Custom Cold DE build

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Uh, this is going to be interesting :slight_smile:

Without spoiling too much, Chillwhisper Reaper scored #3 here, and recently i had an epiphany i didnt post as a build guide yet, as i basically completed the character only in the recent days.

What if i ignore the Chillwhisper set bonuses, and all the additional items which add flat cold damage to Drain Essence, but rather build around all the items which add weapon % dmg, and try to maximize my flat weapon damage instead - all in a cold-drain essence themed build?

Think about it - it hits about 9 times per second with maximized cast speed, and you can add up to 72% weapon damage to it - thats an additional 648% weapon damage per second.

These were my mental prerequisites until i said “lets do this”.

This also required doing a very uncommon devotion map which excludes the spirit of winter.

Long story short:

I managed to hit flat damage levels where every item which would add a certain amount of damage added to drain essence was only roughly 30% efficient compared to my approach.

560k-620k dps with bone harvest buff up only (620k with dream rolls for certain MIs). Everything which isnt named Kubacabra melts in the blink of an eye ( like: literally, you press your mouse button for a fraction of a split second, and in sr30 suddenly the whole screen is dead)

2

I remember comparing 2 x Night Herald with Soul Harvest vs 2 x Chillstrifes (Cold RR) in some beginner Cold DE build long time ago and the latter were better vs resistant enemy :thinking: but I didn’t push the concept to the limit. I think :banana: might have done sth like this but with Acid or Acid / Cold hybrid in the past.

Btw this Chillwhisper Reaper kills Callagadra in like 45s, this is what you have to go against.

3

Of course it would be better versus extremely resistant mobs, that would apply to basically every build in Grim Dawn. Say your resistance reductions would result in an particularly resistant enemy having 80% Resists vs your element of choice. Now you swap to an item/devotion set which would result in a 60% Resist result - basically doubles your DPS vs that particular enemy.

But every non-resistant enemy would take way less damage this way if your sheet dps suffers by e.g 50% - so your overall clear time would suffer as well.

Oh and my Reaper has 13% more PhysRes as well as roughly 25% more sheet dps ( not including the major added dps from leviathan bound to drain essence) :slight_smile:

And roughly the same OA levels, which are extremely important for the “true dps” here as already pointed out in the original guide.

Callagadra is an issue though - as it has to be for this reaper as well, as you cant just facetank it as you might get oneshot. If you get lucky, you can, but you cant be sure. Even without getting sundered. Same applies to Ravager ( although i got greedy here and chose ravager of souls, flesh should be doable)

4

I thought about Calla because there’s already a video for it so it would be easy to compare if you killed her. Maybe you can do that with Cluster and a lucky fight. If not then you’d have to compare in some other way.

You can change Ravager with this if you want. Although there’s no vid of this Top 21 Chillwhisper against it so couldn’t compare easily either.

Anyway, good luck with your build. It’s always cool if a big brain non-set setup can beat a set counterpart.

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5

Nah, id just need to do a slight devotion reshuffle for ravager/callagadra.
This would probably gut my dps by 30% or so, but result in a safe kill. Currently i have 0 defensive devotions besides charriot for more DA, but i think something as small as turtle would help to fill the gap.

But the whole point of particular take was stacking flat damage, and this involves combining leviathan & yugol, which sadly results in making major sacrifices if you still want at the very least murmur & viper for RR ( rhowans was out of the question here)

6

Chariot’s Armor buff is useful against Calla. She takes down Turtle extremely fast unfortunately. Probably won’t be a big help if a build has problems already.

If your build doesn’t have Crown then imo it’s bound to not be greater than the OP. Not having bonus damage to Blade Spirits and other mods matter too. Dunno. In the end you need to make some vids and tests to clearly beat this one. Unless it’s obvious from GT but it’s probably not due to completely different approach.

7

Yes she takes down Turtle fast but what usually happens when you die vs callagadra is that you take, say, a 10k hit followed by a 20k hit - if turtle manages to trigger, that might give you the necessary milliseconds to leech your health back to full to withstand the second hit. Although in certain scenarios turtle wont be of much help here, as you just get deleted without it ever triggering. But getting 30%+ phys res is out of the question here as well if you dont take the MI shield with certain mods - so turtle is the 2nd best insurance id say for a leech build.

Without having exact data from addons, id argue blade spirits damage, even in bossfights, would contribute no more than a few single digit %.

If id have to guess, id say 85-90% comes from drain essence, the major ramainder from leviathan and then the other proccs like murmur and screams of the aether / band of eternal haunt which i utilize as well.

8

I did a quick estimation from Grim Tools and I got sth like 1 : 4 being Spirits vs DE damage vs single target on Chillwhisper. Blade Spirits are not great but they are not that bad to be a meaningless damage source :laughing:

It’s like 4k flat damage / s (before % damage), not counting their special shots just “ticking”. 2 times more than even 4 Whirlpools on top of each other.

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9

We experimented with weapon damage based Drain Essence as well as custom Drain Essence but nothing comes close to full set performance for Reapers. You are welcome to prove us wrong by providing grimtools and videos of course, even a save file for us to test. Here is how our Chillwhisper handles Callagadra btw (gonna add those vids to the op later):

Callagadra 44 seconds kill (~70% success rate)

We are always up for a friendly sparring, tell us more!

We test new ideas every test patch as we are always hungry to try out new toys to play with. However this time around we got a lot of fresh new ideas from Chinese community, ones that we haven’t really explored ourselves. They look at the builds differently and mostly specialize in SR 30-31 speedrunning and this kind of focus makes them come up with very unorthodox and strong specs that none of the top20 builders have thought of before. Like for example Brutallax Dervish, or couple of retal builds that didn’t make the list (and Hellborne Shieldbreaker that :banana: did was made based on a very similiar Chinese Pyromancer).

About high OA - we know that OA’s effectiveness falls off after 3500-3600 OA. However builds with very high in-built crit, or builds that double/tripple dip in OA’s value (like Physical or Pierce builds having a lot of on crit procs) do benefit from scaling it further. Another factor that makes such “overinvestments” into OA viable is that SR is a debuff hell, and your OA constantly gets debuffed.

It wasn’t a secret build or anything, there is a guide for a version of it made by @GSAsylum for example. I guess we didn’t see that much potential in it before (honestly we kinda slept on retal buffs from the last patches). Also when that Warder entered our testing nobody thought of it as a number one build. It took quite a bit of tweaking to make it into the king of builds.

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10

Ill try to write a guide in the coming days where im going to explain it in depth - but ill try to give a short summary in advance in case you or someone else is interested :slight_smile:

So far i didnt even consider trying Callagadra yet, becauses i thought with such small defenses youre bound to get oneshot at a certain point in the fight, but your video actually encouraged me to try it. Ive got 2k max hp less, but the added physical resistance should more than make up for that.

I actually started with 3/4 Chillwhisper even in my build (without the weapon of course) which resulted in approximately 540k sheetdps with bone harvest, but quite a bit lower OA which was in the 3,5-3,6k range not counting debuffs.

For the “final / theoretical” build i switched over to 3 double rare MIs, 2 of them being nemesis MIs. So the final version is basically unrealistic to attain in practice, more like a proof of concept, albeit one of the items actually dropped for me and another one was in my stash :slight_smile:

The Major problem here is that you basically need all 3 items for the switch from 3/4 set pieces to be worth it, as otherwise youll have issues with either not hardcapped drain essence or some lacking resistances.

If i remember correctly its a Reapers Korvan Plating of … for the chest, Moosilaukes Pauldrons for the shoulder and Grava`Thul Legguards for the leg slot - with one of the latter with the winter storm suffix so we end up with 20/20 in nights chill.

Gearwise, compared to the set build here, the only other differences are actually using a level 35 relic (Deathchill), the conduit for the amulet and another pair of boots (primordial rage).

Devotions are made up of Leviathan, Yugol, Murmur, Charriot & Viper and the rest being fillers.

The Night Heralds were just self found with the best rolls i could aquire, having these rolled out optimally would still add quite a bit of value, but these really are a pain to farm as they sadly tend to drop with useless pre/suffix combinations.

11

Beats Ravager of Flesh in about the same time (42s) from another video I’ve seen. Ravager should be way easier than Calla. You can start with that, use all the potions and cluster. Although without Elemental Storm imo there’s 0% chance you can be better.

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12

Well that all sounds like a worse version of a full Chillwhisper build, even with unrealistic double rares. Post grimtools and I will tell you how it is. From our collective experience of doing builds (and we have a lot of experience), it’s impossible to beat Chillwhisper for Cold DE Reaper.

13

Got to give this a try with the method you stated in another post, thanks for the heads up :slight_smile:

Although you might be overstating the value of elemental storm here - it gives 12% more RR, but as i have nights chill and spectral wraith hardcapped, that difference becomes 8%. Still an enormous difference on resistant mobs, and i really feel it in particular vs kubacabra which takes quite a bit of time to kill in high sr, but versus less resistant mobs 20-25% more sheet dps might be more valuable in terms of practical DPS dealt. I think this really depends on the particular mob youre dealing with

14

12% more RR than what? Do you have another source of this type of RR?

Remember that Blade Spirits do contribute here too. Should be about the 20% - 25% damage you mention according to my hopefully good estimates.

Kuba, Calla, Ravager, Moosi etc. And resistant enemies slowing you more than non-resistant ones. I think it’s worth to priorize them. And it’s not like RR doesn’t benefit you even against not very resistant enemies. You get like half the benefit I’d say

15

Sigh, i got confused for a moment here and messed up % reduced resistances and flat reduced resistances :smiley:

Yeah, with the added value of blade spirits here, if they indeed deal roughly a quarter of the overall damage, ill probably not end up dealing more overall damage. Ill see how fast i can kill Ravager :slight_smile:

16

Yeah, Viper’s type of RR unfortunately doesn’t work as good the Crown’s type of RR.

Even if you don’t beat it but get close (Crown needed though imo) it’s still a good achievement. Can probably susbract a few seconds if you don’t have gool rolls on gear.

Also give yourself time to optimize the build.

17

it’s so weak that our Chillwhisper doesn’t have that type of RR at at all. Also to apply Viper’s %rr @Naphal needs 100%+ weapon damage. If their DE is ~70% weapon damage then only 70% of that %rr is applied, right

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18

Now the thing is, i can actually include rhowans, even if its just 3 points for the procc, but ill end up losing chariot in the process. I cannot have Yugols Leviathan Murmur Chariot and Rhowans procc. In this case i dont really have another great option to fall back upon :confused:

19

Thats another factor i didnt take into account yet :slight_smile:

20

I think you definitely want Rhowan’s (unless you have an alternative source of flat RR ofc - but I don’t think that’s the case?)