Been noticing a lot builds use rare green’s to cover resists and boost HP in a lot of builds. I just am concerned how generic gear wise builds seem to be getting.
Stonehide/Thunderstruck Aleksander Causses of Vitality seem to be all over the place. Thunderstruck Heavy Boots of Kings seems like another popular one as well.
The boots are not too bad (in that they are craftable) but still that is going to take A LOT of crafting. The nemesis ones are a lot of kills as well.
In many ways these greens are harder to farm then legendaries sometimes dramatically so.
Just feels like throwing in a bunch of perfect rare nemesis greens seems like the easy way out grimtools when in actual gameplay its extremely time consuming.
As means of min-maxing, they are fine and absolutely necessary. They are also often convenient to use in builds.
The problem though is that there are people who make builds take these MIs as granted. When you see a build utilizing 5 pieces of double-rare MIs, you cannot help but question how the author obtain those at the first place, and you know it’s just not feasible through self-found.
Of course this game as a single player game allows people to play however they want, but posting “build guides” like those is down right misleading.
To wear all wanted items, MIs fix the rest resistance and allow you to min-max things easily.
Using MIs for showcase or to be at BiS is ok. I think the idea, how they min-max things, concept and how they deal with powerful enemies are more valuable than their gear.
I don’t really care about how someone got items. Just play the way you like and enjoy the game
Pretty much how I feel. It can be a little misleading especially for new players.
Obviously they a BiS for a lot (if not almost all) builds in some slots. Have no problem with people using them.
It’s just when they use especially rare ones or ones that are very hard to farm it would be nice if they mentioned that or maybe provide alternate options.
Yeah I agree with this. Can be misleading for new players.
When I asked where new player can get those MIs, one of build poster mentioned to me tool like GD stash.
Or sometimes you’ll get “Then this build isn’t for you” response :undecided:
It’s not that misleading. I mean there is a difference between a build presentation and a full blown guide.
A build poster normally posts a build they like and which to share with others. Some build posters also include some replacements for their MI’s IF there are any. Most try this. With some builds there is just no other way. Some sets, items simply provide more resistances than others.
like MortalKombat said, if a build is really good it won’t depend on items so rare. they are here to make great builds uber builds. the several char that can reliably farm Ultimate in my game are more or less full legendaries. with double-rare MIs there’ll be even better for sure but it’s unecessary.
as for the confusion for new players i understand it but that’s where nothing replaces experience once you’re used to the game it’s easy to tell which build is heavily gear dependent and which isn’t.
its both fortunate and unfortunate, that crate simply wants us to use MI’s.
boots/pants for example, for the majority of builds there simply isn’t any reasonable purples at all. if the MI’s are vastly superior, no reason not to use them.
i’d argue that a build that uses MI’s, should at least be viable without double rares. i think more reasonable to use MI’s with a single rare affix and one nonrare to be more realistic. for instance, if a build says X alekzander pants of vitality. this is quite reasonable as vitality is a nonrare affix and X is flexible.
agree that the right double rares are almost impossible(except boots), and perhaps not much point in showing a build with 4-5 double rares MIs that require specific, nonflexible affixs.
A lot of builds just don’t have legendary options because the gear for their class combo doesn’t exist. Where is the dual wield chaos witch hunter gear? Beyond double fang of chthons and solaels malice it doesn’t exist. You are using either MI, generic uniques like open hand of mercy or gear for other classes that happens to also give a partial boost to you which is bs. But what are you going to do?
Hell, we don’t even have MI options for boots/gloves. They should have upgraded the original faction (Devil’s Crossing/Homestead etc…) rewards to have a lvl 90/94 option so you could at least fill in the slot with a generic useful piece.
Since you posted something similar in my WH thread and I didnt saw anyone else having/using thunderstruck of kings boots (maybe Im wrong?), I somehow cant resist the feeling that this thread is somewhat aiming that build. To bring closer to you influence of greens I posted WH variation of the build with no greens or MIs, so you can check changes/influence of green items.
Also I have to state that I dont farm for specific affixes MI items at all, I use what I have and compensate with other pieces of gear. Most affixes on gear are interchangeable and can spawn on almost any gear piece, pants, shoulders, boots, w/e. So you need right combination of greens not exact the same one, or you can do even with some other combination if you put your mind into it.
To get thunderstruck of kings boots I made more than 1k crafting attempts and probably got lucky or w/e, but secretly I was hoping for stonehide of the kings ones, since instead of stonehide I got tunderstruck I adapted and Im trying to pool out best from it.
About Alex pants, that build like few other of my builds uses same ones, formidable of fortitude, rare prefix and common not so good suffix.
Again if you want to farm for those specific ones probably you are doomed but you can change them for prismatic of something, something of nature bounty, and so many other combos, or even totally different pants. You dont need exact same ones.
Imho, greens are here to help you fill few gaps in build, like stun resistance which is extremely hard to find anywhere outside of green items. They wont make or brake most of the builds. With exception of some totally fucked up double rare weapons on some builds you can be just fine w/o any MI items if you are ready to think and adapt your or anyone else build to gear you have.
Interesting topic… but let us analyse the history of GD in order to understand why we reached this point.
Prior to 1.0.0.4. most MIs you would see in builds were of rings (more precisely, Incorruptible Gollus rings). They were used not only for the extra HP, but also in order to cover aether + chaos resistance. This was a direct consequence of the fact that most legendary rings were pure trash until then (and some still are) and BoC was the only sane farming option besides killing Fabius ad nauseam. Given how weak aetherials were, you could even get away with 20-30% aether resistance, as there was no Port Valbury, no AoM and no obligation to farm Anasteria if you didn’t need the helmet. Consequently, 90% of the SC builds posted on this forum had absolutely no MIs then.
With the release of 1.0.0.5. and 1.0.0.6. stun resistance became important because the Crucible was far, far more profitable in terms of farming efficiency. This led to two problems: 1) increased popularity of the Witchblade (because… you know… soldier has no need for MIs in order to cover stun resistance); and 2) crafting madness. Problem (1) was addressed by nerfing Overguard. Problem (2) was never really addressed, but legitimately you need around 7.000.000 iron and about 4.000 scrap pieces in order to craft boots of the Stonehide of Kings variety. Trust me on this one…I’ve done it.
Currently, people kind of figured out how to abuse the Crucible. They learned that CDR casters are gods as long as they can: a) reduce the cooldown of their skills to reasonable levels (e.g. Blast Shield + Mirror); b) push AoE skills to the hard cap; and c) manage to cover their stun resistance (and other CC res to a lesser extent). Because casters have inherently higher AoE than melee builds, they thus became meta. Problem is…Crate made caster gear weak in terms of armour values in order for people not to abuse this “tanky caster” strategy. They also made physical damage bosses such as Fabius + Iron Maiden as pure caster killers. People, however, managed to work around these problems either by crafting tons of MI boots OR abusing GD Stash item generator.
With this information in mind, let’s be honest here for a second - the root of all evil is the Crucible. By giving disproportionate amounts of rewards, it became the only sane option for farming legendary sets. Because finishing Gladiator Crucible solo in a reliable manner is gated by CC resistance and armour, for 70-80% of builds you can make you have no other option besides MIs (especially of the “Stonehide [of] Kings, Featherstep” variety). So…if you want to bathe in legendary sets you either go that route, cheat - by generating godlike MIs - or play a boring shield character. I, personally, prefer the “boring” shield character option because I don’t cheat and I don’t plan to farm one weak straight for a specific nemesis piece.
P.S.: I have a character with which I’ve killed Fabius over 1000 times until now. Never once did it drop a Stonehide of Kings Shoulderguard. Simple probability logic would suggest I still have a chance in about 100.000. Guess I should keep going…
Only useful double rare MI item that I have is lvl 75 incorruptible Cronley signet of Basilisk. Got it after ~3-4k Cronley kills. Also with all the crucible, nemesis and hidden path boss farming I never got double rare shoulders or pants, including Dreeg ones and I farmed Dreeg guardian toe to toe with Fabius.
Before expansion to get stonehide of kings exalted treads was needed ~4k crafting attempts. Now to get boots like these ones, iron or scrap aren’t the problem, I have them enough to easy make 5k crafting attempts and I do think that is the same case with most veteran players, but thing that is crucial now is Scavenged Plating, you just cant get it enough for so extensive craft, I wasted all my reserves.
Farming crucible can net you average of 30 mythical legendary items per hour, compared to shy 5-6 average by farming main game, its not even comparable. But thats not all, with insane amount of green items that you get by finishing crucible, aside from greens that are yet to be added to crucible loot table, it doesn’t pay off even to farm greens out of crucible, you get them more in there.
Armor is not a crucial thing or even somewhat important thing when facing Fabius or IM, it wont save you from high dmg blows. Armor is more like trash hits absorb tool, much more valuable is amount of DA that prevent them from landing devastating crit hits and make them miss fair amount of times.
GD meta switched to casters long time ago or to be more precise in 1.0.0.7 iirc when Crate more or less effectively killed last top notch, in that time, melee builds (DW BM and S&B WBs, commandos). I wrote about that already. From that time speaking from point of efficiency noting can outmatch casters or hybrid casters build. By efficiency I consider time invested to meet gear requirements for specific build, average time needed to clear crucible, average success rate in doing so and maybe most important flexibility of build and buletproofnes to specific nerfs.
There are a number levels to hacking in this game. JoV describes one that is interesting to me. I do it, as do others, but most seem to have forgotten it is still a hack. Either people are using an editor to give their character free gold and resources, or they are backing up their character, making a bunch of crafting attempts, then restoring it. GD Stash allows you to reproduce the same gear, over and over as well. The items are self found, but they are still somewhat hacked, in that you could not have made so many attempts without outside help, and you’d only have 1 of them to go around, instead of 1 on each character you build. I’m ok with it obviously, as I do it myself.
Now, another thing I recently discovered, is that the new requirements for high CC resists, HP, DA and OA make it hard to put a build together with nothing but your best legendaries. As a result, I now go through every piece of Green Rares I find along the way, before I sell them. They also added rare, build specific attributes to greens, making some really cool items possible to find. When I find a rare with a bunch of resists, I save it. If I find a piece of gear with a ton of DA or OA, I save it. These pieces of gear make it a lot easier to get the required resists, DA and OA for your build to survive. If you give up a few slots, then the rest is a lot easier to fill out. I call these Stat Sticks.
There are also MI’s, which are not so bad, as you can actually target a specific mob, and kill them a bunch of times to find your item. These often have stats that you can’t find in any other way, and they are not hard to get in some cases, because you have a specific target to farm.
Getting the roll you need on a MI or crafted item has always been the worst part about this game. I am not going to try 1000+ times to kill a certain monster or craft over and over again. As long as the game does not allow me to independently reroll affixes on an item I already possess, I’m going to just give myself the green item I need and not feel the least bit bad about it. If Grim Dawn didn’t allow me to do this, I would have moved on from this game long ago.
At (3): absolutely right. The only farming outside of the Crucible right now is for AoM MIs that haven’t been added yet.
(4) I would say physical resistance (or physical damage reduction) is also important besides high DA and this is one of the reasons why AotG, DEE + BWC are godlike skills.
(5) 100% true. Still, a vocal minority insists that casters are trash. I’ve specifically showed in 1.0.0.6. that you can finish Gladiator Crucible even with an AAR build if you invest in Devastation and gear accordingly (i.e. stun resistance, entrapment + high DA). The “casters are trash” discourse comes mainly from the weakness of cast speed casters and skills such as Panetti + AAR. CDR and pet builds (which are technically also casters ) are, however, much better than melee for farming both components - which you need in order to craft those MIs - and the Crucible.
P.S.:
You can actually craft those Stonehide of Kings boots absolutely legitimately. I, for example, have 1785 more Scavenged Plating units remaining in my shared stash.
I have a Stonehide of Vitality Dreeg leg piece. I don’t know what the chances are but I believe them to be astronomically low.
once you’re used to the game it’s easy to tell which build is heavily gear dependent and which isn’t.