GrimTools: Mage Hunter, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
For fun, I’ve been coming up with ‘Monster Hunters’ - Builds that have a specific monster racial damage focus. The overall considerations are: I want to get a good amount of racial damage bonus, and use damage types that nemeses of that race have low resistances to.
I’m finding it makes it exciting to look out for certain enemy types on the battlefield. I’ve never been so excited to see Aleks appear, and it’s because you know your damage numbers are about to double versing those enemies. 
Damage vs Aetherials comes from:
- +13% (Fabric of Reality)
- +10% (Purified Salt)
- +10% (Mythical Mark of Anathema)
- +15% (Agrivix’s Malice relic)
- +25% (“Runecaster’s prefix”, “of Insanity suffix” on the dagger)
- +10% (Mythical Screams of the Aether ring)
Totals at +93% damage vs Aetherials
Crucible 160-170:
Of all the racial damage types I’ve tried, I’ve found Aetherial the trickiest one to stack given the constraints. I didn’t want to use Lightning or Aether damage types as Valdaran or Aleks are highly resistant to them, and they’re the Aetherial nemeses I wanted to build around. But, so many of the items that provided racial damage vs Aetherials are Aether based. Because of that, there was a constant decision to be made between using items that boost damage versus Aetherials, or using items that boost the overall damage of the build. Finding a balance felt tricky. It was helped by using very specific set of affix/suffixes on the dagger, but that feels sort of cheating or something in this regard. That said, having just the prefix, just the suffix, or neither, wouldn’t hurt this build dramatically, but the numbers vs Aetherials wouldn’t be quite as high. The highest crit I’ve seen with this build so far is a little over 400k.
This build has a lot of good defensive things going for it - Maiven’s Sphere for % damage absorption, Mirror as a panic button, decent physical resistance at 39%, not-bad armour at 2.2k, not bad DA at 2.7k, 12/12 Inquisitor Seal for 190 damage absorption, Horn of Gandarr for a nice 25% reduction to enemy damage, and Endless Flame provides 25% chance of fumble to enemies. Due to the 16% healing and casting speed of Flames of Ignaffar, the build has very good and fast healing.
However, the overall HP of the build is precariously low at 10k - Low mainly because the build lacks mobility; it tends to want to stick closely to the inquisitor seals, and obviously has to stand still to channel it’s primary damage and healing.
There are more powerful FoI builds out there, but I had a lot of fun putting this one together for the sake of making an Aetherial Hunter focused build. And again, it’s a weird feeling to be excited when keeping an eye out for specific baddies to burn. And it’s still not bad by any means!
Has anyone else tried making racial-specific builds? I’ve got a few more to post, but would love to see what the community’s come up with.
Enjoy~