OK, look - this isn’t a comment on whether X builds are good or bad in terms of their statistical performance. This is purely a “feels” thread - though I am willing to bet that many would agree the “feel” of the builds below correlate nearly 1:1 with the builds’ performances.
And I also want to reiterate a point of this thread’s title - this is a thread about Weapon Damage-based Vitality builds. Vitality Casters, I feel, are more or less in a fine spot. (At least in terms of their design; balance may vary.)
TL;DR The design approach to Vitality Damage isn’t “fun” in practice. More below:
Vitality is, for some reason, treated much differently from all the other damage types in Grim Dawn. Some may argue this is a good thing - that the approach to building a character should be different depending on your chosen flavor of damage. And by and large I would agree with this assessment. However, the differences of a given approach need to be supported by the game itself in order to be justified in their being different.
Damage types tend to be commonly associated with various effects. Fire, for instance, is often seen alongside OA/DA debuffs. Cold is associated with Slows, Lightning (and Pierce) with Crits. Poison is often associated with Fumble/Impaired Aim.
While most of these are over-time effects that inherently provide decent uptime of themselves due to the ease of refreshing them, Vitality often gets paired with Lifesteal (ADCtH), which is a one-and-done effect, like Lightning’s Crits. Unlike Lightning’s Crits, Lifesteal confers no “feel” on one’s gameplay - it doesn’t make the numbers on your screen larger like Crits/RR/DA debuffs do, it doesn’t change enemy behavior, and when your health bar is full (which Lifesteal inherently results in maintaining), it’s actually totally ineffectual.
Now this isn’t a “toss lifesteal” thread, it’s just pointing out the “feel” effects of the stat, and since the stat is so aligned with Vitality Damage, the “feel” effects of making a Vitality build.
There’s also a recurring trend of making speed stats, most notably Attack Speed (but sometimes even Cast Speed) harder to acquire on Vitality builds than others. They are “compensated” (
's word choice) for this in the form of having a higher presence of OA on their itemization. But OA, also, does not confer a “feel” to the way a character is played. It just makes the funny yellow numbers appear imperceptibly more often. What does confer “feel” is being fundamentally slower to act than every other same-archetype build in the game. And this isn’t a particularly great feeling.
Before I ramble on, I feel I should make clear that I’m not just talking out of my ass with this thread. I’ve tried my hand at multiple % Weapon Damage-scaling Vitality builds over the years; hell, my namesake character(s) are both Vitality Cadence builds!
(Ceno playing Cadence, go figure)
And there was a time in which I enjoyed playing these characters, in wandering about the world with 4k+ OA and infinite lifesteal.
But this is the classic problem. You slap together something with amazing stats in Grimtools and then when you go to actually use it in practice, it hits like a wet noodle or is otherwise fairly inconsistent. Most builds would kill for those OA/DA/Armor stats, or that Phys resistance, but on a Vitality Weapon Damage build, it just doesn’t amount to very much. The damage is low, because it has to be, because otherwise the healing from lifesteal would be too high. But because the damage is low, the crits are low, and because the crits are low, the clearspeed is low, and because the clearspeed is low…
…the feel is bad.
Were this some years ago, I might be singling out a single build as being problematic. But with more years of making builds like this under my belt, and having searched the forums for “Vitality” and seeing mostly casters, I’m led to believe I’m not the only one that feels this way about building around the damage type.
I found precisely one Weapon Damage focused build using Vitality recently:
But even in that build’s thread, we find this exchange at the bottom:
So even this build, which is forced into getting “creative” with an Elemental ring and Physical gloves just due to the lack of viable available options out there, and despite using (what is in my opinion) one of the most inherently-busted skills in the game, is still unable to keep up with a fairly basic, out-of-the-box implementation of a Vitality Caster from countless years ago.
Weapon Damage implementations of scaling Vitality have not kept up with their competitors, and not only has the design methodology surrounding Vitality Damage failed to demonstrate performative results, it has never been “fun” to build around or play with.
I’m beating around the bush to not address directly for the whole “compensated” meme, but to put it plainly, in no uncertain terms, Vitality Damage is not compensated for its lack of scalable damage or access to speed scaling. And I’m more inclined to call into question whether it ever could be compensated for a lack of damage or speed, because damage and speed are vital to defeating the game’s enemies and sustaining oneself with one’s lifesteal. Offensive Ability, as has been the “compensation” thus far, is insufficient, even at extreme quantities.
I mean, here’s an example. What is this item supposed to do with this cooldown reduction?
Don’t get me wrong, CDR is never a bad thing to have. But how does CDR help scale Bloody Pox, Devouring Swarm, or Eye of Reckoning? None of these skills scale with CDR. Other than providing higher uptime on Devotion procs like Dying God, I’d hazard a guess and say that 13-19% Attack/Cast Speed on this item would go a far greater distance than 13-19% CDR, or its 77-115 OA. Heck, two of the three skills that get benefits here don’t even NEED Offensive Ability at all to do any damage!
And this is just one item. Vitality itemization, particularly those that prioritize non-caster Vitality Damage, are riddled with questionable - if not nonsensical - stat allocations. It speaks volumes that the best Vitality gloves in the game are…Plagueguard Grips. A craftable item with access to Vitality/speed affixes. (And you know, those affixes still give you a bit of OA too…)
Look, we’re eight years post-release. I get it, sweeping changes are unlikely. Frankly, the fact that we’re still getting any changes to GD is wonderful. But this implementation of Vitality Damage, for attackers, barely held up in Normal difficulty when the levelcap was 50. It’s just not panning out anymore. And we can bump the numbers in question all we want, but I’m just not seeing “more lifesteal/more OA” amounting to anything of value or changing the “feel” of Vitality builds.
It certainly won’t make them more fun to me. But lessening the song & dance routine we have to do to get Vitality to appreciable speeds or damage levels might help a bit.
