Need feedback and help making vitality DK better!

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
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I was thinking about how cool blood dk’s in WoW were. I always loved the idea of being an invincible mini boss because of the high health pool, the constant healing, and the just straight up tankiness. So I loaded up Grim Tools and went to it! 10 minutes later I had picked a bunch of stuff that seemed to fit and threw it together and proceeded to kill Lokarr. Granted it took a while and the build isn’t really invincible but, it did okay for my first time ever making a build and making it in 10 minutes at that.

Here’s the Grim Tools link https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2BnyOB2 and I’ll try to explain my choices. Be warned that my choice for certain things was really not based on anything other than sure why not. This is basically a concept build that needs to be fleshed out so please don’t slam me too hard if I made dumb choices and believe me I guarantee I made dumb choices.

First we’ll start with the items.

The Mythical Soulbearer: The reasoning behind this is fairly simple. Vit Damage, Health, Cooldown Reduction. The added spirit is nice allowing use to save points. The +2 soul harvest is fairly useful. The thing that sould me on this was Soul Harvest though. Being able to heal and regain energy when anything dies? Yes please. Let me be a god. With all that being said it might not be the best weapon for this build.

The Blood Knight set. I mean what’s not to love? It essentially makes everything we use stronger. Except counter strike, which I want to work back in seeing WoW blood DK was all about autoattacking until blood boil came up. On top of that the set we get to summon an invincible ghost who lowers enemies Vitality and Bleeding resistance.

Mythical Wraithborne Legwraps: What’s not to love? Vitality damage, health, offensive ability, defensive ability, vit res and bleeding res. I mean to me this is probably the most sure part of the build honestly.

Mythical Greaves of III Omens: So these I’m not really sure about. Having +2 to bone harvest is nice, then the ele resist, movement speed, defensive ability and vitality damage is always good but, they just seem kind of lackluster. I’m pretty sure these are going to be tossed away for something else entirely that adds more resists or health.

Valguur’s Focus and Vaalgur’s Touch: When added these items to the build it was actually because I was using the full Valgurr’s set! Then I seen my armor rating and everything else and let out a Michael Scott Nooooooo. So these two are only here as placements really. I think I’ll replace Valguur’s focus with a shield, but I’m not sure which and I’m not sure what I’ll replace the gloves with. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Mythical Deathlord’s Band: So it gives us Attack speed, Casting speed, +2 blood boil, resists and defensive ability. I think that’s really important because my thought behind this build is it can benefit from all that ( not in it’s current form without say cadence or something else to use for auto attacks but, you get the idea behind it)

Mythical Signet of the Fallen: Honestly just picked this due to the OA, res, damage and casting speed. No other reason really.

Mythical Boneweave Girdle: What a good belt. +3 Siphon souls, +110 OA, +28 DA, Health, ADctH, Vit damage, Phys res. You can’t really go wrong with this belt especially for a build like this. I couldn’t find anything better to suit the build and this just had so much going for it I figured it has to be in the build.

Mark of the Shadow Queen: Granted this does nothing for any of our skills but, it gives us some res and most importantly gives us a decent amount of OA which I was sorely needing. Once items get shuffled around, this will more than likely be replaced.

Solael’s decimation: Sort of like mark of the shadow queen, it gives us a good amount of OA. It also provides us with some extra Vit damage and spirit! So we can dump even more points into phys.

As for components, I just went willy nilly trying to get OA and DA up. It worked for OA but, not DA unfortunately. So hitting 3k+ is something that needs to be done but, I’m not really sure how seeing this is my first build. My devotions are also all over the place. I grabbed a bunch of Vit damage and ADctH. I really wanted to get healing rain but, couldn’t. Not sure if I’d really need it but, I guess we’ll see.

Thanks for coming to my tedtalk and listening to a noob builder ramble on why he thinks his stupid choices are somewhat okay. In all seriousness I’d appreciate any help fleshing this build out and making it really pop. I’d like to stick to the theme of Blood DK from WoW but, am willing to adjust to make it even stronger/tankier.

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Don’t sell yourself too short here, you are definitely walking in the right direction already :slight_smile:

Now I have no idea what a DK plays like in WoW exactly, but if you are looking for a total tank with a vitality dmg theme then the Blood Knight set is probably a good way to start.

My first tips regarding your buildcrafting would be to:

  1. try and fully work around 1-2 main skills to maximise your build’s effectiveness (this is true 90% of the time). E.g. the main skills supported by the BK set are Counterstrike & Bone Harvest; the latter is a great nuke skill that I’d try to focus on here much more.
  2. Therefore, things with +to skill X are often even more important than e.g. OA/DA; though you still have to somehow reach your threshholds like ~3k OA/DA, of course. Thus, taking a relic like Uroboruuk’s reaping for its +1 to necro is very much worth using here.
  3. RR is the king! And this is especially true for a DK that only has 1 source of vit rr to start with. I’d strongly recommend going for two rings with -%vit RR like Cursebearer+Signet of the Fallen here.

This is a somewhat outdated DK Blood Knight build I found which you might take some inspiration from (many things have changed since then I’m afraid, so don’t be shy to change things up): [1.0.6.1] Crimson Soviet: 2H Blood Knight, 4buffs/no banners Cruc. 150-170 in 10 min. (Death Knight)

A few notes on this specific build:

  1. Ghol’s Reach gloves (FG item, not in the 1.0.6.1 guide yet) are probably BiS for Bone Harvest setups now. Taking the Ghol’s Medal on top of this for the set bonus is likely worth it, too.
  2. A well-rolled Korvan Reaping Halberd might also be a substantial upgrade if you have one (–> https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/13684)
  3. Since Foul Eruption from the RE skill is, unfortunately, pretty bad, and taking Manticore devotion for flat RR is waaay outdated I’d suggest working in Revenant instead.

I hope this helps a bit!

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The devotion map on this one seems pretty good:

There’s some wiggle room, and Bat is probably better than Wendigo for you.

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Thanks for the help! I took your advice and it’s working somewhat well. I’m using counter strike now along with reaping strike, bone harvest, soul siphon. I figured while I’m waiting on Soul Siphon and Bone Harvest to come back up I might as well be swinging away and getting life steal right? I also reworked the devotions a bit and it seems to at an okay spot.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/8NKOQO8N

Granted I’m using a double rare in the GT, that was mainly just to see if even with a really good weapon could this build even kill anything at a reasonable speed. The answer is sort of. So if you have the potion that gives fire res you can face tank lokarr and just chop away at him. Which is really nice. If you don’t have it well, you’ll have to kite around for a while waiting for cd’s. It sucks but, hey it is what it is. Tried Callagadra and died within a few seconds. Don’t really attack fast enough to life steal back from her quick enough. I haven’t tried ravager or mogdrogen yet but, I have a feeling I might be able to kill mog but, not ravager.

I didn’t test this out in SR because more than likely it’d get destroyed. Which is fine because the build kinda plays like a WoW Blood DK used to play for the most part.

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Looks pretty good to me. There’s better things for the amulet slot than a bloodied crystal I reckon.
Tainted Heart is pretty good, if you don’t have Seal of Annihilation.

Have you experimented with more points in Bone Harvest?
Try taking it up to 26 to make it even nukier.

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I went with bloodied crystal on the amulet just to get more of that beautiful DA. Seeing it just barely hits 3k it might be worth it to switch it out but, I’m not sure what to use instead. I do have Seal of Annihilation, so I’ll switch tainted heart for it.

I have not but, I will now! It seems bone harvest is carrying me so an even bigger nuke can only be good. Thanks for the help! :slight_smile:

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Yeah, I’d recommend maxing out Bone Harvest & Soul Harvest, too; Dread is not really worth it, though. Also don’t forget to take that 2h transmuter for Bone Harvest! It makes it even nukier :wink:

A few other points:

Counter Strike is actually not as much of an ‘active’ skill as one might think, since it only triggers off of enemy attacks. This makes it a great heal for a Blood Knight build, but probably isn’t worth more than 1 point (with the set you already have +8 to the skill anyways).

Siphon Souls is somewhat similar to it in this regard: it is a great heal + debuff with Blood Boil, but the main skill doesn’t scale all that well beyond 12/12 without a dedicated set like Valguur’s (which you said you used before BK?).

Maybe you could try to find a way to squeeze at least 16-1-1 Cadence in there, too? With Harvest & Siphon on CD, you might as well hit 'em with a stick while you’re at it, right? :stuck_out_tongue:

You could probably move a few skill points from Veterancy (needs more regen in other places to really shine, anyways) & Fighting Spirit (very strong passive, but with only ~30% extra crit dmg Cadence might just give you more overall dmg) to get it done without getting into too much trouble :slight_smile:

I like your devotion changes, btw.! The only thing I could think of in that reagard right now would be to remove the 2 points in Primordial+Order Crossroads & take those last two nodes in Solemn Watcher (the 5% DA are pretty awesome).

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I just realized you meant Seal of Annihilation or Tainted heart instead of Bloodied Crystal. I feel like a dope for misreading that so badly lol.

Also, Cinder I moved around what you mentioned! I didn’t realize that I missed that sweet sweet 5% DA. That helps quite a bit. https://www.grimtools.com/calc/O2G4Wr5V That should reflect the new changes. Now the biggest thing is finding an actual weapon instead of a double rare haha. Once I find something that is a tad easier to get then this build might actually be usable in normal situations.

Also, I’m still new to the forums so is it possible to reply to both people that way they get notified and how in the world do you quote two different people in one post?

Edit: So quick little update I took the rest of the points out of veterancy, lowered blood boil down to 12, lowered Mark of Torment to 5 and then got Menhir’s Will to 16 for that extra fail safe for defense. Seems to work fairly well! I was able to facetank Lokarr the whole time. At one point my health got sort of low but, if I had used a fire res potion that wouldn’t have even happened! https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2BnydJ2

Edit #2: It can do ultimate SR! Well, sort of. It’s sort of slow. Fast enough to do it with plenty of time left but, it runs into problems on the boss shards. For example I ran into Grava’thul, Gabal’thuun, Ishtal, Been’Jahr. So in the case of getting those and them all aggroing you basically instantly die. Overall the build is okay, just slow due to low movement speed and you have to wait for bone harvest CD.

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You can @ people to make sure they get pinged, like @FCHatred.
To mulitquote just start typing your reply, then highlight the second bit of text and hit quote again, it’ll add it to the current reply.

As far as that goes, the afffixes are mostly just adding speed and OA, they aren’t enabling the build you know? Those aren’t uncommon stats on affixes, it shouldn’t be too hard to get something to drop that is fairly similar.
Valley of the Chosen seems to be the most common place for the constructs that drop it. You could run around there for a bit and see if RNGesus will bless you :smiley:

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Ah! This is really good to know haha. I don’t feel as lost anymore :smiley:

I was worried that if the weapon didn’t have that AS or OA it’d hurt quite a bit but, you’re right that it’s not enabling the build.

The build seems to be okay now but, definitely not something anyone should ever play. It’s way too slow at killing stuff and it’s probably not as safe as other builds. Not to mention the movement is awful. However, it killed a super boss and it did shard 65, so I’m completely fine with that especially seeing it was supposed to reflect a build from a completely different game. Thanks again to you and @Cinder for helping me get the build to a pretty good point!

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Sorry that the build didn’t turn out quite the way you hoped; but maybe gaining a little more buildcrafting experience is the best thing about cases like this anyways :slight_smile:

There are probably a few edges on the build that could still be smoothed out to gain a little more dmg, but yeah… reaching tier 1 might be very unrealistic, I agree.
Tier 2 is still a pretty cool achievement, though! You couldn’t imagine how many of my theorycrafts just plain melted at the sight of any form of endgame content :stuck_out_tongue:

Based on my personal experience, the main reason for both of the issues of your build you mentioned above is probably the lack of -%vit RR on a soldier build…

Vitality damage is, unfortunately, the one damage type in the game monsters have the most resistance to, so builds using it usually need RR support from both classes to really shine. And since vit builds usually survive through massive life leech the lack of dmg often turns into a lack of defense as well :confused:

Good vit centered builds like Phantasmal Blades builds with the Demonslayer set & Co. are pretty cool to play though in my opinion, if that’s your cup of tea :slight_smile: