Newbie question: How to build around the Sharpshooter's Duty set?

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hey everyone,

so I recently started playing this game and am slowly learning my way around. Well, yesterday I was looking at the few sets I’ve already completed, and got interested on the Sharpshooter’s Duty set. I do want to make a ranged char, so I thought I could come up with a build for it.

However, I’m quite confused about how you’re supposed to build around a set like this. In between the set bonuses themselves and the individual item bonuses, there seems to be nearly half of them directed at pierce damage, while the other half is focused on fire/burn.

The Purifier does have access to some abilities that scale both fire and (physical, then converted to) pierce damage, and some abilities that give “generic” damage bonuses like extra crit damage. But I don’t see a way of working around enemies resistances - if I try to get resistance reduction to both damage types, then I end up stretching my skill points far too much. If I just get one, then the damage investment on the other is probably wasted on most of the game content, seeing how high resists are in GD.

I also thought about conversion, but from what I could find I’d only be able to get a really low part of my damage converted, as most items have like 10-15% damage conversion and I can’t use too many of them since I have most of my gear slots used by the set already.

Last option I could think of is just ignoring one of the damage types. But in that case I don’t really see the point of the set. If I’m going to build just for fire damage, isn’t it better to simply get gear that boosts fire damage exclusively? Same for pierce.

So, that’s the situation I’m in. I know that the Sharpshooter’s Duty set is not true endgame material. It’s a level 82 set of epic rarity, obviously appropriate legendary gear will be better. But my focus at the moment isn’t making endgame builds, but rather building around what I have to understand how builds in this game work. Yet, even for non endgame content, I can’t really see how I should approach something like this set.

So, any tips that could help me?

2

Since the weapon does not have physical to fire damage conversion, I would do ranged Tactician instead with cadence as attack skill.

3

First of all: thanks for your answer :slight_smile:

So basically just ignore all fire based bonuses and go full pierce?

Two follow-up questions:

a) I see a lot of equipment on GD with two or even three different damage types. Is ignoring half (or 2/3) of the bonuses simply how you should build in general? I find this a bit weird coming from PoE, where you’ll rarely just not use so many of the bonuses the item gives (on uniques at least, which are somewhat equivalent to epic/legendaries here). But I guess that’s how it works on GD.

b) If I were to follow your suggestion, the weapon has 40% base armor piercing. With the set, I get a 40% increase on the base. Can I stack something like 140% increase (the 40% increase from the set + 100% increase from Blades of Nadaan) to get a full 100% pierce? I know it obviously won’t get over 100% pierce, I’m just wondering if the increases are limited to 100% increase (so the max for a 40% base would be 80% pierce) or if I can stack increases till I get 100% pierce.

4

a) In GD, single damage type is best almost solely due to how resist reduction impacts the game. It actually increases your dedicated damage type when pushing the monster into negative resists. So to maximize this, you generally need to focus.

b) Irrc it you can aim for that 140%. But Blades of N only works with swords. With that particular set, you might find a few items that increase armor pierce a bit (amulets or such) by 40ish %.
With the sharpshooter set bonus that makes ~80% which makes total ~70ish% conversion phys->pierce where %wd (weapon damage) is involved.

So generally, my process is:

  • see what’s in my inventory for %damage type boosts and maximum RR totals
  • compromise in order to have adequate resistances (at least soft-caps = 80%, more if workable).
  • aim for relatively high OA and DA (3k goal, not always possible)
  • have some kind of health regen (leech or regen) and maybe some circuit-breaker defences.
    Components and augments can fill a lot of the gaps and sometimes you have to compromise equipment to get decent OA/DA/resists

Purifier could work but it is more equipment-specific than Tactician. Firestrike’s Brimstone interacts very well with the Inquisitor WPS. You’d want some gear to convert elemental to pierce to maximize profit.

For example this would be a start of the iteration: starting the iteration of Purifier

I’ve picked out all the gear that I might have (just examples). Now it’s a task of getting the OA/DA/Resists sorted with item switches and components/augments, etc. This gear is not necessarily great, but what this example emphasizes is looking for stacking RR (items, skills, devotions), finding flat pierce and % pierce, and attack speed.

Devotions are mostly pierce-centric, but Raise the Dead is for the RR.

And so on. So play around with stuff like that.

Edit:

I should point out that while focusing on RR generally maximizes damage, you can get by in the Main campaign with compromise builds. It’s more to do with min-maxing by habit or reflex for me of late.

I’ve played a lot of hybrids in the MC, which were fun. Definitely more challenging to play.

1 Like
5

Many sets and items has dual damage types, but in general only one of them is worth building around.

One could argue that one does not need to use flashbang since the belt already has it in built.

One could also go without the set belt and use a belt that has increased armor piercing.

6

That’s a great answer, thanks!

About Blades of Nadaan, I totally missed the fact that it’s swords only. I’m dumb, lol.

As for the example build, this helps me a lot. It’s exactly what I wasn’t being able to understand, how you’d start out a build around an item set like this. I know an endgame build would need to change things (and probably to actually be optimized spec out of the whole set since it isn’t really an endgame set), but this is the start I wasn’t being able to get to. So thanks again. :grinning:

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks.