Advice on first character

Hi!
I bought Grim Dawn with all DLC’s and can’t decide what class to play. I know that in my first playthrough i shouldn’t care about builds to much and learn the basics, but I want to pick something that will be viable in the late game. Unfortunately im that kind of guy who always follows top builds :sweat_smile:
I want to play 2h melee build. Death Knight sounds cool but i guess it’s not the best option. I’ve noticed that there was a big patch recently so which builds are outdated or not.
Any suggestions?

Welcome to the game and to the forum. :slightly_smiling_face:

You’ll find several beginner buillds in the compendium here

Have a look and see what takes your fancy. There are a couple of Death Knights in there and you can always check in the relevant thread whether it’s been updated to the latest patch yet.

I’ve already looked at some builds form this compedium but what bothers me is that most of them are not updated yet. Does the meta changed much in this patch? I know that is kinda stupid question because it’s propably to early to say.
Im considering forcewave dk but isn’t warlord just way better?

Warlord is a little better off for spam FW. If you’re having trouble deciding between the two I’d look at what other builds each of the mastery combos offer and think about respec potential in the future. Pick the one that will let you try out more builds for the price of leveling just one character.

To be honest I wouldn’t worry too much about any meta atm. A few people are yelling dead builds because of this or that, but they’re talking about very specialised builds with very specific gear you won’t have. I suggest just choose something you want to play and start learning how the game works, what skills you enjoy, exploring and finding stuff. If you hit problems you can always post the build here on the forum for advice.

2 Likes

Yeah you’re right. It seems to me that warlord is better than dk because if better synergies. I may try shieldbreaker tho. I founds some interesting 2h melee builds for him. Also i can respec to caster if melee turns out bad for me.

You cannot go wrong with Warlord or Blademaster for first character, there are a lot of melee oriented build possibilities for both of them. But casters seem to be overall in better shape now.

It depends what you want. Do you want an old-school top-tier dps build or are you more like “I just wanna not die in deep Shattered Realms too often and I don’t care how fast it is.” If latter is the case, then you can’t really speak about good and bad builds because all builds can be good at that.

However, if you do care about dps then 2h doesn’t have real good top-tier pure melee. You best bet would be going for quasi-melee builds like Forcewave (fire warlord or demolitionist is best) or Blade Arc (iirc physical warlord is best) or melee-caster hybrids (can never go wrong with lightning Stormreaver vindicator - one of the best builds when it comes to balance between tankiness and clear times). There are some Blazerush Firestrike builds doing pretty well. And others. Oh, the Arcblade spellbinder by Plasmodermic is awesome (or was? it was nerfed big afaik).

But as Medea pointed out quite correctly, this is just an endgame meta chatter that’s only accurate for fully specced and minmaxed endgame builds. For leveling with 2h - Forcewave. And you have lots of time to think about the second class as you can comfortably play just soldier till lvl50-70.