Not sure what to do.... dying, but strong build

Grim Dawn Gameplay Discussion
1

I love this game, its completely addicting, but I seem to have hit some wall.

Pyromancer, on level 67 Elite.
Plenty of everything, but I keep dying, over and over and over.
My entire level 68 progression keeps disappearing.

It is entirely possible that I suck at figuring out how to play or build, but this is my 4th play through, first on Elite, and I have almost 80% resistance in every area but Cold and Bleed.

I have ALL blue and purple everything, weapons, armor, etc. Armor rating is 1100 roughly, health is ~5000 and energy is ~4000 depending on what I have fitted for the particular mission

I have 3 pets (bird, hellhound, riftscourge).

Bottom line is, I seem to die all the time, like I have virtually no armor and defense. Its totally frustrating at this point, as I love this game and want to keep playing. But I’m about to hang it up and move on to Deus Ex…

One example is that I have 77% Aether resistance, but if I step on Aether, I die immediately. Totally confused??

I’m totally aware that leveling gets harder the more you play, but its getting ridiculous. I’m getting wiped out completely lately.

Any advice for a suffering GD addict who keeps getting creamed? :rolleyes:

Attachment: screenshot.jpg

2

Post your build with
https://grimcalc.com/

How much defensive and offensive ability do you have?

Post a screenshot of your character screen so we can identify some items, or name some, or post links to them with
http://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items

3

I’m in a similar circumstance, although midway through my first ultimate run. It seems that there’s ‘plateaus’ of knowledge/response regarding defense. Different areas of consideration that come into play as you continue.

Perhaps there’s a guide somewhere that focuses on defense in Grim Dawn? Or some layout of benchmarks that will give you an indication of how your character will stack up, or what to aim for? Or a breakdown of different gameplay/defensive strategies you can employ to get you through, up to Ultimate?

4

Environmental damage cannot be resisted. It’s a direct reduction based on a percentage of max hit points; depending on where you are the damage rate can be as high as 35% per second.

The only protections from this are damage absorption (Maivens, Overguard) or immunity (Mirror).

So yeah, don’t stand in aether, you’ll die. Other than that, what other scenarios are you struggling with?

5

As pointed out, resistances don’t help with environmental damage. In this game’s logic, even if you have a fire suit on and 83% fire resistance and 1,000,000 HP and run into a burning building, you’re going to die as fast from being touched by flames as a person with 100 HP and -50% fire resistance. It was the most counter-intuitive thing for me to discover (and I learned the hard way by dying after capping my aether resistance). Your fire suit and high health are both absolutely useless in that scenario unless an enemy hits you with a fireball, in which case the fire suit and high health do help – but not the flames coming from the building, there you might as well be a naked level 1 character.

Otherwise 5k HP is a bit low, especially if you don’t have a major damage absorption source (blast shield, maiven’s, bulwark, possession, etc).

Generally for survivable here with upper difficulties you have to become a demi-god when it comes to your health and damage mitigation. That could mean having super HP and healing sources that heal for a percentage of your maximum HP (so you constantly heal tons of HP per second). It could mean having 20% damage absorption so that you’re only taking 80% damage from any source even after your resistances kick in. It could mean having 1000 health points regenerated per second. It could mean having life steal high enough to fill your health back to 100% instantly even after you take a single hit that deals 10,000 damage before you even take one more hit. It could mean having circuit breakers that kick in and save your life and alert you to run away when you reach below 33% health. It could mean having healing procs that trigger every few seconds that heal you a bit. It often means focusing on getting high resistances in every place you can. And often it can be a mixture of all of the above. When done right, it often feels like borderline playing with a cheat engine because your health bar will constantly fill right back to full almost immediately after taking a hit without any healing potions involved (though you will often be far, far from invincible in spite of it), but that’s the key to survival for a lot of builds.

In ultimate you can often take 10,000 damage easily in the blink of an eye. Your ability to immediately survive is often going to depend on having more maximum health than that or damage mitigation (resists, armor, absorption) or to evade some of it (dodge, deflect, DA). Your ability to even survive for seconds after if you could tank that raw damage will often depend on you being able to instantly heal back to full or instantly responding by running away and screaming.

IMO, for this game it is easier when you build characters (though kind of boring) to err on the side of tankiness and defense, especially until you get really experienced with its mechanics. I was so used to the reverse in other games and often erred on the side of too much offense in initial playthroughs, since in most other games you can get by with a super squishy character as long as you dodge everything perfectly (something that is generally not so possible in this one with a lot of builds you might not even expect).

6

The best way for you if you seek help from others - just share your entire save folder for your character by providing it as an attachment. That way other players can see what exactly your character lacks and suggest something.

7

One of the best tactics to use is hit & run, never assume “I’m hard, I can take this guy/mob,” stay back, throw poison, fire, or cold into the mob and wait for it to thin then mop up

Also drop the pets and use the points to improve your defence, even putting them on the mastery bar will improve everything

8

I’m assuming that you’ve taken Occultist as your class. If so, MAX Blood of Dreeg and use it as often as you can.

9

Fantastically enlightening and thanks!! Makes more sense now. It is counter intuitive, I guess that what makes this game so addicting.

10

Doing the Immolation quest can be fun, I, like you, thought “get my aether resist as high as possible and I’ll be fine.” Nope, I died before reaching safety. Tried again heals and health potions, nearly got there but alas I died again. So what to do, I know, cover the distance as fast as I can. Eureka! That actually worked, naturally I riftgated out haha

11

I see a problem right from the start with your build, aka extremely low hp. I am 48 right now with a pet build and I’m pushing 4.1k without any special gear, no legend , nothing. You really need to raise that.

12

One thing I’ve been feeling would be helpful are specific numbers. It seems to me that there must be rough benchmarks that hold true, as it does not appear that your end-game incoming damage (pre-defense) will ever change each playthrough, from character to character. Is this true?

So assuming(for example) Loghorrean always throws out the same nasty attacks and damage potential every round of Ultimate or Elite, couldn’t we establish a specific, narrow range of minimum HP pool necessary to make the run without relying on luck?
Or an HP/sec that’s big enough to manage that average pool?
Or the Defense Ability needed to bring the crit threshold down to something manageable?
Or a damage threshold of what the majority of the trash mobs output, so as to know how much armor or physical resist, etc, you ought to aim for?

Naturally, these benchmarks would need to set at a specific anchor point, since they scale upward. So I’m guessing that Loghorrean Elite @ lvl 75, or Ultimate @ 85 make the most sense? Or would a different boss fight reflect a better prototypical set of benchmarks?

I think this info would make self-troubleshooting a lot easier, or decrease the need for input, when one is still getting a sense of the full mechanical landscape of defense. From this standpoint, communicating the specifics of your finicky individual kit become less important, as you can then see a very concrete comparison: “Oh, I’ve over-compensated my DA. Oh, my HP is too small. Oh, my physical resistance is the best solution here. Oh, I didn’t know armor/absorption/phys resist combined together like that.” Etc.

13

Here’s the Grimcalc page : http://grimcalc.com/build/AlchGeC

I also actually realized that my Defense has ALL Zeros in it. Also, my Skills ALL have Zeros too! Not sure how to remedy that.

14

That’s a neat idea but not really practical. Playstyle makes a huge difference in your received damage profile: kiting builds fare have to deal with very different kinds of problems from facetank builds. Different kinds of defenses mitigate in very different ways. And even if you solve that problem for one specific boss, you have to do all that work again when you look at the next one. Logorrhean is far from the hardest fight in the game.

15

I would say to drop some points from the bird and the dog, since (at least for me) pets don’t really need more than one point in them until endgame. First off, and this is important, Get Blood of Dreeg!! Using that on CD will keep you alive more than anything else. It’s basically a free potion +OA, and it heals/buffs your pets too! Aspect of the Guardian is also nice for phys/acid resist, but really maxing out BoD and using it as soon as you’re hit is what you need. Mend Flesh is unreliable since the bird is an idiot; I’d probably knock that down to single digits (if anything) for BoD.

Get some more mastery in demo and get Blast Shield too, it’ll give you a nice stopgap to soak up damage and protect you from bullets while your BoD comes back. Maybe put some points in Sigil/Destruction, as that has some pretty decent incidental healing.

16

THANKS!!! I’ll try all those things. I did use BoD in one of my other playthroughs, figured I’d try some new items, but apparently, the constant dying is not what I had in mind!

And you’re right, the bird is a complete idiot. The dog at least does some damage. I’m gonna drop the rift scourge also, as it spits acid, but doesn’t really help in a mob.

17

Yeah, well I tried most of the things people kindly suggested, but I’m dying even worse now… Not sure what the heck is going on.

On Elite, level 68, died 7 times within 15 minutes walking through Pine Barrens. Completely baffled, as its my 4th playthrough, and I never died this much. I keep losing so much XP each time, and it just burns so much time, dying over and over and over. Its why I stopped playing so many oddball console games over the years.

I think I’m gonna hang it up for a while and play Nuka World, or move on to Deus Ex. The dying is just way too imbalanced for me at this point.

I’m also held prisoner by Physique, as I can’t seem to progress it along, have some nice legendary armor, but I can’t change that many items I have, as if physique goes too low, my armor goes red. Its an odd quandary that I simply don’t understand. Can’t progress, but need to progress for armor. Keep dying, which loses XP and therefore no progress.

Bummer, maybe I’ll give it another try next month… oh wait, Dishonored 2 comes then!!

18

“The dying is just way too imbalanced for me at this point.” -> All the people playing HC Ultimate say the problem isn’t the game.

Here’s the problem: You’ve made a hybrid pet build. The problem with hybrid pet builds is that they are trying to do damage which draws aggro, without having fully invested in their own defenses. This leads to hybrid pet builds dying a lot. As you’ve discovered.

Don’t do hybrid pet. Either go fullblown pet, untrain your damage skills, and work on being a good backline supporter for your army without drawing aggro, or ditch the pets and rebuild as a standalone.

19

How could a build “dying (a lot)”, but also be “strong”??? Did I miss something??

The core idea of this hybrid pet build is just as self-contradicting as the title…

20

Let me just say this yet again…

Hybrids DO NOT WORK*
*except in very specific circumstances with very specific gear

You can be a summoner, or you can be a firestriker - you don’t get to be both if you want to be effective.

As for specifics on your build you have to A) choose which path you want to walk B) get your mastery investment WAY up, minimum 1 point in mastery bar per level is a good way to look at it when getting started most top teir builds will be 50/32 or higher, some fringe cases in the 50/25 range.

Grenado is a bad skill in general

Stun Jacks is likely a bad combo with Fire Strike

You have no defensive skills of note, the big ones for your class being Blast Shield, Flashbang + Searing light (confuse for trash, fumble for bosses), and Blood of Dreeg for health regen.

You have no access to Resist reduction (that more affects killing speed, although failing to dispatch enemies quickly is sometimes the big problem)

For reference my lvl 62 Witchblade has lower resists than you in general (60’s and 50’s across the top, 80/40’s across the bottom) but has 10k health, over 500 health/sec and some damage absorb. Also has access to over 50 resist piercing and over 4X your DPS. That character has only died once when I literally fell asleep (I was playing while sick and on NyQuil okay?) Without a major overhaul to get your health and DPS up this character isn’t likely to go anywhere.