Regardless, there would have been a lot of ships at sea at the time of the Grim Dawn. I think your concept works well.
I’ve always wanted something done with this island. An idea I toyed around with a while back imagined it as a smuggler base that someone from Homestead sends you to check on (other than unlocking food shipments to DC, Homestead doesn’t have any faction quests unlocked at Honored/Revered). You would take a boat out to the island and find the smugglers slaughtered, requiring you to clear the place of whatever killed the smugglers and bring what supplies you could find back to Homestead.
With all that said, I think the island is perfect for an additional farming location for Cronley’s Gang. Sticking with my idea about it having been a smuggler base pre-Aetherial invasion, it makes sense for Cronley to send an expedition over there to see what they can scavenge – food, weapons, etc. Great opportunity for a pirate-esque human boss, too. 
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These runs don’t stop if you want to farm the nem MIs. In the nem-farming stage, killing other mobs in these areas feels like a waiting room–especially if you aren’t very interested in the MIs being dropped by non-nem mobs.
I too have played them a thousand times, however they were stale to me almost immediately. Farming the same exact small area with slight variations in what mobs spawn makes for a brainrotting activity when there are not enough layers of randomization that can change up individual runs substantially.
But that problem is endemic with GD’s campaign endgame: you repeatedly farm the same small areas as fast as possible before exiting to the main menu to do it all again. Both kymon/dv and cronley have been complained about since their introduction to the GD campaign endgame and with good reason: the runs are so short that you really do need to cycle a lot. Farming a ton of the same area with a very short session time (<1-3 minutes for cronley HO depending on build/damage, for example) and then exiting to the main menu gets old almost as fast as the individual campaign sessions themselves.
I don’t see the problem so much as the amount of rep/run needs to change, as much as I see the problem as the nature of the runs themselves needs to change with new endgame mechanics that provide enough randomization to keep things fresh and increase individual session times. This isn’t an argument against increasing rep/run, but I think that is a bandaid (and not even a cool disney princess bandaid).
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And all these smugglers will be commanded by Darius Cronley’s brother. If they’re still referred to as the Cronley Gang, then someone from the Cronley family should be in charge.
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Just to be clear, I was not actually arguing against myself. I was just acknowledging the other side of the argument, as what is enjoyable is subjective. I still firmly believe the essence of what I’m proposing in the OP would improve the net enjoyment of the general playerbase.
As for your post: I think the dev team has made it pretty clear that instance resetting is an unrealistic ask. Certainly, the short-run resetting is very old-school and arguably outdated. I have recently found farming Lunal’valgoth, to be rather tedious. But that’s sort of the nature of MIs and RNG in general, and it is hard to separate that from the dopamine of hitting the drop you want. So then there is the question of how much RNG is too much RNG? And that varies from player to player. I mean, some people actually… like… MapleStory’s grind. And there are popular games with even worse levels of grind. Bleh
FoA aims to help players have more agency to get the kind of drops they want, which I think is fantastic. Investing in a mechanic for more player agency feels GOOD. I wonder if the altar should have something like D3’s torment levels, but since the bonuses are strong, maybe like a small multiplier on the bonuses to drops per torment level and a large multiplier on the monster stat bonuses per torment level.
Anyhoo, that’s neither here nor there. They’re also going to let us do affix rerolling, and if the iron bits cap on the scaling cost of doing so is reasonable, we will enter a new age of players being able to organically complete a character in a reasonable amount of time.
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Oh, and regarding the Nemesis system… they’ll never do this because it is unintuitive, but I had the thought maybe killing mobs should seldomly and randomly give points to another random nemesis. Opening up the ability for unexpected nemesis spawns. Or maybe the same nemesis should be able to spawn multiple times in a session, but that makes no sense, since they’re a named champion you “killed” in the world. Or maybe there should be a chance for a nemesis to spawn with another nemesis you’ve unlocked, like they hate each other, but they hate you more.
None of these ideas really work, but I do feel like the nemesis system has untapped potential.
On the 5th difficulty level, which will appear in FoA, Nemesis will appear several times per session, including those you have just defeated.
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Ah, I missed that. That’s absolutely fantastic.
yep
yep
As somebody with a high tolerance for brainrotting grind (I like to zone out and do mechanically repetitive things while I think about other stuff and problem solve) the thing I want to focus on is that I don’t think it’s necessarily the number of hours required to hit the EV of a perfect double rare (and the altar+rerolling will decrease that substantially); instead I believe the actual gameplay during that long grind period could be made much more enjoyable–by increasing individual session time in a way that is constructive for achieving that perfect double rare.
When you aren’t exiting to the main menu every ~3 minutes (because there is some constructive activity that helps you farm the MI’s, or the reputation you want) and your session time increases, are you not having more fun because you are actually playing the game?
Imagine a hypothetical hallway with kymon/dv enemies and bosses that took an hour to clear; would that be more fun than clearing a dungeon in 5 minutes and then exiting to the main menu to do it again for an hour? Assume the rep you gain is the same, and you were going to play for an hour straight anyway. What would you prefer?
I don’t know if it is reasonable to increase session times to an hour, but I think that doing a kymon/dv run that took 20 minutes instead of 5 (with the same build, and yielding as much as four 5-minute-runs) would significantly reduce the grind/mental burden of having to reset the world so frequently in such a small amount of time. How can we do that? Exploring that direction–I think–is interesting!
Interesting discussion.
My experience of farming is somewhat different. I quite enjoy relentlessly farming a specific mob for a specific drop - don’t mind killing Alkamos over and over and over. Main menu resetting doesn’t bother me - it takes about 5 seconds, after all.
Concerning this:
my first thought is that if I am farming Malkadarr swords it will now take me way longer to complete a run.
What I find most tedious is Shattered Realm, which is, of course, random(ish) and which can be reset in game. I think the problem, for me, is that it’s so unfocused. It’s just kill random stuff, get random drops. I’m hoping that in FoA there will be much less incentive to run it.
I feel mostly the same way as you. But there’s just something about running Cronley’s Lair that pisses me off. And even after you get Nemesis, you have to keep running it (or Arkovian Docks) to spawn Fabius. With the other Nemesis’ you can diversify much more.
Edit: Actually, Aleksander is pretty ass too, but at least you can combine that with farming Krieg’s pieces.
How could it be after completing let’s say 5 to 10 bounties, table give related warrant as a reward? This way we can get guarenteed warrant and speed up things, but need of some effort and grinding still exist?
I think there is a difference between the grind for a drop vs rep. You may never get the drop, or you at least have no idea how long you will need to grind. Rep has a clear end and I don’t think needs to feel like grinding for an item, but more like something that happens passively with maybe some additional effort. I do think Cronley is a bit of an outlier. Even with items, my attitude is less on grinding hard and more on: If it get it cool, if not I just make a new character and move on for now. Odds are I usually find what I needed on a new character eventually. Makes drops more exciting for me too because I always have certain drops in the back of my head to look for.
One of the things I am probably explaining poorly is that I am envisioning some system where the hour-long-hallway is going to drop something at least as good as what you would get from farming Malkadarr resets for an hour.
There are many ways to achieve that, however the important thing is what you are getting for an hour of farming (a completely hypothetical hour) is going to be at least as good as the EV (Expected Value) of doing resets for an hour (so you are able to reset him maybe 15-30 times in that hour, the drop at the end of the hallway would be at least as good as the best drop you would get after 30 resets, lets say).
Which would you prefer? Longer session with higher quality drop, or many short sessions with low quality drops?
Now, again, an hour is not going to be a reasonable amount of time for the amount of monsters and size of the dungeons we have in our campaign. But 20 minutes per session probably is. Same situation, but now the hypothetical hallway is only 20 minutes long, which would you take?
This is one of the very frustrating parts, psychologically, for the very old school type of farming we have where you boss rush → main menu. You do resets but you are never making any discernible progress towards an item–each item is an independently random event and you mostly (the altar will change this slightly) have no (or, soon, one) tool available to increase the odds in your favor.
Thinking some more about this, I remember that I really disliked the quick-reset/kill-Baal-and-exit mode of play in D2. Yet I don’t mind it in Grim Dawn. I think the key difference, for me, is target-farmable loot*. If your longer-format farm still had that element I would almost certainly like it. I think, essentially, you are just describing a dungeon run btw, except one where you don’t just rush to the end boss. I would be very happy with more of that.
*By target-farmable loot I really mean anything that gives a specific purpose to the farm, so it could also be a consumable that drops in higher numbers in that zone, or some other goal.
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am i misremembering + misinterpreted a misadventure update?,
didn’t Z post something about being able to reset game world from within the game in FoA(part of ascension altar feature or something?) 
Yeah, I can’t say I mind the resets. I think there are specific MI’s that are a bit more annoying to farm than others, but I still wouldn’t say I dislike it. I’m also an SR grinder, even though a bunch of people dislike SR.
Exactly as you said, because of target-farming + the reasonableness of GD drop rates, I’ve never had a real complaint about it. And when one of my SSF starts getting close to complete and the MI’s or a single drop are all that’s left, I can always play a different character when I get tired of grinding on one — an easy way to add variety to my gameplay. Though when you REALLY need a drop, it can get frustrating. But that’s RNG.
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With the release of FoA, ambushes will be added to the Ascendent difficulty. You can add Cronli’s gang to the ambushes if they haven’t already been added. It’s natural for bandits to lure their victims into something valuable. It would be in the spirit of bandits if Cronley appeared under a smokescreen.
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