now that I have my pet conjurer going through ultimate, and with my 2 handed ranged commando on deck, I am planning on making a caster to go through ultimate mode.
as with my previous builds, I do not have BiS gear, I will mostly be using things I find as I go with a few things picked up with other kits.
built around vitality/bleed/chaos. plenty of vitality and bleed resist reduction and not so much chaos reduction so the focus is more on vitality and bleed.
I figured with the extreme amount of straight health reduction will wipe trash mobs quickly, but does the health reduction of pox and doom bolt work on heroes and boss mobs?
thinking swapping fiend for manticore when starting ultimate for less aoe and more resist reduction.
Bleed and vitality do not go that well together. Maybe some skills and some gear suggests it and its viable for leveling. But in the end they want different devotion route and you will have to chose either one or the other. Pursuing both will make you mediocre at both.
That build you show is essentially a vitality caster. Bleed just happens to be there in pox but is not the major part of it and I suggest you do not try to support it at all.
Doom bolt as a second-thought-skill in a vitality build is underwhelming. I think it needs ultimate rank along with some really good chaos support in addition to vitality to be worth investing into. And you can swap it for sigil which is a little more reliable. That should be easy to find out in the process - whether you want one or the other.
I will spec out of the bleed constellations and focus more on chaos.
the doom bolt is more for the health reduction than the pure damage, which I am assuming is still significant.
since I dont have BiS gear, I cant put all my eggs in one basket. even with substantial vitality damage and resist reduction, I am assuming there will still be enemies that will take significantly little vit damage, so having chaos as a back up seems logical.
okay, going on the assumption the bleeding damage will be largely insignificant, but not entirely useless if I am going to be kiting… I changed around skills and devotions to put more emphasis on chaos.
my thinking is that pox and doom bolt will reduce health by alot, and devotion procs being a good portion of the damage output. with plenty of health steal and crowd control keeping me alive while kiting. dont plan on face tanking anything.
Health reduction in grim dawn has its own resistance differrent from vitality and of course bosses are immune to it. This mechanic is an archaic from Titan Quest. It is either overpowered when it does affect bosses like in TQ, or dubious, like in GD. What do you need it for exactly when nothing of value is ever going to be affected by it.
I think the only mobs with vitality resistance that are of concern are leeches. Who also happen tor have chaos resistance being chaos mobs. Now that they are not 100% immune to vitality its not a major issue though.
Since you’re not using attacks flat damage and attack speed from SWF have no value and you can drop it, its only percentages for you. You can get the same percentages from aspect of the guardian along with more useful ones. You will also lose that vitality resistance, but you should be able to get some elsewhere being a vitality build anyway.
If you even want to use grasping vines, put more points in it, it is good enough just for crowd control in a caster build like yours.
With +occultist items and the like maybe you will be able to spare some points for SWF in the end too.
does the flat damage on solael witchfire not effect spells too?
for fevered rage, I figured the total speed would be canceled out with even more slow and the OA canceled out by the -OA on a different evolution. while getting more damage out of pox and more health reduction for trash mobs with -DA as a cherry on top.
Ignoring aspect of the guardian is bad idea for an occultist, its all the poison res you will ever need and 12% physical, maybe you can drop black death just to salvage it.
maybe the problem was building around bloody pox, and all the points required to make work.
how about this instead?
this way, more points in the debuffs and aspect of guardian, and when I get better gear, I can move more points into doom bolt and grasping and entangling vines.
EDIT:\
related question: I have seen clips of flame torrent circling the pet it was put on rather than the player character. the question is, will the flame torrent function similarly for the totems as it does for pets, or are totems not mechanically the same as pets and will make the flame torrent still circle the player character?