[Mod] Duelist Class

Grim Dawn Modding - Projects
1

I am currently designing this class and would appreciate some feedback or additional ideas. Still alot of work to be done

Concept
This class is supposed to be a melee/ranged hybrid that benefits from swapping between melee and ranged combat on a regular basis. Active skills favor a dynamic gameplay, quickly relocating on the battlefield. It should have some good survivability options, too.

Skills

Quickdraw
Required Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 10

After swapping between melee and ranged armament, the duelist gets a buff for short duration. The skill has a short cooldown, swapping weapons during the cooldown will cancel the buff

Duration: 5 Seconds
Cooldown: 3 Secons

  • attack speed %
  • movement speed %
  • offensive ability
  • defensive ability

Quick Reaction
Required Mastery: 10
Required Skill: Quickdraw
MaxLevel: 10

Adds a bonus to dodge and deflection to Quickdraw

  • dodge %
  • deflection %

Surprise Attack
Required Mastery: 20
Required Skill: Quickdraw
MaxLevel: 10

The enemy has a hard time to adapt to your tactics, letting you exploit his weakness

  • Flat piercing damage
  • crit damage %

Evasive Slash
Required Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 6

An melee attack that moves you away from your target in a straight line up to 5m and swaps weapon set

Cooldown: 5 Seconds
Damage Bonus
500% Movement Speed

Skill upgrades:
1: Area Attack fire damage
2: Add bleeding damage
3: CC your target(s) / reduced cooldown

Like A Bullet
Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 6

Ranged attack, rush in to the target, swap weapons.

Cooldown: 5 Seconds
+Bonus Damage
500% Movement Speed

Skill Upgrades:
1: Bullet Piercing chance & Bonus Damage
2: CC Target
3: Dodge buff / reduced cooldown

Master Of All Arms
Required Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 16

Default weapon attack for both melee and ranged weapons

+Bonus Damage

Skill Upgrades:
1: Ranged: %Chance for additional projectiles
Melee: %Chance for additional targets
2: Ranged: Slow Target
Melee: Debuff Enemy Resistance
3: To be done

Preparation

This skill grants a buffs that kicks in after 3 seconds. The benefits depend on the weapon equiped when you activated the skill

Cooldown: 30 seconds
Duration: 5 seconds

Ranged:
Increased Melee Damage
Increased Melee Attack Speed
Increased Defence

Melee:
Increased Range Damage
Increased Range Attack Speed
Increased Offense

Commitment

A buff giving a bonus to the weapon type you have currently equipped, greatly improving your ability with it, but at the cost of using the other weapon type. Also heals over time

Cooldown: 60 Seconds
Duration: 10 Seconds

+Damage, Attack Speed, Crit Damage
5% healed +health/s

Passives
Some passive skills that improve the characters survivability.

2

Reserverd for future use

3

These skills need some tweaks since weapon-swap doesn’t interact with skills.

For example, it would be better turn Quickdraw in two different passives, one for melee, another for ranged only.

Preparation must allow all weapons as a base skill, then you add 2 modifiers with different bonuses for ranged/melee (ex: Searing Might/Searing Strike)

Commitment skill type is always a good idea imo, reminding the D2 Barbarian combat masteries.

Good luck with that.

4

Quickdraw - not possible to give buffs when switching weapons.

Evasive Slash - cannot force weapon swaps with skills, also we don’t have movement skills that require no targets (yet)

Like A Bullet - dashes that utilize ranged weapons will only move you close enough to attack at range. If you are within shooting distance and you use the dash, the character will only shoot and not dash at all.

Master of All Arms - you cannot give a skill a % chance for additional targets/projectiles. They either have it or they don’t. To add to that, default attacks like Savagery or Fire Strike cannot have additional projectiles or targets hit on the MAIN skill, unless it’s a template like Cadence afaik. If you had planned these stats to be on modifiers, then it’s fine.

Preparation - to make a buff that activates after a delay will be tricky. It can be done, but it won’t be simple. You’d have to make a workaround with a pet who casts the buff on you after a delay and then dies.

Commitment - Can’t make a buff like this. Skills can only be given static weapon requirements for buffs and such, they cannot be given dynamically based on what you have equipped. The heal will work fine of course, just like blood of dreeg.

Hope you keep working on something to give the feel of a duelist, it seems like an interesting mastery, just not going to work with some of the descriptions I see here unless you know some kind of lua black magic. (i don’t even know if it can be done with lua…) Some things to consider if you do plan to continue working on this despite my criticisms:

*Vanilla masteries have ~27 skills, not including transmuters.
*Vanilla masteries have a total of around 330-ish skill points, not including transmuters or mastery points.
*Many players like having to choose between two possible exclusive auras. Since you have this duality theme going on, ranged/melee, you can maybe have one buff for each weapon type (ranged/melee). If you wanted to get really crazy, you could setup a chain of autocasted skills onto these buffs to trigger some kind of ranged/melee mechanic but it would get complicated.
*If you plan to make use of autocast skills for interesting mechanics, keep in mind you cannot apply devotions to skills that already have autocast skills on them. You can put autocasted skills on modifiers and retain the ability to place devotions on the base skills though.

5

Thanks.

Yes, alot would depend on how good i can exploit lua, but it seems i have to do alot of research, and you might be right that alot of stuff is impossible with the amount of control we have over the engine.

So i might try to implement some stuff, and if it does not work as intended, i will try to achieve something similar in another way.

I am not one to give up early :slight_smile:

6

I’ve got some idea how to make Quickdraw work. There are 2 skills, one for melee and one for ranged weapons. By attacking with the weapon, the player build charges, up to one every second. After 5 Charges, the player gets a buff for 5 seconds with 10 seconds cooldown.

That way, Quickdraw does not activate on switchting weapons, but encourages the player to switch between melee and range to maintain the buff.

Because the skill needs to be seperated into two skills, each skill uses half the skillpoints to get its full power. Addons should be possible to share for both skills.

A third, active skill allows to activate the buff that would gained by melee attacks without building charges, so the player can start an engagement at range with the buff already running, and building up 5 ranged charges to continue the cycle.

Quickdraw Melee
Required Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 5

Requires Melee weapon
Activates on Attack 100%
gives 1 charge
5 charges start the buff

Cooldown: 10 Seconds
Duration: 5 Seconds

  • attack speed %
  • movement speed %
  • offensive ability
  • defensive ability

Quickdraw Range
Required Mastery: 1
MaxLevel: 5

Requires Ranged weapon
Activates on Attack 100%
gives 1 charge
5 charges start the buff

Buff:
Cooldown: 10 seconds
Duration: 5 seconds

  • attack speed %
  • movement speed %
  • offensive ability
  • defensive ability