People often talk about the worst class and that’s easy to answer, but what is the worst/weakest single mastery and why? 
The Worst Mastery
- Soldier
- Demolitionist
- Occultist
- Nightblade
- Arcanist
- Shaman
- Inquisitor
- Necromancer
- Oathkeeper
0 voters
3 Likes
missing “none - I don’t think there’s the weakest etc.”
3 Likes
I always find arcanist as solo, very… let’s say… weak on its own. It’s pretty fragile it has lots of offense I give that but for some reason, my gut tells me it’s hard to be an arcanist if u only go that.
That’s my take and it’s definitely controversial.
3 Likes
Necro, just for I have no idea why but I’m never interested in using it.
1 Like
I haven’t decided yet, but if you were to let a Kymon’s Chosen vote, you could pretty much guess where the vote would be cast… 
It’s interesting because if you look at the earlier compendiums IX has solo builds for Arcanist, Occultist, Demolitionist, Inquisitor and Shaman. While the base game V compendium has a couple from Dikkiedik that are Demo and Soldier. Seems no one’s posted any solo builds for X; if they have they’re not listed.
For me it’s Inquisitor.
Cons:
- Lame name with a more negative than a positive ring to it.
- 2/10 score spells, below average, no fun. Just pretends to know spells and stuff, but he’s just nowhere there.
- Guns are trash, bows is where it’s at.
- Dual wielding is stolen from the nightblade niche, same as Rune in Titan Quest steals dual wielding from Warfare.
- Inquisitor Seals are copium gameplay experience, a dual wielding gunner supposed to be agile and loses it’s theme because of them.
- Word of Renewal, yet another boring pseudo-aura skill that needs constant retoggle for heal and reapply, stolen from nightblade yet again, and also stolen from Occultist.
- You can’t simply reposition Inquisitor Seals and do just that, they need to have a duration instead of being ultimited duration, so feel just as bad as a retoggle skill, and the class already has one other to begin with(Word of Renewal). Interrupted gameplay.
- Deadly Aim is Soldier’s fighting spirit copy paste.
- Flames of Ignaffar is a worse Albrecht’s Aether Ray.
- Word of Pain is worse Bloody Pox.
- Rune of Kalastor is a worse Canister Bomb.
- Artifact Handling should be built into the runes, not being a separate passive skill nonsense.
- No movement ability.
- Can’t play melee, doesn’t have a melee niche.
- Needs DLC.
- It’s too much expensive in skill points.
Pros:
- Storm Box of Elgoloth,
- Rune of Hagarrad,
- Exclusive skills.
~I guess.
5 Likes
Arcanist, it’s active skills are weak except mirror and null but passive skills are great and stats are good. Though I think IEE should get some buff except it’s crit values; CT’s base WD and DoT should be increased, PRM has low single target damage. AAR not sure about it since didn’t test it recently. OFF also should be supported more for alternative builds.
Edit: Forgot to add TSS since it’s good enough.
6 Likes
TBH the game is designed based on dual masteries, it’s unfair to rate masteries based on whether you can make a good solo build out of one. I think the vote should change the wording to something like “worst mastery when considering all their combinations”
1 Like
Oathkeeper is only 
therefore it is the blandest therefore it is the worst. QED.
2 Likes
I’d probably say Inquisitor, not because I don’t like it or anything but because I feel it does the least to carry itself out of all the masteries. There’s only one “core” spam skill in the whole mastery (FoI). If you want to go Runes, you need some filler for sustain cause they won’t help you in that regard. If you want to go guns, Inquisitor doesn’t provide any attack to use with them. I guess it’s a similar case with Nightblade’s dual wield but at least nightblade has SS, ABB and PBlades as other (possibly spam) build options and does a lot to carry them on its own. Moreover, Inquisitor’s core defensive pillar (Seal) forces a stationary playstyle which clashes with the potential kiting playstyle Runes or guns might incentivise and is real iffy for engagement on melee builds and disengagement on ranged builds.
There’s some much needed RR in Death Sentence, the consistent DR on Horn is nice, if short-ranged, and the defensive benefits of WoR are not to be understated but overall I have very few Inquisitor builds where Inquisitor is the star of the show. Often the star is something else and Inquisitor just provides WoR and some RR to support it. The builds where Inquisitor is supposed to be the star of the show have generally not performed as consistently for me as I would have hoped (e.g. Pierce Rune Infiltrator), with the exception of FoI. Though, admittedly, I haven’t done some of the more vanilla stuff like DW ranged Purifier.
4 Likes
despite flaws in steam forums talking about DW melee, nightblade stays strong. 
EDIT: zantai ma dud here are current results as of now:
You’re making me vote to see the results? This is entrapment!
7 Likes
I voted Demolitionist for the following reasons:
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Flame Touched only gives damage bonuses to Fire and Lightning (and Physical if you include Temper), and since it’s very hard to convert Fire damage to Lightning damage, FT is really only good for Fire Builds only (and Physical too, but then you’re using 24 skillpoints on flat damage and some good OA).
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Fire Strike is a 4-node annoying mix of Physical, Fire, Lightning, and Chaos, where the only great Fire Strike builds come from sets that specifically support it like Darkblaze. Even equipment that gives big conversion to Fire Strike needs horse steroids + massive WPS help for builds using Fire Strike to be a passable DAAR.
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Mines are okay as a RR source, but they’re nothing like CoF or Word of Pain where you cast and forget. It doesn’t help that it gives RR to things like Cold and Aether and then has nothing to support that damage.
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Stun Jacks suffers from the “we can’t figure out how to make this skill good, so we introduce leech life to it even if makes absolutely no sense” syndrome that plagues offensive skills nowadays. Doesn’t help that mines makes it even worse because you have to facetank the opponent so it can sit in your mines to apply the RR properly.
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Grenado is a cool skill to use, but very expensive in skill points, since it’s practically a 4-node skill once you include Ulzuin’s Chosen. From my experiences with Grenado, the only ones that felt smooth to play are the Chaos Grenado (because Chaos grenades + Canister Bomb is awesome) and Physical Grenado (because Oathkeeper is really good to combine with it). The other ones take a lot more effort with minimal gain, which is a shame when you have so many good bonuses on Shattering Blast (but you can’t use it because it’s all placed on Cold Grenado equipment or “The Adversary”)
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Canister Bomb is a devotion proccer’s dream, but other than that, it’s way less cool to use as a main skill than Grenado is.
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Flat RR is incredible to have, but makes Demo even a worse pointsink. And we’ve already gone over the pointlessness of using BWC as a main skill, so there’s no need rehashing that.
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Mortars are just too niche in their equipment usage to raise them out of obscurity. They’re really nice once you can combine it with another class, but trying to combine Mines and Mortars is… yeesh.
2 Likes
Why is Arcanist blue?
1 Like
They all started this fiasco, Grim Dawn ya know…
There is no weak mastery in Grim Dawn…
…because I play only Dawn of Masteries and Reign of Terror.
1 Like
Inquisitor would feel so much better Imo if the seals lasted indifinately and would disappear only if the player recasts them himself. That way the player could just walk between them in selected spots. For example placing them on 3 of the 4 Crucible gates for the whole playthrough. It would incentivise some tactical playstyle without colliding with the kiting gameplay that guns & casters incenitivise.
This way the player could also kite between them without the need of recasting them every 25 seconds, which is the real bummer here to me about the class.
It’s really just the duration that makes them feel not fun and archaic.
Item skill modifier or a transmuter increasing the meters range of a seal, but limiting their number to one would be also welcome, so that it would be possible to kite inside a big one, not just between few pretty small ones, as an alternative.
Because they voted for it.
1 Like