KickStarter Grim Dawn

[Lacrymas]

Devotions do highlight when you hover over their categories on the left of the screen. It would be good to be able to add filters for things like "Vitality damage" or "Elemental resistance", though.

 

[Sykar]

Devotions do highlight when you hover over their categories on the left of the screen. It would be good to be able to add filters for things like "Vitality damage" or "Elemental resistance", though.

And not just devotions. The inventory and stash could use such a filter as well.

 

[Lyric Suite]

i dont know how it is now but PoEs graphics and animations were horrid. that you started the game with items that are supposed to look like trash didnt help either.
hands down no comparison there.

Yeah, but Crate Entertainment is a commercial company, where as PoE was an indie game (in the proper sense of the term).

I'm tempted to give this a spin, but memories of TQ hold me back. I tried to finish that game not once, not twice, but three times, and i failed on all three occasions. The game starts fine but it just kept getting more and more boring as you went along. If GD is the same i'm not sure it is worth my shekels.

 

[Sykar]

i dont know how it is now but PoEs graphics and animations were horrid. that you started the game with items that are supposed to look like trash didnt help either.
hands down no comparison there.

Yeah, but Crate Entertainment is a commercial company, where as PoE was an indie game (in the proper sense of the term).

I'm tempted to give this a spin, but memories of TQ hold me back. I tried to finish that game not once, not twice, but three times, and i failed on all three occasions. The game starts fine but it just kept getting more and more boring as you went along. If GD is the same i'm not sure it is worth my shekels.

GD is a souped up TQ. If you did not like TQ then I cannot recommend buying GD, even though it is better in almost all aspects.

 

[Efe]

looking at their pages, "indie" company seems to be employing %50 more people.
you better hold on to your shekels cos i know that exact feeling and its prevalent in gd too.

 

[Sykar]

looking at their pages, "indie" company seems to be employing %50 more people.
you better hold on to your shekels cos i know that exact feeling and its prevalent in gd too.

Dunno, I liked TQ and finished it on legendary with my Elementalist and farmed stuff for a while. Good times and graphically one of the most impressive classes in any Hack&Slash I played to date.
Heck I reinstalled TQ early this year with Underlord mod and still have a blast with my now lvl 45 Elementalist though I play rarely.

 

[Fedora Master]

So here's a thing that has bugged me ever since I got GD:
How do I level fast? I mean, max is now 100 so how do I get there as efficiently as possible without playing the game, like, thrice?

 

[Haba]

How do I level fast?

You should not.

Restart on higher difficulty.

The best XP gainz are from quests.

You could try to use the potion that gives you 100%(?) extra XP, but even then the grind is silly. And if you have grinded yourself to level 100, you will have nothing to get from switching to higher difficulty (besides the extra devotion points and better gear, ofc)

 

[Lacrymas]

Can't you level fast in the Crucible? I never learned how that works, lol.

 

[Varvarg]

i dont know how it is now but PoEs graphics and animations were horrid. that you started the game with items that are supposed to look like trash didnt help either.
hands down no comparison there.

Yeah, but Crate Entertainment is a commercial company, where as PoE was an indie game (in the proper sense of the term).

I'm tempted to give this a spin, but memories of TQ hold me back. I tried to finish that game not once, not twice, but three times, and i failed on all three occasions. The game starts fine but it just kept getting more and more boring as you went along. If GD is the same i'm not sure it is worth my shekels.

Thats the issue with all ARPG's. GD has less of that brick wall feeling IMO as you are constantly progressing.

Pretty sure Crate could be called "indie" as well, since they are self published.

 

[Sykar]

Can't you level fast in the Crucible? I never learned how that works, lol.

IIrc you grap those special green weapons at the start from two houses in Burrwitch, Francis pistol and a two handed green in another house and you are good to go into Crucible.

 

[Lord Azlan]

Can't you level fast in the Crucible? I never learned how that works, lol.

IIrc you grap those special green weapons at the start from two houses in Burrwitch, Francis pistol and a two handed green in another house and you are good to go into Crucible.

With a level 1 character, and with those weapons mentioned above if you want, you can enter the crucible and fight rounds of ten waves.

After every 10 waves you can stop the competition and take your rewards. You will level up, be given some rewards and items and also be able to receive a devotion point (avoid the essence until you have leveled and skilled up and then take it).

If you do this, your score will reset but you will level up, gain attribute points and skills, and devotion. It's an excellent way to gain devotion points early although it won't change the cap.

The easiest way I found to do this was by using Devouring Storm which sort of sucks if you want other classes.

 

[Great Deceiver]

The feeling of these sort of games getting more boring as you go along is pretty universal, I think. In Grim Dawn at least the setting and areas are interesting enough to keep your mind from going completely numb, at least the first time you go through the game, which is more than you can say for pretty much all Diablo-like games, including every Diablo past 1.

The fun comes from figuring builds out and seeing them develop - and there are a great deal of different builds in this game. Items can be interesting, but I find that as I grow older, I'm less and less interested in the hamster wheel of item drops.

As for the game being worth your money, I'd say it definitely is. Even without access to data, I'd say Crate is a much smaller company than Grinding Gear Games (makers of PoE) and that Grim Dawn has a much smaller budget, regardless of PoE being 'free to play'. Since I'm not at all interested in trading and the economy of the game, I personally find the grind in Path of Exile unbearable, and the myriad different currencies (that are a direct descendant of skinner box mobile games) turn me off completely.

 

[bozia2012]

Crucible gives the best gains right after making the char and until about level 20 - you can buy devotion points for just 3-5 tributes. You can get about 8-9 devotion points before the price goes up to 10 tributes.

The xp gain in crucible is capped - lower waves stop giving any xp if you're above certain levels. You can still run Aspirant difficulty when you're like 80, but you'll get some xp around wave 100.

 

[Average Manatee]

Didn't remove the expansion from an inventory for a few hours to check it out. Have come to the conclusion that Grim Tools is more fun to play than Grim Dawn.

ARPGs really need to ditch the retarded Diablo 2 "play the game twice before you can play for real" bullshit. 28 class combos with approximately a dozen or so builds for each, but if you want to actually play one then get ready to spend 40 hours fighting pushovers interspersed by reshuffling items around your inventory for +5% resist somewhere every 10 minutes. I could just cheat and make a level 60 or so character to skip it all but it just isn't the same as developing a character over time, the problem is that developing one is stretched way too thin.

Funny thing is that the entire game is already massively level scaled. The devs could probably flick a few switches and have all 100 levels compressed into one difficulty easily. Make e.g. 1st act enemies scale up to level 20 + 50% of the player's level difference, 2nd act scale up to 40 + 50% player level difference, and so on. Bump XP, get rid of all the trash item drops, then make Ultimate a selectable mode like Veteran that scales every area to 110-120% of the player's level or w/e. A few minor other tweaks and game is both fixed and amazing.

 

[Sykar]

Didn't remove the expansion from an inventory for a few hours to check it out. Have come to the conclusion that Grim Tools is more fun to play than Grim Dawn.

ARPGs really need to ditch the retarded Diablo 2 "play the game twice before you can play for real" bullshit. 28 class combos with approximately a dozen or so builds for each, but if you want to actually play one then get ready to spend 40 hours fighting pushovers interspersed by reshuffling items around your inventory for +5% resist somewhere every 10 minutes. I could just cheat and make a level 60 or so character to skip it all but it just isn't the same as developing a character over time, the problem is that developing one is stretched way too thin.

Funny thing is that the entire game is already massively level scaled. The devs could probably flick a few switches and have all 100 levels compressed into one difficulty easily. Make e.g. 1st act enemies scale up to level 20 + 50% of the player's level difference, 2nd act scale up to 40 + 50% player level difference, and so on. Bump XP, get rid of all the trash item drops, then make Ultimate a selectable mode like Veteran that scales every area to 110-120% of the player's level or w/e. A few minor other tweaks and game is both fixed and amazing.

There are quite a few voices on the official forum which wants Crate to eliminate Elite difficulty which I would not be sad about and should not be difficult to adjust with the expansion out now. It would speed up things considerably. Alternatively they should allow veteran players to play any difficulty right off the bat.

 

[Average Manatee]

Yeah, Elite difficulty is the worst. Far less levels/devotions to be gained, levels are themselves worth less, and almost none of the equipment you get is going to be relevant for Ultimate. Just axing that would improve things immensely.

But ideally I'd like to see an ARPG with a system like Guild Wars had, where the standard difficulty level went straight to the level cap and Ultimate is purely a toggle that boosts everything up to a post-game level of difficulty without requiring the whole thing to be replayed. You could keep Elite as a difficulty level variant for 1-100 play, making it Normal (game journalist difficulty), Veteran (normal), and Elite (Normal for players with a million components in storage to twink with).

I did get stuck in normal difficulty a while after trying out the crucible, was kind of hilarious how easy the game became. Must be designed for 0 Physique caster builds who still want to face tank bosses without any resistances.

Sad thing is that I now have a lot more respect for Grim Dawn's skills/Devotions/itemization compared to my initial playthrough, but can't bear myself to actually play through the same campaign over and over to experiment with them.

 

[Renevent]

I def would not be upset if they got rid of Elite, although it would be a huge jump to go from 0 resistance penalty to 50, and the fact you will be roughly level ~60 (I think) at the start of Legendary which will be pretty difficult to overcome.

 

[Sykar]

Should not be a problem if you can get proper gear and enchants from normal imho.

 

[Average Manatee]

You could just drop the resistance penalties and give enemies an inherent resistance piercing of monster level/2 or something. This is actually close to what Guild Wars did (every character "negated" 3 armor per level). Guild War's armor/resistance system was logarithmic though which meant there was no damage reduction cap and no exponential/diminishing returns, more games should adopt this. The Offensive Ability/Defensive Ability mechanics are already kind of similar in idea (and presumably the reason they were designed that way was to avoid exactly the problem of breakpoints/uneven returns that a % hit system has).

 

[Great Deceiver]

I think doing away with trash items would do wonders. The quantity of garbage drops is through the roof and 2 hours in I was already playing with Green+ filters. There has to be a better way to balance the constant need for positive reinforcement for the Pavlovian types and a feeling of true accomplishment when getting something cool.

Re: difficulty, it's hard to come up with something that doesn't rely on brute force. Mechanical skill in games like these is almost irrelevant and it comes down to brute forcing everything through gear + proper spec.

Besides 'moving out of the fire' there's hardly any mechanical requirement for any fight in the game, and it really hurts replayability. I sometimes think that having enemies in much lesser quantity but which are much harder to kill (in a mechanical sense) would be a good idea, but I can't really think how to do it in a game like this. Simple HP bloat would just make things more boring.

 

[Efe]

what you are thinking of is probably called "Nox"

 

[Great Deceiver]

I remember playing Nox when it came out ages ago but don't remember anything about it. Did it do things differently from a mechanical perspective?

 

[Average Manatee]

what you are thinking of is probably called "Nox"

Almost 18 years old and still the genre hasn't matched it in several areas. In fact we've even regressed from Diablo 1/2 (how sight works).

I remember playing Nox when it came out ages ago but don't remember anything about it. Did it do things differently from a mechanical perspective?

Less enemies, no aiming assist on attacks, everything harder to hit and more mobile (most attacks/spells castable while moving). Dodging hits in melee and stuff was actually viable. There's almost no AoE stuff that doesn't require precision. Plays more like an Unreal Tournament ported to the Diablo viewpoint and controls, MP has modes like capture the flag and deathmatch which work well.

Also of note is that it actually puts non-randomized level design to good use in SP with hand-made traps/secrets/bypassable areas, which Grim Dawn and other similar games definitely do not (Grim Dawn's secrets are hardly secrets).

 

[Lacrymas]

Don't the enemies get more abilities on the higher difficulties?