So I recently came back to the game, wanted to give it another shot now that some stuff IRL has cleared up to give me more time to play after about a year of absence. I wanted to try out Purifier and I can say it’s been a lot of fun, gotten farther than I ever have before (almost beat Vet lol) but it has really become too painful to play. I have neuropathy, tldr is it causes me pain to have to constantly be hitting buttons and I have a slow reaction time because of it. Puri seemed pretty good for that since the WPS build only has a couple active skills and otherwise just holds down the LMB to fire strike. It was a beautiful, fun fireworks display but having to constantly dodge, reposition, etc just isn’t working. It hurts too much after about 30m. Even with all my resists capped (which I know gets even harder later on) I just take too much damage.
So now I’m here to see what other options I have, particularly in the facetanking category, low skill usage, stuff like that. Chances are if the class is boring to play it’s actually what I need (sad, I know, but it generally works out well for me). I was thinking maybe some kind of Warder? I’ve seen them mentioned a few times as insanely tanky, but that could have changed to another class? Maybe a pet build (I seem to remember pet builds actually being quite button heavy though)? But I’ve been gone so long and the game has changed quite a bit so I don’t know much at all right now, kind of flying blind. There’s lots of classes in the compendium but obviously I’m not really sure what I’m actually looking for so that doesn’t quite help yet.
Any help is appreciated, I really want to enjoy this game, and I do, but it’s just hard to play for me these days. Also, no, a gaming mouse doesn’t work for me since my thumb is the worst offender of all and I can barely move it to hit side buttons on a mouse. I tried, it failed, hard It may not be possible for me to clear everything, I may not get to do high crucible or whatever the upper limit of that expansion farm thing is, but…it would be nice to at least clear everything in the main game on Ulti? Maybe even the gods or whatever the uber bosses are? Might not happen, I know =/
In the link you will find 3 versions of it; “Birds of Bysmiel”, “Lazy Birb” & “Lazy Birb, No Greens version”.
The differences between them is minimal and they all do the trick just fine. So any of the 3 should do.
That said, you might indeed notice that there are a few buttons to click around. Fret not, for you can make do with just 3: Blood of Dreeg, Curse of Frailty & Wind Devil.
Blood of dreeg has a 30 second duration, so it is mostly a 2 button build should you prefer.
And Uber bosses, Crucible, Shattered realm, all of it should be a breeze.
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One of the problems with Fluffy Squishy is that, for all its power, it is rather slow. Defense over offense and all that.
So, should you desire a bit more speed at the cost of sturdiness, enter: Will O Wisp - Pet Cabalist
While it has the same amount of buttons to push, that number can also be reduced to just 3 like before. Here it will be Blood of Dreeg, Curse of Frailty & Reap Spirit.
Reap Spirit can be assigned to your left mouse button and with Blood of Dreeg having the aforementioned 30 sec duration, it might end up even more user friendly than the Pet Conjurer.
One downside is that the build is rather fragile compared to the Conjurer, but still capable of everything ingame.
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But what if you want even less buttons? What if you want to feel like playing a proper Necromancer with an army of rattling bones? I must warn you that the following build is not as powerful as the ones above, but let me present to you: Skulls & Bones - Pet Cabalist
It doesn’t fare well with Uber bosses of Grim Dawn due to the Skeletons being rather fragile to AoE. It is also not exactly fast or sturdy. However, it comes with 3 buttons to push by default (Blood of Dreeg, Curse of Frailty & Reap Spirit) and is fun to watch an army of bones marching to your beat.
Do note that it is built to stand there and face-tank even the Uber bosses of this game and that comes at the cost of its speed when killing things. There are ways to fix that if you are willing to tone down the focus on defense and shift some of it towards its offensive capabilities, but I like to go for maximum laziness.
There are 5 buttons to push, but for most things you will only need your left and right mouse buttons. The other 3 are also on a decent cooldown and duration, so it is not button heavy at all.
One of the glaring downside with retaliation builds however, is that you will need to level it up differently as Retaliation requires proper items and such before it can work properly and will be painfully slow and ineffective otherwise.
That is a lot of info, thank you both. I will definitely give the lazy pet build a try, I like defense > offense, as you can imagine with my inability to always react quickly to much of anything. You even have a leveling section
Pets were my first reaction when I read op but… most pets I played had toolbar literally full. Literally 12 buttons plus health and energy pots separate so 14 buttons.
Very easy to play, but boring as hell. I can’t count how many times I fell asleep playing that character still holding the mouse button and spinning into a wall…
I need at least a little bit more action and thought involved in playing my characters!
As I said, boring is generally the way I have to play, so it would likely be right up my alley. If you consider the fact that WW Barb and Cyclone Slayer are two of my favorite aRPG builds…
I’ve been trying out the pet build so far and I’m finding it fun but I wouldn’t be opposed to looking at an EoR setup as well? Which guides would you recommend?
Depends on what they’re full of. I’m with Maya on the lazy side of things so although my first toolbar is full, it’s all perma pets, one timed buff and pet from items and health/mana potions. The second is half full of permanent buffs. In all once pets are summoned and perma buffs applied I only have 3 buttons to use: Blood of Dreeg on the RMB, and the timed buff/pet.
Take two most popular ones - WH Beastcaller and Bysmiel conjurer: WH/Bysmiel buff, Beastcaller buff, CoF, BoD, Primal Spirit to re-summon, mobility rune, pet attack - this is for almost every setup. For Bysmiel also Wind Devil, and I also got DEE for Mogdrogen proc and Bloody Pox for Arcane Bomb. With Aether Cluster and move to command that’s every single spot taken by actives.
From the characters I did level 1-100 I’d say my Cabalist vitality pet master was by far the easiest. Having close to 20 pets really helps keeping the enemy away and they pulverize most bosses in under 10 seconds, though I was wearing gear I gathered with my very first characters.
Well in my case this is the easiest build I have played by far. I only really need 4 buttons, Summon Skelleton, CoF, BoD and Bone Harvest, though since I enjoy having as many buttons as possible I took MoT, CotG and Ill Omen to proc Dying God.
My other builds which I leveled to 100 have their bars so full I had to think about how to make space for the movement skills and coming from Marvel Heroes I had a two bars 24 skills Dr. Strange and about 18 skills for my Dr.Doom and both of them were my favorite heroes to play in the game alongside Iron Man.
So maybe knowing it from that perspective you can understand why I think that way, having a build that can cruise through much of the game with mere 4 buttons, of which you only really need BoD for heal, regen and buff, the others are only really needed at bosses. Skelletons hardly ever die to non-bosses.
Well consider how easy it is to basically press one button and solo the entire game, SR and crucible naked thats really well deserved…
And it still facerolls entire game SR 65+ and crucible with buffs, with one button. Along with 17k+ HP.
Unlike any other builds where you at least have to piano RR, Oppressor can literally just press EOR button and you passively generate 60 physical RR just by existing. Warlord just need to press warcry every now and then.