One thing that I absolutely LOVE about the removal is it no longer matters which one you give to the blacksmith. I used to HATE going through sometimes 10-15 relics just to see which relics had bonuses i could live without when crafting. Now its just a click and I have what I need without worrying about it.
Also when i first opened my stash i didnt know they had stacked, so when i clicked “combine” to join the 3 pieces I was like"Where the (insert any number of cuss words here, i probably said it at least once) are all my relics??? I laughed like hell when I saw that they stacked. Almost 2 full pages is now less than a quarter of a page. Well done Crate. Well done
Why not just let the components drop less often but in a complete form? I find the state in b29 with the two numbers, one for stacking, one for the completion rate, kind of unnecessarily confusing.
I am tracking the impact of this change and my efforts to restore some of my primary characters lost stats. Right now, I am working on getting my non-elemental resistances back to where they were and finding that I am having to make some trade-offs in other important stats to do so. Basically, I just keep telling myself that if I was starting the game fresh right now then I would not know what we are missing. I have played through the Necropolis up to the final boss successfully so the character is by no means broken. It is just less all powerful than it was. I will wait to take on the boss until they fix the issues with the Storm Totem and Wind Devil not deploying correctly on the floor in the bosses chamber.
It’s not like I won’t miss the bonuses, but every annoyance you mentioned, medierra, is one I’ve felt many times, so I’m with you on this.
Just an idea: How hard would it be to change it from a random bonus upon completion to a random bonus applied when you install a completed component? That way, you still get a bonus, but you won’t know what it will be until you combine the completed component with an item, sort of making like it a blind gamble–sometimes you win, sometimes not. Then if you remove the component, the existing bonus is wiped, and it’s randomly re-rolled the next time it’s combined again with an item.
I like this change. I like the extra inventory space and the making the benefits of components a bit better. I only suggest possibly making some components usable on more than one piece of gear if they can only be used on one type of gear.
I fully support this decision and you did a great job to summarize all the reasons. Components were a burden, not only for the inventory, but also regarding how I spent my time with Grim Dawn. Now it is just a big nuisanance less.
I put all my completed components in one shared stash tab so everyone can get access to it, and at the same time, I freed up space for each character which I can use to store “specialized” items related to their class…
This just fixed all my stash woes. I feel awesome.
The components’ storage and constant maintenance was truly a burden, an annoying task to organize the stash and feel pressed by the lack of space, along with the constant hunt for the most superior bonuses (picking the cherry).
It feels comfortably better now.
On the other hand, it seriously gimped the characters. Chaos res took the major hit, it’s now almost impossible to have any below lvl 70 and the required faction status. It also took away completion bonuses so strong, it’s impossible to be compensated by the current stats adjustments : the flat armor, the % to stats, the IAS, the above mentioned chaos/aether res.
Hell, a character lost 10% IAS, 6% physique, 5% OA, 34% chaos res, that bad.
Cannot tell what I personally find better.
Anyway, it’s already set and it’s pointless to discuss or brag about. For good or bad, it is what it is.
Hopefully it was for good.
I absolutely loved the change. I think it’s the best change in B29.
I can now focus on KILLING THINGS instead of drudgingly managing inventory like a second job or getting pissed off at useless completion bonuses or making something for a relic only to find that it has a valuable completion bonus and I have to make another one.
The countless hours saved by this change GREATLY outweighs any completion bonuses I would have valued before.
The choice is sound, it was either that or create a complete new way to store and select components.
The nerf is also real, though.
Not only in raw power and resists, that still don’t seem to be compensated by gear changes, but also in the ability to slightly correct a char that needs an unforeseen amount of stat points.
ATM I am personally stuck in not putting points anywhere in fear of not having enough to wear the gear I find.
When I started the game after this build my main char could no longer wear 2 pieces of gear because of the lost +26 spirit and +4% spirit on 4 components.
Fortunately I have had this policy for a while and I could dump 7 points in spirit right away, but now I’m playing the game of “wait and see” because I don’t know which points I’m going to be needing later on.
No it was 100% dumbing it down. The farming was only part of it you also needed to weigh the possible completion bonuses of the components when juding whish one was most usable per slot.
Component helped getting resist on character that have no room for that in either skills, or devotion.
I made a 2H aether spellbreaker in B28, i lost 30 chaos res and i badly felt that loss in the end of act4.
I died rarely at that point (looking offscreen, getting sleepy after 5h session of gameplay, ect…) and it was a oneshot festival in b29. Well, not one shot but one doombolt from the last boss in the face get me to 50% hp and the adds hit me at the same time, death by nerf resist.
And i had the very unpleasant surprise of seing a -10 acid resist and 4% bleed when starting elites. I was desesperate to hit lv70 for those augment, now i am considering quiting the game because as it is nom, i have no room at all to get back some acid resist until lv70 and the grind is simply torture.
See an elite, died from getting my face melt off from a facehugger.
What would have been nice is to have some augment sold at the faction vendor that give resist on any armor starting at lv50. We have HL version of useless faction gear, why not low level all armor augment for resist ?
Also, 4 pages for the stash is just to low. Come on, is it that hard to give us 10 pages ? No, it isn’t. You can fill 4 more page on the right of the stash pic and 2 others on the bottom
Tl;DR;
Low level all armor resist augment at the faction vendor.
More inventory in the stash.
Higher level component and better resist on all component too, now that we have a little more space for it we can afford more components.
This change is actually a good one. I remember the pain I was going through while I was juggling with relics/charms in TQ/IT, now I can focus on optimizing things without additional stress.
I guess Crate are smart enough to be able to figure out how+where to improve things in return, and they will do it in the best way possible.
Honestly, i really liked the idea of component completion bonuses, because it reminded me of Titan Quest. That said, Grim Dawn’s itemization is now light-years beyond what Titan Quest offers. I liked the completion bonuses, but i’m glad they’re gone.
I don’t see any need for them to ever come back, even in an expansion: We have the ability to upgrade components with the blacksmith, we’ve got empowered items, we’ve got Devotion. All that on top of the standard and special item slots. And we still have special abilities granted through component completion. I’d say we’re good on interesting & different ways to expand and power up our characters.
Fascinating. I thought of the exact same idea (woo, great minds, lol), but decided not to post it.
{Speaking generally now, not specifically replying to Shadar}
Now that i see the game without component completion bonuses, i never want to see them again. This kind of randomness doesn’t add anything interesting or worthwhile to the game, imo, that can’t be integrated in a more direct way some place else.
For example, Devotion can be expanded and tweaked to add options to restore the survivability that was nerfed. New components can be added to compensate for the missing bonuses.
Maybe now we might even see the ability to add more than one component to an item! :: hopeful grin ::
Or perhaps see components used by the blacksmith as a means of precisely altering the properties of items?
All that said, the point of having multiple damage types is to provide different flavors of threat. To make you assess your situation and your opponents and decide how you need to handle them. For example, you might build a character that is essentially immune to fire damage, but weak against poison. So you can tank one sort of enemy, but have to kite another. If every build can get high resistance to everything all the time, it cheapens the experience, imo.
If i understand correctly, though, Vitality, Aether, and Chaos damage are meant to be exotic damage types. Handling them should be appropriately exotic. Meaning, in part, that players (and characters in the game world) should have to weight a price for the ability to use and/or defend against these bizarre forces when doing so directly and to any significant degree. There should be options to defend against them indirectly that carry only the price of exclusion* (like the Devotion star “Turtle Shell” that grants 500 damage absorption when you hit 40% life, and takes 50 seconds to recharge). (*Exclusion means that because you’ve chosen this path, you’ve used up points that you could have spent elsewhere.)
However, the more direct path of simply gaining resistance to these exotic damage types might impose a more significant price: Perhaps the forces of C.H.A.O.S. really want to Get Smart … no, wait. Perhaps the forces of chaos are naturally drawn to each other, and so the more resistant you become to it, the more enemies who deal chaos damage you have to fight per pack. Or, perhaps the aetherials are less capable of sensing foes who have resistance to their type of existence, and thus the more resistance you have to aether damage, the fewer aetherials you have to fight per pack, or the more difficult it becomes to find sources of further resistance.