Hi, my name is m!ttens and I suffer from newcharacteritis. I have gotten three dudes to about level 50, have two or three more in the late thirties to early forties and scads throughout act one. The problem is I find a cool epic and think that would be great for character x, and I need more mule space anyway so I go ahead and make another character. Slogging through the early leveling game is such a drag too but I just can't help myself.
I am discouraged by hearing you describe your various characters who are most all well beyond my progression with my highest level character, as "the early leveling game".
Haha yeah it's a bit of a grind. I haven't gone much into elite but I've finished veteran around level fifty so elite probably will take the next 20-25 levels and then the remaining ten for ultimate.
Haha yeah it's a bit of a grind. I haven't gone much into elite but I've finished veteran around level fifty so elite probably will take the next 20-25 levels and then the remaining ten for ultimate.
It's 1-50, 50-70 and 70-85, though you can do it faster if you skip side quests. Not much point in that since you really need to be 70 to do well in Ultimate given that's the required level for all the armor resist augments.
I have 316 hours played so far and I still haven't bothered killing Log on Ultimate but I do have two 85s and one 84 at least.
Well, I sort of fixed my Elementalist for gamepad control by getting the Primal Strike transmuter, lowers the damage, but removes the cost and cooldown so I can use it more or less as a basic attack. I'm having a little trouble with sustain, though now that I know a bit more of some Shaman mechanics, I'm working on raising Wendigo Totem. However, that only really helps on things that can live a moment, because right now things die super fast and the totem never gets a chance to heal me except on bosses and such.
This is the character that ultimately is going to be switching over to Savagery instead of Primal Strike around level 66, but I do have to get there. I guess I'll just be using health potions again for a while, got out of the habit of it while playing my Warlock and that retaliate tank. I also may need to bind energy potions to right bumper again, I need that button for my Warlock's panic button, but my Elementalist is having some energy issues.
Maxed out canister bomb is pretty good aoe and has a very satisfying sound and visual effect too, due to the primary and secondary explosions. I used it for my saboteur while leveling up to about level 45 then it started losing effectiveness
Booooom....popopopoppoppop!
One thing I wish would get changed is if I hold the force stop button and click my melee attack outside of the melee range it does not make the character swing away (which I wish it would do). This happens frequently when I'm moving and an enemy runs up to me to attack and i have to drag the mouse back from the edge of the screen to kill the mob before going back to moving. Hashtaglazygamerproblems
What is this game's Volcanic Orb? Is there one? I want to throw giant fuck-off explosions. Some combination of Grenado, Blackwater, and Canister Bomb?
Don't forget to add Devotion procs to them if you really want big explosions.
Which ones? I want the biggest explosions.
If you want the biggest fire explosions, probably go green/pink and grab Flame Torrent from Fiend, Fissure from Mage and top it off with Meteor Shower from Ulzuin's Torch. I think my Arcane/Fire Sorcerer might actually have all three of those, haven't played her for a while but I remember going "Mwhahaha HAHAHA HAHA haa!" at my screen when all the stuff procs.
I want ragdolling bodies to shower down from the highest possible altitudes. I'm not concerned if it's fire or what that gets them there.
I just loved volcanic orb pyro from Titan Quest because it would blast corpses off screen while my pet went ham and then like 2 or 3 seconds after everything had calmed down, the bits and pieces would start pattering down to earth from the stratosphere.
Well, after a somewhat strange sequence of events, I finished normal/veteran for the first time last night, ended up being with my 2H Elementalist. After I had gotten into my melee groove, things were going pretty well and I was cruising through the rest of act 3 and most of 4. Then in later act 4, all of a sudden I started just getting murdered over and over again. This game could really use a death recap log, because all too frequently I find it waaay too difficult to tell what the fuck actually killed me. It doesn't help that the debuffs area of the UI doesn't seem entirely accurate either, but I'll get to that a bit later.
Anyway, after some frustration at the insane squishiness of my character and considering starting a Warder for a similar build with tankiness instead, I ended up farming some aether crystals so I could respec most of my devotions and go a bit more of a tanky route. After that, things went a little better, in that I at least got a second to react and hit the potion button instead of just getting instagibbed at random. I did still die a couple more times or so I think, but all of a sudden I was on the last boss, didn't die to him either. That whole ending bit was a little... unceremonious, I guess I'd say?
After that, I stepped into Elite just to test a bit and as I was heading up past the lower crossing rift, I ran into a skeleton hero of some sort. My critical defenses popped, I used a potion and was still getting low, so I ran back to get some distance, noticed my HP was still rapidly draining like a DoT, but the debuff bar showed no icons at all, then I died. So again, I have no idea what the fuck killed me.
Also, I swear my fucking RNG is just stuck in this game. I get so many copies of the exact same epics, and now I've found 5 legendaries and two of them were the same too, the Meat Shield. So, I'm not sure what my path forward will be now. My Elementalist's squishiness might be helped by the time I get enough levels to get Blast Shield back up to near max. Maybe I'll finish getting my Warlock through act 4 and see how that feels, although that's another one where if I draw aggro before my pets get it, I sometimes just get instagibbed with no chance to react.
Neat game, underwhelming ending and some issues I have with the UI and deaths I suppose, but oh well.
After that, I stepped into Elite just to test a bit and as I was heading up past the lower crossing rift, I ran into a skeleton hero of some sort. My critical defenses popped, I used a potion and was still getting low, so I ran back to get some distance, noticed my HP was still rapidly draining like a DoT, but the debuff bar showed no icons at all, then I died. So again, I have no idea what the fuck killed me.
Might have been Internal Trauma damage which doesn't have a debuff icon at all. I agree it can be confusing to know what killed you - I've played a lot of Grim Dawn and I still have no idea what sort of damage the end boss of the Council of Three storyline does. It's some sort of green fire but I dunno if that's chaos or fire or poison or what.
In general though you are supposed to work on keeping all resistances high and have a bunch of defensive gear, there's no real dps checks in this game but there's plenty of ways to die very fast if you neglect your defenses. It's really easy to look at the devotions for example and just see all the cool stuff that gives you bigger and better explosions or makes you stab harder, when it reality you should be aiming for at least some of the constellations that keep you alive. Starting the game on Normal and playing like that through the plot once just makes it even worse since it gives you the false impression it's an easy game where you should just maximize your dps and then you hit Elite and start dying left and right.
After that, I stepped into Elite just to test a bit and as I was heading up past the lower crossing rift, I ran into a skeleton hero of some sort. My critical defenses popped, I used a potion and was still getting low, so I ran back to get some distance, noticed my HP was still rapidly draining like a DoT, but the debuff bar showed no icons at all, then I died. So again, I have no idea what the fuck killed me.
Might have been Internal Trauma damage which doesn't have a debuff icon at all. I agree it can be confusing to know what killed you - I've played a lot of Grim Dawn and I still have no idea what sort of damage the end boss of the Council of Three storyline does. It's some sort of green fire but I dunno if that's chaos or fire or poison or what.
In general though you are supposed to work on keeping all resistances high and have a bunch of defensive gear, there's no real dps checks in this game but there's plenty of ways to die very fast if you neglect your defenses. It's really easy to look at the devotions for example and just see all the cool stuff that gives you bigger and better explosions or makes you stab harder, when it reality you should be aiming for at least some of the constellations that keep you alive. Starting the game on Normal and playing like that through the plot once just makes it even worse since it gives you the false impression it's an easy game where you should just maximize your dps and then you hit Elite and start dying left and right.
Yeah, I had definitely been focusing a bit more on defense on my Elementalist after I got back from playing my HC retaliation Warder. Defenses weren't perfect across the board at all, I have some weakness in Aether and Chaos especially. Of course, you can only really deal with what drops, unless you're trading. And when I see nothing but random guns and endless praetorian pieces, it gets a little ridiculous.
0
Options
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
My one real build (took it to the warden in Ult) was a Demo/Arcanist that morphed into "all the meteors" by the end of elite; double Earthscorcher (epic pistol with a meteor proc) fire striking with fissure attached, and then also stun canister bomb with the Ulzuin's Torch meteor proc and also I could switch my loadout to another pistol with a caster off-hand so I can cast Devastation. Fun times, but Ult kinda fucks you over because my character was built entirely around kiting and certain enemies are just literally impossible to kite and blow you the fuck up the second they touch you. The Ult warden fight really sucked all the fun out of the game because of that.
Yeah, that's one thing I've heard is that kiting builds are sort of pointless, because enemies are going to get up in your face eventually and some things just can't be kited. Not only that, but generally if you're having to run away a lot, you're not killing things as fast you could be. Basically it just makes more sense to be able to face tank stuff apparently.
After that, I stepped into Elite just to test a bit and as I was heading up past the lower crossing rift, I ran into a skeleton hero of some sort. My critical defenses popped, I used a potion and was still getting low, so I ran back to get some distance, noticed my HP was still rapidly draining like a DoT, but the debuff bar showed no icons at all, then I died. So again, I have no idea what the fuck killed me.
Might have been Internal Trauma damage which doesn't have a debuff icon at all. I agree it can be confusing to know what killed you - I've played a lot of Grim Dawn and I still have no idea what sort of damage the end boss of the Council of Three storyline does. It's some sort of green fire but I dunno if that's chaos or fire or poison or what.
In general though you are supposed to work on keeping all resistances high and have a bunch of defensive gear, there's no real dps checks in this game but there's plenty of ways to die very fast if you neglect your defenses. It's really easy to look at the devotions for example and just see all the cool stuff that gives you bigger and better explosions or makes you stab harder, when it reality you should be aiming for at least some of the constellations that keep you alive. Starting the game on Normal and playing like that through the plot once just makes it even worse since it gives you the false impression it's an easy game where you should just maximize your dps and then you hit Elite and start dying left and right.
Yeah, I had definitely been focusing a bit more on defense on my Elementalist after I got back from playing my HC retaliation Warder. Defenses weren't perfect across the board at all, I have some weakness in Aether and Chaos especially. Of course, you can only really deal with what drops, unless you're trading. And when I see nothing but random guns and endless praetorian pieces, it gets a little ridiculous.
Aether and Chaos aren't that bad if you don't cap them, I usually have them between 20% and 50% - you can either swap gear for bosses or use a resist potion if necessary. Something like low Poison or Bleeding resistance on the other hand can make enemies who do those damage types total nightmares. And of course the three elemental resistances should be capped as soon as possible, I've never tried Elite or Ultimate with 0% in any elemental resist but I'd imagine it would be very painful.
The way this game keeps getting me to create a new character is by giving me drops specific to a build. My highest level right now is 74 but I then have about 6 characters between 45-65.
My latest re-roll was when I was playing my Witch Hunter(dual wield poison dmg) and I got 3(!) legendary drops that were all vitality dmg specific. A chest piece and two matching swords combining for 350% vit dmg. Of course I hadn't built one of those yet so I now have a Witchblade that is dual wielding the Omen swords(crafted for lvl 24) by using the Relic that grants dual wield. The amount of vitality and chaos damage is ridiculous and coupled with the massive life drain it's nearly impossible to die.
Because if you're going to attempt to squeeze that big black monster into your slot you will need to be able to take at least 12 inches or else you're going to have a bad time...
Well, in a bit of a strange path, I started a Witchblade. I was originally wanting to start something of a Witch Hunter Plaguemancer build, lots of spreading poison and such. I had seen someone mention that the Plaguemancer could also be done with a Witchblade for a tankier option, so I started exploring that a bit, but it didn't really seem like Soldier+Occultist meshed together very well over poison damage. I found a physical/bleed/trauma style build for Witchblade that seemed interesting, but it was a dual-wield build going for the Warborn set that came out in 1.0.0.6. I was more interested in a 2H build again however, so I modified it and the devotions a bit to rush down Kraken. It's a little silly, because it really only uses Occultist for Blood of Dreeg sustain and Curse of Frailty for the -physical resist, which is a good use, don't get me wrong, along with Solael's Witchblade for the attack speed I guess?
I started it the other night and got to level 20 right before the Warden's dungeon, it was a bit slow going with Cadence as the main attack and after playing it last night to 25, I was all ready to come in here and start talking about how fucking terrible Cadence is as a main attack while leveling, with 2handers at least. Before I gave up on the character, I decided to try something, refunded all of my points out of Cadence and grabbed Blade Arc instead. Holy shit what a difference, on trash mobs anyway. Prior to doing that, I had a couple of deaths, never to a hero or boss, just due to being overwhelmed with trash mobs because Cadence does not handle crowds well early game.
At first, bosses were going down almost as fast, but as I got to about level 30, I noticed that bosses were lasting a whole lot longer. At 30, I figured out I could pull points I had from Blood of Dreeg to finish getting Soldier to 40 mastery so I could pick up Deadly Momentum and Counter Strike. At this point, I had finished getting Kraken and had started getting some decent attack speed from that and some items as well. Trash mobs weren't nearly as bad now, not quite as good as with Blade Arc, but the Counter Strike procs and better use of Blitz helps a lot I think. Holy shit the difference on heroes/bosses is insane. Cadence hits/crits for like 10-12k already, so when it procs they just melt. I hit 35 before I was done last night, partway through the Homestead area, and had finished up getting the Turtle constellation then Assassin's Blade, which is also key for a physical build. It does feel like the build is coming together now. I should've put a point into Blindside a bit earlier than I did, but it and Deadly Momentum procs seem pretty key for handling crowds.
I'll see how it goes moving forward, act 4 will be telling I think.
Oh man, I'm really liking this physical/bleed/trauma 2hander Witchblade so far. Hit 46 last night, had a few good upgrade pieces at 40 waiting for me, which helped a lot, like the Farmstead Liberator scythe for a weapon. I ran into Bolvar, that asshole cultist in the Blood Grove, and completely destroyed him no problem. The couple other times I've fought him, I ran into issues taking him out. Similarly, I started the Hidden Path stuff, utterly destroyed the Guardian of Dreeg, got into some minor trouble against the Guardian of Solael, but nothing too serious. I bit the bullet and spent a bunch of resources on a Haunted Steel for my scythe and it's the greatest panic button, the huge Cadence hits refill my health so fast when it's active.
The build feels sort of unstoppable right now, which worries me a little, but I'm still only at 6 deaths. I think if I had started with Blade Arc for the early game, I could've eliminated those first deaths easy and then if I would've actually had poison resist by the Jagged Wastes, I wouldn't have died to the manticores either. I did clear the portal in the Blood Grove to the Ashen Wastes and it was a little bit tough in spots, nothing unmanagable, but I hope it's not a hint of things to come in later act 4, granted the enemies were 4-6 levels higher than me the whole time.
Blitz is super useful for helping to handle groups as well as just zooming around. Charging into a manticore and sending it ragdoll flying backwards will never get old. Honorable mention to blitzing into a group of skeletons and having bones explode EVERYWHERE.
It's definitely tough, a lot of the time. I can't even imagine how it gets at the legendary level, maybe better because those pieces have more stats on them? Because right now, it seems to come down to 'is another +20% physical damage and a bunch of attack speed worth losing about 40% worth of cold and lightning resist?', the answer is probably no, unless you can cover the resist loss elsewhere, but I do it anyway.
You almost have to save up several potential upgrades until you get pieces the cover stuff that you lose from upgrading other stuff. Of course, there's also the components and augments that can help, though a lot of that stuff seems to already be taken into account on good builds, from what I've seen anyway.
Early game, I prioritize damage over everything else until I am one-shotting packs of trash and spending no more than 2-3 seconds on a hero. Once damage gets to that point I try to balance health/mana regen (depending on build) and resists. Top bar resists (elemental, pierce) and bleed take priority over chaos/vit/aether, but I'll maybe tweak to get more vit/chaos resist in act 5 if needed. Overwhelming opponents with dps will eventually take a backseat to raising defenses enough that I'm not constantly chugging potions. That at least is my experience with normal/veteran mode and act 1 Elite.
How do you guys evaluate weapons and armor to decide what's good and not? There are LOTS of stats in this game.
Early game it is pretty easy, but late game I often just stare at the stats a long time, then my brains explode and I flip a coin to decide which one I use. What makes it tougher especially with weapons is that the dps calculation doesn't take into account the components and augments and procs so you can't be sure if the new weapon is an upgrade with that alone. Add to that you need to destroy the old weapon to get the component back and it's easy to end up with a worse weapon. I blew up a legendary weapon to switch to a higher level epic one with my Warden and I've regretted it ever since.
On the other hand I realized only after I had been using it for a long time that my Trickster's Brutallax procced from my damage aura crits as long as I was in melee range to the target, which made its huge bleed proc even better.
So yeah ... trial and error.
With armor the problem is often that a single piece can given one huge bonus, say 50% poison resist, but is otherwise crap. Then you need to somehow get that poison resist fixed before you can upgrade, or be horribly vulnerable to poison.
Eh, you can get a lot done when you're unemployed... just nothing useful.
I did finally get my 7th death on my Witchblade up in the Plains of Strife. There are just waaaaay too many mobs around there. I suppose if I were playing hardcore I'd just take it a lot slower, pull packs back to safer areas and such. I needed to take a break for a snack, but after that I think I will finish up normal and see how the character does in the beginning of Elite. I'm pretty eager to get more devotion points to get my devotion build fleshed out, after Kraken and Assassin's Blade, I got Bull and just finished Dryad. Next up is getting some prereq Ascendant points (mostly via Hammer), to be able to pick up Dire Bear. After that I can refund Hammer and work on Eel and Sailor's Guide to get me the remaining Primordial to go for Tree of Life, which will finish things up.
Also, for stuck RNG again, I finally got the first legendary on that character, from the very last shrine I finished, a copy of the very first legendary I ever found which was on my warlock, a quite specific pyromancer's wand. Hopefully I get some better luck on the legendary from completing the last boss quest. Or maybe the last boss will even drop one this time, he didn't for my Elementalist. Regardless though, I already feel so much better about how my Witchblade feels compared to my Elementalist, damage and survivability wise. Large crowds are still a bit of an issue, as I found out on that death in the plains, but that's a very specific area.
I have to say, I fear nothing with the Warder. Even if it's a hero and hits hard, I'll bash it's brains in with Savagery before I can take hardly any damage, and I've got like 5 AoE effects for groups. I did die once because I was watching TV instead of my hps and didn't use a potion.
I have to say, I fear nothing with the Warder. Even if it's a hero and hits hard, I'll bash it's brains in with Savagery before I can take hardly any damage, and I've got like 5 AoE effects for groups. I did die once because I was watching TV instead of my hps and didn't use a potion.
Not to rain on your parade too much but that's because you are on Normal (or Veteran, but probably on Normal if you kill hero-class enemies with ease). It gets harder.
I'm sure it does. I've been essentially ignoring resists at this point, and have mostly nothing invested in any defensive skills. I'm sure i'll have to rework at some point. And yes I'm just on Normal.
Oh man, not too bad I must say. I didn't get to start Elite with my Witchblade last night after all, as I spent a while trying to organize my stash, and made a mule/placeholder character to hang onto all this poison gear I've been keeping. After a lot of character swapping, I got the stash somewhat reasonable, but didn't feel like starting up Elite at that point as I probably would've been stuck playing much too late.
So I waited until tonight, and also realized that my sheet DPS was wrong because I had never put Cadence on my mouse button. Once I did that, I found out my Cadence DPS is listed as 15k. Not too shabby for level 52. I blitzed around through early Elite, mostly just bee-lining available shrines, hitting some key sidequests like blacksmith and such. Didn't really have any problems, except that my lightning resist was now -15%... the floating eyes that shoot balls of lightning tended to hurt at times. I did end up dying a couple of times, once being in the Depraved Sanctuary, I thought it might happen, though I got Salazaar on the second attempt. The second time was when I was about to enter the Smuggler's Pass cave, I was fighting a troll hero, noticed my health was getting down about half when I was considering hitting a health potion, suddenly I died and he died at the same time. Still not sure what happened, he was wielding a shield, maybe a partial reflect or something. No idea.
Somewhere in act 1, I got some legendary legs that were a pretty decent upgrade, nothing too spectacular, but good. Through some minor upgrades and mostly devotion points into Dire Bear, my sheet DPS went up to 18k. I have noticed that I've been getting blueprints like crazy in Elite, considering how insanely rare they were for me on normal. I was down in the Steps of Torment to get the shrine there and when I completed it, a purple came out... Stonefist Rebuke. Holy shit, an actual item I was actively hoping to get! I immediately went back to Devil's Crossing and pulled the Haunted Steel off of my green maul and put it on the Rebuke, though I was lacking the augment I wanted, I'd have to swap back to normal to grab one from Homestead. Even without that, my sheet DPS jumped from about 18k to 23k, which isn't too shabby at all, and the +2 to all Soldier skills is near godly. I hopped back into SoT and as I was heading to the Grand Priest, another legendary dropped, this one a 2-handed sword called Nightshade's Reach, some kind of Nightblade sword.
I only needed a couple more devotion points to finish up Dire Bear and to be able to swap some points around after, so I pushed on to Homestead and did a couple shrines around there, also got a new augment for the Rebuke. Level 61 now and sheet DPS is just shy of 25k, I just completely decimate with Stonefist Rebuke. It's so damn good. I think the only possible upgrade from here would be a Leviathan? Unless there are any other great physical two-handed melee weapons I don't know about.
Oh yeah, I also managed to get the blueprint for Badge of Mastery. So, is that thing just a complete crapshoot or what? You just have to make a ton of them and hope you get lucky enough to get one that buffs stuff for your class?
So which pets in this game are worth looking into if you're looking for a taunt/tankey pet?
The way this game works, either you don't use pets at all or you play a Conjurer and you use all of the pets. That said Hellhound, Briarthorn and the revenant summoned by the Black Grimoire of Og'Napesh are the tanky pets.
I only needed a couple more devotion points to finish up Dire Bear and to be able to swap some points around after, so I pushed on to Homestead and did a couple shrines around there, also got a new augment for the Rebuke. Level 61 now and sheet DPS is just shy of 25k, I just completely decimate with Stonefist Rebuke. It's so damn good. I think the only possible upgrade from here would be a Leviathan? Unless there are any other great physical two-handed melee weapons I don't know about.
This made me check my Cadence sheet dps and it's only 19k at rest for my lvl 84 Warden. On the other hand I never* die so I may have spent more points on defenses than you.
*Ok, Fabius killed me once when I only had 85% pierce resistance. Damn he hits hard. Went back with 90% pierce resistance and killed him but my hp still bounced up and down more than I would have liked.
Turtle Shell is on Field Command
Assassin's Mark is on Cadence
Bull Rush is on Markovian's Advantage
Dryad's Blessing is on Curse of Frailty
Maul is on Blitz
Healing Rain will be on Solael's Witchfire or Oleron's Rage, whichever I feel like, but I won't be able to get it until mid-Ultimate or so.
I modified the original spec, removing Solemn Watcher and Scales of Ulcama to get the points to grab Raven which gave me the Eldritch I needed to get Kraken. I've got one last free point that I don't know what I'll put it into just yet, though I could have up to three points if I don't take the branches on Tree of Life.
So, Solemn Watcher was some defense and Scales of Ulcama was some sustain, I don't know quite how severely that'll impact my survivability, but eh. I wanted that Kraken.
Geezus, well now the game is just throwing legendaries at me. I just got The Guillotine, which is a bleed-based Warder 2-hander, and now I picked up Obsidian Juggernaut, which is a chaos-based Witchblade 2-hander.
I really need to figure out what I'm going to do with my stash... I didn't really want to use the GD Stash item storing functionality, but god damn, I don't have nearly enough space to do what I want and I'm terrible about throwing out epics. Maybe I should look into it...
ummm... if you don't want that juggernaut, I may be able to find a good home for it.
Edit: Sadly, I only have like 3 legs... one is a coat that I think is based around occult/demo (it's on my conjurer because the stats are pretty good), some boots for a poison/acid nightblade, and I think some pants that my saboteur is using (they aren't really anything special)
Well, I don't really need the Juggernaut. I don't know how multiplayer works, you'll have to PM me or something.
I started messing around with GD Stash and ran into apparently a somewhat rare bug where it just corrupts the stash, and even corrupted one of my characters when I tried to save the moving of items from his inventory too. Luckily I made backups before hand and got everything back in order, but that one doesn't seem like it's going to work for me.
I might try Item Assistant, which is apparently supposed to run with the game and auto-imports anything you put into tab 4, then you when you use the tool to export items back to the game, they appear in tab 3. Seems maybe a little smoother? I don't know. Though IA doesn't seem to work with Steam cloud enabled at all, so it might be time to turn that off, I guess.
So which pets in this game are worth looking into if you're looking for a taunt/tankey pet?
You get different versions of tanky pets. Shaman is for max HP, Occultist is for HP regen.
I prefer Shaman for kiting and pets. Briarthorn is good. You can slow with the vines and add the Affliction constellation to slow even further. Find something to align with Revenant to made Skeleton summons. Shaman + Constellations mean you can have piles of temporary pets.
ummm... if you don't want that juggernaut, I may be able to find a good home for it.
Edit: Sadly, I only have like 3 legs... one is a coat that I think is based around occult/demo (it's on my conjurer because the stats are pretty good), some boots for a poison/acid nightblade, and I think some pants that my saboteur is using (they aren't really anything special)
And it just gave me another one. Yeah, you can certainly have one now. Again, you'll have to PM me so we can set something up.
Edit: Oh, also I did start trying out Item Assistant, after turning off all the Steam cloud saving stuff. This definitely seems to work much better. Way less cheaty too, which is nice. It can only pull items that you can normally put into a stash tab, which prevents problems with soulbound things. For instance, when I was experimenting with GD Stash, it took an Alvarick's Rebuke that I think might've been soulbound, and the thing just disappeared entirely. It's a little weird the way it normally just lists the base stats of the item while in the program, but when you put it back into your inventory in game, it's correct again. Something about the way the game stores the item and then the 'seed' that tells it how the item rolled I guess.
Well, the other night I finished Elite with my Witchblade and got far enough in Ultimate act 1 to finish at least getting Healing Rain from Tree of Life. Then I felt like playing something other than a melee, so I started up a a gunslinger fire Sorcerer on normal and got up to about Broken Hills. It's extremely simple right now with basically just shooting Fire Strike bullets, but it seems to have some potential.
Tonight, I decided to go back to the Witchblade for a bit, to try to see if I could kill the Warden in ultimate. At the time, most of my resists were pretty good, but a couple were REALLY weak, I think Cold was around 15% and Aether was -15% while Lightning was about 30%. Random aether shots were messing me up, along with the bolts from the floating eyes, but I did make it to the Warden and he wasn't too bad. And he dropped a blueprint for the Warborn Visor... which is the set I want for this build, but I didn't realize was going to be a blueprint. Literally none of the information I've found about the Warborn stuff mentions it being blueprints, so I thought it was just a normal drop.
I went through part of act 2 and hit 75, then dropped to Elite to finish getting the Black Legion to Revered to get my primary 2-handed weapon augment. I did get a Stormreaver, which could be a pretty good 2-hander for my Elementalist if I ever get back to him, though I really like my Witchblade as far as that type of character goes, so I don't know. I picked up some legendary gloves that were an upgrade, though not the specific ones I'm after, and after swapping a ring with one with high cold resist, I swapped some augments around and got my lower resists all pretty respectable, around 60% for fire, lightning and aether. Everything else is either 80% or extremely close.
I also hit nemesis with the aetherials, which apparently sucks, because he's a complete asshole if you run into him. I think I'll hop back into game for a bit and do Cronley runs on ultimate, see if I can get them to nemesis any time soon.
Edit: Oh yeah, and from my Black Legion farming runs, stopping at Spined Cove in between, I picked up plenty of ectoplasm, so I was able to make my Warborn Visor. It looks like Smithy's skull head from the final fight in Super Mario RPG.
Posts
I am discouraged by hearing you describe your various characters who are most all well beyond my progression with my highest level character, as "the early leveling game".
It's 1-50, 50-70 and 70-85, though you can do it faster if you skip side quests. Not much point in that since you really need to be 70 to do well in Ultimate given that's the required level for all the armor resist augments.
I have 316 hours played so far and I still haven't bothered killing Log on Ultimate but I do have two 85s and one 84 at least.
This is the character that ultimately is going to be switching over to Savagery instead of Primal Strike around level 66, but I do have to get there. I guess I'll just be using health potions again for a while, got out of the habit of it while playing my Warlock and that retaliate tank. I also may need to bind energy potions to right bumper again, I need that button for my Warlock's panic button, but my Elementalist is having some energy issues.
Booooom....popopopoppoppop!
One thing I wish would get changed is if I hold the force stop button and click my melee attack outside of the melee range it does not make the character swing away (which I wish it would do). This happens frequently when I'm moving and an enemy runs up to me to attack and i have to drag the mouse back from the edge of the screen to kill the mob before going back to moving. Hashtaglazygamerproblems
Don't forget to add Devotion procs to them if you really want big explosions.
Which ones? I want the biggest explosions.
If you want the biggest fire explosions, probably go green/pink and grab Flame Torrent from Fiend, Fissure from Mage and top it off with Meteor Shower from Ulzuin's Torch. I think my Arcane/Fire Sorcerer might actually have all three of those, haven't played her for a while but I remember going "Mwhahaha HAHAHA HAHA haa!" at my screen when all the stuff procs.
I just loved volcanic orb pyro from Titan Quest because it would blast corpses off screen while my pet went ham and then like 2 or 3 seconds after everything had calmed down, the bits and pieces would start pattering down to earth from the stratosphere.
So satisfying.
Anyway, after some frustration at the insane squishiness of my character and considering starting a Warder for a similar build with tankiness instead, I ended up farming some aether crystals so I could respec most of my devotions and go a bit more of a tanky route. After that, things went a little better, in that I at least got a second to react and hit the potion button instead of just getting instagibbed at random. I did still die a couple more times or so I think, but all of a sudden I was on the last boss, didn't die to him either. That whole ending bit was a little... unceremonious, I guess I'd say?
After that, I stepped into Elite just to test a bit and as I was heading up past the lower crossing rift, I ran into a skeleton hero of some sort. My critical defenses popped, I used a potion and was still getting low, so I ran back to get some distance, noticed my HP was still rapidly draining like a DoT, but the debuff bar showed no icons at all, then I died. So again, I have no idea what the fuck killed me.
Also, I swear my fucking RNG is just stuck in this game. I get so many copies of the exact same epics, and now I've found 5 legendaries and two of them were the same too, the Meat Shield. So, I'm not sure what my path forward will be now. My Elementalist's squishiness might be helped by the time I get enough levels to get Blast Shield back up to near max. Maybe I'll finish getting my Warlock through act 4 and see how that feels, although that's another one where if I draw aggro before my pets get it, I sometimes just get instagibbed with no chance to react.
Neat game, underwhelming ending and some issues I have with the UI and deaths I suppose, but oh well.
Might have been Internal Trauma damage which doesn't have a debuff icon at all. I agree it can be confusing to know what killed you - I've played a lot of Grim Dawn and I still have no idea what sort of damage the end boss of the Council of Three storyline does. It's some sort of green fire but I dunno if that's chaos or fire or poison or what.
In general though you are supposed to work on keeping all resistances high and have a bunch of defensive gear, there's no real dps checks in this game but there's plenty of ways to die very fast if you neglect your defenses. It's really easy to look at the devotions for example and just see all the cool stuff that gives you bigger and better explosions or makes you stab harder, when it reality you should be aiming for at least some of the constellations that keep you alive. Starting the game on Normal and playing like that through the plot once just makes it even worse since it gives you the false impression it's an easy game where you should just maximize your dps and then you hit Elite and start dying left and right.
Yeah, I had definitely been focusing a bit more on defense on my Elementalist after I got back from playing my HC retaliation Warder. Defenses weren't perfect across the board at all, I have some weakness in Aether and Chaos especially. Of course, you can only really deal with what drops, unless you're trading. And when I see nothing but random guns and endless praetorian pieces, it gets a little ridiculous.
Aether and Chaos aren't that bad if you don't cap them, I usually have them between 20% and 50% - you can either swap gear for bosses or use a resist potion if necessary. Something like low Poison or Bleeding resistance on the other hand can make enemies who do those damage types total nightmares. And of course the three elemental resistances should be capped as soon as possible, I've never tried Elite or Ultimate with 0% in any elemental resist but I'd imagine it would be very painful.
My latest re-roll was when I was playing my Witch Hunter(dual wield poison dmg) and I got 3(!) legendary drops that were all vitality dmg specific. A chest piece and two matching swords combining for 350% vit dmg. Of course I hadn't built one of those yet so I now have a Witchblade that is dual wielding the Omen swords(crafted for lvl 24) by using the Relic that grants dual wield. The amount of vitality and chaos damage is ridiculous and coupled with the massive life drain it's nearly impossible to die.
I started it the other night and got to level 20 right before the Warden's dungeon, it was a bit slow going with Cadence as the main attack and after playing it last night to 25, I was all ready to come in here and start talking about how fucking terrible Cadence is as a main attack while leveling, with 2handers at least. Before I gave up on the character, I decided to try something, refunded all of my points out of Cadence and grabbed Blade Arc instead. Holy shit what a difference, on trash mobs anyway. Prior to doing that, I had a couple of deaths, never to a hero or boss, just due to being overwhelmed with trash mobs because Cadence does not handle crowds well early game.
At first, bosses were going down almost as fast, but as I got to about level 30, I noticed that bosses were lasting a whole lot longer. At 30, I figured out I could pull points I had from Blood of Dreeg to finish getting Soldier to 40 mastery so I could pick up Deadly Momentum and Counter Strike. At this point, I had finished getting Kraken and had started getting some decent attack speed from that and some items as well. Trash mobs weren't nearly as bad now, not quite as good as with Blade Arc, but the Counter Strike procs and better use of Blitz helps a lot I think. Holy shit the difference on heroes/bosses is insane. Cadence hits/crits for like 10-12k already, so when it procs they just melt. I hit 35 before I was done last night, partway through the Homestead area, and had finished up getting the Turtle constellation then Assassin's Blade, which is also key for a physical build. It does feel like the build is coming together now. I should've put a point into Blindside a bit earlier than I did, but it and Deadly Momentum procs seem pretty key for handling crowds.
I'll see how it goes moving forward, act 4 will be telling I think.
The build feels sort of unstoppable right now, which worries me a little, but I'm still only at 6 deaths. I think if I had started with Blade Arc for the early game, I could've eliminated those first deaths easy and then if I would've actually had poison resist by the Jagged Wastes, I wouldn't have died to the manticores either. I did clear the portal in the Blood Grove to the Ashen Wastes and it was a little bit tough in spots, nothing unmanagable, but I hope it's not a hint of things to come in later act 4, granted the enemies were 4-6 levels higher than me the whole time.
Blitz is super useful for helping to handle groups as well as just zooming around. Charging into a manticore and sending it ragdoll flying backwards will never get old. Honorable mention to blitzing into a group of skeletons and having bones explode EVERYWHERE.
You almost have to save up several potential upgrades until you get pieces the cover stuff that you lose from upgrading other stuff. Of course, there's also the components and augments that can help, though a lot of that stuff seems to already be taken into account on good builds, from what I've seen anyway.
*has 3 characters*
*highest one is 35*
*has been playing the game since Thanksgiving*
*is mildly depressed now*
Early game it is pretty easy, but late game I often just stare at the stats a long time, then my brains explode and I flip a coin to decide which one I use. What makes it tougher especially with weapons is that the dps calculation doesn't take into account the components and augments and procs so you can't be sure if the new weapon is an upgrade with that alone. Add to that you need to destroy the old weapon to get the component back and it's easy to end up with a worse weapon. I blew up a legendary weapon to switch to a higher level epic one with my Warden and I've regretted it ever since.
On the other hand I realized only after I had been using it for a long time that my Trickster's Brutallax procced from my damage aura crits as long as I was in melee range to the target, which made its huge bleed proc even better.
So yeah ... trial and error.
With armor the problem is often that a single piece can given one huge bonus, say 50% poison resist, but is otherwise crap. Then you need to somehow get that poison resist fixed before you can upgrade, or be horribly vulnerable to poison.
Eh, you can get a lot done when you're unemployed... just nothing useful.
I did finally get my 7th death on my Witchblade up in the Plains of Strife. There are just waaaaay too many mobs around there. I suppose if I were playing hardcore I'd just take it a lot slower, pull packs back to safer areas and such. I needed to take a break for a snack, but after that I think I will finish up normal and see how the character does in the beginning of Elite. I'm pretty eager to get more devotion points to get my devotion build fleshed out, after Kraken and Assassin's Blade, I got Bull and just finished Dryad. Next up is getting some prereq Ascendant points (mostly via Hammer), to be able to pick up Dire Bear. After that I can refund Hammer and work on Eel and Sailor's Guide to get me the remaining Primordial to go for Tree of Life, which will finish things up.
Also, for stuck RNG again, I finally got the first legendary on that character, from the very last shrine I finished, a copy of the very first legendary I ever found which was on my warlock, a quite specific pyromancer's wand. Hopefully I get some better luck on the legendary from completing the last boss quest. Or maybe the last boss will even drop one this time, he didn't for my Elementalist. Regardless though, I already feel so much better about how my Witchblade feels compared to my Elementalist, damage and survivability wise. Large crowds are still a bit of an issue, as I found out on that death in the plains, but that's a very specific area.
Not to rain on your parade too much but that's because you are on Normal (or Veteran, but probably on Normal if you kill hero-class enemies with ease). It gets harder.
So I waited until tonight, and also realized that my sheet DPS was wrong because I had never put Cadence on my mouse button. Once I did that, I found out my Cadence DPS is listed as 15k. Not too shabby for level 52. I blitzed around through early Elite, mostly just bee-lining available shrines, hitting some key sidequests like blacksmith and such. Didn't really have any problems, except that my lightning resist was now -15%... the floating eyes that shoot balls of lightning tended to hurt at times. I did end up dying a couple of times, once being in the Depraved Sanctuary, I thought it might happen, though I got Salazaar on the second attempt. The second time was when I was about to enter the Smuggler's Pass cave, I was fighting a troll hero, noticed my health was getting down about half when I was considering hitting a health potion, suddenly I died and he died at the same time. Still not sure what happened, he was wielding a shield, maybe a partial reflect or something. No idea.
Somewhere in act 1, I got some legendary legs that were a pretty decent upgrade, nothing too spectacular, but good. Through some minor upgrades and mostly devotion points into Dire Bear, my sheet DPS went up to 18k. I have noticed that I've been getting blueprints like crazy in Elite, considering how insanely rare they were for me on normal. I was down in the Steps of Torment to get the shrine there and when I completed it, a purple came out... Stonefist Rebuke. Holy shit, an actual item I was actively hoping to get! I immediately went back to Devil's Crossing and pulled the Haunted Steel off of my green maul and put it on the Rebuke, though I was lacking the augment I wanted, I'd have to swap back to normal to grab one from Homestead. Even without that, my sheet DPS jumped from about 18k to 23k, which isn't too shabby at all, and the +2 to all Soldier skills is near godly. I hopped back into SoT and as I was heading to the Grand Priest, another legendary dropped, this one a 2-handed sword called Nightshade's Reach, some kind of Nightblade sword.
I only needed a couple more devotion points to finish up Dire Bear and to be able to swap some points around after, so I pushed on to Homestead and did a couple shrines around there, also got a new augment for the Rebuke. Level 61 now and sheet DPS is just shy of 25k, I just completely decimate with Stonefist Rebuke. It's so damn good. I think the only possible upgrade from here would be a Leviathan? Unless there are any other great physical two-handed melee weapons I don't know about.
Oh yeah, I also managed to get the blueprint for Badge of Mastery. So, is that thing just a complete crapshoot or what? You just have to make a ton of them and hope you get lucky enough to get one that buffs stuff for your class?
The way this game works, either you don't use pets at all or you play a Conjurer and you use all of the pets. That said Hellhound, Briarthorn and the revenant summoned by the Black Grimoire of Og'Napesh are the tanky pets.
This made me check my Cadence sheet dps and it's only 19k at rest for my lvl 84 Warden. On the other hand I never* die so I may have spent more points on defenses than you.
*Ok, Fabius killed me once when I only had 85% pierce resistance. Damn he hits hard. Went back with 90% pierce resistance and killed him but my hp still bounced up and down more than I would have liked.
Turtle Shell is on Field Command
Assassin's Mark is on Cadence
Bull Rush is on Markovian's Advantage
Dryad's Blessing is on Curse of Frailty
Maul is on Blitz
Healing Rain will be on Solael's Witchfire or Oleron's Rage, whichever I feel like, but I won't be able to get it until mid-Ultimate or so.
I modified the original spec, removing Solemn Watcher and Scales of Ulcama to get the points to grab Raven which gave me the Eldritch I needed to get Kraken. I've got one last free point that I don't know what I'll put it into just yet, though I could have up to three points if I don't take the branches on Tree of Life.
So, Solemn Watcher was some defense and Scales of Ulcama was some sustain, I don't know quite how severely that'll impact my survivability, but eh. I wanted that Kraken.
I really need to figure out what I'm going to do with my stash... I didn't really want to use the GD Stash item storing functionality, but god damn, I don't have nearly enough space to do what I want and I'm terrible about throwing out epics. Maybe I should look into it...
Edit: Sadly, I only have like 3 legs... one is a coat that I think is based around occult/demo (it's on my conjurer because the stats are pretty good), some boots for a poison/acid nightblade, and I think some pants that my saboteur is using (they aren't really anything special)
I started messing around with GD Stash and ran into apparently a somewhat rare bug where it just corrupts the stash, and even corrupted one of my characters when I tried to save the moving of items from his inventory too. Luckily I made backups before hand and got everything back in order, but that one doesn't seem like it's going to work for me.
I might try Item Assistant, which is apparently supposed to run with the game and auto-imports anything you put into tab 4, then you when you use the tool to export items back to the game, they appear in tab 3. Seems maybe a little smoother? I don't know. Though IA doesn't seem to work with Steam cloud enabled at all, so it might be time to turn that off, I guess.
You get different versions of tanky pets. Shaman is for max HP, Occultist is for HP regen.
I prefer Shaman for kiting and pets. Briarthorn is good. You can slow with the vines and add the Affliction constellation to slow even further. Find something to align with Revenant to made Skeleton summons. Shaman + Constellations mean you can have piles of temporary pets.
And it just gave me another one. Yeah, you can certainly have one now. Again, you'll have to PM me so we can set something up.
Edit: Oh, also I did start trying out Item Assistant, after turning off all the Steam cloud saving stuff. This definitely seems to work much better. Way less cheaty too, which is nice. It can only pull items that you can normally put into a stash tab, which prevents problems with soulbound things. For instance, when I was experimenting with GD Stash, it took an Alvarick's Rebuke that I think might've been soulbound, and the thing just disappeared entirely. It's a little weird the way it normally just lists the base stats of the item while in the program, but when you put it back into your inventory in game, it's correct again. Something about the way the game stores the item and then the 'seed' that tells it how the item rolled I guess.
I am a Pokemon master
It's pretty great so far. Almost 50
Tonight, I decided to go back to the Witchblade for a bit, to try to see if I could kill the Warden in ultimate. At the time, most of my resists were pretty good, but a couple were REALLY weak, I think Cold was around 15% and Aether was -15% while Lightning was about 30%. Random aether shots were messing me up, along with the bolts from the floating eyes, but I did make it to the Warden and he wasn't too bad. And he dropped a blueprint for the Warborn Visor... which is the set I want for this build, but I didn't realize was going to be a blueprint. Literally none of the information I've found about the Warborn stuff mentions it being blueprints, so I thought it was just a normal drop.
I went through part of act 2 and hit 75, then dropped to Elite to finish getting the Black Legion to Revered to get my primary 2-handed weapon augment. I did get a Stormreaver, which could be a pretty good 2-hander for my Elementalist if I ever get back to him, though I really like my Witchblade as far as that type of character goes, so I don't know. I picked up some legendary gloves that were an upgrade, though not the specific ones I'm after, and after swapping a ring with one with high cold resist, I swapped some augments around and got my lower resists all pretty respectable, around 60% for fire, lightning and aether. Everything else is either 80% or extremely close.
I also hit nemesis with the aetherials, which apparently sucks, because he's a complete asshole if you run into him. I think I'll hop back into game for a bit and do Cronley runs on ultimate, see if I can get them to nemesis any time soon.
Edit: Oh yeah, and from my Black Legion farming runs, stopping at Spined Cove in between, I picked up plenty of ectoplasm, so I was able to make my Warborn Visor. It looks like Smithy's skull head from the final fight in Super Mario RPG.