I played Grim Dawn a lot back at 1.0, and recently got back into it(clearly a few months too early! )
Currently working on a Cold/Frostburn Spellbreaker(NB/Arc), but I’ve run into a minor snag. The only ice spells from components are for ranged or off-hand only. You can’t actually dual-wield and still have Greater Ice Spike. So you’re left with the option of “Better Melee, but no ranged skill”, or “Ranged skill, but you miss out on all the dual-wield stuff”.
Is there an approach in the game that would do both? Magic Missile and Phantasmal Blades eat a lot of skill points, for something that I’m just using as a “shoot the weaker mobs” skill.
Forget Greater Icespike, it becomes already obsolete in Elite. I am afraid to say, that Component Skills are meant for leveling. Its not even strong enough to clear trash-mobs in elite, not talking about heroes and whatnot.
The issue with dualwielding is, that it also eats up a lot of your skillpoints. Wether you go with Savagery, Firestrike, Nightblade-Dualwield or Cadence, all of them are cost-intesive.
There are some caster builds, that use dualwield to amplify their magicks or do other shenanigans. Dualwield Crimson Fate for doubleproc, dualwield Aldritch’s Decree or Spark of ultos for 100% damage-conversion. These builds usually dont go melee though.
Then another question, for people who have been following more than I: Are there plans to introduce higher level components with better component skills? Or at least a wider complement of component skills? My memory from 1.0 was that the only component one that scaled well was the Mark of Dreeg and Beroneath thingy.
For GISpike, it was an easy way to have a pure Cold ranged skill with 100% pierce. Hit the trash in the back. Good for Crucible.
you say leveling up but didn’t mention what level or what skills you are using so kind of hard to offer options … not sure if you already know that the coldstone component aura stacks so you could have two of them if you want to as an option for instance
I still use component skills on some of my builds on ultimate, mostly to proc effects and devotions. The one caster component skill I don’t use extensively these days is (Empowered) Lightning Nova - if I had to move that close to something I’d rather be hitting it with my weapon or with a stronger weapon damage skill.
You still have other options to introduce more cold damage to your dual-wielder, like the Shard of Beronath, Coldstones and the Blessed Steel component. Just check the Grim Dawn Components wiki page.
If you want melee combat AND ice spells, that’s what devotion skills are for.
Greater Fireblast is more then capable of beating the games content. Lightning Nova used to be pretty strong but took a huge nerf back before Elite and Ultimate came out. The skills with cooldowns are pretty strong especially the melee ones and Chaos Strike, but are only secondary skills thanks to the cd’s.
Far as I know there aren’t any plans of making new components but maybe that will change with the expansion.
but its actually much stronger now as I made a new GFB build using only Greater Fireblast and Thermite Mines (Dropping High Potency & Devastation to see how it could do on its own.) Been playing POE so haven’t had time to make a video for new build yet, but it is quite strong for not using any skill points.
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