IceCream - Budget Forcewave Soldier

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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Foreword:

I wanted to make a lazy Forcewave Soldier on a budget. It is built more for tankiness than damage and with the budget nature of the setup, do not expect much from it other than a relatively lazy build.

Also, ideally you do not want to limit yourself to a single mastery, but this is just to show that even if you do, it will still work decently.

For an endgame version of the build, look here - Creamy Fwuffy - Traumatized Warlord

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  • [S&B Caster] [1.1.9.8] (L) (sr) Cream Force - Lazy Traumatized Soldier (Maya)

    • Damage: Physical, Internal Trauma
    • Active Skills: Forcewave, War Cry, Blitz, Krieg’s Wrath
    • Passive Skills: Menhir’s Bulwark, Counter Strike, Field Command, Aether-Ward

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Knight2
Knight2650Ă—650 169 KB

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O) GrimTools Link: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZr5XaMV

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Shattered Realms, Shard 65: https://i.imgur.com/nNnxymR.jpg
No potions/consumables used except Tonic of Mending & Elixir of Spirit.

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Build Details

Factions:

  • Kymon’s vs Vigil = Entirely upto you.

  • Witch Gods = They are not mutually exclusive and you can max your reputation with all 3.

  • Barrowholm = Upto you.

  • Anasteria = Doesn’t matter. Upto you.

Devotions:

  • Crossroads - Blue + Yellow + Purple

  • Dryad > Tortoise > Sailor’s Guide

  • Eel > Hammer > Assassin’s Blade

  • Harvestman’s Scythe > Dire Bear

  • Vire, the Stone Matron

  • Light of Empyrion

  • Azrakaa, the Eternal Sands (1 point)

  • Ulo the Keeper of the Waters (1 point)

Skills:

  • 24/16 Forcewave, 1/1 Tremor, 17/12 Rending Force, 20/12 Internal Trauma.

  • 18/12 War Cry, 3/3 Terrify, 18/12 Break Morale.

  • 16/12 Fighting Spirit, 20/16 Menhir’s Will.

  • 10/16 Blitz, 16/12 Blindside

  • 20/16 Counter Strike, 16/12 Oleron’s Rage

  • 16/12 Field Command, 16/12 Squad Tactics,

  • 12/8 Decorated Soldier, 12/8 Scars of Battle

  • 14/10 Military Conditioning, 14/10 Veterancy

  • 5/12 Markovian’s Advantage.

Note - This is with the skill points given by items factored in.

Items:

Benevald is in The Blood Grove.

Hyram is in Steelcap District - Malmouth.

You don’t need Krieg’s Set to make the build work, so if you find that luck is against you and you are having a hard time getting the pieces to drop, you can instead use Faction items or Monster Infrequents in their place.

Components:

Augments:

Crafting & Transmuting NPCs:

Crafting -

Transmuting -

(Click to Expand)

How to Level

Attributes:

Everything into Physique, except for when you need to invest into Cunning or Spirit to meet the required stats for equipping items. It is recommended that you keep a few spare points while leveling.

Items:

Focus on the player’s defenses like Resistances first and foremost.
We are going to use Forcewave as our primary skill, with physical damage being the focus.
Grab the strongest two-handed weapon you can find and you are pretty much good to go.

Second Class:

You can go for anything that your heart desires. The idea here is to provide you with a Soldier only leveling setup so that you can pair it with a class you like, without having to use different setups to level different builds.

Devotions:

  • Blue Crossroads > Sailor’s Guide > Remove Blue

  • Green Crossroads > Raven > Remove Green

  • Kraken > Purple Crossroads > Hammer

  • Dire Bear > Yellow Crossroads > Dryad

  • Remove Yellow > Tortoise > Owl > Remove Hammer

  • Harvestman’s Scythe > Toad > Eel > Lotus

  • Vire, the Stone Matron (5 points for Fist of Vire)

  • Tree of Life (4 points for Healing Rain)

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Note - Assassin’s Mark is good for Physical damage builds due to its Resistance Reduction. However, keep in mind that it requires enough Offensive Ability to actually activate, since it procs on Critical Attacks only.
If you find yourself able to Crit consistently, taking the devotion is highly recommended.

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Skills:

  • Lvl 10 – 16/16 Forcewave, 1/1 Tremor.

  • Lvl 20 – 12/12 Rending Force, 1/12 War Cry, 3/3 Terrify.

  • Lvl 30 – 12/12 War Cry, 12/12 Internal Trauma, 7/8 Decorated Soldier.

  • Lvl 40 – 8/8 Decorated Soldier, 8/8 Scars of Battle, 1/16 Counter Strike,
    1/12 Field Command, 4/12 Squad Tactics.

  • Lvl 50 – 12/12 Squad Tactics, 12/12 Menhir’s Bulwark

  • Lvl 60 – 12/12 Break Morale, 1/16 Blitz, 8/12 Field Command

  • Lvl 70 – 12/12 Field Command, 16/16 Menhir’s Will

  • Lvl 80 – 10/10 Military Conditioning, 10/10 Veterancy

  • Lvl 90 – 12/12 Fighting Spirit, 8/12 Blindside

  • Lvl 100 – 16/16 Counter Strike, 12/12 Blindside, 1/12 Markovian’s Advantage

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Note - The skill point investment is intended for a more defensive focused approach and if you must absolutely level with Soldier only, without picking a second class. It also does not factor in any additional skill points you may get from items.
Feel free to experiment with the setup that fits your playstyle the most. Soldier is rather flexible in terms of how you wish to build it.

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(Click to Expand)

Save file :

_Creamy.zip (853.1 KB)

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ReserCream

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ReserCream x2

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Final Cream and done :3

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Build changed to be more offensive.

Reason -
The original version I posted killed rather slow, but felt rather tanky and I accepted the lack of damage as the sacrifice for its sturdiness.
But, after testing it in patch 1.2, it was both slow and also the tankiness wasn’t there to justify the lack of damage. So, it was changed slightly. Build is still tanky enough, but has a decent bit of damage now as well.

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Allow me to have some questions.

Restless Remains - Items - Grim Dawn Item Database gives 10% casting speed and 3% Life Leech which is huge for both damage and sustain. I hope the reason is not to maintain Poison Res with Antivenom Salve in this affixless Krieg setup. In general it seems there’s some Casting Speed / Life Leech aversion here when both are actually essential for damage and sustain for a high Weapon damage spam caster.

Also I wonder what’s the deal with using only the cheapest components while you’re using Krieg set that looks like it’s very hard to farm. Crafting high level components should be way easier than this.

And the Krieg set itself. It doesn’t suit budget Physical Forcewave at all. No Casting Speed on gloves is basically a no-go when you can craft some basic
image if really wanting Physical res. Some faction gloves / Fewmets otherwise.
, Physical damage converted to Aether on Blitz, blocking actually useful Mis and other items. I think one could be better of both in terms of dps and tankiness if using different items. Starting from a more damaging build and tweaking it for better sustain / tankiness if needed while trying to not lose that much DPS because it also helps with survival. And wouldn’t have to farm the set for no good reason.

The devotion doesn’t look that tanky to me when you could take Ghoul, Crab and in general more Life Leech instead of Light of Empyrion, Vire or even Dryad since you already have War Cry (there’s a MI that lowers that lowers its cooldown if it’s needed). Scales of Ulcama + Vit → Physical items for passive heal is possible. % Health can be obtained in different ways. Not sure how big of a problem it is actually - but it would be helpful if devotion was the same as your target endgame build so that you don’t have to re-level different devotions for it.

Cunning dump is very beneficial for such a build and HP / DA not hard to fix.

Seems you wanted to make a nice looking deterministic no-affix setup but the price paid for that seems too big. Especially if using Krieg. I’d love to attempt a different setup for this that would be damaging, lazy and tanky in 1. 2 SR 65 but to do it properly I think I would have to level it myself and farm the items which I cannot do currently. Personally I’d encourage you to play some conventional setup and making it tanky instead to see the difference.

I’ll ping some beginner builders maybe they can correct me or add sth to the matter
@The_Coyote @Nery @RektbyProtoss @Stupid_Dragon @Evil_Baka

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Reason - I had mixed responses from discord when asked if Krieg’s was considered budget or not. Some considered it a fair choice while others felt that the drop rate was too low.

Considering I wanted to go for an affixless setup, it felt like the best possible option, especially given the Aether > physical conversion on belt, even though it is only partial conversion and I still lose damage from blitz.

Devotions can be tweaked, I was mostly going with Vire for some extra CC on mobs in SR with petrification (while still having some bonus phys damage) and being a ranged proc, while Empyrion was just a bunch of resists + some additional damage. The DR on both were more of a bonus for when Warcry was on CD.

Devotion not being same as endgame one while leveling - mostly due to me hating Assassin’s Blade while leveling and not wanting to bother with keeping up with OA requirements or rely on blindside/fighting spirit just for that.

Also, Tree and Ghoul were both tested for extra tankiness, but I ended up going with this and just relying on Dryad & Bear for sustain.

I wanted to go for it even with the changes to MIs in 1.2 because the conventional green MIs Forcewave was already done and I wanted to take a different route rather than just make a defensive version of the same.

I also realized I left Assassin’s blade unbound on the GT link, time to fix that :sweat_smile:

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