Hello fellow Grim Dawn enjoyers. Here is a build I’ve been working on for a while that I’d like to show off and also get some advice on.
As soon as I saw the new Zakull’s Anima set, I knew I had to try it out on a spellbreaker. I’ve always loved shadow strike, and pairing it with well-supported TSS for a hit-and-run playstyle was highly appealing to me. SS and TSS both have a ton of crit damage natively available, and so I decided that I would try to maximize the crit damage of the build as much as possible (despite not using Mythical Night’s Embrace. Lol). I took as much crit damage as possible in my devotion tree, and access to Kraken and Berserker was a fairly large factor in my decision to use the Rimeblessed Spear MI.
Anyway, the build has performed quite well in endgame by my estimation. The aoe clear may leave a bit to be desired (chillspikes have helped mildly for clearing trash) but the single target burst damage is pretty nice. Ravager and Callagadra are fairly easy to deal with, since in any dangerous situation you can easily disengage, cast TSS, and then gap close with SS. I look forward to testing it out against Mog, Crate, and Nerf when I finally get around to doing the quest. I’m sure there’s still quite a bit more optimization left to do, and I would be open to suggestions on how to further improve the build.
Not sure if you can grab some ideas from it, but it can’t hurt to share.
The most obvious difference to me is how many points we each put into star pact. The cooldown reduction is REALLY good, don’t miss out on it. It not only affects TSS and SS, but also every devotions. Get enough of it and you can enjoy near-permanent uptime on chariot, phoenix, etc…
Nice build! Thanks for sharing. That is a solid amount of phys res on yours. Now I’m thinking maybe I should replace the Nemesis relic with Aurora…would definitely help the overall tankiness of my build. Not sure how significant the dps loss would be since he’s the one proccing blizzard.
We have the same spear affixes. Very nice
I see your point regarding star pact. I could definitely afford to move some points from overload/elemental balance and maybe phantasmal armor to max it out. While 9 additional points only gives 4% additional cdr, the flat frostburn is quite significant. I also notice you’ve softcapped elemental awakening, which has got me thinking maybe I should do the same…
Edit: okay, after trying a slightly different stat allocation it seems more points in elemental awakening is not particularly strong. While my OA is high enough that I can afford to take points out of overload, I think it’s best to leave elemental balance at 8/12 to maintain optimized crit damage while still getting some % frostburn. Keeping star pact at 22/12 for now and phantasmal armor at 10/12 to maintain capped freeze res.
It’s either/or. All 3 of these offer some measure of damage improvement… either flat frostburn, %damage, or crit… whichever fits the best for your build.
The biggest difference in how we’ve spent our points besides Star pact, is I’ve treated TSS as a “nice to have” and proccer. Every node is at just 1 point. So you’re not going to be able to sink as many points into passive buffs as me anyway, so chose the ones that make the most sense to you.
If that’s the main reason you put those points in phantasmal armor, you would get slightly better return on investment putting those points in conversion instead. It would also improve your petrify and trap resist at the same time.
Ahh yeah I see. I’m a bit torn on TSS…I could further strengthen SS by taking points out of it and investing in buffs and nightfall. If I were to do that I’d swap out the 2 piece eastern set, probably for exactly what you have. That would probably make for a more efficient build overall, since SS is doing most of the heavy lifting anyway.
Good point about conversion. I like the flat armor from phantasmal armor, but at the same time I doubt I would really notice a difference without it.
