Theorycrafting Dump

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
63

i wonder if someone tried pure melee DK build like this
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/0V0P7roV - dont mind resist i didnt put res augments

build focuses pure physical with warborn set, using belt and sword to convert all cold and vit dmg buff from soul harvest, and using 2 seal of might to convert %50 aether to phys and uses boneharvest as big boom aeo clear to componsate melee trash aoe clear*no i never find olerons proc nuff for my high lvl of clear standarts*. rings might be improved tho these are best i can fit to build.

before i start i need some feedback, ty

64

JoV’s Concept (outdated) - http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67380

The DK variant by panda - http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67853

The Shield DK variant by Thrash - http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=67919

65

ty man, ofc someonelse also realized how good combo is not surprising :slight_smile:

66

Fangs of Ch’thon

[spoiler]This is something I came up with while brainstorming ideas for pet builds.

The initial concept should stand out immediately - 2 Harbingers as often as possible. With Time Dilation, there’s a downtime on these of 4 seconds. Following this, I built around it to mainly make use of a strong Hellhound and Skeleton army and focused on Chaos then Vitality damage, though between Acid Spray, the Harbinger’s Auras and Vulnerability, there should be decently good RR across other damage types.

I’m pretty bad at pet builds though so it’s riddled with problems like:

[ul]
[li]A lack of a way to deal with the health loss on Hungering Void.[/li]
[li]Harbingers take 450 energy to summon and I haven’t managed to include a way to mitigate this.[/li]
[li]Extremely precise/hard-to-get MIs to cap/overcap resistances, patch low DA and 26/16 Raise Skeletons.[/ul][/li]
Edit: Found a mistake on devotion layout. Had to move 10% Crit Node on Dying God to Crossroads Order to meet Staff of Rattosh’s requirement.[/spoiler]

67

Random bleed caster (pure bleed) with 186 bleed RR. It was supposed to be a crucible “cast a spell run away” character, but I came out with another idea and made a warder instead, which actually required skill to play.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/r2BOmzrV

All the damage comes from Massacre relic, you just cast Devouring Swarm, Grasping Vines and Bloody pox and run away. Massacre and other procs will take care about everything around you. You additionally use Curse of Frailty on bosses. Without any devotion procs, you get 126 bleeding RR, additional 60 from procs (Rend + Acid Spray). Just don’t hide behind obstacles and let Massacre spam.

Gear info: greens are only for increased bleed duration, you can ignore any suffixes in armor gear, the important thing is the “Bloodletter’s” prefix. Weapons are basically a must-have. Rings just give you a huge DPS, amulet more AoE and medal is to wield two weapons. In case you get hit, your belt gives a kiss to your enemies.

Skills are basically to debuff enemies, Grasping Vines is for slow and immobilization while Wendigo Totem for healing in case an enemy is fast as heck and you can’t stop it by any other means than killing it.

Hint: don’t forget Elixir of the Hunt for extra speed.

68

Elemental Drain Essence Apostate

[spoiler]I’ve been musing on this tome for quite some time now trying to find a use for it because it is one of the more unique conversions out there. The skill bonuses on it point towards Drain Essence Apostate so that’s what I’ve tried my hand at here.

  • Conversions everywhere - 100% Vitality to Elemental/Fire for Decomposition, paired with Gravechill results in Fire/Cold/Lightning Drain Essence, also good for Soul Harvest. 55% Pierce converted to Elemental/Fire means Arcane Empowerment is more potent. 30% Aether to Fire/Lightning is nice because Spectral Binding is high on skill points already for the OA/Health it provides and now provides some extra flat Fire/Lightning.
  • OA/DA reductions from Decomposition, Biting Cold and Blood Boil and Deadly Aim’s % OA should bring OA/DA to acceptable levels.
  • Amulet choice is something I was kinda hesitant on, Vigar’s Vitality damage would make up for the lack of skill bonuses in Decomposition so that is a option but would mean that all of our flat damage loses all value. Peerless Eye is also applicable as I was seriously struggling to stack enough OA and had to resolve to picking up Hagarrad for Biting Cold.
  • Ravager’s Dreadgaze can obviously be substituted with Clairvoyant’s Hat.

It’s probably gearable with more realistic MIs but I have no idea how damage output on it would fare. My suspicions though are that it wouldn’t be great compared to other Drain Essence builds. Maybe it’ll be worth looking back at if/when Gravechill/Cold DE gets better gear support to work into this.[/spoiler]

69

I wanted to make a superior tank forcewave caster. Instead I ended up with a random 11250 HP 91 cunning Tactician with 7671 armor and 44% physical resist. I often try to hit at least 1% crit vs. Ravager, if I don’t have anything that happens on crit, and I can’t reach it, I leave it as it is. In this case, the tank would deal almost no damage to Ravager because of how high this super boss’s armor is. The character has 62% physical RR, so you can kill Ravager after a fair amount of time and also taking (almost) no damage.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/xZydrkwV

I simply don’t think this build is that great, therefore chose to throw it away. People often don’t know what an actual tank is, and by that they can see how to build their tank. Kind of. This build has, for sure, no chances with Mogdrogen as his lightning resist is trash (only 80% with high overcap). Ravager should hit for about 1318 - 3202 physical damage with his normal attacks, no buffs (well he honestly won’t deal so much damage, probably will hit around 500 - 1500 damage constantly).

You can basically stay in place and drink your tea/coffee and everything nearby will die because of Targo’s Hammer and Trample devotions. 1090 + 31% HP heal in case you gon’ die (if you die, you suck :P). Item and devotion setup is basically a must. You can remove Trample and/or Targo’s Hammer and pick up some lifesteal or other damaging thing. I chose those because they have low cool down and can be spammed in hordes of enemies, resulting in funny “I gotta scratch my balls, brb” moments. If you really like Overguard, you can remove Deadly Aim. It’s not needed in this build, to be honest.

You, of course, pick 7% armor for all craftable items. You’ll probably end up with around 4700 - 5000 base armor (with perma buffs) if you get 7% to all parts.

Slight skill choice explanation: Menhir’s Bulwark stays at 13/12 because of the damage reduction. Scars of battle doesn’t provide anything to this build at all. Forcewave is the main skill even though it’s just +7/+5/+5. Overguard is a healing skill - you can remove points from Deadly Aim and add them to that if you really want to (deadly aim is useless here, kinda). Military conditioning gives additional physique and HP, 1% more to be exact per level, and as we have low physique, every point of it is needed - same with HP. Counterstrike just looks nice.

Yes, I love tanky characters more than anything else. I rather take than deal damage.

70

That can’t actually equip any of its gear because it’s 400 Physique off. :stuck_out_tongue:

71

Decided to change my superior Belothian Infiltrator and try some of that cold gunslinging.
Here is what I made.

Took few hours to craft all the damn components and Ignaffar’s Combustion. Results? Mediocre. Sure, fun to play in campaign and dispatches of everything pretty fast. But I usually test build’s worth in a 100-150 Crucible Gladiator run “naked” (no buffs/banners). Well, build couldn’t do it reliably (if it all). Radius on Night’s Chill and Aura of Censure as well as relic’s proc are frustratingly small. And Beronath component sucks donkey balls, frustrating to use, not even sure it’s that much better than ABB + simple autoattacking.

Went back to Belgothian and omg it feels so good to play powerful builds where everything clicks.

72

I didn’t even pay attention to stats tbh. I often look at them when I start to collect gear at level 94. Anyway, I believe people are not dumb and they’ll figure that out and move some cunning points to physique. :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, going 34 physique solves it: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YVWQrEdN :slight_smile:

73

Acid/Poison Conjurer Caster

[spoiler]Some of the recent posts about items like Ixillor’s Rageflame got me looking at items that no one uses and this caught my eye for some reason.

[ul]
[li]Initially, this build started out with the idea of spamming Grasping Vines to cause Acid damage via multiple ground instances (like Sigil of Consumption) and having it bound to Guardian’s Gaze to spawn multiple eye’s nonstop. With this setup, it has a cooldown of 1s and duration of 6s so a couple can be maintained easily.[/li]
[li]Dreeg’s Evil Eye is an Acid/Poison nuke. Bloody Pox supports Vines and DEE’s damage and is an amazing debuff.[/ul][/li]
I imagine this character would be similar to a typical Vitality Conjurer or Cabalist but worse.

Edit: Updated build link to use Judicator Seals instead of MI rings. Devotion route changed slightly to pick up more resists and I realised that stacking + skills to Grasping Vines was pointless as I don’t have much Physical->Acid conversion. Misery could really benefit from a skill mod for something like that to make investing in/stacking Vines worth it here.[/spoiler]

74

Pure Elemental Mortar Trap

[spoiler]This is a weird idea I’ve sat on for a long time now but I was never able to put a full grimtools together that I was happy with.

Mortars have a large portion of damage as Physical that any Fire/Lightning/other magic build won’t get much mileage out of but what if we converted it entirely to Fire/Lightning/Cold?

The way our global Physical to x conversion breaks down is:

  • Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange - 27% to Elemental
  • Star Pact - 15% to Cold
  • Malakor’s Infusion - 15% to Elemental
  • Seal of Destruction - 10% to Fire
  • Seal of Resonance - 10% to Elemental
  • Iskandra’s Prism - 22% to Elemental

This works out to 74% to Elemental, 15% to Cold and 10% to Fire or 99% in total. Though, you can inch out 100+% with an above average roll on the Mace.

Besides Mortar Trap, we have Stormfire as our secondary form of damage.

Main form of defense comes from Blast Shield, Mirror of Ereoctes and stringing them together with Time Dilation, so we’re a discount Binder.

The build isn’t without it’s faults though with the biggest one being that it’s short on resist reduction. Fire tops out at -85%, Lightning at -97% and Cold at a measly -32%.
[/spoiler]

75

Some of these builds look interesting. I like the idea of the “You can’t hit me” one, I was wondering if it would work as a Witch Hunter with Veil of Shadows.

76

Wouldn’t be applicable anymore, as Zantai’s a giganerd and capped PTH.

77

Oh, didn’t know that. So it’s not worth pursuing an Offensive Ability Debuff build then?