Devil's Crossing reputation gain is too slow

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
21

It’s not about being harder.

Warden actually dies quite easily and is weaker than Gutworm and Salazar. But, he is memorable because of the quest, the run-up to him, the OST, and the two-phase fight. He’s also the first enemy to address the player.

Cronley has a proper quest, a faction named after him, and has dialogue. But, his own fight lacks the flashiness of Rutnick or the thrill of Fabius. Darius just pops a Maiven and tries to whack you.

Voldrak is a traffic cone. He has no story context. He is memorable because he’s the first huge troll you meet and he shows up unannounced as you approach the exit to Smuggler’s Pass. I love his boss fight but calling him an Act boss is a stretch. The fact that he’s even in contention for that title shows just how terrible Cronley is.

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22

Wait, DC has a quest when we reach Malmouth? o_0

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Conveniently hidden by architecture.

Only if you gave Kasparov the research notes though.

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Is it when you reach Malmouth? I thought it was after you reached the Fleshworks.

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If you gave Kasparov the stuff, he’ll give you the quest as early as you unlock the Lone Watch rift.
If you didn’t give him the stuff, you’ll have something to interact with inside of the Fleshworks.

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26

I’m just thinking out loud here. I opened up a character I started when 1.3 beta came out, and at this point it’s done with base+Ashes+FG. I’ve done everything pretty much once (no repeat runs or anything). I have about 1k/5k Devil’s crossing Respected. I’ve read most of the various ideas here. I think making a new area is pretty much out. Increasing rep for Cronley quests would help as would increasing the level cap for Cronley’s Hideout.

However to bring it in line with a lot of the other reps, maybe something as simple as adding more quests in an appropriate spot would help with Devil’s Crossing.

Maybe when you get to Elsa, you talk to her, but there’s someone else with her temporarily. They mention they’re exploring, and you need to do a quest for them, maybe gather materials from broken wagons in the Barren Highlands (kinda nothing there right now quest-wise). After that they say they’re moving on. Bit of DC Rep. Then you meet them again in the Pine Barrens. Once you kill the dude at the end of Tyrant’s Keep, they could give you another couple of quests, one to kill the Named Crowley dude in the Docks area, and then another to rebuild that bridge.

Or maybe just building that bridge, and the bridge that you usually go through the Flooded Passage to skip gives you rep? The bridge into the East Marsh too…but maybe not on that one.

Just tossing out ideas, if you really wanted to get rep up in a Normal/Veteran game, a few additiona quests might go a long way.

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Just a minor correction. The previous suggestions are for increasing the rep for all of Devil’s Crossing quests. This includes even the earliest quests that involve killing Kyzogg, fixing the water pump, killing the Devil’s Aquifier boss etc.

I think this’ll have a considerable impact on rep farming. Especially if Crate also considers the other suggestion pertaining to Cronley gang about adding ambushes and more hero spawns in pre-Four Hills areas.

As much as I love quests, especially for DC, I’m not exactly vibin with the suggested quest chain. The only logical quest that I can think of for DC would be from Sergeant Havos asking us to scavenge for food and supplies so that DC can be repaired further to create accommodations for his men. There’s an unused room next to the smuggler and a lot of open space in the spot where you get Crudely Scrawled Note. The latter could use the same treatment that Homestead got after we secure Gryver’s Mill.

I think a simpler fix for both Bareen Highlands and Broken Hills would be to turn Lutra into a unique boss.

That’ll give the harpies a unique variant, it’d give both zones a proper unique boss. Lutra is situated right around the exit of Broken Hills so she is the perfect candidate for being the boss of both areas.

I’m fine with Barren Highlands being a pass-through area.

I do like the suggestion about retrieving stuff from wagons, really suits the post-apocalyptic feel.

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I’m not sure I agree with those specifics. On a first-time playthrough, Devil’s Crossing reputation reaches Respected and opens up the “fabric quest” at around the time the player reaches the Burrwitch Village rift. So that’s perfect timing already.

The main issue is not getting reputation up to Respected, but rather from Respected to Honored. The Hargate quest is the one lagging behind by a fair margin.

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I think the idea is that the increased initial reputation gain would help with reaching Honored faster as well.

I mean, you hit Honored with Ugdenbog by the time you’re done with theirs + Barrowholm’s quest chain. No reason for DC rep to be quick as well. Heck, you hit Barrowholm with some moderate farming.

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Fuck, I always skip that Slith quest because using mandates I get to revered with DC without it, so I don’t bother.

Well, time to do that quest twice again.
1200 hours in and still figuring out new stuff.
I like this game so much.

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so, this thread once again made me do a slow rep levelling
and i honestly still don’t get what the hubbub is about :thinking:

ah, there it is (again) - the natural progression availability isn’t palatable, but why? Even ignoring some aspects of bounties being boring, what’s wrong with doing them, it’s still doing multiple core parts of the game, pseudo quest tasks, killing enemies and getting loot.
Now, i’ve repeatedly hammered on about the frustration that bounty rep rewards are downscaled on lower difficulties, which means you have to take more of them “when you need/want them”, and ult reward basically encourages cheesing (kinda hard todo ssf naturally with rushing or “knowing”). Combined with the weirdly annoying 5x session limitation that forces needless restarts, it’s an otherwise slight extra hassle to something otherwise useful and “normal”(hunt enemies)

I deliberately decided to ignore DC rep until i was done with act3, which gave me a fair few levels to delay my rep gain, but still got Honoured DC by lvl 49, not needing to do that many bounties.

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*+'s are from Writs applied after honoured, except Kymon where i accidentally applied a warrant and used a mandate to counteract it

Without fishing i got lucky and pulled the relic bounty immediately, did Bolla, Boris, Halion, Ascended Outlaws - which gave me a reason to visit Arkovian Docks(but strangely didn’t provide enough spawns :thinking:), Lieutenants and i was 100 rep short so pulled another and lucked out getting Romanov which was an instant clear/being where my portal had left off.
7 bounties - passed on all the bounties that wasn’t Cronely related, but otherwise didn’t fish for specific good boss/reset (otherwise would have ignored the ascended one i think).

I genuinely don’t see how this feels unreasonable to engage with the bounty system like that, even if the reward/interaction feels less nice simply from Ult scaling existing. Nor how it’s unfair it’s not “intended”/og base designed around we’re granted Revered on playthrough 1 - let alone without re-kill or bounty interaction.

The progression feels both reasonable/fair and even decent to me.

*fwiw i’m also honoured with Rovers and Homestead by now, Homestead ironically requiring more bounties than DC ended up needing. Rovers i got Honoured with way way earlier/right after Steps of Torment iirc, only being basically a missed totem spawn short iirc/1 bounty needed.

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again, i think the simple solution is to do away with the annoying bounty rep penalty on Normal, and enable the full bounty table like Ceno’s script does ,simply for comfort of not having to reset after merely a handful of kills (it just feels smoother, even if you don’t opt to cheese it)
I don’t think we need “passively” increase rep gain from quests/Cronley kills like Vigil/Kymon did. Everything we need is already there, not wanting to re-kill or use bounties at all seems… ye i don’t understand that restriction :thinking:

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There recently was an entire thread on why the current bounty system is bad and boring: Bounties feel very outdated, some are outright bad, and all can be easily improved

That being said, I do run a bunch of bounties when I want to farm Revered reputation on Elite or Ultimate. Still boring, but I can kinda accept that. What seems unacceptable is needing them to get to Honored and unlocking a big faction quest like Hargate.

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ye, but why does it feel like that for honoured/normal? what makes it unacceptable, the alternative is you get something for free you don’t need/“deserve” and more so way way too early.
I’ve said it before, it does not feel “right” to both get honoured for free doing 5 quests, nor so doing it at lvl 30, it’s just… wrong on multiple fronts imo :sweat_smile:
The system is there to engage with, whether we use bounties or repeat kill, and bounties being a bit meh/less optimal on normal, still doesn’t mean to just to dismiss what’s just incentivizing the core loop anyway i think. (ie getting “double” rewarded for doing the thing we’re already doing and should be doing; killing stuff - and you state outright that’s also unacceptable which makes 0 sense to me in a slaughter simulator)

*The “main” pov where this begins to make sense to me; is a rushing mindset, where it’s about to get through efficient and fast, but then SSF should not be the comparison.

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Well, the “why” is explained in the thread I posted above. I don’t want to repeat it here as it seems offtopic but feel free to post it there, if you disagree; that’s fine.

Why does it feel bad to get “honored for free”? It happens to pretty much every other faction in the game except for Devil’s Crossing. Certainly, you’re not proposing to reputation nerf all friendly factions just to force people to do bounties, right?

I was not rushing btw. As I explained in the OP, this was a playthrough where I killed everything once, and explored the entire map. A “completionist” run; pretty much the opposite of rushing.

As for the SSF dismissal attempt: as I’ve mentioned earlier in the thread, SSF is the same as a first time player experience. It’s not some “special case” that should be disregarded when it comes to player feedback; quite on the contrary.

The reason why I consider the situation “unacceptable” for Devil’s Crossing, is because, if the player chooses to forego repeat-bounty-farming, the natural progression of the game is: the player gets to Honored in Elite.

Should the player stop mid-campaign on Elite, just to go back to Normal difficulty to complete quests that unlocked too late? That is what makes no sense to me.

Edit: By the way, I didn’t mention this before, but on my playthrough, I sometimes did accept the “bounties along the way”. This means only the bounties whose targets are ahead of my natural exploration of the campaign. Even then, that is still not enough to get to Honored with Devil’s Crossing by the end of Normal difficulty. You’ll still need to do repeat farming or repeat bounties, which makes no sense in Normal difficulty for many reasons, including the fact that some areas don’t even scale with the player level past a certain number, so you’re basically killing low level monsters.

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it doesn’t tho, you’re continuesly killing enemies and have to do so, i even highlighted this in my comparison, i had to do more bounties for Homestead to get honoured at the relevant point. I had to clear an entire skeleton key dungeon+totems "past faction engagement"stage.
I just got respected with Legion after clearing the base game, and now have to do bounties, or wait until level 75+malmouth and get honoured
“i have to work for the rep”/progress towards the thing i want.
But this is somehow not applicable to DC uniquely so? - the difference is they don’t have enemies past the faction engagement stage and some of the others do (not even sure i wanna count Legion in that since malmouth “far off future”). Which naturally means retreading to get the same continued kill engagement. - but it’s still continued faction engagement either way…

that’s what i mean by rushing, no repeat, because a-b then done"no more" tolerance.
No work, no “grind” (not that i’d call a dozen bounties grind in GD :sweat_smile:)
The alternative is we get it for free way way before level 40 because you’re done with DC faction/act 2 by lvl 30…

it’s not, for one significant reason, veterancy. Hence the “rush” notion, about efficiency/“not accepting reclears”.

if the player didn’t care to get honoured on Normal; why should the go back to Normal at all? - what’s the point or significance and importance in redoing Hargate on Normal?
It makes no sense to attribute that value if the there was no value/desire in getting honoured outside that for DC

it’s an arpg, we repeat things :neutral_face: (and considering the amount of newcomer posts that talk about refarming areas for gear or xp etc, many seem to be onboard with that even at the start)
As for the low bounty spawns, they should scale since it’s dynamic spawns, the surrounding areas just dont’ scale (part of why i griped about unrelated spawns+rng spawns bad bounties/Ballior in the other thread). Cronley bounties all scale to lvl 40 or above, which was why i could still double dip despite waiting all the way to lvl 49 clearing them. - and that could also be solve by cleaning up the bounties to be faction relevant as per the other thread.

If you get it for free, by increasing the existing one way or another, thus effectively ensuring honoured at lvl 30/by end of act 2 on a 1x clear, we might as well remove the rep gate entirely, since the faction shop is only level gated then as it was default rewarded anyway. - and imo that’s something that should be worked a lil to be obtained, specially if wanting it “early”, otherwise it’s extra free power, that seems best served for skips/Mandate and not a first time experience (again the difference between actual new player and self-imposed ssf+efficiency routing/desire)

edit. if this is about something as trivial as just the Hargate quest/“full clear quest log”, (which again i’d suspect most newcomers dont’ return for/being unaware Honoured quests even exists), and not the faction shop benefit; isn’t a smooth handle to just lower it to be Respected tier quest?
^this would also mean new players would likely not miss other quests too if/when unaware of returning to X camp at Honoured stage is even a thing for a “hidden” popup quest, Shrine/Immolation/Food/Other You/chosen etc

36

I’m a person who doesn’t play endgame. I’ve built a couple of “perfect” characters and that got boring for me very quickly. However I do enjoy leveling character after character from level 1 to whatever. When I’m leveling a character, my goal is to explore the character, and not to rush to level 100.

With that playstyle in mind, when I hit reputation requirements for various base factions, Homestead, Rovers, etc, I’ll actually go to them to see if there’s an upgrade for me, and much of the time I can upgrade at least a slot or two, which is neat, I like using these vendors. I never ever use gear from Devil’s Crossing, however. The reason why isn’t that it’s not good for the level its at, it’s that I never have the rep for it, and by the time I do I’m way past that point. This is why I would argue for increasing rep gains for Devil’s Crossing during one playthrough.

Use bounties. Ehhh…low rep in Normal/Vet, and too samey/grindy. I might as well go kill Rutnick over and over for his +75. Run elite as soon as you can. This is an outdated idea. Normal/Vet has scaling all the way up to the highest levels. Running elite so I can get equipment, now I’m over leveled which moots me wanting DC equipment. There’s been a massive amount of discussion on difficulty level that’s not worth talking about here. All that aside, Devil’s Crossing is the only rep I’d have to do that for.

It’s about a reward vs time investment. As I said earlier in the thread, overall it’s a minor quibble, I really don’t care about the Hargate quests all that much, but it would be neat to be able to use DC’s equipment at a relevant level.

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37

I can hit Honored+ for pretty much every faction sans Devil’s Crossing without touching bounties. I’m referring to naked (no writ/mandate) rep farming.

I think I only needed to do bounties for the Kurn, but that problem will go away once the Bloodbound dungeon releases.

From the perspective of a new player, DC rep farming is a slog. I don’t mind bounties for Devil’s Crossing btw since it’s my favorite faction in the game. But, I do still think the rep from DC quests could use a bit of tweaking.

Of course, I still hope to see some improvements made to Cronley’s crew.

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