Quite silly to expect the game to give you awesome loot right at the start.
Now if this was like Diablo 3 where I have had instances of not finding a legendary/set items all the way to Inferno… then I would be kinda annoyed. However it isn’t thankfully.
As Younghappy already stated you need to farm higher leveled enemies for a better chance in getting a blue item. Hallowed Hill is usually one of the better areas.
I’ve found quite a number of blue/green items and vendors can sell ridiculously awesome gear for high prices (usually unattainable prices if you don’t cheat in some way).
Yes, in hindsight I realize that it is quite common. Books can be written about the shortcomings of Diablo 3’s loot system, but it also have fewer tiers of loot than Grim Dawn does. Broken and normal items are useless in any game. After that D3 has magic, rare and legendary/set. I haven’t accustomed myself to the names in GD yet, but it has yellow, green, blue and at later levels purple. So, in fact for lower levels D3 and GD actually have the same number of tiers; 3, making GD’s yellows equivalent to D3’s magic (blue), green to rare (yellow) and blue to legendary/set (brown/green). Forgetting legendaries and set items, I think you’d be pretty mad in D3 if you played for 6 hours straight without a single rare even… Or what?
Of course, a saving feature for GD is the components you can create and put into anything to make them stronger. The gem features in D3 are a complete joke.
I’m certainly not expecting it to rain blue items at the lower levels, and I never said that. 1 by player level 18 is fine, I have no problems with that. However, after having 4 or 5 green items drop in the first 14 or so player levels, having only 1 drop in the next 6 hours and 4 player levels is frustrating. Especially when in those hours and levels you’ve killed more than double the amount of orb dropping boss monsters than the entire game up to that point. It feels like the game’s getting harder, and you get less spoils in return. Disregarding the player level you’re at, that seems like bad design. Had it been the other way around; 1 green in the first 14 player levels, and then 5 in the next few levels (6 hours) as the monsters got harder and boss monsters became more frequent, it would feel like a normal progression of the game. Green items SHOULD be more frequent in player level 14-18 than 1-14, but it certainly didn’t seem that way here. Of course I may just have been very unlucky, but I still feel it’s worth addressing, to get some opinions.
If we are to further compare D3 to GD we need to look at the frequency of drops. Note that we haven’t played GD in it’s entirety so we have no idea how the progression will ramp up when it comes to drop consistency of certain items.
D3: White/Blue/Yellow items are almost all deemed useless due to legendary/set items almost always being better. White/Blue/Yellow items had a high drop rate while leg/set items had a low drop rate, their was nothing to bridge the gap of drop rates of the items between rare and leg/set items where such an item could perhaps have a better potential to be decent (like higher minimum on affixes rolled and the rolls of those affixes).
GD: So far the drop rates of green and blue items aren’t too high (depending on enemy level and farming efficiency) which I think is good as having these items come out in droves will make them less wanted (what D3 suffers from) in that it would then come to the quality of the item rather then the item itself. As you already know we still have purple items plus TQ’s relative to the artifact as well as other things perhaps.
I’d say it’s too early to judge the drop rate but at the moment I think the drop rates are fine. At the start whites are decent for awhile then yellows are and then yellow items usually end up as trash items to be replaced by green/blue items.
Essentially I feel like the consistency of drops are fine and that green/blue items are a good bridge between yellow drop rates and purple drop rates (which may be rare like D3 legendary/set items).
I just played a pure demo from start to finish with no twinks. By level 12, i was socketting my best yellows. Found one green shortly after. Replaced most of my yellows with better yellows and socketted them. By the end of the village I had maybe 2-3 greens equipped and just before the warden i bought a green at the vendor. Basically, at level 18 and having killed the warden with a green ring, boots, book, gun and helm and the rest yellows and more than half of my gear socketted. To me that is pretty decent in terms of the longevity of yellows and frequency of greens. Found 1 blue, but its for an unreleased mastery.
I really like the progression so far, but of course we are missing most of the game so a comparison with a complete game, is unjust. Further, a comparison with a game totally flawed in the loot department seems silly.
One thing to keep in mind is that I think some of our yellows tend to be better than you usually see in ARPGs and our rare’s can be quite powerful.
Magical in most games provides a single weak bonus while ours sometimes provide strong single or even double bonuses. In that sense, I think they can potentially be better than the type of rare’s you see in other games, where they’re just a larger number of weak bonuses, often nearly useless bonuses.
Our rare’s can be quite powerful and I think it is appropriate for them to drop more on the rate of unique items. They’re basically like randomized epics. In fact, if you get the right combination of double rares, they can be even more powerful than epics, although very hard to find.
We’re trying to pace things out so that people don’t just blow right past yellows. There are a lot of good yellows and I think the experience Jiaco describes of having the chance to upgrade a round or two of yellows before replacing them with greens is about where we want to be.
Purple Legendaries won’t drop until higher levels / difficulties. Legendaries and finding ultimate double-rare combos are more of the end-game. We haven’t decided yet when Legendary drops will start but I think it will likely be sometime in epic difficulty.
We still have a lot of game to cover, so we want to make sure there isn’t a power glut early on. I’ve personally found in the past that I reached a point around 12-14 where I sort of lost my hunger for loot. My gear would be good enough and my character performing well enough that I just didn’t really feel like it was necessary to go out of my way to find that next chest. I think that’s bad and if we pace things right, people should always have a hunger for loot.
We basically want to be at the point where people wish the drop rate was a little higher but still get enough good drops that they feel like the next jackpot could be a chest away and don’t become overly frustrated on the long dry spells where luck is working against you for a while.
Of course, with a truly randomized game, there are always going to be those times when someone ends up on the extreme end of the spectrum where its raining blues or they don’t see one for a long time…
Are you telling me there’s no limitation on the possible affixes/suffixes? So it IS possible to get Officer’s/Onslaught, Prismatic/Nature’s Bounty, Demonic/The Abyss, Flamecaster/Scorching, etc.? Since i hadn’t found any yet, i just assumed game-breaking combinations of affixes/suffixes were simply not possible. If that is untrue, i’m even more stoked for this game than i already was.
Haha, hopefully they won’t be too game-breaking but there are no restrictions on which prefixes and suffixes can be paired.
However, we’re currently in the process of creating high and lower level versions of many rares so that those that drop in the early game won’t be quite as powerful as those that drop later.
I for one find the difficulty satisfying. As an experienced gamer in many aspects, i believe the difficulty to be moderate to high. I currently have two max level Commandos in Hardcore (I have only played hardcore). One focusing mainly on Demo and one mainly on soldier. One thing i have noticed is the sheer power of Will to Live. The soldier class definitely has a one up in the aspect of surviving and not losing your hard core character. Both of my characters are at the point of max stacks of potions (99). Don’t get me wrong, you can still die with the soldier class. I have lost a 20 Witchblade to three Heralds in the same area in the Depraved Cellar with the Bloodsworn. Those enemies hit like dump trucks and have a stun. In total I would say i have lost about 4 characters in the 60 hours or so of gameplay i have. I have probably had around 25+ blue drops, and 2 fully upgraded stashes of characters filled to the brim with greens. Most of the ones that died even had greens. I currently feel the drop rate for greens/blues to be slim to none from 1-9. Once i hit 10 or so i started to see alot more rare drops. Absolutely loving the game. Keep up the good work.
Hi all again
I’ve been studying, training and started to work so my abscence was long.
Just to ask is alpha still available to play? Got the first paycheck and I want to show support and play if possible
Currently the content for B12 is done and we’re just working on a couple lingering bugs.
It has been taking a while to get it to a release-ready state because there were so many big changes. Most notably those aimed at improving pathing performance have required a lot of additional fixes. Pathing interacts with many different systems, from character and enemy movement to targeting, to spawn placement, to where UG doors place the character upon entering / exiting. Making fundamental changes to such an integral system can require a lot of clean-up. A couple times we’ve thought we were good to go and then found additional issues. We don’t want to release a patch knowing it will introduce significant new bugs.
So, it could really be any day now but we won’t know until we get there.
I guarantee it’ll be out Friday or Saturday this week. Why? Because I’ll be getting ready to go on holiday and won’t be able to play until I get back! :eek:
