Confused about Conduits

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

I have looked at two buillds today where the choice of affix for the Conduit amulet does not make any sense to me. Shieldbreaker Spellbinder

I thought the Spellbinder was just outdated, but then I found the Shieldbreaker with the same problem. In both cases the Conduit converts one of the primary damage skills to a damage type with basically zero scaling.
Am I missing something, or has there been a recent change to the Conduits (In which case I’d appreciate it, if you could tell me which patch)?

Edit: Off topic, but why does no one ever use “The Big One” on mortar builds?

2

Welcome to the forum. :slightly_smiling_face:

Those builds are quite old so I suspect things have changed since they were made.

3

Thanks, I actually just found the patch notes for the Conduit of Destructive Whispers in 1.1.6.1. I previously only looked at the major patches since I didn’t think they would do such a major change in a hotfix.

4

Until recently, it would only fire once in a Mortar’s lifetime, only awhile after it was summoned. It also used to be the case that overcapping the base Mortar Trap node could mean it was doing more Physical/Fire damage than The Big One because of how scarce the skill ranks for it were (and still are).

Since then, the scaling on the base Mortar node has been lowered so The Big One at 12/12 is always stronger than Mortars at 26/16 and it fires multiple times in a Mortars lifespan so we may see it get used more in Mortar builds going forward.

5

Thanks for the explanation.

6

According to my tests here, Big One fires on average 3 times per mortar lifespan now.

7

Those conduits have been removed from the game. In general Pyran set has been gutted in every which way, and it makes little sense to use full set I think. If I was to redo this concept (max Mortar dmg with 100% ele to fire and ele devos) I guess ti would like this: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jQ4dxN (no affixes but already 3k+% on gt = sweet).

Interesting. Back then it fired like 0.5 times per mortar on the average. Just answering the op question. But did you take into account that if you actively rotate Mortars (especially with the cdr mod from the Ternox book) they don’t live a full lifespan? What I said back then would fix it was if Big One procced as first or one of the first projectiles. Does that happen now? If it doesn’t then Big One is still meh when you can pop a new Mortar every 2.5s.

8

I also noted that they were equally distributed along the mortars life time.