What is you’re experience with, let’s say, unusual damage combinations?
Like, and bear with me here 'cos I know it’s horrifying, combining Aether and Bleeding.
I was curious because there is itemization for aether shaman, and shaman gets natural bleed bonuses, as well.
And it allows a surprisingly sound devotion map. Alas, it’s as bad as you probably imagined, lacking OA, DA, resistances, % damage, armour, and speed. Or, as others might say, just about about everything.
But. now I wonder: Are there ‘whacky’ combinations that work well?
Things that were probably not supposed* to fit together, but somehow do?
I’m not talking high SR, which I’ve never played, or Crucible, likewise, but finishing ultimate MC and maybe SR 40 without atrocious grinding and respawning would be nice.
*If it has any reasonable itemization besides the odd item with a set of bonuses you’re sure no player was intended to tap into all at once, then one could argue it is ‘intended’, but maybe that’s just an afterthought or everyone thinks it’s bad. I’ll let you be the judge.
i mean, you can combine any and all dmg types as much as you want and however weirdly you wish
but in the end it comes down to a couple of simple things
can you get enough +dmg across the board
can you get enough/decent RR for your damages, split or otherwise
is your attack/skill getting enough dakka combined, or is a it wet paper towel ?
trickster is probably one of the easier silly ones as example,
NB has cold RR, strong cold skills but also Vit and Bleed, Shammy has Cold Vit and Bleed RR, and decent potential support and offensive skills/synergy
that’s 3 completely “unrelated” dmg types you can smash together (and that’s assuming you aren’t tossing in pierce too)
and personally/for me it feels a bit “meh” in the end if i’m going “halfsies”…
then start sling dmg types and masteries together with minimal native support and see how it takes you when it’s one big mashup mixed pot
Yes, I can always do anything. Most of it os obviously pointless, though.
I know, f.Ex., that there’s no good way to convert aether damage to pierce, given there’s only a single item that does that.
But I did notice there’s a few resistance combinations that enemies often end up not having. A combination of chaos and aether seems quite viable for that reason even without the very best items.
So I mostly wonder if I overlooked some juicy interactions. I guess I’m just bored procrastinating.
I usually start with a mastery that offers 2-3 damage types, then find an item converting one of them, and then I start wondering how to still utilize the rest.
It’d be interesting if I could find a way to utilize mogdrogen and seru (though some would argue if I even try I’ve already lost control of my life^^).
With end-game builds that I’ll never see because I never play a character long enough, I often ( surprisingly little in GD, though) feel like there’s a few agreed upon best choices and not using at least one of them means I’m just gimping myself - so I tend to go all the way.
@Valinov tried a FoI build with Chaos Transmuter + Aether Conduit to benefit from 2 Total Damage modifiers
But he also included this gif so not sure how he feels about it https://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jRp9v2
anything can work endgame, like there is some real stupid stuff out there if you look hard enough
speaking of aether->pierce, that would for instance be one you could pair, as you can fully convert the fire cold and lightning (minus dot) to pierce, and keep aether, while you have ex inquis that offers RR for both, in the same spell
you could also go totally bonkers and do aether-pierce hybrid spellbreaker, as now there is a bunch of yummy aether RR for NB
the only question is how much time your willing to spend to try swap/fiddle with items (assuming GT not ingame ofc); and possibly “how green are you willing to go”
i’ve done a couple of stupid builds myself, some of them very green because there was just no other way to fluff the skill points (surprisingly on offbeat dmg combinations there aren’t really often a lot of native +skills on most gear )
and there is a royal ton of conversion transmuters and global conversion now, and bonus RR on items, that make almost anything possible, it’s just about spending enough time browsing through GT and trying to fit half a puzzle together then shove the rest of it in place with a little brute force maybe
I only play dual damage builds now and some work better than others. If you’re trying to mix damage types that aren’t supported by the usual equipment pairings (Aether/Lightning, Aether/Chaos, Fire/Chaos, Vitality/Bleeding, etc.) then you’ll run into some issues.
But pairing different damage types is definitely fun in GrimTools and in the game - thanks to GDStash and double rare MIs!
Weird damage type combinations in my experience hinge on a couple of things:
Getting enough +% damage to both damage types. You ideally want a couple pieces of gear and/or 1-2 of your component/mastery buffs to benefit both damage types.
Getting resist reduction for both types. Arguably easier than the above with the prevalence of RR across skill modifiers and in masteries nowadays. You are likely gonna be forced to take 2 RR devotion procs though if you don’t want one overshadowing the other e.g. for an Aether/Bleed user, you want Arcane Bomb and Rend and a means of applying them efficiently.
And obviously, you want ample means of applying damage on both sides of your damage type. Bleed is somewhat more awkward since it’s a DoT so you ideally want multiple skills or procs with it, or multiple player pets with it as each individually applies it’s own Bleed damage.
All of these can be varying levels of difficult for standard builds depending on what gear is available and how bizarre or remote of a combination you’re going for.
Pet builds by far have it the easiest as tons of their gear comes with +% to all damage with some offering specialised amounts like +% Acid or Fire on top, Occultist is generally a given and CoF covers 7 damage types for RR, Shaman covering 5 with Devils/Swarm and Necro covering 3 with Spectral Wrath - skill modifiers again can add more. Even for some other damage types like Pierce/Chaos, Inquisitor is the next best mastery for pets after the holy trinity and offers RR for those. The Salazar Harbinger serves special mention as well for 15 RR to everything.
You make a good point! Seems to work well though I’m only level 85 (in Ultimate). I haven’t completely got my head around end game gear. Still looking for a theurgist’s Spectral Bludgeon of caged souls or a spectral crown of shattering haha
So after a bit of trying, I’ve come to the conclusion that while there’s supposed for Ritualist in a great many items with bleed, aether, lightning, and physical, the first two never happen together for some odd reason. Though I have a feeling I knew that before. Would have been nice to make a character that uses different tools against different enemies, but this isn’t it. I assume chaos/bleed is even worse. And I won’t even look into Aether/Acid, though that would be thematic. Stuff is probably poisonous.
Scratch that, I’ll look into it.
I wonder: If there’s a flat damage bonus against X, what damage type will it actually be?
Also, while I’m at it, can damage bonuses on normally utility skills end up making that skill a viable attack?
my guess is you don’t see it is the same reason bleed aar isn’t a thing
bleed is a dot, thus requires weapon dmg to apply (and preferably lots of it)
which means either your skill needs baked in bleed, or WD, which just isn’t frequent on aether/chaos skills
siphon souls because of transmuter being one of the few i think
Yes, certainly. But even if you make an autoattack char, combining aether with acid/poison/bleed or chaos with bleed leaves you lacking so many stats. I think that is sad, given that green/purple devotions allow elemental, aether, and bleeding support on the same path.
On the example of acid/aether, necro certainly has both, yet when you want to spec into it with ravenous earth, you end up just converting everything to aether. A pity.
Guess I’ll busy myself with trying to turn Seal, Horn, Warcry or WoP into a main attack and try to create a char with A -> B conversion that then still uses A by converting everything else to it.
or you can just not use a transmuter and use global conversion…
also your devo path doesn’t fully hold up, it becomes impossible to snatch too many things at the same time, especially when you have to at minimum get RR, likely get sustain or defensive layer or +dmg/flat stats like OA/DA on top
this is obviously on purpose, having to make decisions on what to get. This goes for just a regular build, so trying to expect it then being possible to accomplish while supporting multiple unrelated dmg types seems a bit far fetched thinking even if we disregard massive “conflicting” mandatory bonuses that gets lost
even as something native, ex Bleed, it’s impossible to get all the purple bleed devos at the same time while getting just bleed RR not even talking about flat
likewise you can on avg on a greedy devo route get maybe 3xTier3 devos, which then obviously makes it impossible for one to get all the elemental devos at the same time.
Just something as chaos, getting Abom+DG can be tricky to fill in if having specific or other needs.
As for gear it’s much more possible, but you will still find combos you rarely or never see combined on a single item, again because you’ll have to be very creative the further into the meme’s twilight zone you step
if everything were just semi decently fully supported it would obviously be nuts, as stacking 4 dmg types would obviously be better than 1. That’s why you don’t see many multi dmg types with perfect distribution and all of the damages having 3k +dmg…
Well, no one’s asking for everything being fully supported, at once, to boot.
Indeed, the very fact it’s not is why I consider it interesting. I just think it’d be nice if there was the odd item that supported a completely unrelated damage type just so people could latch onto it to create utter retardation.
I know it’s far from optimal, I wrote as much above, but at least I consider a tree like this visually pleasing, in an odd kind of way.
Alas, Aether+Bleed is definitely not a viable combination, and neither are chaos+bleed, aether+acid, or chaos/aether+cold - though the latter might have been possibly with the old spellweaving suffixes.
I’m sure there’s many more unviable combinations I haven’t yet discarded.
Yes, conduits are great. Some beautiful options there, indeed. Wish they were available earlier, so I could use one instead of just theorycrafting with them.
I kind of started with one - after extensively pondering one of the new sets, that is.
Thing is, they offer just that - a conversion. They don’t really offer unusual combinations*, just a combination you usually expect on other classes.
To roll with the original example, Shaman has phys, lightning, and bleed, and there’s support for lightning+bleed (and obviously plenty of bleed+phys). Then there’s options to convert phys or lightning to aether, or just add a lot of it, to savagery, primal strike, upheaval.
There’s even a small bit of aether RR to be had.
But there’s no provisions for Aether + Bleed. Either you go full aether, or aether + lightning, which is a combination a lot of arcanists will know well.
Though they do admittedly allow people to build around them, so they fit my original statement.
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