[1.2.1.3] my first playthrough, completely blind - build advise

Hi everyone!

As the title suggests, I’m new to GD. I mainly play PoE, but I want to try something new. I have the base game without DLCs. I think GD is a pretty cool game, I don’t know why I missed it until now. But anyway, I wanted to share my first build and get some tips from some older players. As I said, I went in completely blind, until now the build feels solid, but I’m just level 50 and begin Elite now.

So what do you say?

First advice is to buy full game.

The incoming damage is based on you are having 80% resistances to each type but physical. So push them to their limit.

there are two variants of defending yourself from physical threats. bumping armor or physical resistance. armor reduces damage ‘flatly’ so if u caught 1k damage for example it will be reduced by armor value (if you having 100% armor absorption, you can watch it’s value by pointing on armor stat, it says you have 70% now).
Physical resistance reduces incoming physical damage by %.

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well, same like POE, u would cap your res, before u can play the game, you should buy all DLC to enjoy it all (without it, imagine play POE but no endgame content). Elite suck 25% all res from u, and 50% on ultimate. so with your build right now, u will die a lot even at Elite, so should stay at normal and grind some “green” gear, with lots of res (DLC helps a lot on that)

Whilst I agree that you should get the DLC expansions, that may not be an option for you or you may not want to do that yet. (I played the base game without DLC’s on my first character then later on bought the DLC’s and since made 5 more characters so it is definitely “worth it” from my experience.

In terms of your current build - the skill point allocation looks quite messy to me. You are spread out across quite a few different damage types. Grim dawn (afaik) is a game where you want to focus on 1 maybe 2 damage types and then you can be more selective about the items that you find to match those damage types. It will also help you to pick out the right devotions - again to match the main damage type you want to focus on.

To make matters more complicated, certain skills/items in the game “convert” one damage type to another by a %. This type of stat is quite tricky so you might want to avoid it unless you know you want to specifically change the damage type into some other type.

Other than this, the main idea around making a build is to focus on a main damage ability - usually goes on your right mouse button slot, and then complement this with defensive abilities and other skills that can reduce the enemies resistances to the type of damage you are focusing on.

On the topic of resistances, as others have said above, you want to aim for 80% on all of them (except physical resistance which is much harder to get)

  • elemental (fire cold lightning) resistance you can get easily from item stat and complement with components
  • poison res you can use antivenom salve on belt slot
  • Pierce and bleed res use silk swatch on pants/shoulders
  • Vitality use soul shards in both rings
  • aether res use aether soul in amulet/medal or purified salt on weapon/shield/offhand

Basically having the resistances up to 80 comes first and then if you have those capped you can use components for damage or other things.

Jump in to elite, check the resistances you are missing, then go back to normal difficulty and you can put in the required components to fix the resistances.
Also you may need to change out some of the items that have resistances as a stat on it because components alone might not be enough.

Once you have these things sorted you should be able to survive easier and also deal more damage to progress with the new difficulty.

edit:

I am definitely no expert but my suggestion for the skill point allocation is to put 1 point in curse of frailty and max out vulnerability from the occultist - this will provide enemy resistance reduction of 25%. You can remove points from sigil of consumption and solaels witchfire.

and for the arcanist skill points you can mostly leave it as is if you enjoy calidors tempest as your main skill otherwise you can consider changing to a trozan sky shard build and put all the points along that skill line up to star pact.

hopefully someone who is more of an expert can chime in and give further tips

Take points out of Occultist and max out Blood of Dreeg. Get Behemoth devotion. And put Corpse Dust on all your jewelry. This will give you some pretty serious health regeneration, which will make your life way easier.

When you reach Honored reputation or better, you can buy augments from faction vendors. That should help with the resistance penalty on Ultimate. Note that you can use a component and an augment on the same item at the same time.

When it comes to devotions, I’d respec Kraken(needs a two-hander) and Sailors Guide. And I’d get Jackal and Behemoth. And then I’d respec Imp as well.

Get 10/10 in Curse of Frailty/Vulnerability. For the radius, duration, and resistance reduction. And it’s great and casting Arcane Bomb. You can take points from your Arcanist passive skills.