V1.1.8.0 Mastery Combo Discussion

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
62

I would like to see Elemental Battlemage be a thing beyond memes. It’s currently the biggest noobtrap in the whole game, causing thousands of new players to pick Battlemage as their first mastery combo when it’s in fact one of the hardest things to make work in end-game.

The issue is that there’s no way to make this work by adding elemental -RR% without unnecessarily buffing other classes. Instead, I was thinking about increasing flat elemental damage from Soldier and Arcanist skills or items along with elemental conversions that prevents single or dual elemental damages from exploiting them.

For Example, currently Iskandra’s Elemental Exchange adds 37 flat elemental damage at 12/12 and 94 at 22/12. This is simply very, very little award for such a niche damage type. Instead, it should be brought up to at least 300 at 22/12, the same value you get from Soul Harvest at 22/12. Or instead, to make sure only Elemental damage builds can make use of it, move half the flat damage to Manifestation and also add elemental conversions to it, preferably all three, so it would look like “50% Fire/Cold/Lightning damage converted to Lightning/Fire/Cold”. That way you couldn’t just use existing conversions from items like Chillheart to gain all of the juicy flat bonuses without actually building for tri-elemental damage.

Something similar should be done with Soldier as well. Add a modifier or something that adds global physical to elemental conversion and some flat damage. The bonuses should be very potent in order to make Elemental Battlemage an enticing thought. Battlemage simply must be the mastery combo with the most flat damage in the whole game.

A couple other smaller suggestions. Firstly, for Shaman, I would love to see bonuses from Tenacity of the Boar being moved to Mogdrogen’s Pact. Maybe just the OA/DA, or Slow resistance. As it is, building non-Savagery shamans is the most painful experience I’ve had in this game.

Secondly, I want to see fire damage Saboteur be real. I think it would be fine to add Fire or Elemental -xx% to Night’s Chill, but if that’s not possible then maybe add some Fire -xx% to a weapon that’s actually useful for fire melee builds because currently the only one I see, Warpfire, deals Aether Damage. Or add Fire -xx% to another ring so you can combine it with Combustion Band. It would also be very useful for Vanquisher Templars.

4 Likes
63

I think that active skills should have more love.
This game has too many default attack changers and wps. And they have lots of item support.
So many top tier build have no cool default attack. Idk why cool time skill is poor than non cooldown ones.
My commonsense is longer cool, big damage
But poor variation of item especially set items
Long cooldown active skills are not good.
Some is okay but i say the diversity and overall power balances
If dev can’t make new items right now, then I think those skills themselves should buff damage or something

1 Like
64

:frowning:

Dumping into cunning/spirit is popular nowadays. Veterancy is pretty useful for those builds that don’t want to all in on physique.

65

I don’t know if I’m the only one that faces this, but the new Crucible aggro just sucks for pet builds. Absolutely sucks. It’s hard enough fighting 2 Nemeses when both of them are gunning for you and you have no active form of leech. Now fighting 4? Most of the pet builds I’ve made in 1.1.6.0 that had beaten 170 are now getting clobbered because I can no longer take advantage of the aggro system to fight down 1 Nemesis before the others rush me, especially since you have to deal with oncoming strikes as well (Fabius Shadow Strike + Iron Maiden’s charge + Alex Meteor + Reaper rush is hard enough when you’re not considering your pets’ health as much as your own - heaven forbid any of your pets died before and now you have weaker pets without the Crucible buffs).

Point is: the new Crucible demands drastically limit pet build diversity because the player just doesn’t have the items + skill points necessary to get enough pet damage and pet resistances and player survivability. That makes items like Beastcaller’s Cowl or Sovereign Ruby completely dominating because you can no longer afford not to have a burst option to beat down rougher enemies (and even then, it may not be enough).

Demo has all the potential in the world when it comes to pet builds, but every option I’ve tried either lacks the skill points to get all the required skills or lacks the stats to have it stand out over your more standard fare. I’ll pinpoint examples where I can:

Mantle of Mogdrogen: Two of the skill bonuses benefit Shaman, except there’s no item in the world strong enough to justify giving up the Beastcaller’s full set [2 Briarthorns and essentially 100% Primal Spirit uptime is essentially mandatory for most builds relying on Shaman pets]. Then you have an Arcanist skill bonus which I assume is for double Bird builds, but why use Arcanist when you have so many bonuses for Conjurers? I’d replace either the Shaman skills or the Arcanist skills with Demo skill bonuses so you can have a full 100% Fire to Lightning conversion pet build.

Lost Souls Set: Having a set use your Weapon + Helmet + Amulet and not give +all skills to Occultist is a travesty. I’ll make a more detailed post about this set specifically, but all I’ll say is that this set needs skill points in the Occultist side desperately. Chaos Hellhound would be pretty cool to test, except 1) the Conduit conflicts with the Lost Souls set, and (2) you need 50 points in Demo to actually access Hellfire Mine and there are very few +all skills items that pet builds can really take advantage of.

Pet Conduits: The Raven conduit + Blight Fiend conduit is fine, but everything else is a mess. The Hellhound conduit has the Lost Souls set problem above, and also doesn’t have a good second class to synergize with it because of the skill point problem for both Demos and Inquisitors (who have 0 pet support). Briarthorn conduit is completely redundant, but since there are already modifiers for Fire, Acid, & Cold while obtaining 100% physical conversion on Lightning & Chaos, I don’t know what else we can give the conversion to. Skeleton conduit is a neat idea, but if I can’t make it work with Apostate that gives pets a heal and bonus racial damage, I doubt it will work on Defiler, which I assume is the real target. There’s just not enough sustain in the world to handle 3-4 Nemeses simultaneously when AoE ground damage from them alone can melt all but the sturdiest pets and nuke your damage potential in a way other builds don’t have.

Potential solution: give Acid to Fire conversion to pets somewhere - maybe off-hand? That way you can either utilize the flat from Blood of Dreeg or use Blight Fiends to give more support to the Skeleton conduit.

There’s more, but I’ll need time to break down potential pet build options.

4 Likes
66

I would settle for 200 even. Casters won’t get the advantage of it so it won’t create a balancing issue, some other melee builds that uses(mostly I use them) arcanist as second class also get the reward since they’re mediocre.

Changin terrify mutator may help here, not -%RR or atleast %30 elemental resist reduce maybe since I’m not sure engine would support which one of them.

Nice to see some support. Though your idea about shaman is not possible. Z likes shaman as it is.

67

j0 =).
I toyed a bit with dw crescent moon cold sabo , easely amassed 3k armor/capped DA with memetongue and stuff. With pure firestrike i couldn`t kill MQ+a pack of heallers on wave 147 naked. Simply not enough dmg to kill a single blobed healler before MQ period kick-in, Regardless of 30%human dmg and 157k tooltip firestrike dps.
BTW rimetongue should be shipped with some extra ectoplazm slots if someone intend to use grenades with it :smiley:

68

It’s there for builds that can afford a cunning dump. The constitution can be changed to something good though.

Comparatively, many builds can find a place for a green medal that can give a big OA bonus, augments, and a cunning dump. I don’t think there are any armor-based crit damage affixes, and most of the ones on green weapons are suboptimal for phys (leaving aside the suitability of green weapons in the first place).

69

While I haven’t played every mastery combo in the game, I have played a select few for the last 1000 hours now. So here are my thoughts.

NIGHTBLADE: I exclusively play 2H nightblades and it sucks that most content is geared to DW. Yes it makes perfect sense to DW as Nightblade, but it’s not the only playstyle in the game. Example: ABB and Ring of steel both work off a single weapon, so 2H just makes sense here. Yet most gear for ABB is 1H (and mostly acid?!). RoS has Nadaan’s, but its only pierce. Suggestion: keep playstyles and damage types more open. It’s lackluster when skills only have a single playstyle (DW) in mind. 2H cold ABB with no cooldown when? Shield RoS NB when?

REAPER: My favorite class… always falls flat to infiltrator or trickster. This is partly because of RR, but that can be fixed with items. My issue is with utility. Besides mark of torment and ill omen, Necro doesn’t do a lot defense-wise. And sure there is skill support for damage but with that missing RR, you kinda also suck offensively. I made a suggestion before to add player buffs to Call of the Grave, ideally defensive buffs. This works for pet builds and regular builds, and should mostly help with survival. Also the following, which I’ve also suggested before. Give %crit to necro!

SPELLBREAKER: Big topic, I’ll keep it short. Despite having lots of utility, it is damn hard to have enough skill points to get everything. Mostly on the arcanist side, NB is fine. I imagine that balancing for classes takes into account that a spellbreaker is using max mirror/maiven’s/inner focus/etc. But I can never max out all the utilities and then my main attack. So the balancing hits a little harder than it’s supposed to. Suggestion: more arcanist skill support in NB items.

TRICKSTER: Good damage, good survivability and good utilities. But it is incredibly hard to get good OA/DA when you AREN’T using savagery. Primal strike looks so cool, but juggling that + savagery + ABB is awful. Suggestion: sprinkle some OA/DA on shaman items that DON’T support savagery.

71

May I have 150% move speed cap?

There, my frivolous and unnecessary request.

Cheers,

Malph

72

I’m going to frame my comments in the context of cold builds because they’re what I’m most familiar with and also because what else would you expect from me.

The main issue I have is with Tricksters. They’re a class that went from only being good for niche bleed builds to being one of the premier options for cold melee thanks to conversion from several items. Which is a great thing, but as someone else has noted, it is such a chore to get acceptable OA/DA on both of these classes. Korba Tricksters kind of sidestep this by focusing on Savagery and the buffs you get from Tenacity of the Boar, but cold Primal Strike for instance is pretty much dead in the water. A lot of this is due to lack of item support, which is beyond the scope of what you asked for, but even some simple OA/DA availability on a few skills or class items would go a long way.

Dervishes have a similar issue. Conduits give them a lot of options for converting skills to cold damage, but the problem is that pretty much all of them can be converted to Acid instead, with better performance and much less gear support even with all else being equal.

…and honestly that’s about all that comes readily to mind. The recent steps to make cold Blademasters more viable and updated cold MI’s are really doing a lot to address my complaints. I might add more stuff later, but I don’t want to stray too far into unfamiliar territory.

73

I wanted to update my vitality DK and have to say it’s not really impressive both defensively and offensively. Vitality is lot bet as caster than melee but still I wouldn’t really go DK, another untapped potential for the class.

Counter strike is good for retaliation builds but now so much going vitality. For bleeding builds it’s usually more useful if you have the points to spare.

Horn is support skill only. Even with all items and focus it doesn’t have sufficient damage. I want to be prove wrong here :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
75

I think Horn can reduce elemental damage by 45% on max level. It’s hilarious to try Lokarr with Conviction+Horn as pierce build.

Also nice procing skill. But still need extra effect or damage to find it’s way in Inquisitor’s rotation.

2 Likes
76

As well as battle mage.

77

If Cunning/Physique ratio <2 it doesn’t count)
And nevertheless players prefer ADCtH to Regen.

78

for a battle mage, you can also Arcanist -% of the physical RR somewhere to screw

79

Still depends. Something like DW reaver’s claw blademaster will have +3 soldier by default and 1 point on veterancy gives them 10% reduced phys requirement, getting phys reqs on heavy chest/pants down to 933. That’s around ~9 - 14 cunning attribute points. Very relevant on most physical soldiers since they spam both heavy armor and + soldier most of the time. On constitution I agree since the start. Just didn’t point it out

80

How’s about change cold RR on Veil of Shadow to elemental RR?
Go go lightning Tricksters and fire Dervishes!

5 Likes
81

Small wish list:

Occultist could use some cast speed and/or Energy regeneration in its tree.
Despite having a spam skill in its arsenal, the class doesn’t cater to it and even with a high value on a caster off-hand + gloves it’s often hard to get capped CS with an Occultist combo.
The Energy regeneration issue has been brought up before and would be a useful boost since many of the skills you’d typically use on this class tend to struggle with Energy sustainability.
I would suggest any bonuses to go on Solael’s Witchfire or Second Rite, since Possession and Blood of Dreeg are already quite stacked and good as they are.

Oathkeeper’s Presence of Virtue line scales very poorly and could use some changes.
The skill itself is good and most people probably max it out, but its 2 modifiers tend to be 1 pointers.
Haven’s initial 3-5 ranks are much stronger than the ones following it, which gives the player little reason to allocate more precious skill points to it. I think the skill itself is on the weaker side even if you’re using a shield and it could use increased values or an extra affix.
Rebuke gives useful Life Reduction resistance, but the way the flat damage scales is undesirable and feels lackluster as well.
These two modifiers remind me of the old Phantasmal Armor, Veterancy, and skills like that.

82

I didn’t even use shattered set.I used Justicar

Like this. FS flat dmg is not shown in GT but it was huge and dps was around 230K or so. It looked amazing on paper. Had excellent survivability but hit like a hot wet noodle. Didn’t even bother leveling it from 98 to 100 as you can see :smiley:

Ah, i went full fire like the one above. It’s partly the lack of good RR that kills fire sabo

1 Like
83

I might be wrong, but i don’t think that such things should be balanced around green items with specific affixes. Because, in that way, one could say that lacking pierce res on fire casters (for example) isn’t a problem, just use green with “impervious” affix. Of course i’m over exaggerating, but the point is simple. Every class can acquire tons of OA simply having several “Aggressive of Attack” affixes.