Looking for advice on ranged cadence pierce tactician (Silverbolt Goredrinker)

I’ve never made a ranged cadence build before and I tried searching for any posts on the mechanics about it, but it’s not that easy to find (I failed). (Ok while I’m typing this, this thread got some info now: Physical Tactician using 2 Havoc pistols - Damage and killing potential is terrible. Any suggestions? - #16 by Gnomish_Inquisition )

I made this build (found it again yesterday) for a bit of a meme, to get as much chthonic racial as possible.

It seems to do alright to me at the moment, but I’m not happy I didn’t max the main Cadence node and have no clue what’s good on the wps side of things as I don’t know how that interacts with 2h-ranged Cadence. Also not happy with Living Shadow having a bad trigger.

I’ve seen people say 9-point Fighting Form is “good enough”, but I’m not sure why that is. You get +13% damage increase per level, so it seems like a good investment to me. :thinking:

Either way, it does SR34-35 totally fine, killed mog (didn’t try much else)

I actually think replacing the silvercore bolts with Seal of Blades might actually be better as it has more life-leach.

it’s when you reach 100% passthrough on Cadence, that’s all you really need in terms of base dmg necessity on ranged Cadence

*as for the 13% dmg increase, keep in mind it just acts as normal additive dmg/like 13% dmg on gloves or ring etc, and in this case only applies to the Cadence hit ofc

at a quick glance i’d say swap gloves, get plunder? relic, ditch jaxxon ring
( you don’t have flat RR?)

What would I be looking for? These have decent attack speed and +4 squad tactics. As well as +4 word of renewal. (And some extra health.)

I’ll give that a go, I assume I ditch some other wps then, probably bursting round. :thinking: Though I’m a bit afraid the loss of the skillpoints I will hurt. I’ll have a look at how bad it is.

I assumed it would help trigger cadence hits, but reading the other discussion I guess this one is a ‘split bullet’ type of wps. I guess either another blackwatch or a bladetwister then.

Probably not. I thought about using war cry, but that won’t have 100% uptime (and be even worse for triggering Living Shadows :sweat_smile:) Not sure what to use for it. Rings of mercy/vengence could be an option, but I’d rather not lose even more cadence points.

gloves dont’ have pierce dmg
so you’re trading 0% dmg 0flat dmg for some generic/X skill points, where other gloves would have X skill points anyway

i did a doodle just to check what’s even available Tactician, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
i’m not arguing this is better than yours, mostly i’m surprised how 0 items come with Cadence points and pierce dmg besides ring :sweat_smile:
but here we do get RR, more cadence, more lifesteal, extra res overcap, at the cost of some health and slightly less weapon dmg (unsure if that x %/flat dmg tradeoff is technically worth tho)
I think the biggest drawback or noticeable/feel impact will be going from 33% DR to 15%, it seems rather huge even assuming everything else was 1:1 on the offensive and defensive side on my GT.
WPS different is purely hypothetical, going from 106?% wps with mix “poor” wps to 97% “better” cadence wps, whether that actually has the positive impact in play as theorycraft suspects i can’t say.
There’s a bunch of ways to handle devos i realized, which one is better or optimal you’d probably have to ask Lee or Banana, specially since i didn’t want to include extra greens etc to fix XY stat up and down that appears on one route or the other.

*yes i did use a badge of mastery to fluff the Cadence points, but it’s only using 1 affix not both :sweat_smile: - so atleast that’s something

i’d almost guess if not leaning into bleed, goredrinker may not gain as much value because it ends up struggling on maxing out Cadence easily, so perhaps dips in terms of pure pierce compared to Valdoot or custom :thinking: - pure speculation, been a while since i tried messing with either

Yep. So was I :rofl: And I already have +3 (to everything) from the weapon. So I thought it shouldn’t be too hard to get it up there, but eh… yeah, didn’t really get there.

I must be missing something. I get to 72% wps? Plunder, Zolhan, Chill?

oh no… :see_no_evil:

Where do we get the 15% from?

Maybe. It lured me in with 40% healing increase and 60% weapon damage on Cadence. And it’s not bad.

oh snap, it was supposed to have a few points in MA for easy 25%, but must have brainfarted it when i was checking out compensating with Bursting instead i guess :thinking: :man_facepalming:

shadows, shadows, they got added 15% DR lil while ago to not make tyrant prefix default bis on pierce

ye, like i said, purely speculative because of how much is “sacrificed” to use that set in terms of cadence hardcap etc. It may very well be the wd and extra pierce shred makes up for it and Valdun is “only” good on Puri now, with custom being fantasy, don’t know for certain. (would need Lee/Banana/Eard etc to confirm that for current patch)

Ah! I missed that. But I still have the problem of actually spawning them :rofl: Not sure putting them on volley will work well…

I tried this variation of gear just now: Tactician, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
It’s worse I think, but it does feel like it hits harder on the cadence hits. In game I now have 194 attack speed as well, which feels nice. So I have to think about what I want to do here, while I level another dude :smiley:

Thanks for the help

one of the reasons i took out storm spread is, aside from not fast charging cadence, going over wps pool then means it actually lowers the % chance of your 3 other fast charging wps, slightly wasting the bonus point investments into the others too
but yea, considered that medal too, just seemed like a bigger loss than using BoM or even a green :sweat_smile:

I maybe wouldn’t mind bom if I didn’t have to craft 100 of them, this one isn’t much worse and has guaranteed +3 :stuck_out_tongue:

Maybe I should try farming gutworm a little or something :thinking: Wendigo eye, basilisk crest, maybe even rylok crest? Sadly I don’t have any of these with any cadence. And the cadence affix has % physical, not % pierce :disappointed:

Ah yeah, I forgot. That’s actually 3 points wasted there.

i thought about gutworm with cadence prefix because “bias” too, buut still bit fantasy/theory if not GDstash, and only +2 in the end :sweat_smile:
Maybe with FoA affix transmutation it will be easier, and then can slap on a pierce suffix for the extra dmg or something, but seemed like BoM was just simpler by comparison atm :woozy_face:

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+2 would be enough if you also have another of those +2 rings. The question is, if it’ll be overall better or not. I was just fiddling and it looks like flat dmg actually adds a significant amount, comparable to adding more levels of cadence. Both is best of course :stuck_out_tongue: So maybe just two rings and be stuck at 25.

ye it’s kinda hard to gauge sometimes if hardcap is truly worth it, for me/personally i tend to just chase it because “ocd” satisfaction :sweat_smile:
but when it’s in terms of performance etc it’s also why i started out saying i outright wasn’t even sure it was actually/technically better. Flat dmg scale “everywhere” here, but cadence ranks only scales X on the cadence hits, maf is hardz :sweat: