Then take Master of Death/Oleron’s Rage/Aura of Conviction/Whatever else.
You have options.
Or don’t take an exclusive at all and use the skillpoints to beef up other areas of your build. A build getting 2-3 stats from Reckless Power is much healthier for the game than the same build getting one stat from Star Pact but preferring that stat because LULCDRISBROKEN
Edit: FWIW, my suggestion to the spellbinder problem was to remove CDR from Star Pact and add CDR to pieces of gear more selectively, such as on Shadow Strike pieces or TSS pieces. I think what was actually implemented is a much cleaner solution that is far less egregious.
Mythical Malakor’s Infusion: replaced bonuses to Aura of Conviction and Heavy Ordnance with +3 to Aura of Censure and +3 to Cadence. Added 100 Elemental damage and -15% Elemental Resist modifiers for Aura of Censure.
Mythical Stormheart: added 100% of Physical dealt as Lightning modifier for Cadence and increased Lightning damage modifier to 70
Mythical Stormreaver: added 100% of Physical dealt as Lightning and 50 Lightning damage modifiers for Cadence
Actually signed up for the forum finally just to chuckle at this one because the apparently intense desire to kill off CDR Binders for good is going to, uh, have far-reaching consequences. It’s really tough to see how casters generally and Arcanist in particular aren’t dead now (CDR Binder was really the only thing propping Arcanist up as a primary class choice to begin with, though I confess that I haven’t tried out PRM and AAR since the recent buffs, so hopefully they’re great now and I’m wrong about everything. Would actually be nice because I love the idea of both of those skills, even if their performance has always been junk).
Anyway, GD has never actually supported “ranged attacker, survives primarily by manually avoiding damage” as a legitimate playstyle. You build for the hardest thing you expect to have to kill, and all the candidates for that title in this game charge you, are immune to CC, spew AoE every which way, and hit you like a truck, so you’d better be able to facetank (or kite I guess if you can stand to play that way) if you want to survive. This is why every Inquisitor build with enough sense to max Seal and WoR seems to “just work” no matter what crazy stuff you try to stack on top of it. This is why 90%+ armor absorption, max resists, and 4-figure health pools are basically mandatory. Etc. There’s no such thing as “manually avoiding damage” in Grim Dawn aside from “don’t stand in whatever death pool the game is throwing at you this time.” It’s spreadsheet vs. spreadsheet all the way down with just a dash of good positioning thrown in for flavor. Facetank capability is not optional in a “good” (all content viable) non-kite build.
Stacking CDR on Mirror/WoT/Blast Shield is how casters facetank. With the nerfs to Mirror/WoT and the new pogrom against CDR on (good) gear, I can imagine a few ways to keep them viable, but I surely don’t see any way for them to thrive.
Not true as there are several Trozan Sky Shard builds that do not use Necro that can beat gladiator crucible 150-170 with good times, and there are at least a few PRM builds that aren’t binders that can beat crucible gladiator as well, although not as fast. PRM was definitely not top-tier, but it wasn’t junk before the patch. The Trozan set was quite strong before the patch, and then it got a buff.
Wow, Duality change hurts, but it’s not game breaking. By nerfing Focusing Prism you basically went ahead and finished most Spellbreaker builds out there. Good job.
In dark times like these some common idioms come to mind:
You’ve got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette.
No pain, no gain.
“You can’t win a marathon without putting some Band-Aids on your nipples.”
Or really we should just compare the game to hearthstone, and how sometimes something players like is limiting the design space for future changes. We hurt binder today, and other builds are might be collateral damage, but in the long run we can probably bring a lot of it back around via skill modifiers and buffs to non binder class gear.
CDR really should be given only sparingly to classes with invulnerability tricks.
This is some 1984 level of totalitarian propaganda bullshit, man.
My Spellbreaker, a build that I am very proud of, took a lot of effort and testing and min-maxing. And even with after painfully collecting max cdr gear to achieve that coveted 50% cdr it still wasn’t immortal and still couldn’t squeeze three runs on 150-170 into 1 blessings durations. It was a good build, but nowhere near Arcanor Forcewave levels of good or Spellbinder levels of good. That Iskandra’s amulet was a core item for this build. Without it build becomes a f…king gimmick.
Fair point, I did probably get a little strident there, and saying “dead” was not exactly the best word choice, either. I blame the internet for training us all to be as hyperbolic as possible at all times.
I still feel that Arcanists and stereotypical “ranged caster” builds in general have always been second class citizens in GD because of the whole “primary defense is long cooldown, short duration damage immunity/absorption skills” concept that just performs very poorly without a metric ton of stacked CDR (and isn’t exactly amazing with it, Binders aside), and this change just pushes them farther still into general mediocrity. The game just rewards generic tankiness above all else and always has.
I have an idea… BRACE YOURSELF… request the cdr be put on the TSS set bonus… which needs it since TSS is far behind the other archetypes now for arcanist and unlike the others gets no weapon dmg and thus no lifesteal sustain possibilities.
I’d support it. 5% CDR on 3 or 4 piece bonus of the Trozan set.
And if that doesn’t do it for you than let me remind you of the age ol’ creed: War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; and Ignorance is Strength. :rolleyes:
This guy gets it.
Here’s something to consider everyone: What if many %weapon damage builds are already performing beyond what was ever intended? What if the fact that %weapon dmg builds spam aoe %weapon dmg procs/devotion stuff making them have amazing single target, amazing lifesteal and decent to great clear speeds has hurt the ability to even make a balanced system where casters, tanks, dps weapon, support builds etc. are all distinct from each other?
Just a thought. More useful thought: Bring your non binder builds that were hurt to the forum. Say how they were hurt. And doing all this in ideas and feedback suggest ways that they could be made whole again that wouldn’t buff binder. Non binder skill modifiers, buffs to gear choices aether binders wouldn’t use, etc.
[ul]
[li]Fleshwarped Incinerator: -2 Second Skill Recharge modifier to Canister Bomb was updated to -3 Seconds[/li]> [li]Allagast’s Stormbinder: 120 Aether Damage modifier to Trozan’s Sky Shard was replaced with 120 Cold Damage[/li]> [li]Ixillor’s Rageflame: increased damage dealt and reduced cooldown on the skill proc[/li]> [li]Malakor’s Infusion: replaced +3 bonus to Aura of Conviction with +3 to Aura of Censure[/li]> [li]Shard of Lost Souls: -8 Second Skill Recharge to Summon Hellhound modifier was replaced with 33 Vitality Damage and 100% Physical Damage converted to Vitality Damage[/li]> [li]Mythical Shadowflame Mantle: added 25% Aether Damage converted to Chaos Damage[/li]> [li]Mythical Spelldrinker: added +15% Attack Speed[/li]> [li]Mythical Tome of the Arcane Wastes: increased damage and crit modifier on the skill proc[/li]> [li]The Infernal Champion set: increased damage on the skill proc[/li]> [/ul]
Mythical Malakor’s Infusion: replaced bonuses to Aura of Conviction and Heavy Ordnance with +3 to Aura of Censure and +3 to Cadence. Added 100 Elemental damage and -15% Elemental Resist modifiers for Aura of Censure.
Dear god, is this even legal? Max cadence, take discord, 2 malakor’s maces, iskandra amulet, ignaffar or iskandra relic, overcap aura of censure and just -75% of elemental resistance with only one aura. I cannot remember such broken resist reduction sources in GD since early access.
Everything Soldier related is legal in Crate’s book. Tacticians were already op with ridiculous Arcanor sword, now with these two weapons it’s not even gonna be fair.
I think the problem is that sure, the grand vision of a better tomorrow that you’re hinting at may actually exist, but if it does it certainly hasn’t been announced, there is no public roadmap detailing how you intend to get there, and nobody out here in player-land has ever heard of it before so we’re forced to interpret changes in a vacuum.
If you asked me to derive the high level direction Crate is taking the game solely from the last couple of patches, I would come back with this:
“The goal is to wreck CDR Binder builds as well as CDR itself as a central build mechanic and further entrench the tanky, ADCtH-sustained, %weapon damage meta that has totally dominated the game at least since the content ended at the gates of Homestead (when I first got on board).”
Because that’s what the last two patches actually do. My toy immortal Binder is DOA, but my practically immortal, infinitely easier to pilot DW pierce Belgo’s Infiltrator that’s been facerolling Gladiator since shortly after AoM launched is… still facerolling 150-170 like it’s no big deal.
So what happen with patch? Clairvoyant binder is dead, as I predicted, others binders still stay in the centre of arena and, well, you know, do binder stuff.
Such a step toward diversity, the only build that required some button-smashing is dead.
