I wanna get back into grim dawn but with a new character. The last time I played was back in ca. 1.0.0.5 and as far I know the devs used to rebalance a lot of things in each patch, so the characters and items are probably quite different than they used to be.
Anyone who can suggest me a build, which does not just feels fun to play but also nice to look at? Niche, meta don’t matter to me. Also builds relying on key items are no problem since I have a summoner which can (probably still) clear end game content.
the build can kill anything relatively easily (due to low health some hard hitting enemies like Shar’Zul or Moosi’s overhead smash can be dangerous) and fast.
you have a lot of skills to work with: you use ABB as your left clicks to proc lethal assault and keep that up; Shadowstrike does tons of damage, allows you to teleport around and due to it’s low cd, it does so really quickly.
you have a lot of onepointers that get a lot of value due to the plus-skills that your gear gives you: ring of steel (frost) for close range aoe damage, blade trap to trap and debuff (lowers DA) mobs, bladespirit just to have more stuff around!
health is low, but you have excellent defensive abilities with Maivens sphere, Mirror of Ereoctes on an insanely short cd, bladebarrier for “oh shit” moments. you have a pretty decent dodge chance with shadow dance and stuff from gear and devotions and speaking of devotions, some of them also help a lot of survivability
the build looks good because of the high damage numbers it does! jk, with whirpool from the leviathan devotion and the set bonus from the 2 alkamos rings, your screen will be looking really…blue. ontop of that you have the nemisis pet with you, so you wont feel alone while playing…enjoy!
the dual wield procs are basically just 1 pointers that can give you a bit more single target dps between ABBs. im actually not fully sure how much you actually get out of them, since your cds are so short (ABB has 1.6 seconds, shadowstrike has 2.3) that you will be rarely even autoattacking. id say if you want to save a few points you could completely leave those out or only skill dual blades and execution.
the 2hander (soulrend) is just an alternative weapon you could use. you’ll have slightly less dps with it because no dual wield procs and no 4 set deathmarked bonus but the weapons proc looks nice, so i pull it out every now and then ^^
also if you want to add even more speed to the build, put a riftstone in one of your weapons to get another teleportation skill. makes you insanely mobile but you give up the utility from olerons blood, just a fun thing to do imo :3
The ABB dual pistol builds looks similiar to Luminas one but ranged. Interesting to see that it is possible to play that way, always wanted to try out a ranged build. No idea on 2h vs 2 1h though.
Since I am already working on my new spellbreaker it seems like the question for me is to go either ranged or keep my melee build.
Why are almost all builds melee-based?
I’ve been looking for a viable lightning caster build for long time, but still nothing appears among builds through updates. Sad.
Well, the game is really way too melee-oriented and barely has any classic casters. Literally no pure classic fire, ice, lightning magic, like in Titan Quest.
Components have really good elemental skills, they are very much sufficient for normal and a bit of elite.
Also the inquisitor from the xpac will bring some elemental runes.
As someone who almost exclusively plays casters, here’s my 2 Cents:
While I agree that GD has a bit too much focus on melee, you can build viable and fun-to-play casters with every single damage type(except pierce maybe :D) and lots of combinations of two or even more damage types. It just needs some creativity and it is often more gear-dependant(conversion, …).
Conversion is key here, either converting physical damage(from caster skills like Stun Jacks, Forcewave, etc.) into smth else, or converting other damage types(for example elemental -> chaos with Blood Rite skill from that offhand or cold -> fire via warpfire, etc. ppp.). I have to admit though that most of my fav builds are pretty standard (e.g. Aether CT or Lightning SJ), but I also have a lot of niche builds of all kinds. Atm I’m having tons of fun with a Aether/Chaos Obsidian Tremor Warlock, it’s insanely brilliant :D:D
My “best” builds(with spammable casts, not a big fan of CD rotation builds) using your desired damage types are:
-Lightning: Stun Jacks Elementalist
-Cold: Winter King’s Might + TSS spellbreaker
-Fire: CT + BWC Sorcerer(using 2x Invoker’s Burning Hand to convert some of CT’s Aether damage to fire, though it still has some aether as secondary damage type)
All of them completed ultimate campaign without problems. These are just examples and just my personal way of playing, but it shows that there are a lot of possibilities to play casters in this great game
I feel the opposite has been happening lately when it comes to melee and caster build ratio. It feels casters are starting to get much more common than melee builds.
The problem is that i don’t want to throw some traps pretending to be lightning caster, this is strange and boring. I want to throw lightnings of various sorts from my hands or a wand/staff, but the game won’t let me. I can’t cast ice shards, spikes, frozen winds, flame walls, fire balls, fire elementals and other.
I want to be a classic elemental mage, but there is nothing like this in the game.
There is but again you have to be creative with your use of skills. And you can’t be worried about being a world beater in clear speed meta. I already posted some lightning builds above.
And you can easily build around Empowered Fireblast. If you have 2 warpfires you can do a Empowered Fireblast, TSS and OFF fire build. Used to only need 1 warpfire until it got nerfed and you were able to use Devastation.
Not sure why they nerfed the cold to fire % since they just gave us beronath with 100% conversion plus they had Blood Orb also with 100% Conversion.
