New poster, long time lurker. I’ve got a lot of hours in Grim Dawn, love it to bits. I’ve always played softcore but recently the 100% achievement bug bit me so I decided to do a hardcore character to get them. Objectives were to get all hardcore achievements, beat SR 20 in Ultimate, and beat all 5 of the Skeleton Key dungeons on Ultimate.
1st go at hardcore went well. Leveled my druid to 100 and got his starter gear together (lightning AAR) and made my way through the base campaign. Decided to leave the dungeons until last, beat Malmouth and Forgotten Gods and SR 20. Steps of Torment and Bastion of Chaos go well, on to Valbury. Unfortunately, I missed a previous patch note that a certain guy moved from the Plains of Strife to ruin my day.
Loxmere Nightmage
Let me tell you, I was not expecting to get Shadow Strike’d, Nullification’d, and burst down within 2 seconds. Once I figured out who was responsible I wanted to know what happened. Starting 2600 DA and losing 575 due to two skills certainly explained it. My fault, too many attribute points put into Spirit for OA and lightning damage. Props to all the hardcore players, don’t know how you stand losing that many hours of work to a dumb mistake like that.
Well, I’ll be honest Loxmere killed not only that druid but my enthusiasm for hardcore for a time. Went back to softcore, leveled a few more builds, eventually got that bug in me again. I considered a much tankier build, like Avenger Warder but it didn’t feel right. Not only was I going to beat this guy, I was going to do it with the same class and build. Just needed to build up the defenses, get more points in physique and keep DA high so I couldn’t get burst. And a little earlier today, I managed it.
If anyone’s interested in my actual build I’ll post a grimtools link at the bottom of the post. The base of the build came from Jason_the_Iguana so check his build out if you’re interested. Cheers to the hardcore players and Grim Dawn’s creator team. Wonderful game and I think I’ll be putting down hardcore for a while more.
Braver than I, I certainly did not attempt hardcore with that build!
Incidentally, I have been tweaking my build based on @_maverick 's ideas in that thread, taking some ideas from his devotion map and adding wendigo totem instead of storm totem and such. (but still with a lot of armour and regen.) Can facetank pretty much anything until you hit mid-30s Shattered Realm.
I think the build is much better now than when I posted that link.
More CDR, much more OA for bigger critical hits, even tankier with Wendigo totem, and even more cool procs for offense and defense. Armour is a bit lower, but so is enemy phys damage in this patch, and when Wayward Soul trigger (and it has high uptime) armour is still very high for a caster. And when Arcane Will and Inspiration both trigger, I get 4K OA.
As for your build: looks like a great start. That’s some impressive DA.
A couple suggestions:
I’d suggest putting fewer points in Iskandra and more in the first node of Wendigo totem. (Second node is not needed.) Unless you really need the mana regen, that is. The totem adds a lot of sustain.
I’d also think carefully about whether the Aetherbolt pendant is worth it. Sure, it adds a lot of electrocute damage… but electrocute on Aether Ray is not that good, as the AAR hits about 8 times per second and electrocute only applies 1 tick per second.
And that amulet has a multiplicative 10% damage penalty to AAR, which is very painful. So I’m wondering if some generic lightning amulet would not be better until you find the mythical Stormseer Sapphire.
Nice to hear from you. I still don’t have the Stormseer’s blueprint, or many other fine gear since I don’t usually play hardcore. Once I find it I’ll definitely be switching Aetherbolt out. Thanks for the suggestions on bettering the build, as well as the original build. If I decide to keep trying out this character once I’ve finished up Ashes and FG on this character I’ll definitely try to build towards your Veilkeeper build.
fizzo_man, siosilvar, and Jason_the_Iguana really helped me with my Lightning Damage Primal Strike Druid. They really know their stuff and it really turned my Druid around for the better. I didn’t post an update on that character because I set it aside and have been testing/playing other builds/characters since then. I have 3 level 100’s in base/xpacks and I just got my 3rd character to level 100 in Grimarillion.
Only softcore tho. I haven’t had ‘that’ bug in Grim Dawn yet, but I do it every season for D3 and have played hardcore characters since D2 first launched when I was just a wee lad. In the very beginning I had my hopes crushed for hardcore because I lost my D2 Barbarian, but eventually something always keeps me coming back for more. It doesn’t matter if it is online or offline. I’ll even play with 12k-16k red bar lag. Lost so many characters over the years due to lag spikes and rubberbanding, but it’s still a lot of fun. One day I’ll start my hardcore journey in Grim Dawn.
Grats on your hardcore achievement and keep on trucking.