Grim Dawn - An ARPG from Crate (ex Iron Lore aka Titan Quest devs)

I reached level 13 last night with my Spellbinder (necro + Arcanist). I hope they don’t nurf the skeletons before January or February. I think if I play a little every night, I should be able to finish the game on Veteran Normal by that time.

I’m playing a Cabalist (necro+occult) as a pure pet class. Skeletons, giant putrid thing I forget the name of now, raven, hellhound. Gameplay is basically going around waiting for them to slaughter everything and occasionally summoning them again where needed. Very zen. I like it. ;)

How well does that work on bosses?

So far, as a Necro, I have to take care of the bosses myself, while the skeletons and putrid thing is good at taking care of the little stuff.

Too early to tell. Just killed Warden, and all the bosses up to that point (Warden included) were not a problem at all. I had to quaff a couple potions at the Warden fight, though.

My skellies are much more fragile than,say, D3 summons. Also, having to summon twice (or maybe more?) to get the full complement of summons is annoying, with the cool down. Makes more sense to me to let you cast it once and have all five or whatever show up at once. But, they are kinda cool, with crossbows and stuff.

Thats to stop you from spamming them in combat.

Skellies are what keeps my Apostate alive. Sure hope they don’t nerf them. Inquisitor sigil is pretty awesome too. It’s not really a synergistic combo but I doubt I will ever get deep into ultimate level. This combo definitely seems to handle the damage spikes better than my old mad sorcerer though.

Finished the main game on normal veteran. At 50 I did Steps of Torment with some skeleton keys I had the materials accumulated for. Guess I will start the expansion.

Well, yeah, but I guess what I’m saying is that it’s a very different style of minion/pet than in other ARPGs, where often the pets are more long lasting. I’m not sure the damage they do here is worth the trade-off of their fragility.

Your skeletons die fast? After 10-15 minutes of battle, I maybe lose one or two. I think you may need to upgrade them a bit to help you stop losing them.

Oh, that’s quite possible. They are only 7/4 or 7/5 right now (first and second skill). I’m only level 22 or whatever. I am pretty sure they are fine, it’s just me that has to adjust from Diablo 3 mentality, where my pets pretty much never ever die.

Mine are 22/16. I think I lost 2 on the final boss.

Its the last skill in the skeleton line, that gives your skeletons more armor - Thats what I would beeline for a bit, if I were you. Or rearrange your points a bit.

I reached level 15 on my Necro last night. The farther I go into the Necro, the more I think I’ll ignore my Arcanist second class. I really like the Necro abilities and want to focus on those for the normal/veteran difficulty run.

I got rid of the skill that makes enemies run away and the skill that slowly drains health from enemies. The latter seems too slow to be effective or satisfying. And the former works fine on little enemies, but all enemies with a star over their heads seem immune to it. And those are the enemies that always end up killing me, so to my mind that makes it a worthless skill. Gone. So now at level 15, I’m focused on my skeletons and Bone harvest for my active skill that I use constantly on the right mouse button. What an awesome skill this is.

Bone Harvest:

  • Most importantly it causes an earth-shaking visual effect in an arc in front of me where bones come out of the ground to hit enemies
  • Its damage is mostly based on what weapon I’m using in my main hand. Therefore it will keep scaling up even if I neglect it on points, but just keep upgrading my weapon instead.
  • It has a chance to terrify enemies as well once you take a secondary skill, another reason to ignore the Ill Omen skill
  • It is an area of effect skill with a pretty darn large area of effect even to start off with.

What’s not to like about Bone Harvest? It’s freakin’ cool. And it’s a great skill for giving my Necro something active to do while my skeletons are doing their thing.

By the way, one of the benefits of Grim Dawn not being randomized like Diablo 3 and other ARPGs (one of the only benefits) is that certain parts of the map can be bellwethers in comparing characters against one another.

There’s a spot on the map before you reach the Estates where you go into a cave, and the boss there is so strong compared to everything else you’ve been fighting that he kicks your ass. No matter how strong a character I’ve made, I always get my ass kicked by this guy at this point in the game. Obviously you can level up and come back if you remember later. But anyway, I reached this cave last night with the Necromancer. And predictably he killed me repeatedly. BUT!!! But wait. I didn’t give up. I kept summoning skeletons and concentrating on running like hell. He kept killing my putrid summons and my skeletons but I kept resummoning them and running in circles around the area. And eventually I got him!

Woohoo! So score one for the Necro over all my other characters.

I might have to make an exception for Word of Pain. The second skill in the Word of Pain chain is Word of Agony, which just has you doing more damage. But the third skill in that chain is Death Sentence, which adds one of my obsessions in this game: it lowers resistances on enemies. At max level, it lowers pierce resistance by 25%. So I think that should be an awesome skill for any gun-user, enhancing the pierce damage that guns do to enemies. It might not be satisfying to do a debuff with almost no visual flair. But it’s pretty satisfying to blow enemies away with guns, and it looks like this skill will help you do that.

I love that the more points you invest in the skeletons the more powerful they look (as well as are). I started noticing my ranged guys are sometimes skeleton mages, for example and now that I’ve got 16 points in it, the melee guys look badass indeed.

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Just spent an hour going over my occultist/inquisitor (Deceiver) in an effort to make build that doesn’t suck for once. At level 28 it started showing some weakness in the Arkovian Undercity. Not horrible, although the boss guarding the shrine did manage to kill me once (got stunned). Mostly it was just taking far too long cutting down some of the bigger skeletons. So I think I am switching form a dual pistol, heavy cold build to dual pistols, heavy fire, with a strong hellhound. Something to tank for me while I blast them. My worry though, is having a back up to fire. Do any of the big bosses have a strong fire resistance?

I still need to figure out the right constellations as well. For me that’s one of the flaws of the game, finding the right constellations is too time consuming.

No doubt. I made Inquisitor my second class to put points only in the two ranged-weapon procs, as I’m dual-wielding pistols. I should be able to get to the last skelly thing soon enough I suppose.

The Warden kicked my ass a couple of times. But the joke’s on him! I’m more immortal than him! Mua-ha-hah! Now I’m hunting pesky humans on the West side of Devil’s Crossing. I just hit level 24. Necromancer continues to be great fun. I love that the Necro’s base stats grow equally between Physique and Spirit. So it’s a character designed be good at kicking ass physically, not just via magic. I have no problems always having enough Physique to get the latest biggest two handed weapon or big piece of armor that’s meant for Soldiers.

In fact, I think that will be a great future combination to try: Necro+Soldier. I believe that’s called a Death Knight in the game. I kind of wish I could take back my choice of an Arcanist as my second class.

Anyone playing the Crucible? I am finding it to be a good test of character builds. I was doing really bad with my cold based Deceiver, refined the build to a few key skills and switched to fire and it made a huge difference in the Crucible. Plus, it’s pretty fun. Can’t imagine getting to 100+ rounds though.

I admit I bounced off this back when it was released, only got my Demolitionist up to like level 23 and gave up. So I rolled a new Necromancer today and damn if it isn’t fun. I think I just dislike aiming. :p

Maxed out my skellies, am I limited to 3?
Also, I don’t recall leveling being so fast, was that changed?

Looking at these builds, Neco+Demo seems interesting.