I’ve been searching the forums and haven’t found many recent lazy builds for endgame campaign or crucible. I think GD is for the more hardcore ARPG fans than Diablo 3 and as such the game itself doesn’t favor lazy builds. My impression is that lazy builds account for less than 5% of content-viable GD builds. I believe this figure is significantly lower for crucible-viable builds. Therefore, please call out the few lazy builds that shine!
If you can, please define how lazy the build is. I propose the following system:
Active Skills (often the primary factor)
Threshold is 6 active skills. I believe more than 6 active skills rules out a build being lazy for the most part. Passive skills don’t count. I would consider a pet or some skill that has to be cast once every several minutes virtually a passive.
Roughly speaking, if a build doesn’t require much movement and it’s skills can be cast faceroll (ideal lazy situation):
Somewhat lazy: 5-6 active skills
Lazy: 4 active skills
Very Lazy: 3 of less active skills
That brings us to the other two factors I think we should consider: Movement Requirements-
In general, the less movement while fighting, the more lazy a build is. Hence:
Tanky - lazy-friendly
Effect-driven Movement- less lazy
Kiting- not lazy at all
Skill Usage
This runs a gamut of styles with many nuances, so I think I’ll point out the extremes:
True Key Mashing/Faceroll- lazy-friendly
Very active management requiring debuffs, timing, etc- not lazy
So, using the above classification, I’ll provide an example. Stronghold Purifer https://www.grimtools.com/calc/aZqaYxAZ
4 active skills here (not using gaze of beronath) - inquisitor seal, thermite mines, firestrike, and word of renewal.
+tanky, some effect-driven movement (walk into seal, posititioning around thermites)- positive, but not ideal
+some keymash, some active skill management, but requires only a modicum of focus: keymash renewal, active seal every few seconds, active thermite every 30 sec-min - average
= Somewhat Lazy
Please let me know if you can think of something I didn’t include. These are just my thoughts.
I’ve combed through dozens upon dozens (hundreds?) of posts and found only the above few crucible-viable lazy builds from the last few patches, plus a few others I can’t remember now. There must be more. Please post them!
This new build has a few skills but once you get used to it (and especially in campaign) you can basically watch your pets kill everything while you keep your pet buffs on cooldown. Can only recommend http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=76155
hammyhamster- good point. I edited and clarified. I’m looking for endgame builds.
I’m personally looking for endgame crucible viable builds, but I think campaign is useful to post as well for anyone else that views the thread. Also, campagn builds can be tweaked to crucible sometimes.
You just press Blitz to get close to the target. Everything else is just a bonus in case you’ll be way too bored (like, literally, literally not even joking, not even trying to make you giggle or smile). Oh, the other defensive skills (Word of Renewal, War Cry, Overguard, Inquisitor Seal) are for Ravager only. Forcewave is supposed to be the main skill… issue is, your main skills are passives from devotions that are attached to your buffs (Trample, Targo’s Hammer). Doom is just to ensure you to clear trash, but your main passives already do that for you. So you basically end up with only Blitz. vs. everything minus super boss.
Big note, very important: play for a maximum of 5 minutes a week to make sure you won’t get brain damaged by this build.
We all know by now that min-maxing is a subjective thing which varies from player to player, but I have a couple of questions about this build because I don’t think it can kill the Loghorrean on singleplayer ultimate difficulty:
Why Rattosh as a T3 devotion choice? Your pets deal no vitality damage at all. And that devotion doesn’t grant any pet bonuses either.
You seem to be taking the glyphs to convert pet physical damage to lightning, but I don’t see how that would help because you don’t take Raging Tempest, Vulnerability, or Widow (the devotion).
Briarthorns, as well as the primal spirit, deal huge amounts of physical and pierce damage, and because you have two briarthorns, why didn’t you take Assassin’s Blade?
Nemesis is a relic that scales with player bonuses, it’s also not affected by flat damage auras (hellfire, storm spirit, blood of dreeg). There should be no difference in kill speed with or without this relic. Primal Instinct is still the way to go.
No Devouring Swarm, Rend, CoF, or Mogdrogen, but somehow still take primal bond. That’s a lot of bleeding damage you’re missing out on.
No Shepherds Crook, one of the strongest pet devotions. Why?
Falcon swoop, Guardian’s Gaze, Scorpion sting. Why? You’re not debuffing any of these damage types.
I would like to talk more about the poor item choices (those gloves, offhand and the weapon for example, are trash), but they should still be good enough to kill every nemesis with 0 deaths in ultimate. It’s just that the skills and devotion choices seem to aggressively avoid their intended synergy.
Also, how did you farm those legendaries? I know that it’s possible to kill bosses like Lokarr without the Beastcallers set in 20 seconds (I’ve done it). This build however, number-wise, is not strong enough to farm any lucrative area in the game (Ancient Grove, Lokarr, and just nemesis hunting in general). And if you had another build to farm these items for you, then you’ve probably noticed how weak this pet build actually is.
I don’t intend to be rude or anything, but I’d rather eat an aetherial imp in real life than to get eaten by one with this build.
xtoastx, I didn’t have time to give you a detailed answer yesterday. So here it is now.
Firstly, I don’t mini-max my builds. That’s not my thing. I’ll look at builds and if the gear selections are good that’s what I’ll use. Finding the absolutely best gear doesn’t interest me, so long as what I use gets me to the end of the game I’m happy.
Secondly, I didn’t farm the legendaries, farming is not my thing - I crafted them in GDStash. A lot of people will cry foul about that, but it’s a single player game and I’m used to raiding my TQVault for items and duping stuff in there so it’s sort of habit now. Plus I wanted to see how good the build might with the proper gear.
This build is very old and based on JayNyne’s original Lazy Pokemon.
I started trying it out when he first posted it since I love pet builds. I love standing back and watching them do their thing. But as he added to it, it became more un-lazy so I changed it to be more lazy.
Because this build was so old I used it to try out the new AoM content when it was released for playtesting as it was the only one I had able to go straight into the content. Because I’d just switched out the gear to the lower versions of the items and I’d come back from Act 2 Elite to play the new content I restricted my reports to any bugs that I found, i.e. I didn’t use it to report my impressions for boss fights in Normal/Elite since they were way too easy and not representative.
It has killed Loghorrean on Ultimate and indeed the last boss in AoM as well plus taken down Kuba in Ugdenbog though I can’t remember if that was in Elite or Ultimate. I can run Crucible Aspirant up to around 165-167 before I die. I ran the rogue dungeons in Normal and Elite with it, but didn’t bother with Ultimate since they’re not my thing really. I only tried them in the other difficulties because the build was a bit over-levelled so I thought it would manage them. I did manage to clear the Ancient Grove with it on Ultimate difficulty after a few goes during the testing of that new area and it’s also done the Ancient of the Waters on Ultimate too.
So to your questions:
Will of Rattosh initially had pet bonuses so that’s why I took it during testing since it was one of the new constellations along with Typhos and Staff of Rattosh for pets. The devs later removed the pet stuff from Will of Rattosh. I just haven’t bothered to see if there’s anything else I could use.
2-3 &7. Again, I was following a build. It probably doesn’t make sense now, but it worked very well when JayNyne originally posted it.
JayNyne’s build actually had Bysmiel’s Domination as the one to go for and I did use that for a long while. But I’d recently seen the purple manticore in a stream and found out it was obtained from a relic so I thought I’d give it a try since it gave me another permanent pet.
5 & 6. Because I wanted the build to be lazy and didn’t have a skill to attach Shepherd’s to. JayNyne’s build included it.
There’s no way this is anything like a best build - and I don’t care. I’m not into running rogue dungeons, hunting down Nemesis, farming or doing Crucible runs. I just like to play the game and this build gave me a lot of fun doing that. It’s not safe - it’s died 101 times so far, but that’s something else I don’t care about. I could probably have had less deaths if I’d been more careful in some situations, but dying in a game doesn’t bother me.
There’s a lot of min-maxing going on out there, but I think this build shows that you don’t really need to do that to beat most of the game’s content on softcore. The main thing is to have fun while you do it - and this build has given me that however weird and wonky it may seem to be to anyone else.
As an end note when I first met Kuba in Ugdenbog during testing I didn’t know anything about how he worked. He was already doing a number on my pets and when they finally caused him to split I decided retreat was a good idea. So I ran and ran and ran. I ran so far that I actually outran his leash and believe me it’s a very long one. Don’t think Zantai believed it was possible. I regrouped, resummoned my pets and proceeded more cautiously eventually bringing every spawn of Kuba down.
There are so many lazy crucible dominating builds. All you need is to look at the build compendium with ctrl+f for some keywords ie:“crucible” and you can easily decide if it fits your description, even more lazy than the avenger
try shield builds. Blood knight is pretty lazy unless you hate mark of torment casting.
Shield BWC purifiers, or Aegis shield gunner, some others
Suggesting gear-based builds to people and actively encouraging them to circumvent the (rather shitty) post-85 progression system of mythical legendaries and sets by effectively cheating (“just craft a max-rolled full set and face-roll content”) while actively avoiding synergy is the worst possible feedback I can imagine anyone would ever expect to get. In fact it’s non-advice. It’s just admission that the game is gear-dependant and build diversity outside the BiS geared levels is near-nonexistent.
Here is a fun fact. Normal is doable with most things with little to no gear. Elite is doable with little to no gear but a solid build. Ultimate requires a hyper-optimized build for whatever existing faction / common MIs (spectral longswords, groble sky effigies) that can be reasonably acquired.
I know, because unlike you, I played legitimately. I didn’t cheat, I played the lazy pokemaster, I started with the maxed-out pets variant, then tried several “flat-damage-buff-stacking” 1-pointer pets, and now I have a sort-of functional one thanks to raising a different character who can work better with gears that I can reasonably expect to acquire in a timeframe where farming is still fun and before it becomes a chore, but the number of rebuilds I was forced to do was nowhere near fun.
What changed the situation and made the lazy pokemaster playable was some gear I got from hours upon hours of farming with a totem vindicator: Mythical fiendflesh greaves, wildshorn, a mythical beastcaller chest, and a mythical spark of ultos that accidentally dropped while I was still trying to get a salazar’s blade with pet affixes. Yeah. I have a stash tab half-full of salazar’s blades, without even a single common pet affix, and the pet bonus on the naked blade is pitiful and the pet doesn’t really offset what I had from a mythical blightstone invoker.
Without those goodies, I had to beat Loghorrean on ultimate with a normal level 40 black grimoire of og’napesh (which also required a separate character to find it in her 40s), and the fight, with only one death (I think, might have been two) was about an hour long, because the pet AI is so abysmal it kept targeting the adds and I had to regularly pull back, eliminate them, so in the brief seconds before Log resummoned all of them (dreadguards and tyrants), MAYBE I could chip away at it’s health. Meanwhile I had to do near-perfect evasion, potion and blood of dreeg usage, because I didn’t have enough DA (remember, legit gear) and a bad step, or a shotgun from a tyrant could erase me.
If you are into that experience, sure go ahead, but don’t suggest it unless with a disclaimer that it’s for masochists.
I’m not suggesting anything. xtoastx asked questions which I answered. Nor am I encouraging anyone to cheat. I explained how I got the gear. If people want to cheat they’ll do it without encouragement from me or anyone else.
Normal is doable with okay gear - the build used just that when I played that difficulty. Elite is also doable - as is Ultimate since it’s not a hyper-optimized build in any way and finished that difficulty and most of the quests (still finishing off some side ones). There’s probably much better gear/devotions that would make it a better build now and JayNyne’s updated build uses a different concept anyway. I’ll be trying that out when testing on FG starts - legitimately I might add. That one was an exception really; I do try not to make stuff in GDStash and play most builds as self found or what’s in the collection. Funnily enough I’m quite happy to do that in GD, but not so much in TQIT/AE. Weird.
@boromonokli: everyone is entitled to play the game however they want to so long as it doesn’t impinge on others. I’d like to remind you that Medea has been nothing but cordial and helpful. It’d be awesome if you accord him (?) the same courtesy.
As he pointed out - he was doing nothing more than answering questions.
I’d also like to add that the game isn’t as gear dependent as you think it might be, boromonokli.
Logic dictates that there must be some element of gear dependency if you wish to conquer optional challenges, and take on the hardest content in the game.
However, as the recent crucible meta clearly illustrates, piloting skill plays a huge role.
For example, if fluff were to post his belg BM character file on the forum, I doubt that most people would be able to clear 170 with it. I know I couldn’t.
Not a problem sir spankalot, I get it all the time. I made a similar whoopsie with eisprinzessin when discussing the assumption that female usernames are all being used by men and not women. :o
But it still begs the question - why? Is it that gaming is still so “macho” orientated that guys can’t stand the thought or the assumption that few women play these types of games? Do that many men really hide their gender behind a female username? And vice versa of course - do that many women really hide behind male usernames? Considering the online abuse some female gamers have been subjected to I can’t say I blame them, but for me I don’t care what gender you are. You’re a part of the GD community and that’s enough for me.
I just think that sexism is a habit which dies hard. The default pronoun used in English is very male orientated (mankind, history are examples of such words).
Wasn’t making an assumption about your gender so much so as I was being lazy. I didn’t want to type out “his/her.”
EDIT: I also think using the gender neutral pronoun “they” sounds weird AF, and is too PC for the forum. Haha
