That ice bomb trap is so fun and so deceptively effective since it actually freezes enemies briefly, so you can shoot at them for longer. On paper it doesn’t look that great in terms of damage, but even one point in it is soooo effective because it helps keep enemies at bay.
Also, when you get to the fire version of that spell, called Rune of something else, don’t forget to use that as well. Again, the damage numbers on paper don’t look great, but it is really fun because it explodes all over the place, and it stuns enemies briefly, which is again something that makes it deceptively good.
Yeah, pure Inquisitor. I don’t theorycraft as much as you guys but I hope the folks at Crate have found ways to compensate for the stat deficit of single classing. Anyway, in non-hardcore I don’t worry about it too much, since survivability isn’t a life-or-death matter, and my pure classes have done fine (my only toon to complete Act IV on Ultimate was a pure-class Arcanist).
In the case of the Arcanist, it’s easy to spot how a pure class can do fine on base stats. One of the abilities you can invest in increases your spirit, and another (mental alacrity?) reduces the spirit cost of all your spells (and as a bonus, also increases your casting speed).
One of these days I want to try an Arcanist that uses that replicating missiles spell. Enrique Peña Nieto’s Replicating missile, I think it’s called. It’s a tree that can be a huge point sink, which is why I’ve never tried it. It seems like an all-or-nothing tree. 16 points in the base skill, and then 12 points in each of 3 subsequent skills in that tree that affects Pena Nieto’s Replicating missile launchers. That’s 52 points in order to max out that skill, and then another 12 into an exclusive skill to enhance it. So that’s 64 points to max it out, total. And then there’s other skills you can get to enhance aether damage and total damage. So add another 24 points to max out the damage of that skill, makes 88 points to max out the missiles.
Edit, all this talk made me want to make such a character: Spellbinder build. Almost a pure Arcanist, I just couldn’t resist going just a little bit into Necromancer to get the Aether debuff.
If you’re going to play a “pure” class, take another mastery and just put points into the mastery, you’ll still have more than enough points to go around. You are seriously gimping yourself without those mastery bonus points, because of the way scaling and % works in GD. Just the base stats you get alone from taking a mastery to 50 are huge.
It’s very hard to argue with putting points into the soldier mastery, and at least taking the 10 points into military conditioning, that’s a win for any possible class. If you try to do a solo mastery, you’ll end up with very low hit points, which will get you one shot by ultimate bosses pretty routinely. Regardless of what skills/build you have, there is a point in GD where you just need to have a certain number of hit points.
For example, if you just went straight arcanist to 50 points mastery, you’d end up with 3500 hitpoints, if you take the soldier mastery as well, take it to 50, and only invest in military conditioning, you end up with 7000 hitpoints. Keep in mind that military conditioning also is a % boost, so any items you add to your character that boost health or phy, exponentially scale, this is why it’s so important.
I would also add to this, that the higher difficulties you get into, the more defense in general becomes the probable cause of success or failure. It’s pretty easy to get through elite with glass cannon-y kinds of builds, but it starts to get rough because things just start to live longer in ultimate, and the house of cards tends to fall apart.
Also tried an arcanist today. Now I can kinda see why alts are fun. Sure the maps and quests are the same, but the toys you get to use to do all the killing are wonderfully varied.
I’ve always derived a lot of pleasure out of tinkering with and figuring out builds, as well as trying out new skills. GD is one of the best games I’ve ever played for that, just because there are so many combinations to try. I usually burn out on games quickly once I’ve got a handle on everything, thankfully I keep learning things about GD every day.
Okay, so I’m feeling particularly stupid and could use some help. I’ll also gladly accept snark, as long as a little help is in there as well.
I’m trying with my 360 controller, and for the life of me I can’t figure out how to attack with it. I can grab the mouse and whack away no problem, but I’m heading over that first bridge from Devil’s Crossing and I can only serve as a speed bump against those 1hp zombies. The options menu only has keybindings, so no help to find there.
I believe you have to enable it in the options, then you have to go to skills, with the gamepad, hit Y (on the 360 gamepad at least) to select skills, then use the wheel to select skills for the triggers and buttons. It took me a while to figure out too.
So in the “you can actually do that” category of things you can do in GD… There are some components you can put on both weapons, shields, and caster offhands …like…Enchanted flint for instance. You can actually put a completed version on both your main hand and offhand, and run BOTH of them as buffs at the same time, and get the full value from both on your character.
Enchanted flint completes to give you:
4-6 Fire Damage
+25% Fire Damage
+25% Burn Damage
10% Physical Damage converted to Fire Damage
Granted Skills
Burning Weapons (Granted by Item)
Empower your attacks with a blazing flame. This ability must be toggled to maintain its effect.
10 Fire Damage
15% Chance of 135 Burn Damage over 3 Seconds
+75% Fire Damage
+75% Burn Damage
150 Energy Reserved
Bonus to All Pets
8 Fire Damage
15% Chance of 135 Burn Damage over 3 Seconds
+75% Fire Damage
+75% Burn Damage
Now this is pretty darn good when you run it as any kind of fire based damage character, but it’s absolutely insane when you run it as a pet class. Not only do you get the flat 8 fire damage per pet, which is huge when it gets multiplied by all the various pet buffs, but you also get a stacked 150% fire and burn damage. As an example, if you have the base hellhound, and the familiar with the 100% elemental buff going, the hellhound base does about 230 damage, with the bird running it does about 460, with both of these running it does over 1000. When you apply that kind of scaling to a build that uses a lot of pets, like a skelly necro for instance, the damage boost you get from this is just insane.
I was really surprised to find out you could stack these, and it seems like an oversight to me, I wonder if it’s actually a bug? I did a bunch of testing yesterday, and you do indeed get both bonuses in all facets.
Same thing with flat damage on dual pistols or fast attacking things as well. Purifier with the demo skill fire strike, into these buffs, creates a HUGE amount of flat damage that is quite fun.
as far as inventory management, i’ve been using the grim dawn item assistant
it is a third party “plugin”, where you put any weapons you want to store into the shared stash tab 5, and it deposits it into the plugin (easy to search through, can filter by weapon and armor traits, etc.). Then, you can offload it to the game with one click, and it appears in your shared stash tab #4. Some people may not love this, as it is an infinite stash, but I just use it for legendaries or special weapons for now. quite nice.
But wait, it’s an ability you have to toggle (Burning Weapons). Are you saying if you’ve got it on two items, you can toggle that ability on twice? Doesn’t it just toggle it off when you try to toggle it on a second time?
Also it’s interesting to see that they made Enchanted Flint so much more powerful since I last looked at it before the expansion came out. It used to do this:
4-6 Fire Damage
+25% Fire Damage
+25% Burn Damage
10% Physical Damage converted to Fire Damage
Fire Aura (Granted by Item)
35 Energy Cost
+150 Energy Reserved
15 Meter Radius
5 Fire Damage
10% Chance of 75 Burn Damage over 3 Seconds
+35% Fire Damage
+35% Burn Damage
Has anyone had luck with autoattack-focused builds? I see all those abilities at the top of every class that trigger off default attacks, and they always look cool, but if I’m just firing off throwing knives or whatever, I’m never going to trigger them.
Also, I’ve been getting a ton of lightning gear and want to try out a lightning character. Shaman seems necessary, but I’m torn between Inquisitor and Demolitionist as the other class. I guess I could just try both.
You can usually tell pretty easily which abilities count as default attacks because they show up as options on left-click. Plus if something is not a default attack, it’s usually something mentioned in the skill tree. Like the lightning attack that the Shaman does (Primal Strike), it has a little side skill modifier thing (Thunderous Strike) that specifically mentions that if you get that, it will not be used as a default skill, meaning none of the auto-attacks will trigger off of it anymore.
As for using those, yeah, I love using those as little bonus attacks off my default attack. My Warder (Soldier + Shaman), who was my first character in the game, triggered those things a lot. And my Purifier (Inquisitor + Demolitionist) also triggered those things a lot. I think those are the two characters where I used the auto-attacks a lot. I can’t think of any other characters of mine that used them.
By coincidence, I just played my Vindicator most of the way through Act 1 last night. Only the Warden left to go. Even though I chose Inquisitor as my second class, honestly i’m mostly only using the Shaman. I just got the Storm totem finally, and this is the first time I’ve used the Storm totem in the game, and it is awesome. So the Shaman is the star of the Lightning skills for sure, and even though I’m using Inquisitor as my second because I’m going with 2-handed shotguns, I think a Demolitionist might be better as a second now that I’m looking at the tree. You could get Grenado and turn all that physical damage into lightning damage, which could be crazy.
Edit, this got me fiddling around with the possibilities: Shaman + Demo = Elementalist. Great name for lightning god. I’d love to make this soon.
Yes!! There are many skills in the game that work this way as well, I think anything that can be put on both a weapon and an offhand. You’ll have 2 separate icons listed when you look at your skills list, and can slot both of them and activate both of them.
I think Elementalist looks good. Definitely giving that a try.
I want to try a Purifier that uses the Demo’s basic attack replacement (Fire Strike, I think) with dual pistols and support abilities afforded by the Inquisitor.
