Creativity seems to deminish with every patch

So… lots of hours logged in here. Kickstarter, alpha, beta, etc. and keep in mind this post is from the perspective of someone who exclusively plays hardcore.

One thing that seems to have diminished over time with each patch is the ability to be creative, eccentric, or outlandish with builds. More and more this is becoming a game where your hand is held as you navigate Cairn. Now I understand some people like their hand held. These are the ones who want to buy Legos that only go together one way who are more or less guaranteed that they will end up with what’s on the cover of the Lego box. Then there are those who buy Lego’s in bulk in order to build…whatever their imaginations can dream up… and I feel that each patch brings more lock downs on the latter group in regards to Grim Dawn creativity…and so much so these days that I look at builds on the forum and it’s just people reposting the same builds over and over.

There was a day when legendary items were… legendary. Now I feel they should be renamed to necessary items. (after level 50 I pretty much sell anything that’s not legendary…no point) And to prefix legendary with “Mythical”… over sells them. I feel Crate has made their perfect mold of gear that keeps you from having great wombo combos that they didn’t plan for you first. I remember when breakable walls weren’t highlighted and you went around swinging at everything feeling rewarded when you found something cool. Now we’re forced up an escalator of gear with no choice but to arrive at Crate’s intended destination with each build. I about shat myself a bit when I saw them allow +3 to all skills on the mythical silverbolt (up from the previous +2). I thought to myself, there’s the Crate I remember, let them back out! Oddly Crate’s creativity is at the cost of players creativity. As Crate implements how they want builds to go it’s at the cost of the freedom for players to be able to.

I would like to back the argument that it’s ok that not every build succeed and it’s ok that some combo’s are a bit overpowered. Usually when nerfs like this are in effect it’s to balance multiplayer games, specifically those where one player is vs another, and while I appreciate Crate’s diligence in their updates, is there really any need to tear the cape off of superman? There’s no monetary gain for Crate when we grind, no pay to win, so let us be… legendary! What’s the downside? By the time people get enough gear to start these crazy combos they’ve already logged plenty of hours.

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You people need to give me a break with these uber dramatic threads. I can only take so much!

OptimalElaborateBlacklemur-small

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Zantai likes to tear off capes eh? Interesting…

Cue youtubers making videos with baity thumbnails and titles like “Grim Dawn is DYING and this is why” and “What KILLED Grim Dawn?” and a 15 minutes video of YongYea consisting of him reading the OP and inflating the controversy.

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I don’t know… my skeleton pet defiler has been getting better during her lifetime. who knows… maybe by 1.1.5.0 it’ll beat the daylights out of papa kymon without breaking much sweat.

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Wait the singleplayer-focused game that i kickstarted over 6 years ago and just recently got its second expansion is now considered a “dying game” by both the brightest minds of YouTube and the biggest drama llamas of the official forums?!?!?!

Banana man, I hereby demand a refund of my 40-ish USD and several thousand hours of entertainment.

Valinov makes creative high performing builds all the time. Does “creative” have to be implemented the exact way you imagine to qualify?

The game has plenty of creative outlandish stuff available, just don’t expect it to be a top performer. As for creative top performing builds, I’ve seen those exist sometimes without sets as well, like fire AAR.

Does a build have to be as powerful as you imagine to qualify as legendary? Clear times have sped up up up over the years.

The game has so much room for creativity the problem is that the community doesn’t produce or seem to appreciate creative builds unless they hit top tier performance too.

Your post is so full of shit I don’t know if I’ll ever get the stink off me. Excuse me while I continue to use retaliation Warlord (takes some real tinkering, not set pieces, to get it to do as well as it does now) to carry people through challenge content effortlessly.

The new conversion MI belt changes didn’t open up enough for you?

Nah you’re just another narrow-sighted player with no appreciation for all that exists currently as creative and interesting because you need to have it exactly your way or you can’t see the forest from the trees.

I even made item threads for the non set items to encourage players to help get the bad “legos” buffed. Where is your voice there? The next misadventure shows a lot of green affixes are going to get buffed opening up way more lego-build creation.

My post might be mean but at some point someone needs to call it for what it is, you’re so blind and blatantly wrong that I refuse to say nothing and let your negativity poison the mind of other people reading.

And every single damn patch I’ve put in work, thought, and dragging of other member’s to provide their thoughts to try to buff the under-used stuff in the game into being fun and have its own distinct identity.

Here’s a fucking idea, instead of whining about your vague grievance and complaining about nerfs that Zantai has already explained why they happen, why don’t you SUGGEST specific things that can be buffed in an interesting way and how to do so? This game’s been out for years and is a huge success, and gets more loves from its developers than makes any fiscal sense.

Another question: Do you even consider for a second whether or not there might be easily accessible examples that proves the gravity of your drama to be wrong, even entirely wrong? Or are you just salty that not every item exists in a build that does SR75+, which is a ridiculous metric to hold all things in the game to.

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Okay, this is worth a bit more than my knee-jerk pet-petting experience. Look, we had a grim misadventure, and 1.1.5 is going to bring, this fall, some epic and rare stuff. Really good stuff. And we have plenty of builds now, the forums you see are just the small slice made to fit specific community standards (few to no greens, c+, sr+). In this specific slice, legendaries, and myth leg sets are mandatory for the standards of sr and cruci, not for general campaign and mid-tier farming stuff. This is for two reasons. One, they are leaps and bounds better than their epic counterparts now, and the other, is that they are much more likely to find than a good rolled triple rare. So comparatively acquirable.

If you go all out with GD stash and bring out the nastiest greens (see Reakd), or if you lower the power standards (elite or normal shard 60 instead of ult 75, cruc wave 130-150 buffed instead of 151-170, roguelikes, clones), then you’ll see that you have more options to be creative and combine things that aren’t combined in the mythleg set-meta.

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I don’t want to accuse you of not doing any research, but Zantai posted Misadventure 163 less than 12 hours ago talking about serious buffs to lower tier stuff.

And lets not forget all MI belts got a +1 class skills buff just recently, that’s a massive usability increase.

Hell, by my count 1.1.4.0 had 69 lines of balance changes to Epic items and most of that was buffs.

I’d like to know if this Video are for real or only made up for the sake of your Argument? I searched for them due i want something to laugh at, but can’t find them.

@Zantai
At this Point i’d say we need an Forum-Community-Special about the “Quote of the Week” plus nominations for the Drama-Queen of the Month.

#Topic:
Than again i can’t help to believe, that this topic is a troll-attempt anyway… because it’s way too much of coincidence if someone complain about something like that some hours after Crate did tease us with GM 163 that they will buff Affixes and Epics with 1.1.5.0…

/edit: Also
38xy20

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I was joking. There are no videos of that kind about Grim Dawn… YET. I doubt YongYea will ever speak about the game, anyway. It’s well protected by being niche enough and lacking controversy despite our weekly drama threads.

Why would you want Crate to feature a @mad_Lee quote every week?

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These overly dramatic threads with no feedback of any value whatsoever are starting to get old at this point. It was funny at first, but now not so much.

If you have issues with the game then give actual feedback. Like specific examples. Just saying “creativity is diminishing” or “legendaries don’t feel like legendaries” helps no one.

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No one can stop the players being creative! Yes, it’s true that with set items builds being stronger than non-set and that can lead to more cookie cutters builds, but every patch there are multiple very strong completely strong builds. And then you can always make some goofy funny idea. Like build surviving only on health regen. Or make like some other guys role playing or story mode characters. Game can still offer lots of possibilities for everyone’s tastes.

If you have some specific feedback, please write it!

Yeah, this is what irks me the most about 99% of these threads. None of them offer any sort of constructive feedback and specifics. Just wah wah wah.

There’s plenty of creativity in this game. I’ve done several unique builds myself (currently working on a -gasp- Witchblade right now and it’s a blast. Will it get to farm all the nemesis/celestials/500+SR? Who the hell cares, I’m having a great time. The histrionics and over-dramatization is so tedious, I think we should start giving out DRAMA FLAIR as someone mentioned earlier.

Yup. I post my responses for the benefit of the other readers not even the OP at this point. Criticism is fine but demonstrable bullshit needs to called out or the mental health of the community gets hurt. Negativity should not be the loudest voice when it’s pure nonsense.

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Well, I can say this much, a few patches ago (like before FG), I wouldn’t have even dreamed of a Pet Purifier or a Pet Dervish and both are possible in the current patch even though they won’t be setting records or anything.

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I think your problem is that you are not creative. You played since alpha, have probably all the gear in the world and a good idea of what works and what doesn’t for HC by now (has to hit X, Y and Z or is not worth considering, thereby eliminating (some) exotic ideas from the start), correct me if I am wrong…

and then you think about some new idea and automatically fill in the legendary items that make sense, because you have them. There is no need for you to work around missing items and get creative…

The same to me is true for your ‘legendary are just meh’ statement. Now that you have them all and have been using them for ages, a legendary drop is not special any more, even though legendaries are probably in pretty much the best place they ever were.

Name 5 legendaries that were special and no longer are and what changes caused that instead of making broad statements, I doubt you can (and that also is not the same as ‘were better for my build before’, except in rare cases, as better for your build and special are completely different things…)

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I mean, this is how I approach making/gearing my character(s) when I play any RPG. Sure, they’re not going to bring maximum DPS compared to a dedicated build designed for a specific task (like dungeon clears, speed runs, etc.) but I find it fun to make a build around a character concept based on a backstory I have in mind and then find synergies that way for a certain play style.

I don’t know why people think it’s necessary/required to run certain gear or builds for everything ever when they can just tinker on their own. They can even take what’s considered meta and tweak it, which is something else I do.

Bullshit. There are very strong builds, that dont rely on being clad in legendaries. Lightning AAR Mage hunter, for example. And MI’s nowadays are better than ever!

And what “creativity” exactly do you keep in mind? Can you enlighten me with an example, please?

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At some point we might learn to NOT respond to these posts and let it die an unrecognized death.

Oh…:nauseated_face:

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