So two friends of mine and myself decided to pick up Grim Dawn (Since we each played a different ARG and none of us could be convinced not to try to PL each other in said game. We settled on finding a new one). We were trying to build our characters and got to level 14 (I know, not very high) before the other two realized that they didn’t like their chosen class combo (Battlemage and a Witch Hunter) and I realized I had royally messed up mine.
My character was conceptualized as a Tank who killed enemies through CC and DoTs, so I went with a Commando. I quickly found myself being out-tanked by the battlemag and came upon a startling discovery; Cunning, the stat I had put nearly everything into, wasn’t increasing my Burn damage.
Well, I need to re-roll solely for stats, the Witch Hunter liked the look of the Battlemage and the Battlemage is up in the air as to what he wants to play. So since the Tank role is going to be taken, I figured I’d go all in on the DoT damage.
So in a long and roundabout way of asking; what is the best thing to pair with a Demolitionist to get; Excessively high DoT damage (I’d think Poison might need to be added to it), survivability, and CC? Think really tanky plague doctor.
From what you’ve said, my first thought would be to look at Blackwater Cocktail, perhaps with the Infernal Knight set at endgame so you’de be mixing in some chaos damage.
Blackwater Cocktail does good fire and burn damage and is great for proccing devotions such as Fissure that will cause more. On top of that, I remember reading that it noticeably is good for drawing aggro, so should serve your tanking role quite well.
You’d want occultist or arcanist second for fire dots, I would consider occultist the better choice myself. Poison/bleed are the big bad dots of the game, the others not so much as there aren’t enough/big enough sources to get huge stacks. You can decent burns with fire though, okayish with electrocute, and frostburn just kinda sucks
The problem with fire/poison is that the gear/devotion support for such a mix is not there, getting big % modifiers and skill levels to highly overcapped levels would be quite hard. With occultist second (only option for this) you would have plenty of resist reduction for such a build tough. That being said you could definitely make this build work and I am intrigued by the idea enough to try it
I’d suggest Go back to the witch hunter and bask in the glory of huge poison dots for bosses and awesome aoe Or try one of the many bleed builds
I still think Commando is a good option because you can convert the Internal Trauma to Burn for extra damage. But Arcanist and Occultist make good supports as well.
BWC is the strongest burn skill the demo has. Canister Bomb is the second strongest surprisingly if you have enough conversion. Along with Thermite Mines all 3 skills stack burn damage.
I made a vid of a burn focused 2-handed melee Commando vs the Mad Queen without BWC. I used Clean Sweep + Canister Bomb + Thermite Mine. It took 3 rounds to knock her out but on the 3rd she was ticking away for 80,000 per second which is pretty high for Burn builds.
