Grim Dawn

Hateyou

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Well I got AOM. Got AoM on sale and Grim Dawn on sale the other day. Gonna give it a try and see how it goes before I put any more money in it and get the latest expansion, unless it goes on sale heh. Thanks for the info. I have no idea on playstyle yet haven't really done anything other than start the game and exit out. I know I don't want a pet class, never cared for them. Probably some kind of melee. Not big on finger waggling.

Try the nightblade, soldier, demolitionist, shaman, probably in that order.

Nightblade is rogue-y dual weilding, warping, cold and piece mostly.

Soldier is tanky, physical, sword and board.

Demo is mostly fire based. Has some ranged abilities but also some nasty melee abilities. His fire prof attack is one of the meanest melee abilities.

Shaman has one big pet but isn’t necessarily a pet class, it’s mostly good to use the pet for fast leveling though, and it has a lot of HP so you don’t have to manage it much like a true pet class has to. Lightning based mostly, 2her abilities.

I think if you try those classes into 20s or 30s you can find some abilities you like then try to plan an end game build better. Keep in mind you dual class so you can refund points and try different abilities, you just can’t refund the base skill points. When you look at build guides on that website it will break down the main abilities it uses, what damage type it utilizes, etc.
 

k^M

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If you play a shaman, you can easy mode the entire game by dumping your points into their bleed/lifesteal insect swarm skill (forget the name?) as it pretty much one shots entire paths of enemies. Between that and the life regen totem, if that's your first spec choice its pretty hard to die until way later in the game.

Was a lot of fun to start with that and then branch out.
 

Pyros

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Well I got AOM. Got AoM on sale and Grim Dawn on sale the other day. Gonna give it a try and see how it goes before I put any more money in it and get the latest expansion, unless it goes on sale heh. Thanks for the info. I have no idea on playstyle yet haven't really done anything other than start the game and exit out. I know I don't want a pet class, never cared for them. Probably some kind of melee. Not big on finger waggling.
For melees and if you have AoM now, I'd recommend checking the Deathknight Krieg starter build. It's basically a guide on how to play a starting Deathknight(Soldier/Necro) with absolutely 0 gear, and farm your way to Krieg's set(in AoM) to actually get a really strong char. [1.0.6.1] Beginner's pre-Krieg Deathknight - Grim Dawn Forums

Guide is old but still works, it's a nice way to get started and understand what to look for and how the various systems work since it's soldier based(so very tanky with a lot of free stuff from passives) and it levels very easily using 2H forcewave or necro skeletons(but if you don't want pets, then forcewave is what you should look at) until it has enough gear to switch to 1h+shield cadence(but you can stay 2H forcewave if you prefer the playstyle until you're farming the Krieg set).

If you want something more agressive, I played a really nice pierce Infiltrator based on this guide: [1.0.6.1] Luminari Godkiller: Ravager, Mogdrogen, Cruc.150-170 8:50min 4buffs/no banners Infiltrator - Grim Dawn Forums Some of it is a bit outdated and obviously the gear is endgame setup and stuff, but even leveling it was pretty strong, you just need to farm some swords every now and then to keep up the damage(you can get good MIs swords from the Hive in act 3, MIs are Monster Infrequents, which are green base items that drop from specific monsters or monster types, in this case insects, and those come with a bunch of nice base pierce stats so if you roll semi decent affixes on them, you've got good weapons). The advantage of this build is you get a shitton of defensive stats for "free" from the tree, as well as a good amount of pierce flat and OA, so you don't need crazy gear to facetank stuff. It is a bit more high maintenance than blademaster however since you have to stand in the circle and refresh 2 buffs constantly, but it's neat.

Then as I mentionned you can probably find an older guide of a primal strike/savagery 2H warden(shaman+soldier) which just kinda melts shit pretty good, but starts pretty slow. It's recommended for that to lvl as a shaman caster maxing the vit spell and then switching later. Something like this not sure if there's any better: [1.0.6.1] Ymirsiol, the Storm Titan - Primal Strike Warder, Gladiator farmer (8 minutes) - Grim Dawn Forums
 

Nirgon

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You can take every point out of everything as long as you remove the constellation assignment to it.
 

Borzak

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In the description of the builds I see 8 minutes or 11 minutes and such. What are they timing/refering to?
 

Hateyou

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I guess I should clarify. If you see it in the title it’s how fast they can clear a crucible run. You’ll also see time references in build descriptions in regards to specific super bosses. They’re all just used for benchmarking the clear speed / dps of the build. Some builds have high dps but can’t tank certain mobs so their clear speed and dps isn’t as good on certain ones. The times kind of evens out the discussion.

Those times you see aren’t very realistic unless you are going to play the shit out of the game and min max. Those are very tweaked, very geared build times, basically the best they could eek out of the build. They do give a general idea of how good/fast it can get though.
 

Void

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You might enjoy this style of build, based on what I'm reading. The main character I still go back to when I'm wanting to kill some time is my 2h warder (shaman + soldier), similar to what Pyros mentioned but even more simplicstic, because it is so simple yet fun to play. I have very few active skills and rely on a lot of passives (passives are round btw, square skills are ones you have to activate). Here is my grimtools, Warder, Level 100 (GD 1.1.2.2) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator

although something is definitely fucky with it now that I look at it, because it says I have skill and devotion points still to use. That's probably from me fucking around and "cheating" by copying a character file and then stripping all of the points and classes from it to try out another build. I don't know why it would have fucked with my actual real character, but whatever, I freely admit that I'm not gonna level another character just to try out a build that I might hate in a fucking single player game. If I like it well enough at 100, I'll go make a level 1 and play it for real, but I'm not gonna spend weeks (at my progression rate) only to find out I hate it.

Anyway, the key points of that build are Savagery with a couple of passive procs, mainly the Brute Force line from Shaman and Zolhan's Technique from Soldier. I use the Devouring Swarm on bosses to proc Assassin's Mark, Blitz to run into the center of packs, and War Cry to debuff them. That's mostly it. The majority of my dps comes from the procs via skills, item procs, and devotion procs. My biggest one is the devotion skill Blind Fury (from Oleron constellation in the far bottom right). Will take you forever to get to it, but it is a MASSIVE dps boost if you crit a lot, and can go off every 1 sec, hitting everything within 5 meters all around you. Apparently it doesn't show the real damage stats on grimtools, so you'll just have to trust me that the damage is YUGE.

I keep coming back to that build because even if I forgot how to play (some builds require a lot of "cycling" of skills that are easy to forget after months away), this one is easy because I can literally just hold down attack and do like 80% of what I would normally do anyway.
 

mkopec

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Def best beginner build is dethknight. Why? because the gear set is easily farmable, I mean, its still rng, but not random drops, so certain mobs drop certain pieces so this is why its easily farmable.

Its a really powerful and tanky build which you can basically clear all content with so what this will allow you to do is farm gear for other builds. What people usually do is base builds around equipment they drop, not build something then farm the gear (exception is the deathknight)

The new expansion, if you do get it, allows you to convert pieces to other set pieces of the same type, which is really useful. So for instance, say you drop helm, pants, boots twice, but still missing the chest, it allows you to keep rerolling that extra set of boots until you get the chest.
 

Needless

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I still dont get the constellation system. I think i got a druid to 50ish using that shaman swarm build (for the most part anyway). But never understood how the fuck i access some of the constellations at the lower part of the constellation map
 

Void

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The new expansion, if you do get it, allows you to convert pieces to other set pieces of the same type, which is really useful. So for instance, say you drop helm, pants, boots twice, but still missing the chest, it allows you to keep rerolling that extra set of boots until you get the chest.
Actually, unless they changed it recently, once you reroll it gets some sort of hidden modifier that prevents it from being rerolled again. So you're stuck with whatever you get.
 

mkopec

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Actually, unless they changed it recently, once you reroll it gets some sort of hidden modifier that prevents it from being rerolled again. So you're stuck with whatever you get.

Well then they must of changed it then, because I rememeber rolling shit until I got the right piece. Several times.
 

mkopec

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I still dont get the constellation system. I think i got a druid to 50ish using that shaman swarm build (for the most part anyway). But never understood how the fuck i access some of the constellations at the lower part of the constellation map

You need to get some prerequisites to open up the later constellations, then just delete the ones you dont need anymore later, thus opening up more points to get others.
 

Void

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Well then they must of changed it then, because I rememeber rolling shit until I got the right piece. Several times.
Interesting. I haven't played in a month, so I wonder if that was something people complained about.

Unless it works differently for the "in set" vs. "out of set" reroll. I can't remember now, but it is possible that I just took some random set item and got another random different set item, and then tried it again and it didn't work. I might not have tried for a different piece in the same set. Or they just changed it in a month, that's always possible.
 

Pyros

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Interesting. I haven't played in a month, so I wonder if that was something people complained about.

Unless it works differently for the "in set" vs. "out of set" reroll. I can't remember now, but it is possible that I just took some random set item and got another random different set item, and then tried it again and it didn't work. I might not have tried for a different piece in the same set. Or they just changed it in a month, that's always possible.
You could always remorph them, maybe you ran out of mats? Some sets can't be rerolled at all though so maybe you mixed that up? Specifically sets that drop in specific places only(Krieg, the vit/chaos caster one and the Shattered Realms set from shattered realm obviously). That said it'x expensive to reroll items so if you don't get lucky, you could just end up with no mats and nothing worth it. When I made my Infiltrator set I had 3 pieces, crafted 2 helms and rerolled them into exactly the pieces I needed to complete the set, but that was great RNG, realistically you're gonna have to keep farming for hours to get enough mats to roll it again once and probably fail.
 

Void

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You could always remorph them, maybe you ran out of mats? Some sets can't be rerolled at all though so maybe you mixed that up? Specifically sets that drop in specific places only(Krieg, the vit/chaos caster one and the Shattered Realms set from shattered realm obviously). That said it'x expensive to reroll items so if you don't get lucky, you could just end up with no mats and nothing worth it. When I made my Infiltrator set I had 3 pieces, crafted 2 helms and rerolled them into exactly the pieces I needed to complete the set, but that was great RNG, realistically you're gonna have to keep farming for hours to get enough mats to roll it again once and probably fail.
I suppose it is possible. I like to think I'm not that dumb, but I can't say I haven't ever boneheaded something simple, so perhaps. I could swear that I tried it multiple times though, and nothing worked more than once. And I can't remember what the mats were, but I've got mats coming out of my ass because every character just tosses them in shared storage, so I feel that I wouldn't have run out, particularly if I was able to grab another piece and try it once and then fail on the second try. But it is possible I'm mis-remembering or hallucinating too.
 

Hateyou

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You can reroll within the same set over and over on the same piece. I think the limit you are talking about is rerolling a set piece into a completely different set. Now I haven’t tried that but I did see someone comment that was the case. So either there is a flag that doesn’t let you reroll to other sets more than once or they didn’t have the mats and didn’t realize it. The mats you need to do the rerolls are not shareable between characters.

I know for a fact you can reroll within the same set over and over, I’ve done that a lot.
 

Borzak

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Thanks for the info. I played to about lvl 15. I don't think it's the game for me. Maybe later I'll try it again assuming there's a way to skip the story entirely.
 

Hateyou

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Thanks for the info. I played to about lvl 15. I don't think it's the game for me. Maybe later I'll try it again assuming there's a way to skip the story entirely.

Well that’s what crucible is. You’re just in a room killing monsters.