We’re vitality hybrid now! Much less blue, much more red, better survivability but still no damage and no item support. Credit to @Nery for creating original concept, big thanks to @tqFan and @lMarcusl for help with troubleshooting the OG cold build.
GT link: Apostate, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.0) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
Playstile:
Standard Inquisitor channeler. Stand in the Seal channeling Drain Essence, cast Rune of Hagarrad on CD. If you need to move, make sure you can recast the Seal on arrival.
Features:
Tanky - and much more tanky than the previous iteration. It can ignore boss mechanics at farmable SR levels, it can generally go higher now. Hurray!
Still prone to catastrophic pulls - I’ve spent a lot of effort originally eliminating Ill omen from the build - but now we have Hand of Ultos to pull things into us from offscreen! At SR 85, main cause of death is “HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET AGGROED OVER THERE”. It is what it is, exercise caution.
Half-decent damage - it’s not good, it’s not Reaper-levels, but it’s an improvement over cold, especially in AOE department. Kuba still dies from old age mostly (because it resists all our damage).
Itemization:
Pants - the value here is in “of Incantations” suffix, as we rely on it for disruption protection. Otherwise you will die of crayfish. So try to score those pants with the suffix at least, or try Mythical Arcane Harmony Leggings as substitute. Just be mindful of elemental resistance - it will go below 80% outside of the Seal, which isn’t optimal.
Offhand - the main value is in Essence Drinker’s prefix, as it patches our casting speed. Try to get some OA on suffix. The item itself can not be substituted, as it dictates entirety of the build here. The conversion percentage, due to a lot of back-and-forth in the build, is relevant in one exact case - the higher your conversion, the faster you will kill Moosa’s summoned crystals. Which is an important task, so 50%+ conversion is desirable.
On the conflicting conversions and the pain of being an Apostate:
So, yeah. The Leafmane trophy. Let’s talk the yeti in the room.
Theoretically speaking, LT is the dream item for the build. It gave poor Alice much needed flat damage to DE, increased lifeleech, casting speed, some Inquisitor love AND resist shred! All of those fun things that only Reapers usually get, amazing! It’s really a shame that said shred is for vitality, huh… And there’s a global elemental to vitality conversion… On a cold build…
Well, turns out it’s not all bad. Due to how DE acquires most of its cold damage, the global vitality conversion almost doesn’t affect it, and it remains mostly cold. And suddenly, a lot of misaligned Inquisitor elemental damages get converted to vitality - we’re talking relic proc, Aura of Censure, the whole seal and Hand of Ultos proc. So whatever damage we lose due to the trophy, we get back elsewhere. Mostly.
This leaves the biggest victim of said conversion - Rune of Haggarad, which just casually becomes half-vitality. With the recent changes to activation time RoH became a much more reliable skill, we now have the points to spare for it, and it steps in to replace AOE we lost from Leviathan. Don’t misunderstand me - RoH is NOT a Blade Spirit, it will NEVER be as good as Blade Spirit, Chillwhisper is really a BS-supporting set in disguise, and any DE or RoH bonuses it has is mostly for bad ERP like what this build does.
But it’s a fun bad ERP, so we integrate more vitality damage and shred into the build to support the poor rune. Too bad we still can’t convert pierce on the thing, as Morgoneth ring loses us too much casting speed to be practical, and there are no other options. This whole process also brings us to the second biggest discovery of the build - Rattosh.
Rattosh is a chad. We aren’t even after his Vitality RR, though it’s good - the real prize here is 10% reduction of lifeleech resistance, which FINALLY makes DE lifeleech competetive with… literally any other skill if I’m being honest. This reduction would probably find its value even on the “pure” cold build, and together with 5% leech on the Trophy FINALLY brings the build to a reliable tanking potential.
1.2.1.0 endgame performance:
SR:
SR 81, no deaths. Getting killed here will require some active effort. 80-81 and anything below is consistently farmable.
SR 85 can be cleared deathless and on time, but it requires some luck with shards and pulls. All nemeses and most shattered bosses still can be facetanked, though paying attention to the sunders and mechanics is a better idea by now.
Crucible:
Full buffs without extra spawn at 6.18. As proud as I am of that result, the run was an outlier and consistent clear times remains somewhere at 6.50-7.00, on par with the previous build. It’s less due to damage being bad, and more due to the need to walk towards distant targets and place our stuff. We aren’t mobile. At all.
Full buffs with extra spawn at 7.01. I mean… This is ALSO almost a minute faster than the previous build results… I’m shaving off 30 seconds off the CR number in the title. Poor Alice deserves it.
Legacy link for the OG cold build. I really liked the way it looked: Apostate, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
