Weapon switch builds. Who's got 'em?

[salvor]

@WyreZ

If you have an item equipped that gives modifiers to a buff skill (like Defender of the Three, the shield that gives +6% phys res to Blood of Dreeg) and you cast the skill, you get the benefits of the equipped item for the rest of the duration of that particular cast. So if you equip the shield, cast blood of dreeg, remove the shield - you still get that added 6% benefit to your build for the duration of that cast. This means that you could minmax a character by stacking modifiers on a skill on your weapons, so when you rebuff, you switch weapons, get all the benefits of that, switch back to your main fighting weapons and continue. This is terribly exciting news.

This is not true, the only thing that is preserved on a weaponswap is duration, cooldown and the skill level. Skill modifier buffs are not preserved. If you don’t believe me, take any reaper. dualwield bargol’s core, open your third character page (to see physres), cast call of the grave (you will see your physres increase), then swap and see bonus physres drop. What’s interesting that the moment you swap back the physres will increase again.

I’ve played some builds that utilise weaponswap, but in my experience it’s important not to be full overboard with it. I think the only builds that actually get better by having weaponswap are some of the arcanists that swap for mirror duration.

The best example is this build by mad_lee [1.1.7.0] Green Lantern: 5:45m Crucible Gladiator 150-170, easy SR 75-76 Aether Lightning caster Spellbinder [vid][c+][sr+].

The build already has a lot of bonus skillpoints in devastation that it can’t use because of a 2hander and almost has permanent mirror-mark uptime and it doen’t use any permanent auras. If you want, you can turn it into a weaponswap build, for example doing something like this Spellbinder, Level 100 (GD 1.1.9.1) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator . Now it will have permanent mark-mirror cycle and capped devastation.