it’s me again, here to complain at length about my favourite game of all time. in general though, as with all my feedback threads, anything i don’t mention is something i’m completely satisfied with. i really do love this game more than any other, and that’s why i’m so hard on it at times. if you haven’t noticed, i’m pretty emotionally invested in what you guys have created. at this point you guys should realize that i’m probably one of the most hardcore of your hardcore audience, so all feedback will be from that perspective. i think the game is incredibly well-balanced (other than resistance reduction, which i’ll address later), so most of my issues are mechanical. i’m basically going to just list all my thoughts here, stream of consciousness style (like i do in all my threads).
note that a lot of my suggestions involve reworking existing systems into avenues for more legendary items. i am aware that this would increase the amount of legendaries that players would amass per hour, which might be problematic. you could easily just reduce the normal drop rate of legendaries while implementing any of these suggestions to equate to an equal amount of legendaries per hour but with a significantly more rewarding endgame experience.
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to start things off with a positive: the devotion system is absolutely brilliant. like, it’s genuinely one of the best-designed systems i have ever encountered in a game. i’m constantly finding minor tweaks to my devotion setups on all my builds, and those little epiphanies are why i play games like this. kudos to you guys for making it worth the wait. it’s not perfect balance-wise, but given the astonishing breadth of options available, it’s incredible that it’s as balanced as it is. i don’t think there are any egregious balance flaws beyond offensive devotions not being good enough, and final tier devotions generally being underpowered. a good fix to the latter would be to give them affinity for completion as well, allowing some of them to self-sustain. but yeah, not much else to say regarding the devotion system, it’s really my favourite aspect of the game.
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class balance feels really good at the moment except for how heavily you nerfed arcanist and soldier. i touched on this before but i get that those two classes were massively overpowered relative to others for several years, but as this is not a seasonal game there is no need for a revolving door of what classes are OP. the best way to balance the game would have been to bring the underpowered classes up to their level, and you did with demolitionist and occultist, which are now incredible. the thing is that the buffs to those two classes would have put them toe to toe with b30 soldier and arcanist, so i don’t see why you felt the need to make soldier and arcanist just worse than demolitionist and occultist as support masteries. this is most salient with arcanist and the constant nerfs to things like maiven’s, inner focus, and now even mental alacrity for some reason. every class should be a good support class. the vast majority of people complaining about how OP soldier and arcanist were never even finished ultimate.
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my other problem with class balance (though this is more with the skill system in general) is that +skills to main attacking skills are way too good relative to +skills to support skills and passives. this is unfortunate as often times the two seem to be weighted equally on gear. titan quest was amazing for its (admittedly broken due to things like stonebinder’s cuffs) +skill system, as you’d have linear boosts to all skills into ultimate levels, making them equally meaningful. the sad thing is that this was rendered irrelevant since there were no bonuses to single skills, only entire masteries. in grim dawn most pieces add bonuses to individual skills, so why you felt the need to significantly reduce the value of +skills to supports and passives is beyond me. i get that it’s a concern with scaling, but the fact that something like maiven’s offers 20% absorption, 10% less damage, and 5% less physical damage at 12/12 and 25% absorption, 8% less damage, and 2% less physical damage at 22/12 is ridiculous. why do the first 12 points have 4x the value of the final 10? mental alacrity follows the same trend, with the first 10 points being worth 4x the value of the 10 ultimate levels. this is really disappointing, especially when compared to +skills on damaging skills, where the 10 ultimate levels are often worth more than the first 16, point for point. i get that balancing passives is difficult with 10 ultimate levels, but i think that it’s something that should be worked on, as it’s tremendously disappointing.
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legendaries are in a much better place than they were before, and i’m thankful you took so many of my suggestions from my prior thread. i still have no idea why you haven’t made every legendary weapon skill cooldown-free, however. no one playing this game is using stormreaver’s 2.5s cooldown skill. in general though, legendary balance feels a lot better. the new winter king crown is really cool, so why not just do that for every legendary skill?
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farming at end game is just not interesting enough. i love this game so much that i’ll run SoT and BoC hundreds of times just because, but some kind of incentive would be nice. one of the main problems is that there is literally no reason to kill trash mobs. this is a massive flaw in the game, and one that i’m having a really hard time ignoring the more and more i play. i think jajaja and i have the two most efficient endgame builds right now, but his is better than mine because mine kills regular enemies a lot faster while sacrificing boss killing speed, and his just kills bosses. there is no reason to kill regular enemies, ever. components don’t matter anymore, and i think i’ve received maybe 2-3 legendaries from trash mobs out of several hundred thousand that i’ve killed. gap-closing from pack to pack and killing heroes is not the way ARPGs should be played. note that i’m not even talking about a 25% drop rate boost to trash mobs; they need to drop legendaries at least 20x more than they currently do to make them worthwhile. this is a really serious design flaw. i shouldn’t be seeing a legendary from a trash mob once every 50 or so SoT runs.
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the nemesis system is also just not interesting or meaningful. in early access i was so excited about it, but it’s just disappointing. the only nemesis that is in any way relevant is fabius, because he can be easily farmed. the other ones may as well not exist. i have thousands of hours in the game, a lot of it spent grinding at end game, and i’ve never seen the aetherial nemesis. i don’t even know his name. moosilauke showing up in SoT is cool i guess, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence. also the fact that nemeses don’t drop a guaranteed legendary is completely ridiculous to me, i really don’t understand why you think that would be unreasonable. people were running iron maiden for gear in b29, and you didn’t like that for some reason, so you nerfed their drops, and now nobody runs iron maiden anymore for any reason. mission accomplished i guess?
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further, it just doesn’t make sense from any perspective. you’ve killed a lot of dudes in one faction and their response is to hide a super powerful boss from you that you have to hunt for? uhh ok. the obvious solution to both this problem and the aforementioned problem with trash mobs is to create a system where a nemesis will automatically spawn when you kill x number of a certain faction in a session. this harmonizes and rectifies two very egregious problems with end game farming.
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the only thing with the nemesis system that i actually really enjoyed was the recent addition of anasteria’s nemesis-only legendary helm. that was super fucking cool. it was an agonizing grind, but for the first time i actually felt like the nemesis system mattered in some way, because for every other faction it doesn’t. they don’t give you anything that you can’t already get from other sources, and unfortunately you can usually get it faster from other sources as well. every single nemesis should have 1 or more super rare legendary (or incredibly powerful MI, to make the hunt even greater) drop. if used in tandem with my prior suggestion, suddenly killing trash feels meaningful, because it summons nemeses, and killing nemeses feel meaningful because they have a chance of dropping unique loot. it’s a simple fix and makes farming so much more interesting. i don’t think anybody is especially happy with the current nemesis system. it was made to give incentive to your hardcore audience, but as your hardcore audience i can tell you there’s no incentive and it’s not interesting at the moment.
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another huge problem with end game is the removal of completion bonuses. i don’t think you guys realize just how massive that change was for people who want to grind. i loved this game in early access because i was always hunting for the right hallowed ground and chains of oleron completion bonus. now components are completely pointless. anybody who’s played the game for a meaningful amount of time has a preponderance of every single droppable component (short of ectoplasms and corpse dusts due to skeleton keys), and there’s nothing you can do with them. what am i going to do with my 90 hallowed grounds? nothing, ever. you completely removed one of the farming goals from this game for the sake of complaints from the community about lack of stash space, instead of just giving us more stash space. this is the only choice you’ve made as developers that made me feel disenfranchised as a hardcore player, since it was very clearly taking away an interesting mechanic to appease your casual audience. i understand that it was something you felt you had to do, but it still really bothers me.
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one solution to this problem is to give components a very small chance on completion to have boosted stats. it doesn’t matter how minor the boost is, it still makes collecting components feel relevant again. they would take up a secondary spot from regular components, which isn’t a big deal since it would be a maximum of 2 spaces per component type. if you don’t do something like this then there is literally 0 reason to have incomplete components at all. reduce their drop rate and make them drop as complete components. the problem with your component stacking solution is that, even though they take up less space, there’s now no need to keep picking them up, so the reduced space they take up is now irrelevant. i don’t really care that my 80 hallowed grounds take up 1 spot in my stash; if they took up more i’d just throw them all away, since i can’t do anything with them. it really doesn’t matter. another thing you could do is just make these ‘advanced’ components craftable, requiring x amount of the base component to create.
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another solution is one that also makes end game farming more interesting. the fact that devotion shrines can drop legendary items is really enticing, and they’ve completely taken the place of one-shot chests in terms of things to look forward to on a new character. it’s a lot of fun to do these shrines on fresh characters due to the chance of a legendary drop, but the fact that there’s a finite number is disappointing. i suggest creating devotion-like shrines (with no devotion point awarded of course) that randomly appear in roguelike dungeons, with either very heavy component requirements to cleanse (i’m talking like 5-10 hallowed grounds per, for example), or really difficult monsters that get summoned if it’s corrupted. this keeps things fresh and exciting, it makes collecting components feel meaningful, etc. any solutions that solve multiple end-game problems are definitely good ones.
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one shot chests are also unimportant given how prominently the mechanic is advertised as being a selling point of this game. epics aren’t the final tier of loot, and the fact that one shot chests on elite and ultimate aren’t able to drop a legendary makes them pointless for everything but your first character, and even then they’re still pretty underwhelming. i completely ignore every one shot chest on elite and ultimate on every new character, as i’m assuming everyone else who plays this game a lot does. give them a chance to drop a legendary on elite and ultimate. simple solution to make an unimportant gameplay element past a very easily reachable threshold important again.
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dismantling is another disaster resultant of your removal of completion bonuses. it was somewhat interesting when players were hunting for completion bonuses, but now it serves no purpose whatsoever. i’ve talked about it before, and even with the small chance of a rare crafting material, it’s still a massive waste of time. i tried doing it with epics and i was getting something like 1 rare material per 30 epics dismantled. it doesn’t matter how much more likely it is with legendaries, this doesn’t help the fact that we can’t do anything with epic items, and they drop constantly. dismantling really should be used to gain some kind of currency which can then be exchanged for a random legendary. this is by far the most elegant solution. i talk a lot about this in a prior thread of mine (http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=31464) so i will not go into too much more detail here, but the whole dismantling situation just feels so incomplete.
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legendary drop rates are also fine as they are (though should probably still be easier to get due to how many of them there are lack of smart loot), but the fact that epics are still useless past a certain (easily reachable) point at endgame is incredibly disappointing. there is absolutely nothing that you can do with them. refining the scrap/dynamite system to make epics relevant even for players on ultimate difficulty would be a welcome change. it’s probably way too late in the game for this, but to be completely honest, there is no reason for epics to even exist past a certain level. every epic level 60-65+ should have been a legendary with updated stats so as to make the available gear pool at end game that much more interesting. players have rares and faction gear to keep them afloat while they farm for these legendaries. in fact, doing this would significantly increase the value of both iron and crafting materials, since it would make crafting (or shop farming) necessary to survive the final difficulty level until you find some legendaries. the updates to rare affixes and MIs makes this very doable. it would make 3 useless objects (epics, scrap, and iron) actually meaningful.
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i think the main disappointment i have regarding grim dawn stems from having read medierra’s posts a while back lamenting the state of titan quest’s endgame, saying that the two additional difficulties were tacked on at the end the game’s development with little to no testing. i expected that to mean that grim dawn would have a robust endgame. in actuality, titan quest had more features that were gated by additional difficulty. talos, the dragon liche, and the hydra, while simple boss encounters, were still later-difficulty only content. grim dawn technically has 0 content that is gated by difficulty level. it has devotion shrines and gear that you can’t get on normal/veteran, but that isn’t ‘content’. nemeses are encounterable on normal difficulty with enough effort, and even they are such a minor element of gameplay that even if they were suddenly made to be elite/ultimate only, it still wouldn’t really feel like enough. i really appreciate the efforts you took to balance ultimate, and i like the current difficulty of it a lot. i just wish there were more to do. i’m hoping that survival mode fixes this problem.
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bounties are also mostly pointless. the black legion is the one case where you have to do them, which is fine i guess, though it’s pretty agonizing. i don’t think i’ve done a bounty for another faction in months though, and i reroll characters with some frequency now. it’s so much faster to just kill the appropriate enemy type. even when i’m farming rover reputation on new characters, for a while when i would run SoT for rep i would check back at the rover bounty table to see if i could get the bounty for skeletal knights or revenants so i could boost my rep gain a bit, but when i realized that they offered like 200 reputation, barely more than a boss, i just stopped doing them.
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they had some kind of merit back when components still mattered, so this is yet another problem resultant of your removal of completion bonuses. i can’t even remember the last time i actually looked at the bounty completion screen to see what component piece it gave me, because it really doesn’t matter at all. right now the only meaningful thing you can do with bounties is get the devil’s crossing one where the cronley hero spawns in the room beside cronley, and then you just never turn in the bounty and kill him for an extra 25 rep every run while you grind cronley reputation. i’m going to assume this was not your intention, and it’s pretty disappointing that the only thing that makes a system you created in any way meaningful is something completely incidental.
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this is really easy to fix, just give bounties a chance of rewarding legendary items upon completion on ultimate difficulty. it’s a bandaid solution but it’s still something. i get that i’m coming off as a broken record here suggesting that everything involve legendaries in some way, but this is a loot-based game and legendaries are the highest tier of loot, and anything that doesn’t involve them (or MIs i guess) at end game is irrelevant. this is the nature of ARPGs.
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scrap is also a weird mechanic. scrap-crafting still leaves a ton to be desired, as well. it feels completely unfinished, and as i mentioned in a prior thread, it feels like it was put into the game to give people something to do during early access, but has little to no benefit at any point for any character. relic, component, and legendary item crafting are the only things that are worth doing. it is always faster and more resource-efficient to keep resetting and check the devil’s crossing vendor to get specific rare items. the vendors might not be able to sell double rares, but the odds of crafting the correct double rare item are so low that it’s not even worth mentioning. scrap crafting serves no purpose when leveling either, since you are even more resource-starved, making the shop farming thing even more appealing. it’s a trap for new players who don’t realize the pointlessness of the system.
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this can be fixed by either giving a small chance at a legendary from scrap crafting (which, with the boosted rate on scrap from dynamite, almost makes dismantling worth it), or simply homogenizing scrap and my aforementioned ‘legendary currency’. make a vendor that will turn 500-1000 scrap into a random legendary. this makes dismantling useful (assuming you bump up the amount of scrap gained from dismantling, which you should), makes random epics/repeat legendaries useful, and makes iron useful. the latter doesn’t fix the scrap crafting problem, though. you can also make a new blacksmith recipe that requires x number of scrap and y number of rare components to get a legendary, which then makes scrap more meaningful, rare components more meaningful, and crafting more meaningful.
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a solution for scrap crafting could be to dramatically boost the blacksmith bonuses. like, dramatically. they’re so minor that they don’t really have any impact on anyone’s gameplay. it’s disappointing that the answer to new players asking ‘what blacksmith should i pick’ is universally ‘it really doesnt matter’. if they were significantly higher then not only would scrap crafting have some kind of merit over shop-farming, but it would also make craftable legendary items worth crafting multiple times to get the right bonus. at the moment i don’t really care if i get 10% energy regen or 8% elemental damage on my legendary helmet, it’s not enough to make me want to craft the item again. the angrim/duncan dichotomy is even less relevant when you consider that due to how obscenely rare bleed resistance is in this game, crafting from the skeleton dude in the necropolis is always your best option.
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re: legendary craftables, i really like them and the game needs more of them. i think they’re balanced really well in terms of cost and reward, so nicely done on that.
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another problem i have with crafting is that completion bonuses on most relics are irrelevant. the non-class specific ones can roll some amazing stuff like %OA, but the majority of the class-specific ones don’t really matter. my callidor’s tempest character rolled an agrivix’s malice with bonuses to inferno and overload, the best possible outcome, and it didn’t matter at all. i think it boosted my damage by close to 1%? class relics should go back to boosting main skills again, i have no idea why that was changed. a long time ago i complained that the pool was too large and that the bonuses were often irrelevant (nobody wants +2 to nullification as a bonus, for example), but making the completion bonus meaningless was not the solution i was hoping for. again, this is a change that only really matters to the small percentage of players that play the game enough to min-max in hardcore, so why not give us something to farm for? this is another way to increase the value of components.
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treasure troves are incredibly confusing. i honestly have no idea why they exist. iron is not really a big part of the game for anyone who isn’t a new player, and to have created an entirely new kind of chest just for iron strikes me as a really bizarre design choice. you see one of them, you port to homestead, you buy dynamite, you port back, and you profit like 5000 iron. what is interesting about that at all? you’re never going to find a legendary from it (maybe you will, but it doesn’t seem to be any higher than just getting one from a standard chest which is like one out of several hundred).
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i don’t get why you created two fully functional applications for dynamite when neither of them do anything meaningful. you could completely remove both dismantling and treasure troves from the game and nobody would have any problem with it. every thread related to treasure troves on the forum is players asking ‘what is the point’, then they are told what the point is, and their response is ‘oh’. there are so many useful systems you could have created for dynamite that involve loot in some way. i have no idea why you thought that the recent rare materials from dismantling was in any way enough to warrant the mechanic’s existence.
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my only game balance complaint is that resistance reduction is just as good as it was in titan quest. removing sapros from the game doesn’t make the mechanic less important, it just makes players find other methods of accomplishing the same thing. every top build involves heavy resistance reduction, and any builds that don’t feature it are objectively worse. i say that as someone who discovered one of the best builds in the game. it’s probably too late in the game to rectify this problem but maybe you can do something about it for the expansion. i think it should be removed from the game completely, and that there should be a mechanic similar to what they have in PoE where you gain the ability to penetrate x percent of an enemy’s resistance, with no chance of putting it below zero. or if that’s too difficult to implement, remove -n and -n% resistance reduction, and only allow for items to reduce by x%, so it will always stay above zero. it’s too good a mechanic, and it really limits gearing choices. this is only really apparent when it comes to min-maxing, so i understand that it’s not especially pressing for you guys to fix it, but given the steps you’ve taken to try to curb OA/crit damage stacking, this is worse than that ever was.
basically, you put tons of effort into multiple systems (bounties, nemesis system, dismantling, treasure troves, one-shot chests) that don’t actually offer anything to the game. they all have superficial merit that might fool new players, but they don’t matter past normal difficulty (if at all). i get that the vast majority of your player base stops playing the game after normal, but these systems are already in place, why not just update them even slightly to matter to the people who play elite and ultimate? none of these suggestions negatively impact the game for newer players, and i think most of them elegantly fix several problems at once.
[b]TL;DR for people who don’t want to read a massive essay:
- killing regular mobs is pointless, so create a counter that automatically summons a nemesis after having killed x number of that faction’s mobs in a session
- nemesis system is pointless and offers nothing that can’t be attained elsewhere with less difficulty, so give every nemesis a super rare unique drop a la anasteria
- farming is monotonous, so give devotion-like shrines a chance to spawn in roguelikes (or around the world) that don’t offer a devotion point but have a chance of giving you a legendary, with very high component requirements to cleanse or very difficult mobs to kill if corrupted
- scrap and dynamite have no reason to exist short of fixing bridges and shit like that, so make scrap and dynamite a relevant part of the gameplay experience, ideally through a scrap crafting system that can offer legendaries
- component drops, especially rare components, are mostly pointless due to how quickly players amass a surplus of them that they can’t do anything with, so make components worth picking up through my prior devotion shrine suggestion, or an ‘enhanced component’ possibility upon completion, or just use them in crafting for a chance at a legendary
- epics stop being useful very quickly in a player’s progression at end game yet they keep dropping, make them worth picking up by refining the scrap/dynamite system, boost the amount of scrap generated by dismantling epics, and giving scrap crafting a chance to roll a legendary
- scrap crafting is a waste of time and blacksmith bonuses are largely irrelevant, significantly boost the blacksmith bonuses to make scrap crafting have some kind of merit over shop farming, as right now the mechanic is a trap for new players who don’t realize that shop farming is faster and cheaper
-one shot chests are pointless on elite and ultimate for all but the newest of players, so give them a chance at rolling a legendary on elite and ultimate difficulty[/b]
that’s about it for now. i’ll update this as more ideas come to me. i hope this doesn’t come off as a THC7-style ‘more ! more ! more !’ list of demands; i think i’m being pretty reasonable with my suggestions for the most part. i really hope that survival mode fixes a lot of my problems with end game, but i’m keeping my expectations reasonable as well.
but guys, great job on the release, sincerely. i know this is a pretty negative thread, but know that i’m beyond thankful for all the work you’ve put into this game, and for the way you treat your community. your transparency and consideration of your players’ demands is nothing short of inspiring, and you really deserve all the success in the world. i’m so happy to have played a part in this game’s development, and i don’t think another game will ever mean this much to me. thanks for putting up with my hectoring over the years.
