Been trying to run with a straight up Nightblade and have made it so far to level 50, just about to hit the Warden on Elite. It’s here where I’m finding out what I think is a serious limitation with pure builds and that is stats. I’m finding that I’m seriously short of main stats and thus cannot seem to equip higher level gear! I this the reason why there are no pure builds in the build compendium?
Anyway, here is what I have so far which has been working very well.
*cannot link build as not enough posts *
Dual Blade (16) and all sub skills (1) Nidalla’s Hidden Hand (8)
Armasta’s Blade Burst (16) (primary attack) and all sub skills (1)
Ring of Steel (1) and sub skills (1)
Blade Spirit (16)
Shadow Strike (1) and all sub skills (1)
Pneumatic Burst (12) and all sub skills (1)
Veil of Shadow (1) and Night’s Chill (10)
Blade Barrier (1)
all three passive skills (1)
Devotion
Crane
Dryad’s Blessing
Tip the Scales
I’ve been using the Pierce/Cold weapon enchants for the pierce/cold bonus.
I’ve not bothered really with specific damage types as I’m not someone that really farms gear, just picking up what I find. Cold/Pierce so far seems to be working well. I’ve also been using Vitality damage.
What I’m looking for though is some tips on where to progress from here. I think I’m likely to add another class and I’m leaning towards Soldier, mostly for the extra defense. I also think my devotion point allocation isn’t really that great. The Energy recovery from the Scales constellation has been helping a lot however as the build uses a lot of Energy.
To make a single mastery class work you need to know your way around item affixes, so if you don’t like researching Graceful Dusk for phys/cun/spirit/health/energy sources then I wouldn’t recommend it. Otherwise they’re not really that much different from dual mastery classes, with their own pros/cons.
Link to your build based on your description, you didn’t mention anything about transmutes.
Even if you’re only using a single mastery note that there are still several ways to play a single mastery build. From what I can tell, you seem to be focusing on too many things at once. You need to consolidate your skill point distribution by reducing the number of skills you take and then focusing on them (note that you have access to skills from three different sources - masteries, devotions and items - so mastery-wise only pick the skills relevant to your build, and from those only max the ones that get used most of the time).
For example. I imagine your build relies heavily on Veil of Shadows for it’s slowing effect and the resistance debuff from Night’s Chill, so I’d max that. Higher skill level = better range = more mobs affected, more mobs slowed, stronger slow. Meanwhile, unless you’re auto-attacking like 80% of the time I wouldn’t max Dual Blade. For every second you’re running around/using other skills, you’re not using that bonus, and that’s a grand total of 15 skill points wasted. Better to max Amarasta’s Quick Cut, which gives you a chance of doing massive damage when you do auto-attack something.
Soldier works very well with Nightblade, just don’t spread out your points too much. There are a lot of guides for those in this section of the forums.
Thanks for the reply Tyr! I’m not entirely sure what you mean by too many skills?
Armasta’s Blade Burst is my LMB skill and so is used as part of my ‘auto-attack’.
Shadow Strike is used for escape and hitting at range important enemies like casters, etc.
Blade Spirit does a tonne of damage!!
Pneunmatic Burst is my heal (essential)!
Blade Barrier is for ‘recovery’
Is this too many?
Could I actually loose Armasta’s Blade Burst all together and concentrate solely on auto-attack? I’m also not familiar with transmutes (a bit embarrassing as I’ve been playing the game for some time!)?
IMO there is no way you are going to survive Ultimate with a single mastery & therefore only max 50 points in masteries…you are simply not going to have enough health, even if you devote your devotion towards HP & defense it’s not going to be enough…that is why everyone make dual-wield Spellbreakers, Blademasters, Saboteurs & Tricksters.
If you think about it logically, putting just one point in to Acanist opens up Inner Focus then a further 12 points gives you +10% OA, that is really nothing when you have 220 points to allocate and gives so much!
Similarly, 1 points to Demolitionist opens up Fire Strike and Flashbang which with a similar investment can either provide a crazy boost to DPS or an AoE debuff!
It may not fit from a role playing sense of the game in terms of a pure class build, but you are deliberately gimping yourself by NOT taking a second class!
IMO there is no way you are going to survive Ultimate with a single mastery & therefore only max 50 points in masteries…
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33046
In B30, zero legendaries, only 25 points in physique.
The end-game version of that build has 10.2k HP, can max relevant resists with item swaps including physical resist with procs up, and can hit 800+ HP regen with item swaps, higher with procs. He’s actually tougher than a lot of my other summoner builds. Yes, I didn’t expect that either.
That said, the build is a testament to what you can accomplish if you fully immerse yourself in GD mechanics + actual playtesting. If you’re more interested in just playing the game, I would not encourage sticking to only 1 mastery.
Thanks for the reply Tyr! I’m not entirely sure what you mean by too many skills?
I just think that you have points in too many skills.
You took Belgothian’s Shears/Amarasta’s Quick Cut/Whirling Death/Execution and left them all at 1 point, for example. You either need these skills (in which case you should max them) or you don’t. Same for Ring of Steel/Circle of Slaughter/Shadow Dance/Elemental Awakening.
Perhaps if you were stacking a lot +to all Nightblade skills your skillpoint distribution would make sense, but even then I’d have thought you would prioritize maxing skills like Veil of Shadow or Shadow Strike.
My suggestion, take a look at some Nightblade builds (like Blademasters, there’s a lot of them here) and look at their skill point distribution. Read the build descriptions and find out what makes these builds work so you’ll have a better idea about what your build needs. Doing so should also help you decide how you want to play your character.
I wish I can tell you something formulaic like “just max these skills and you’ll be fine”, but I have no idea how to do that using mostly Nightblade skills.
that’s great, but how is a pure Nightblade going to summon anything to kills things for them? Blade Spirits and Nemesis relic? …I hear Ultimate Loghorrean is pretty difficult for summoners though
Question on the dual blades line. I see that some of skills will proc 8 percent of the time, to a max, I assume, of 40 percent. My question is, will the procs overwrite each other? Or is there a chance, for example that both Belothian’s Shears and Whirling death can proc off the same attack?
So if that is the case, it begs the question, is it worth getting three skills that add up to 100 percent proc rate? Or are the points better spent elsewhere?
I continued on my ‘pure’ nightbalde build, concentrating on the 'auto-attack aspect, ending up with all either points into all the dual wield skills (with 16 into the base). This was proving quite successful and fun! I found that going for weapons that had just straight piercing, physical and attack-speed% was the best as many weapons that have elemental damage, also convert the physical damage which I think adversely effects your skills that convert damage.
All was going well till I hit the final boss on Elite (at level 64), the big L! With just 3800 health to my name, I found the boss nigh impossible as virtually every attack he does one shots you, and that’s on top of all the adds. I was just about ready to give it all aaway when I bit the bullet and decided to invest in the Soldier tree, investing only the 15 points needed to get Military Conditioning to 10. This along with a few health items got me to a reasonable 6800 health.
I also changed my skill loadout from a straight ‘auto-attack’ build to primarily focus on shadow strike for the damage over time. Jump in and Shadow Strike, run away until my health cooldowns are back and jump in again after taking out some adds. Trying to stand and DPS the boss just doesn’t work.
With this strategy I finally managed to take down the final boss and unlock Ultimate difficulty
To answer my question about viability of ‘pure’ builds. I think the answer is ‘yes’, but depends a lot on the class. I had trouble with the Nightbalde as there were no skills that actually increase health. This was one of my biggest issues. I think the Soldier would do pretty well as a pure build and I may just give that a go …
The max proc chance of the passive WPS in the dual blades line is 20%, you can achieve this by 5/8 points into the passive, any additional points only contribute to increasing the damage. If you set all other them to 5 points, you will have a 80% on any default attack to proc a random WPS. If you have other WPS from other classes (markovian’s advantage from soldier) or from items that push the total proc chance over 100%, the chance of each individual WPS proccing is pro rata based on it’s percentage (which means the proc chance of an individual WPS will go down). For example you have 20% for each nightblade WPS and you also have 25% for markovian’s adv., your proc chance of any nightblade WPS proc will go down from 20% to 19% and markovian’s proc chance will go down to 24%. But your overall WPS proc chance stays at 100%
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