⭐ Top 20 Softcore builds, End of Forgotten Gods Edition [1.2.1.6]

grey-maybe · January 18, 2026, 2:15am

Guess who’s back with the third edition of our top20 softcore list!

After almost six months of creating and testing builds of new and old we finally arrive here! Game has changed quite a bit since last time so did the candidates. This time, we explored the realm of Chinese Grim Dawn community. Special thanks to @mi023 who was our connect into the world of powerful, weird and beautiful builds from the other side of the globe. As you can see quite a few builds that made it were initially created by Chinese builders and then min-maxed and fine tuned by our little toxic cabal. And we even have pets now (yay!).
Much like the last time, the process was long and arduous, friendships were made and broken and ma… You get the bit, it was needlessly drawn-out, we almost succumbed to the usual apathy of why bother with anything, especially other people and their wrong opinions, by sheer miracle slacked through it and now are somewhat-proud-with-how-it-turned-to-be and we-definitely-should-do-this-one-some-other-time.

If you want MOAR builds or download build files, or to look at some nitty-grittie’s of ranking and have some tips have to play them, take a look at this spreadsheet made by @eardianm.
And if this post will become link-uneditable like the last one did, we might post updates exclusively there, but lets hope it wont come to this.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RRwAvJQyNxZPpRRRJhXRFolj2CPOCAtx?usp=sharing

More about the process below, as well as obsevation on how the meta shifted:

The process

6 people made their personal lists of top 30 builds. Based on each list builds were given 35 points for the first place and all the way to 6 points for the last. Out of those 6 lists the final top20 was made.

First step was the nomination - the list of all possible builds that can be considered for the “contest” of the best builds in the game. Sounds vague but the “we” i’m referring to is a group of veteran endgame players who kept up with the game changes and had sufficient cumulative knowledge to account for all the best performing builds.

Secondly, we wanted to develop an objective scoring system for builds’ performance. But soon we realized that we would not be able to pull off the huge amount of data required for it - both the amount of SR, Crucible and superboss runs for all builds in the contest as well as the sheer amount of people needed to make data entries to shoot for anything objective. So we’ve settled for a compromise: each player makes their tier list of builds and the summary of these lists will be the final list of top builds.
We did, however, made a sort of scoring system that helped with the development of the project, especially for the purpose of filtering out the contestant builds to reduce the amount of grind. The system had 6 scores, each from 0 to 10 with a 0.5 step:
1) Solo dmg output
2) AoE/multitarget dmg output
3) Tankiness vs solo targets
4) Sustain in the crowded environment, including vulnerabilities to CC and special effects
5) Convenience - how easy is it to play the build: the amount of active skills, mobility, difference in nature of active skills, how punishing are mistakes you make (had 80% weight in the scoring)
6) Gear accessibility - how easy is it to farm the items needed, how easy is it to substitute BiS items, is there a viable faction gear variant of the build (rated on the scale of 1 to 5)

We tried to do the above, but this time we collectively came to the conclusion that the scoring system we’ve been using is hot garbage that has little to do with reality, so we practically abandoned it. We will return to it in the next issue, but it’s gonna get heavily revamped and hopefully we’ll get new way of testing and benchmarking builds in endgame, as SR is just incredibly volatile and CR is irrelevant.

In the end we had 6 people who extensively tested the contestant builds against endgame content - SR 30-31, Crucible 150-170 and superbosses, last two categories bearing least weight - and also several people on top who provided the contestants to test and helped with the discussion.

As for performance guidelines, it went smth like this: every top20 build is able to farm SR 30-31 with ease and finish every SR76 regardless of mutators, rooms and boss selection; every build is capable of finishing Crucible 151-170 within 4:30 in the best run, safely farm it with correct play, finish 151-170 without buffs and banners with safe play; take down Mogdrogen and Ravager with facetanking or minor kiting at worst, Callagadra with kiting by extension.

Disclaimers

Game version was 1.2.1.6. We are aware than next test patch is bringing the significant changes, however we don’t have the manpower to make the list for every patch. We will try and adjust some builds based on the biggest changes in the game.
As the goal was to aim for best performing builds, we tried to take the “fun factor” out of the equation as much as possible. Different people like different builds, no one is in the position to say what is “objectively more fun”.
Props to game’s balance, the contest was a very tight race. Even though the absolute best builds were kinda clearly ahead, it is safe to say that the game has over 100 builds that are not far behind the best of the best in terms of performance. So if you don’t personally like any of top 20 builds, there is a huge chance there is a build exactly for you and it will not make you feel handicapped. It’s all about optimization.
Every build in the list has an author of the exact variant we tested as means of props for the optimization work done. It’s not a copyright label or anything. It is important to mention that the majority of the builds had some degree of community effort in them, whether it was some “meta” adopted by the builder or outright gear and devotion change suggestions from the others.

Meta Trends

During this extensive testing we realised that the meta of buildmaking has shifted quite dramatically and that our ideas and approached have changed accordingly. Below are listed some of the general trends, that reflect how and why new benchmarks and standarts came to be. Why every build has 20k+ hp and when did the-oh-so-precious physical resistance go.

Offence:

Stacking OA and crit helped elevating a lot of builds, for example: Chillwhisper Reaper got from mid 10s into top3 that way. Chinese players were making high OA/crit builds for quite some time for SR speedrunning, but now this route is available for more builds that are less skill-demanding. There’s still not enough opportunities in the game to make a build fully focused on two skills to reach that desirable dmg lvl where you roll over SR30-31, and most of them are locked behind sets. And the devo proc dmg kinda falls under the overall powercreep curve. So stacking OA and crit is quite often the only way to push the build’s dmg beyong the base and mod numbers of your main skill.
High burst dmg is very important in many SR scenarios. When you jump a Nemesis surrounded by other mobs and can focus-kill it within 5 seconds surpassing a lot the dangerous, initial timeout mechanics, the SR chunk experience is much smoother. Same for Arcane and healer heroes: one-twoshotting them rids you off a lot of pain.

Defence:

Max HP is by far the strongest defence in the game. With some recent flat HP buffs for affixes, devos and set, 20k is available to basically any build. More often than not 20k is not enough, though. Some Reapers and Oppressors that we’ve tested only really felt sufficiently tanky at 26k+ point. Reason for that is burst dmg is also the strongest tool of the enemy. When you jump a big pack in SR, first few seconds are the most dangerous: you don’t have any debuffs applied to the enemies, a lot of dangerous hero debuffs don’t have any initial cooldown, and most importantly - enemies don’t really miss in this game. You can Shadow Strike into a pack of manticores and will see every single tail converge on your head before your Nightfall even hits. No amount of tricks up your sleeve will matter in those first couple of seconds. Only your max HP, your absorb and…
DA. The second best defence has made the full comeback. Unconditional % of dodge and crit immunity are important multipliers of your max HP layer. And then you have increasing returns (to a point) from stacking DA because you start applying damage reduction to the enemies from your DA - their OA difference.
Leech >> regen. Regen had its spotlight couple of years ago but then was kinda nerfed, and HP was powercrept together with enemy non-physical dmg that made flat regen values fall behind even more. Leech is still a much stronger mechanic overall, and regen mostly comes into play when it’s free. Other sources like flat absorb and %hp regain are often cheaper and more reliable.
Passive leech is best leech. Every build that aquired some substantial source of passive leech immediately became better. Too often your main skill dmg can be suddenly turned off, and having some passive source of hp regain that scales off the size of the enemy pack is a dealbreaker.
Physical dmg is no longer THE threat, and phys resist is no longer the main stat in the game. If you have it - good, but most builds can go by with 0. Armor on the other hand has visible impact on your survivability (ehp) at least up to 3k level.
Big areal CC is very important for SR experience. Even formerly hated confuse can be a lifesaver. It’s not uncommon to run into packs where some strong debuffers stay at range and if you don’t have some (ideally passive) CC to handle them, the encounter drags out and becomes more dangerous.

That’s all cool and stuff, but didn’t you hear the expansion was announced?:

We sure did! In fact, the announcement and its (hopefully) soon arrival is what insipired us to do the list, to capture the moment at the very end of extremely long expansion, right before the new one arrives with it incredible and inevitable powercreep. A moment captured in amber if you will. Besides, having some base line for balance might prove usefull, who knows. Surely, no sudden patch coming before FoA is going to ruin this, that thing just can’t happen.

Speaking of “we”. People who played the contestant builds the most and made their final lists of top builds: @Nery, @nofika4u, @mad_lee, @banana_peel, @grey-maybe, @romanN1. People who provided and helped with gathering contestants, as well as provided feedback: @mi023, @eardianm. Special thanks to the latter for setting up the spreadsheet and doing data-gathering.

1. Dawnbreaker Warder