Vitality Weapon Damage "Feels Bad"

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” (:zantai:'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.

image

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 :zantai: 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.

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for WD vitality builds, replace adcth with life leech DoT. This actually gets multiplied by %weapon damage, so it’s helpful for phat cadence hits. It’s also less strong than adcth (hitting a monster with 1 hp with high adcth, will give you the full heal, hitting a 1hp monster with high life leech dot with get you… 1 hp).
Z will shoot it down, but I’ve grown more and more fond of this type after experimenting with it, as casters with “little %wd”, typically cant abuse the leech as well as they can with adcth.
As for how it feels… I guess you could go around slapping monsters and rack up more and more leech as you go around.

wanted to dig up some old videos of me playing vit cadence DK but luckily I have none. tho maybe I’ll try sth like this to see how it fares, even if I know that it fares bad.

another working WD-based vitality build that I forgot about is Vitality FS Defiler, tho it took a giga-buffed weapon and probably the strongest vit set, and still I had to sell all of my pants and a piece of soul to get all good stats and resists (and then it’s still could be better since it’s a freaking Defiler with 0 res or cc-res).

I have several concerns with vit damage, however.

  • the first and the most obvious one - the best vitality gloves for a melee/caster (unless one uses DB or Dark One ones, lol) are Emberguard Gloves. I recently played vit dee and, well, it looked like this: Conjurer, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator.
  • another itemization problem - outside of Bloodknight set, there’s nothing you can go with on… somewhat exotic setups. Vit Cadence - here you go. Vit FS - sure, slap that bad boy on. Vit EoR - ye, you guessed right, it’s BK time again. and it’s not only the set being that good, it’s just it has no alternatives. And one of the reasons is that skellies from amulet give one crucial thing - AoE. this brings us to the third problem.
  • vitality damage has almost no AoE. when everyone and their mom has some kind of it, vit still has none. it’s very short on devo procs and none of them add to that AoE. this is mostly melee problem, since casters can play RE, SoC, Vit Totems and etc and etc. melee has virtually zero AoE besides wps and Bloodknight skellies, if one happens to use the set.
  • severe lack of CC resists. speaks of itself, I guess. you’re almost forced to go frozen hearts + chains of Oleron to have any kind of trap/freeze/petrify res.

Probably I’ll add sth more if I try or remember sth else.

EDIT: remembered one more. Devouring swarm exists.

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Whenever I tried vitality melee it was always squishier than it should be when one looks at its stats…

I have these 2 h melee builds

Cadence Death Knight Death Knight, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

Primal Strike Conjurer Conjurer, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

Primal Strike Ritualist Ritualist, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

Primal Strike Warder Warder, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

They are SR 80-85 builds but squishier… Warder is fine but it has lower damage. It can sometimes do SR 90.

when if you “need” 50-100% more weapon flats/fatansy setup for a vitality weapon attacker to feel “ok”, it’s probably safe to say something is wrong/the “compensation” is off :sweat_smile:

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I only have one horse in this race, some homebrew Vit Oppressor using Righteous Fervor.
I also noted the lack of attack speed on purple items, but since I love green items, not a huge deal for me.

What I noticed is that the procs from gear and devotions are less impressive, visually and impact-wise, than any elemental or Acid/Pierce procs.

  • Fire: Things explode, meteors rain from the sky.
  • Cold: Often a blue circle, of some kind, blue projectiles flying outwards etc.
  • Lightning: Just lightning. Maybe even a bit much sometimes.
  • Acid: Often green goo, green spikes, green novas.
  • Pierce: Spikes flying around, maybe the least visually impactful.

  • Vitality? Usually a faint purple-ish glowy symbol on some monsters, indicating a debuff. Sometimes a purple wave goes out.

The other procs can often kill trash mobs and that’s a nice “Hey, it did something” moment.
The DoT/pseudo-DoT nature of some vitality procs means, things don’t usually die from them or don’t die on-screen.
Some other procs can also destroy terrain, urns, crates. Vitality, not so much. Can’t debuff a furniture.


Then I tried 2x Rings of Basti on the same build.

Holy smokes, what a glow-up:
BastiOrbs

Build performance: Measurably worse.
No attack speed on the ring and a set of skills that isn’t suited for weapon damage builds.
But most importantly, missing the RR procs from Cursebearer/Voidheart.

But it felt so much better to run around and slay monsters like this.

okay, so I wasted about 15 minutes of my life playing this good ol’ abomination of a melee build:

(it’s vit cadence DK for those who don’t dare to open the link)

how it feels tho?

against Ravager - bad. maybe it’s the lack of RR but I’d say that any other build with these stats and deez nuts ADctH numbers would steamroll Ravager pretty easy (I’d ask in that case for a bit more OA). but truth is that against big chonky boss this one feels very volatile.

against Crucible - that’s a pretty insufferable experience since terrify does its job and mobs start bouncing around.

against SR - it’s ok, I guess. but definitely lacks some punch.

overall - cadence lacks punch. there are simply no mods for this one. these swords btw has an abundance of AS, it’s overcapped by a lot. full phys conversion is ok, but I guess I’d also ask for either full ele>vit conversion or, uhm, increasing flat RR on WPS to a level when one can skip it in devos. (it’s a single-RR vit melee build, what can even go wrong at that point?)

what if build gets “50%” added chaos conversion(somewhere) and the devos go abom instead? :thinking:

won’t be much different
you can already have 50-60% chaos>vit conversion from the belt

EDIT: just did a quick Ravager rest, abom is 1:48. I guess that’s it.

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