I got through normal, elite, and actually going through ultimate fine. However, I am getting bricked hard on bosses in ultimate and super bosses in elite. My damage feels BAD. It took me like 5 minutes to kill mogdrogen on elite (base game), and like 8 to kill ravager on elite. ravager was SKETCHY and i should not have tried, but i will not be doing that again. I am really concerned about some bosses coming up in ultimate. all my resist are at least 30% over, my health is a little low, like 5k or more lower than it should be and a few hundred da/oa than it should be. but my damage feels SOOO much lower than it should be.
I have played enough and know sort of enough to barely scrape by on most things, but i feel ive lost the plot on end game after taking a large chunk of years off. i dont follow guides i like winging it until i get to end end game. and im not quite there yet since i cant beat ultimate. i see like chaos evoker doing triple my damage and that doesnt make sense to me. I have so much resistance shred for cold on this setup, and its just a wet noodle for real bosses. obviously i feel i am tunneled WAY too hard on cold and frostburn. but im not sure what to do about it. i can clear maps super well and most normal bosses and elites and stuff. but i will not be able to do anything real in terms of bossing with this on ultimate or super bossing on elite.
Is my build just broken. i feel like its kinda similar to some other successful builds i see people doing end game in. theres just a disconnect somewhere. i really want to stick with ice talons wereraven style gameplay with OFF. super fun playstyle to me. any help or ideas is appreciated.
OFF stats only applies if enemy is not freeze immune, and only for the duration they are frozen
Any enemy/boss that is still 80-90% resistant after OFF debuff, has cold RR for 1.3 secs or less…
For me/ignoring dmg output for now on some items since HC. I would not enjoy pants and boots that don’t have fat hp and or phys res
Amulet confuses me, similar like medal, you can craft a faction Amulet if you dont’ feel like using an MI Heart of Malmouth - Legendary Amulet - Grim Dawn Item Database
wow, i didnt know that about off. i thought it lasted for the duration OR at least for the frostburn duration it caused. if its not lowering resist on things that dont freeze, then this setup seems useless entirely for extreme end game then… i mean its great for clearing a screen and perma freezing some boss/elite enemy groups but wow.
any suggestion on weapon change up then? really bummed out about this. makes sense why im clearing maps and everything but feel like i do nothing on super bosses/certain bosses.
When i came back I deleted everything an started from scratch so i dont have many blue prints. it was just for the cold damage, +2 off and resistances. the ONLY thing i crafted / farmed was my weapon (had lower level one for the longest time) and my gloves (crafted). so thats why im looking for anything really to aim for because for the build im doing nothing really JUMPS out at me for a must have like some builds and gear do.
that amulet looks dope. I am not maxed with that yet. i will be soon as i am in AOM right now so ill get that as soon as it comes up. thats exciting thank you. the cast speed is exciting as well.
I would likely just ignore OFF and go TSS for dmg, you’ll feel that more on bosses probably
Alternatively, you do like some weird 2h cold Callidor raven mebe so you can still benefit from form of the beast TDM, that way you also get easy lifesteal on top as heals instead of talons with 0 leech (you can 1pt raven if so, or alternatively just use CT spam+cold snap i guess)
I’ve so far not been a fan of raven dmg wise, but i’ve also only tried 2½ things, so my sample size isn’t exactly the greatest, but there are heal items out there (like the neck) to atleast make it more comfortable, specially if/when dmg isn’t the main priority on HC. But, some of them are RNG legends…
Dmg you might be able to improve just with adding in trozan, however, i don’t recall many Onslaught items to wereraven (one of the gripes i had), so whether trozan is “big” value i can’t say.
Other thing going spam CT might have is being able to scale weapon dmg, so you can benefit from all that flat cold dmg sources you have/can get in Evoker, where talons/cold snap can’t
*this isn’t me saying to swap to CT, but perhaps gauge it out if you feel it’s comfier dmg/survival wise because of the innate difference, you can still cast it in Raven form if you don’t wanna do wolf for Form of the Beast buff, and it would still fit with cold theme if you go… .Nacrathan? medal Mark of Nacrathan - Rare Medal - Grim Dawn Item Database
Faction blueprints are the first to get
A trick you can do if you don’t have mandates yet, is use the Ascension Altar with 5x aether shards, it will boost rep by 125% from kills, so you can kill grind faster if you were already done with quests on Elite. *and it stacks with a Writ if you atleast have that yet (also remember to always apply a Writ immediately when Honoured with XY faction)
Not sure what you mean by TDM , but yeah CT has never been a fun skill to me. I did have that medal at one point and tried it out but my ice talons was just out dpsing it so i didnt bother doing more with it. im definitely speccing out of off some and going into tss though. but then tss also gets worse without the weapon im using.
i guess im mostly wondering what is the transition main hand and off hand wise. ill have to dig around the db i guess and see what works with wereraven ice talons/cold snap.
i wonder if my rings are even worth it now. they felt amazing innitially but now im thinking they arnt worth it…
I am capped on faction for everyone but the 3 FG ones (will get once i go to FG they are all really close), the aom one which im about to hit, and devils crossing.
Without tier 3 constellation, you always lack damage , also your skill tree needs improvements ,it’s a bit " let’s put 2 points here and after that I will put 3 points there " situation . You run single RR mastery combo so you don’t have high cold RR like you think , high RR will be Reaver for example. Weapons slots are very important to be occupied by Silver and this gem ( that means even less damage ) . I am actually impressed this setup manage to kill Ravager and Mogdrogen in Elite , really bold move
i thought about speccing out of chariot of the dead in devotions and going into whirlpool. would you suggest that then?
and yeah im just not sure what else to focus on to dump points in. i had off, and the wereraven tree maxed, along with my exclusive skill maxed, i had enough in mirror for cd, maxed mavens. so was just trying to get some base bonuses from a bunch of things until i hit the soft caps and move on to something else. im open to any suggestions that i should focus more into and take away from. when i get that amulet im going to drop some points in aclirty for example. i swapped a chunk from off after learning the weapon situation to tss.
i could afford to drop the silver in my main hand probably. but im also about to change my weapons entirely. like i wasnt even going to use a shield anymore. was looking at some offhand caster codexs, and a completely different weapon. but no clue whats optimal at this point.
edit: base mogdrogen really wasnt that bad. but ravager was something i will ever do again on elite until i see some drastic improvements.
I don’t play hardcore but this is what I’ve been building towards on Ascendant for my Flash Freeze Arcanist:
This is where I am at now:
I’m still a working on getting my ascended rolls to the ones I want but that is basically the build. It is hard to map out exactly what the greens will look like for you, but as long a you get Amontak Pact suffixes and the resist you need it all evens out. You can use the offhand I have or just another Mythical Olexra’s Chill. They felt to be about the same output wise, just the extra resist reduction can feel slightly better in some fights ( really only slightly though). You may want to go double Spectral Scepter instead of using the shield. You’ll get a bit more damage out of it, even better if you can get the poison affix that reduces resistances.
I can basically face tank bosses even while sundered and still burn them down pretty fast when not using the altar. Fully juiced at 700% more hp and 350% more damage I have to dodge some attacks but it is manageable. I haven’t cleared any of the super bosses yet but I’m waiting on getting my ascended affixes perfect first. I have done the campaign cap stone bosses like Korvak and the FOA guy with full Altar mods though. I also clear all the rogue dungeons fine. Basically safe enough to Boss Rush each campaign map when I echo farm with full altar.
I went the tree of life route stacking health and regeneration. I sacrificed some %max life recently for more life resist reduction. I got tired of some of the life steal bosses so now I just pop an oil with my resist and sit at 65% reduction. There is also a medal you can hotswap from the brawler arena in Four Hills to really overkill them. You get around your poor physical resist by having a ton of armor. I sit between 4200 and 4700 atm thanks to the Korvak medal. That thing puts in serious work.
I don’t us crown when going Tree of Life and you can still get half effectiveness through devotion procs like Tsunami or 100% effectiveness for single target when weaving in movement abilities.
my point is OP uses crown which is already better, and wont require a wd attack (while stacking dmg as proc - eg RS’ mention about more dmg procs/not removing one), nor necessitate to use a movement rune to engage in facetank on HC to even apply or get reduced effect like from Tsunami, detracting even more than Crown.
Single RR class (off doesn’t count as we saw), so crown is probably just worth it regardless, - even if one might want to go ToL anyway
I have played cold pure raven evoker fresh start a couple of times and my problem was always suststain I even took bat devotion one time, another time I went full life regen mode,… same problem as say panetti builds = awful gameplay standing still and spamming a skill (ice talon in this case) with no in-built heal/leech. I can see why lightning raven primalist is easier because one get way more hp-regen with shaman
I wasn’t speaking from the perspective of the OPs build though. I was offering options on what to use when going heavy blue/yellow for an interim piece of gear that will most likely be upgraded to Arcanum Infinite Eye which covers all their resistance shred needs to begin with.
levelling raven feels manageable sustain wise atleast to me, weirdly enough i’ve gotten 0 raven items tho so don’t even have the “dope” items, and i think that’s probably where part of the dmg drop feels compared to wolf.
and my point was to take crown even if going gold blue,
largely because of issues with plagubearer application, but also rr shortcoming probably making crown attractive from a dual dmg proc and rr pov when the concept is dmg, HC engagement then additional potential factor not always wanting to rely on leaping in to apply RR perhaps and benefit off that range with talons
remember, regular bosses on Ult have like 120 freeze res as base, so off gives you cold shred for about 1 second, nemesis with 135 even less, so having 32 on single RR class isn’t that bad, also as range dproc
Next time I will either do lightning raven primalist with almost insane hp regen, or chaos raven dreadnaugh with high hp regen + bat or something bound to Bwc lol
I even took bat devotion one time, another time I went full life regen mode,… same problem as say panetti builds = awful gameplay standing still and spamming a skill (ice talon in this case) with no in-built heal/leech. I can see why lightning raven primalist is easier because one get way more hp-regen with shaman