How can I tell whether a skill is a "default weapon attack"?

Question

I'm playing Grim Dawn using a Shaman/Soldier classes. I'm using Primal Strike and Thunderous Strike (so I get lightning strikes on every attack).

I also had points in:

• Brute Force
• Feral Hunger
• Upheaval

But someone pointed out to me that I'm wasting my points in Feral Hunger and Upheaval, because they only work in conjunction with "default weapon attacks", and Thunderous Strike isn't a default weapon attack.

Up till now I had assumed that any passive skill (marked with a circle) works with any active skill (marked with a square), but that seems not to be the case. When I'm choosing skills, is there a way I can tell whether given passive and active skills will work together?

I did find this page...

https://grimdawn.gamepedia.com/Default_weapon_attack_replacer_skills

...which seems to indicate that there are almost no primary weapon skills with which I can use these passive skills. Is that right? If so, how can I best tailor my character to use passive skills (or avoid them if they'll be useless)?

Answer 1

The type of skill you're looking for is called a Default Attack Replacer (DAR). You can tell if a skill is a DAR by checking its description tooltip - if it's a DAR, it will include the phrase "When used as your default weapon attack..."

The full list of DARs in the game (not including your character's default attack) is:

• Cadence (from Soldier)
• Savagery (from Shaman)
• Fire Strike (from Demolitionist)
• Righteous Fervor (from Oathkeeper)
• Belgothian's Strikes (from Belgothian’s Slaughter set)
• Touch of Chaos (from Rah’Zin’s Torment set)
• Fleshwarped Strikes (from Heart of Theodin Marcell)
• Runic Bolts (from Runebinder’s Spellthrower)
• Troll Rage (from Mistborn Talisman)
• Beronath’s Fury (from Shard of Beronath)

Only DARs (and default attack) can trigger Weapon Pool Skills (WPS), attack modifiers that proc off of autoattacks. You can tell if a skill is a WPS via its tooltip as well; WPS will include the phrase "X% Chance to be Used."

Note that most procs on items (phrased "X% Chance on Attack") are not WPS, though they look similar. For instance, the Direwolf Claw skill on Mythical Direwolf Crest is a WPS, while the Bear Claw skill on Mythical Sigil of the Bear King is not.

You can read more detail on how these two skill types interact in this guide.

Answer 2

As comments are ephemeral, I wanted to add my own summary answer from the discussion above:

The question is when weapon pool skills can be triggered. Examples of weapon pool skills are Markovian's Advantage, Zolhan's Technique, Belgothian's Shears, and Feral Hunger. These all have text indicating that they activate off of default weapon attacks.

Weapon pool skills can only be triggered in these cases:

• You attack with the default attack.
• You attack with a default attack replacer (see the list in the other answer).
• You attack during the cooldown while using a skill with a cooldown, such as Forcewave, or Primal Strike without Thunderous Strike, or Blade Arc with Clean Sweep.
• You attack during a non-triggering hit using a skill that for other reasons doesn't trigger every time. For example, Cadence only triggers on every third hit. The first and second "non-Cadence" hits will trigger weapon pool skills.