I feel my situation is similar to when vanilla Diablo 3 came out. Having to play through the campaign 2 times, on each character you play, just to get to what is considered endgame difficulty. It sounds pretty daunting to me considering all the possible builds that one could potentially want to try. Don’t get me wrong, I think the game is one of the better ARPGs out right now, but I feel it needs something similar to Diablo 3 adventure mode. Anyone else agree?
I never did adventure mode on D3, but they are working on a survival mode. I don’t know what it will consist of but it should add a nice touch to the game.
plus who knows what the expansion will bring 
I absolutely hated Adventure Mode. Strangely enough, I’d rather progress through the story 40 times than pointlessly run around doing dailies. That being said, I wouldn’t really mind a game having alternate play modes…
…as long as they do not drastically overpower the game by giving disproportionately better rewards, like Adventure Mode in DIII did. Absolutely killed the game for me.
Yeah I’m super excited for Survival Mode. But on that note I hope they don’t rush to release it so my expectations aren’t quashed.
H/e I kind of do see where you’re coming from re repeating the story line. Still, I think that’s generally par for the course on these kind of games. And I mean with the mods coming out, that could probably change too.
Can’t you download a level X character and get rid of the leveling phase?
Yea you can, but then you’d also have to cheat in gear to be able to play it.
There aren’t dailies in Diablo 3 and it’s not like gearing up in Diablo 3 is hard, especially compared to this game. You can still play the campaign endlessly while gaining legendary items.
Agreed, the journey to GD’s endgame is excruciatingly boring. The sad realization is that bounties could have given an adventure-mode-like experience if Crate hadn’t defaulted on their promise to create an open world as advertised in the Kickstarter. I guess you could emulate adventure mode up to Act 2 though? :undecided:
Elite and Ultimate need to bring something new to the table to make subsequent playthroughs engaging, other than “well the monsters are tougher now I guess”. It might not be a bad idea to completely remove the third playthrough, and instead just do what Borderlands 1 did: when you beat the Loghorrean in Elite, everything gets scaled up to “Ultimate” difficulty. Just bring more of Normal’s Devotion Shrines back into Elite to make up for it. Done. 33% of the slog eliminated.
There were absolutely dailies when I played. 5 a day. You would get a quest to kill the Butcher or something and then you’d get crazy drops. The game does seem to get a complete 180 redesign every 3 months so I don’t know anymore.
We’re not talking about hardness of objective, we’re talking about fun. Regardless of how easy it is to gear up in DIII, it’s not fun, so I wouldn’t engage in it. I don’t play a game for the mere sake of gearing up.
Adventure Mode dailies gave you giant amounts of legendaries and crafting blueprints. Compared to campaign mode, it was astronomical. I went from rarely seeing legendary drops to getting them essentially effortlessly. Too bad I hated Adventure Mode.
They weren’t “dailies” per se.
Each time you started an Adventure mode game every act had 5 bounties to complete.
Restarting the session reset the bounties, so you could do them over and over. Not just once per day.
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I guess I never got far enough with them to find out.
Obviously you don’t just play for gearing up, but you can’t deny it’s one of the main objectives of these types of games.
The “endgame” isn’t even the most fun (at all) part of this game so i don’t really see why you’d do that.
I disagree. Endgame is something I almost always look forward too in games, so having it gated on each character behind 3 campaign playthroughs is a bit of a pain.
Im only enjoying Ultimate as of now, cant even bring myself to complete act 1 in normal with builds i want to play. And i have only Done one full playthrough. Its not that ive gotten tired of the game… I just think normal/elite isnt as fun as Ultimate. Not because its harder but because its the “endgame”, its where you get most of the content.
Same for My brother, who is my only irl friend that likes gd, but he didnt even get to elite before he got bored of the slow levelling process. Even though adventure mode in D3 is boring it is still an awesome feature that makes it quicker to get to the fun part. For me this would make all the difference between just doing some nem-runs from time to time, as im doing now, and trying out several other builds.
Mixed feelings on this. The vast majority of my real-life friends who play Grim Dawn are a little irked at needing to trudge through the game twice to start playing the really challenging content at the end. I myself don’t have a huge issue with it, but I question whether that’s a bias on my end, having grown accustomed with this sort of thing in traditional ARPGs.
I wonder whether there’s a possibility of Survival Mode fixing this, i.e., Survive 50+ Waves on a character and unlock Elite, Survive 100+ Waves and unlock Ultimate. Then you can take that character into Ultimate and get on with questing and progression as usual. Or you can keep pushing your survival capability higher and higher.
Of course, none of us have any idea how Survival Mode will be designed, what it entails, or whether characters from a Main Campaign will even be capable of participating in it - or vice versa (i.e., Main Campaign Characters vs. Custom Campaign Characters, and needing to rely on something like TQDefiler to swap a character between the two campaigns). I always kinda hated that discrepancy, which is why I really hope they just get rid of it when mod tools come out and just let characters exist with no differentiation of which campaigns they’ve participated in. But I digress…
Campaign Gating is seemingly a keystone of the genre we’re involved with. Whether or not that’s a good thing is up for debate, and I honestly have no idea which side I want to argue for.
“Slow leveling process?”
Level up game standards are getting weirder and weirder.
Anyway if they’re working on some type of survival mode, then that’s probably why it seems as if the main game mode is getting more and more linear.
how is it faster, you still start at level 1 and need the same XP to reach max level ?
I do not get this endgame obsession at all. You basically pretend like you start playing the game after you are actually done with it… I see why MMOs with a monthly subscription fee came up with this idea, but why anyone would subscribe to it is beyond me
When your char is done, farm a bit and start a new one. Farming for 100s of hours with the same char is about the most boring thing I can think of doing in any game.
The game could open up Elite and Ultimate permanently once it’s been reached on any character.
If someone’s bored their first time in Veteran, though, I think they may just not like this kind of game.
I would not mind the act to have a shortcut, like you can bypass all of act 1 by repairing the bridge (does not have to be quite as drastic, maybe have some areas you need to cross), most likely too late for that though.
Sounds a little bit like you’re on the side advocating faster levelling progress after all 
At least I sure hope so 
In adventure mode you get significantly more experience, it is designed to get to max level fast soo…
I get that the idea of GD is to enjoy the journey. But some people mostly just enjoy playing at max level. For me it is collecting Legendary Sets (especially since Ultimate Legendaries is faaar more beautiful than Normal/Elite Epics) and having that greater challenge that makes me wanna skip right to Ultimate. I understand that you dont agree, but theres no good reason we should NOT be able to powerlevel to max in a few hours. If both options are there everybody is happy, right?