Disintegrate all that divides and distinguishes!!!
On my first time through Grim Dawn, the mastery I chose to start off playing with was Demolitionist. Almost 1000 hours later, and now that I’ve become (hopefully) pretty competent at putting builds together, I wanted to try my hand at what I think is the quintessential Demo class fantasy: covering the entire screen in earth-shaking, flesh-melting fiery explosions!! Here’s my best shot at it.
Grimtools Link
Sheet stats with no procs. DPS shown is for Fire Strike
Fire Canister Bomb fills 5 slots pretty easily with Ulzuin’s Avatar. Relevant conversion and %WD to main skill, lots of Demo skill boosts, RR and straight up damaging procs, with a bit of a heal and duration boost to Blast Shield for more reliable defenses.
Still, defense is not the set’s strong suit - I tried to maximize Physical resistance, namely due to the fantastic Obsidian Grasp, providing flat Fire damage to boost my Canisters as well as decent skill bonuses and a huge maximum 7% phys resistance at their highest roll. Solael pants, since our Canisters can benefit from ADCtH (with Formidable or Dominator’s prefixes, which aren’t too hard to acquire) and a decent pair of Stoneplates (Impervious is pretty necessary - Demo in general is lacking in Poison and Pierce res) cover up any patchy areas of resistance and provide around 8-10% more phys res across the both of them. Mark of Divinity provides a valuable circuit break with good stat boosts and nice max Elemental resistances. Flat damage absorption from Ascension and Phoenix Fire also puts in a lot of work, but make no mistake - this is certainly a caster. A conditional one, mind you; a decent amount of things can be facetanked pretty reliably. But there are certainly equal or greater numbers of circumstances where all of the defensive measures I employed pull their weight.
SR 80-81 Clear
(Video time here is a little deceptive - my recording software fucked itself and destroyed pretty much all of Shard 81 except the boss room. The real time is somewhere around 14 minutes)
STRENGTHS:
- Fantastic damage. High RR from Ulzuin’s set procs, Thermite mines, and Guardians make mincemeat of crowds, quick work of most bosses, and chunk away decently at highly Fire resistant enemies. Especially effective against targets with larger hitboxes. Slightly dependent on Ulzuin’s Chosen activating, which is a frustration I’ll elaborate on soon.
- Decently difficult to kill for a build that lacks high sustain. Lots of absorptions, procs, and high Physical resistance.
- Flexible application of DPS. Most damage seems to come from stacking Burn, which supports a more kiting-oriented caster playstyle when the situation arises, but it works perfectly well standing still spamming bombs as well
- Flashy! Bright screen! Ooh! Yay!!!
WEAKNESSES:
- My shitty piloting on casters (I really like standing still)
- Damage is great but a little conditional. Applying burn and doing flat damage with Canister Bomb relies pretty heavily on Ulzuin’s Chosen, which despite being hardcapped, really feels like less than a 40% chance when you actually need to throw the bombs
- Iron Maiden. Fabius is a bit of a problem too, but he’s manageable if I’m able to time Ascension with an ounce of forethought. IM, on the other hand, just runs up to me and Blitzes me and takes no damage and kills me in three fucking seconds flat. I’m seriously baffled by how hard she counters me. If there’s any suggestions for her specifically on a setup like this, I’d love to hear them
NOTES/THINGS TO IMPROVE:
- I’d like to get a phys res prefix on the Stoneplates but I literally blew 10,000,000 iron to get these ones so I’m gonna just leave it as is for now
- There’s an alternate devotion path with Solemn Watcher instead of Turtle for more DA and resistances, but I think the proc on Turtle has saved my ass too much to give up. There’s also the possibility to work Magi in for more damage - as usual, I am not shy about being pretty shitty at mapping devotions
- RektByProtoss put out a Sorcerer version of this character while I was chipping away at making this and it very well could be a better second mastery. I like the extra RR and Ascension from Oathkeeper, but it is most likely objectively a worse choice than Arcanist
- I’m iffy on Fire Strike. It’s really not that much of a point investment and yields about 3x more sheet DPS as a filler than Blazing Eruption from my relic but it feels a little weird. Either way, I’m not that attached to it and will drop it if I see a decent argument for something else. Feedback appreciated.
Thanks for reading this far!