I think the only thing holding this build together is the guaranteed 100 % passthrough on the chonky Cadence hit. If that goes I think my days are numbered in chunks cause my clear disappears. Also, while yes Cadence does eat a ton of points, I honestly have more points than I know what to do with (hence the extra points in Military Conditioning). There just isn’t that much in the Battlemage tree beyond what I have that helps me much. All the Exclusive Skills are just halfway useful.
True about exclusives. It’s quite sad that there is no exclusive with elemental damage %.
But if you could swap somehow relic for wps one then around 50% shots would have passthrough. You would be missing cadence shots but in exchange all of the rest would be stronger.
Also even stats in Arcanist line would help a bit.
Edit: IEE would lost points and bonuses and that’s seem like a big drawbag
You could experiment with the Mageslayer set and include OFF. OFF would add some fire/cold RR for many things. It might not help with bosses, but it could help AoE clears.
Or (although I get the impression that you want to maintain elemental - but your ground rules don’t clarify) you could switch to a physical damage build/itemization, where you can profit more from soldier RR and one dev RR. I suspect you could keep the Blind Sage proc and juggle some of the dev around.
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I’ve pondered Mageslayer as an option but I think it would be best as a Fire build to really take advantage of that massive native rr. That’s a major build overhaul though, so I haven’t tested that one yet, my attempts to fine tune the build have generally all circled around a few minor variations of the same Tri-Ele shell.
I’m gonna do some testing on a version using the Fleshwarped Casque first, see what good affixes I can realistically get on those, then build my defenses around what I found. I’ll also try dropping Attak Seru and try Ghoul, cause if I’m gonna drop Shattered Guardian I’m gonna need some other form of circuit breaker and the extra lifesteal wouldn’t hurt. I’m also thinking of looking through what Kaisan amulets I got stashed way to see if I can get a general boost from there, cause all the amulet options I’ve been messing around with are honestly just embarrasing to look at. The medal and ammy slots are really weak on this build so maybe I can cook something up there. I’ll post an update once I’ve put it together and done some testing, it’s gonna take a while to get the pieces in place. If that doesn’t pan out I’ll try a Runebinder crossbow variant and a Mageslayer variant and see what’s what.
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Is changing damage type out of the question, or are the only requirements are “2-handed ranged battlemage” ?
Since you’re stuck without RR anyway, you might as well go for a damage type that is less resisted, such as bleed, chaos or Aether
Bleed especially, would work well since Cadence has very high %weapon damage. With a good Ugdenbog boltthrower, and you could get RR on warcry from a conduit, or support for cadence with the Goredrinker set.
Arcanist wouldn’t contribute much directly to damage, but a lot of OA, CC resist and damage absorption helps anyone.
I put this together in like 5 minutes, it’s probably bad as-is, but it gives a rough idea of what it can be (I didn’t change all augments either)
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Holy lifesteal batman! Honestly would have never even thought of going bleed on a Battlemage. Doesn’t quite match the arcane archer flavour but deviation to Aether might fit the bill.
Looks like I’m gonna be busy with this build for the next week XD So much to think about already, thanks guys!
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well, if you skip the 2h approach, dw phasebreaker allows to boost ZA (so beside Cadence, there are two WPS with passthrough - and one of them is rather strong) - beside the dw cadence boost (more cadence strikes while dw). Obviously, I prefer more RR and have taken all three RR devotions, even at the cost of damage (from the T3 devotions)
edit: of course - giving up elemental damage completely, e.g. going physical - would allow other builds
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That Aether idea could be interesting. Your comment about Fleshwarped casque got me wondering if it could be worked into a 4-piece Krieg’s and compare it to 5-piece + Magelord rings.
Profit off CT for extra AoE/proc. Use Reckless instead of Oleron’s.
And perhaps maybe even get some value from Fleshwarped Carbine if you had some superb suffixes that could compare to the Dreadscorcher % damage and + skill. That would be tough finding that, though.
I’m curious to hear how this one goes, if you work something out.
Did some brief messing around with dual Phasebreakers with Korvaak’s Brand. The sheet DPS was sheet (like, less than half) but dummy kill time was pretty much identical between Arcaneweaver and Phasebreakers (that was without changes to devotions though i.e. I still had Kraken on DW). So my damage would be very low on average but very spiky on Markovian procs. Could be worth pursuing further, but I worry the spikes could lead to issues with reliability of sustain in the downtimes.
But I think the Fleshwarped Casque experiment is bearing fruit. My best outcome after farming half an inventory was Magi’s of the Boar. Suffix could be better but the CD on Magi’s is very helpful for War Cry and Mirror uptimes. Sadly got an average roll of 4 %. Looked through my stashed up Kaisan’s Burning Eyes, had a Magi’s of Vitality (also sadly a 4 % CD so my War Cry has a 0.1 s downtime). Put that together, replaced the chest and shoulder since the Shattered Guardian set was now, well, shattered. Tried an SR run but it still wasn’t doing the trick on sustain, with a death at early 77.
So I tossed the Seal of Resonance for a Haunted Steel, redid some other components, most notably adding Prismatic on head cause I just couldn’t bring myself to drop Attak Seru to get Ghoul for the circuit breaker. Haunted Steel plus Diamond will have to do their best Ghoul impression. And voila, beat an SR75-80 within timer with -15 % health and -10 % total damage mutators on first try. Final room was hairy with IM and Fabius (who at one point had me at 700 hp, thank you movement skill for getting me out of that damage aura range in time for Constitution to save me). But I made it. This is the current build Battlemage, Level 100 (GD 1.1.9.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
WD has gone down very slightly compared to the Shattered Guardian version, my phys res is 8 % down and armor, max res and health have dropped, but I’ve got more lifesteal, two new circuit breakers (Diamond and Bloodthrister), pretty much full uptime on War Cry (stronger too) with %WD on it and my DA has gone up by 200+. Down 1 % absorb on Maiven but up 2 % DR on War Cry
Gonna test how reliable it is across 5 SR runs but if I can manage at least 3 wins, I think I’ve got the final version.
Might theorycraft an alternative for the Aether variant and Runebinder variant after I’m done with testing.
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Coincidentally, a couple weeks ago I did a GT doodle of a 2H Fleshwarped cadence Krieg battlemage. Looks ok on paper and only a couple buttons to push but no idea how it will perform. Was planning on testing it out eventually, but here it is if somebody wants to run with the idea.
Note: energy regen looks like a problem now that I look at it again.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner! Finished 3 out of 5 SR75-80s within timer. Possibly could have been 4, had a run with pretty nice mutators…but ran into a Keynen Burntheart right out of the gate at 75 who was taking damage in the order of hundreds. By the time I realised why my health wasn’t going up, I was down to half. Said screw it, popped a potion and charged onward to shake the bastard…and ran into 3 fire traps blocking a corridor. Got shotgunned by them as I tried to squeeze through XD
It’s not a super comfortable build by any means and I would not go around recommending it. You have to be careful about positioning, create separation if you start getting swarmed but up until around 78 you can be fairly confident you have some breathing room and can most definitely facetank a lot of stuff.
Relinking the final version from my previous post (no changes) for convenience in case you like having to sweat for your SR runs: Battlemage, Level 100 (GD 1.1.9.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
Thank you all for your suggestions and feel free to keep discussing whatever funky Battlemage varieties you’ve been playing. I might theorycraft a few of the options that have been suggested here and post them here later. For now, I need a bit of a break from looking at the Battlemage skill tree XD
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Something I’ve noticed consistently in the original build and in many of the theorycrafts is too many points in Fighting Form. Fighting Form gives nothing to this build (unless you change it to be a bleed build), except for passthrough on the 3rd cadence hit, and it gives you that with only 4 points.
The game tells you it gives 51% chance at 4 points, as does grimtools, but ingame, you get passthrough every time at only 4 points.
GD is full of weird surprises. But have you confirmed that any Cadence passthrough = 100%? If you can have absolute passthrough at 1 pt due to the [new?] mechanic…
Also - while your point about the bleed being pointless is valid -the node does provide some % damage support to the physical portion of Cadence primary only (not DM afaik) and increases the maximum for number of targets. I typically considered the small %bonus increment not worth extra points when scarce, but the # target breakpoint is a consideration.
(or is # targets also irrelevant now?) I haven’t played in a while.
The number of targets is for melee cadence, it doesn’t affect ranged cadence. You can test it for yourself that it always passes through with only 4 points in.
well, then either the behaviour in game or the skill description is bugged
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Congrats Marcus on polishing the build and not surrendering !
Assume was quite a relief 
As for Cadence I always assumed that target limit is only for melee hits.
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Well, that’s a bug, but can confirm that it’s true:
Gonna make a bug report on that. However, it’s not true that Fighting Form provides nothing besides. With Discord, the % bonus to physical should apply to my Elemental, as it’s a direct skill modifier rather than global conversion.
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Why are you not utilizing Nullification?
You don’t have many buttons to press and keep track of. And it would be useful even if used only occasionally, at low skill point investment, no?
You totally could move points from Military Conditioning to it, I just didn’t really see a point. The DR on it with the points I’d have available would be lower than War Cry’s DR, so I’d only be doing it for the dispell. And while yeah, purging the occasional DoT, DA debuff from Reaper or Possessed Elementalist shield/Mirror of Ereoctes is nice, I don’t personally find that valuable enough to sacrifice health and DA for. Maybe I’m underestimating the skill. I’ve only really used it extensively for flavour (cause I was playing a Spellbreaker and I just CAN’T not have Nullification on that) more than actual utility so far.
My suggestion - play with it some more, see what all can be dispelled and what’s the impact of that.
For melee especially, always aiming it to both affect your character and your immediate targets clarifies it pretty quickly.