Grim Dawn

That's true, but it's still a waste to loot a guaranteed blue drop at low level when you could have gotten a guaranteed L40-50 item instead. It's not something I'd reroll a character because of, obviously, but if you're aware of how the scaling works then you really should take advantage of it. The only time I loot one-shots is when I can clearly see that the monsters in the area have stopped scaling up (because they are at or below my level instead of being 3-5 levels higher than me). Once the mobs stop scaling, so do the item drops in chests.

As for loot-drop frequency, I find the game to be very streaky. Sometimes I'll get multiple blue drops in a row from heroes, other times I've gone literally 3-4 hours of solid play without a single blue from a hero. Elite is no better than veteran either; while there's a ton more heroes they seem to drop mostly components and greens. RNGesus is a fickle bitch.

I think I may actually have to start over entirely. Occult/demo is just such complete anti-synergy that even after going back to normal difficulty I'm having a hard time progressing anymore past Homestead. Pretty much every elite/named/boss is multiple deaths in a war of attrition to finally grind them down because I have absolutely no way to survive their damage output. The "taunt" on the hellhound ability seems to be entirely a lie and I've never seen a named swing at him ever. I tried sinking a bunch of points in to blast shield and that helped some against gun dudes, but my dps is otherwise already such crap (we're talking like 2-5 minute battles with named) that I can't really afford the points there, much less in that heal/regen skill in occult.

Is there something I'm missing here, or do some class combinations just not work?

Edit: I ditched all the 30something points I had in pet skills and dumped it all in to demo with lots of molotov/firestrike/passives and my damage is way up. Apparently occultist pets just suck noodles? Now I'm just left with the 30 points of specialization in occultist that I'm not using -_-

Also if the scaling and whatnot is anything close to how it was in Titan Quest then you'll run into massive walls at certain areas if your gear isn't up to snuff, and some mobs will just ALWAYS hurt unless you're pimped out bigtime. I'm only lvl 14ish so not sure if this is the case but just another possibility.

I found a semi-working cheat engine trainer that let me remove the mastery points from occultist at least. I can't fully remove the class, but it's down to like 10 mastery for weakening curse and bird heal only, rest I swapped over to demo and am running a full fire damage build that is working a loooooot better so far.

I feel like my gear is complete balls, with my of my stuff being like 20 levels lower than me, but I can't even really pick out what stats I should be going for besides +fire/offense really. I guess resists are good, how important is armor? Is there anyplace to check the math on how good the base stats are (cunning etc) vs offense rating or elemental damage buffs?

Do skills that do % weapon damage work the stupid way like the used to in D3 where it's based purely off the X-Y weapon damage roll and doesn't account for speed at all?

As far as armor etc. goes it's probably important enough (it was in TQ) that you do NOT want gear 20 levels below you even if you have to swap it out for garbage magic items of your level (at least as far as not getting rekt by mobs). Just because something is blue doesn't mean you should keep it forever til you get more blues.

An easy way to gear up in the 35-50 range is to run some bounties or just grind reputation with the various factions until you hit respected or honored. The gear the faction quartermasters sells for very cheap once you have the rep is extremely good. My spellbreaker is still wearing like 80% faction gear at lvl 54.

Is there some wierd loot code that prevents green/blue drops from higher lvl mobs? I was lvl 28 and blew some dynamite in the B. Outskirts in the noobie area and it led to a lvl 35-38 area. I was on vet difficulty and i cleared the entire area including like 4-5 bosses and not one single green/blue dropped. Its a huge area and took awhile, exp sucked, and no gear. Is this related to being 8+ lvls below it? Also all the yellow gear was only selling for 50-90 gold.

WTF ? Side note my 6th reroll led me to an occultist/arc, going full damage on Dreg Eye line and then arc is strictly for survability with shield and just started getting points into the absortion skill. I smoke Conley on vet without much a challenge. Liking this, damage is good now i just need to shore up some of the def abilities.

Unrelated; my next toon if i get the reroll sickness is a nightblade but i tried one already going into spell breaker (NB+arc) i just don't see where the damage is supposed to come from. I watched an end game video of one and it was doing lightening damage but i don't see any where in either build to do that. So i was debating either parying NB with a shaman or demo using savargy+ DW or fire+DW with demo. Any one have experience which one of the 2 have a better damage and which has a better survability?

That's the same streakiness I've been bitching about. I've done that area (and every other that has a good concentration of heroes/nameds) and gotten several blues in a run, and I've farmed it for a couple hours without getting anything better than a green. Not sure why the yellows would sell for so little though.


Shaman and demo have no real survivability to speak of. You really need to pair NB with either soldier or arcanist imo. Nightblade damage comes from tons and tons of OA. For NB/Arc specifically, you're doing phys, pierce, bleed, vit, cold, and chaos damage with your Phantasmal Blades, so getting Total Damage is really the only effective way to increase it; total damage comes in lower amounts than specific types, but you really don't need that much of it when you have massive OA. Third offensive priority would be crit damage.

My spellbreaker is shredding the dps currently. The way I built it is I use phantasmal blades as a delivery mechanic, but I focus almost entirely on cold damage. Coldstone weapon enchant,rhowari sceptre(converts my physical dam to cold), deathchill relic (with the aura), nether edge passive. Basically just tons of flat added cold damage from gear/passives. Then you wear +% cold damage on most of your gear slots and devotions. Tsunami devotion linked to blade spirit and blizzard from amatok devotion linked to phantasmal blades. To buff the dps even further, you use viper devotion + nightchill aura to double stack cold penetration.

Rest of the build / devotion involves survival and stacking OA. From devotion you have scales of ulcama, chariot of the dead, and behemoth to give you a bunch of self healing, and phantasmal blades has life leech builtin to the skill already as well. Then your typical defensive stuff like maivens, empty throne, crane, mirror, etc.

Very happy with my build in elite. Hoping it stays on track into ultimate!

I haven't had time to play in the last week, but my pet build is still strong.

When I try a new class next, its going to be a ranged pistol class I think.

Sinzar_sl said:

My spellbreaker is shredding the dps currently. The way I built it is I use phantasmal blades as a delivery mechanic, but I focus almost entirely on cold damage. Coldstone weapon enchant,rhowari sceptre(converts my physical dam to cold), deathchill relic (with the aura), nether edge passive. Basically just tons of flat added cold damage from gear/passives. Then you wear +% cold damage on most of your gear slots and devotions. Tsunami devotion linked to blade spirit and blizzard from amatok devotion linked to phantasmal blades. To buff the dps even further, you use viper devotion + nightchill aura to double stack cold penetration.

Rest of the build / devotion involves survival and stacking OA. From devotion you have scales of ulcama, chariot of the dead, and behemoth to give you a bunch of self healing, and phantasmal blades has life leech builtin to the skill already as well. Then your typical defensive stuff like maivens, empty throne, crane, mirror, etc.

Very happy with my build in elite. Hoping it stays on track into ultimate!

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Do you build into Iskra's Elemental Change? When i took my first stab at it (low lvl) i started putting points into that but I just didn't see how it was doing much for me but i thought i read it was one of the main strengths of spell breaker. Also related; is Elemental Balance in arc really that good to drop 12 points in? I see almost any one who has Arc main or secondary drops 12 points in but the damage boost seemed wasted as most builds dont have burn/freezeburn/elecfried damage types that i've seen. Or is 25% crit damage worth 12 points alone?

Turbo_sl said:

Do you build into Iskra's Elemental Change? When i took my first stab at it (low lvl) i started putting points into that but I just didn't see how it was doing much for me but i thought i read it was one of the main strengths of spell breaker. Also related; is Elemental Balance in arc really that good to drop 12 points in? I see almost any one who has Arc main or secondary drops 12 points in but the damage boost seemed wasted as most builds dont have burn/freezeburn/elecfried damage types that i've seen. Or is 25% crit damage worth 12 points alone?

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yeah. personally I dont think IEE is that great.
its an aura, which adds to your weapon attacks and pets. good for pets.
but, its important to remember, IEE should be "after" you max out those main attacks/pets, etc. 1 point wonder for a long time with maybe some+skills adding to it.


IEE itself, the flat elem damage, and energy leached is added to attacks. not spells.
same with %phys. (not sure on spells which use weapon damage, like calidors.)

the energy regen is global passive to everyone using it.

Overload.
burn/elec/fburn procs. added to attacks, not spells.
%elem is global to all attacks/spells/sources of elem damage.

Elemental balance.
all global. So, this does effect procs on gear, skyshards fbrun, calidors burn, etc.



Personally I dont find crit that great as noted. Watch your OA and hit/crit rates. VS trash great. 100% hit rate, and 2-30% crit. The NPCS you CARE about, the bosses who are +3 levels to you, that shit plummets. Suddenly 60% hit rate, with 0-1% crit.
so, I find crit itself very low on stat priority. OA itself, cunning very high.

oh and should point out, dots from multiple sources stack, but not the same source.
meaning, like I have skyshards, and Oflash freeze. Each apply frost burn.
skyshards hits 3 times. only applies frostburn once, and the FB lasts long enough I can cast it again on the same target. still only once. FF's frostburn however, will ALSO be applied when cast.

Also, despite, having fully ranked SS frostburn, and a metric ton of cold damage/frostburn damage, Frostburn is still like nonexistant damage.

Caliane_sl said:

(not sure on spells which use weapon damage, like calidors.)

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If a spell has a weapon % as part of it's damage, it will qualify for things that only apply to "attack", so things like phantasmal blades get all the goodness of your passives.

Elemental balance is a decent dps boost for the crit damage bonus, but it's definitely low on the priority and should probably be the last 12 points of your build. It's also a kind of well if you don't put them there, where else would it go.... The build I'm doing (link) isn't really point starved and gets everything it wants with a couple left over for random stuff you probably don't need.

Crit dmg is lower priority because OA gives both crit chance and dmg. It's still nice to have more though. And people who focus entirely on OA crit bosses just fine. You can see videos of dudes on ultimate with OA in every slot, the Arcanist passive, and a bunch of devotions crit bosses all the time for up to like 3.0x damage multipliers. It completely trivializes the game, and will almost certainly have to be toned down (again, they already nerfed the OA% nodes in devotions once).

As for IEE, it's pretty much a 1/1/12 skill imo. It's also one of those skills that you should refund points out of if you have items that boost it past the normal max. The diminishing returns at 13+ aren't worth the points.

It seems to me that pets are procing some on hit shit that I have equiped. Interesting.