Just wondering if there’s any good resources/guides to help somebody start to learn to theorycraft builds etc for Grim Dawn. I’ve never been a theorycrafter in any game, nor am I an amazing mathematician. I love playing around with skills and different builds in all games, and I really love the talent trees in Grim Dawn. I have so many ideas of things I’d like to try, some of which I can’t find anywhere else, but I have no real Idea of how to actually build up that idea.
I don’t want to just blindly follow other people’s guides anymore. I want to look at them, actually understand why certain choices have been made, and then (hopefully) proceed to make my own stuff.
Is there anything online that can help me with this? Right now I just level characters and sometimes mess around a bit but I can’t actually tell if it’s doing good or bad until somebody more experienced tells me. Which is fine but very rarely do they ever explain why!
I have already had a quick look at the “DoT’s for dummies” thread (will give it a proper read later).
I don’t see anything else on the stickies though that could help me. Do you just mean the wiki? From what I can see the bit about game mechanics there is a copy and paste from the website’s game guide.
Ok thanks. Dyslexia + generally not being great at maths is going to make following this tricky but I have to try. I know I’ll get so much more enjoyment out of the game 9or any game) doing my own thing rather than just copying. Spent 12 years copying builds and guides for WoW and I’m bored of following guides now xD
It’s a shame there’s not voiced or video versions of game guides with animations to help explain stuff. If I understood the stuff myself I’d even try and make some! Don’t say use text to speech. Those annoying disjointed voices don’t make anything easier to follow.
Just play and while you have fun you will learn skills and synergies, it takes time but if you wanna do your own thing ( which is big part of the fun) that’s probably the best way
This bit of a quote is probably the simplest way to explain how people go about theory crafting builds from scratch:
There’s obviously different key points depending on what kind of build you are doing, e.g. Retaliation and Pet builds won’t need to worry about Offensive Ability (unless you are doing a hybrid) but the skeleton/starting point is there. While not mentioned here, other miscellaneous stats like Attack Speed/Casting Speed, Crit Damage, Attack Damage converted to Health and many others are also all important stats that play a major role in builds.
The rest comes from experience, trial and error, that sort of thing. My recommendation is to not dwell on things too much, try out any ideas you have and ask for advice on the forums and people will be able to help you out and advice you on what to do and not to do.
Thank you very much for the list. One question, I get why you focus on one damage type first. Where in this list, or how do you go about planning for, a second damage type? For example if I was focusing on lightning as my main damage. I know there’s a guy who’s very resistant to lightning, so having a second damage type would be useful. I decide to pick fire as my secondary damage type so I’m not 100% useless against monsters with high lightning resistance.
How do you go about looking at when to pick talents/gear which give + lightning damage or when to look at +fire damage? Sorry this is probably a very open ended question but looking at a single damage type is easy, but most of the time you want atleast 2.
The good thing in your example is that there’s a lot of gear, abilities and so on that couple Lightning and Fire together including Elemental such as Fire Strike, Elemental Storm and just about every Ulzuin item.
Some damage types have this synergy where they are frequently placed together - Fire/Cold, Fire/Lightning, Chaos/Vitality, you get the picture.
If you’re trying to place 2 damage types that aren’t commonly seen together is going to be more difficult but not impossible. The above quote I posted will still hold true but you will have to look at both types separately and at the same time if that makes any sense :rolleyes:
I know Lightning/Fire has a lot of good synergy which is why I gave that as the example! xD Didn’t want to dive into the complicated right away.
So I would just rely on the passive +fire stuff that just happens to came long with suitable + lighting gear/talents?
I’m not entirely sure about the two damage types which aren’t already paired. If there’s no gear or talents which have both damage types on them, how do you go about that? Just split your gear between pieces with damage type A and pieces with damage type B? Or do you have to rely on items with conversion on them, if you can find any which works for your damage types?
Edit: I also don’t have any idea how people decide how many points to put into each talent. How do you decide what’s worth capping and what’s not?
That’s if you want to have Lightning serve as your primary damage type and Fire as your secondary.
If you want both to be equals, you need to start focusing on Fire more by specifically adding in more resist reduction for it such as Eldritch Fire for example, just as you’de likely have Arcane Bomb for Lightning, sources of flat Fire Damage (if you’re doing a weapon attacking build) such as Flame Touched or spells that do Fire damage. A bit of an example is this topic someone made where they wanted to try a Cold/Acid Spellcaster.
I’m not entirely sure about the two damage types which aren’t already paired. If there’s no gear or talents which have both damage types on them, how do you go about that? Just split your gear between pieces with damage type A and pieces with damage type B? Or do you have to rely on items with conversion on them, if you can find any which works for your damage types?
This is where it starts to get trickier because you’re working with little to no synergy at all. You’re somewhat right in that conversion and/or dedicating slots is probably the way to go. My suggestions in the above linked topic use both of these.
My first ever character was a battlemage. I never got very far on her though. Coming back to the game I notice discord is a thing. I would love to do a physical/cold damage battlemage sword and board-esque character. I don’t see much love for cadence or discord however. I also don’t understand if it’s just the physical damage of the base candace abilty that is effected with discord, or everything in the cadence “tree”.
Btw I edited my previous post in regards to skill points and how to spend them. I don’t suppose you have an opinion on that?
Thank you very much for all the help and explanations you’ve given so far. I already feel a bit more confident in building something.
It’d be difficult for me to explain this as it can come down to the skill or modifier itself and what you gain from it or how much you gain from it. I’ll try and explain common cases for point placements.
-Some skills start to scale poorly at a certain point such as Vindictive Flame. After 16/16 (or even 9/16), the gain in % Total Speed per point starts to drop so people consider overcapping it a waste.
-Some skills are “one point wonders”. Ones where people put a single point in them either to use as devotion triggers, for utility (i.e. Mirror of Ereoctes and Nullification) or to bring the skill’s rank up with + skills for minimal investment.
Edit:
-Other cases are where people put one point into something are if they are taking a skill or buff for a modifier. Examples of this are Mogdrogen’s Pact - the health regen and energy regen on their own aren’t very attractive but the % health added by Heart of the Wild is massive. Similarly, putting one point into Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange to take Elemental Balance for the % Crit Damage is also common in Arcanist builds.
-Finally, the same concept can be applied to active skills if there is a specific modifier along a skill that adds damage that you want to specialise in. One example of his is JoV’s Vitality Conjurer where he one points the entire Dreeg’s Evil Eye line except for Vile Eruption which adds a ton of Acid and Vitality that he is able to spam out. In Superfluff’s Markovian Madness, he one points Cadence and Deadly Momentum because he is using it for the Bleeding source in Fighting Form.
Right ok. Thank you very much for all your info. I’m looking at battlemage right now but without any elemental resistance reduction on the talents themselves I should probably start somewhere where it’s “all included” as it were.
