Lots of great builds out there, but looking for something different

Hello All,

Been playing GD for about a week now, and I was building a retaliation warden, however I am now finding that it takes far too long to kill things. Granted I cant die, but I want to kill things faster!

Id like to try something out that isn’t a soldier / shaman, however so far in my experimentation’s everything ive tried ends up being too squishy and dies real fast.

My warden can play on Veteran difficulty just fine, but my other classes on Veteran die way too fast.

Anyone have any good builds to suggest?

Thanks!

One suggestion… Don’t use Veteran? Generally builds take off at around 75, when you can put on nice gear. Many builds also don’t do wonderfully in Normal/Veteran, for various reasons. Each class generally has easy ways to level, if you don’t mind leveling through Veteran as a totally unrelated build and then just respeccing a ton.

As for something tanky… You could play something that is only a Soldier or a Shaman, instead of BOTH. Various options there. If you check up in the Build Compendium, there’s a marker denoting that the build has cleared Gladiator Crucible… Anything that can do that, can handle the main game just fine.

I partially agree and partially disagree. Almost any build can end up tanky, but leveling as a build is generally going to be problematic. They just don’t come together until after normal.
I’ve leveled a lot of characters (all on veteran, I like the challenge) and generally you try and find their “normal/vet skill” and max that first. Then when that stops being effective you swap to something closer to the build you want. Here’s a list of the normal/veteran skills I use that I find effective at low levels.

Shaman: Devouring Swarm or Summon Briarthorn
Arcanist: Olexra’s Flash Freeze tree (Clears most of the screen. Suggest you have an item skill allowing for the killing of freeze resistant mobs)
Occultist: Dreeg’s Evil Eye (I haven’t tested this much, but others swear by it)
Demolitionist: 1 point in Fire Strike then max Explosive Strike (just tried this. It was surprisingly effective with a 2 hander at low levels)
Nightblade I haven’t tested much.
Soldier is a little slow going. Soldier takes off after you get a few ranks in Cadence and 1 point in Fighting Form.

The key here is to find something innately powerful and max as soon as you possibly can. They all can stay effective for a while if geared for, too.

I will swear by Dreeg Evil Eye. My first char was an Occultist that I leveled to 50 before taking a 2nd class and was running DEE (and later on Mark of Dreeg component skill) and nothing else (1 point in Hellhound and Familiar so I could place myself better when I wanted to drop DEE into huge pack of mob) and it was super effective.

Are you looking for anything specific? Honestly just about anything outside of out right troll build can handle beating campaign on Ultimate and have enough tankiness

If you are dying way too fast/often on Veteran you are doing something wrong. Even with potions as only source of healing you should be able to survive in veteran with good health/resists. Pump everything into physique, half to 2/3rds of pts into mastery bar, and pick up gear with resists. Base damages kill things plenty fast in veteran and elite, you just want hp/resist on gear mostly

Thank you for all the suggestions! Although I only wish we could reset the chosen classes as well as skill points lol.

Soldier: Max Blade Arc and Laceration, and wear 2H melee weapon. You can clear normal with that skill.

if you don’t mind using a 3rd party program you can change class, attribute points and skill points put into the mastery bars. GD Defiler is a great program for this.

Would you believe I’ve never even tried Blade Arc? I bet it’s way better. Thanks!