I tried to explain that most likely the problem isn’t in the SR system itself, but on the inherent difficulties of scaling in its upper ranges a complex system made of a vast number of variables.
There is always a curve to these things, and at some point you start feeling the side effects of the right-hand side. This is me hypothesizing, I agree. But I would still put money on the fact that one of the reasons we are hearing more about insta-kills than ever before is the fact GD system is already under stress.
I just checked what the description is when you click Ascended mode:
I think this should frame discussion context and perspective of Ascended mode.
Regarding farming ascendant mode for the 1st time, when the dread spawns or even maybe Nemesis one should be using their Elixir and Oil, furthermore they should have the top tier potion modifier for their health and energy while also be using the ideal ones for that char.
With a strong char this makes Dread achievable, once you have a few Soul Fragments (which also can drop sometimes other places) you can then ascend your main and offhand slots.
Also with awakened ashes one can reroll their green/MIs to have more ideal affixes, along with rerolling all gear for closer to top stats.
This then makes it easier IMO, especially for strong builds (not necessarily meta ones).
Over time one can then reroll the two ascended slots for more optimal affixes and progress onto other slots.
Ascended 1st time is a progression that takes a little time, and frankly the meta builds with some of the above are chewing through everything right now without reducing things even further.
Even strong builds are in a good place for farming Ascended by using all of the above mechanics that were added with FoA in a progressive way into Ascended mode.
I am not sure about the Dread being disabled or having its spawn rate heavily reduced is a good fit for Ascended, why?
Because I use to be a bit nervous going into the Skeleton Key dungeons, with altar activated and wary of the dangerous domain mutators, both with Dread spawning and the harassment of Nemesis with boosted altar stats.
Now there is none of that wary tension and on a strong build with the above in place (with just 2 ascended items) it feels like going on autopilot again.
These builds should be the ones farming for your other characters that aren’t necessarily ideal for Ascended, same way as not every build has a good time with some of the celestials.
Thats my take on it anyway.
how/when/where/why?
i did no such thing, took existing "non top 20"build and jumped into ascendant and killed everything in MC and Dungeons
Altar bonuses are additive, not multiplicative
New nems are just not balanced with the old. It can be seen even in base ascendant. And in SR the differences get wider and wider as you go up.
Considering that the fight can be avoided I am also not sure about the option to disable it. If someone is haunted by it just play ultimate. The same goes for nemesis density.
I also think that the density of monsters is generally too low in ascendant.
Look at any monster on grimtools, Ultimate vs Ascendant. They typically have more than double the health, on top of other inconveniences. Health is most directly affecting your clear speed and the overall flow of the game, so my comment mostly focused on that aspect. And yeah the “double damage” thing is a lower boundary of how much stronger you actually need to be, to have similar gameplay.
That probably means that your build already had the over x2 damage on top of “having good enough clear speed for ultimate”. However you’d define it.
Either that, or your sense of having good gameplay is rooted in something else entirely, and that’s fair enough. We can have different preferences.
They weren’t part of my calculation. Still, you mean additive with each other (which I know) or additive with something else?
additive with monster existing stats
So when you see Altar 200% dmg or 200% health, you’re not actually doubling either ofc
as for not needing 2x dmg, reason for that is even with a health increase, it doesn’t mean we need double the dmg. Sr scaling also has increased health and dmg and defences, and rando multiplicative mutator variable on top. And Ascendant was made with former SR end chars in mind
So if you could clear SR before, which is the type of builds Ascendant is/was intended for (even if people are wanting to making it less now apparently), those non top20 Ult SR capable builds should then still be able to clear MC Ascendant decently. Not with 0 impact, different game mode/you’re not multi banging 4 bosses etc have XY same interaction and scaling impacts, but reasonably enough you don’t need to suddenly magically manifest 2x dmg or upgrade your build x^.
Ascendant scaling was not meant for budget builds, but reasonably optimized end chars
edit. i think part of what might be missed is, in SR, you’re fighting 4 bosses, (2x if you want rewards). So you’re dealing with a health bar that’s already increased from Ult scaling, and then doing it 4x (with 2 of them always a nemesis hp bar)
In Ascendant you’re 1v1 MC bosses/Nemesis, so the combined health bar doesn’t even come close. - the detractor is you can’t aoe things down like super optimized builds can with 4 boss gangbang in SR. But then again that was also kinda not the intended outcome/design of SR either #powercreep
Hm, can’t really see what’s their base increased% health. But fair enough, I can test it in-game, and pay attention to numbers.
Yeah I get it. That’s what I’m describing, “ascendant” difficulty builds on top of high end of optional FG endgame, rather than on top of baseline FG endgame. And that’s unexpected from (my) regular player’s perspective because FoA’s features are gated by ascendant, and nothing about them really says “uber tryhard celestial content”, it’s just some funny augments to make a build with, or farming QoL like new totems / chests / void spawns / etc. That’s the complaint. Whether Crate cares about it or not, well that’s their business.
Yeah like you said, depends on build. Could be better to fight 4, could be worse. Dread and nemesis are also here to help you turn the fight into a multi-target one
+200% health altar results in 8.5mill hp boss going to 9,6mill
they are not
not a single one afaik is gated to Ascendant, everything is available outside it - only difference is reward ratio, exact same how reward ratios are different in crucible/sr and depending how high you farm (or how fast)
they are not, trust me, most my stuff get mauled by Celestials on Ult(which dont’ scale on Ascendant btw), but can clear Ascendant MC
It is not the same ballpark.
Ascendant is Ultimate with some SR dmg/hp scaling added on top and massively increased rewards for it, that’s it.
equally optional or controllable
*again i’m not arguing whether dread should be made non-optional, but it technically is (in several ways)
On one hand, that brings us to the question of Altar’s affordability / per-session design. I say it’s too expensive, people with 4k hours say it is not, Crate casts their judgement.
On the other hand, you kinda want the whole package, and altar is bad at giving you that. So, yeah, it’s fair to say that the proper farm is gated. But reducing the altar costs would help with overcoming the gate, and that’d be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
Sure, I trust you. That’s not what I meant though. Well, whatever, circling to the previous discussion again.
The costs for a single session of boosts do not justify the returns. You could triple the numbers and ratios and it would likely still not feel fantastic.
i have more than 4k hours
it’s too expensive or rather the mechanic is to skewed for hyper long sessions and grind to be decently utilized in current form imo Someone said it elsewhere
altar isnt’ bad because ascendant mode, but ratios and because SR/Cruci is seemingly just more optimal still.
You’re paying for an “edge”, but barely “slightly”.
Ironically my gripe with Ascendant is regular MI drops overflow, not the real rewards we want could tone down one and increase the other perhaps, if base rates was increased also meant altar would have higher impact, altar not affecting SR then means MC gains more edge.
I wasn’t talking about ascended mode there. I was referring to regular FoA MC content. Still, it’s the end of the game, it shouldn’t be easy. I find it reasonable to need a (half?-)decent build (on ultimate) to be able to comfortably get through there.
But for Ascended mode, the intention of it is to be an alternate end-game mode next to SR. Also the reason (I guess) why the altar is accessible in the other difficulties, so as not to gate playing with that behind the end-game mode. So I wouldn’t expect you to immediately have a good time on your first character in ascended mode. I would hope I can have a good time there with a character that is fairly optimized and well put together with ‘the best’ gear I can reasonably collect.
I think there needs to be an equilibrium between the cost in materials and the amount you would, on average, farm in, say, an hour (one can debate the period of time). This would be bearing in mind that you can blow up unwanted legendaries for mats.
Then, you could say that a 1 hour (or whatever) session would tend to break even, longer sessions would turn a profit, shorter ones a loss. Overall, it would be self-sustaining with the likelihood that you would be nicely in profit after a while.
This is similar to the way SR requires Eldritch Essence to make waystones, but usually gives you at least 2 back, so that after a while you have hundreds of them.
The bad outcome is if people end doing non-altar runs to fuel the altar, just as it would be bad if people had to separately farm Eldritch Essence before an SR session.
What I would say is this: Grim Dawn desperately needed the “third pillar”. It’s existing endgame - ie SR - had become dreary and repetitious for a lot of players (including me, as you may guess).
Also, it was really necessary to give Ascendant some unique allure in terms of rewards that you could get there and not in SR, because SR is terribly efficient for almost every kind of farming.
[ One nitpick: I would not say that SR1 was the baseline endgame. SR tiers from 1-20 are basically just a long grind to open up actually rewarding SR, which starts at about that point. ]
My thinking is, if you intend for altar to be self-sustaining, why not just make it a permanent unlock? It would work better with short sessions (which are HEAVILY incentivised in Grim Dawn, for example, in no other game did I have an idea to “do a 1 minute Cronley run” just because I was bored or indecisive). And it would feel much better when you’re poor (even if the price is higher) - if I know that I’m purchasing useful metaprogression on a character, I don’t need to think about ROI half as hard.
And if Altar is not intended to be self-sustaining, then it’s less of a justification for putting FoA goodies into AM and giving AM a high baseline difficulty, relative to FG (with which you disagree, duly noted)
They can nerf the loot. I’d be okay with that. Not the materials though, I feel they take too long to interact with the new systems in a meaningful way…affix re-rolling seems okay.
I’ve always been a fan of out defending mobs but not quite sure this is completely possible now for certain things. Is what it is, but I don’t have to like it.
Which are unfortunately not needed to do ascendant (my meme chaos TSS warlock says so) and costs way to much mats to eventually land what I want to ascend. Some people are okay with this, and that’s okay. I am not. I’ve had a hard time playing the last 2-3 days because I can’t justify farming these mats when a) I don’t need them b) will likely need too many. I am the type of person that plays one character for extended periods and want to actually finish it with these new systems but it’s unrealistic. Yes, make a new character…just haven’t really done it because I haven’t found anything yet that I really want to play or have the gear to build at this moment, so can’t play it
Also the system isn’t what its first intention was…and was shifted because of “loot filtering?” Sad. It would have been a brighter world if magic items could be highly competitive. Maybe they are? And even if so, it would take a non GDstash user 100s of hours to get there - per item.
Just “me” issues. I get that people don’t feel like this or are okay with longer grinds and such.
I wouldn’t mind that. Crate must have considered it and decided against it for a reason, but they do change their mind about things. Maybe this will be one of them.
That is the crux of my point and you just emphasised it, the Ascended materials are worth more than the most of the gear and there is a feeling the Dread and Nemesis slows down being able to complete skeleton key dungeons.
Meaning, people want efficiency in farming for ascendant materials that massively improve characters.
This mechanic is a risk/reward one IMO and if people are gaining these materials too efficiently either the dread/nemesis need to be a gatekeeper or the materials droprate may eventually be reduced.
I know I have mentioned about spawn rate trend of Nemesis seem high for dangerous domain, but this is where I was hoping it could be nuanced with the rate being balanced for most dangerous domains but as you go deeper levels in a skeleton key dungeon the more likely you are to see them - for ascended mode that is.
There is a post on this forum that pointed out that it took them thousands of materials to get an ascendant roll they wanted on a single item. The pool is flooded with affixes that are virtually unusable, more so because of affix rerolling and how easy it can be to, for example, over cap res.
If you think the amount of materials that are being dropped needs to be reevaluated based on, at minimum this, you need to take some time and re-evaluate that opinion.
As for items, a lot of the MI’s are 100% drop off a mob and gambling exists. You can’t gamble these mats and dismantling is unreliable to target. On top of that most sets have a crafted item in them…once you have the pattern and play pretty consistently, you can just craft and transmute…making those mats > gear.
The changes to asters and the ascendent re-rolling costs that have just rolled out…well they speak for themselves.
