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.
