Back on a Grim Dawn kick recently in a big way, and want to try out something Devouring Swarm-y. There are a couple of builds like that in the Build Compendium, but they’re all… pretty involved in terms of rotations.
I tend to not really like much “rotation” in my ARPGs - I like to focus on a skill or two, use those, and focus the rest of the build on passives/auras/etc. that support the chosen skill (e.g. Diablo II Zeal paladin, Titan Quest Bow Haruspex, etc.)
Now, Grim Dawn seems to have its fair share of builds like this - but from what I’ve seen in the Compendium, Vitality or Bleeding based builds aren’t exactly amongst them.
Is there any low-rotation (e.g. CoF > Maybe One Other Spell > Devouring Spam) way of building this that isn’t just an inferior approach?
I am not sure about definition of the “Rotation”… but I have Witch Hunter who uses Vitality based Phantasmal Blades to kill every monster. fair amount of DPS, but decent role as crowd control.
I don’t think so. All of the vitality focused attacks are 1-2 node skills without weapon damage synergy.
Phantasmal blades is like 1/3th Vitality damage. Wouldn’t call it a primary vitality based attack. You would need to use a 100% Vitality caster weapon to turn it into a primarily Vitality attack, and I think there is only 1 legendary that has that.
You could do a Chaos damage dagger tossing build pretty simply, though:
I guess that depends on what constitutes a “big” rotation.
You have 3 good Devotions for bleed/vit (Rend, Falcon Swoop, Wendigo’s Mark) which you can proc quite easily with 3 active skills on a Conjurer (Devouring Swarm, Curse of Frailty, Grasping Vines), giving you a semi-passive “small” rotation.
You’ll probably want Blood of Dreeg for survivability and OA, which’d be button #4 that you press regularly.
You’ll need more than that for ultimate, though, so you’re either looking at a bigger rotation and/or a hybrid that incorporates ranged or melee attacks with Savagery, and most likely makes use of Wendigo totem as well, due to the skill’s strength and +skill support from items being there anyways…
You can begin with grasping vines (with rend) and devouring swarm (with falcon swoop) till you’ll encounter skeletons at the end of act 2.
Then you’ll need COF to bypass their bleed resist.
You can do all of normal and elite with this rotation :
COF (with falcon swoop) -> grasping vines (with rend) -> devouring swarm (with whatever you want) and with a blood of dreeg here and there.
Unluckily for you it’s really low dps for ultimate so you’ll need another bleed skill to add.
For now in ultimate i use the following :
COF (with howl of mogdrogen) ->grasping vines (with rend) -> devouring swarm (with falcon swoop) -> bloody pox (with nothing for now, i might try with wendigo or bat) and of course blood of dreeg when needed.
It does the job but it’s not the best dps you can see. It’s pretty good for clearing rooms though.
I’ll also recommend a pet of some sort that can occupy the monsters while they bleed, og’napesh undead or shaman’s primal spirit aren’t bad, but the best are the swarmlings, they’re really good.
Yes, I forgot wendigo’s totem but if you stay out of range it’s not part of the rotation, it can help when the monsters are coming too fast to you.
The problem with bleed and all the dot in GD is that they do not stack with DOT from the same power. It only refreshes the DOT.
So once your DOT power is maxed you must use another DOT power to increase your DPS and so on.
It seems to be easier to accumulate poison than bleed (plus poison usually comes with a great deal of acid, bleed has no instant damage counterpart).
But bleed powers usually comes with vit damage and some kind of life leech. So more damage for poison but more survivability for bleed (even if many poison powers have a confusion or fumble effect).
A small rotation of something like CoF>Wendigo>Swarm can do ok on Normal but not Elite or Ultimate, unfortunately. You just won’t have enough dps.
I’ve been playing a vitality caster for awhile now, and honestly once you get into a routine it just becomes muscle memory. You won’t even notice the extra keystrokes after awhile, especially once you get some casting speed onto your gear.
For my conjurer, I go with CoF>Wendigo>Storm totem>Sigil of Destruction>Doom Bolt>BoD on my 1-6 keys, and then have Swarm on right click.
I use 9 Keys more often and have 3 passives. So far it’s not the most easy Prio list there is but its a lot of fun compared to leftklick builds,
CoF>GV(standart and will work like a charm) This Combo alone gives you all the time you need to run circles arround the enemys and think about the button you want to press next.
CoF>GV>DS>BD=SoC Thats easy enough in my eyes, i still have the Wndigo totem and blood of dreeg on my bar. The first i use if something comes close the latter i use all the time ^^.
After this i only have Bloodthirster and Blooddrinker on my bar, throug components and just for the lulz. So the primary rotation comes down to 5 skills with 2 skills have a CD of 6.5 and 3.5 seconds. I dont know why someone would have less, unless there might be some kind of handicap.
One should point out that once your Vitality caster is up and running with procs, it actually does become a 2 button class for most of the fights. Curse + Bee Swarm auto-kill 95% of the things you encounter in ultimate.
These kind of casters just aren’t that great though. Using only a few skills would do hardly any damage even with bis gear.
I have sigil at 22/12, devouring swarm at 26/16, and blody pox at 21/12, 19/12 and 10/12
With all that, rend and lots of %vit dmg I still kill bosses very slow. It’s fun but just lacks the survivability and dps of lbm attack builds and most other builds.