hello! I just started playing Grim Dawn today - chose an Arcanist… no idea where I am going when I choose my 2nd mastery. I tend to favor magick-wielders, but this sounded like that, but not, if that makes any sense. I have been looking thru the forums and honestly don’t know what alot of it means, but I DID play Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, so the gameplay itself is quite familiar.
I cleared out the cave under Burial Hill, came back to Devil’s Crossing & now I am talking to the various townsfolk/quest givers, but that’s it so far…
**THANK YOU devs for the TQ Anniversary edition!!!
When I heard that the devs from TQ were making Grim Dawn, I was immediately interested.
Anyways, I’ll keep browsing the forums and playing this awesome game.
If you already have 4 or 5 active abilities you like from arcanist, you may not need more and just want passives from another class. A good choice for that situation is to take soldier as a 2nd class and just take the tanky passive skills. Like the elemental resistance and +%physique one. If you want to take him to the higher difficulties, being tanky is very important even as a mage. Shaman also has some great passive/toggle skills which make you beefier.
I also have a guy who uses the aether ray, with the modifier to make it chaos damage. For this guy I took occultist, because it has a lot of +chaos damage and a great exclusive skill, called Possession.
I was looking at Occultist as it just looks freaky-cool.
I did some looking up on the stat score, physique/cunning/spirit - I started the game mainly putting points into spirit based on playing Titan Quest, but it seems physique is the main deal as everyone no matter their class needs survivability…
I have some kind of mystical bone thing in my off-hand and blasting everything with the “magic missile”-type deal with great success so far. I was using a rifle, but my own magic seems to do just as good if not better. I keep a 2-handed great sword just in case, but I don’t think I have even used it. I also have 3 shard things called down from the sky and some burst deal(I don’t know the names) in case I get swarmed. I think I have only taken 2 health potions the whole time…
Ya occultist has some really cool abilities but most of them are active abilities. Just remember that with 6 or 7 active abilities, it can become impossible to cast them all every cooldown because there are just too many to fire. Also you may have too many damage types, and would do better with a more focused build. So try to focus on like 4 or 5 that work well togehter, then the rest of the points can go into mastery and passive stuff
However rest assured that literally no matter what class combination you take, you can play through the first 2 difficulties without running into some problem like “my build just isnt strong enough”
Ya in the first run through, if you put a lot of points in aoe abilities you will basically one shot the entire game. Be careful with how many points you put in spirit because if/when you want to play the next run through the game you can get literally 100 - 0 one shot by some bosses. The arcanist mirror shield spell is very good to help with this problem though, and only really needs 1 skill point.
The replicating missile is amazing for groups and does fine vs bosses for now but later you may find its single target dps is quite low. So you could change over to the aether ray later, if you wanted to.
