Vitality -RR% on Nightblade's Night's Chill

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
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Recent test patch developments saw several resist reductions granted to masteries and some of them revoked and then granted again but in a different flavour.
Disclaimer: personally I think current class balance is in a good place in terms of resist reduction availability and no class was really lacking on that front (except for Battlemage where -rr% aura can’t be added). In my opinion Nightblade is one of the strongest and most versatile masteries that didn’t really need more diversity and more power in its skills. If anything Vitality damage could use some help by target buffing existing archetypes, like Ritualists and Conjurers and Cabalists etc.
Personal bias aside tho, let’s try to break down how this addition can (or can’t work). Easiest way to do it would be analysing existing Vitality Nightblades:

Demonslayer

Feedback after rr addition

Buffed back to the top20 level this test patch this build absolutely slays. Here are some videos with its current performance as a Reaper (before Vitality RR addition): 1, 2, 3.

Grimtools before rr addition

As you can see the points are really tight because set occupies weapon/helmet/amulet slot while not having +1 to NB. Now given that set is getting nerfed (minus projectile to PB) with this RR addition there is no way you can skip this new RR now (and in general in GD -rr% in masteries and devotions are pretty much arbitrary obligatory). Now here is how it looks with Night’s Chill for rr:

Grimtools after rr addition

The only thing that make sense to sacrifice are Anatomy of Murder (ironically a signature Vitality Nightblade passive) and Spectral Binding. In the end, much less hp and less OA and Human racial for maybe a bit of a damage gain because of RR addition. So essentially build is becoming more glassy with this change while maybe gaining some damage (but that’s not a given).

Here is another Demonslayer, Witch Hunter, done by @romanN1. Here is how he planning to solve this point deficiency. As you can see, flat/%damage from Solael’s Witchfire and %damage from Anatomy had to be sacrificed. And because relic had to be changed to generic pet +1 to all relic a lot of OA disappeared.

Conclusion

With minus projectile and the way Demonslayer set operates (a lot of kills are happening outside of Veil’s of Shadow radius) it’s like that the aoe damage will go down while single target damage might stay at the same level against an average mob and go up against resistant. However leech and tank will probably decrease (loss of a projectile and some the defensive passives sacrifice) and build will become worse overall. There will always be a very annoying problem with skill points as this addition requires existing builds to find 15-20 skill points out of somewhere. And adding +3 to Night’s Chill to the set won’t help this problem one bit.

Morgoneth Reaper

Now this is a second and last “mainstream” Vitality Nightblade. I made one long ago and although it’s outdated in terms of some item choices and maybe devotions/components in essence it would be the same

Grimtools before rr addition

Now this build will gain a bit less from Night’s Chill Vitality RR as it already had -18% Vitality RR to VoS from the set which is going to be reduced to -8%. Now here we have many more skill points to spend.

Grimtools after rr addition

Bone Harvest was the first candidate to go as it’s more of a support skill here. Overall rr gain is worth it.

Conclusion

Despite net gain being “just” -18% rr this particular build will definitely benefit from this change. But if the goal was to buff this particular build it could’ve been done by increasing the existing -rr% modifier to VoS.

Exotic melees

Now here is where the well of Vitality Nightblades is beginning to dry up as we are getting into the meme/gimmicky builds territory.

Trickster (sketch made by @banana_peel)

Grimtools

Getting everything you want is not easy on this build. Even if you change that juicy green helmet to generic Ravager it still looks like it won’t have enough points for VoS and Night’s Chill. And even if it does it won’t help the build match because there is a lot of clunkiness when playing such melee: you have to stay in Wendigo Totem’s radius for flat damage buff and use Swarm which is less than ideal for any melee. Plus the biggest problem of any Vitality melee - aoe will be present here as well.

Witch Hunter with Blade Spirits support (sketch made by @banana_peel)

Grimtools

A rough sketch but as you can see it’s literally impossible to get enough points for everything including some crucial stuff. Not to mention build will have to use a weak aa from Beronath component.

Currently I don’t have more examples since there aren’t many Vitality Nightblades to begin with. But based on the data I gathered I can humbly offer the following

Suggestions:

  • Scrap this Vitality RR to Nightblade idea. Existing mainstream Vitality Nightblades are doing well without this additional rr. Adding rr will make skill distribution for Demonslayers very awkward. Morgoneth Reaper can be helped by increasing -rr% to VoS on the mod it already has. When it comes to melees Nightblades are overrepresented and imo it’s better to help out existing Vitality melees rather than shoehorn couple of more gimmicky/memey ones.
  • Don’t scrap this Vitality RR, but then all existing Vitality Nightblades should get much more points from the items they are currently using. Adding +3 to Night’s Chill to Demonslayer won’t make a dent in a sudden “Find 15 skill points” problem it will face, set will need +1 to NB somewhere. The downside is currently it’s a very unique set enabling a very powerful Nightblade build (several builds actually) without generic rr in mastery. It will lose a bit of its flavour plus adjusting it with more skill points might power creep it further.
  • Vitality RR should be added to VoS itself. This will help with the skill points problem a bit. Description can be changed accordingly.

Now, do you have examples of existing Vitality Nightblades that can or can’t be helped by this upcoming change? Share them and share your thoughts on the topic!

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I suppose this could be a nice change if tried spammy vitality bone harvest (nightblade as dual wielding enabler + exactly this RR);

or…

spammy vitality primal strike with that shaman set “Wildheart Vanguard” / “Nightbringer”, where we also get total speed from burst as well that sweet new thingy on veil of shadow. It would open another door than picking harbinger of souls for exactly that or occultist, I guess.

This seems a more logical addition than chaos RR for sure, where I doubted a few things. This could work out if other builds did receive additional skill points for the VoS or itself as you suggest. I think I could get a hang of this change.

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You probably meant obligatory not arbitrary…

Otherwise I agree that skill points are an issue. RR change this patch created more problems than it solved.

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As I’m certain you know by now, we’re not big on hypothetical feedback.

The build is not up yet. All the changes are not up yet.

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Yea, but dreaming is free.

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This is pretty straightforward… Many skillpoints missing suddenly…

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Well skill points thing is not hypothetical, it’s based on your changelog. Existing Vitality Nightblades overview is also not hypothetical. Of course conclusions of their future performance are a bit hypothetical, but it’s not really hard to predict what is gonna happen to all those two and a half Vitality Nightblades based on the changelog and their existing performance and my experience.

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In my opinion, vit RR is welcomed to enable more builds, but sadly there is no item support and not enough skill point support for vitality nightblades. On the other hand bleed RR would be welcomed since bleeding builds are far behind and there is item support for that. Forgot to mention, its also thematic.

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Yeah we’ll have to test the builds to see the performance. But the skillpoint problem is usually solved in planning the build, and it can be seen before the changes are in the game.

For reference, most cold, acid and pierce Nightblades are only able to find enough skillpoints (and sometimes they can’t) because of the accesss to items with a lot of +skills and +all skills.

Since NB was not originally designed with core vitality support, there’s just not enough items with “pluses” in the game that would allow you to comprise a complete build.

There is no NB relic that supports vitality.
There is no melee vitality item with +1 to NB.
There is no NB belt that supports vitality, and the green one converts it to cold.
There is no leg. ring that has any points for melee NB.

The support is so scarce that you won’t even go past hypothetical with a lot of NB classes here. Builds are tested in the actual game but they need to be conceptualized first. So when you start conceptualizing a build and run out of skillpoints before even getting to Night’s Chill, the concept dies before it was born, and no in game data will come out of this.

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I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand the point of this build. It has ABB and vit blade spirits, but ABB doesn’t do anything for the blade spirits. Apart from that there’s nothing damage wise other than a bunch of flat? Am I missing something?

I don’t have access to the playtest, but I was tinkering yesterday to see if I could find anything vitality and came up with a reaper: Reaper, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
No idea if it’s any good, but it might work. At least it has ~150% effective adcth on normal attacks and >200% on ring of steel :rofl:

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All of this points to bleeding RR being better for NB…

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Abb is to support melee attack, for flat in other words. You need a lot of flat to make Beronath Strikes viable on Vitality.

You could definitely improve it quite a bit with min-maxing, but in general RoS won’t be as hot without Bloobriar amulet.

Couldn’t have put it better myself

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sad hypothetical vitality noises
image

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Here is another random calc example, vit RoS

I want to play vit RoS with the daggers that support it. I take Keeper for rr% and cdr to make the end RoS cooldown somewhat serviceable. I then take Blade Spirit support cause vitality melee range builds don’t work without AoE support and this one is the best for buck you can get here.

I take LA and Dual Blades for RoS flat… and that’s it. I don’t take RF filler, i don’t take any WPS for sustain ibetween RoS hits, i don’t take Circle of Slaughter, Ascension, Resilience. And i still have no point to even cap the most vital passives. I can replace the helm with Ravager here and lose cdr, BS damage, cold conversion, important racial, and at that point the build will just look like a big downgrade to pierce or cold RoS.

And it’s all logical cause vitality gear doesn’t support Nightblade.

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Sorry if I missed something obvious but I do not understand why you picked Oathkeeper as the second mastery over Necromancer.

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I take Keeper for rr% and cdr to make the end RoS cooldown somewhat serviceable

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Because Oathkeeper has Path of the Three and that has CDR.

I’ll say that it’s odd to complain about Necro getting cold RR when cold reaper is strong, but then ask for Bleed RR to Nightblade when Trickster is already a pretty powerful bleed class combo (not directed at the OP, just at some posts i have seen here).

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Hmm, right. An entire mastery for -0.22s. I’m not too keen on this kind of min-maxing but thank you for explaining!

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The chaos RR to nightblade made some sense to me because of berserker. I thought that if this chaos RR was deemed too OP or problematic to balance, it would be either reduced or removed. Swapping the chaos RR to vitality seems like an admission that there was no great overarching plan to solidify nightblade’s identity as a chaos class and increase its synergy with zerker–as if this was a long-standing desire by the devs–and strongly suggests we are operating under the assumption that we must give nightblade some RR, and the only thing left to decide is which damage type to infuse it with.

I question this assumption.

In the necromancer situation, cold damage is a considerable part of the mastery, and cold RR to ill omen seems to have become a necessary copy/paste for an increasing amount of itemization. Adding cold RR to necro seemed like a way to cut out the middleman. I thought that nerfing the builds that rose to the top as a result of this change would be the “cost” of this business, but that wouldn’t be a big deal because, presumably, these builds would be nerfed back down to the level they were before this change–if not, at least, a little better. The acid RR buff seemed like a way to infuse a greater variety of acid builds into the game, since there is a decent amount of acid necromancer already. It also seemed like a good chance to finally make radaggan make sense.

However as others have pointed out in this thread, there is a dearth of vitality nightblade itemization outside of two sets. It is not clear to me how vitality nightblade will rise as an archtype without more help.

I expect that arguments against vitality RR because of this problem will not have the intended effect though, since I suspect that Zantai is more than happy to support previously non-existent archetypes through RR buffs in this manner as long as the RR is at least tangential to the mastery’s identity.

My point is that until now, vitality damage has not been a particularly emphasized part of nightblade outside of two sets–in stark contrast to the necromancer situation. Why should we play musical chairs RR with nightblade and settle on vitality? Just because it has very little support? What is the justification for the assumption that we have to select from damage types in nightblade and slap RR onto the class? Why does that assumption make sense?

Regardless, I find it somewhat ironic that some people who were decrying the initial round of RR buffs as unwarranted power creep are now advocating for bleed RR to nightblade over vitality. I personally prefer bleed RR to nightblade because I think that given the amount of support for bleed nightblade in the game, that damage type does constitute a greater part of nightblade’s identity than vitality damage. However there will be many VERY strong bleed nightblade builds that suddenly appear which will have to be dealt with.

I don’t mind the powercreep as much as others; it just isn’t clear to me what the motivating reason to slap some RR onto nightblade is–given the current state of nightblade–and particularly if there wasn’t a plan or justification for why that RR was there to begin with.

PS.

There is this skill in the bottom right corner of nightblade called “Blade Trap”. No, really, there is! It isn’t even a hypothetical skill, although you might not know it by the mechanical shortcoming it has and the amount of itemization it has received.

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I’ll probably say an unpopular opinion, but maybe we just leave NB as it is? it’s probably the strongest mastery in game rn, and a ton of gear was designed around it supporting 3 damage types (well, 4 if we count bleed), and adding sth like Vitality RR will result in overhauling a shitton of items, which might be simply not worth it.

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