Here is my relatively long feedback from many hours of playing Grim Dawn.
I have played Titan Quest a lot back in the days and started playing Grim Dawn maybe 6 month ago.
I bought from GOG the base game, the expansion and crucible and played most of the game with version 1.0.4 or later.
All in all I have probably a few hundred hours played and have two chars at level 100 and many others between level 30-60.
However when I compare my characters to the forum builds they are pretty weak, mostly because I lack the proper gear.
I collected many legendary item, but I am not even close to have one complete legendary armor set.
I do not try very hard to optimize the chars, but they are still good enough to beat ultimate.
In the following I try to describe I experience the gameplay and have some suggestions for improvements. I did not comb through the forum and read all discussions, so some of the things I mention might have been discussed already somewhere else.
Gameplay and story:
Both the base game and the expansion are really great gaming eperience. Certainly I will buy the next expansion when it is available.
I tried a bit the crucible addon, but I find the lack of a story not very exciting.
I liked the story arc around the Cronley gang / Rovers most and would love to see an expansion of this.
Leveling and drop rates for different difficulties:
Leveling in Normal(Veteran) and Ultimate is fine, however the elite difficulty seems not so great.
It seems that XP in elite (AoM content) are very low, so leveling is too slow there.
I felt elite endgame is pretty difficult and not rewarding (neither XP, nor item drop rates).
When you finish AoM elite and start with ultimate act 1 (around level 80 for me) it feels like switching to easy mode.
Enemies are weaker, XP higher and legendary drop rates also much higher.
So I think the elite difficulty should be improved.
I reached level 100 with my chars in act 2 ultimate. After reaching the level cap, the motivation to play further is pretty low.
So I think some increase of the level cap would be nice to keep the motiviation to play until the end of ultimate.
I addition, I think at higher levels the amount of yellow items should be gradually decreased and the scrap amount should be increased.
I think most players sell the yellows anyway immediately.
Nemeses I find super hard but doable, so I think this is how they should be.
However, the loot from them is often disappointing. It seems not much better than from a regular boss.
Devotions:
I was very disappointed to see that 55 devotion points are the maximum and restoring more shrines does not give additional dev points.
So either I would remove the maximum cap or remove some shrines.
Soulbound items:
The whole soulbound mechanic seems pointless and bit annoying to me and should be removed or optionally deactivated.
What is the purpose of it?
I think one of the best mechanics in the game is to exchange gear between characters, why should there be some gear not transferable?
All items have already level restrictions to prevent that low level chars are equipped with too powerful gear.
And the faction reputation restriction is much weaker than the level restriction anyway.
It happens often that I remove an augment, transfer the item to another char and put the same augment fot the other char on it.
This is just tedious and not very fun.
Inventory and color-coding:
A large part of the fun in the game comes from collecting items. So I would prefer, if there more inventory space.
I would love to see a possibility to buy infinite inventory space in-game.
I think the colorcoding of gear can be improved. The only mod I use is “Item Filter (via ColorCoding)” which allows the immediate
distinction between normal greens and double greens and MIs. It is very useful and I suggest to put it in the main game.
The faction gear should not be blue or green but should have its own color.
Bugs:
Sometimes the Mortar Trap is shooting, but the projectiles are never hitting the ground.
I play on resolution 1366x768. When both the inventory and the quest menu is open they are slightly overlapping.
I can not close the Quest menu with the “x” in the top right corner (unresponsive) until I closed the inventory menu.
My laptop has both an nvidia 940m and an intel HD Graphics card, but in the graphics card menu (ingame) I can see only the HD graphics card.
I am not sure which graphic card is used by the game.
I experience often short freezings (~2-3 sec) followed by very fast gamespeed. These “hickups” I recall from Titan Quest, but it would be nice to have them fixed.
Create a game profile for GD in the Nvidia CP. Find the appropriate setting and force the game to use the appropriate card. Thus you can be assured the game is using the correct card regardless of what it says in-game. If you need further proof then toggle between the cards in the Nvidia CP and monitor the fps difference. In this manner you can quite readily see the difference as it is always very noticeable performance-wise between an integrated GPU and a discrete.
This has long been an issue with laptops and GD, if it was fixable or they were intending on doing it it would have been done long ago.
The surplus shrines are for the benefit of new and experienced players alike. You can still get 55 points, if you miss or deliberately skip some shrines on your playthrough.
If there is an obstacle, then I assume it is working as intended. If not, please submit a report in the bug section with more details.
You can “fix” this by lowering your UI scaling in the game’s video options.
Which Nemeses? Some of them (like Fabius I think) had their loot toned down due to the fact that they are easier to track down and farm than some of the others (like Valdaran or Benn’Jahr).
Devotions:
I was very disappointed to see that 55 devotion points are the maximum and restoring more shrines does not give additional dev points.
So either I would remove the maximum cap or remove some shrines.
Limiting the number of devotion points available to the player is for balancing purposes. If I can pick 3-5 T3 constellations easily, it’s going to lead to some power creep that then means everything else (such as enemies/bosses) needs to be balanced for. Currently, the game is designed with the the 55 points in mind.
The whole soulbound mechanic seems pointless and bit annoying to me and should be removed or optionally deactivated.
What is the purpose of it?
The only time I’ve seen/had soulbound items were when they had augments applied to them. And I think this is done so you can’t bypass trading augments to other players.
Bugs:
Sometimes the Mortar Trap is shooting, but the projectiles are never hitting the ground.
This is often because they are trying to fire at something out of their line of sight, i.e. an enemy in the next room or around a corner.
For Mortar Trap builds, I keep a key on my key bar for ‘Pet Attack’ so I can manually direct the Mortar’s fire elsewhere or you could just move them closer to whatever they are aiming at.
People usually do not pick yellow items after level 5 - 20. Some people even don’t pick them at all. If you need more scrap, go to the disenchantment guy and detonate items with dynamite. You always get some scrap and sometimes useful materials (components)/rare materials.
Use the item filter button (far left hand end of the ui bar) to stop seeing yellows when ever you want and simply press Alt to see everything regardless of the filter settings if needed.
Regards the colours, this is not possible as the game is also made for colour blind players and as such there’s only so many colours that can be used / combined without causing visibility problems.
more shrines does not give additional dev points :
It’s for balancing, more devo points will make some builds over power
more shrines means we have more options for shrine locations
Not all player know or want to take shrine in some locations
With more shrines, we have easy way for capping devo points
Grim Dawn Devs is kind enough giving us several shrine locations
Even sometimes we get cool legendaries from those shrines
Really? I know most yellow items are garbage but they’re still useful sometimes to get higher armor or better dps weapon, as green and others aren’t that much common in comparisson with yellows.
