Newbie - please help with HC tanky battlemage

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hey guys,

so… me and a friend want to try HC. We are both pretty much grim dawn newbs, we have SC chars at around act 3 elite, but other than that haven’t played the game much.

The idea is, that I’ll go a bit more tanky and he’ll go a bit more damagy. I want to have a tanky shield build, with a lot of block and defensive mechanics in general, but I also want to do a bit of damage, obviously…

As the first class I picked soldier - it seems like the obvious choice. With the other class I was’t so sure, but finnaly settled on arcanist. I know that there’s a couple of warder builds, but I wanted to do cold damage instead of lightning, hence arcanist.

Anyways, here’s the build:

grimcalc.com/build/1007-OdMaNA
(this is my first post and apparently I can’t post links yet :eek: )

The idea is that I’ll be autoattacking with cadence with tsunami proc, I’ll be CCing with blitz and the frost nova thing and I’ll have several procs/skills in case things go bad, such as Mirror, Flash freeze, Menhir’s will and celestial powers…

Now, the build is not by any means optimized, I have no idea about what kind of end-game items there are etc., so… please give me some tips and feedback :)… is it going to work at all? What about devotions?

Thank you!

2

Use this site to check end-game items and try building your toon around it.

gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items

If you decided which your primary skills are, check for items or sets that would give bonuses to your primary ability.

3

Thanks for the reply!

The “build your toon around items” is really good advice, because it seems like a lightning / shield based char has many more itemization options compared to cold / shield… Might have to switch to shaman after all, we’ll see

4

Soldier+Shaman is definitely very tanky, and a lot more lighting-y.