Briarthorns and Retaliation/Internal Trauma

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Briarbutts have both Physical retaliation in their main skill and bonus to Retaliation in Emboldening presence + Internal Trauma in Ground Slam. However the support for these are kind of lacking/non-existent.

Would it be better to remove the retaliation (don’t think the lack of +% retaliation from Emboldening will cause problems for any retaliation builds) and give them something else and change the IT to bleed maybe?

2

IMO briarthorns ground slam has some issues that could be improved.

1.Internal trauma damage: This should be bleeding damage instead as IT damage doesnt seem to synergise for pet damage in terms of gear/devotion support

  1. Not sure if its just me, ground slam seems to have a shorter range than the blight fiend’s blight burst at the same level. A much better “spikes coming from the ground” forward direction attack would be bone harvest. Having the skill cover a wider target area like bone harvest, with the range increasing with additional skill levels seem to be a better option

Another way I would consider improving “retaliation” pet builds would be allowing devotions that causes damage and are triggered upon being hit to be linked to pets such as how devotion procs on attack can be tagged to pets. Examples: Fetid pool, hyrian’s glare, spear of heaven, Fist of Vire etc etc.

3

Been pushing for Briar’s to get IT changed to bleed for a bit now. Think I should bump my old feedback thread.

Right now the IT on Briar’s is best supported by things that convert it to something else since theres basically no support for IT DoTs on gear for pets, yet theres things that specifically support poison, vitality decay, elemental dots, etc… things that don’t even invest in Ground Slam. Hell, even giving Ground Slam some retal to attack wouldn’t break things much.

There is gear support for retaliation pets though, so I’m hesitant to agree on changing that.

4

Briarthorns are the only pets with innate retaliation damage, with Og’Napesh having 8sec duration, 35 sec cd Shield defense skill.

Also, with no retaliation to attack mechanic for pets, you are stuck wth the same problems that retaliation had before.

Those were my reasons to suggest a change to it.

5

I’m on the fence about this IT->bleed change idea, but ultimately am not bothered.

My reason is that any conversion will not see that IT dot converted, once at bleed. I know that there is a cold converter for Briars and I’ve TC’d vit and elemental pet conversions.

These potential conversion have a bit of a fun factor. That said, the shaman mastery does push a lot of bleed on pets, and it might be bleed is generally more useful.

6

Yeah IT > Elemental conversion won’t be possible if it gets changed to bleed instead. That is indeed something to consider.