Elite and Utimate modes suck!

The game play through normal is decent but when you bump to Elite or Ultimate levels the game falls apart as the deaths you incur are far too fast to react to. To get the resist you need faction and to do this you need to go to elite or ultimate settings for the enemies to count but the resists are so pathetic a character gets trashed very quickly. This makes the faction farming problematic as you need the faction to increase the resists buy you get destroyed so fast you cannot react. After over 200 hours of playtime it is my opinion this game sucks major ballz on Elite and Ultimate levels because of this catch 22. getting my character de-leveled while attempting to build a faction is a major waste of time.

This game needs a lot of work to make the SR, Elite and Ultimate levels more enjoyable. As they are now they are piss poor for solo play. I have been on level 84 for over a week because of stupid deaths while attempting to farm faction. I am at the pointing of dropping the game altogether because the mechanics are so poor. The experience penalties are too extreme at this point.

Whytewhysper

Do bounty quest to get more faction reputation.
You can try to use components to get your resistances up. Don’t be afraid to use yellow items for better resistances.

You just need to understand the mechanics of the game a bit better. It is quite doable to achieve max resistances and good overall defensive stats to stay immortal throughout the game including Ultimate and even high SR.

Some of us play it in hardcore mode only. Heck, I even recorded the entire journey from 1 to 100 beating Ultimate using low level gear.

And if you still have doubts, here’s a Classless (no mastery allowed) Hardcore run using self found gear only - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV1xeE7C0U4&t=973s
And here is a Classless Hardcore Warden AFK Kill - just standing there - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w-WQgA4n6A&t=22s
It’s all about balancing your defensive and offensive stats, which is quite possible without grinding faction rep. And even that can be done super fast btw.

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Is not possible.

If you’re not getting sufficient resists on elite you’re not trying that hard. Random greens, components and consumables make it decently easy if you’re vaguely aware of such options.

You could be shooting yourself in the foot by not having enough DA. So why not upload a grimtools so we can have a look see?

From what I can tell you either are under leveled, not capping resistances which is way more important in this game than other arpgs or playing a melee character with no idea what you’re doing.

Not to be condescending here but when you hit a point in any game where it starts to become challenging, do you also give up there and/or blame the game for your deaths/failures?

First time I stepped into Elite, I also had a lot of deaths and do you know what I did? I thought about what was killing me and why at every turn:

  • Could be I didn’t have enough defense in some area like resistances. Negative resistances are a big nope and I learnt quickly that -25% Acid/Poison resistance isn’t allowed for instance.

  • Similar to the above, every mastery has some way of lowering the amount of incoming damage or healing it off via skills/passives in the mastery tree and you want to take advantage of those, especially so in Elite and onwards.

  • Certain Boss attacks become even more dangerous. I guarantee you I have died at least once in my 2k+ hours of play time to Krieg’s shotgun spines, facetanking Darius’s Aetherfire for too long, Karroz’s chaos pool stack, Lucius Aether TSS, Log’s Acid/Poison vomit etc. But I don’t any more because I know how fatal all of these and more can be and how to dodge all of them.

I’m a beginner as well, and just completed ultimate and reach 100 yesterday. I struggled too when jumping from normal to elite, because the rez takes a huge penalty and I didn’t really cared about rez on my “normal” gear since it wasn’t needed.

Then, instead of farming new gear, I changed all my devotion to get rez and Defensive ability and life leech and so forth instead of DPS devotion, and elite, while not “easy” per say, was way more enjoyable (besides Krieg who was the ONLY boss who seemed to just one shot me because his stun sucks even with 80% aether, took me definitely 10-ish tries to learn the patern and tells from the animations and dodges those arrow things u_u)

I got the same feeling, to the point I was thinking to restart another character than my Reaper Phantasmal blades for my first one. I took a break from the game and retried once cooled off, and I manage to defeat the game after 110 hours. I finished ultimate with 62 death total (I almost certain that at least a 1/3 of them were against Krieg, since he also was a pain for me in ultimate xD), but I enjoyed the accomplishment nonetheless.
I’m not necessarily a good player and I consider myself casual definitely but once you get to put though into components and focus on survival instead of raw number, the game becomes more “fair”.

I understand you feel the game is unbalanced, if you compare it to other games like it but I’d say it’s just a difference of internal mechanics and your need to learn Grim Dawn to play Grim Dawn, and not take for granted the experiences you have in other ARPG.

Just don’t give up ^^

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Sounds like you need to git gud.

Or just facetank him and he won’t use those attacks. Never disengage when fighting him and you will be fine, even with a non-tank.

He still uses the stomp up close which can hurt on low armour characters and stuns/slows to boot, the spread shot is only if you’re at a distance though.

Yes, but either high DA or decent armor or regen mitigate this attack and you only really need to check one of these to survive his melee attacks even in HC.

Well that’s good to know, I’ll try that tomorrow. But I don’t think I had a great armor value. I just changed my chest piece from something that had like… 480 I think it was lol And everything else was pretty crap too.
I just changed my build now to use a sword I dropped but through my journey in Ultimate I had like… not even 1000 armor value I think ^^’

You’re kidding, right? I can roll a fresh character and have them at near maxed resists (across the board except for a few outliers) if I actually try - between levels 20-30, before I even make it to the Warden and definitely before I even begin mucking around with Factions. And I can do this all self-found, straight from the ground, from trolling the local merchs for items, and from beginning Blacksmith components. And lets not forget that your mastery and devotion choices may also provide resistances as well!

You have potential sources to cover your ass coming from every direction in the game.

If I can do that then you can definitely have your resists in a good spot before going to Elite (and then later, Ultimate).

Hogwash.

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Powbam is becoming my favourite person of this community :3
And YES, you can easily cap your resistances early. I always do that with my new character at about level 35, when I get to Homestead. Items from vendors, MIs and epic items with an addition of blacksmith components gives you a lot of variety for covering your ass!!!

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Hi there. I know how frustrating it can be to die fast in this game. 90% of my gameplay has been in Hard Core. Which means most of my lessons came with a very harsh penality. With that I had a bit more insentive spends time reading guides to understand the game. Dozens of deaths later, I finally farmed my first Lokarr set today with ease.

This game has depth like old school Diablo and Titan Quest. It’s worth getting to know and very rewarding when you manage to beeze past content that KOed you in one shot prior. Cheers

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Useful for all low level characters’ resists, get Leovinus’s ring as soon as you can. Hidden Oasis urn cluster, 24% elemental resist, 15% all damage, 3% experience. Temple of Osyr rift, run past all enemies, get in the Oasis , grab ring and port out. Should be able to cover elemental resists on your other gear easily in normal.

A lot of enemies will sop chasing you after a while, you get more experience by doing quests in the early game than fighting everything you see. I usually have most factions revered in late normal, Malmouth you have to do some bounty quests,. You will be at too low a level to use some of the augments, but jewelry augments are low level required and well chosen gear can cover you well enough, damage takes second place to defense.

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Best thing to do is post a link to your character so we can have a look at it and see what improvements can be made.

Use grimtools calc to upload your character here.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/

To upload your character click the ‘up arrow’ button in the upper-lefthand corner. If you have cloud saves enabled (enabled by default) your save file will be in \Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata########\219990\remote\save\main_{character name}\player.gdc

Otherwise it will be in \Documents\My Games\Grim Dawn\save\main_{character name}\player.gdc

Then click on the icon below the arrow and copy the link shown to paste here.

op should change the title to ‘i have problem raising my resistances in elite and ultimate, need advice’ instead of clickbait-y ‘Elite and Ultimate modes suck!’. anyway, i’m sure op can overcome the challenges after posting op’s build and applying other commenters’ advices. keep it up, and you will reach lvl 100 ult and be swarmed in purples in no time!.

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