Is dire bear just as good as bat for sustain now?

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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For context: (numbers taken from Grimtools)

  • Bat gets 340 damage, split in vitality and pierce, plus 22% weapon damage, and 40% ADCtH. It gets 2 projectiles with passthrough, so it can hit multiple targets. On a 0.6 second cooldown

  • Dire bear gets 305 physical damage, with 35% ADCtH. It attacks in an AoE, so is just as likely as bat to hit multiple targets.

Both have a 20% chance to proc on attack.

Dire bear has lower damage, no %weapon damage and higher requirements.
But it only has 1 damage type to convert, and most importantly, it has no cooldown.

If you happen to bind it to a skill that hits multiple times per second, wouldn’t it be better for sustain (or at least as good) overall to use dire bear than bat now ? And if so, at what breakpoint ?

Has anyone tested this somehow ?

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IMHO bat is superior because it has a % weapon damage component. And it’s useful if you need green/red points to get to tier 3 devotions. Dire bear does not have a weapon damage component and it’s a fairly dead end devotion which doesn’t yield points in return.

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It depends on a character. I have a soldier + oathkeeper sword and board tank. I took dire bear asap and it has sustained me pretty well. I played with no bat, no ghoul, no adcth for pretty much whole campaign. I only added adcth later when I focused on celestials. Of course, overguard, menhir’s will and menhir’s bulwark helped as well, but dire bear did a lot on its own.

Also dire bear reduces armor in percentages which increases damage and life leach and comes with duration, which means if you are stunned dire bear will heal you until you can act again, which is great early on.

I’d argue that both are good and that it is pointless to compare them. Dire bear is better when surrounded at melee. It was easy to proc it on blade arc. But bat is better if enemies are in a line, which favours range characters more.

In addition, I’m not sure into what damage type can you convert dire bear, since it isn’t as convertible as some other types, such as elemental.

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The no cooldown part is misleading. Even if you proc the skill multiple times, it doesn’t stack as dire bear proc is an aura, unlike bat which is a direct attack.

For the vast majority of non phys builds you still wanna take bat because there’s not many damage types that wanna go blue/purple route. For phys, dire bear is almost mandatory but not because of sustain. Dire bear is basically your second rr devotion for phys so you take it. The sustain is a nice bonus. Some builds can afford 8 yellow but not purple so they take scales instead

Another factor to consider is conversion. It’s not easy to convert even 50% phys to whatever compared to 100% vit to whatever.

Bat is just more accessible for most builds than dire bear.

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Ah, that’s a good point.
Though it still means it will trigger leech every second for a few seconds, it will only do so once per second, which is slower than bat can be.