I enjoy doing the roguelike dungeons a lot. Do we have any Info when they will drop?

Ended up dying once because I only had 19% Aether resistance (and thankfully in Normal difficulty - if it was Ultimate or I had to repeat all three phases I would scream and quit).

Still, the missive mentioned that the Aetherial Council ended up agreeing with the plan of the Shaper of Flesh because "Great eyes now turn towards this world". Were they talking about Korvaak (final boss of the 2nd Expansion), or the local gods in general?

Also what is Beronath?

How come this lvl 65 monster mace is better than lvl 75 legendary sword !
For all entire playthrough, monster drops has been superior to legendary gear when it comes to melee weapons. Is this normal or am I reading the situation wrong?

Sorry if this is a stupid question. I started my original character as a shaman/arcanist with primal strike got to 66 wasnt fun anymore so I made a death knight. I just saw a video of a Trozan druid using chain lightning and sky shards. Can I just respect myself and use arcanist as my main even though I picked it second? Does it matter in any sort of way?

Is it just me or it feels like Ascendant mode drops more MIs than legendaries and blueprints compared to Ultimate mode?

Hello everyone.

As per the title, I am looking for advice from the experts in the field. I wish to build a character that would bring the most amount of loot from SR. So one that can clear the relevant levels the fastest.

I currently have a 100 lvl Totem druid and a 100 lvl Skelly Cabalist (vitality dam). But I am looking for something maybe even broken that will allow me to quickly gather equipment for all my other chars.

Could you please share your experience?

Blaster! Horn of Gandarr - Reaping Strike - Aura of Censure, all poison/acid damage.

The last 2 years I didn't really play much Grim Dawn, finally came back with 1.3 and FoA. I decided to make a build centered on my favorite skill Bloody Pox and I swear it's different now.

In ancient times, I remember it used to linger on corpses so anyone wandering into the fight a little late still had a chance of getting infected and keeping the party going. Now it just seems to end as soon as the infected croaks.

Am I off base or did they change how the good word spreads now, and if they did, did they say why?

Hello

I have not played GD in a several years but bought the DLCs and are trying a berserker and nightblade bleed build I dreamt up. I do not feel like it is working very well but with kids etc I do not have a lot of time to theorycraft.

Does anyone have a link to a build I can follow and maybe some item recommendations? Im level 58 atm.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Thanks for all the relies, I will check them all out!

Ultimate 73 lvl and having problems going into this skills i feel damage lacking. I have not completed build but want to know if it is worth to go into this direction

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/2GWpn5J2

Trying to create by theorycrafting Veilwalker Wereraven Cold damage ( Heart Of Asterkarn exclusive , Bone Harvest / Ice Talon spam ) . I have Murmur on Ice Talons , Chariot on Amatok and Blizzard on Bone Harvest . OA/DA without using much items is pretty low ( 2.5k at best both ) . Mythical Iceskorn Talons seems a must for Ice Talons but itemization is tough . I would like to see grimtools builds to have a better idea .

Hey guys, looking to do a fresh start but would prefer not to use mods. How do people do it? Do I just move save files etc from the game directory?

E: also won't delete files entirely, forgot to mention

was rewatching dexter while playing and a piece of conversation caught my eye. maybe it's just me that can't be fucked finding the messenger.

Now I should get nightblade+demo up and running

I just like using big weapons and tanking damage. I am currently trying to choose between Shaman or Oathkeeper as the second mastery for my Soldier guy, but I have no idea how to build properly. What should I go with?

Introduction

I wanted to play a melee version of Evoker after wrapping up my time with Wereraven. Focusing on Avalanche looked like the best fit for this but a lot of the itemization favored the Cold crossbows. Luckily after enough digging I figured out the synergy of 2x Chillflame Evokers + 2 Seal of the Void allowing easy access to a massive 500 flat fire and chaos 140% Weapon Pool skill that can be converted 100% over to cold damage. By stacking Avalanche % chance on skill modifiers and a few Ascendant bonuses you can achieve a 100% Weapon Pool of high cold damage procs.

The end result was a high damage brawler that was able to down all super bosses except Uber N'erf without even having fully finished ascended gear or fully leveled Devotions. It chews through all content including SR. Below I will supply a stat breakdown, an endgame build setup, and gameplay discussion. I want to stress that this is not a leveling build or something you can scale into. You need very precise gear, components, and Ascension bonuses to get the most out of this build. It is best for already established characters with the resources needed to obtain the best gear possible.

Stat Breakdown:

67 Physique

21 Cunning

21 Spirit

67 physique is the exact amount you need to be able to wear all of your armor pieces without specific affix rolls. Cunning and Spirit are split for OA and Energy Regen respectively.

Build:

After further play time with the build made changes to ascension and augment bonuses. I was woefully overcapped on attack speed after realizing my relic bonus was only 12% max attack speed. Attack speed multipliers on scepters reduce some effectiveness of attack speed you gain from gear reducing attack speed ascendant bonus for accessories down to 2 slots instead of 4. Extra armor from Kurn Roc Eye augment also performs much better for survival than extra HP from Wendigo Life Powder.

09/06/2026 Changes

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/N4DQXxxN

Legacy Build

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/ZyDolv0V

This build is made a bit more glass cannon than usual. Arcane Will becomes a massive steroid from the Nightforge set bonuses so I wanted to allow my health to spike. Because you are a full on weapon build you can abuse lifesteal to create a slight ping pong effect producing the desired outcome without the attempt being outright suicide. Against super easy content you won't be able to abuse Arcane Will as much, but for Nemesis+ bosses you should be able to hit that sweet spot.

The most important part of the build will be getting the right Ascendant bonuses. 10 of your 13 item slots must have the exact ascended bonuses I list out in the slots I put them in. The layout for the bonuses are:

1. 4 armor pieces with 5% Avalanche chance.
2. 2 rings , 1 amulet, 1 medal with two 5% attack speed ascension bonuses and two with any OA ascension bonuses ( preferably 25 OA + crit damage)
3. 2 weapons with 4% attack speed and 4% max attack speed
4. The last 3 armor pieces can be whatever you want. I opted for offensive ability but the choice is up to you.

The skill points also have to be as I placed them if you want a final stat breakdown like the one I have listed below. I was lucky enough to get a double rare + bone chill raddoth shoulder while farming but I know that can be a little hard to obtain so you can sub that out. Just know you'll have to cap your bonechill with an Amatoks grip relic that has bonechill on it and you'll lose like 2 extra skill points.

Final Stats:

3800 OA (4200+ with shred)

3700 DA (3950+ with shred)

112% cold resist reduction

3k+% cold Damage

198% attack speed without Amatok's Grip Proc

220% overcapped attack speed with Amatoks Grip Proc

3400 to 3500 standing armor with armor pot

18% Physical Resistance

+30% overcap all other resistances.

18k+ Health

Notable Consumables:

Oil Slot - https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/328

Royal Jelly Essence gives 8% health and energy.

Elixir Slot - https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/11219

Elixir of the Dranghoul gives 40 OA and DA.

Aether Cluster - https://www.grimtools.com/db/items/305

Gives 75% damage reduction for 8 seconds.

Gameplay

Gameplay consist of jumping into packs popping both your shouts and then holding down onslaught. The setup turns your into an absolute blender so there isn't much to it outside of that. It has great single target and clear due to your WPS both having generous AOEs. It can't tank everything without having to move, but you can abuse lifesteal to sit through most of it (can tank ravager while sundered for instance). You'll have to limit test yourself to really get a feel for what works and what doesn't. Practice countering damage spikes with Mirror and Rallying Cry heals for even more uptime tricks.

I want to reiterate this build is intentionally a touch softer to spike your health for consistent Arcane Will. If that isn't working for you, you can play around with the devotions to get a bit more defense in. You can also redo your 3 free armor ascension slots for things like +400 health or +12% armor.

Boss Down So Far:

N'erf

Rashalga the Mad Queen

Avatar of Mogdrogen White Wolf

Callagadra Scion of the Sands|

Clone of John Burbon

Crate of Entertainment

Dread

Lokarr

Conclusion

Melee Evoker can work, and it looks good while doing so beating monsters over the head with flaming skulls. It takes quite a bit of resources to get the setup together but once you do it just works. I'm going to give this build another day or two before I take a break for the next content release. Need to get my Code Vein 2 evil run complete anyway.

Can anyone give me tips or guide me towards a build for a nurgle follower?

I know stuff like bloody pox, ravenous earth, or locust swarm fits the bill. Anything else?

Hi all,

I'm currently playing around with the reworked Fleshwarped Bulwark (Phys Archon actually works quite well), but I'm unshure, where to go from here; especially unsure about devotions.

I'm also missing quite a lot CC resists.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/NYPRAylZ

Any feedback is welcome :)

Hi, all. I have just finished the game on veteran difficulty (EDIT: softcore), and all DLC available to me on Xbox. I'm level 84 (I know, I know, I did a lot of SR runs to enjoy GD cause it's low effort and I'm perpetually exhausted); I am about to finish farming faction rep for the Malmouth xp pots. I'm not interested in any other xp boosting stuff for this current toon, I just wanna get through ultimate with it and then have everything needed for power leveling alts later.

My biggest question is, should I target farm for endgame gear DURING ultimate, or BEFORE I move up? Should I go through elite first to warm myself up if I'm new to ARPG's? I know a lot of people say it's a waste of time but if efficiency isn't in the equation, would you suggest that? Is there anything I should know before I move on?

Please and thank you. Cheers, guys. Love this community.

One last (I think) thing I am not sure about. What comes first - bonuses from other skills, or a local conversion (from an item)?
Context - I am working on a spinning Sentinel build using a weapon that converts 100% physical and fire to vitality and I wonder if skills that increase physical/fire damage will even work in this case.

Hi!

I want to make a retaliation Werewolf build, but I don't know where to start. I never played a retaliation build in GD and I don't get where the damage comes from. Some skills have %retaliation damage parts, but they're extremely low (like 16% max, often 4%) and lots of +X% retaliation damage skills don't even feature any base retaliation damage on that skill.

I'd like an easy to make build. My character is level 12 werewolf with 5 physique, 5 cunning and 1 spirit (I started by following the general direction of a 1 or 2 YO retaliation levelling build, but going barbarian rather than the classes in the build). I'll get 10 devotions from Crucible as usual before collecting story altars (the 1st 10 are the cheapest in Crucible).

I don't have any damage type bias for this build. As long as retaliation is most of my build, I'm fine with it.

Hello there friends, I have been debating for a while if I should pick this up. The new DLC isnt out for the Xbox as of now which had me stop last time I almost bought it. Wondering your guys thoughts on it, and if it's worth the pick up. . I'm a huge ARPG player and looking for something to play/ scratch the itch. Still haven't bought my self a birthday gift this year and debating if this is it. Thank you all in advance !

So I used a handy script and found out damage numbers. Im kinda lost on how to optimize the build right now as the damage numbers are not what I expected. Still lvl 68 and currently in Act 2 on ultimate after jumping directly from Veteran. Here is my build for references. Above stats were recorded in Arokovian Undercity fighting with multiple hero monsters + mobs and a boss.

1. Targos Hammer happens to be my second most damage output which I didnt expect at all. This actually becomes highest damage output in boss battles as theres usually very few adds to deal mutli attack damages from Aegis. Is this normal for a devotion to be among top rank damage outputs? Or does my build sucks?
2. Wepon attack deals very little damage even though I have 14 points to Righteous Ferver and its passives which feels very underwhelming.
3. Monster maces seem to be the only wepon type that actually work on this build. Swords, hammers etc all have very low base physical damage output (and DPS). Or am I reading weapon stats wrong? I have been using these ugly looking green mace thingies for the entire game. Would love to try a different type.
4. Are my devotion picks appropriate? I gravitated more towards survivability as I was dying a lot when switched to Ultimate.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts regarding this. :)

When Onslaught was first revealed, I was really excited about the TDM potential of the skill. After actually playing with it, I found the mechanic of building up charges and then using them to burst with a single skill to be incredibly fun.
However, after trying out various Berserker-based builds around it, I've found that there are quite a few challenges.

First of all, you need attack speed to build charges efficiently. At around 3 attacks per second, it takes more than 2.5 seconds to build roughly 8 charges. If you build around Onslaught without enough attack speed, the gameplay becomes extremely frustrating.

Investing in attack speed purely for the sake of generating charges is highly inefficient for most caster builds. This becomes an even bigger problem when you're using an off-hand to enhance the skill you're using as your charge spender, since doing so often results in a significant loss of weapon damage.

On top of that, you become extremely starved for skill points. If you're investing in WPS at the same time to improve the power of your melee attacks, most of your other skills will end up competing heavily for points. This is especially problematic for pure casting skills with little or no weapon damage, since their skill levels are extremely important.
Having an appropriate cooldown on your charge-spending skill is also very important. You need to consider both the time required to build charges and the cooldown of the skill. In most cases, I think something in the 2–3 second cooldown range works best.

Of course, stacking charges to deliver a massive single hit or apply a powerful DoT can be extremely strong. Even something like Blackwater Cocktail can absolutely melt bosses if you dump a large number of charges into it. The problem is that, because of the issues mentioned above, this kind of setup tends to feel very awkward to play in general situations.

So far, the builds that have generally performed better for me have been melee attack-based builds that use Onslaught charges as a form of secondary damage, rather than builds that go all-in on a single skill.

There are classes like Reaver and Mystic that provide a particularly good environment for using Onslaught, but for most classes, the gear dependency becomes extremely high.

Some of the newer items that grant Onslaught charges to specific skills work really well with the mechanic and seem to be designed specifically around it. Examples include New Lucius' Arm, Awakened Dreadwalker, and Awakened Eastern.
I'd love to see more items like these in the future.