[1.1.8.1] Trap, Slap, and Toot - Rimetongue Horn of Gandarr Infiltrator [SR 85]

Horn of Gandarr was given great damage reduction utility last patch, and I felt that this underrepresented skill could use a bit of love. This build is the Grim Dawn equivalent of a Dutch Oven, trapping your opponent and then mercilessly tooting on them. This is best summarized as the “trap n’ toot” playstyle, but just trapping and tooting does not provide a large amount of DPS. Luckily, Shadow Strike (the slap) provides the needed single target damage to help kill bosses more quickly. Accordingly, the trap, slap, n’ toot build was born.

Grimtools

Build

The build revolves around stacking as much -cd for Horn of Gandarr while simultaneously attempting to stack flat pierce damage. Noctirn is a fantastic weapon to complement the Horn of Gandarr playstyle, but one downside is that the offhand is needed for Gandarr spam but it doesn’t have any pierce damage bonuses. A ring and boot slot are used for resist overcaps, so pretty much any item will fit here to fill holes in the build.

I went for Azrakaa in devotions because WoP is a decent enough proccer for this devotion if you cast it on multiple enemies. I also went for Harp because it’s a decent investment with high cd reduction. The rest of the devotion choices are centered around getting as much pierce damage and CC resist as possible.

It’s possible to play more offensively with points in Anatomy of Murder instead of Inquisitor Seal (this was my original version of the build), but maxing Seal helps mitigate this build’s health sustain difficulties. Since most of the build’s life leech is sporadic between shadow striking and casting Gandarr, having strong forms of mitigation makes this build much tankier between casts. Earlier version of this build also had Blade Spirit as a devotion proccer, but I didn’t notice much of a DPS change between 1-point Blade Spirit and no Blade Spirit, so I removed it. If you like having little spirit friends along for the ride, feel free to use them.

Gameplay

The gameplay is simple:

1. Trap - cast blade trap to hold the unwitting enemy in place
2. Slap - Shadow Strike to close the gap
3. Toot - blow them away with a fruity tooty from your holy horn

Don’t forget to cast WoP somewhere in there, and make sure that your Lethal Assault and Seal are always active.

Shattered Realm

Video of shard 75 8:40 clear
Given that this is mostly a joke concept, the build shines in SR. AoE damage reduction and Seal allow this build to tank multiple bosses, although Seal’s damage absorb falls off hard once the player reaches shards above 80. in the mid 80’s, camera aggro abuse is required to pull 1-2 bosses at a time. A full shard 85 boss fight is a bit boring because of this, but I’ll include a video of the tail end of a boss chunk just to show that it’s possible

Crucible

Crucible 8:04 Clear
Since a large portion of the forum community plays crucible (or is at least interested in it), I’ve decided to include crucible gameplay footage as well. This is my first time playing crucible in over 2 years, so my crucible skills are quite rusty, and the build is (expectedly) quite slow. Although the AoE and trapping ability is great for clearing heroes, most bosses highly resist trapping, and clear speed suffers because of this. A better pilot could push this build to about 7 minutes, but I would be surprised with a clear speed anything less than 7.

Pros and Cons
Pros Cons
Piano Build :) Piano Build :(
versatile slower
tanky clunky

Piano build is a pro or a con depending on who you are! I personally don’t enjoy a build unless I’m actively casting at least 4 or 5 things. What do I mean by clunky? Since this build casts a lot of skills back-to-back but only has a cast speed of about 150%, skills take a while to actually come out. For example, sometimes my blade trap doesn’t actually cast despite hitting the keybind; I’ll hit another button too soon afterwards, and this cancels the cast animation.

Special thanks to nobody, because nobody likes Gandarr enough to give a shit.

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21 Likes

True, but Rimetongue seems like having a lot of fun.
I played with this spec using Horn for DR debuff only. Bladetrap is balanced to cold version more, though.
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That’s a very interesting idea to use Blade Trap only for skill modifiers (they are strong, but trap itself is weak), but I think if you include 24\16 Blade Spirits while compromising on LA and Nightfall a bit it’s going to be even better.

I’ll have to give that a try on my next SR run, seems like a simple enough change to try

Lovely meme build, I have a somewhat similar build planned.

1 Like

Great to see more different skills being used Snazz/Dmt! Never even would have considered a Pierce variant with Noctirn for it.


Has anyone tried Gandarr as a damage devotion proccer? 5s base cooldown with huge flat CDR from gear modifiers means it should become a guaranteed proccer for low cooldown procs.

For example, take this example gear setup and bind (too lazy to do the full build) for an Elemental Gandarr build: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/a2Emrqb2.

Not as much direct damage to it as Snazz’s or Dmt’s builds but you can guaranteed spawn and maintain 5 fully converted Attak Seru seals.

3 Likes

Nice build man, Blade Trap is one of my favorites and its good to see some HoG love, but I wish there were more ways to do it in an equally effective manner than always always always using Rimetongue. Are there any other worthwhile options for HoG? Has anyone tried to do Acid HoG? I havent found any Acid HoG builds.

1.1.9.0 Update:

The build was given an insane amount of buffs, so I’ll summarize them here in order of significance:

-0.5 second cooldown to horn of gandarr (from base skill change, this effectively halves the cooldown from 0.8ish to 0.4ish!!)
+35% crit damage to horn of gandarr (from amulet and offhand change)
+4% physical resist
+150 health (+200 to chest armor, -100 from devotions, +50 from Vigor buff)
+15 health regen (from devotions)
inquisitor seal “rebuke” damage increased (base skill, not very useful)
+8% health/energy regen (from devotions)

and some smaller nerfs:
-5 flat pierce damage (from gloves nerf, this hurts a bit)
-2% attack damage converted to health (from devotions)
-20 offensive ability (from devotions)
-15% elemental resistance (from rimetongue changes, but the build is still ~50% overcapped on these)

Overall, big buffs for the build! The cooldown of Horn of Gandarr was essentially cut in half, so the DPS of the skill is about 110,000 (not bad for an AoE debuff skill!) Horn of Gandarr crits extremely often due to it debuffing enemy DA by 200 alongside Blade Trap DA debuffs, so expect to see some big crits when tooting your horn!

4 Likes