*When the nerfed Octavius meta makes a glorious and unexpected return
**Credit for the picture goes to @Tararihen
Foreword
Octavius Soldier has gotten nerfed quite a bit since Forgotten Gods came out. And Tactician went from being one of the best cookie cutter classes in Ashes of Malmouth to a class rightfully considered to be one of the worst. So making a relatively fast Crucible farmer and a tanky deep SR crawler out of it seemed like an impossible task at first. Well, only at first.*
*This is the old description I decided to keep just for history. Tactician is doing all right currently
The Build
<<<< GRIMTOOLS >>>>*
*Craft for Slow Resist
Scroll down for Warlord and Paladin builds
Internally traumatic questions
No Forcewave? No Trauma focus in devotions? No Doom relic?
Well after some thorough testing I figured out that cooldown Forcewave is not worth it and all of that trauma-shawarma loses to the magic of converted Physical damage (that bypasses armor) and it’s not even close. Focusing on OA and decent casting speed turned out to be the recepie for success.
But Reign of Ice and Fire is not a Physical ring…
Yep, and it’s best-in-slot here. Points to Artifact Handling that are hard to come by + a proc that is a converted physical damage that goes thru armor (and heals)
No War Cry? And you call it a tank?
It is a true tank. And there are no points for War Cry, instead - Empyrion’s proc serves as damage reduction mechanism
Gear/Skills/Devotions/Leveling
Core of the build is Octavius set and wonderful Physical damage dagger - Decree of the Circle of Five (nouns in the row). Everything else is pretty standard and in-line with latest physical meta. The only trauma that Internal Trauma devotions and skills are inflicting is a moral one, so I skipped them and build became much faster and more fluent.
For leveling guides, check this forums. This is an endgame build and works as advertised once you equip all the items/skills/devotions at character level 100
Gameplay
In Crucible everything is facetankable but be careful on wave 169 around Anasteria. You don’t lose damage by kiting as long as you are making enemies step on your runes.
In Shattered Realm build I pushed the build as far as SR 90 (maybe 100? Too lazy to check).
Stats
General (before Deadly Aim)
Defense
Videos:
1.1.9.8 Ravager 1:55 facetank kill
Crucible Gladiator 150-170 5:02 run by Plasmodermic
Crucible Gladiator 150-170 5:34 run
Crucible Gladiator 150-170 5:35 run
Supertolik’s Naked Crucible Gladiator 150-170 run
In Conclusion
Thanks to @Tararihen for his help with providing a picture for the guide and to @supertolik to kindly agreeing to test this build and record a video.
BONUS BUILDS
CHINESE WARLORD*
*Build is inspired by the Octavius SR75-76 speedrunning meta, created by Chinese community. This build is a tribute to the countless Octavius specs they made and also to @banana_peel who did snb melees out of Octavius builds before it was cool
<<<< GRIMTOOLS >>>>*
*Craft one item for Slow Resist and Freeze resist
*You absolutely have to get Tyrant’s prefix on weapon and Vampiric on one of the rings.
Sometimes Grim Dawn works in mysterious ways. And this Warlord is a good example of this. Equipping just three pieces of this caster set and making build into a pure melee with a lot of dot damage yields much better results than playing Octavius Warlord “as intended”.
Build is just a tanky speed demon: it clears farmable content like SR 75-76 and buffed Crucible Gladiator 150-170 very fast and at the same time it can facetank Ravager without pharma and Callagadra (with pharma) and clear SR90. Anguish’s belt proc is negated by high physical resist and sufficient elemental overcaps.
Here are some videos with the examples of build’s performance:
Crucible Gladiator 150-170 4:09 run
Ravager 1:24 kill (no pharma/no cluster)
Callagadra 1:32 kill (~60% success rate)
SR 75-76 4:10 run (fixed map layout)
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TOP20’S BIGGEST SNUB PALADIN*
*Build is one of my favourite Octavius specs ever. You can probably make a spec that is more damaging but this one is balanced pretty well in my opinion
<<<< GRIMTOOLS >>>>*
*Craft or Slow Resist and Freeze resist
**Single-rare Ugdenbog Repeater will do. Of Fury suffix is something that you want to prioritize tho
My take on Octavius Paladin. Extremely durable, almost immortal if played right. You don’t have to stand still to do damage (but you can, build facetanks almost anything), on the contrary zip-zapping around with Vire and Amatok to damage for maximum dot-damage coverage is preferred.
Build could’ve made it into top20 but because I presented it for testing a bit too late only banana_peel managed to test it (besides me) and it didn’t get enough votes unfortunately.
Here is what it can do:
Octavius Paladin vs. Shard 90 (5:57 run, no deaths + tough bosses)
Octavius Paladin vs. Shard 100 full run (few deaths)
Octavius Paladin vs Ravager 1:47 kill
Octavius Paladin vs. Callagadra (3:09 kill)
Octavius Paladin vs. Crate (1:04 kill)
