So today i finished Elite and though i died 3 times to the last boss i did it any way.
Now i started Ultimate and had the audacity of walking through a poison cloud from a zombie and got rekt “didn’t die but come on”.
So at this point should i farm elite tell i’m ready and most of my resists are capped or what do you do?
I play a melee battle mage so range and kiting isn’t an option and this is my first character so it’s 100% self found which means i’m not covered in Legendaries.
What kind of build are you running besides battle mage (ex: what sort of primary attack, do you use shield, maiven level, etc?) and do you have appropriate components/augments in all your gear to get at least some healthy level of resistance in ultimate? (not dipping into the negatives at the very least?)
If you got good standing with multiple factions then you can usually get reasonable resistances with a combo of components and augments from them even with not-so-great gear.
To me some tweaks to your skills/devotions and appropriate components/augments might be viable options to avoid grinding elite – it’s kind of a last resort for me to go back to elite because ultimate is too hard (so miserable and depressing unless you’re doing some new quests like hidden path – I have a tendency to abandon characters and start new builds if I can’t do well in ultimate on a first try and can’t find any way to respect and tweak to do so).
Also what’s your constant healing source? High health regen, attack damage converted to health, procs? Generally for ultimate with a lot of builds, you need a high amount of one or more of these to constantly heal back the damage you are receiving. Your health bar should be fluctuating in battle typically, not steadily dropping and dropping but instead constantly going back to 100% right away. In many cases it’ll be hard to tell for sure exactly how much damage you’re receiving because you’ll be healing it right back so quickly.
In GD I feel like this is true for more builds (possibly even all) than any other game I’ve played. You have to have a constant and rapid healing source to face ultimate difficulty in addition to damage mitigation. For melee your survivality tends to become a very simple equation of whether you’re healing damage faster than you are taking it and that you are mitigating it enough (absorption, resistances, evasion, armor, shield block, etc) to avoid receiving too much at once (beyond your maximum health pool) before you heal it right back.
In my case I run a witchblade, also sharing the soldier line in common (battlemage was my most tempting alternative) and doing fine in ultimate (Crucible gladiator wrecks me). My healing source is health regen primarily which is over 1k hp/sec with bulwark, blood of dreeg, overguard, and some defensive devotions like dryad which adds minor healing constantly along with 16% ADCtH. Also got a Mark of Divinity circuit breaker on top of Menhir’s will which can be a lifesaver when I receive too much damage at once before I even realize it. My damage source is cadence with deadly momentum/bulwark and fast attack speed far more than my weapon damage – also self-found mostly-meh gear. Damage mitigation is Menhir’s Bulwark damage absorption, as high resists as I can make with my crap gear (my aether resistance sucks in ultimate at 15% with aether-ward aura up and negative without). In your case you don’t have the healing and CoF debuff but got the super sexy maiven’s sphere – should probably max that if you didn’t.
So this is my build
http://grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=46500
I follow it up.
only i dropped CT and OFF and got all melee with max shield training and overguard.
My DPS is near 5 k puffed with Auras and HP is around 8.8k
Resist all above 30 but poison is -17.
My healing comes from a searing green axe that i found way back and it convert 6% damage to HP beside the behemoth and turtle procs and of course pots.
maybe i need to grind black legion for their augments.
Sucks that if i augment anything it becomes soul bound though.
Rovers and Devil’s Crossing both actually have nice poison resist augments you might use. Black Legion is the most painful faction to get honored and especially revered with, since you can only gain rep through quests/bounties.
For the soulbound part, you can actually undo it at the inventor at the cost of losing the component (or the item if the component is more valuable to you). The item without the component will no longer be soulbound, but it removes both the component (if there is one) and augment at the same time – kinda sucks, but better than perma-soulbound.
Also just sticking some antivenom salves here and there might do the trick.
My DPS is near 5 k puffed with Auras and HP is around 8.8k
5k DPS is a bit low (I’m at 28k with fighting spirit and deadly momentum with a crap weapon and I think I started ultimate at around 19k DPS) – you might want to look into that part too, but survivality first for melee IMO – better to kill slowly than not at all and just die all over the place (opposite for kiting character – better to be able to kill than spend endless time running and not killing anything).
My healing comes from a searing green axe that i found way back and it convert 6% damage to HP beside the behemoth and turtle procs and of course pots.
For this you might want to try a haunted steel or hollowed fang on top. High ADCtH can really help. Health pots no longer become a viable healing source in ultimate for me. I feel like I’m doing something wrong if they are. They become a panic button for me when all the other sources have failed, or an extra-safety button when I feel like I’m in danger and don’t mind drinking it just to be safe even if I didn’t need it.
Just looked up hunted steel and because i went with the other faction “the Templar like one not the death vigil i lack the blue print”.
I didn’t find a single weapon that would raise my DPS and the rest of my gear though could be better DPS wise I value suitability more.
i feel that i need some farming still and maybe doing a some quests for black legion will net me on the long run some gear.
It’s kinda funny that though i finish the game twice never got a legendary for my class.
First time got a gun second time got a scepter.
I have like a gun collection of legendaries too and no gun character! It’s like the game is beckoning me to create a ranged when I get Havoc and Silverbolt for the third time.
I didn’t find a single weapon that would raise my DPS and the rest of my gear though could be better DPS wise I value suitability more.
What attack skill do you use? The funny thing for me with deadly momentum that kicks in after cadence combined with menhir’s bulwark and a little bit of flat physical from shield training and +physical damage% modifiers is that I can actually do reasonably fine in ultimate (something like 18k DPS) even using a yellow level dagger of alacrity that I use on my level 10 character!!! The weapon damage is almost irrelevant (well, I’m exaggerating quite a bit but I get so much physical damage from the skills that the weapon damage is just a bonus – the attack speed is almost more important than the weapon damage for me to achieve high DPS now… or maybe it is more important – not 100% sure).
It’s why I like cadence with deadly momentum and bulwark so much when focusing on physical damage. It gives you so much damage independent of the weapon provided you attack fast – very gear-independent.
What type of damage type are you focusing on? Physical, piercing, bleeding, elemental, aether damage, something else?
To me your devotions might use some tweaking since you followed a CT guide but decided to deviate and go purely with melee attacks. CT is generally going to focus on aether/elemental damage. That guide’s devotions are heavy on the defensive and I think you can keep that but it might be worth revisiting the drawing board based on the damage type you’re focusing on to multiply your DPS. Soldier line with heavy melee focus benefits most from pure physical (or bleeding) unless you start to do heavy conversion since the skills that add tons of damage are physical.
That guide shows 13k for an endgame build but that’s with CT damage on top which is AoE plus probably devastation going on a lot along with powerful procs. For pure melee your DPS should really be towards 10k minimum IMO to be ultimate viability even in the earlier acts (and especially when you don’t have debuffs to enemy resistance, though you have war cry to spam and you absolutely should), since your damage is often going to primarily be single target or at least not that much AoE if you are using blade arc, e.g.
Also for war cry you might want to kind of dial it towards the opposite of the guide for Break Morale if you are physical (more points in break morale and you can get away with fewer for war cry). The physical resistance debuff is going to amplify your damage quite a bit in ultimate assuming physical damage source (not quite sure what to do if it’s more elemental or aether, but should probably at least pick up some debuff constellations).
The thing that didn’t appeal to me as much about battlemage (though I still want to try it – think it can be the tankiest build ever) is lack of spammable resist debuffs. The witchblade has CoF which, to me, makes the difference between killing things two or three times faster when it is on an enemy.
War cry isn’t spammable as much but to me it pops out as vital to me for a battlemage focusing on physical attacks.
Sorry for all the questions/comments at once. I got all excited to encounter a battlemage melee build since I’ve been wanting to make one, so I’m kinda imagining how to tweak your build as though it were my own.
Ultimate is pretty much a resistance check. You need to have at least decent resistances to be able to tank some hits.