Troubleshooting: Non-pet, Non-Wendigo Shaman/Occultist

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Hello! This is my first character, so of course it’s got mistakes. But I also like it, and want to learn as much as I can from this character, and see how far I can go.

I call her Thunderbird. Up until now, the character’s been wildly, hilariously powerful through Veteran, and into Elite. But now, I’ve gone past Cronley’s Gang on Elite mode, and am starting to die a bit more, and run away or kite a lot more. Trouble is on the horizon, so I figure it’s troubleshooting time. In this troubleshooting, my goal is to make my build more melee survivable, if possible, while retaining his current style of offense. Maybe impossible, but we’ll find out.

Here’s the general idea: I put all that I can into 2h frontline fighting, Offensive Ability, and lightning damage. Curse of Frailty turns up the lethality greatly. Blood of Dreeg has been great for survivability. The Kraken devotion grants even more damage.
But most importantly, I leverage the Reckless Tempest devotion to a Storm Totem. The moment I bought Reckless Tempest, the game changed.

Until the end of veteran, and beyond Elite Krieg, this combination resulted in INSTANT room explosions. Two clicks and the entire room is cleared in an awe inspiring and hilarious blue-white explosion. No aim, no maneuver, just one totem and everything fries in the most spectacular way possible. I’d play entire sessions continually giggling to myself, “LOL WTF.”

But now the proc-on-crit is taking longer. And the monsters are hitting harder. I’m suspecting that my reliance on crits could be problematic over time. To adjust, I plugged a point into Bloody Pox and the secret ingredient, FEVERED RAGE. Sure enough, the “LOL WTF” instant room clears return, somewhat. And the fights are much more tricky. But sometimes they don’t die fast enough, and they rage me down with the crazy offense I grant them.

My suspicion is that this build just wont have the OA over time to sustain a Reckless Tempest based build. Particularly since I need to dedicate gear to surviving Fevered Rage. But oh god it’s so tasty. It’s so pretty. It’s so funny.

Can I possibly make this concept work into Ultimate somehow? Or will I need to convert out of melee into a full caster who’s always running away? Or will even that be insufficient to keep up the crits for that magic proc?

So far, I have about 2/3 of my stat points into Physique, but I’m now unable to equip new heavy armor. Not sure if I can catch back up.

The build looks something like this, as of ~lvl 60
grimcalc.com/build/B8adgm1 (Updated with devotions now)

Am I chasing one too many rabbits, and there’s no recourse? Will I have to ditch Reckless Tempest, and just focus on staying alive? Or do my noob-wasted Spirit & Cunning points make frontline fighting in the future untenable? Etc.

Thanks for the thoughts.

For other newbies reading this: If you’re not too concerned about going through Elite, and just want a fun Veteran run, this build is hyper effective, and really funny.

2

Just my 2 cents, there are others with far more experience than myself. I didn’t see your devotion points, but if you are looking to increase 2-hand damage and survivability I think you can shift some points around. I would drop the storm totem, fevered rage and go to 1 point in Tenacity of the Boar for now. You could take a few out of Brute Force as well, and and use those points to pump savagery. It would also be worth it to push Occultist to 32 for the stats and Aspect of the Guardian. The additional stats, poison and physical resist will go a long way towards keeping you alive. Feral Hunger should be sustaining you against mobs you can life steal from. Alternatively, having 12/12 in Wendigo will let you face tank anything until Ultimate.

For devotions, I still think that Falcon Swoop is great to take for additional damage. Make sure that you resists are capped, this is huge as you progress through Elite and into Ultimate. If you can get gear with physical resist it is very helpful for survival as well. Make sure you are augmenting your gear with things like Scaled Hide for 100% damage absorption. Any offensive boosts are always gravy.

With your heal, life steal and good resists you should rarely be in danger on Elite. If you are having trouble now, Ultimate will be harsh. This won’t have as much room clearing speed, but it will keep you alive. Dead characters do 0 DPS :slight_smile:

As an alternative, you could pump Primal Strike. It will clear rooms in seconds, but really drops off in early Ultimate. Keep in mind that as you progress the difficulty is also a gear check - some builds/skills are just ok until you get better gear and/or overcapped skills. Good luck!

3

Thanks!

Yeah, I’m pretty sure lower level gear is a big part of the issue. But it’s a bit of a rock & a hard place, due to my mis-allocated stats - I don’t have the physique for heavy armor anymore. I seemed over-qualified just a few levels ago, enough that I started rationalizing Cunning for the Offense(ugh), and some Spirit because I’m a cute noob.

But there seemed to be a sudden spike in phys requirements @ 50.

Oooor perhaps that’s just because 35-55 went so incredibly fast, and my recollection is badly outdated. Around 35 was when I stumbled on this formula(along with the gear upgrades). At that point, laying down one storm totem was enough to fry everything on screen(and lots off screen) within 3 seconds. I seriously cannot overstate how nuts powerful this combination was. I spent more time looting than fighting, could scarcely get an axe swing in.

Speaking of which, I doubt I’ll lose storm totem - it’s my most powerful ability, I suspect. I think all the electrocute DOT ticks & lightning jumps are what’s vastly improving my chances for a crit, and Reckless Tempest is tied to it. That’d be a lot of crit checks per second, and my quickest route to a proc.
That’s just a theory, I don’t fully understand everything that’s happening on this build.

By contrast, when I’m using my primary attack, Savagery(or Primal Strike, I’d imagine), that’s a fraction of the accuracy checks per second I’d be getting. I’d see my Reckless Tempest proc far, far less, I’m guessing.

Back to gear though… I’m probably insufficient with resists too. They were great previously but not as much now with Elite. Up to this point, fighting Krieg, even in the Undercity, I’ve been taking few hits - everything just instantly exploded - so I guess I didn’t get to adjust resists accordingly.

Alright, I’ve updated the chart with devotions. grimcalc.com/build/B8adgm1

My goal was Reckless Tempest, and was aiming for Spear of the Heavens, but it seems like that’s no longer a good idea. Better to angle toward defense or crit. In the meantime I took Guardians Gaze in that Dreeg constellation, sorta helped, and got me points toward Reckless Tempest. And I just picked up Wayward Soul for the auto-heal, though initial experience makes it seem unreliable. But hard to know since it’s still low level. And of course I’ve got Kraken for the giant damage boost.

4

I think your best bet with any class is to figure out how much you’ll need to invest into physique to get to 970 so that you can equip all armour, then hold off on spending anything else except for spirit once you have a requirement for jewellery and cunning for weapon requirements.

I think as far as resists go, as long as your kill speed is not infuriatingly slow, it’s always best to gear for maxing out your resists as much as you possible can, along with materia with this strategy as well.

My dual wield Conjurer has face tanked everything so far and I’m currently at midway point of act 3 Ultimate with the same strategy of always maximizing defence first.

If you could post a screenshot of your character screen with resists and armour and such, it would give anyone here trying to help a better picture of where you’re lacking and how you might get to where you need/want to be.

5

I think your best bet with any class is to figure out how much you’ll need to invest into physique to get to 970 so that you can equip all armour, then hold off on spending anything else except for spirit once you have a requirement for jewellery and cunning for weapon requirements.

I think as far as resists go, as long as your kill speed is not infuriatingly slow, it’s always best to gear for maxing out your resists as much as you possible can, along with materia with this strategy as well.

My dual wield Conjurer has face tanked everything so far and I’m currently at midway point of act 3 Ultimate with the same strategy of always maximizing defence first.

If you could post a screenshot of your character screen with resists and armour and such, it would give anyone here trying to help a better picture of where you’re lacking and how you might get to where you need/want to be.

6

Grasping vines + Wndigo devotion is a realy good combo itself. It wont explode a whole room you you’ll simply dont mind the mobs in there because you have a lot dmg into health. I play two conjurers myself, one with more focus on the occultist and one more for the melee department but both still use the Wendigo devotion because it’s insanly helpfull.
With CoF it even does some extra dmg if you put the devotion on the Lightning Totem or the vines.

7

How do you do any damage with savagery at rank 1? :stuck_out_tongue:

This build is totally viable and don’t worry about OA you can reach ~3k with proper gear/devotions. Look up at jajaja’s conjurer build and you can see the power of this build

p.s. you are probably gonna want wendigo totem lol

8

Thanks again guys.

Re: Wendigo -
As the thread title suggests, this is a Wendigo-No build. Reading the forums while choosing my first mastery, I saw that everyone goes wendigo. And raves about how powerful it is. Fair enough, but frankly that’s part of why I don’t want to take it. The other reason being that it’s not lightning. Given the game’s apparent design intentions, I presumed that alternative builds would be possible, and that abilities are designed NOT TO BE must-have. Further, Wendigo would pull my attention away from stacking lightning damage(which so far has served me real well).

So this is my character’s gimmick: lightning exclusive, Reckless Tempest because it looks so damn great, 2h melee, no wendigo or vitality damage. That’s what I want to make work. I understand how restrictive that is, but there it is.

Re: 1 rank of savagery
I dunno, my damage seemed sufficient. Though it’s harder to tell once Reckless Tempest has been doing the heavy lifting. I’ll consider buffing savagery(or changing to primal strike), but my offensive capacity isn’t really a big deal at the moment(aside from crit proc chances).

Re: Maxing defenses first
Yeah, that’s a clarifying ethos, and I think I’ll re-gear to do that. Even if Reckless Torrent is proccing slower, it still procs, so defense has to be my first concern. And my weapon damage has been solid. I think. So when I next log on, I suppose I’ll see to that.

Re: Other peoples’ wendigo builds
It’s hard to get much out of reading those, because they reference numbers from an 85 character, rather than, say, a lvl 55 Veteran-end benchmark that I could relate with. And talk about relying on Legendaries that I wont have. And of course they don’t talk about Reckless Tempest. What useful info is there is hard to parse for my purposes.

The big questions at the moment, I suppose are
A) whether I’ll have the physique for ultimate heavy armor(and I’ll just math that out when I next play), and

B) will I be able to find gear, augments, or devotions that sufficiently bump up my offense enough to crit decently, and

C) what stages of defense to prioritize or put my attention on, and how devotions will factor into that. After finally reading the game guide for this sort of detail, it seems that I could benefit from focusing more on some defensive aspects, less on others. But it’s still fuzzy. Also

D) What can I do in the near term to shore up survival? Sacrificing some augments to better plug my resists will help, but I suppose there’s an armor deficiency happening too, due to low physique. Or is armor really the place to focus? Resistance? is it a DA problem? Insufficient health buffer, or regen rate? This I suppose isn’t addressable without screenshots. But theorizing could be helpful.

9

Feral Hunger will save your butt against trash if your attack speed is high enough, I recommend trying it out.

Another alternative would be buffing hp regen to crazy heights using Tenacity of the Boar, the Mogdrogen’s pact tree, and Blood of Dreeg. Aspect of the Guardian should definitely be considered since enemies do a lot of physical damage in ultimate, and you’ll need the physical damage resistance if you want to tank.

Feral Hunger will allow you to tank trash but not bosses by itself, so if all you want to do is be able to tank up against trash a bit more grab feral hunger. If you wanna tank bosses in melee range you’ll probably need to at least consider all of the above options that I mentioned.

10

A - If you went full physique you will have enough for all armor, if not then you may need gear that lowers physique req, like Tinker’s Ingenuity.

B - You should, but it might be a little difficult without a few epics and legendaries. Keep in mind there are some excellent faction pieces that give tons of OA/HP/resistances. Homestead gloves are a potential BiS for any build looking for OA.

C - After you pick up Widow, Kraken, Viper, and Reckless Tempest, you can go full defensive devotions if you like. However, I recommend getting Rowan’s Crown if you don’t have a Black Star of Deceit. It helps to know which acts do which type of damage so you know what to prioritize. Elemental, pierce, and to a lesser degree bleed are prevalent in all acts. Acts 1 and 2 are heavy on poison/aether, while acts 3 and 4 are heavy on vitality/chaos. You can farm merchants in Homestead or Devil’s Crossing if you really need to for gear.

D - In the short term, go for offensive devotions and defensive gear. You could do the opposite, but there are so many great devotions for lightning builds that are hard to pass up. Try to get your resistances up to at least 50% for elite and max for ultimate. Remember that lifesteal is a MUST in a melee build. Look for accessories with attack damage converted to health on them and put a hollowed fang/haunted steel in your weapon.

E - For the love of god, max savagery. You are missing out on tons of damage. You don’t need to max brute force or feral hunger right now so drop points in those and put them in savagery. I’m not sure why you don’t want wedigo totem. The healing it does is great and since you are having trouble surviving, would really help. As for devotions, you are missing out on TONS of -res. At the very least, get Widow and Viper ASAP. I would also recommend Rowan’s Crown. Oh and using Fevered Rage is just asking to die. You are only on elite, think of what it does to mobs on ultimate.

11

My dual wield conjurer has Savagery at 1 with 12/12 Tenacity of the Boat for the OA/DA.

Though I might pour the last 12 points from 79 to 85 into it to test the DPS increase.

My damage comes from Solael’s Witchfire/Second Rite maxed along with lots of AoE from Devotion procs.

12

You can definitly get the OA to proc reckless tempest reliably in Ultimate but it takes some work and the right devotions.

What you can’t do however is survive Fevered Rage. Even the heaviest of shield witchblades have a hard time living through fevered rage - a two handed conjurer? Not a snowball’s chance in hell by late elite.

13

Haha, yeah, that’s what I’ve concluded just now, after a bit of time back in game. I mean, you can survive it if you run away, or kite around while Reckless Tempest cooks off a 5 mile radius, but I don’t want to run away.

So to adjust to all this, I nixed Bloody Pox and Fevered Rage - I can get crits without them, if not instantly, and that’s good enough.

And for defense, I increased my health buffer, plugged my resistance holes, upped my armor absorb, increased my attack speed to leverage Feral Hunger.
I also equipped The Guillotine legendary 2h, which I’d set aside since it wasn’t good for lightning, but it IS good for health leech.

In total, after a Kilrian run, it’s all working well. I think the problem I ran into that sent me here was mainly some resist holes, standing in lava, and fevered rage. And also impatience at things no longer insta-crit/insta-dying, having been spoiled by the Storm Totem + Reckless Tempest combo(it’s so sugary sweet).

If I can re-orient my devotions to maximize their utility - get some OA % boosts and something to bolster defense - I think this build will last into ultimate. Will be interested in how it performs then.

For now though, I’m still under-armored. Need to figure out how to best acquire armor that’s suited for this build. Nothing good has been dropping.

One direct question though - I’d previously picked up the Wayward Soul/Chariot of the Dead devotion for the heal, but it’s still low level, and I’m not so sure this is gonna that helpful or reliable, or difficult to level… Thoughts?

Okay, another. What devotion might I consider aiming for next? After recently ruling out Spear of the Heavens, now I’m a bit aimless.

14

Chariot of the Dead is more for the OA and DA bonus than the heal. It helps against bosses, but it is safe to drop and put the points somewhere else. I said it before in my earlier post, but you really need to pick up widow and viper at the very least. Rowan’s Crown is excellent for a lightning conjurer as well. With those you could pick up Giant’s Blood if you wanted, or go for Turtle.

15

So an update, and a question. Haven’t played in a while but came back and continued on this character.

I’ve hit 82, and just cleared ultimate Steps of Torment, Alkamos, and Moosilauke. This build is indeed working, and it’s pretty fun - watching the lightning storms cook off everything to the horizon never gets old. I also completed Spear of the Heavens devotion, which… the jury’s still out on that one. It’s low level, but it procs constantly, and plays well with my 1000% lightning bonus. Could be good, but maybe not, I don’t know.

But the downside I’m finding with the build overall is that I cannot keep up on the defensive end of things. I regularly innitiate on a pack of something like Stonetusks or something, and surprise-die in 2 seconds.

I take the heaviest armor I can find that fits the build, and have ~1150 armor at this point. Every attribute point goes into physique besides a scant few early-game mistakes. My regen is okay, my defense is ~1700, and most my resists are maxed.

Yet many trash mobs are hitting like a truck, individually inflicting a huge percentage of my health pool(which is around 8.2k). Trash is hitting me for over 3k per hit.

I’m guessing this is normal physical damage. It’s beginning to feel as if my armor isn’t there at all. Or, perhaps, I don’t understand how armor works.

I’ve been trying to compensate on these big hits by switching in a hollowed fang for lifesteal, which is sorta helpful, but also exacts a cost in other areas. I would think the better answer would be reduce the damage of the hits. But I frankly don’t know how I’m gonna do that. I’ve been starting to prioritize % physical resist, which is now ~16%, but that’s been hard to get, and also tends to exact a cost in other areas. Seeing as I lack optimal gear by a longshot.

So I suppose the question I have is this:
What does a non-soldier have available to deal with the magnitude of these hits? Are all non-soldier characters basically required to hit & run? Is there a better way to understand how best to handle defense at mid-late ultimate?