hi there guys, playing GD here and there, decided to learn alot more about Bladedancer skills and GD in general.
As you all know ingame skill explanation is not really best in GD and leaves alot of space for exploration and testing until it is figured out, no doubt alot of you GD masters have already done that and I would appreciate getting knowledge from you guys ^^
Here is my bladedancer Lawana,
using Cadence for AA replacer
I would like to focus as much on AA as I can, taking all the stuff that triggers from AA - Belgothianâs Shears / Amarastaâs Quick Cut / Whirling Death / Execution and from soldier line Markovianâs Advantage / Zolhanâs Technique / Fighting Spirit
focus on Pierce damage, then physical then some cold from Dual Blades / Nightâs Chill
Iâll ditch Ring of Steel Later imo, now its good to farm faster
and Iâll put just one point onto Blade Spirit to have it dance around
how do all those triggers work, I see on Bladedancer builds, people skip some of those AA triggered abilities, while in my logic, I donât see harm in putting atleast one point in all of them (excluding the one that changes my main damagy type pierce into poison/acid), because I like my items that raise class skills to raise as many as possible especially if they are passive skills that give u instant benefit.
Often theyâre skipped because of the animation length of the AA triggered abilities (Weapon Pool Skills/WPS) results in a loss of DPS. Crate has done some animation speed and power rebalancing regarding those in recent patches, so you donât have to worry about it as much anymore. (And honestly, that it only ever an issues at the highest difficulty content the game had i.e. Celestial, Crucible, SR). At your level, you are correct to put a point in all of them. WPS sum to 100%, then get weighted to occur which scales down how often the best ones happen. As you get more +skills, you can decrease the chance of Execution happening, and with endgame gear, itâs really easy to get 100% proc chance with only four of the Blademasterâs six WPS. Plus, Cadence canât coincide with a WPS, so itâs a lot of investment for a skill-point starved class combo when getting 100% WPS really only gets you 66% occurence.
Three damage types is too many, you donât get enough devotion points to support that many, but you still want to max Dual Bladesâfor damage and physical resisitanceâand Nightâs Chillâfor resist reduction. Blademasterâs generally become 100% pierce damage and when you take the âincreases armor piercing by 100%â node of Blades of Nadaan, your damage will skyrocket (you should rock two Dermapteran Slicers to convert all physical to pierce).
Fighting Spirit triggers when you take damage, not deal it, for what itâs worth.
Blademaster is a popular class, Iâm sure someone else will chime in.
thank you for the reply, Iâm sorry but can you elaborate more of this " WPS sum to 100%, then get weighted to occur which scales down how often the best ones happen. As you get more +skills, you can decrease the chance of Execution happening, and with endgame gear, itâs really easy to get 100% proc chance with only four of the Blademasterâs six WPS. Plus, Cadence canât coincide with a WPS, so itâs a lot of investment for a skill-point starved class combo when getting 100% WPS really only gets you 66% occurence." ?
from what I understood, having multiple AA trigger abilities reduce the chance of triggering the best one , AKA âExecutionâ ? This I kinda predicted will happen.
Does the best set item, Belgothian provide AA replacer ? didnât check that, if it does, Iâll remove cadence once I get to that point
if you have 5 wps of 20% each, you have 100% wps
if you then add additional 5% increase to each, 5x25, you still have 100% wps, and it gets weighted down with its proportions intact, so in this case still an even 1/5 for all
if you have a skewed proportion the weights will reflect this, but still down to 100
so if you have 4 wps at 20% and 1wps and 30%, you now reduced the chance of the other 4, but the 5th still wont be fully at 30% but still higher chance ofc and now the weights are 4 wps at 18% and 5th at 27%, ratios still maintained.
so once one of those WPS skills activates by chance, others cant during it duration, so like you canât be extra lucky at no point and activate 2 or more WPS skills at the same time ?
no, never
the point of wps is to never make regular âblankâ/umodified auto attacks, so getting 100% pool then means all your AAs are boosted, but you canât get multiple wps to trigger at the same time since they are not regular procs (and would just massively overpower a potential AA stacking like that)
ok, thank you very much, so if I understood correctly, AA replacer Cadence activates any WPS only on its 3rd attack (or on 1st and 2nd but excludes them for the buffed 3rd attack?), which means, Cadence is ruining or wps when we have it at 100% ?
no
Cadence triggers wps on first 2 hits, this is no interference on cadence nor an issue for cadence (itâs good because it means your 2 first attacks wont deal low normal dmg) since no actual cadence hit occurs only your wps % factors in.
on Cadence âdischarge hitâ(usually 3rd strike) itâs a pure Cadence hit, no wps can trigger in terms of modifying the cadence dmg, this is ok, itâs not a drawback on your wps dmg because the cadence dmg is bigger, this is regardless if you have 1% wps or 1000% wps, Cadence take precedent.
if youâre dual wielding technically you can sometimes get wps to happen on the other hand not triggering cadence, but it doesnât boost the cadence dmg itself (since cadence is 1h only), but still boost your offhand dmg.
TLDR; wps is good for cadence builds still, youâll want wps even if they donât intermingle exactly same way like other AAreplacers
amazing, then cadence it is.
Also I saw builds not taking war cry, is it not good to put atleast one point into it for -33% reduction of Health of your enemies, not sure if massive health from bosses is also reduced that way, doesnât feel like it.
hp reduct is basically meaningless in vanilla GD
it works from current health, so gets less effective as enemy hp drops, and enemies have massive resistance to it anyway, so it basically just tickles them
Cadence vs Belgothianâs Strikes in endgame ? which one is stronger ?
Also Fighting Spirit can activate (when damaged) separately from all those WPS triggered abilities ? I really like Fighting Spirit, it has some crazy numbers like already on lvl2 buffing for 50% all damage input plus all the rest of the bonuses it gives.
yes, they are unrelated
regular procs has nothing todo with wps
it sounds better than it is
first you need to realize it has less than 50% uptime, this type of proc buff doesntâ start cooldown until duration ends
then you have to remember that regular % bonus dmg in Grim Dawn is additive, so itâs not that much in the long run - the OA is really neat tho
basically when youâre seeing your dmg ingame you already have XY dmg boosters applied
so when you see a new dmg bonus, or buff like this with 50%dmg, it doesnât take your existing dmg and slap another 50% on top it, it adds 50% to the base dmg
so lets say your cadence tooltip is showing you 5000dmg, but you already have 350% dmg, and maybe some from cunning. Adding 50% from fighting spirit would not make it 7500, it would make perhaps 5700
If youâre then at a state where your dmg is based of existing 2200% dmg boosters to get that 5k displayed dmg, that 50% dmg bonus would then suddenly be a 1/44th increase (2200/50), so then suddenly itâs only actually adding 100final bonus for 5100 final output, if that makes sense?
Basically the more %dmg bonus you already have, the less effective more and more %dmg additions become.
Early game as example fighting spirit bonus is huge; because you donât have many high %boosters yet at that point. But later on it then becomes less strong(dmg wise) since the bonus dmg has less effect and only partial buff time duration on top.
unsure what you mean by attributes there, if you mean ex cunning or spirit thatâs still bonus additive %dmg
base dmg is whatever raw unmodified dmg your skill/attack does + applicable flat dmg sources, such as weapon dmg
easiest way to see skillâs base dmg is grimtools, tho it wont show effects like weapon dmg combined as base dmg but still with dmg bonuses applied, tho you can count the dmg sources up manually as they will be displayed in their raw form on on items and buffs etc
i donât know which blademaster builds you watch, itâs good, should generally be taken because AoE, but depends on your overall build and what you have
