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.
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.
Nope - level up “Undead Legion” and you’ll get more. To give you an idea, I have mine at level 3 and my summon limit is now 5. HOWEVER, each time you summon your skellies, you only get three at a time (so I’d cast it twice to get my full complement).
Crafted my first mythical relic, Nemesis, for my Nightblade.
Pretty cool. The pet it summons is no joke.
My Apostate has 8 skeletons and a fiend and I’m loving them. They’ll sure be nerfed, although without them I think I’d be nothing but butter for my opponents. At level 33, I’ve died once to some random mob dropping flaming boulders on me but have a much easier time with the higher level ‘boss’ encounters. I’m dual-wielding pistols, and the range with the pets as distraction is all that keeps me from being toast.
I’m in the same boat here with my Apostate. Resistances make such a huge difference. If you have 0 resistance to a particular attack that a hero or boss mob has, you will have a tough time. I try to keep some yellow/green armor pieces with decent resistance to the various types and go to the locker for them if I get wiped and it’s obvious why. Green Acid or Poison is my bane. Also, you can buy some recipes with vendors like Devil’s Crossing and Rovers to get enhancements/augments for some key resists like Aether and Chaos.
The terrain on my path to Malmouth has been really cool. There is a bog area with huge fallen statues.
I really do wish blues and purples dropped with more frequency and that there was an algorithm to help me with sets and pieces that are under-powered. RNG Goddess has been fickle lately.
What difficulty are you playing at? You get a lot at the higher levels. My shared stashed is almost completely full with blues and as few purples from playing Expert and Ultimate difficulty. Read you can get some purples once your over level 100 in the crucible as well.
Ah maybe that explains it. I’m level 56 normal Veteran doing the expansion material.
I think at that point in the game, I only had one purple which was a drop from the Act IV boss. End of the Malmouth got me another purple, and since moving onto Elite, I have picked up one further purple.
What is a little annoying with the blue drops is that sometimes I’m getting low level blues dropping. That seems wholly inconsistent with what I remember from Titan Quest. I do think soon I need a Grim Dawn vault or something to easily manage what is a largeish shared stash, only because I like to keep one of every blue I acquire. Always tough choices as to which stats I value most when they vary.