Howl of the Wendigo Still Needs More Buffing

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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So, mucked around last night and came up with this build:

It’s got -117% vitality RR + 20 Flat from Scales and a monster 3900 OA (in game) and it still struggles to clear SR80-81 in a good time, which I consider about 12 minutes or less. Got a video showing a 17 minute clear, which has been pretty par the course in testing today.

Video evidence:

This is in contrast to this Bloodknight Deathknight clears SR80-81 far more smoothly and noticeably faster:

Death Knight, Level 100 (GD 1.2.0.0) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

The key difference being that build’s damage is augmented by Counterstrike and other skills, where as the Warder relies mainly on Blade Arc + a bit from Devouring Swarm. Which means one can kill Kupa even sitting in his blood pools, where the other very slowly tics his health down, only getting significant damage in when the pools aren’t stacked up.

DPS is similar for both of them in game too with everything procced.

Now did the buff Howl of the Wendigo yet in 1.2 help a bit? Sure, it make the Deathknight build be able to handle SR80-81 with ease now, where before it was touch and go and probably pushed the pre-patch Bloodknight version of this up to be able to get though SR75-76 a bit faster. But it has other sources of damage, namely Counterstrike, to augment it’s total dps. Where as solely relying on Blade Arc for damage shows the weakness of the buff, namely it’s still not enough to put it on par with physical Blade Arc. And I doubt whether or not the MI amulet that adds more physical damage would help either.

More flat vitality damage might help, but I think (if I’m right lawl) it would be better to increase the skill modifier to convert 150% Physical to Vitality damage on Blade Arc, which would push the damage up massively and put vit-BA near on par with physical BA. Though not sure if that’s how conversion works :upside_down_face:

Also tried a hybrid Vit/Bleed version and it was still just as sad as the last time I tried on the Deathknight, even with Primal Bond buffing bleed damage. Because this mace doesn’t as more bleed damage to BA.

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Tried Vitality Storm Totems, slowed things down considerably damage wise, guess life tap on the Wendigo Totem is doing some significant damage. Also tried Clean Sweap, to the usual results - i.e. no good with a single hand weapon without an autoattack replacer, like say the relic that gives Uroboruuk’s Reaping. Boosted OA to 4K as well, and it didn’t really help.

Also did a run with the Deathknight, and loo, it’s still the same, a bit slower in the boss rooms due to less RR, so highly vitality resistant bosses take longer to kill, but it’s still faster in the chunks. Which is where it really counts so you’ve got enough time to run within the timer if you accidentality die. Though it’s also more tanky due to MoT and has better trash clear due to necromancer kills. So about 12-15 minutes depending on mutators.

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/bump

So, made a Warder BA build around Howl of the Wendigo after 1.2 hit:

It’s semi okay for SR75-76, but for SR80-81 and SR85-86 it shows that this only Blade Arc attack is too low damage wise due to Howl of the Wendigo not being good enough. Even if I buffed the attack speed it would still sadly not be good enough, as with the OA being so high and -117% vitality RR + -20 RR it should have been high crit damage murdering pretty much everything in SR80-81. But that didn’t happen and SR85-86 showed that issue much higher.

Anyhow, brain’s deads, can’t do words, as this would be longer and better…

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Conversion over 100% is useless else it would be the go to stat since it could multiply damage by a lot on soome builds. (Actually there is a niche case where conversion overcap is useful I think where if you have conflicting conversions it can push things in favor of your main. Eg: 100% phys to fire and 50% phys to chaos becomes 66 fire and 33 chaos, so if you increase to 150% phys to fire then it makes it 75% fire and 25% chaos) (This is if I understand it correctly lol)

Maybe something like damage modified by 10-30% would be what you wanted. That could also boost the DoT cooldown version nicely I guess.

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