Hello,
I am a new player to Grim Dawn and I am looking for a build. I did not see it in the beginner friendly builds, but then I may not have understood the jargon.
I am looking for a highly defensive, retaliation (thorns) type build for melee. Ideally a charge/leap skill into a group of enemies and then some form of AoE/attack while enemies just die hitting me. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Thanks!
As far as levelling skills that fit your idea go, these ones come to mind:
There is also Ulzuin’s Wrath in Demolitionist which is similar to Counter Strike being a passive that procs when you get hit and spreads a bit of your Retaliation damage to ranged enemies but mechanically is harder to explain, also more geared to crowds and not reliable for single targets like Bosses.
Personally, looking at skills and numbers, I would go with Entangling Vines or Aegis of Menhir as both look like they have the capability to put out the most in a decent AoE.
Keep in mind though. Retaliation builds are not generally recommended for new players as they often weigh too harshly on the “way too tanky” end of the spectrum and struggle with dealing damage due to a lot of Retaliation damage being found in the biggest, meatiest amounts on Epic or Legendary gear and in bulk amounts later on into devotion rather than at during the early stages. It’s not an exaggeration to say they are slow levellers.
Take it from someone who has levelled a Retaliation character from level 1 to 94 - it was giga-tanky, almost never died, but it took at least 3 or 4 times the length of other characters to kill Bosses or clear crowds the entire way through until I could equip some prepared Legendary gear at 94. I honestly never want to do it again. Having some Retaliation Epic sets ready at 40 or 65 is the only time I have heard from others where it’s less painful.
Instead, what most people will do is just level a character as something that isn’t Retaliation that is comfortable and strong, farm the gear up later and swap into it.
gonna echo Baka here; it’s not recommended you level as retal, especially not for your first character
(i’ve leveled multiple retal characters, twinked and ssf)
very few approaches are as gear reliant as retal during the leveling stage to deal “any” form of reasonable dmg, made worse by retal being a more limited item pool than other regular/avg dmg types.
Highly recommend only considering the idea when you are able to twink your retal toon for leveling, with ex Perdition sets for 40, 65 etc and other stuff
it’s easy for you to level any character/build as tanky, also while even dealing decent dmg or aoe, but retal is really slow and low dmg without twinking.
if it’s merely the “effect”/FX of thorns/retaliating strike effect, i’d recommend you do a build that does stuff like dmg auras or pseudo “thorny” attacks, Vindictive Flame+Ulzuin’s Wrath in Demo being a good example.
Oathkeeper also has stuff like Heart of Wrath,
Necro has a “strike back” buff(that also debuffs enemies),
Inquisitor has a straight up dmg fire aura, + a dmg seal that stings enemies stepping on it.
Shaman ofc has Vines that is straight up aoe thorns,
Nighblade also has a damaging aura + a blade spirit “pet” and a cool af Ring of Steel skil you can also get as proc on gear(rng ofc).
Occultist also as a sigil/“damaging ritual circle” that burn anyone coming close to you/stepping on it.
you could either level a specific character, ex Warlord, as non retal, then transition into retal endgame later. Or level an entirely different build, ex something using some of the stuff mentioned above; and then gather twink gear on that, and then subsequently level your retal character.
After I am done with my ssf pet build I need to do ssf retal just to see how bad it is lol. But retal until you get counter strike skill will be extreme hard as well
it’s not that retal is “bad”, it’s just slow if that’s what you do. Like, you do more dmg doing “anything” else/auto attacks until you have a decent amount of it and/or rata 
just getting something like perdition drastically makes an improvement
I would limit to “no sets or too lucky drops” 
there is an okay assortment of faction retal stuff “later”, the 2 most annoying issues is the affix pool obvious being way smaller than “any” other dmg, phys retal or fire retal, yay, and the smaller pool of “dedicated” items ofc like epics
stuff like totally normal shield, or MIs, “fixed” items really feel like they become much more mandatory than usual. Fortunately there is an okay selection of them spread out across the acts, but the “having them all at once”, is a big deal compared to waiting out individual slots until reaching them “manually” lol
I know that
Counter Strike just got some heavy Retal damage nerfs (like basically everything Retal across the board did) and even before them, I still would have not recommended levelling with a focus on using the skill as a major damage source, Retaliation or not.
Retaliation’s ability to build damage is seriously hampered while levelling because of how scarce it’s damage bonuses are (both flat and +%) on green and below gear like Chosen Pauldrons to the point that skills early on like Ascension provide ten times the amount compared to the aforementioned shoulders, T1 devotions provide similarly small amounts with only 1 T1 devotion proc dealing Retaliation damage to Attack (on Block as well, pretty poor early on), T2/T3 ones like Messenger or Obelisk are where more starts to come in both on nodes and on the proc and at the end how miniscule of it gets pulled with Retaliation added to Attack.
With all that said, I can understand why Retaliation gets screwed on the damage front. Crate has been adamant on making sure that a build cannot both be giga-tanky and clear as fast as the average build for as far back as I remember. Markovian Commando/Witchblade being nerfed in vanilla being some of the prime examples I recall. Paraphrasing what they said back then - a build can’t be defensively sturdy and push cutting-edge competitive damage/clear speeds, it has to give somewhere.