KickStarter Grim Dawn

Arcanist and Occultist are the best choices. Occultist has Sigil of Consumption and Curse of Frailty which are godly. Arcanist has Iskandra's Elemental Exchange to boost that Elemental damage, Inner Focus, Maiven's, Mirror of Erections, and Callidor's Tempest + the Transmuter for some crowd control. To put it simply:

Arcanist offers some survi in the form of tankability thanks to Maiven's and Erectoes, a buff for Elemental damage and to apply Elemental DoTs and a PBAoE knockback, which isn't the greatest since it doesn't work on bigger boss monsters, but at least it's something.

Occultist offers more offensive utility. Curse of Frailty is nice since it slows movement speed and debuffs Phsyical and Elemental resistances. Very good. Sigil of Consumption does a lot of damage and heals you for a nice amount of health as well. Offers you some tankability while being offensive at the same time. Blood of Dreeg with Armor of the Guardian as one point wonders will heal you for 15% of your health and buff you 10% attack speed for 15 seconds which is a nice burst in DPS. Or you can spec deeper into them if you decide that you want to do Acid damage instead. Acid is objectively one of the best damage types in the game because there aren't that many monsters who are resistant to it, and you can debuff those who are.

 

Manual stats allocation and /pvp are nice but they don't magically make TL2 a good ARPG. Like Hobo Elf already said, mechanically it was subpar and map design was pretty much 1:1 D3.

The only reason why TL2 was even noticed was that the community was totally pissed off by D3. Everyone rushed to give TL2 10/10 scores on MC just to make D3 look even more miserable in comparison. Personally I think it was childish and unnecessary.

In conclusion: D2 > TQ > PoEx > VH > D3 > TL2.

Here's your problem. You need to overcome your blind hatred towards TQ, then you'll be able to enjoy GD.

 

Non-modded TQ was unbelievably bland and boring. I liked the mythical setting, and I still like it more than the generic fantasy of Grim Dawn but in combat pace and enjoyement Grim Dawn is a league above TQ.

 

Hobo's really gone off the deep end with his Grim Derp fanboyism. I'm sure it's a fine game but no reason to twist logic to bash any and all similar titles. TL2 was fine... hardly worse than some of the shit Soldak puts out.

 

Diablo 2 has an easily recognizable character system where you put points into 1 of 4 attributes and skill points into skills. Like TL2 and unlike D3. In fact that's the main difference between D2 and D3 so calling TL2, which has 4 attributes and skillpoints a clone of D3 is fucking retarded.

 

If you'd read the thread you'd see I'm very critical of Grim Dawn. It still has a lot of of major issues, mostly with its balance. The next few patches will be polishing up that balance so we'll see how it all comes together in the end. I'd hardly call that fanboyism. I'm just glad that there's finally a good ARPG come out with replayability and isn't a tired masturbation of Diablo 2. Diablo 2 is great, but it's past its expiration date at this point.

 

Yet you haven't provided a single example why that is and how it pushes the genre forward?

How exactly?

No it wasn't, in fact it has the best level design out of any games in the genre by far and also a good solution to random levels for single player (or well... improved properly on D2's).

No, it was a great game, a bit rushed out and devs didn't bother to sustain it properly. It was praised because it improved the formula without feeling the need to throw it in the trash. The only fail was devs going "fire and forget" on it.

Blind hatred? The shit mechanics from TQ directly fuck up my enjoyment of this game. Like the multitude of pointless damage types that are flat damage with different names and manage to royally fuck up drop rates beyond what PoE or AH D3 were ever capable.

 

I could never enjoy TQ, simply because to me it felt too dull. Don't get me wrong, the game was alright, but I could never enjoy it like D2.
It was the same thing with Dungeon Siege - I got bored the fuck out of it, and then Dungeon Siege 2 was good for a bit of multiplayer on LAN partys back in the days.

 

That's because TQ's content was not only dull, the most interesting and iconic boss fights, such as the Hydra, were only encountered in the higher difficulties, not Normal. Most people struggled to even get past Normal. Mechanically TQ was excellent.

 

I didn't think it was particularly dull (maybe a bit of a slow starter early on, which might've put off some) but then again I dig all that mythology stuff. GD's world is better though, it's like straight out of some metal song lyrics where everything is gloomy grimdark evul. Even the currency is just pure fucking iron, screw gold and all that other shiny crap!

 

TQ was incredibly fucking long, and not in a good way. I caught myself thinking after every single location "whew, thank god this shit is done". Couldn't even finish IT because of that, 7 level dungeon with a very laggy beginning and same mobs throughout it was too much for me.

 

I liked the setting a lot and the world looked great, I thought. It was a really well done non-grimdark ARPG without being cartoony. But it was exhaustively long. Maybe it wouldn't feel too much that way if you'd level up at a better pace, but every single area seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. I think it took me 10 hours to finish the 1st act.

 

In addition the third (?) "chineese/far eastern" was imho much weaker than all the other parts in TQ. Great Wall part was nicely done graphic-wise but otherwise it was always the most boring part of the game. It just didn't fit the theme of greco-egyptian... things. The overall pace was a bit too slow as many have said. Add the fact that some content was only available on higher difficulties didn't help (at least in the eyes of say "less hardcore" crowd).

What i want to ask here however is about POE and GD. Someone a few posts ago bashed its passive skill tree ("circuit board" lol). Imo It not only works perfectly well in practice but also is something different from D2 which POE copies religiously in so many other aspects. It can only be seen as a good thing imo. Overall attacking this particular aspect of PoE is just non-sense. Some other aspects otoh... but this is not what i want to ask.

And here comes my question - i haven't played Grim Dawn since... well since it was capped around level 20 or 25 or something, dont clearly remember, quite some time ago. And the biggest change i see at first glace is this "Constellation" thingy. Please tell me it was planned from the very beginning and there are some proofs of that (posts by devs or whatever) because at first glace it looks so awfully PoE-ish: "Let's make some additional layer of modifiers/skills with a pretty graphic representation, we already covered base stats elsewhere so let's put some other stuff there so people can't say we are copying POE but we totally are". I'm probably wrong, and it doesn't bother me anyway much, another layer of complexity in character creation is welcome if you ask me. But it made me a bit curious.
Is this an aftertought, a typical "oh look this other games made this nice thing and people like it so we might sell more if we add it to our game" case or completely not ?

 

It's kinda PoE-ish, but the difference is that it's on top of the character progression and not THE char progression. It can be used to insulate weaknesses your char might have (lack of aoe, survivability, lack of single target dmg etc.). I find it quite enjoyable and it adds to the exploration since you have to search out the shrines to get the points you need. The whole game is a balance mess at the moment so I can't comment on that, but they are going to polish and balance it in the next 2 months before release.

 

Hahaha. Wishful thinking. Basically nothing beyond what they had during the kickstarter was planned. Arcanist was not planned, Shaman was not planned, devotions were not planned. It doesn't feel like an afterthought system, though. It adds to the gameplay in a way that feels rather organic. It also helps make more builds viable, which is great, but it also helps make some builds viable earlier than usually possible. If you want to make a thorns character then you can just grab a few devotions for revenge damage and you're good to go even if you don't have appropriate gear yet.

 

Thanks s for the answers about "Constellation". Aftertought or not, the option looks interesting. As i said before, having more options in character developement is (almost) never a bad thing.

I run into this thing browsing discussions on Steam in a hllarious thread about genre-qualification of Grim Dawn. Hillarious as in = full of morons and possibly autistic people but this guy must be a codexer - at least at heart:

The thread was locked by a mod a few pages later.

 

Should be an obvious choice, but... that sweet, sweet damage. Would the crit bonus and the extra OA offset the big loss of total damage? The fire damage only helps the hellhound, and mostly its special attack so that's prob negligible.

 

In theory. In practice mobs don't attack fast enough for retaliation to be viable (and it doesn't seem to work on ranged either). Not even the chance on block skills do enough and you already said they plan to nerf block...

 

Its normal attacks also deal some fire damage. But that thing is godly for fire revenant pet which also spawns from another off hand...

 

I'd say the resistances and skill cooldown are also tempting...if you have cooldown somewhere else as well (and are using the hound, which you should be) that's more explosions! If you aren't far into epic it doesn't really matter yet though, when you get further into epic and especially in ultimate you're going to really need to start looking at your resists/etc.

 

With my previous set enemies took 2500 Acid damage per hit. I got it to 2900 with devotions, but I wasn't particularly aiming for that kind of build. It is more than viable and easy to do, but I wouldn't rely on it completely becaues casters and ranged characters don't suffer from it. It is stronk as fuck, though. Enemies just exploded as they touched me. Loghorean was NP as the adds killed themselves while I wailed on at the fattie.

 

Still doing Normal so it's all about the offensive potential for now - and the yellow skull has the same cooldown reduction, too.

 

What? dins curse is possibly the single best diablo inspired aRPG to have ever come out.

 

I did read. Didn't you say you played like 16 hours straight? You're PPPPPPPPPPPPP much obsessed with this game.

 

Even over Divine Divinity, Nox, and perhaps Prince of Qin?