Two Handed Swords and Weapons in general

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Hey guys so grim dawn is an awesome game (why else would i be here if it wasnt xD). That said I find the two handed blue and legendary swords or axes in this game to be very underwhelming for many different builds. Shamans generally dont have a problem in this area but most other mastery classes do. There are actually quite a few two handed weapons that can probably beneift this game greatly by a slight rework. I am mostly going to focus on the mastery classes of Soldier, Occultist, Arcanist, and Nightblade since I have the most experience in these.

Also In terms of role playing when I make a ‘fighting’ style charecter I generally strongly prefer to use two handed Swords though I can find some Axes/Scythes to be very fun as well. I strongly prefer NOT to use mauls, maces, and other blunt based weapons though I have friends that do enjoy these styles.

NightBlade
Night Blade seems to have two cool options for two handed swords:

Bane of the Winter King

I think Bane of the Winter King is probably fine, however, in general I think shaman has the best and most viable options for two handed swords/axes so I dont think there is much surprise in this category.

NightShade’s Reach

NightShade’s Reach, however, pains me greatly. The stats on this weapon are great and I tried to make this work, I really did – I got a bunch of poison nightblade legendarys to even synergize with it as much as possible. That said ultimately it felt like it did not synergize well with the Nightblade mastery itself Seeing as so many of the Nightblade abilities are structured around duelweilding.

Usually switching to duel wield, even with bad weapons, would be a significent DPS increase and would even open up another componant slot for a chaos/aether aura or whatever may be needed. Maybe allowing this sword to ‘count’ as duel wielding or allowing nightblade duel wielding techniques to also work for two handed swords (such as katanas in terms of assassin/samurai lore) would fix many of the problems here.

Arcanist

Temporal Arcblade

This is a really cool weapon that practically screams ‘battle-mage’. It looks great and has generally great stats, however, in terms of the ‘battle’ part It seems to be lacking in one core category – % attack speed. Generally speaking, with caster builds its almost always better to use a one hand and caster off hand. For battle mages, however, in many cases %cast speed doesn’t do anything and is thus a near useless stat on this weapon if you’re a battle mage. My suggestion for this weapon is to simply add %attack speed to complement its %caster speed.

Soldier

Stonefist Rebuke

Needs to be reworked slightly; 90 Reduced target’s Defensive Ability For 5 Seconds from the weapon, 125 Reduced target’s Defensive Ability For 5 Seconds from the weapons ability, and then reduced DA from markovians advantage and blindside from the soldier tree don’t stack (?) and thus it feels like poor design for this weapon.

Leviathian
An over all great weapon that is really cool.

That said Leviathian and Stonefirst Rebuke seem to be to two most viable options for soldier two handed builds and they are both two handed maces/mauls >.<

To me Soldier in general needs a few more two handed sword epics and legendarys – after all half the icons for abilities such as markovians advantage, zolhans technqiue, blade arc, cadence,etc have swords in their icons. What is the point of playing a ‘blademaster’ if there are no viable end game two handed swords for soldiers?!!

Occultist

Empowered Wrathblade

A cool weapon that seems to be for a battle occulist, but like the Temporal Arcblade suffers from a similar problem, it is given %caster speed, but would benefit more from %attack speed. Even then it is not a end game legendary.

Obsidian Juggernaut

A great weapon; its Skill: Obsidian Tremor seems a bit underhwleming to me but otherwise a well-designed weapon. That said it is still a two handed maul/mace >.<

My current character is a soldier/occultist that uses chaos strike, markovians advantage, and Zolhans technqiue and specializes in chaos damage. I am a battle character and really any good two handed weapon for a soldier or occultist would be great for my build. Sadly, all the ‘viable’ options for soldier or occultist seems to be two handed mauls which are really hard for me to role play with – Please add more two handed legendary swords, axes, and scythes for soldier, occultist, etc.

2

I agree, the late game 2H options are just weird across the board. We have a 2H option for a mysterious NB/Shaman build (Bane of the Winter King) and TWO lightning 2H’ers at 75 that are largely the same and as you said a cool yet largely useless weapon (Temperal Arcblade) that isn’t really used, yet pure cunning/physical/pierce/bleed builds don’t have ANY options beyond level 50 (Stonefist Rebuke and Guillotine) when there are multiple builds that could use them? Personally I would remove the weird cold stats and proc from Leviathen and make that an option but there needs to be more. This is probably the most glaring itemization hole left in the game and its been there forever despite the dev’s wanting to push people towards 2H builds from DW.

3

Temporal Arcblade could be good for Tremor if:

  • Forcewave worked better on non-flat terrain
  • Devastation worked with 2H weapons

The first issue is confirmed to be fixed in a future patch. The developers have refused to budge on the second issue for whatever reason despite strong support for it.

Also, don’t forget there are some good MIs out there like Alkamos’ weapons.

4

I finished the game with my 2H Trickster hybrid-summoner that uses Bane of the Winter King, the craftable Crown and Heart of the Mountain amulet, as they all seem to work well with eachother.
Pets are Briarthorn and Chillmane from the amulet.
It was ok, but a niche summoner/cold like this is nothing spectacular. Did fairly well against crowds of mobs thanks to maxed out Embolding roar’s physical resist buff, but the bosses took a few minutes of standing still and slapping them, so it won’t be a character that I’ll play for grinding loot (Loghorrean took me around 10min to kill, so yeah…).

5

A cooldown-based poison witch hunter with Nightshade’s Reach is a very strong build. Check out some gameplay footage from Avatar of Dreeg here.

6

He switched in between 2 different kinds weapons…
That play style is quite…complicated…

7

I fail to see your point. LMBFTW builds are not the only strong builds. Also, “press W” shouldn’t be a mentally taxing instruction for most players.

8

So these 2H builds have ONE choice at endgame, if any. Many, like any cunning based builds, have zero and are forced to either use a lvl 50 legendary or some weird 2H with cold stats. When 6 legendaries have +Devouring Swarm on them, it somewhat irks me that popular and viable builds have a choice of 0 or 1.

9

Not only are legendary and epic options for most builds nonexistent but finding a good green two handed sword also seems very hard since even the vendors in the game are biased against two handed swords – go to a vendor at level 85 and you’re lucky to see 2 imperial claymores whereas Axes and Mauls seem to be abundant through the game.

10

You can find everything you want if you look at the monster infrequent rare weapons. Legendary weapons aren’t the end game, rare monster infrequent is.

11

I find a general problem exceeding the lack of this or that items, and it’s more likely related with the Crate’s mentality to enable build diversity around sets/certain items (and their related procs), rather than around generic skill enablers.
That’s why players are urged to inquire more and and more of specific items, which are supposed to be sufficient in numbers and quality to satisfy the needs of all the build/damage type varieties.
I find this not only limiting, but also dangerous to diversity. Currently, a great percentage of lategame builds depend on legendaries and their unique properties, rather than on green items, as a result.

People better ask how are they supposed to play a 2H melee nightblade different than cold/frostburn one, rather than where are the items intentionally tailored to fit a predetermined build.
In other words, where’s the skill to serve as build enabler, but not the certain items, supposed to play this role. The skill supposed to spread the damage.

I won’t stop to repeat that game needs more “generic” active and passive skills, able to enable a whole set of builds consisting of various damage types, but not locked to predetermined damage types.

Just take a look at the Amarasta’s blade burst.

12

You have 15 mastery combinations, every mastery has access to at least 4 damage types, that gives you at least 60 potent yet very different builds, double, triple quadruple that number if you count minor variations. That’s plenty enough. You don’t need to give every build access to every damage type, otherwise what is the point of the 6 classes in the first place if they are all playing the same?

13

You didn’t get anything. We may have 5 trillion different damage types but it’s nothing if we got no ways to effectively spread those damage types combined in the way one may prefer.

For ex. to play 2H melee nightblade as a main class, using damage type different than cold/frostburn, you got to combine strictly with one of the classes which enable the damage spread. Though you may not want to go to those classes at all, you have to pick one.

2H vitality/chaos true melee witch hunter? Nah.
Lightning/fire 2H true melee spellbreaker? Lol.

You somehow may slip through by certain items with certain procs, but it would be highly suboptimal.

IMO game’s always needed more generic AoE enablers, rather than dependency on certain items to enable the damage spread.
Occultist/arcanist for ex. got just self sufficient “fixed” AoE spells.

And that’s why players ask for more and more specific items with, the most important part, specific (AoE) procs.

Whatever, just my observations. Quite aware that the mindset of the people in charge differs from my opinion.

14

Nightblade has access to cold, pierce, bleeding and poison, therefore you can wield a 2 handed weapon that also uses any of those 4 damage types, not sure what your issue is.

15

Issue is current skill set (from items,relics and masteries) does limit some build variations for end game you mentioned above.

16

This is true for a lot of things – like the end boss in steps of torment does actually drop a great two handed sword/scythe for cold based builds.

But legendary items are part of what makes farming in grim dawn fun and help to make unique and cool builds – Its just sad that the soldier class has no sets or legendary items revolving around two handed swords and that the occultist doesn’t have a legendary two handed reaper scythe set or legendary similar to Scythe of Tenebris.

17

Yeah, 2H melee could use some love. Right now the available options are very limited.

It’s not just weapons and it gets much worse if you want to play something that isn’t one of the standard builds that have been around since forever and change little from patch to patch. For example, 2H BA/CoF witchblade makes perfect sense as a physical+bleed spec but good luck on finding any armor piece that is intended for it. Oh wait, there is one. You don’t need more than one legendary do you?

It’s kind of funny to hear so often about build diversity in a game where itemization inevitably railroads you into one of the few well-known endgame builds.

Which leads to a question: why should green items you can buy from a vendor outclass legendaries?

18

The cool part about rare infrequent items mostly come from the unique affixes and suffixes. Look at this page and tell me there isn’t an affix and a suffix for every class combination. The green ones are incredible.

https://gracefuldusk.appspot.com/items/TwoHanders/ (under rarity left of the screen, only tick affixes and suffixes)

How does one legendary with one set of statistics and one skill make for more unique and cool builds than a rare item with dozen possible awesome and unique statistics and skills. Look at the green affixes and suffixes again, they have +skills stats and unique skills just like legendaries, but they have those for every single class and every single damage type.

19

Many affixes are unique, but not that awesome. An item with just two or three very good stats can be much much better than some double rare with an virtually endless list of stats.

Furthermore, double rares may be cooler and more interesting, but they are just awfully hard to get, if you want a particular item with a particular prefix and a particular suffix. With Etram Fald I’d say it’s much easier to get a particular legendary than it is to get some double rare, so you can more or less plan to get legendaries at some point. I’d never plan with some double rare.

Many magic or rare affixes are very limited. There may be some double rares and double rare MIs (and even some magic items) that are BiS for certain builds, but I’d say this is more an exception than a rule, especially when looking at skill bonuses and Granted Skills.

Take, for example, my current Vit Conjurer. Looking at important skills like SoC or Wendigo Totem, there are zero rare suffixes for Caster Off-Hands that are raising these skills. The best possible bonus a magic or rare Off-Hand can get on either of these skills is +1. On the other hand there are many epic or legendary Off-Hands with +1 to all Occultist skills or even +1 to all skills. Likewise the granted skills of many rares are very average when compared to their counterparts on epic or legendary items.

20

Some strange discussions going on here sometimes.

If a person creates a Warder and fails to make a chaos mage out of it, I see no issue with this situation. In fact, I would rather queston mental ability of this individual then add legendaries/skills/whatever to support him.

Doing builds is about choosing things that benefit most (and therefore rating things from “good and effective for this toon” and “weak and pointless for this toon”). This implies that there is a limited amount of “popular and effective” builds.

Encouraging people to think that every way is the right way is a bad practice both for the game and their real life experience.