[1.5.0.1] HC Pain Ultimatum - Cold Pain Infiltrator - All Content Viable!

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hi Guys,

Major Update! :

Here’s the new Grimtools

Dummy test

Alkamos

The Sentinel

Changes:

Added Chillspikes (Seal of the Night) - Big Damage boost! Inspired by Valinov’s Chtonian build! Thanks Man!)

Alkamos’ Rings - Nice damage and proc, Pierce to Cold conversion for Chillspikes, good synergy with the overall cold focus.

Myth Chilling Grip of Hagarrad - More damage buffs, Pierce to Cold conversion.

Works great with the DA ‘fix’ as we are now at about 3.6K - still very respectable!

Sheet WoP damage is now 27k

Training Dummy reset time - 30-35 sec.

The only problem is spirit drains very quickly now because of Chillspikes.

This is my second attempt to make a viable Word of Pain build for Hardcore. While there are many builds incorporating this skill, I want to show you one that uses WoP almost exclusively, both for AoE and single target damage. My goal here is to maximize Word of Pain damage while at the same time allowing very high DA to be able to tank most of the game’s super bosses and take on Gladiator crucible.

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Q. Why Infiltrator and not Deceiver? Deceiver has CoF (-30% RR)?

A. 80% of our endgame damage will be Cold, so the difference between CoF and Night’s Chill is negligible. Furthermore, this is a dual wield build, so sacrificing a medal/relic slot is a huge dps loss. And as a small bonus, you get a free 3 sec immunity (Blade Barrier) and a teleport ability (Shadow Strike). Plus, casting CoF takes an extra split second and is annoying when you speedfarm.

Gear:

3 Items make the core of the build:

Mythical Temporal Tempest - flat WoP damage - We gonna be using two of these bad boys.
Mythical Gildam Arcanum Commendation - big flat WoP damage!
Conduit of Runic Whispers (WoP version) - this item is what makes this build truly shine as it converts lightning to cold to Word of Pain!

The idea is to maximize the entire tree:

Word of Pain: 26/16 - (+4 from weapons, +2 from the belt & amulet, +2 from the relic, +2 from the chest)
Word of Agony: 21/12 - (helm, +1 skills on belt/amulet/relic, shoulders)
Death Sentence: 21/12 - (pants, +1 skills on belt/amulet/relic, medal)

Note:

It’s possible to achieve 26/16, 22/12 & 22/12 for all three skills but at a significant cost of DA. It would work fine in softcore but for HC I recommend focusing on DA to reach 4k+.

Unfortunately, the endgame gear is astonishingly hard to get as most of the items are green with the rarest affixes.

Endgame stats we are looking for :

DA - 4k+
OA - 3k with DeadlyAim active
Armor - 2.5k
Word of Pain sheet damage 25k+! It is possible to break 30k but not without a significant DA sacrifice.

Grimtools - Engame (or close to it) - https://www.grimtools.com/calc/eZPoa5dV

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Grimtools - Progression (much more realistic) - https://www.grimtools.com/calc/4NOlA4P2

Here you can find the entire 1-100 leveling process - 52 hours of casual play lol - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlzvakmBBxQ&t=369s

A quick dummy test using the progression gear (up to 65k WoP crits) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FWm7HzWJXA

Gargabol - https://youtu.be/BSnmhf-SPiM

Alkamos - can stand in those pools all day, even though I did something stupid there near the end lol - https://youtu.be/6uFZfCztyuA

Shar’Zul - https://youtu.be/wk5UtBGSZhU

Loghorrean - https://youtu.be/HRJSYlGa1XI

Mad Queen - Reflect damage is the worst, sigh… https://youtu.be/d-MLp1iybNg

Gladiator Crucible 1-100 - 4 parts, total time 34min - https://youtu.be/vYlHEn-nOzQ, https://youtu.be/11NKu0z5O0g, https://youtu.be/9HS6LrJ8Xkk, https://youtu.be/7MWmMgcXbBg

Gladiator Crucible 100-150 - Just under 30min. This was my first run and a terrible one lol. Didn’t notice the loss of aura and almost got nuked by Fabius + Valdaran. Lost a lot of time. Lost even more while kiting the Mad Queen and Zantarin. With some optimizations this could be improved. 25 min should be doable on a better map and better play.

Part one - https://youtu.be/CTHONmhglVA
Part two - https://youtu.be/I_PCFmKM028
Part three - https://youtu.be/XDCnMIP4mqc

Devotions:

Here you can either go full elemental of focus on cold. I personally hate meteor and always go for Attak Seru/Leviathan/Arcane Currents. But there are great alternatives. You could drop the currents and grab Blizzard instead. I’m still toying with these and will update the build if I find a better combo.

P.S: Can someone point me to a guide to embed screenshots into this post pls?

Attachment: pain.jpg
Attachment: Word of pain - final.jpg
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Hey, nice build. Never knew you could convert lightning to cold in WoP using conduit.

I always find those people who dare challenge the higher waves of gladiator on hc as insane people (not in a bad way). I mean how do you guys handle the pressure of playing that knowing you could lose everything with one set of bad mutators? And with an innovative build above all of that.

How essential is riftstone in this build? Is the second mobility skill really that needed?

Anyway, you can upload your images to imgur, get the link to that image (the one with the .jpg or .png extension with it) and paste the link after pressing the img button (the one on the left of the quote button).

3

Technically, two conversions happen at the same time: 100% fire to lightning from the weapons, and lighting to cold from the conduit. So the end result is 80% cold 20% lightning, which works out great for this build.

I always find those people who dare challenge the higher waves of gladiator on hc as insane people (not in a bad way). I mean how do you guys handle the pressure of playing that knowing you could lose everything with one set of bad mutators? And with an innovative build above all of that.

Once the Mad Queen vid is up, you will realize how insane it gets, I almost got oneshot several times in a row there lol. And yeah, I’ve lost a few great toons already, but that only made me wanna push higher and try more interesting builds. The one real fear with this build is reflect damage. I’m not sure how to improve that. Would appreciate some help here.

How essential is riftstone in this build? Is the second mobility skill really that needed?

Anyway, you can upload your images to imgur, get the link to that image (the one with the .jpg or .png extension with it) and paste the link after pressing the img button (the one on the left of the quote button).

Yeah, the riftstone is just for an extra teleport, it’s not really needed for crucible. I just use it for campaign mainly.

4

I see you have several procs, Stormbox and Runes are better for proc machines (you stack a lots cold dmg so I recommend Rune of Haggard as it has -DA and your OA is very low). 12 points on Phantasm armor is too much, better using a stonehide or impenetrate prefix to cover your pierce res. For devotion, take Wolverine instead of Owl, as you like massive DA build. One bargol weapon is nicely as it mods WoP -12% elemental res.

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Thank you for your suggestions. Will test and update. Regarding bargol’s mace, it gives -12% RR true, but you lose ~55 flat WoP damage which is a lot. It translates to almost 4k base WoP damage, way more than 12%.

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  • Mouse-over an attachment
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Added a few more videos.

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Those Gargabol video is insane, with such a low hp stands stand right on the volcanoes without any harm, it’s impressive.

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DA is key. Once you reach the point where monsters’ PTH (Probability to Hit) is below 70%, they can’t crit you anymore and also deal reduced damage when they manage to hit you. My buffed DA is around 4.3k now, so Gargabol has about 30-35% chance to hit after OA debuffs. And even when he hits, he deals highly reduced damage. Not sure about the actual numbers though. It gets complicated with dodge, seal, resists and armor bonuses.

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Added crucible 1-100 - 34 min. Recording 100-150 next.

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Added crucible 100-150 (30min). Bad first run. 4 min without aura of censure including the Fabius+Valdaran fight lol. Need to practice, this is terrible and almost cost me this character. But the good news, this build is definitely capable of clearing 100-150 in 25-28min. Great AOE makes up for lower single target damage.

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Very interesting take on Infiltrator. But it’s hard to watch videos knowing that it is hardcore and you only got 7,7k life. I understand that your char is very tough due to dodge/evade/seal, but still, made me really worried when you were facetanking mad queen (is there even a reason to facetank her if you are a ranged caster?). Good build!

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Thank you!

Sob Yesterday was my first ever Mad Queen fight. A newbie here. I didn’t do much research and just facetanked her lol. Don’t have to do that with this build, but staying within 6 meters is best for both aura of censure and night’s chill to apply their debuffs. Killed her a couple more times today and realized that her reflect is easily avoidable. Other than that, there’s no issue with low HP. Can tank most nemesis and secret bosses without any issues. In fact, if I could reach 5k DA, would dump most points into spirit instead for more damage.

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Her aura only reflects projectiles, just dont cast Rune and you will be fine. (I always facetank her on crucible with melee or DoT purifier).

15

Hi there

I was wondering if combining your WoP idea with the Arcanist class ?
I think the biggest draw back would be that we lose the ability to dual wield - any thoughts on that ?

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Not only you’d lose DW (massive loss to flat elemental damage, or have to drop BiS relic - another big loss), but you would also have less resist reduction overall, as arcanist doesn’t have much to offer vs bosses.

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The biggest issue with WoP builds is that there are no good support items for the existing conversions. For example you could go full Chaos or Aether but most of the gear that boosts the WoP tree has no support for either of these. And since there’s no % Weapon damage component, we are pigeonholed, elemental is our only option. So, Infiltrator or Deceiver. No real choice.

18

Have been playing around with this build for the last week or so. And i was absolutely loving it, tons of defense, fun playstyle etc. Very good job, and thank you!

Unfortunately i was oneshot by Lucius’ meteor right after hitting 90. I am so gutted right now :frowning:

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Damm, that’s unfortunate… Did you get oneshot at close range? What were your Fire/Aether resists? He debuffs your DA as far as I know.

Good luck on your reroll man and don’t get discouraged! Your next char will be stronger!:cool:

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Resistances were capped even pre word of renewal buff. But it was my first time reaching Ultimate, everything upto Lucius was a breeze. Was around 2.6k DA, probably should have farmed easier content first. I literally said to myself “Just kill Lucius to unlock Outcast vendor, and then stop” and then he killed me :smiley: And yeah, were oneshot by the meteor at close range, might have overlapped with a melee hit most likely, even had 12,6k HP as well.