[1.2.1.5] Hungering whispers - Chillwhisper cold/vitality DE Apostate [6.30 Crucible, SR34]

Serafim_94 · June 11, 2023, 8:00pm

meme

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.

1.2.1.6 preview:

So there are good news and bad news.
Good news are, we are getting flat DE damage all over, which is always a massive buff to our thing. We’re trading 2 less targets for it though.
Good news also are, RoH is getting a damage buff too.
Massively good news are, necros are getting native cold shred, and due to galaxy-brain levels of theorycrafting on this build we’re prepared for it in advance, and almost won’t need to reallocate skillpoints.
The bad news are, this is one of those buffs that actually calls for reevaluating SR and Crucible performance again. FML, just a week after retirement -_-

1.2.1.5 state:

I missed the last 2 patches, but I don’t think there were any major changes for us. Build is still the best it has been, with its foot firmly in SR34 territory. Rune of Hagarrad is actually a skill now. Solid A- all along.

Build is also probably the best it will ever be. Barring some miracle items in FOA, I foresee no possibility of major buffs without fundamentally changing the way DE works. So the build updates are put on hold. The need to re-time Crucible 10th time in a row is killing me -_-

1.2.1.5 GT link: Apostate, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - 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 high SR, 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. Big chunk of RoH cold damage is also unconvertable now. 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.

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.

1.2.1.5 endgame performance:

SR:

SR34, with 1 death but still on time. Don’t stand in dumb stuff. Anything below should be consistently farmable in facetank mode.

SR36, with deaths. Demands extremely careful piloting against certain bosses, making build barely reliable. Generally ill-advised. Still possible though.

Crucible:

Full buffs without extra spawn at 6.29. A consistent result which can probably be slightly improved by better piloting and targeting. Safe and uneventful.

Full buffs with extra spawn at 6.43. Also safe and uneventful, and a testament to how far build’s AOE has advanced since creation.

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

afanasenkov26 · June 11, 2023, 8:57pm

hello there!

may I suggest making some tweaks to your build, probably sth like this: Apostate, Level 100 (GD 1.1.9.8) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
a bit better phys res, capped slow, more energy regen and better skills distribution (like you really need to max Artifact Handling while playing runes).

unfortunately, it will be nigh impossible to do any supers (except for maybe Mog).

Serafim_94 · June 11, 2023, 11:12pm

Good variant!

I’ve been experimenting a lot with RoH point distributions in previous patch. Sadly, my conclusion is that the build is explicitly NOT an RoH build, and as such I’d rather put more focus into DE. Adding or substracting points from any of the 3 RoH damage nodes made almost no observable difference back then. It’s slightly more of a difference now due to flat buffs, but barely. The rune here is mostly to serve as eye candy, to debuff, and to proc devos, in that priority order

The build also used to be really dependent on the combination of its debuffs to just live. It got better, but I really don’t want to test it without Blood Boil.

Edit: I also have to point out that Ultos devotion path still isn’t sustainable energy-wise, which is why I abandoned it for Leviathan/Harp initially, with Scales replacing Harp to iron it out completely. In prolonged fights (Crucible in particular) it will run out of energy sooner than energy potion comes off cooldown.

Serafim_94 · November 16, 2023, 10:06pm

1.2.1.3 patchnotes:

Class changes:

Necro:

Hungering Reach: increased Targets scaling with rank to 5 by rank 12, 9 by max ultimate rank
Decomposition: increased Vitality damage scaling with rank

Inquisitor:

Word of Pain: increased damage scaling with rank
Word of Agony: increased Lightning damage scaling with rank and increased % Damage scaling with rank to 144% by rank 12, 264% by max ultimate rank
Death Sentence: increased Elemental damage scaling with rank

Devotion changes:

Item changes:

Mythical Deathbound Amethyst: increased % Vitality dealt as Cold modifier for Drain Essence to 100%
Mythical Riftwarped Grasp: increased Vitality damage modifier for Drain Essence to 140
Chillwhisper Set: added 100% of Pierce dealt as Cold modifier for Spectral Binding and increased Targets modifier for Drain Essence to 6

Preliminary thoughts:

We would be so back if we ever were there in the first place. DE damage is buffed, full pierce to cold RoH conversion is here - and of particular value is a double buff to Hungering reach, which combined with RoH should make our AOE situation that much better.

With build’s focus shifted more towards cold, reassessment of our vitality investment is pending. Rattosh most likely will stay. Signet of the fallen might go.

Serafim_94 · November 22, 2023, 6:44pm

Why it still sucks ass: notes for begging Zantai for new itemization in expac

Cold DE is just a bad skill with this set (and maybe just bad overall):

1.1: It can deal 2 times more damage than now, and both AAR and FoI will still win over it due to sheer AOE potential. While chad AAR caster damages the whole screen in front of him, virgin DE user will still be running to enter the pitiful cast radius to attack its max 11 targets cap. FoI is more comparable due to its own crippled range, but…

1.2: It’s borderline impossible to plug % weapon damage into DE. There’s exactly one item in the whole game that does that - Night herald, which comes at a non-viably high opportunity cost, competing with main hand, and demanding dual wielding to be taken in offhand. Where it still competes with offhands. This heavily limits the damage DE can deal, while also feeding into its terrible lifeleech. We’re getting there. Meanwhile FoI casually pumps 58% weapon damage on its core node, which can be further improved by items. AAR potentially can get 16% from BiS neck slot, on top of its overall superior range. That and 1.1 culminate in…

1.3: …our final destination - DE lifeleech is a joke. It’s 15% on core. Paired with its AOE problems, that’s absolutely not enough. You can increase it to 25% with Vigar’s hunger, but it competes for a slot with vitality>cold conversion. Meanwhile, AAR gets to the 15% with a BiS offhand and one of 2 BiS amulets. The second BiS amulet is Conduit with % weapon damage, so that also leeches. FoI easily leeches with its native weapon damage. Both FoI and AAR will leech off anything in their radius, while DE is capped at 11 targets tops (actually lower, because that’s with MI). GG.

Bottomline: at the endgame level with itemization at hand, cold DE is a skill with barely competitive damage, absolutely noncompetitive AOE and barely competitive lifeleech. FoI is strictly superior. AAR is infinitely superior to both. Conversion options for cold DE further cripple it, where both AAR and FoI find their conversions casually on native sets and their own mutators.

RoH is a terrible skill, and Chillwhisper is a terrible set to support it:

2.1: Runes suck. Period. Between RoH and RoK, the first sucks even more. It needs more skill points to dump into than RoK, it doesn’t shotgun like RoK does, it has no immediate effect like RoK does, it has worse coverage than RoK. It’s trash.

2.2: Chillwhisper sucks. Chad Ardor of Octavius set offers to RoK the following: 400 internal trauma over 2 seconds, 240 physical damage, and 100% fire damage converted to physical. Virgin Chillwhisper set offers: 600 frostburn over 3 seconds, 80 fucking cold damage, and meaningless 33% energy cost reduction. No pierce to cold conversion. Do i really need to explain which set supports its respective rune better? Really. 80 fucking damage. Pierce to cold conversion is strictly unavailable to the build, requiring either a dualwield weapon or rings competing with RR options. Fuck.

Bottomline: runes are inherently bad, and RoH is inherently worse than RoK, with infinitely worse support from supposedly dedicated set. RoH is a terrible fucking skill with 0 redeeming qualities to it.

Itemization for cold DE apostate doesn’t exist. It’s all for Reaper.

Chillwhisper itself is a Reaper set, giving it a secondary skill in form of Blade spirit that just shits all over RoH. BS gets full pierce to cold conversion from the set, lifeleech and comparable (if not superior) damage bonuses, while not being a garbage rune.

Riftwarped grasp - vitality/chaos item for Cabalists. Mandatory regardless.

Cord of violent decay - spellbinder/defiler support.

Night herald - spellbinder support.

Scion of bitter winds - reaper support, loses half its value otherwise.

Leafmane trophy - an actual apostate support, but only for vitality DE and with conflicting conversions. Fuck.

Grasp of the dead - reaper support, loses half its value otherwise.

Gravetouch - reaper/oppressor support, loses half its value otherwise.

Speaker for the dead - reaper support, if for a different skill. Only has value for its RR shred.

Vigar’s hunger - native necro item, yay. No bonuses to inquisitor.

Deathbound amethyst - reaper support, still has value though.

Ilgorr’s eternal vigil - reaper support, loses half its value otherwise.

Bottomline: fuck Apostate. It terribly lacks items to support it, above all a viable offhand choice. While at current point in the game it’s probably too late to ask for items like that, I put my hopes into FoA release to rectify this damn mess.

Serafim_94 · June 20, 2024, 1:05pm

You know what? Fuck this. Maybe we aren’t good. Maybe there is no good cold Apostate setup, maybe cold DE is reaper-exclusive. Maybe we need GDstashed greens just to function. So what? Let’s embrace the madness.

We aren’t good, but that’s not bad. We’re bad, but that’s good. Let’s build a cold/vitality hybrid. Let’s pump conflicting conversions, because hey - the Reapers can do it.

Above is an experimental setup pending current testing. So far the results at SR85 are promising - as in “better than building cold or ripping off TQfan’s Reaper setup”. But I’m currently swamped at my job, so testing will take a few days, and, if successful, IDK when I’ll rewrite the guide.

So far it performs much safer against the hero hordes - comfortably even, as lifeleech is much higher than before. It also reaches consistency against Fabius at SR85, where the previous build did not.

Final edit and thoughts: the current version achieves full consistency at SR85 against all the usual suspects. It can withstand the hero hordes now. It can facetank all nemeses through their Sunder mechanics with exception of Iron maiden (because why on earth would you even try). It can facetank absolute majority of Shattered bosses - you can even try your luck not moving against Outcast and Gargabol, though I wouldn’t recommend it. Actual non-braindead piloting should provide even more consistent results.

As for damage - I tried TQFans Reaper at the same SR level. We are NEVER getting that damage. Not even close. While our numbers may look comparable on paper, and while RoH is finally a skill worth putting points into, it’s nowhere close to what 4 Blade spirits provide to Reaper. And it will take, like, doubling or tripling the RoH damage to reach it - so not in this lifetime. Blade spirits are BS. And we still do the absolutely retarded conversion hybrid after all.

We are somewhat tankier though. Who would have guessed.

Retarded math sheet:

Chillwhisper crown always produces less vit>cold conversion than offhand elemental>vit. Current items at 30% and 40% respectfully.

DE native is:

290 cold (unconvertable)
234 vitality
1102 decay

Items flat:

180 cold
198 vitality

432 convertable vitality total

Items DE conversions:

75% vit>cold
40% ele>vit

Thus after conversion:

290 cold
324 cold (conv)
108 vit (left)
72 vit (conv)
108 cold (left)
826 frostburn (conv)
275 decay (left)

Total DE(should be multiplied by 1.15):
722 cold
180 vit
826 frostburn
275 decay

The rest of elemental damage (AoC, RoH, various procs) are straightforward 40% ele>vit conversion, except seal. The rest of vitality damage is straightforward 30% vit>cold.

Overall value of vitality resist shred depends on the balance of head/offhand conversions.