I'm going to play the necromancer. What characteristics to upgrade?(Physique, Cunning, Spirit)

[Traundir]

Previously I played as a Demoman(Physique)

[Plowbat]

Well necromancer can be played as pet-centric, or mage, or auto-attack based with no weapon restriction, sooo... yeah no way to answer your question without an idea of how you want to play your necro.

My own pet build is a 75/25 between physique and spirit for example.

[Traundir]

Originally posted by Plowbat:

Well necromancer can be played as pet-centric, or mage, or auto-attack based with no weapon restriction, sooo... yeah no way to answer your question without an idea of how you want to play your necro.

My own pet build is a 75/25 between physique and spirit for example.

I plan to play as pet-centric (skeletons)

[Neit]

With pet-based build, you'll need majority in Physique, as that's your most important stat. You'll also probably need a few points in Spirit, as it's required by some caster items. You shouldn't care about Cunning at all, unless you are going to end up with some crit-based proc in your build, but even then there are usually better ways of getting the required OA.

[Traundir]

Originally posted by Neit:

With pet-based build, you'll need majority in Physique, as that's your most important stat. You'll also probably need a few points in Spirit, as it's required by some caster items. You shouldn't care about Cunning at all, unless you are going to end up with some crit-based proc in your build, but even then there are usually better ways of getting the required OA.

Thank you very much

[Fall Damage]

2 things that I'm kinda peeved about the Skeleton pets is that:

#1: Raising skeletons is completely RNG at what type you get, which is quite annoying imo.

#2: They don't draw Threat/Aggro at all unless you bind certain Devotion skills to them.

Aside from that, they can and do most certainly have the ability to tear your foes a new one!

[Neit]

Originally posted by Fall Damage:

#2: They don't draw Threat/Aggro at all unless you bind certain Devotion skills to them.

They definitely do, but obviously not as well.
1. They do not have "additional threat generated"/"taunt" abilities like bigger pets.
2. They are horde pets, so the threat is not shared by the group, but held by individual skeletons, and individually they are not as strong as the bigger bulkier pets. And of course when a skeleton dies it's aggro is lost.

So you have to plan around this when you plan to hide behind them.

[Fall Damage]

Originally posted by Neit:

Originally posted by Fall Damage:

#2: They don't draw Threat/Aggro at all unless you bind certain Devotion skills to them.

They definitely do, but obviously not as well.
1. They do not have "additional threat generated"/"taunt" abilities like bigger pets.
2. They are horde pets, so the threat is not shared by the group, but held by individual skeletons, and individually they are not as strong as the bigger bulkier pets. And of course when a skeleton dies it's aggro is lost.

So you have to plan around this when you plan to hide behind them.

Yeah, I've been scavenging the interwebs on that and realized I read over that they have an abysmally short Aggro/Threat range.

[Synopse]

If you plan to play pet-centric

Originally posted by Traundir:

Originally posted by Plowbat:

Well necromancer can be played as pet-centric, or mage, or auto-attack based with no weapon restriction, sooo... yeah no way to answer your question without an idea of how you want to play your necro.

My own pet build is a 75/25 between physique and spirit for example.

I plan to play as pet-centric (skeletons)

Check this guide. It has some nice theory crafting, even though it is a bit dated.
https://requnix.com/gaming/grim-dawn-builds/sir-crunchybones-skelemancer-cabalist

[Neit]

Originally posted by Synopse:

If you plan to play pet-centric
Check this guide. It has some nice theory crafting, even though it is a bit dated.
https://requnix.com/gaming/grim-dawn-builds/sir-crunchybones-skelemancer-cabalist

Please no, not that site again.

Aside from the fact that all "requnix" guides are very outdated since he stopped playing the game years ago and the game changed significantly since then, those guides were very low quality even before that.

This specific build is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. Yes, you'll be able to finish the game, or clear some lower SR, but that's not exactly an achievement for a build with that kind of gear.

If you really want to recommend some build, there is a lot of great, even beginner friendly, guides on official Crate forums, so that's infinitely better place to get your build than this:
https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/beginner-build-compendium-87-guides-for-aom-fg-expansions/106137

[Synopse]

Originally posted by Neit:

Originally posted by Synopse:

If you plan to play pet-centric
Check this guide. It has some nice theory crafting, even though it is a bit dated.
https://requnix.com/gaming/grim-dawn-builds/sir-crunchybones-skelemancer-cabalist

Please no, not that site again.

Aside from the fact that all "requnix" guides are very outdated since he stopped playing the game years ago and the game changed significantly since then, those guides were very low quality even before that.

This specific build is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. Yes, you'll be able to finish the game, or clear some lower SR, but that's not exactly an achievement for a build with that kind of gear.

If you really want to recommend some build, there is a lot of great, even beginner friendly, guides on official Crate forums, so that's infinitely better place to get your build than this:
https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/beginner-build-compendium-87-guides-for-aom-fg-expansions/106137

Do you mind to give at least an example, what you think is wrong with that build?
Sure there are other more current guides on builds. I just picked that one because I had it bookmarked since it worked for me a while ago. That why I mentioned that it is dated.

[Neit]

Originally posted by Synopse:

Do you mind to give at least an example, what you think is wrong with that build?
Sure there are other more current guides on builds. I just picked that one because I had it bookmarked since it worked for me a while ago. That why I mentioned that it is dated.

Ok, let's have a look at some of the huge ones:

1. Damage types are all over the place.

I am honestly not even sure what damage type he even had in mind when the build was created. Hound is physical/chaos/fire, bird is elemental, skeletons are physical/vitality, fiend is physical/acid/vitality, skeletal servant deals vitality/physical.

Now looking how this is supported elsewhere, we have physical, vitality, acid and elemental resist reductions from Curse of Frailty and physical and vitality from Spectral Wrath. (I am ignoring damage types not used.) We have a nice Necrolord Shroud and Dirge of Arkovia, which nicely boost vitality damage, which multiple our pets deal. And then the insane part, there are 2 rings, which based on their roll convert 80-100% pets deal from well supported Vitality to basically unsupported (in the current build) Chaos damage, drastically reducing the global damage output for the pets. We also have Fiend devotion, which boosts pet fire damage, we basically don't have and gives skeletons fire/chaos spell. Note that this devotion is not needed at all and can be easily replaced with something else that's more beneficial.

Nice thing about Pet Cabalist is how easy it is to actually consolidate all these damage types, replacing just few items will let you consolidate 80-90% damage dealt by pets into single type, either Vitality, Chaos, Fire or Elemental and boosts your total damage at least 3 times compared to this mess.

I could go more in depth, but this is already a huge wall of text and we are still discussing first major issue, so let's move on...

2. Skills are all over the place

There's a lot of wasted skill points. I am going to assume that overcapped skills (red ones), are caused by balance patches, because several patches actually did touch pet builds and skills granted by items. So some of this can be easily fixed.

Lost Souls set is Hellhound (and Skeleton) oriented, it even gives you additional Hellhound so it's doubly beneficial to invest into it, so why did he skip all the Hellhound abilities is beyond me. They deal Chaos/Fire damage, which is sort of supported by the gear/devotions, they are the main source of threat generation, so they help Hellhounds to keep their aggro and they hit hard, after 1.2.1 even harder than before. But they are skipped. Lot of wasted potential here.

At certain threshold, Blight Fiend's and Hellhound's skills are able to taunt the target, below that they at least boost the threat generation for the said pets. This is partially replaced by Ishtak, but it still works better when bigger portion of the aggro is held by fewer strong pets.

Another change from 1.2.1 is that pet autoattacks are now weaker, but abilities stronger, so whatever I stated above is now even more important thanks to this change.

Back to damage types, lot of skill points are instead wasted on various skills that directly or indirectly support damage types we barely even have, Spectral Wrath, Curse of Frailty, Storm Spirit, Hellfire are all heavily invested into, and I am not saying they are bad skills, but I don't think they have to be all (almost) maxed out together in one build. Especially when other more beneficial skills are not invested into at all, as mentioned above.

3. Build is weak but expensive

Build requires almost fully legendary gear, which makes it not accessible to new players. But you can tweak the skills/devotions a bit, replace the gear with easy to get monster infrequents, even without correct affixes, and you will still get build that is as powerful as this one, or even more powerful.

I am not going to continue, I hope this sufficiently points out the obvious flaws and I don't really think it's worth to try to fix this build, when there's a lot of better and up to date and even beginner friendly builds already shared by other Grim Dawn community members.

[Synopse]

Thank you. I see the build aged not so well. It was actually a build to not have BiS in mind. No idea why you claim the opposite, but maybe you just clicked the Lvl 100 example.

It played great back when I used it. It had the focus on pet damage and buffs off all kinds.
But I see that the skills changed too much to advise this anymore.
That doesn't make that guide bad, it's just didn't got necessary updates.

[Neit]

Originally posted by Synopse:

Thank you. I see the build aged not so well. It was actually a build to not have BiS in mind. No idea why you claim the opposite, but maybe you just clicked the Lvl 100 example.

It played great back when I used it. It had the focus on pet damage and buffs off all kinds.
But I see that the skills changed too much to advise this anymore.
That doesn't make that guide bad, it's just didn't got necessary updates.

Well the guide was published maybe even before I started to play the game, so I cannot really claim I remember how exactly the game looked like back then.

Looking at history of some items, lot of problems are caused by balance changes, 1.2.1 alone was huge, but there were multiple patches before that touched various parts of the build, after all the guide is around 5 years old.

But David Allen, the author of the guide, never had great reputation in GD community and even years ago when I knew literally nothing about the game, people were warned against his guides as they were considered low quality, so make out of that what you will. They are definitely low quality now, as they are horribly outdated.

[Valar Morghulis]

Rule of thumb for Any class is physical. and only add (and later remove) spirit etc to equip stuff. In the end you should have more than enough

[Synopse]

Originally posted by Neit:

But David Allen, the author of the guide, never had great reputation in GD community and even years ago when I knew literally nothing about the game, people were warned against his guides as they were considered low quality, so make out of that what you will. They are definitely low quality now, as they are horribly outdated.

There was a breach between him and a part of the communtity. Never felt the need to join the sentiment. The guides are not bad, because of that. Now they are outdated. It is as it is.