[v1.0.0.2 Elementalist] STORMHEART: How to facetank at 10.000 Volts

Grim Dawn Classes, Skills and Builds
1

Fire! Lightning! Stormheart! (18sec Shar’Zul kill, no potions)

get.php?id=10379&stc=1&d=14593602681024×640

The Pros:
Insane DPS
Perma 100% crit demage
Great AOE
Very tanky (1400 Armor with 100% absorb, 2050 DA, 1400 Regen)
Lightning!
Fire!

The Cons:
Needs very specific gear

How it works
The main idea of this build is to combine the +crit demage from stormcallers pact and explosive strike with the demage and OA potential of the demolitionist class. In order to make this work and to get the most out of our lighnting demage, we need static strike at ultimate level. With our DPS in champion mode, we dont rely on offensive devotions and can tank up!
But we aren’t limited to Boss killing, we got so many procs going that our clearspeed is really high.
Everything in this build is self found and there maybe some better options (Justicar Rings etc.) but in it’s current stage there are maybe 2 encounters in the game which actually make me sip a potion (Not Fabius or Log).

Procs active, note that you can add 250 OA since everything we hit will be flashbanged (thats a word now!)

[COLOR=“RoyalBlue”]Grimcalc Raw
http://grimcalc.com/build/bSLzBh
Grimcalc Bonus
http://grimcalc.com/build/dwQ0hO

[COLOR=“RoyalBlue”]Items

Weapons
STORMHEART!!! (haunted steel, blessed steal)

Head
Mask of Infernal Truth (Sanctified Bone)
Great item all around and we need plus skill.

Amulet
Empowered Essence of Benorath (Attoned Loadstone)
Boring I know, but attack speed and plus 1 skill is just too good for this build

Chest
Empowered Fanatics Overcoat (Sanctified Bone)
There is probably someting better, but the stats are nice and the proc is good.

Legs
Wraithborne Legwraps (Scaled Hide)
There is probably something better, but the resists fit and I dig the 7% OA

Relic
Ulzuins Pyroclasm (Proc goes off on CD with flashbang and vines alone)
Need the plus skill for static strike

Belt
Ulzuins Torment
Great Stats, Plus 1 for Demo

Medal
Direwolf Crest (Attuned Loadstone)
Absolute best in slot! I love it! :wink:

Feet
Stormtitan Treads (Mark of Mogdrogon)
Very good health and armor, soso proc, 10% Movespeed so we are capped on Runspeed)

Hands
Grasp of unchained might (Concencrated Wrappings)
We need AS and the proc is really nice for this build

Shoulder
Divinesteel Shoulderguard (Scaled Hide)
Good Armor, OK demage but we can make use of the bonus skills, good retaliation skill (20% for 8000 over 2 seconds)

Rings
Still cant find anything legendary worthwhile, Justicar Rings seem good though. If you have them.
The Green (70 OA, 40 DA 47% Bonus Regen and some resists)
The Yellow (100 OA , 108 DA)

Skills
I don’t want to go into the super obvious (Heart of the wild etc.) just some things worth pointing out.

Static Strike
The bread and butter of this build. Needs to be on ultimate level for that 75%

Brimstone
Forget Fire Strike and Explosive Strike, the DPS increase is marginal. Brimstone is the only skill, that significantly contributes to our DPS. Keep as high as possible.

Grenado
With all the plus skills this turns into a 1 point wonder: With just 1 skill point spent on every capstone, we use it for trash clear and it’s low CD knockdown for crowd control.

Blackwater Cocktail
With the transmuter this reduces incomming physical demage by 25%.
Great against bosses and tightly packed mobs. AOE is actually larger then it l looks. Once your used to it, this is a great skill!

Thermite Mines
With just 6 Points invested, this reduces fire and lightning resists by -40%.
The skill has no cooldown and the animation is super fast. On big enemys and mobs it’s no problem placing the mines. If you fight Fabius for example, move urself into a position where he has to stand on them. This skill needs some getting used to, but once you master it, it will be a great investment.

Flashbang
Combined with Flame Touched this increases our OA by over 450. Great control, use it EVERY TIME.

Blast Shield
No secret here, really starts to shine when overleveled.

Grasping Vines
Great Skill, doesn’t need high level to be effective. This makes all our procs go crazy and heavily contributes to crowd control.

Devotions (Update: Added Widow and removed Spear of heavens)
Nothing too special here. I tried one more node in Obelsik for the additional DA which brought me to 2150 but I didn’t feel a difference and put it back in spear for the 100% lighnting node. One note on Dryad: This skill is crazy good and I have it bound to firestrike. It can proc every 4 seconds which would make it an ok heal allready, but it allows me to facetank Log without a single potion with -20 poison resist. It basically enables you to skip on poison and bleed resist and cap armor absorbtion. With these constellations and items we can achieve regen of over 1400.

Videos:
Log Kill

Fabius


Note that I play a little lazy here and I dont have any plus demage to humans, but it still works out just fine

Bastion of Chaos with 18 Sec Shar’Zul kill


Note that my computer is going Commodore on me while recording, which makes it much harder to play.
Interesting parts: 4:50 two legendary Drops; 12:50 Shar’Zul kill

Thx Crate for this great game and to all the nice people in this forum who inspired this build!!!

Attachment: Stats 1.jpg
Attachment: Stats2.jpg
Attachment: Header.jpg

2

Very nice build. I was debating on an Elementalist as there aren’t many of them. I was looking at doing just about the same build.

3

do u really need dryad with totems n stuff? arcane bomb is huge dps increase.

divinesteel shoulder, if ur going trielement why not shadowflame for +4 brim? unless ur most ignoring fire/chaos, in which case id even more strongly consider arcane bomb tbh.

anyway, i theorycrafted about this combo before. interested in seeing how clear times / boss kill times compare with sabo. got some vids?

side note, screeny is with procs right? how do u even get that much OA with these 2 class and 2 sancified bones?

4

nice try bro

5

I don’t think anything can be as good as saboteur for Fabius farming due to all that extra human damage.

I’m wondering how much brimstone is doing in a mainly lightning based build, i had a similar idea but stopped at blast shield. Idea was to stack as much -lightning resist as i could get and go full on lightning and using both totems and procs for AoE.

Devotions i went for blue/red instead of yellow, with options. 5 spare points could go to Revenant, Aeon Hourglass, or Manticore. Or take out dying god and take Rhowans crown and most of Tempest. Widow is to good to pass up for a lightning based build.

http://grimcalc.com/build/kzaoOW - I guess with points the way they are i could of also pick up brimstone… I didn’t build it as i haven’t found a direwolf crest. And i wanted to farm Fabius and it doesn’t have sources of human damage. So i went for Saboteur.

6

Wendigo Totem is actually rather weak in ultimate. Most of the survivability comes from high DA, good armor, lifesteal and devotion procs. I used to run Briathon but against bosses where your tankiness really counts, it dies very easy.
Brimstone increases our DPS by a few thousands, but this build totally works without it. In the end its a question where you can put your points in a meaningfull way. In the case of shadwoflame mantle, it wouldn’t be a huge buff compared to the resists (30 Elemental is huge in this setup and the 47% bleeding resist isnt a waste, even with dryad) and the other stuff (flat lightning demage, retaliation procs, plus skills to blast shield, etc…)
If you go the route of arcane bomb, you will probably miss out on the spear of heaven, but it might be a worthy trade…
Concerning OA ,Flame touched alone gives over 200, my legs give 7%, the rings 160 combined, Stormheart has some OA, Direwolf Crest 100, Spear 5% plus 40 flat, procs from Overcoat and Grasp 225 and all that is without the 250 of flashbang.
Concerning clearspeed, Fabius is probably the slowest one to farm, but we are still talking way under a minute. If you just want to kill Fabius, you can simply stack +demage to humans and be done with it. Thing is everything else just gets melted, check out the Log Vid as an example. Apart from that, Nemesis farming is not the way to go anymore. I will upload a Vid of a Boc run just to show how fast you can clear big mobs and bosses.

7

You can only deal demage if you can stand face to face with Fabius. Dont overestimate the power of Wendigo. Im allmost certain you gonna get whacked with low regen, DA and armor form your devotions. If you want widow i would go like this:

http://grimcalc.com/build/3IGbu4

As you can see you can still kill Fabius without a single potion in under a minute, so its not like you cant deal with him. The biggest part now is finding him and running a build which wrecks mobs and works against all enemys, not just humans, will allmost certainly yield more results.

8

i really love that build, nice work mate :slight_smile:

9

Levelling one atm and having a ton of fun. Was gonna put up the build once i test ultimate farming on it, but you beat me to it. From My limited experience, I already see a few problems with your setup:

  1. You need riftstone. You can’t farm BoC/SoT/Nemesis effectively without the blink, it’s just too slow.
  2. Ulzuin’s hat is best in slot! Fire/lightning res are already hard to debuff, this is one of the best sources of resist reductions. Since you don’t convert 100% of your physical dmg, the armor reduction is good as well. If you lack +skills to max static strike, just put on Ulzuins shoulder for +2 static.
  3. Considering #2, Ulzuin’s chest beats Fanatic because it already gives attack speed and the set bonus with the hat gives a huge bonus to fire/lightning.
  4. Arcane bomb is a must. Again, resist reduction is still king.
  5. No Dreeg, no Black star, no manticore, no malediction, no max Agonising flames… Get one of those for further resist reduction (they also improve your lifesteal and the residual physical dmg you do). A pattern seems to emerge.
  6. Compared to the totem, Tree of life heal is negligible. You waste a lot of devotion points getting it, and I’m not sure it’s worth it. Also consider that %health bonuses are not as effective on shaman as they are on other classes.
  7. Totems have their separate cooldowns for devotion procs, consider using the lightning bolt constealtion on WT instead of Spear. It also gives a massive flat lighting bonus. I’m still in elite, so I might be wrong on this one, but this is a major source of clear speed for me.
  8. Find a way to pick up the bottom left Obelisk node, especially if you don’t use the signets. It will bring you up to 2100-ish DA required to avoid being crit by Shar’Zul.

I’m still wondering if going up to brimstone is worth it. I will definitely test a pure lightning build (with storm totem) before investing more mastery points. Brimstone is meh if it’s not at max ultimate level.

10

As with all builds, there is the part of theory crafting and the part of reacting to how it feels. The extra DA for example. As i wrought above, I allready tried out the 3rd Obelisk node and it didnt make a difference at all. At the moment im runnning my old constellation with Widow instead of spear of heaven. Concerning resists: You get -resist from:
-Thermite mines
-Viper
-Blessed Steel
-Blackwater cocktail (to a very minor degree)
-Widow
So I’m not exactly skimping on this part.
I can’t comment on the riftstone, because I tend to kill allmost all trash and not rush through the level and sacred strike feels really strong. But of course, if it suits your playstile better, go for it! Regarding Shar’Zul I slaughter him without pots or any potions in 18 seconds with full health. Again, maybe I’m too defensive with my devotions, if you can make a more aggressive version working, I will gladly adapt my setup.
I dont have Ulzuins shoulders or armor and as stated above, there might be better items for the slots, I just don’t have them :slight_smile: Initially I didn’t run with brimstone, but didn’t find a way of investing my points in a more meaningfull way, beacause there simply arent any skills that really improve the DPS. I even tried maxed out grenado or mortars. Maybe Totems are a way to go.
I’m uploading BoC run with 18 Sec Shar’Zul facetank as we speak.

11

i know i have some +human damage but thats wierd. that u kill sharzul in 18 and fabius in 50+.

i kill fabius in 17secs and sharzul in 28. this is without thermite mines. i can probably get sharzul down much faster with thermite.

the ratio seems really off, maybe cause more of my dmg comes from brimstone compared to u and sharzul has huge fire/chaos resist. but still fabius has 90 fire resist too.

i have multiple shamans builds for end game, i understand wendigo on its own it not sufficient. o wait, u dont have a 5s pneumatic… nvm on this. maybe dryad is needed for u afterall. i’m used to having a 5s pneumatic burst, kinda assumed u had it too since similar build.

i really hate blessed steel since it replaces ur FS hit. but i guess u have to if u want the -30 since u cant use blackstar…

since u have free points u should max searing light tho, skill is just as broken as blastshield.

nemesis may or may not be the best runs , but they dont take any freaggin ectoplasms and corpse dust :slight_smile:
also, u shoudl really try riftstone. FS builds arent big on AOE, nonhero trash is an extreme waste of time. i do hero boc clears in 6mins, killing trash takes me 12min. and really doenst give me anything more , not even mats.

12

Yeah that Fabius run was just weird. Sometimes he goes into Blade Barrier all the time or maybe its my low stun resist or I was hitting his blade spririts…
You are of course right talking about efficiency and riftstone, but I just like to cleanse stuff.
If I want to go assasin I bring out my witchhunter.
BoC is up by the way, kill is at around 12:50

13

thanks for build, that dps o_O

14

Man just realized my badass header wasn’t showing… all those hours in photoshop for nothing… You win again, internet!

15

Done with the leveling (up to 75 I mean), looks really good so far. Went Revenant (5 nodes) for attack speed and lifesteal to try it out, not too bad.

Reckless tempest (Tempest constellation) is absolutely amazing, gives me much needed aoe damage and the ministuns severely reduce incoming damage when surrounded (definitely make up for the lack of Veil of shadows).

Not sure if it’s better than Sabo, loss of Blood sigil hurts a lot. So does having less attack speed. I’m loving the 10k health and 2x crit modifier. Gonna hunt down Fabius now to see how that goes.

Edit: just realized i have 6% bleeding resistance. Doing Fabius was a bad idea.

16

Great looking build.

Feel like I’m missing something obvious, but what grants the ability to dual wield?

Thanks

17

The Direwolf Crest Legendary Medal.

18

Never mind

19

Nice build! I am working on my Elementalist but going 2H.

20

Thanks for sharing. You should post it on the build compendium :slight_smile: http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36808