this combined with tunneled zone design w/o any variety and funny item drops is what acctually killed repleayability for me.
i've just got firewalker pice drop. nice. increased fire damage can add to my warfare/earth mastery build but it is int set and i havent invested much in inteli beside what i get from lvling earth mastery :|
lets lvl up a bit and invest all stat points in inteli.
few days later...
greath now i can use the firewalker and i got few more pieces for 2-3 set bonus but... those high rares and low legendaries that i have to replace with firewalker boost my dps far more then firewalker
now i have to lvl up even more to get stats points for str for next legendary piece i got since i wasted so much points on inteli that i didnt actually needed :|
but it takes ages to lvl up cause i am quite over lvled because of farm to boost inteli. i cant go next act cuase the end boss of this act slauter me in 2 hits as i lack resistances cause i cant wear the gear that can help :|
may be i start with new toon and i focus developing it only for useful items and dont get myself sidetracked by useless stuff.
but i've sold out useful low lvl items that can make my new start easier cause of lacking space so i'll have to gear up again and i've have to play bosses hit and run again as i wont be able to facetank em undergeard even thou this isnt my first toon and i have some gear stashed :|
and i'll have to run slowly for quite some time till i get speed lvled up
ummm...
fuck it no.
lets play something not so booooring else.
i havent played much GD but from what i've seen so far it has much more game play variety with all those short cuts through the fences, house basements, caves etc and even thou landscape is fixed as it is in tq it is far from monotonous and booring. and with constelations they manage to add poe's skill tree variety into tq's limited class&skill system.
The first part reads like you desperately should roll a new character and start fresh
When you're struggling for stats early in the game (that is pre-Ultimate really), the build is unlikely to work well later; unless you've aimed it towards a very specific endgame gear set(up). But in that case, what you should be doing is separate a levelling build and an endgame build. Respeccing is easy, possible and cheap these days.
The second part, can only agree and its what I really like in GD, the balance they struck between depth and not going crazy about it as they did with PoE. I do agree PoE takes things
very far. And I also agree with
@bug that the way that game has its progression managed isn't exactly perfect. GD nails that, in my view. The entire path from 1-100 is a carefully designed progression path that keeps expanding in its requirements as you reach for the top.
I think the gist of all those subtle differences in design is the
influence of online on games. Grim Dawn handily avoids that influence and stays true to the original ARPG formula. It doesn't need artificial time sinks or repetitive content because what it wants to do is offer the entire experience in those 100 levels and across that single world map. No RNG zones/maps. The best you get is an arena style end game called Crucible to really take things further. And, with the latest expansion, they also added rifts as another sort of timed challenge mode. Neither is required or deeply integrated into the game, its bonus.
Hahahahaha Managed my first Nemesis this morning, and he gifted me a Nice set of
boots, and the
Malediction recipe I started drooling over yesterday. Gave me a 6kdps-showing bump for 5 minutes of crafting a couple more random relics and a new chant for my boots, at least I think that's where they both dropped. Of course, he also gifted me two more deaths, since he split himself twice and I wasn't prepared for either. Still, a solid bump in DPS and defense, so I should find things a bit smoother this time thru AoM...
Damn... I've been looking for Malediction for weeks now. Still waitin'... I need it as the LAST component for
https://grimdawn.fandom.com/wiki/Dreeg's_Affliction_(relic)
Still rolling with the Acid/Poison Oathkeeper?
I have to go hunting the mobs, and pretty quickly get in "stuck" range
**edited: wrong weapon originally
View attachment 122294
Did you get Forgotten Gods yet? If so you can buy Emblems that apply as an Augment to your Medal and those are all movement skills; ie a teleport, a pounce, a charge. They're also cheap and do not require reputation. If you have the expansion you can jump straight onto them (pun intended). With that and Vire's Might combined you'll be like Sonic.
Btw that weapon is drool worthy and I want it too. Stop stealing my drops okthx
Btw you might want to be careful with that Chains of Anguish belt. The movement speed reduction can be a dealbreaker there. The damage not so much, but suddenly slowing down can cost you a heart
Especially because it also slashes your defenses at the same time. High risk high payoff item for sure.
GD is deep allright. It's just that when it came down to skills, I had a hard time finding synergies and stuff I'd like to play. Granted, most of that was just me looking at numbers, I didn't have the time to actually build characters and try skills on my own extensively.
In TQ, it was pretty easy to spot Marksmanship, Onslaught or some spell for casters that, with synergies, will carry you through the game. In GD, not so much. Though I'm sure if I had the time, I could find said skills in GD, it wasn't easy to spot them by just looking at the skill tree. The dearth of skill points only made things worse (btw, after the expansions, are skill points still as scarce in GD?)
I get what you're saying here. And for me playing this for over 600 hours now, I can say that really, all those different skills are actually quite same-y. The main differences are in how damage types are used / converted / buffed. Grim Dawns' stronger builds are very well adapted to double dipping in damage types in many different ways. My poison build I shared earlier has elements of it too; I double dip in Retaliation damage there, and the poison DoT handily supports that because it needs time just like the creatures that need to reach and hit you.
But the individual skills, you're absolutely right, aren't all that distinct or game-changing. The biggest damage comes from stacking many different skills in a short period of time, in the right order, and triggering the right on-hit effects. I have several builds where the lion's share of DPS comes from a few Constellations rather than the class skills.
I think much of GD's learning curve is also due to these design choices. They mixed it up just enough to challenge your set ideas about how to stack and min-max stats. As for skillpoints being scarce; you consistently get 3 points per level and down to 2/level after level 50 and 1 per level after level 80 I believe. Plus a couple from quests. The breathing room in skillpoints needs to come from gear drops that offer +x to skills. Some even offer +1 to
all skills. Or all skills of a class. You can also
overlevel skills to amplify the effects further. I've learned that if you lack skillpoints for a given build, it needs to be trimmed down/streamlined further, and that usually only benefits it. There are many ways to stack things to reach similar results, some expensive and some a LOT cheaper.
The weapons I've used the most have all been gamblecrafted actually, for my "main" (2H melee Commando), mostly because of life steal.
So to you who knows, I wouldn't live without life steal. It feels like I'm doing something wrong, or the game is just like that. In Titan Quest I think all of my chars tended towards ridiculous amounts of health generation, not really by intention, but it was so powerful and some gear gave you pretty silly bonuses to it so it just ... sorta happened. It was the same with this Commando in Grim Dawn. I stumbled across a weapon with like 10% life steal and it was silly how useful it was. Haunted Steel on everything, and gambled weapons with life steel is how it came down. Level 95 or so and only ~70k damage, which isn't a lot I feel, but otoh I have never laid eyes on gear that increased that damage. I'll try to build my dude in grimtools one of these days and let yous all has a look.
In any case things became so much simpler once I hit 94. Close to finishin Malmouth, the .... Langerrhaonsnen or whatever the boss for vanilla was called was surprisingly easy once I got to him. It. Her?
Loghlorrean I believe
Just wait until you fight the Kraken, AoM expansion, his little brother... He's mighty fun on Ultimate
70K is fine. Grim Dawn is not a game where you are supposed to run through maps in two minutes with stuff dying left and right, speed runs are not rewarded at all (quite the opposite, many secrets are found and randomly placed in world objects and even monster spawns often happen some time after passing through areas) and the gear requirements are pretty high to begin with. The DPS calculation is also very... very... inaccurate.
Lifesteal build... still wanting to do one, but I'm always getting stuck on the fact that lifesteal only applies to %Weapon damage and nothing else. Pretty big limitation. If you're struggling to see where other builds get their health from... on-hit procs (Wayward Soul etc.) and hard Health Regeneration stats. You can stack that very well (1k HP/sec is not uncommon). Also, just a heavy defense priority and mitigation allows you to run off health pots alone.
