[Feedback] Sad Stormreaver/Veilkeeper Druid feedback

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
61

I mean… it’s 6% OA and 10% attack speed. I get that it’s meaningful, but Druid really doesn’t need the OA. I’d be Happy with the set bonus to give maybe half that as a flat 3 and 4 piece bonus, and bump up Arcane will’s uptime to make the health regen on it more reliable.

Yeah, I get what you mean, but there are precious few sets that foster health regen as a sustain strategy that I’m certainly not going to advocate for that part to be removed.

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My view on this as well

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63

i just remembered i took the veilkeeper medal on my health regen AAR druid :sweat_smile:

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64

okay, I’m still very lazy to post detailed feedback but here’s sth at least.

Lightning Veilkeeper Druid -
pretty good I’d say. solid constant regen, even better with AW/Giant’s Blood. SR is mostly 5:30-ish or low5, naked is still hard if Grava shows up.

wouldn’t mind getting a better - or, well, any - DR (maybe 15% on Upheaval or elsewhere) but overall build became better.

Aether Veilkeeper Ritualist - some things never change, and this one is still absolutely horrible. no real damage, no aoe, very poor resists, poor tank.

what I suggest?

  • add targets for RS
  • buff aether Savagery conduit. compared even to the Chaos one, it’s a bit of a joke, and not like aether savagery has any top or even mid builds with it.
  • build has a ton of vit res but is extremely short on every other resist. a problem that should be looked at, imo.
  • another problem is that with both those WPS investments and kinda low OA you will never ever see Upheaval triggering. It’s mostly aether problem but even on lightning with OA close to the humanly possible numbers it’s still inconsisnent, obviously. But I’m not sure what to do with it other than looking into the very Upheaval itself again.
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65

So I thought that since the whole arcane will side of this set is more of a gimmick that I’d just skip it altogether and pick a class that seems more suited to the core theme here, regeneration and lightning upheaval. Made this elementalist with it:

Here’s the in game stats with savagery up:
lituph

It works, but it struggles to reach OA/DA numbers I’m comfortable with for end game content. It’s dependent on its regeneration, the only part of this set that seems to always work no matter how you build it. Without inner focus and the set’s OA bonus on IEE it struggles to reach a reliable crit rate on bosses. And without that no upheaval build works well. I’m honestly not sure if these issues are with the set or the class, but I will note that ember’s calling works just fine if you only pick one of its supported classes. Veilkeeper seems doomed to be always played as a druid, to me anyway.

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66

Something I’ve been noticing over the last couple of days, for all these lightning versions of this set, you really have no choice but to use stormreaver. I hope FoA gives us a lightning two hander that doesn’t care about electrocute and is in line with other legendaries damage wise. Currently there isn’t really one (ultos doesn’t count here).

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it surely will but it will

other than that, there are really no lightning 2handers except green shovel for PS.

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68

and how do you see the dw builds of this set?

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there’s actually a surprising amount of blue/epic lightning weapons, maybe that/some of those could be prime candidates for FoA epic->legend ascending :thinking:
(aside from new dedicated MIs/legends)

*4more if we include ele stuff/split flat lightning dmg

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thought on this sheet/appearance Ritualist, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator ?

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Could be good but needs more DA and perhaps 12/12 Wendigo Totem for better survival. Should be able to do SR 85 from the looks of it. But it is missing a lot some circuit breaker - ghoul would be good…

I am not sure that the relic is a good pick. OA is already high. I would go for Uroboruuk.

Also armor absorption is not maxed…

I would get a bit less OA and went more for defense.

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you really need to get your head out of them sr90 clouds :sweat_smile:

12/12 is utterly pointless, and totem isn’t there for healing (its healing sucks here) - 30% lifesteal and regen is already out-healing it alot

it’s a purely upheaval focused setup, if anything it could use a bit more OA :woozy_face:

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73

killed red puppy in 90seconds :partying_face:

20241129215459_1
20241129215459_11920×1200 419 KB

*although it did take me 3 tries to not repeatedly get fucked by sunder timings :sweat_smile:

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74

okay, it’s time for another massive (kinda) feedback poop.

druid: Druid, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

I tried (for lulz and data) different devo paths: Spear + Kurwaak, Spear + Lultos. Lultos + Kurwaak are probably the best, and Spear + Lultos is the worst.

I have several issues with this build still, and those are ones I can’t really fix/have no idea what to do or suggest:

  • the build still has that very weird dilemma of choosing among speeds, dollar-store DR and disruption res. Seriously tho, you absolutely don’t want to drop Seal of Annihilation cuz speeds and proc; you also do want to keep Arcane Spark or the first met Grava or disruptor will eat you alive; so you can’t really take Lodestone but even if you take it, it’s a small dr in a small area which doesn’t quite help.
  • Build sometimes receives wild damage spikes when your entire HP bar gets deleted in half a second. This is mostly a naked problem - I wasn’t able to finish it in over 5 or 6 tries simply because at some moment I get popped like a rotten fruit.
  • Upheaval being Upheaval. I dunno what to say. The Spear + Korvaak combo has 4400 OA with AW active (and extra shred from Korv’s proc) but even then you might not see a single crit against white mobs. And this is simply frustrating. On a wps build, you get those wps for 100% pool, get some stats and there you go, basically. If you don’t hit with one wps, you hit with another, you’re good. With Upheaval you push the humanly possible OA numbers only to wait for that crit to roll. And you might have to wait for a while. This is simply frustrating and demotivating. The game has literally 2 Upheaval builds - this one and Blazerush, and they both can’t really compete with top melee builds because of the wild cazino.

Now to our next guest, lightning dw Ritualist: Ritualist, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator (sketched by @banana_peel and tried by me). Aaaaaaaaand… it kinda sucks.

naked - same case as with Druid, died 4 or 5 times in a row and quit.

so, the problems …

  • damage is just bad. despite having solid tooltip (62-88k with rings’ procs) and big dick mods from the swords, damage is simply not there.
  • umm… tank is not there too somehow. despite pretty big regen and proper DR build doesn’t feel much safer than aforementioned druid. and it’s way less tanky than, say, Stormheart Pyro. And way less fun, to tell the truth.

now to the suggestions.

  • first things first, some non-build-related stuff. Spear devotion is probably the weakest among all lightning ones. Good thing is that li devo path is one of the most flexible but this one is an outlier. Maybe add some flat e-cute to the nodes. Maybe sth else.
  • Lodestone can get its proc area doubled, imo. make it like that Valdaran lightning nova or sth. Keep the DR the same (or maybe a bit higher, like 12%) but it needs some better area. That’s my hot take.
  • I don’t know what to do with the whole Veilkeeper set thing, tho. Maybe it can get some disruption res as a 3-part bonus, but the main concern are both Upheaval and wps. First is wild cazino that, in the end, doesn’t even hit that hard, wps aren’t quite good even with huge arc from AA mods. and they have their flat almost doubled and converted. Sth has to be done.
  • Regen part is ok. Until it isn’t. It’s good to have those big regen numbers flating around but when they fail you, it’s a spectacular fail.

I haven’t tried aether 2h Ritualist so far but I doubt it would be much different from what I recorded before the patch.

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75

Upheaval is just a very taxing skill in today’s game. Successful melee builds hinge on different combinations of avoid/da/dr/cc but the first layer of defence is stable output vs enemies infront of you. When you have a build that can sometimes hit 8 blank white hits in a row vs a pack of enemies you need extraordinary layers of defence to guarantee survival.

In all honesty, I, as a melee and diversity apologist, see no inherent value in this Upheaval gimmick being a proc on crit that’s overriden by WPS. I’ve made a case for Upheaval being turned into WPS before but let me lay out the arguments again:

  • First and foremost, it’s extremely confusing for new players, and this problem is gonna hit with a new vigor when FoA attracts new players. WPS pool itself is not elementary to understand, how is a new player supposed to realise that this Upheaval thingy, which is a direct continuation of 2H specific attack line similarly to Inquisitor or Nightblade, is smth entirely different and can be almost a void investment point for a build with other WPS taken?
  • Upheaval is a lightning skill be default, also being open to two major lightning sets, Ultos and Veilkeeper. Lightning is already very heavy RNG loaded, with all those % chance to do massive dmg, big discrepancy in flat values, often reliance on crit from the exclusive. Adding another massive layer of RNG pushes it over the top to the point that you don’t feel like you control the outcome of your gameplay
  • Current shift in the game massively favors melee builds with stable output. When 80% of your dmg is locked behind on crit hits, it can work for a nimble caster, but not for a melee fighter
  • Making Upheaval a proper WPS eliminates 2 or 3 gimmick 4k OA builds from the game (that are superhard to balance) but in turn opens up 20 or 30, if not more, proper 2H AA builds with 8 (soon to be 9) classes and various dmg types. IMO it’s just an easy win for diversity
  • If Upheaval becomes a WPS, it functionally and visually remains the same as it was, it just gains stable chance to proc. Which means that anyone who wants to make a heavy Upheaval build won’t be forced into solving a 4k OA puzzle to properly use the skill
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76

Would this problem be somewhat solved if Upheaval was to overrule other WPS instead of the other way around ?

Seems that it would be much easier to explain, and would not cut down the number of time something special happens but increase it.

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But then wps investments with Upheaval would have worse roi, because if you have high OA and Upheaval you won’t be proccing them as much. Which would be also not intuitive at all.

I agree about reworking Upheaval into wps. Builds with it are indeed gimmicky and rely on very specific and hard to put together collection of greens and in the end they still lose to wps builds. Moreover the way OA scaling falls off significantly after a certain point yet you need to go far beyond that point on an Upheaval build to get some kind of performance out of it. And it’s still going to be a casino.

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78

I want to report that aether DW Spellbinder with this set is now very, very good. Very tanky, not super fast. Overall enjoyable to play.

The problem with lightning Ritualust, that’s more supported on the surface, is that lightning is not supported in any way by Necromancer. The build has over than 1k% less dmg than aforementioned Spellbinder.

If lightning (or aether) Ritualists are meant to be supported by the set, the set needs to have a much stronger lightning support for Necromancer and conversely much stronger aether support for Shaman. I think the only easy solution here is to introduce aether rr% or high %dmg help for Shaman and lightning rr% or high %dmg help for Necromancer on the set. That way both aether Druid and lightning Spellbinder can also start being considered.

But i’m happy that the set now has two viable builds.

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79

You’re right, but it’s the lesser of 2 evils in both intuitiveness and application.

Explaining that Upheaval won’t proc if something else procs, and that ANY WPS makes Upheaval less effective… is a lot more convoluted than saying “if it’s a crit, it’s Upheaval, no matter what else you have”

And on the application side, it’s not as good for other WPS, but at least it doesn’t completely tank any investment you have in Upheaval. In short, I’d arther have every WPS be slightly less likely to proc, than having a situation where Upheaval is almost never going to. At that point, picking Upheaval becomes a conscious choice with slightly diminishing returns for other WPS, and not an absolute “That and nothing else” that it needs to be right now.

The only real downside to this fix I can see is that other WPS will never crit of you have Upheaval, but that’s easily fixed by … not taking Upheaval.

Whereas the alternative to having skills that don’t work as often and don,t crit… is having one that simply never procs, or procs so unreliably that it might as well not exist.

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That’s true.

How do you even balance a build like that. Avoid OA if you want more wps less Upheval? Avoid investing into WPS via mods if you want more Upheaval but then a sprinkle of wps? I guess if you want more Upheaval you just try to get a wps pool for minimum investments or something. But that seems rather puzzling and convoluted still.

But how do you explain it tho so players have an idea how to balance their build between Upheaval and wps?

Contrast to that, having it as a wps is no evil at all. Well except you have to rework couple of Upheaval items/set.

1 Like