still a handful of situations where i take so much instantaneous damage (korvak) it kills me even despite the insane life leech
got some equipment upgrades (finally got the mythical abyssal mask blueprint and some tonic of reshapings so i could restat to equip the highest level korvan plating), which beefed up my resistances and DPS quite a bit. vigar’s hunger, a signet of the fallen, and maybe some better green affixes would be the only equipment changes left to finish this guy up. also would prefer a rune of vampiric shadows for mobility, although the AoE from soul strike is very nice.
this char is feeling much more solid, working my way up from SR shard 55, the only thing that really can kill me is if i do something stupid like facetank fabius and the map room guardians after getting sundered, or jump straight into zantarin’s stupid shotgun attack.
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