Crawling Your Way To Victory

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Got inspired for this thread off forgetting to kill one of the oligarchs. It cost me around 10 mins. of walking (areas cleared no fights) - tp to old arkovia, walk for ages, tp to broken hills, walk for ages to get the quest reward.

Being away from this game for long, it’s somehow easy to notice the good and bad not influenced by the routine and getting accustomed to the game by the hundreds or thousands of hours put in.

The first impression of the game was I’m like walking in mud.
Throughout the content you are slow, like moving on slow motion. The low base MS helps for this feeling.
A part of the playthrough is with no MS on boots, later on you get some, but it doesn’t improve much the overall experience. This reminds me, never equip boots with no MS, no matter how good they are. Of course there are skills like PB, vindictive flame and oleron’s, also (very rare) MS on items, but there are still cross-classes which don’t have access to these, nor they fit to their build. What’s worse, such skills become to feel like a necessity, combined with high MS boots.

To add insult to the injury, there are the multiple slow effects, following you through all the content.
In this game you are unable to remove debuffs, besides cleansing waters, which is still crap and still alone.
So the slow applied through curses, chill, and various other debuffs, stays until they expire.
There are also a few slow resistance items, while the effect is widely spread.
Basically there’s too many slows on the player, and a few ways to get rid of them. Majority of monster factions got at least one representative to apply slow, and it’s usually common in crowds.
This does not only kill players, but is extremely frustrating in fights. Let’s not forget there are no true movement skills in this game.

I’m aware of the technical and balance factors why it’s this way, I also understand that some of the developers may be fixated on MS, nothing wrong. Also aware that players always want everything and now, all the power possible included.
But being able to play the game somehow “fresh” after the brake, I can see that movement in this game is terribly slow and it even gets worse at times, with few ways to get over it. Can’t see how it helps the overall gaming experience, nor how it’s going to leave a positive impression in new players.

2

You don’t have a lot of options in the very early game, but if you don’t have 130%+ speed at level 20 it’s because you decided other things were more important. Some people don’t mind slow movement; if you do then you have options available.

3

Riftstone is accessible by anyone, soldier has blitz, and if it comes down to it you can just walk past enemies you don’t feel like fighting a lot of the time.

That said, it would be really nice if the caster masteries (arcanist & occultist particularly) had some kind of “blink” skill to teleport X yards for some added mobility. When your hp is roughly 10k at most, you need to get away from enemies, not towards them. Such a skill would be invaluable.

4

I have been trying to analyze why I get this feeling from Grim Dawn more than any other ARPG I’ve tried. It gets to the point where I sacrifice character effectiveness for more movement speed just to avoid getting bored to death, and anything less than 135% run speed feels like I’m playing the game in slow motion.

The 100% base run speed definitely feels slower than Diablo 1 or 2, for example (the two ARPGs I played to death), so that might be one part.

I think another part is that this game tempts you to play new characters a lot. I’ve just been playing for a couple of months but already have over 20 non-mule characters (and I’ve deleted some, including characters who were level 60+, so I think probably I’ve played over 30). Most of them have at least completed veteran difficulty so I’ve repeated the entire game for almost all of them in elite, and ultimate for 6 of them. That means I keep repeating the game from Act 1 in Devil’s Crossing and then miserably walk around everywhere, doing the same tedious quests I’ve done hundreds of times over.

A lot of the excitement of playing the game for me now is often when I create a new character around a build idea. The groaning comes from realizing how much questing/walking I have to do that I’ve done over and over and over again before I really see that idea come to fruition (or not).

This game emphasizes questing and seamless, open world a lot more than Diablo 2 and especially Diablo 1, but that tends to increase the sense of repetition of going from point A to point B to point C and then back to point A a lot faster than these two. It’s fun on the very, very first playthrough in veteran but after that it’s repetition, repetition, repetition – I can’t count how many times I made that long and arduous walk from Broken Hills to SoT or Smuggler’s Pass, or from Pine Barrens to the blacksmith in Tyrant’s Hold. It feels the worst for maps that are sparse and not filled with many enemies (Broken Hills stands out there where it just feels like an endless walk around winding paths with just mostly harpies here and there between long periods of walking).

In any case, the game definitely made me notice my run speed more than any other like it before. The difference between 100% run speed and 135% for me is like the difference between boring, repetitive grind and reasonably fun. I wish all boots gave an inherent +movement speed as part of the base item, or that our base run speed could be increased a bit to something that doesn’t emphasize all the walking we’re doing (which gets old and repetitive real fast) in between the hacking and slashing (which never gets old to me).

[…] nor how it’s going to leave a positive impression in new players.

For brand, brand new players playing their very, very first character, I don’t think the game felt so bad there. At least I was still excited exploring maps and walking around and didn’t feel quite as annoyed. It gets more annoying as we go to elite, then ultimate, and/or start a new character. It gets old really fast, and GD makes me groan a bit each time I start fresh in act 1 (new difficulty or new character) in a way that I didn’t when I went to nightmare or hell difficulty or started a new character in Diablo 2 (though D2 gave more incentive to keep going with a character than creating new ones – for example, level cap took ages to reach, and there was only one class to choose, so I didn’t create that many new characters in D2).

5

This is sooo true!

I think the OP definitely has a point here. When just roaming around the map, the player should not be forced to choose between a reasonably fast movement and his combat stats. Of course movement is part of combat as far as kiting is concerned, so it makes sense, to a certain extent, to balance it against other combat stats, but it looks like other ARPGs have found a better balance here.

It would help a bit if the game provided not only secondary slots for your main hand and your off-hand item, but for all 14 slots. This way you could have one set of fast movement gear (for roaming) and one set of combat gear (for fighting) and you would just have to press one key to switch between them.

Easy access to some movement speed increasing aura, that can be toggled on and off, would help, too.

In its current state the game feels a bit like it’s constantly wasting your time …

6

I’ve been thinking about this and I realized something: it’s really odd to me that GD has all these ways to make alts more fun (warrants, mandates, +xp% items, shared stash, etc) but then doesn’t have any way to skip the real slog, which is normal/veteran (and elite, to an extent).

What I would really like to see implemented is something, maybe a recipe offered by Creed after you kill Log in ultimate, that you could craft and put in the shared stash and instantly level a character that uses it to 50 and unlocks all the portals in normal. Or even to 45, and you can get those last 5 levels speed running the main questline & building rep. That alone would make alts actually viable to me, since I’m typically a one character kind of person.

7

I don’t think there should be anything like that. If you want to, there are tools that let you create a char at e.g. level 50 with Epic or even Ultimate unlocked.

8

I really love the idea of being able to open up all the portals for a new character with an existing one this way. It’s something we can do multiplayer with the help of a friend streamlining another one’s experience, and an offline way to do it makes sense. If our build can handle the challenge of skipping large sections of the content and going to more difficult areas, then it makes sense to me to have a way to avoid bothering with it completely instead of breezing through it while feeling like it’s painfully slow and repetitive.

I’m not so sure what to feel about the idea of being able to instantly level up to 50 though. There is a side of me that wants that and wants to streamline the entire experience, but the main reason I want it is to make the game fun by eliminating the most boring kind of repetition. Being able to insta-level to 50 with a new character might streamline just a little bit too much (eliminating boring repetition but maybe also a lot of the fun of creating and growing a new character).

Mostly I just want the game to feel fun and fresh on repeated playthroughs (higher difficulties or new characters), reducing the feeling of the most boring kind of repetition (like walking all over maps repeatedly) so that we can focus on the really fun stuff more (killing stuff, leveling up, collecting cool loot).

It’s funny but I feel like Diablo 1 felt the least repetitive when we started the game over and over from the beginning (new difficulty or new character), and funnily it had the simplest design when it came to quests and dungeons – just randomly-generated roguelike dungeons where we descend from level 1 downwards to hell and beat Diablo with just one central town (Tristram). It was such a ridiculously simple map/quest design that probably only took a small fraction of the effort to create GD’s maps and quests, but it didn’t have that feeling of repetition of GD which constantly puts a spotlight on the fact that we’re doing the same quests over and over and over, traveling back and forth between the same places over and over at a painful traveling speed.

Take a Rogue variant such as Angband. Imagine giving it multiple towns, seamless open world maps, and not just a central town and dungeon which goes down a hundred levels. Doing that would probably improve first-time enjoyment but would probably diminish replayability as we play with our dozenth character traveling all over this world and doing the same quests over and over. I used to think roguelikes kept to such a simple “central town and deep, randomly-generated dungeon” design for sheer development economy reasons, but it has become apparent to me after GD that the simplest designs for quests and maps are arguably the best designs to maximize replayability with new characters.

Don’t know what the solution is for GD to really streamline away the most boring type of repetition on subsequent playthroughs, but I really do like the idea of being able to open up all those portals for new characters once we have made an experienced one that can afford to purchase such an item as a start to tackling the issue.

9

Anyone using melee weapons.

10

The base move speed on Grim Dawn doesn’t seem that slow to me, but I played around 800 hours of Titan Quest, which had ultra slow base move speed, so of course GD looks much faster.

I don’t get the cap at 135% though. Some builds can get 135% move speed very easily.

The ideas you guys are proposing seem too extreme. I think something that could work would be every time you are out of combat, you get +20% move speed that can go over the cap. The game already checks if you are or not in combat to trigger regeneration through Constitution.

This would allow faster running when travelling empty areas and wouldn’t affect combat much.

11

Honestly, I was playing a new character the other day that had ~120% move speed, and I kind of hated it. It felt like my character was moving too fast and was hard to control. Granted, I’ve never been one to be concerned about move speed, and I consider move speed only slightly more valuable than light radius (i.e. not at all.)

Also, I like the quests. I’m the kind of person who has dozens of characters and still full clears every map, though (and I hate skipping enemies unless they’re so low they won’t give me XP or rep.)

12

I had to add TLDR : movement’s too slow in general - in and out of fights.

It’s not only that low MS provides tedious experience while exploring the content, but the feeling is doubled or tripled in fights due to various slow effects applied to the player, paired with inability to remove the debuffs inflicting it.
Player is effectively slowed in almost every fight. If you play with a class with no access to %MS/total speed or it isn’t a part of your build, it makes you wanna cut yourself.

Some people are talking about the movement skills in this game. These are not actual movement skills. They are about jumping between mobs in a fight, and got nothing to do with the overall slow movement in the game.

13

First of all, sorry for my bad english, not a native.
I just had the idea, while reading this thread entirely, that our characters could receive a little %MS every time we level up( like tibia). So if you are 85, you have 110%MS despite of your equipments.

Sent from my GT-I9505 using Tapatalk

14

yes but that also means you will reach the cap very soon. i’m basically on Vaeliorin side here, i’m not bothered at all by the (relatively comparated to TQ) slow movement speed. i can see where it’s a problem when you constantly level up new chars, but if you don’t, once you opened all portals you can reach any fun place (aka farming zone) very easily.

15

Try farming the Sentinel for his blueprints and wait until after your first 50 runs …

16

ok but farming for a single item on a peculiar boss is always frustrating if you aren’t lucky. and a portal near a boss is never a good idea anyway, i was talking about the entrance of the dungeons.

the Temple of the Three is far from my favourite zone of the game i admit, so i see how it can be tedious though :wink:

17

No sane developer would place a WP next to a farmable spot.
But it’s also not a good idea to sadistically increase the distance to the target, especially in a game with movement speed equal to an enraged snail.
Like they did with increasing the distance to SoT. Very funny.

There should be appropriate balance between the average speed of walking of the players, and the distance to the farmable area/target.

18

I haven’t played Normal or Elite in quite a while. All My characters start off at 65 in Ultimate.

19

In particular there should be a balance between

  • length of walks,
  • difficulty of enemies, and
  • drop chances of loot.
    I could live with the distance between Burrwitch Village Rift and the Temple of the Three, with the time it takes to reach the end of the Temple, and with the relative difficulty to fight the Sentinel, IF drop chances of what you’re farming him for were more adequate than an abysmal 2-3%.

And for the long walk to level 4 SoT there’s really no excuse, especially not for having to wander through levels 1-3 each time.

20

when was that ? the distance and path have always been the same…