Well, Grim Dawn has officially been out for about a month now. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've was an early adopter back when Crate Entertainment still had the game in Kickstarter. I played around with a few of it's alpha and beta builds, but I hadn't given it a serious look until it came out. After playing around with it a bit these past few weeks, I've decided to have a go at developing my own character build.
As I also mentioned in a previous post, I don't consider myself particularly good at ARPG games. I'm open to any constructive criticism or other input as to my design choices. Up until now I've always pulled my ARPG character builds off of the web, finding one I liked that somebody else had done and copying it. This is my first attempt at flying solo in this regard.
Introducing Balthus the Conjurer. Or as I prefer to call him: Balthus the Smash-Your-Dreams-With-a-Hammer-er.
Like it's predecessor Titan Quest, Grim Dawn lacks a traditional class system. Instead, it has what they call a "Mastery System". A Mastery is a set of skills that follow a certain character archetype. The current Grim Dawn Mastery choices are as follows:
Soldier - Melee Tank
Demolishionist - Ranged Phsyical and Fire DPS
Occultist - Summoning, DoTs, Chaos and Acid DPS
Arcanist - Traditional Mage, Elemental DPS
Nightblade - Melee DPS
Shaman - Hybrid Physical and Magic Melee DPS
None of the Mastery choices are limited to those specific descriptions, but those are the archetypes they most lend themselves to. Depending on which Mastery Skills you have, where you put your base stat points, and which "Devotions" you choose, you can make any Mastery serve any roll. And there's another thing - You get to pick two.
The idea is that you can find skills in two different Mastery's and take advantage of synergies between them. The game determines the name of your character class based on which two Mastery choices you make. Balthus here is a combination Occultist and Shaman, which the game calls a "Conjurer". Contrary to what you might think, he actually does very little conjuring and does a lot of smashy hammering.
Hulk Approved
This character build is an example of classic Spencer Schaepman build philosophy (I suppose now it should be called "Three Second Rush" build philosophy), which is "I don't always hit you, but when I hit you, you're dead." It combines the Occultists chaos damage and attack speed buffs with the Shamans improved two handed weapon damage. Both skill sets add bleeding damage to attacks as well, which is a nice bonus. All class skills are focused in damage dealing, all Stat points and Devotion points are dedicated to survival. Heavy armor and heavy weapons are the name of the game here.
As of right now, Balthus is level 22, having just defeated the first story boss, Warden Krieg. I am playing on Veteran Difficulty and all gear is self found. Here is a link to Grim Calc, a web based skill calculator for Grim Dawn, it shows where my build is so far.
My first goal at character creation was to max out the Occultist Skill Solael's Witchfire before unlocking my second mastery at level 10. I did this more to take advantage of the skills attack speed buff than to get the added chaos damage, but that helps too. As soon as I unlocked Shaman Mastery I took one point in Savagery and one point into Brute Force. I then added mastery points until I could max out both the Occultists Consecrated Blade and the Shamans Strength of the Bear upgrades. After that I put all of my points into Savagery until it was maxed. All other points were dedicated to the Shaman Mastery, apart from one point that I put into Feral Hunger to get it's bleeding damage and health absorption buffs.
All base stat points (you get one per level) are committed to the physique stat. This stat increases your health and constitution, increases your chance to dodge enemy attacks and allows you to wear heavy armor and wield heavy weapons. I do this because, as stated before, this character is more focused on hitting hard than on hitting consistently. He needs to survive long enough to deliver the killing blow and this makes that possible. For this reason all gear is focused on Armor level first, then magical buffs to physique, health, and defensive ability, and finally buffs to offensive ability and cunning. This makes the priority order base armor, defensive buffs, attack buffs. Jewelry is selected based on getting the max possible health regeneration and then follows the same pattern as armor. I have exclusively used the Salvaged Armor Plating and Bristly Fur armor upgrades. My weapon upgrade of choice has been the Serrated Spike because it provides me with the Piercing Aura skill, which provides damage retaliation.
Devotion points are earned by cleansing shrines to the old gods that you find in the wilderness. From there you can distribute them as you wish between five devotional affinities: Order, Eldritch, Ascended, Chaos, and Primordial. The different Devotions are represented by constellations. I have focused all of my devotion points into Order because it provides health, health regeneration, and resistance buffs. I focused all of my devotion points into completing the Dryad Constellation so that I could unlock the Dryad's Blessing devotional skill, which provides a chance for healing on hit. I then bound that skill to Savagery because it's my default attack. Now I am working on the Tortoise Constellation because it provides a defensive shield when you drop below 40% health.
I'm very satisfied by how this build has been working out. At this point I'm killing most mobs in one hit, elites and bosses take a few more. Warden Krieg went down pretty quickly and I didn't suffer a significant loss of health in the process. A key thing to remember with this build is that you need to keep moving, any time spent not in combat causes you to lose charges of Savagery, which greatly reduces your damage output. As long as you can see enemy mobs on your screen, chase them and kill them. You can go back for the loot later.
Well, that's it. I hope you like what I've done so far. I'm always open to comments and suggestions. If you have any questions about specific terms or why I did a thing, feel free to ask below. I'll be post updates on my character progression as I hit milestones in the game, so stay tuned in for more!
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