Hi guys!
I wonder if anyone here played Torchlight II ( and I ).
What did Grim Dawn better than Torchlight?
Why did you moved to Grim Dawn or do you still play Torchlight?
How did Grim Dawn achiev this?
I loved Torchlight I. But Torchlight II not. But I can not quite remember why.
Anyway, I would love to hear some stories & thoughts from you.
(I hope this is the right section for such a thread 
)
I haven’t played either, but I’m sure other members of the forum have.
Welcome to the GD forum. Haven’t you tried it?
I really liked and enjoyed Torchlight 2 but it definitely had it’s flaws.
All in all, it was a good game but it had some weird design choices and perhaps could have done with better skill balance, I don’t care for making the cookie cutter skills worse but for making the underused skills actually worth using.
I do played both of them. But that was 3 or 4 years ago. The sequel didn’t turn out to be as good as the first game though. Actually, I do not remember why.
Since there are many living ARPG-almancs around here, they could maybe kind of compare the two games or answer the questions I asked.
I woud love to hear some thoughts!
Hello and welcome to the Grim Dawn forum.
Torchlight 2 was my favourite hack and slash until I discovered Grim Dawn.
Now don’t get me wrong, I still love TL2 and I play it from time to time( just to get a char to 100 and some hours or days after that), and I feel really sorry that Runic Games was closed. They were some of the better developers out there and in my opinion some of the best talent in this domain.
I personally think Grim Dawn is much better than Torchlight 2 in almost every way.
Torchlight games were fun the first playthrough but the farming process was boring.
If they would have added more gear customisation and did a better job with the balance of skills it would have been great.
That said, Grim Dawn is hard to beat for theory crafting:
All in all grim Dawn is a much better experience. D2 Lod is next, even though quite nostalgic about it! There’s POE but playing 2 arpg is way too much time consuming, i also didn’t like it much.
TL2 is fun the first playthroughs, but then you realize that half the skills are useless and some mechanics are a mess. And considering the amout of noobtrap skills, I find the fact that the game only let you respec the last three skillpoints atrocious. The level restriction for skills is terrible too. You have to spend hours and hours until you can get the fanciest skills.
I played both quite extensively (GD much more though) and i found GD to be the much better game.
My main gripe with Torchlight 2 is what is already stated above: being able to only refund the last three skill points. I’m all for players learning from their mistakes but this going to way too extreme of that. It barely allows you to just test skills and see how they perform.
Fun fact.
Salan (famous TL2 Synergies mod creator) used to visit this page and asking few people to join his new banner under GD mod pack. He halt, in the middleway.
I like the approach with classes. Having a Borderlands skill added to it as well. However a lot of skills felt unresponsive. They had a very noticeable delay in press vs output that it got really annoying for me. Only mastery which has it is demolitionist, but it is much less noticeable these days. The aspect of the skill trees I really do not like, can’t state this enough, is the damn excessive amount of passives in each damn tree. Sure GD has a lot of procs that activate automatically, like a passive, but GD still offers plenty of active skills as well.
Boss fights in Torchlight were decent in presentation and move sets. However the HP pools of heroes and bosses were so high it made each fight tedious as hell. After you took down 10% of their HP you knew it was a victory, but you still had to do the remaining 90% as a damn slogfest.
I never enjoyed the gear in Torchlight. It often felt very uninspired and didn’t really bother even farming for it.
I also don’t like ARPG’s that let you choose 1 difficulty at the start and thats it. I quite enjoy going through all 3-4 difficulties with 1 character. The first method I can’t get into the whole replaying over and over and enjoying it with different builds for some reason.
Torchlight games are a fun game in between the big ARPG’s that get you properly hooked. You play it once or twice and never touch it again.
TL2 was a nice game with some flaws, yes. Runic’s patching policy didn’t help matters either…
I do remember that there were Respec mods, though. I made one myself.
GReeeeeeeeen
played the 2nd one. Only one playthrough though and I enjoyed it a lot. Not sure if I am coming back to it again, since Grim Dawn pretty much is a better experience overall.
However it’s sad to see the devs (Runic) go. The game may not best Grim Dawn but it’s a solid game in spite of that. I hope someone buys the engine ( like the TQ scenario) improve the game towards a third iteration. There is a lot of room for the game imo to improve.
I had high hopes for this game, bought it 1st day it went out. Sadly, devs just went for money. They never cared after the game was released. Some small bugfixes and that was it, no content, no balance tweaks, nothing. The game was released with console enabled, so there was obviously no “real” multiplayer either due to mass item creation and cheating. The game bit the dust really quick, despite having potential for being so much more.
Oh well. Grim Dawn is a better game, so good riddance I guess.
in fact they did release one content patch, wasn’t much though…
to me it was what D3 should have been at the time, but then came GD
I did enjoy modding TL2 though and played it for quite some time
Some of Torchlight II major flaws were
Armor and elemental armor system. Perhaps it was just impossible to balance due to so many difficulties and NG+ cycles that in higher difficulties armor became completely useless. And people relied on all damage reduced by % items, which came from very rare socketables (curse Limoany) and a few uniques.
Mechanics too shallow. They were simple but often just too simple to have any variety and depth. No meaningful respec, no crafting except enchanters, simplistic skill system, 95% useless item affixes on rares. Combat was fun though.
No updates and support. A single major patch only added some new content and bugfixing but after that the game was dead. No balancing for better or for worse.
For Grim Dawn
Grim Dawn is constantly rebalanced and that sometimes fucks up people builds.
Resistances in Grim Dawn are a little too many.
Skill system design makes items super-specialized to fit all classes and all possible nieches. There are hundreds (or is it thousands already) legendaries. Too much loot makes it difficult to find what you need.
No Meaningful endgame, not even mapworks like. Except Crucible which is boring and lately especially requires ultra-specialization to farm it.
Not on Crate’s part, but tools like GD stash trivialize the game. Multiple stalwart of the dranghoul MIs ftw.
Regarding gameplay, Torchlight II was arcade-ish - use movement skills and CC and careful positioning to avoid taking any damage to survive. GD is - stack DA and armor and resist and damage absorption, block, evasion, chance to fumble etc to survive. I personally liked TL II way more.
Grim Dawn is constantly rebalanced and that sometimes fucks up people builds.
The only time this has happened was when Nidalla Justifiable Ends had % CDR. You could make Shadow Strike have nearly 100% uptime with the CDR buff in the Crucible. Besides this, no one’s builds were “fucked up”. I know this because i have nearly 40 builds and none of them were ever screwed up by any update. The people who moan that their builds were “fucked up” are the ones who realize that their build is not super OP anymore.
Yeah, no. Think you only need that to survive in GD, gonna have a wake up call. There’ still some positioning and strategy involved. Also, you just proved that Torchlight 2 doesn’t require much strategy by just stacking the damage reduction gem that could stack to 75%. I did it and by the end i literally could just plant my ass in the ground and facetank nearly everything. And even with that, regularly you couldn’t dodge enemy attacks no matter how hard you try because the game would throw an obscene amount of enemies at you.
I’ll take the rogue dungeons and Nemeses as endgame over the mapworks. Torchlight 2 mapworks is an atrocious endgame that just recycles map and bosses from the main game. And the terrible loot drops of the game just made it way worse.
I don’t think standing in one spot was generally viable unless you are a berserker with that rare set granting instant life leech or some sort of force field engineer and even then. Some bosses, the dragon, the giant robot, but Netherlord too could oneshot you through 20K hp and capped all damage reduction.
Then there was Tarroch tomb on elite with level 200 mobs oneshotting with their screen wide BS
When crit was nerfed everything went to hell. No builds from before that stayed the same. When firestrike was rebalanced it changed a lot too. Boss permafreezing came and gone
And most of that was due to terrible balancing because the devs just stopped updating the game shortly after release. Grim Dawn is constantly updated to not have bullshit like that.
And even then, that’s just handful of bosses, that’s why i said nearly everything.
Because permafreezing was broken and trivialized major bosses. If you mean build “abusing broken mechanics that clearly were never intended to work like that”, then i guess. But those builds were going to disappear sooner or later.
And crit builds weren’t “nerfed to hell”. I just did a Primal Strike Vindicator and stacked an insane amount of crit. My crits reach the dark orange easily. And Fire Strike builds still work. So none of these “were fucked up”.
Not staying the same but still working =/= “fucked up”. Fucked up implies they no longer work. Which is what you implied.