Just killed the final boss in the Grim Dawn expansion and it was a lot less difficult than I thought it would be. It took about 39 hours. There's one quest I haven't done that involves an end boss in a dungeon and so far I haven't been able to beat it. I think I have to get my defenses up a bit before suceeding. For those who haven't played the game the dungeons are sometimes called "roguelike" in that you can't teleport out of them, so the only way to exit is through death or victory. Also you need to craft a special key to open them, so they're meant to be difficult, and they are. So far I haven't cleared a single one of them, not fully. One of them I can breeze through pretty easily but the final boss hits like a train and he does it so very fast indeed.
But seriously this game is excellent, despite it being almost identical to Titan Quest, the expansion of which I have never got through to be honest, despite liking the game. Grim Dawn is just much better at everything. It has the same technical flaws as Titan Quest (weird performance issues at times, clicking things is slightly inexact at times) and as I said earlier a whole lot of it is identical to Titan Quest .. but it has so much more polish, and the setting is a lot more engaging that the one in Titan Quest. It's more realistic and down to earth, somehow. Part of it is because of all the notes you can gather, and they are worth reading as they tell small stories in a world gone mad. And the action is much more engaging and pleasing than it was in Titan Quest. It's hard to pinpoint why, but it just feels like everything is more polished and everything has its gain turned up a few notches. The maps are quite similar to those in Titan Quest, but they rarely turn into a boring clearing of it and then a quest of the next portal or rebirth fountain. The difficulty is better balanced as well. in Titan Quest the only times I've really been challanged were by some bosses, but overall you could just run through everything without stopping. I don't know if I've been lucky with builds or something, but in Grim Dawn ... well I can almost run through most things without challange, but I have to be more careful than in TQ, and I think it's because of the balance in the game. I could be wrong though.
About the only complaint I have is not something wrong with the game, but rather a lack in it: I wish it had more engaging quests, and I wish there were more choices to make. The game already changes as you progress (if you save people for instance, they get back to the closest base and you can talk to them then and even recieve quests in some cases), and there's no way to undo things. There are times where you can choose to lie to people, or like in one case you can pressure a dude who might be bad or not on money ... and later on there will be a very slight consequence to whatever you do. At one point in the expansion you can choose to side with an entire faction, and the good thing is that there is no upside to not being friendly with them. For reasons I won't spoil it might not be to everyones liking to be friendly with them, but in gameplay terms there are no downsides to it, but if you choose to treat them as hostiles you only get some boss monster to kill, and they don't even have nice drops. And that faction has some pretty nice gear you actually can make use of.
I really wish there was more stuff like that in the game. It is a pure hack'n'slash RPG, and the entire point of the game is to go from point A to point B and kill as much as possible on the way. That's the entire point of the game, it's not supposed to have meaningful choices with any kind of impact, at least not beyond what class you pick. But the setting and writing is already so good that with some adjustments and some more quests the game could really have stood out. They could have had the pure, well crafted action as well as an engaging sad tale of a world in flames with interesting characters and interactions. There could even have been meaningful choices to make that alters the game slightly. It has some of it, but in my opinion not enough.
I do have another complaint actually, and that is that I miss the rebirth fountains. You have to get to the next portal if you want to quit the game and not having to go through the area again, and sometimes I feel they are too far apart.
Is it better than Diablo 2? Well, no, but I am almost willing to say it is very, very close to being as good as Diablo 2, and that is not a small thing. We'll see what I think of the next difficulty, or of when I take the Necromancer further, but currently I could definitely see myself running through it a few more times, and the only other time I've been able to do that is with Diablo 2.
I still don't want to say it's a spiritual successor to D2, as many say, but it's still a danged good game.