Can anyone give me some ideas to improve this build? Dervish, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
This niche build actually has pretty good damage, but defense and sustain is horrible. Tested in Crucible 150-170. Very high chance to die at 155.
Maxing 3 offensive skills (EoR + blades + guardians) will not get you very far from your current point, regardless of the changes. Imo the bad ingredient of your build is Guardians - maxing the skill and adding the corresponding conduit is not contributing much.
The survivability issues stem from low health (13k is very low, aim for at least 17-18k), the medium life leech (12%, must aim for closer to 20%), and the relatively low phys res/armor/armor absorption.
Option 1 - keep the items/key skills and do minor readjustment: You can min-max resistance armor augments, to add one or two 4% health augments. Add unholy inscription component in gloves (+5% life leach, +bleeding and vit res. so you can remove those resistances from other augments). Add scaled hide in pants to reach 100% armor absorption. Also, you can drop of few points of presence of virtue/safeguard in favor of haven (to increase hp %). Add a point to shadow strike to help mobility. Remove points from spirit, add them on Physique.Expect a minor improvement though with the above, not sure if you can achieve your gladiator goal
Option 2 - drop Guardian of Empyrion. This will give the highest potential of your build. Switch your amulet for a more meaningful one. You will also ditch the + guardian armor for more suitable pieces (eg shoulders).
Other considerations.
I get that you used Honor relic to max EoR and soulfire, but it is kinda meh…
Serenity (to get +1 skills+ tankiness), Nidalla’s or others may be more appropriate.
Blade spirit in your current build should contribute a lot as secondary skill but unfortunately, there are not many options for medal/amulets to further boost either cold EoR or cold Blade spirit. I would consider testing/switching to ring of steel for secondary damage source. Your chiellheart already gives a big bonus/modifier to it and you can combine it with Nightstalker Pendant and Mythical Mark of Calamitous Desires as amulet/medal (assuming that you have the blueprints).
Rough build with same items and revised skills/devotions. 16.5k hp, more OA/DA. Expect more boost with revised items. Dervish, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.6) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
OK, appreciate your reply. But I’m wondering, have you ever seen or done a GoE build that can do Crucible or endgame contents in general? Is it possible to use GoE as a main damage-dealing skill instead of a debuff or secondary skill?
I have a Dervish using the Magi Visage which has GoE as a main damage source: Grim Dawn Build Calculator
It’s not amazing but it’s pretty chill, mostly you just run around and let stacking DoTs take care of everything. Lethal Assault is probably also not really worth it since it doesn’t have many skills that use WD, so you could take the points from there and put them elsewhere. You could also maybe use another secondary mastery.
There’s a Vitality GoE build somewhere on the forums (using Blightlord set and Word of Solael I believe), you could also try that instead. But for any GoE build you want something that gives you + Summons, which the conduit lacks, and the items that give you + Summons don’t support cold damage at all.
Thanks, I’ll look into this build. Kinda sad that there are not a lot player pet builds viable for endgame contents.
I tried this in the past, but no matter how you buff the skill, I don’t think it can become your main skill in terms of damage. You’d first have to have more minions and, from what I can remember, you could do that with a 2-handed axe (Barthollem's Gavel - Items - Grim Dawn Item Database) and a helmet (Magi Visage - Items - Grim Dawn Item Database). With these two items you increase their number from 2 to 5, so their dps becomes 2.5x. You should also raise the skill level to the absolute max because it grants you 1 or 2 additional guardians, I think. Maybe if you also take other similar minions and buff them too, like Blade spirit or Wind devil, you might achieve what you’re after. Maybe Wind devil and also totems. But this would imply to have conversion to a single damage type for all these minions, which I’m not sure you can. Totems can easily be turned to vitality, so you’d have only guardians and wind devils left to also convert to vitality.
Sadly the amulet doesn’t give you a 3rd Blade Spirit any more, but the mace will give you 2 extra Guardians now.
Those builds (I’ve only looked at the fire one) look like they’re the best you can achieve for that particular goal. But unfortunately only 70% of the physical damage was converted, right? Or maybe I didn’t look in detail. In any case, I’ve noticed that it’s hard to achieve 100% conversion from physical into fire. Same should be for Eye of Reckoning, is it just 70% converted from physical to fire, or did I miss it?
Thanks for your letting me know. I might as well give up doing player-pet builds and won’t ever rely on them to deal damage anymore. Not only they don’t have any leech to sustain you, their build options are also too limited. And their uses are mostly debuff and proccing devotions. That’s a bit too meh for me.
One of the biggest weaknesses of GD I’ve seen. Unless game mechanics related to these pets are updated, I wouldn’t put points in these pets.
Thanks for the build, but I doubt it’d work for endgame contents.
Wait just a second, here’s a stub I just came up with. I’m interested again in this, all of a sudden. It seems like all the damage was converted to vitality (except electrocute) and I’ve gathered the largest amount of minions with these 3 items. I’ll have to explore this further, maybe something great will come out of it.
I won’t bother with player-pets anymore, but yeah. Let me know if you can cook up something viable for endgame.
You could also try with Trickster. Wind Devils instead of GoE. Chillwhisper Crown for conversion and Amatok’s Maces for plus frostburn. Yugol’s relic for spin2win. I tried it and it was fun. Not a big endgame guy so i can’t tell you how good it is though.
That, I think, might be a wise decision. But if you add a good main skill to all of this and stop investing in the minions any further, the build’s main skill(s) might be augmented by the minions in terms of total dps. Because these minions are parallel dps sources that are scaled by the same global bonuses that your active skills are.
Thanks for suggestion, but I’ll move on to other builds.
That’s true. A good example of this would be a build with Chilwhisper set. But then again, builds like this are few, and Blade Spirit still ends up as a “secondary suport” skill, not a reliable main skill. But well, it does work.
The stub I posted earlier should work very well with Righteous fervor without requiring any extra gear. So, the wind devils are converted by the weapon (except their electrocute damage). And I’d also entirely drop Raging tempest from the skills. Then, by using the transmuters of Guardian of Empyrion and Righteous fervor you ensure that you convert the entire damage of these skills to vitality and acid, internally. Then, the weapon fully converts the acid damage to vitality, externally. You add Feral hunger and Smite as WPS, because the conversion from Righteous fervor is carried to them and you have everything fully converted without any extra gear, so far. Because of the transmuter for GoE, they now apply a RR debuff to vitality and from Shaman you have Devouring Swarm to do the same. I think it looks like a good combination. And you have a total of 13 minions as support.
I’m quite sure that damage can’t be converted twice. Once damage is converted internally, it stays that way. So conversion from weapon is useless for and Fervor and GoE.
Wow, you’re right. Again, I’m shocked that the information I got a while back is false. This means that I need to respec some of my builds as well. I thought that conversion only happens once for a particular layer (internal or external), but not that the two layers are merged together. Thanks for the reality check. And it’s such a shame, because you could’ve obtained all kinds of effects by having two layers of conversion. So, what didn’t get converted internally is still susceptible to be converted externally, right?
That’s right. The rule is if a damage source is converted to another damage (either internally or externally), then the damage you get after the conversion can’t be converted for a second time into something else.