Mainly looking for second mastery which gives most benefits in terms of physical and elemental resistances. Currently considering either Witchblade or Warlock, but not sure whose passives/skills benefit more in that regard…
Any suggestions are welcome.
If you just want resistances and tank stats from your 2nd class, soldier is basically always strong. If you have your damage/active abilities from occultist you can get something like this:
http://grimcalc.com/build/8o1Hbet
If you use a shield you can put some in the shield-only abilities too
Arcanist has MUCH lower health and physique from the mastery bar. However there are still lots of warlock builds but they are mostly squishy mage casters. Just depends what you want.
Shaman can also be good for spreadsheet stats while also giving vitality damage and healing from the two totems. Both totems are extremely powerful
We need to know which skills in the occultist tree you are focusing on. The answers are very different if you want to be a chaos centric caster vs a pet build vs poison centric.
Thanks, I was actually looking exactly at those soldier skills, but I got 2 questions:
Considering shield, I don’t think I will be going for it, I’m looking for primary class bonuses off-hand with additional summon.
(EDIT: ) Many weapons do physical damage so if you auto attack at all with those you will benefit from +physical. However the resistances with that passive is what you would get it for anyways.
If you dont auto at all, and just use spells and summons, you should consider going full pets conjuror with shaman. Shamans pets are possibly even better than hellhound and shaman still has great hp and physique stats.
I havent tried a “half” pets build, only full pets conjuror so im not sure how well it works. I imagine your bonuses are a bit too slit between your personal stats and +to all pets. But idk go for it if you want.
Oh and auro buffs are extremely good on pets, if you dont go soldier you can get the chaos weapon one and/or blood of dreeg to buff them
This is not true at all. Daggers and scepters have non-physical base damage. Several unique and legendary weapons do as well. And even for weapons which do have a physical damage component, it’s possible to get 100% conversion to another damage type in at least some cases.
I’m going mainly chaos/vitality (bleeding comes as a bonus from some skills). I also invest single point in pet chain skills just for flavor, not aiming for top build for HC-Ult, and clearly not pet build. Still experimenting. Focusing mainly on Scepter as main hand weapon, but usually have to fight with whatever better I find.
I guess Soldier synergy will do, but what is not completely clear to me is if I max Consecrated Blade (Solael’s Witchfire utility) will it somehow give me any benefits of +50% phys bonus from Decorated Soldier if I pick weapon with main Phys damage? I mean how exactly does transfer Phys to Chaos work? Does it give bonus to only weapon damage or somehow spread across my Chaos dmg stats overall?
Sorry for silly questions, started recently, mechanics are sometimes confusing.
Oops i was wrong about the weapons. Well ill just link you this then for damage conversion:
Regarding elemental resistances, specifically, these are very easy to attain through gear and and augmentations. There’s no reason any given character can’t have full elemental resists, so I don’t think you should worry about that.
The other resistances aren’t quite so easy, with some being not bad, and some being a hassle to garner. But no class really has market cornered on troublesome resistances. Gear and Devotions will do a bit of this work however, and a bit from skills too. But if it really is a top priority, then soldier might be the standout with it’s crowd-control resistances. But it’s not a standout by much.
You can’t. For any given %damage modifier, either it’s useful to your chosen damage type, or it’s not. It’ll still factor in, but it’s mostly inconsequential unless you have a high base physical damage, or are gearing to physical. But if you’re gearing toward Chaos, etc, then it’s mainly useless.
If you intend on playing as a melee character through ultimate, then eventually defense is going to be the biggest concern by far. Things hit so incredibly hard, it’s going to be difficult to keep up unless you dedicate nearly all resources to defense.
This assumes, of course, that you don’t have a stash full of legendaries already waiting for this character to meet it’s level requirement.
Yeah, I’m still struggling with the damage conversion issue. But for sure, if your weapon has low/no physical damage component, then there’s no way that a %phys component to a skill will be useful. Perhaps flat damage would be useful though.
Ok, thanks, that was really helpful.
Another question:
How does Ember Claw work exactly? (Hellhound chain skill) In Grim Calc it displays percentage of increasing aggro per level, in-game description doesn’t display numerical value, only flat taunt.
If I go summoner, are there any mechanics that let my pets draw the aggro? Because It seems like all enemies, especially bosses, completely ignore my pets, even when they block their path.
Hey man I just played a Doombolt Warlock in softcore up to end game crucible and am currently playing a Witchblade in hardcore that uses chaos strike; both are very strong and fun in their own way, however, the warlock probably has a higher skill cap. In my experience both options are great relative to defences and resistances and it really depends what type of play style you are looking for. Also in both cases I suggest placing most stat points in physique.
Do you want to be a spell caster?
Then warlock is probably best.
Do you want to play battle occultist using weapons?
Then witchblade is probably the best. If you do pick witchblade I suggest looking into Chaos Strike augment for weapon which is really fun to use.
Pet aggro is a bit of a topic. Personally, I have only minor experience with it, but from a google search(“grim dawn aggro”) it appears that you’re likely to get and keep aggro if you strike the monster first and/or keep hitting it.
Perhaps it’s related to damage dealt, in which case, you wont avoid aggro unless you are gearing for pet bonuses.
Even without the issue of aggro, pets are a bit ‘all or nothing’ later in the game, as their capabilities wont keep pace unless you gear for pets… Which means you’re not spending all your resources on yourself.
This gearing also implies that a pet-boosting build benefits from gaining as many pets as possible, furthering the polarization. This is why you see a preponderance of ‘pokemon’ builds, and not so many single briarthorns or just the raven.
Should ultimate difficulty be your goal as a melee character, then pets might not be the best investment. Particularly given that their aggro will end up dependent on their gear potency.
On the other hand, if it works for now, then there’s no problem having it for now.
Hopefully my speculations here will be corrected, if I made a mistake.
I see, thanks.
Lately have been testing Bloody Pox, and it’s not clear to me, is this skill completely useless or I don’t know how to use it right?
Bloody Pox is great trash clear, up to a point… then it falls off.
Regarding soldier and the 50% phy damage bonus you were asking about.
The answer is: you don’t get any benefit from the phys damage bonus… its the rest of the skill yuo are using it for.
Also DSoldier has flat OA, flat DA, huge health, and armour absorb increase. As a defensive part of a build it is quite strong. And that’s if yuo don’t want to put points into war cry to reduce income damage by up to 25%! 
regarding pet aggro, you need to make sure your pet is attacking and killing stuff BEFORE you get close to the mobs or cast curses or do any damage.
I have a DOT mage who uses devouring swarm, pox, evil eye with transmuter and pox in ultimate at lv70 is still doing incredible damage and a huge debuff. Pox, like all DOT spells which hit the whole screen, has a near 100% proc rate on devotions as well
Dont even take the transmuter on pox though as the attack speed and OA buff you give bosses means they crit you and hit faster too. It’s suicide
Assuming it gets to trigger at all before the mobs die. My complaint with Bloody Pox, aside for the visual effect being hard to notice and the skill being a bit tedious to cast (kinda difficult to precisely tag a specific moving target in the middle of the battle) is that by the time it finally triggers and spreads around, I’ve already killed everything. It’s just too damn slow.
It’s probably better in the crucible.
Well, I’ll keep pets for now, then if I decide to go Ultimate, I’ll respec and throw points in something else, I see that I should really be dedicated summoner or no pets at all.
Considering Pox, I would be happier for single target debuff which wrecks boss/tough enemy and lasts more than 5 secs with long CD. And yeah, I learned about Fevered Rage the hard way… can’t even think who might benefit from this.
About +50% Phys damage in Soldier passive, what if I get Meteor Shower from Ulzuin’s Torch? Will it benefit?
Few more questions:
I have bound Flame Torrent (Fiend Devotion) to my Hellhound, pet is pretty durable, always in the midst of enemies and procs Torrent basically non-stop. Along other damage bonuses that are clear, it also gives Main Hand bonus damage, does it benefit Hellhound like increasing its regular auto-attack?
Choosing between Soldiers’ Field Command and Scars of Battle skills, obviously I can’t take both, but curious which may benefit my character more.
In field Command OA/DA bonuses are nice, but they are pretty small, like +75 at max level, plus since I plan my gear more towards caster, I won’t have too big armor rating where increase in armor % will give best advantages.
Scars of battle gives nice status resistance bonuses, since freeze and stun can mess you up pretty bad, also you spend less skills to level it and it gives you +25% armor absorb bonus.
So which is considered more beneficial overall, +% to armor increase or +% to absorb?
Are there any items which gives permanent Harbinger pet? The one from Salazars’ Blade is pretty powerful, but 30 sec living is kinda not cool. I need it more for the trve kvlt flavor it gives my char, rather then practical purposes.