Hello there,
It’s been many months since I played GD. Last time I played it was a Death Knight and I had a lot of fun with it (with some help from the forum of course). I don’t recall why I stopped playing after reaching level 100. Maybe I wanted to play something else for a while.
Anyway, after playing Torchligh 1 & 2 lately, I wanted to play GD again. I started to have a look around for a new build. My criteria was range weapon: in D3 or TorchLight I liked playing with range attack.
After a quick look I found that build (Demo + Soldier + 2H Gun) which looked “promising”:
Since my DK was more soldier, I wanted to be more demolitionist this time.
I started a new game on Veteran. Things went well in general, but I realized that my character defense was bad with so little point in physique. I then remembered my first game: put “everything” in physique.
I played through the campaign at a good pace until AoM. Since I started in Ugdenbog my progress was slow and tedious: taking down enemy packs is slow with a lot of kitting to avoid the enemy rush. I’m now in Malmouth and it takes me ages to make progress (level 59 now). Any Sentinel I encounter takes me a lot of time (10-15 minutes) to deal with. DPS too low ?
Either my build is bad (which wouldn’t surprise me) or a 2H range commando is not a “good” choice. Right now I have the best gear I could find yet.
For devotions I got the Kraken and could put one point in Hydra.
What do you think ?Is this type of build a good option ? Having such hard time to progress in Veteran, I don’t see how I’ll make it through Elite or even Ultimate.
Hopefully, this is not telling you what you already know, and maybe has some new ideas.
Generally “ranged” is about putting as much damage down as fast as possible, and less about distance.
In order to do this you need:
lots of damage
the ability to stand still for short periods of time. In kiting terms, this would be ~stutter-step. The longer the stutter, the more damage you are putting down. Most everything ends up in your face eventually.
unless you focus on dot (damage-over-time), which is more about putting a bunch of duration-dots on and kiting while time does the rest.
Commando’s big issue for the above is that it has limited wps skills (default attack weapon pool skills) and no real fire support (boosts, resist reduction, etc).
But soldier does have battle cry, which will reduce damage done to you while you do damage, attack speed, and some armor and resist bonuses.
And nothing says you can’t tweak your dev/gear to try a different style as well:
There is also canister bomb, that could help in clearing large groups, in demo. There are a number of MIs and lower-level items that support this skill. There are some recent build guides for something like this, both with 2H and 1h “ranged”. You just need to search around commando + fire/canister/etc.
Grimtools is down, currently, but the guides often describe the tools and playstyle.
Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind. By ranged I meant attack from a distance. Not across the map, just far enough to not be a melee attack.
Since I posted I got few new gears and it improved things a little. I can get through Malmouth (Harbor, Steelcap District) faster than before. I still have to move and be careful, but I can stand still a little longer.
I also noticed that I was not using flashbang as often as I thought. It is binded to right-click and it did not trigger every time. I used it more consistently by taking a very short brake between the main attack and the right-click. It may help if a skill is used …
Thanks again. Let’s see how far I can go before coming back in the forum asking for help
I had some doubt about the build when I remembered that most attribute point should go in physique. Around level 40 I had about 32 points in cunning. It was not easy to survive with such low defense ability. Hopefully my other toon had a potion that I used to respec the attributes. I’m glad I did it.
Regarding grenado, I was considering removing it. It does not seem to “work” well. I’ll look at the other skills you highlighted. I’ll re-allocate grenado points to those.
I just leveled up a 2h commando last week. Not at home but I’ll upload the link when i get back. Since grim tools is down it’ll be a slightly older version of GT on Google cache.
Sent you a message sent GT still isn’t up and I couldn’t figure out how to get the stand alone version to show a link (I think it’s still connected to the online db for that so it isn’t working.)
Besides the fact that the build I was using was bad, it seems it was also a gear check.
I got a new shoulder armor piece (Dawnshard Pauldron), a new shotgun (+1500 dps) and man things are different now. I just destroy everything on my path. What was tedious yesterday is much easier today.
And the next time I create a new character I’ll come here to get a build instead of using random stuff on other site.
) I bet you have 0% life steal too.