Help needed for begginer Dervish

So i started a Dervish as my first ever char and got it to level 45, using a couple of different builds - immortal pets then eye of reckoning, then Virulent, which i am following right now and it works fine, but during the leveling process i figured that i don’t really like pets and melee builds.

What i would like is a caster build with big AoE, so i opened GrimTools and tried to make a build that i think i would like - the Judgment Dervish. The intended use is to drop Judgment on them and fervor the straglers/bosses.

So now i am looking for advice on whether this build is able to finish MC, kill all the bosses and farm me some gear for other builds.

I understand that Dervish is not the best combo for a Judgment build, but i’d want to finish the game once before starting a new char.

I intentionally didn’t add any affixes to my gear, because i will have to roll with what i find and though i am aware that i will have to farm a bit to get all the gear, i still don’t want to farm for specific affixes. I added only those items that i currently have, or can reasonable obtain. Some advice on the relics that i should keep an eye on would also be very valuable, maybe the ones that can be bought.

So please tell me what you think? Will it work, or it’s not possible to do it with a Dervish and i should stick to melee?

Judgment isn’t that bad for Dervish but it is usually done with either Dreegalanore or Targo set. Fire Dervish is an exotic concept, but idk, try it? In the end if it’s fun for you then it doesn’t matter if it’s considered sub-optimal by others.

P.s. I’ve theorycrafted a very similar concept, but it was a Templar.

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Well, i want to know if it at least looks viable, before trying it.

If it’s going to be fun, i will try to farm those sets and make it end-game viable, perhaps. What i need now is to know if it looks good enough for Elite/Ultimate. Are the numbers on it fine? The devotions aren’t messed up too much? The skills are assigned good enough? No useless skills taken?

No idea to be honest. If it was me I’d try to get Ring of Steel as high as possible for two reasons:

  1. It synergizes with pull effect of Judgment
  2. It justifies Dervish pick with your amulet, so I won’t feel like I should be playing something else.

Honestly I wouldn’t go for auto-attacking with this kind of build, so my build would be optimized rather differently.

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Will it be able to kill bosses only with Judgment and Ring of Steel? Or you would get some other single target skill?

With Judgment, Ring of Steel and hella lot of fire devotion procs? Yes, I’m fairly sure you would. The real problem is healing, but there are ways to deal with that. For example, Bat with the amount of pierce to fire you’re stacking would heal you a great deal if you bind it to 1-1-1 Vire’s Might.

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So, what you propose is to lose Righteous fervor altogether? What should i have as my main attack (as in left mouse) in this case and how would you optimize the build?

I don’t know because I haven’t built anything similar, only theorycrafted. In theory it should work as a plain caster just fine, but in practice you’d probably want either fervor or amarasta or maybe even greater fireblast just to proc stuff.

As for optimizing the build - sorry, I’m not ready to spend more than a hour polishing the rough idea in GT just for you. I believe I provided enough insight as is already, how about you figure out the rest yourself and make your own unique build?

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That’s what i’m trying to do, but i really don’t have enough experience with the game yet. I guess i’ll just roll with your Virulent Dervish.

So, I tried to do exactly that. Taking into account your advice, I came up with this, since I have the conflagration relic blueprint.

The idea is to Shadow strike into a group of mobs, pop Judgment, then Ring of steel and kill stragglers with conflagration. In case that things go bad - vire might out of there.

How does it look now? Did I choose the right devotions for the job? Did I bind them right?

I am concerned about the small fire resist reduction. I have heard that mobs in Ultimate are highly resistant to fire. Any suggestions where I could get some more of it, or is it good enough?

Pretty bad…

Absolutely not.
For starters you’ve picked more devotions you can manage. I’d say you don’t need Imp and perhaps Fiend too.

The two most important damage constellations are Ulzuin’s Torch and Magi. Meteor Shower needs to be on Guardians (standard meta binding, cooldown is big and proc chance is big too, so it doesn’t matter), Fissure should be on Judgment (Flames of Wrath would proc it around you on cooldown). Alternatively you can bind Fiend to Judgment (yet again, Flames of Wrath should proc it reasonably well), but then Fissure would need to go with Vire’s Might (the puddle left by Volcanic Stride is a good activator for anything low cooldown), and then you’d be challenged where to bind Twin Fang, could had been Righteous Fervor. Solael’s Witchblade should go with Shadow Strike I think.
Another useful activator you can pick is Blade Spirit, I think you can try Phoenix with this one.

You can get Rhowan’s Crown for a bit more flat RR and you can also try finding more points for Celestial Presence.
There are fire builds that work fine despite having only one RR skill in the class. They might not be top performers but they should be fine with Ultimate. Perhaps you’d just have some issues in unlucky cases when enemy spawns with %fire or %elemental resist gear, but not with the vast majority of enemies in the game.

Conflagration costs 200 energy per second while your build has 44 energy regen. And you would need energy for using all the other stuff too.

If you want a filler skill so much then just get RF or Amarasta’s Blade Burst on left mouse button, bind Elemental Storm to it.

The cheapest relic that is good to use is Endurance. It has +1 to OK and it’s sold by a faction.

Your skill distribution is also rather bad. Isn’t Judgment the skill you want to play around? Why did you drop almost all point from it?

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/RZRkGvjN

That looks a bit better.

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Thank you very much!

I think it’s still doable with just Bloodlord’s Vengeance, TD and Belgothian’s Carnage. The uptime probably won’t be 100%, but close to that. This isn’t something you can do early on regardless.

I mean OP is currently playing an acid dervish following my guide. No matter how I look at it trying to pull off a DW fire dervish would be a downgrade in pretty much everything for him - less damage, less gear, less aoe. More complicated and more gimmicky instead.

I understand that i’m a royal pain in the ass, but i’ve scrambled this build from the gear i had and wondered what do you guys think about it. It’s intended for leveling further and farming gear for the build linked by Stupid_Dragon above.

How would it fare compared to this Virulent Dervish? Will i be able to use it further, or i’d better stay with the Virulent one?

Edit: i would gladly try it myself blindly, but it requires some resources for the change, that i have, but if it won’t work, i won’t be able to roll back, so i need as much confidence as possible…

I’d had gotten the amulet and Ring of Steel first.

If you lack resources for the backward respec then simply farm them, trivial.

P.S. if you drag it on it would be easier to just rush Abomination, which is an AoE comparable to Judgment. How much devotion points you have at the moment?

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33 I think. But I only bought one from Crucible, so I guess I could get some more there. I have no idea how the costs there change though.

Ok. Don’t know your current devotion setup, but you can rush Tainted Eruption with this:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/p25d34PN

That would require 2 more devotion points.

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Great, will get right to it! Thanks a lot!