comprehensive feedback/wall of text on release build

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
21

Well my point was more along the lines of, when a monster has 80% resist, resist reduction increased your damage a lot more than a monster with 0% resist.

Resist reduction would increase the damage dealt on a low resist monster by a much smaller percent than on a higher resist monster. That’s all I was getting at -.-

I still think resist reduction needs smaller numbers where it appears.

Ceno plz. I know resist reduction is a multiplier. My point was that high resists me and resist reduction is an even bigger multiplier. Ultimate made resist reduction even more powerful then say, normal. I’m on my phone

Damage and resist reduction can be balanced. It’s just difficult.

Say a monster had 99% fire resist and you did 100 fire damage. 100 more fire damage would only give you 1 more damage, but 9% resist reduction would give you 9 more.

Now if that monster had 0% resist all of a sudden the damage is much better. The problem is RR hardly competes with damage in game because you can get it from so many places and adding high damage to any slot would unbalance the game. Same for % damage. I was only speaking mathematically. I never considered higher hp lower resist monsters a fix, but it would take some of resist reductions potency down.

I also haven’t been putting that much though into a solution since I’ve just been enjoying my travels around the world. Consider my suggestion a bandaid until I crunch the numbers.

22

So you don’t glaringly disagree? That’s precisely what I was trying to say about resist reduction. If you limited the areas resist reduction appears and make those spots highly competitive with crit and %dmg/ raw dmg then it can be balanced.

But also the numbers are just way too high. 40% resist reduction I’m the current meta is like, hey would you like an easy to obtain, no drawback 1.4x multiplier that increases with the enemies resist? It’s just too strong.

Afaik, no monster has negative resists, so even a 10% resist reduction stat would be a minimum of doing literally 10% or more damage than you would have been doing without it.

I agree monster hp is not a straight solution as long as the damage variance in builds is so high and resist reduction competes with nothing and is easily obtained in vast amounts. But once the items/skills/devotions are more balanced I’d argue adding high hp low resist monsters to the game will make more sense to you than it currently does.

Glad we agree it had a place in the meta. Balancing it will be tricky.

23

I pretty much have the same thoughts on legendaries and nemesis spawns. I have been in ultimate difficulty shortly after release of the difficulty content, and looked forward to loot drop fix days before release. So instead of seeing the same blues drop over and over, I now see more legendaries, but rare
still. And I know I will be excited the day I finally see the recipes drop for the relics I need to finally make a max level one, but for now I am still stuck to using the same damn level 25 relic I have had over the past year or so.

Since I play hardcore melee, I look forward to heavy armor with high resists. Though I have augments, devotions, and components to patch up my low resists where I can, I get frustrated when I am still using the same pieces of gear because nothing drops that I can use.

I was hoping that nemesis spawns would alleviate lack of loot, but they seem so elusive, that since the nemesis system was implemented, I still haven’t had one spawn. So I cannot determine if I would be able to safely farm them, let alone get geared up

24

Oh these first world problems :undecided:

I don’t think every mechanic should have an end game extension. E.g. scrap crafting and one shot chests.
It’s also contradicting how you want more grind through empowered components (and they will be the only ones that matter, in the end, with a decent amount of agnst to finally get two empowered dread skulls) and less grind through increased legendary drop rates.

I do firmly agree on nemesis drops. I’m against a guaranteed legendary, since they are not that hard to find and not that challenging to kill, at least on elite. But I did more than 20 runs (around 6 or 7 on ultimate) for Moosilauke for the last two days, and haven’t got a single legendary from him. If it wasn’t for recipe drops I wouldn’t bother with him at all.

Bounties do need an end game extension and them being a stuff you do after there’s nothing left to do makes sense. But bounties are the massive topic, I could have written an essay as long as half of yours just on the issues I have with bounties and possible solutions. Not really a fan of bandaid here.

25

Granted it’d be a lot of work to write such a thing, but I’d at least be interested in reading it. I imagine others would be too.

26

A number of the issues raised could and probably should be addressed together. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of random mechanics like Dismantling and Bounties, which aren’t quite good enough to stand alone. You could solve a few things together.

Trash mobs not worth it
Nemeses require hunting
End game lacks a sense of motivation

The idea of “threat meter” has been brought up before- basically if you kill mobs in a faction quickly in succession, the meter rises. It could have a few tiers where it may release a pack of tough trash mobs and eventually releasing the Nemesis when you’ve killed enough. This makes more sense because the player drives a type of rubberband AI. Lore-wise, if you’re killing the faction’s dudes at an abnormal rate, then they’d start sending out the specialists to take down the threat. Killing trash mobs becomes important because there aren’t enough Heroes to sustain the threat meter alone. Tie the ceiling of the threat meter to the reputation tiers and it’s vaguely scalable from start to end.

Now that could satisfy players for a while, but this is a loot-based RPG so in my mind you’d have to tie gear in as well. The idea of enemy faction-specific loot would fit it nicely. Similar to friendly faction gear, the enemy factions could drop certain tiers of blueprints, armor, augments, etc once you reach the according reputation level. The extra wrinkle would be to only allow these drops when you kill enemies at the top of the threat meter. This motivates players to enter areas with a high density trash mob area to farm for items. With a few Legendaries like the Outcast’s hood, that’s plenty of incentive.

Bounties serve no purpose once reputation is maxed
Scrap/Dynamite/Iron are worthless

The idea of Skeleton Keys is an interesting mechanic that could be recycled. Once you reach max Rep with a friendly faction you could unlock faction-specific side areas, similar to Hargate’s Isle, but with more variety. Basically, it could be a stronghold of the faction’s worst enemies with great mob density. Maybe even tie it to the impending Survival Mode. However, restrict access to the areas with debris/bridges with high costs that reset each time. If all that’s keeping the Bane of the Bane of Cairn away, then you’d damn well believe they’re going to move rocks in the way to block you. It may even be worthwhile to create a blueprint that requires a lot of resources, including rare components that only drop from enemy factions once they reach the top tier of the threat meter.

So now you have to give a good reason for players to want to enter these strongholds. Max rep bounties could begin offering MUCH better rewards, but make the quest require access to these new areas. I’m not sure what the rewards should look like however. Legendaries is the obvious answer, but as others have pointed out that makes no sense lore-wise and it diminishes motivation to kill enemies to find Legendaries. What could work would be a new type zone-exclusive item. Maybe not even gear. My half thought-out idea is a material similar to Ancient Hearts that enable Blueprints to a shiny Augment that works on Relics. And instead of making generic bonuses like +100 OA, you could imbue them with build-defining skills/item procs that are like those on Legendaries, such as Blood Orb’s 100% Elemental conversion to
Chaos.

At any rate with the latest preview of mod tools, it looks like Crate may be giving us the keys to solve the end game problem ourselves. I look forward to peeling back the onion!

27

That’s fine but you’re ignoring the possibility that some people actually play the game instead of trying to maximize efficiency for a single purpose. Taking your maximization to its most silly extreme means adding a button that you press that dispenses legendaries whenever you press it. If that’s the way you want to play it’s completely legitimate and I don’t have a problem with it, per say. However, to call trash mobs loot drop rate a flaw when the game is designed to be played as a game, rather than primarily as a loot farm, is where you go a bit astray. Loot farming is a side meta within the game itself, not the purpose.

28

i have a lot more to say (especially regarding ceno’s posts) but for now:

as i mention in the OP, i don’t really have a problem with the current amount of legendaries i am getting per hour. i would be more than happy with the frequency of legendaries being reduced from hero and boss monsters and increased on trash, as this makes more enemies worth killing, and doesnt pigeonhole endgame builds into ‘shadow strike from pack to pack and kill heroes/bosses’. what about ‘i want to kill more enemies in this game’ makes you think i want a button that gives me loot?

i do not think you understand the irony of telling me that i am not looking at the game as a game, when all i want to do is feel more incentive to kill the irrelevant 95% of enemies i encounter while playing; that is, i want to play more of the game. if you think making trash mobs worth killing would in any way make the game less of a game, or in any way infringe upon whatever your current playstyle is, then i don’t really know what to tell you. to argue that they are already ‘worth killing’ because everybody plays this game for different reasons is a complete and total cop-out. i cannot even imagine a circumstance in which my trash mob suggestion in any way vitiates the gaming experience for other players. how can you not think hero/boss monsters having a several thousand times higher chance of dropping legendaries than white/yellow ones is is a design flaw?

to argue that my playstyle is radically different than other people who play on ultimate difficulty is also ridiculous; i play the game to kill shit and get legendaries, same reason everyone else on ultimate difficulty does. i’m just better at it than most people. all i want is for more of the game to feel relevant to me, and i genuinely do not understand how any of my suggestions that make more aspects of the game relevant to me do so at your, or anyone else’s, expense.

edit: let’s apply your argument to something like ceno’s prior point, like how stonerend quarry is a super cool area with a unique boss that doesn’t really do anything (which i agree entirely with). what he and i both want is some kind of loot-based incentive to go there. do you think the devs giving us a loot-based incentive to spend time in stonerend quarry in any way sullies the gameplay of people who ‘play the game as a game’?

29

Easy there tiger. ‘Sullies’ is a pretty fancy word to use and perhaps we could take it back down a notch or two as I in no way feel like your suggestions ‘sully’ anything. I have no illusions or delusions of chasteness or purity.

There’s a point where sometimes you just do something to do it, regardless of whether you feel incentivised or not. Not everything has to be associated with a specific reward for doing so.

Ultimately, as long as I’m not inundated by loot rewards everywhere I go, just simply for going somewhere and doing something, I don’t really have any issues. Just, personally, it seems silly that we need to be incentivised all the time to do stuff within a game. It sort of defeats the purpose of just fucking off, you know?

30

Loot fest is one feature of hack-n-slash game, nothing wrong with maximizing loot rate.

31

wow ok so i had a huge response to a lot of people lined up but uh

this really fixes almost every problem i outlined in the OP, i am blown away

32

Yea, these are all nice changes.