Great Game... but...

You won’t find good Battlemages or Warders that try the ‘wrong’ damage types either :wink:

You have to focus on related types, so you should focus on Physical/Pierce/Bleed. Even if the skill also deals Lightening, you focus on the bleed or the lightening, not both. See it an an option to go either way, depending on what other skills / mastery you have.

As ppl have pointed out, your build isn’t very good, lotta wasted pts, and a lack of focus.

A- First and foremost, the basics: Bleeding and Lightning are both competing damage types, you can’t max both to their maximum effectiveness as

1)a they both have an elite skill and you can’t have 2 elite skills at once. You can’t pick both Sormcaller Pact and Primal Bond, you have to choose

1)b the only ability shared by both damage types is Savagery, that means, you will run out of skill pts trying to take all the good stuff for both damage types

  1. their respective devotions have different requirements and you can’t take all the bleeding and lightning devotions either, you have to choose

and 3) lightning is magical and scales with spirit and bleeding is physical and scales with cunning, you can’t max both attributes at once, you have to choose

As you can see, gears are the least of your concerns, no matter what you decide, you will end up with one main damage type, and maybe a secondary damage type

B- if you want your main damage type to be bleeding and wanna play with a 2 hander, you could try this http://grimcalc.com/build/1007-PtVJLe (savagery with storm touched has a fancy lightning buzzing visual and sound too)

if you want your main damage type to be cold / lightning and wanna play with a 2 hander, you could try this http://grimcalc.com/build/1007-FGCZ8e

and if you really wanna mix the two and wanna play with a 2 hander, you could try something like this http://grimcalc.com/build/1007-BmwnKV trying to make up for your lack of focus with a high offensive ability and critical damage

I have not done one because I play the “traditional” way, but I am under the impression that a build with zero skills points put into active skills is still viable. Since the game features so many extra skills/abilities/effects thanks to the devotions and gears, it sounds to me that a build with zero core abilities (nothing but masteries and passives) can still make its way through the whole game thanks to the extra skills (items and devotions), which are available to all builds and therefore unrelated with any specific one of them.

That’s the problem. This means that at the end, what makes the build important, its efficiency, its resilience, is not within the build, but everything around, which would mean that the build by itself is not that relevant.

Helpful, yes. But not redefining the whole build.

In the old ARPG like Diablo II, Dungeon Siege, Warcraft III to some extend, Sacred etc, the gear was very helpful for the melee builds, because it supplied them with their basic means of attack and defense, but most casters only got bonuses and protection with their gear, not much more.

The developers have been creative with the devotion system, but the problem with this addition to the game coupled with the shared items means that at the end, the skill points put into the masteries, the first choice of the players and what should really define the builds, are no longer relevant enough. You just need to meet the items requirements with the attributes and that’s pretty much it. There are so much Skills granted by items and %chance on attack/critical/hit that ultimately the strategy of your build relies much more on your shared stash than on your choices throughout the game.

I play the traditional way, and my survivability is mainly based on the HP+defense+armor+resistances, and with nearly all my builds, I always find that in late game, if I have no %damage converted to health, massive health regeneration, %damage absorption, I am just too weak. And getting some instantly make my character more viable. Which is why I am under the impression that those features are actually more important. And since those features apply to everything (all builds in all situations), this looks like the proof to me that the damage type system does not work well enough by itself without those all-in-one bonuses.

And a good paper>rock>scissor system needs no all-in-one solution. The fact that all melee builds at the end do need massive health regeneration, health leech etc mean that their core stats (HP etc) cannot be enough just by themselves. To have most builds ultimately have to rely on the same feature is no sign to me that the multi-class system works that well.

And I also should get new options thanks to that choice.

And since one of the only option granted to the 2H builds is the overpowered Kraken, this looks again to me that the core system is broken there as well without the overpowered stuff around.