Vileblade Pack set, feedback.

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

The VemonBlade/Vileblade (Vile being the mythical set upgrade) Pack set.

This set is a melee poison/acid set, focused on the Nightblade class. It is currently the only option for melee poison/acid high end build. The set focuses on buffing and augmenting Ring of Steel.

The elephant in the room, Ring of Steel is a pierce skill, that has a node to alter 75% of the damage to cold. If you so chose. This begs the question, why would a poison/acid set have anything to do with a skill/ability that has nothing to do with poison/acid skill? I don’t know. It seems completely random.

The easy fix would be to ajust the set to modify Ring of Steel to do poison/acid damage. Why that was not done to begin with is a bit of a boggle, but whatevs. The issue here is availability of ability points. Your second class choice is logically either Soldier or Occultist. There are pros and cons to both. Regardless, this is a point starved class combo, and while Ring Of Steel is a solid ability, you don’t really have the points for it. Assuming the skill was poison/acid based. It’s not.

There are many things you could do with the set, change, add, alter, Duel Blades to do acid/poison, same for Night’s Chill. Buff Merciless Repertoire. Change the cold on Execution to acid etc. Be creative, make Shadow Strike jump to a addition enemy within X meters.

Outside of the set there are several poison/acid items that add to Nidallal’s Justifiable Ends and Hidden hand. Allowing you to easily max out both. While that’s great, and frankly expected from end game gear. There is a issue with Shadow Strike, you can’t currently come anywhere close to maxing it. With max Nidallal’s Justifiable Ends you will of course be using Shadow Strike a lot. There is no + to Shadow Strike skill on any gear poison/acid related gear.

A note on the skill Blade Barrier. Typically it’s just a panic skill. A one point wonder ability. But for a poison based toon it’s a powerful offensive ability, as you can jump in, dot everyone up and watch them die as your immune to damage. Just putting that out there, as augmenting this skill is a idea.

On to the rest of the set. Thankfully the head piece has +1 to Nightblade skills. And make no mistake + to skills are lacking overall.

Aside from a lack of +skills that are relevant to the class, the greatest weakness comes from being “squishy”. There is no easy solution to this, you simply have to kite and dive bomb with Shadow Strike repeatably.

Overall the set has decent stats. The one glaring exception is Fist of the Venomblade. For the love of god, please put atk speed on this item. The only reason to use this thing is for the 4 pierce set bonus. Currently your better off using the weapon Agony.

The set and supporting items lack resists. You can compensate for this by using Sash Of the Immortal Sage. The hp on it are also most welcome. I would love to use the Bladebreaker Sash, mostly for the +1 to Nightblade skills. But alas, it nukes my resists. On that note, if you could add a high end belt that specializes in poison/acid with ideally + to Nightblade that would be great. Because currently, there is not a single good belt I can find to fill that void.

Lastly, the relic. Melediction is currently your best option. A lvl 60 relic. The lack of +class skill is painful. One would think a relic with the name Nidallal’s Outbreak would be heavily based around poison/acid. Yet that is not the case. The granted skill is decent, but I have enough active skills on my bar alrdy, a passive would be most welcome. A toggle to replace, upgrade Melediction. Currently it seems like a dead item. No sane person would use this relic for any build.

2

I’m going to start off by saying I don’t really care for this set, or Ring of Steel for that matter. I don’t think it’s powerful enough to be a “main” skill, but I do have a few criticisms of your arguments:

The elephant in the room, Ring of Steel is a pierce skill, that has a node to alter 75% of the damage to cold. If you so chose. This begs the question, why would a poison/acid set have anything to do with a skill/ability that has nothing to do with poison/acid skill? I don’t know. It seems completely random.

The set has an innate +/-30% pierce (and cold) -> acid conversion. In addition to this, we now have the Basilisk Mark which converts 100% of RoS’s pierce damage to acid damage. Don’t forget that RoS has weapon damage, so if you have enough flat acid the base pierce on the skill doesn’t matter as much.

The easy fix would be to ajust the set to modify Ring of Steel to do poison/acid damage. Why that was not done to begin with is a bit of a boggle, but whatevs. The issue here is availability of ability points. Your second class choice is logically either Soldier or Occultist. There are pros and cons to both. Regardless, this is a point starved class combo, and while Ring Of Steel is a solid ability, you don’t really have the points for it. Assuming the skill was poison/acid based. It’s not.

It sounds like you’re trying to do too much in one build. The set focuses on RoS, so you should to. I tooled up a Vileblade WH recently just to see what it looked like, and I didn’t find it hurting for points.

There are many things you could do with the set, change, add, alter, Duel Blades to do acid/poison, same for Night’s Chill. Buff Merciless Repertoire. Change the cold on Execution to acid etc. Be creative, make Shadow Strike jump to a addition enemy within X meters.

The focus of the set is on RoS with a little bit of ABB thrown in. Many of these suggestions are unnecessary fluff that wouldn’t fit with the theme of the set.

As for the Execution suggestion, a Conduit of Night Whispers prefix already does that.

Outside of the set there are several poison/acid items that add to Nidallal’s Justifiable Ends and Hidden hand. Allowing you to easily max out both. While that’s great, and frankly expected from end game gear. There is a issue with Shadow Strike, you can’t currently come anywhere close to maxing it. With max Nidallal’s Justifiable Ends you will of course be using Shadow Strike a lot. There is no + to Shadow Strike skill on any gear poison/acid related gear.

Again, you’re trying to do too much with one set. SS will be used solely for mobility in this case. If you want to have a more SS focused build, there’s plenty of other options available to you.

On to the rest of the set. Thankfully the head piece has +1 to Nightblade skills. And make no mistake + to skills are lacking overall.

The set has plenty of +skills:

  • +7 Ring of Steel
  • +5 Amarasta’s Blade Burst
  • +3 Phantasmal Armor
  • +2 Circle of Slaughter
  • +2 Lethal Assault
  • +2 Pneumatic Burst
  • +1 all Nightblade

All of these +skills are useful to a RoS build.

Aside from a lack of +skills that are relevant to the class, the greatest weakness comes from being “squishy”. There is no easy solution to this, you simply have to kite and dive bomb with Shadow Strike repeatably.

This sounds like a fundamental misunderstanding of Nightblade surviviability. As a NB you rely on DA (and enemy OA reduction), avoidance, fumble (more so since you’re going to want to pump as many points as possible into Circle of Slaughter), and mobility for toughness, and life steal and Pneumatic Burst for sustain (as a Witch Hunter you also have a ridiculous amount of health regen). You have plenty of tools at your disposal for staying alive, it’s just not the traditional (read: Soldier) way of “tank and spank”.

Overall the set has decent stats. The one glaring exception is Fist of the Venomblade. For the love of god, please put atk speed on this item. The only reason to use this thing is for the 4 pierce set bonus. Currently your better off using the weapon Agony.

I wholeheartedly agree with you here. The fist has flat damage, which is nice, but the lack of attack speed is a travesty.

The set and supporting items lack resists. You can compensate for this by using Sash Of the Immortal Sage. The hp on it are also most welcome. I would love to use the Bladebreaker Sash, mostly for the +1 to Nightblade skills. But alas, it nukes my resists. On that note, if you could add a high end belt that specializes in poison/acid with ideally + to Nightblade that would be great. Because currently, there is not a single good belt I can find to fill that void.

The set is only 2 armor pieces, and since weapons usually don’t have resistances, it’s fairly understandable that it lacks a large amount of resists (the poison resist on the helmet is frustrating, however). I don’t agree that the supplemental items lack resists, since most of the best supplemental items for this build are MIs (which has always been the case for acid builds).

Lastly, the relic. Melediction is currently your best option. A lvl 60 relic. The lack of +class skill is painful. One would think a relic with the name Nidallal’s Outbreak would be heavily based around poison/acid. Yet that is not the case. The granted skill is decent, but I have enough active skills on my bar alrdy, a passive would be most welcome. A toggle to replace, upgrade Melediction. Currently it seems like a dead item. No sane person would use this relic for any build.

I agree with you on Nidalla’s Outbreak, but as I have seen from other threads people do like this relic for certain builds, just not acid ones.

In summary: I think the Vileblade Pact is one of the better designed sets. It has a clear purpose, and everything that it does supports that purpose. The things that I would change are A) replace the poison resist on the helmet with something more useful, and B) add attack speed to the Fist.

3

Your acid obsession feels weird to me :eek:

4

Malediction has a higher %acid bonus as well as a whopping 32-45 flat acid damage. I will take this over +1 NB and a lackluster skill with no acid damage on acid builds any day. The damage difference between these two relics for acid builds (with a substantial amount of weapon damage) is very clear. I will continue to stand by my statement that Nidalla’s Outbreak is weak for acid builds.

5

Why not add skill modifier that converts the bleeding damage(in part or whole) of circle of slaughter to poison? Currently the bleeding damage part of circle of slaughter is not that useful to a poison/acid build as it cannot be converted and few items boost both bleeding damage and acid/poison damage.

This would both fit the theme of the set and make ring of steel a good(better?) main damage skill.