Hey guys! I love Grim Dawn, most of all because it has so many viable builds. I’ve noticed a lot of complaint about how tankiness is king over the past few months, and while the introduction of the Necromancer and the Inquisitor will likely be a buff to ranged/caster classes, there seems to be a recurring problem where the best builds are invariably the ones that allow you to stand still and tank so you don’t have to stop dishing out damage to turn and run every few seconds. I get that it’s singleplayer focuesd and thus we don’t actually need kiting builds to be top-tier, but it’d be nice if it wasn’t so hard to make them ultimate viable (let alone hardcore).
I’d also like to say that I’m really thankful Grim Dawn didn’t just fill the classes with teleport skills as an easy way to include mobility. This was one of the first things I noticed when I started playing. That being said, if there were just one or two skills that allowed you to relocate without targeting an enemy to jump to, it would be a huge boon to ranged builds meant for kiting, and allow them to be built without having to focus heavily on DoTs (so they can keep doing damage while they run).
I don’t think they should be particularly strong, and adding a downside to them could make it so the ability isn’t braindead. The simplest ways to include such an ability would be to allow a character to teleport a short distance in the direction of the mouse, or teleport a short distance away from the mouse (so players can continue to hold down their default attack while they teleport). To make it more interesting, such abilities could have a long cooldown, impose a 50% movespeed penalty for a few seconds afterwards, or lower all resistances by 30% afterwards. The ability could even place a rune that you teleport to after a few seconds, creating a delay and forcing you to think ahead.
Putting this on a relic could make kiting more viable for a variety of classes, but since it’s such a powerful active the relic could have poor stats to make it a choice between other relics. Maybe it could even decrease max resists slightly? Putting such an ability on one or both of the new classes could be cool too.
What does everyone think? Would this open up build diversity or would it be detrimental to the game?
Actually the problem is that builds that should be able to stand still against some of the strongest attacks in the game shouldn’t be able to dish out as much damage as builds that need to kite enemies, the idea being that builds that need to kite enemies have chosen to value offense over defense and so can only engage enemies directly for only a limited amount of time.
Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to discuss these things theoretically than actually try to fix the problem, especially since there ARE massive DPS builds that should be kiting mobs but have found some kind of loophole that allows them not to.
I don’t know if it’s a loophole that lets so many builds be tanky, most chars can take a lot of defensive devotions and be okay. They are sacrificing a surprising amount of dps to get there. I know some of them can still spit out tons of damage, but I used to see a lot more builds with close to 100k sheet dps running around, and more and more people are settling for 40k to ensure they can stand and facetank most enemies. I always thought those builds that used every synergy they could to max dps were really cool, and there’s fewer now since people have realized how much easier it is to just grab some of those defensive devotions. I think it’d be nice if we saw more builds focused on mobility and kiting, and a teleport skill of some kind could enable that.
I don’t know if it’s a loophole that lets so many builds be tanky, most chars can take a lot of defensive devotions and be okay. They are sacrificing a surprising amount of dps to get there. I know some of them can still spit out tons of damage, but I used to see a lot more builds with close to 100k sheet dps running around, and more and more people are settling for 40k to ensure they can stand and facetank most enemies. I always thought those builds that used every synergy they could to max dps were really cool, and there’s fewer now since people have realized how much easier it is to just grab some of those defensive devotions. I think it’d be nice if we saw more builds focused on mobility and kiting, and a teleport skill of some kind could enable that.
The problem is - if you cant facetank youre loosing effective DPS. Its a lot better to facetank with 100k dps and kill stuff in 10 second, rather that run away like a little girl with 200kdps and kill stuff in one minute.