My coffee cup avoid them too.
I thought end-game was “what do you do when char is fully leveled and main campaign quests are done”… :rolleyes:
You do another char, or you farm Crucible for another char.
Craft a bzillion Badges of mastery till you get the right one…
As to the OP, buy it ‘n’ try it? I think the story/world building in Grim Dawn is worth the money regardless of the ARpG.
I might actually watch a stream of “coffee cup gamer review”. Needs to be a full cup, for extra excitement.
or learn to play with the ones you craft 
But I need Summon Skeleton at 26… You can’t winz with only 25!
I need to overcap my skill ranks in case I get debuffed 
Definitely agree with that statement. A story play through by itself worth buying GD. Even if you end up leaving it after 30 or so hours. Especially if you buy it on sale, which is very often.
Yeah, on sale one can get the base game and AoM for like 20 USD or so. Which is what a cinema ticket cost.
Wow, do they give you a massage at that theater, too? That’s more than I pay. :eek:
Nah but you do get some popcorn and a soda. No free snacks and drinks when you buy Grim Dawn unfortunately
One thing that hasn’t been touched on is Melee.
Melee in PoE is atrocious needing to stack crazy survivability because of the constant threat of one-shots or instant alpha-strikes, and most melee skills just don’t play that well.
Melee in GD is actually quite good, with a number of melee builds being near the top of the heap in terms of power (there are also casters, ranged gun users, summoners, and even channeled skills there - a good sprinkling of all archtypes)
While as with any ARPG when talking about min-max’d builds the items needed get narrower and narrower most archetypes can be started within the first act and played using only what you find (SSF) all the way through to killing Nemesis and the challenge dungeons without needing any specific item* This is especially enhanced by the NPC vendors who sell decent starter-type gear at various reputation levels (basically they smooth out bad RNG if going the SSF route)
*exceptions made for monster-infrequents which aren’t hard to get as long as you aren’t super picky about the affixes.
PoE progession on minimal life pool:
First HC league 4k HP
Nemesis league 5k HP
Ascension 6k hp
Lightning Arc trap league 7k hp
Endgame.
There is no endgame in GD
Except that there is, and it’s much more versatile than in other games.
For one, once you reach level 100 you still need to get your reputations maxed for access to faction gear and augments, and get your negative reputations maxed to be able to kill nemeses.
Then you can go on a hunt to fight those nemeses and maybe get warrants to make maxing negative rep easier for your alts.
Then there’s the roguelike dungeons, especially tailored for endgame builds, 4 in total.
There are also secret quests to complete with challenging bosses.
If that isn’t enough for you, you can get the crucible DLC, it’s not for everyone though…
The new expansion will also feature an endless dungeon, adding even more endgame.
Well imo leveling progression is much more fun experience in grim dawn than in poe. Number of good/viable builds is much higher. Gear support/itemization in general is better. You can fine tune your build more than in poe.
I guess the downsides to most people that don’t like grim dawn are the “slowness” of it and the fact that it’s mainly intended to be single player game. Also having no random map system of any kind turns some people off i guess. Upcoming expansion however will be introducing new movement abilities that are usable on all classes. That might make it a bit more speedy experience for those who can’t live without the speed.
In fact when i was talking to some people about gd a while back, they didn’t even know what it was like really. They just presumed it was a cheap, terrible indie game like torclight 2, and so never had given it a chance. I was really surprised that people actually judge games by price without giving them a real chance.
That’s a lot coming from poe players btw…talking about game price.
I have 6000 hours in, so I have my bias. I played some POE, I’ve played some of every ARPG known to man. But GD is the only ARPG to replace Diablo 2 in my heart.
Some people complain about its grind, but its drop rates are much more generous than in most ARPG’s by no small degree. Furthermore in Forgotten Gods the drop rate is increased to help counter act the increased item dilution from new gear added to loot pools.
Furthermore new features were added to make completing sets easier.
And then there’s the Shattered Realm for farming. I’ll probably make a youtube series to show how quickly one can gear up in GD.
Crafting Relics can be a bit tedious but they’re so potent it feels pretty fair, and you use lower relics to craft greater ones so you do feel like you’re just upgrading as you go.
If you know where to farm crafting components it’s pretty reasonable though.
Balance is subjective. But GD is pretty damned balance. It’s astonishing how many “good” options the player has.
Loot is not specific. You don’t specifically get more loot for your class. But loot is more generalized and rounded in general and with the drop rates it works out fine.
It’s worth noting that while the idea of non specialized drops might scare you off but you need to realize that loot is all around better in Grim Dawn. There is a higher consistency of usable gear dropping.
And your character’s power isn’t solely gear dependent. The constellation system, the skills themselves, etc. are pretty potent so if you get unlucky with drops you won’t feel gimped.
Also there are faction reputation shops that have plenty of lower tier gear that are solid enough to round out your character while you farm.
It’s a single player focused game, whereas PoE’s drop rates are based on a multiplayer mentality. Keep that in mind.
My personal favorite is the PoE players who leave negative GD reviews saying to just play PoE because it’s “FREE”… while completely ignoring the fact that that “free” relies solely on people paying to keep PoE servers running. They come across incredibly snobbish about it too, and incredibly ignorant about the economics behind it.
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Yeah, the free price model is a technical thing, the game is anything but free. You need to spend money on stashes to do anything, and 1-5 stashes is not nearly enough. Shit even 10 stashes is cutting it close if you do any serious trading/hoarding…
Then if you want the char to look good you’ve got to dump 30-50 bucks on armor set cosmetics… or if you’re really in love with one of the supporter pack cosmetics you can spend up to 500$ on like 5 armor cosmetics and a shit load of poe bucks (so you can buy more skins and tabs)
there’s nothing free about poe except the “installation fee”
Tell me about it… a couple weeks ago I went on to the PoE site to look at the pricing of things and that blew me away how much you had to cough up for cosmetic shit. That’s a lot of money. The stash prices I could see doing if I were a PoE fan but the cosmetics… ridiculous.
And worse, by all accounts I’ve read from PoE players you pretty much look like ass without coughing up for these things.
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