I agree with all of that.
So I’ve been starting over because new machine and no cloud saves (which is fine, journey before destination). Cold Nightblade (Blade Burst) is very strong and fast through Homestead at 39. She’s pretty good. The regen+speed skill is so great.
But then last night I was moved to obliterate act one with a vitality shaman relying on Devouring Swarm for now who just got totems Storm and Wendigo right before Warden. My goodness I love this build. It’ll be even better with Oathkeeper support later for the invincible resist-debuffing summons and the ridiculous ultimate aura.
No twinking with this dude other than the level one Crucible run, which effectively just means he started at level 8 with yellow equipment and a devotion point. Absolute murder factory on Veteran.
Swarm is hilarious with devotion procs, btw. It pulses every two-ish seconds, and each pulse can proc in this case Twin Fangs from Bat. It’s yuuuuuge.
I love devouring swarm but whenever I play it it usually seems that at the end of act one it starts not being quite strong enough. I have nightmares about fighting the act one endboss, hitting him with the devouring swarm and then having to run in panicked circles like a headless chicken because it only took a teeny bit of his health off.
Oh no doubt, it’s a support skill against hard targets. But the vitality debuff aspect of it makes it a massive boost to e.g. totems.
This is my dude who just killed Warden on Veteran: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrknj3N
Probably killed Warden faster than most of my characters thanks to not losing DPS when dodging. Pretty much “keep Swarm and totems up and dodge,” which is a delightfully safe playstyle especially given all the drain from Swarm (and heal from Wendigo Totem if you’re forced to park it).
Wow, nice, you have Swarm up to 16 points. The limitation there is always mana. 16 points into Swarm takes way too much energy if you do it too early, but you have your energy built up really high by this point by investing in the base Shaman leveling. Well done.
Devouring swarm proccing Twin Fangs is something that remains powerful and useful all through the game, due to the scaling on Twin Fangs. DS itself tends to fall off once mobs have a billion hit points, and really sucks in certain places (necro). When enemies are resistant to it, it really hits a brick wall. I have made many a vitality build, there are some really fun/powerful ones.
Depending on what your second class is, you can make builds that can face tank literally everything, including bosses, until pretty late in the game. Making me want to go start a new vitality character again.
Out of all the classes, Shaman is by far my favorite starting class. There are several builds that are just flat out OP as a starter, lightning being the other one. Which reminds me…I need to get back to my lightning/vitality hybrid…
Honestly the way to go with most characters early on is to slam points into whatever active skill and gear whatever regen you need to support it. The increased power is well worth it.
Spreading yourself too thin is a recipe for disaster in Grim Dawn.
Without a doubt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a shaman because they’re awesome!
I just started playing the Reign Of Terror mod again…it’s so so good. It brings a smile to my face every time I play it. Probably my favorite mod in history, across all games.
I have never Modded Grim Dawn, I’m afraid to. There are still vanilla class combos/builds I haven’t tried yet. I just made my First Commando ever last night. Sword + Board + Fire = Awesome. Now I want a 2 handed build. I saw replies in this thread 3 days ago and fired up a new character. I didn’t even bother to read them FFS I just saw it and like a moth to a flame I was slumming in Burrwitch Estates almost instantly.
Must. Stay. Away.
This game has developed an extremely hermetic argot that ensures I will not understand basically any discussion of builds I find.
Really? The only weird stuff aside from skill names (which, I mean, c’mon) is the composite classnames (i.e. Shaman + Oathkeeper = Archon). Other than that, I honestly have no idea how you would play the game without knowing e.g. damage types.
So, you GD wonks, take a look at this, if you don’t mind, and explain a couple of things to me.
I assume the one point into Hellhound, say, is because he gets buffed up by other things like Storm Spirit and doesn’t need extra points in him directly, but what is going on with that single point in Dreeg’s Evil Eye?
That’s from an old version, you can tell that the skill tree is messed up.
I wonder if Dreeg’s Evil Eye also gets pet bonuses? It says you “Summon” Dreeg’s Evil Eye. I’ve never had a character use that beyond the early game when i decided I didn’t like it. But if the evil eye gets pet bonuses then that’s a lot of pet bonuses you’ve got on that character, including one on the belt that gives a chance of lightening striking nearby enemies.
You mean an old version of the game and the skill tree has changed enough to mess up an old grimtools build?
Yeah. You can’t take later skills without points in the earlier ones.
Grimtools encodes the build info using ids assigned to each skill, and those ids can and do shuffle with patches and changes to the trees.
Well crap.
I’m sure a few people like myself in this thread would be happy to critique any build you were to put together, though! Playing with builds in grimtools is half the fun :)
I usually start with a skill or two I want to build around, then search the devotion tree for that kind of damage and go from there.