I am a new player to grim dawn. Got up to level 90. Respec’d into dervish after reading the compendium and some message board chats. It seems like it fits my play style. I’m geared mostly with faction gear but my resists seems pretty strong across the board for ultimate.
Long story short, I seem to be getting absolutely crushed by even trash mobs. I see vids of dervishes face tanking crowds of mobs. They obviously have better gear, but my resists seem to be on par with the videos. I don’t know what is wrong with my spec. I’m new to the build so some of it is probably user error. I tried to follow the compendium X dervish build. I posted it above.
Thank you in advance for any help or thoughts you might have!!
Before touching on why you are getting wrecked one note: Your build heavily lacks focus. Gear is hinting towards elemental/fire build while Devotions are for a poison build. You use guardian transmuter for poison RR but ignore RF transmuter for Acid Conversion.
That aside as already mentioned, some Resists are far below their max (and desired 80%). Help yourself with components.
Armor absorption is at 70% meaning your armor only provides 70% of its potential resulting in more damage for you. Use Components to get 100% here aswell.
Armor and Defensive Ability could be improved aswell with items/components.
Your Resistance Reduction skills could also take some more skill points (Nights Chill, Celestial Presence)
You ignored the Pneumatic Burst transmuter for some reason.
I would say that your major problem is, as others have stated here, your resistances. I’m not sure which videos you have watched but most builds that handle content in the upper 10% of the content in this game have these three components
over-capped resistances (all of them)
2700+ defensive ability
gear that makes sense
I’ll address these in reverse order
Now, obviously with your first character (I absolutely know that feel) you won’t have the best or even near the best gear in the game, relying on faction gear, crafting or self-found gear. However, with that being said, there are a lot of good things you can do in order to make your build more well rounded. I’m not familiar with all the ins and outs of dervish builds or even what type of faction gear is available, but from my looking at the two trees you are going to want to focus your damage on mainly poison and either your choice of vitality or cold as a secondary damage. Maybe give all the faction vendors a look and see if there is something there where you can replace some of your gear that gives weird stuff (for your build) like Fire/Chaos or Fire/Lightning/Aether. Even just gear that gives you health/DA-OA/resistances might be preferable to these slots which give you really nothing of benefit as is. You can also do a fair bit of “window shopping” at vendors in the game and look at what they have. You would actually be surprised at what kinds of nice things you might be able to find.
Secondly on this point, your skills are really all over the place. You seem to want to stick to fire/physical (nobody says you can’t do this BTW as a dervish, it’s just slightly harder than poison/vitality or poison/cold) but you have taken “path of the three” without having taken “dreeg’s reproach” transmuter on your righteous fervor. I would line these up better. If you want to stick to fire/physical then just move points over to Divine Mandate and try and get all the pierce and cold damage you do to transmute to fire (again somewhat hard).
You have also neglected some things that are very useful, like stacking your defensive and offensive ability points with investment in shadow dance, elemental awakening, and presence of virtue. I would invest in these before anything else just to give yourself more rounded stats. Also, for the love of God, put a point in Breath of Belegothian.
Your defensive ability needs work. This can be remedied by investing in Shadow dance and veil of shadow (a debuff on mobs means a soft buff on you) and components. Your offense ability also needs work and can be remedied the same way. For where you are right now, try and get these both up to around 2400 each. Sometimes the best defense is to kill the enemies as fast as possible.
Resistance need to be overcapped, especially poison, chaos, and aether in the late game. Componenents and faction powders are your friend here.
Thanks to everyone to taking time from their day to provide constructive feedback. This is the build I modeled myself after from the compendium. I thought I followed it pretty carefully save for the lack of gear. Please help with any suggestions. I want to get this right.
My gear is weird because I’m switching from a leveling vires might build.