Just another S&B Blademaster, this time with poison, WIP

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Because I somehow suck at creating builds, and probably a lot of people like to theorycraft builds, I thought I share my ideas and maybe someone can help me figure out if we can make this a viable character at all, and what we have to do for this.

So I saw the frostburn S&B Blademaster and I had a Blademaster lying around, I thought I’ll try something similar with poison. The main idea is to use shadow strike as the main skill, max out Nidalla’s Justifiable ends, which gives us a nice cdr on the skill, poison damage and crit damage. But to really crit, we would need OA at least over 3000 I assume or even higher. I also want to max out Merciless repertoire and Lethal assault, because they give us more damages. :slight_smile:

This is the current state of the character, just hit lvl 94 and I am trying to find the optimal gear, skill and devotion setup, I have barely any components and augments, and still pretty high dps and resistances, so that is a good sign.

http://www.grimtools.com/calc/wV15vQYV

Riftscourge Slicer MI seems like a good choice for acid/poison SS builds, preferred with poison affixes ofc. Viloth’s Ring and Basilisk Mark seems good as well.

Main issues currently: low OA, too many skills and devotion procs, a bit squishy despite having a shield, AOE mainly relies on devotion procs. Some serious mana issues. Not really good item support for this class and playstyle, melee acid/poison supports dual wield a lot more.
(Or maybe we can even go 2hander with Nightshade’s Reach, but then again, it would be better to go witch hunter)
Main advantages: hit and run playstyle because of the huge DoT, we can very effectively switch targets with the low CD SS, bunch of poison resist reduction, no need for any attack speed.

So any suggestions are welcome, in regards of the skill, devotion, item, component and augment choices. Thanks in advance!

2

They say one of the best ways to learn is to post some builds and ask for advice, but it is a bit hard if you get exactly 0 answers when you come up with a thread like this. :slight_smile: It is even fine if someone says that this build is a bad idea and cannot be made anything near viable.

3

I have a 2h poison build that I really enjoy playing which might help towards your s&b build with some tweaks:

Currently on this build: http://www.grimtools.com/calc/nZoW6gEZ

Working towards this: http://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jeDrjN (with maybe a few changes to attribute point distribution, to adjust OA/DA and energy)

As for skills/devotions, I find that Tainted Eruption works really well with RoS, rumor with blitz or ss, and Acid Spray has 100% chance of proccing with War Cry - I find the 5 sec rr on it also helps keep WC effective during CD.

I use ABB as my LMB due to the low CD (about 1.2 secs), couple this with bat proc it acts as a nice survival skill as well as a dmg booster.

I generally fire off WC first to lure in mobs and drop their resists then RoS them with TE having a 51% chance and a large radius (10m) to boot.

4

Hey! I’m busy today but I’ll give you some feedback when I can =)

5

Thanks, guys!

I haven’t really played with this character since I posted this, because I have some others, but this time I tried something which seems unique and maybe can work to some degree. But I think I made some mistakes so I thought it will be nice to get some feedback and see what other people’s opinions are.

My main mistake is when creating builds that I stack the damage % from all skills and devotions to my main damage source, and not focusing on OA, DA and other aspects of the character. Since this time even the main skill has a bunch of crit damage, it will be really nice to get a lot more OA somehow, probably mainly with devotion changes, and it will probably work a lot better.