[Feedback] Repetitiveness and boredom of enemies' damage type

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

I’ve been playing the game for nearly 600 hours by now, and there’s something that I really, really dislike and it’s the damage types of enemies. To be even more exact, one damage type almost every enemy shares - physical damage. Nearly (or maybe over?) 95% of monsters have that damage type in their arsenal, making the game armor/physical resist focused. The issue about this is, armor is very easy to get, for example by devotion, giving up devotion damage focus. You can get about 2500 armor on any caster if you give up picking damage devotions, melee builds usually (if fully focused) can reach up to 4k, again, giving up on damage. Physical resist nowadays is very easy to obtain on any melee character, since many parts of equipment grant, on average, 4% physical resist per part, and one green shield may even give you 28% of it. I even found a way of getting over 80% physical resist (perma buffs only) and about 3k+ armor. As far as this is not a problem at all, it’s really disgusting that in order to kill any boss (except for Valdaran, Zantarin, Aleksander [meteor is easy as heck to dodge], Mogdrogen - I don’t care about the easy bosses) you gotta either get (at least) 95% armor absorption and kite, get the same value of absorption and over 2k armor or get 25+% physical resist in order to not get fucked by a random physical chain the enemy does.

A random hero, which may wield a weapon and deal physical damage, can easily out-damage a Valdaran or Benn’Jahr because of physical damage. As we all know, not every monster can have physical damage in their arsenal, because a physical lightning bolt or electrical discharge would be kind of weird. Instead of the boring physical damage, which can annihilate everything in a split of a second, I’d rather see enemies deal %HP damage, because it works the same way as physical damage, but doesn’t need anything at all to be weakened (low current HP is enough). I’m not saying physical damage should be replaced with %HP damage, no, don’t think of it. Instead of the boring physical damage, I’d rather see it getting removed or replaced (in some cases) with resist reduction. Why so? Any random mage you meet in Grim Dawn can not do anything to you, because they deal non-physical damage and you usually reduce that damage by at least 70%, meaning you take very low damage (… do I even have to give examples?).

I’d rather see enemies be one damage type focused (or multiple, but for fuck sake, every monster has physical damage) and have even 80% RR to the main damage type in order to deal damage - even trash monsters. It’s way better to know where to get the heck out of the monster range instead of getting annihilated because our armor is too low. Look at Gargabol, he can deal massive damage OR annihilate you in a split second by his auto attacks or eruption, respectively. The other example would be the Kraken, you know when to run away, because when he uses his whirl or shower you basically can’t stay in the range because your HP slowly drops by 10 - 40% per second. Even the old Aleksander, if you dodge his meteor, you win (this is kind of bullpoop, because Aleks is basically a Valdaran v2).

To wrap this up, the physical damage and resist overload is totally pointless. You’ve been adding random physical resists, armors etc to the game in order to help players survive. Instead of doing that, remove physical damage from some enemies and add resist reduction instead. Make the game more various in facing enemies. Right now, before you cap your resists, you cap your armor absorption, as the main priority, get some physical resist (everyone wants at least 25%) and increase your armor by any means (Angrim… who the heck says “I want to get some crit damage because I do not need the armor Angrim gives”?), because if you don’t have any type physical damage resistance, your character is literally useless.

*Tanks don’t have that problem. 4k armor, 40% physical resist… Shield…

2

I don’t think adding RR all over the place helps, at all. It means physical resistance or armor become even more important, so pretty much the opposite of what you are looking for.

Also, if every mob had 80% RR to its damage type, you might as well give no resists to the player. This too would never work / improve anything.

That RR is rare is a good thing…

3

I find it not surprising, that most units deal physical damage, as the system to mitigate this type of damage is more complex: you reduce damage by armor of the body part which was hit (modified by your absorption rate) and then your resistance is applied, whereas for other types you only have resistances.

I wonder if your criticism is not the other way around: non-physical damage types are most of the time not threatening enough.

4

I mean, not to add exactly 80%, but to stronger monsters - yes, and make it to one particular damage type, for example, Fabius would reduce all resists by 30 (as he does) and pierce resist by 60, because it’s his main damage type (this is only an example, I don’t remember which damage type is Fabius’ main). I find it more fun if you know you gotta raise your e.g. aether resist in order to kill Theodin. Right now the only thing we’re thinking about it to get some physical resist/armor, after that we’re not caring about anything anymore, because if we know our physical resist/armor is high enough to facetank our enemies, we just go blindly and kill stuff and if we know we can kill both super bosses, we just don’t need to care about literally anything (although let’s take super bosses away from this topic, because they’re fine as they already are, imo).

Whenever I play I only focus on physical resist and armor - I rarely care about overcapping other resists because they are not that important anymore.

5

I agree that the majority of incoming damage is disproportionately physical, more so from regular monsters and heroes. That builds vary so much in their armour rating and other physical damage mitigation (shields and phys res) also adds to the problem and makes the difficulty of the game too variable in my opinion and somewhat boring (for tanks). How can you design reasonable levels of incoming physical damage effectively between builds that vary from low armour amounts of 1.6k or so to a build with 4k+ and shield protection? A physical blow that deals half of the tank builds health may one shot the other one.

Non-phys damage is not threatening enough overall. Perhaps reduce max res cap from 80 or increase damage. There are ways to go about curing it but at this point I understand it most likely won’t happen given the time involved in such fine-tuning.

6

Non-phys damage is not threatening enough overall. Perhaps reduce max res cap from 80 or increase damage.

I was thinking this too. If you really itemize well and/or swap for various fights, you can get 100 over the cap, especially with end-game items.

Or the damage of mobs is tweaked with the assumption that everyone is at cap. But then this is likely terrible for newer players and everyone would use +max items.

The only other dmg type that is of concern to players is large % reduction to health and it is fairly rare.

7

Seems the problem is that you have the best gear already, at which point the game is obviously less challenging.

While you try to get there, there is plenty of challenge left, so whatever additional damage you pile on to make it interesting for you again might make it near impossible for others to get there… the content cannot be balanced around giving optimized builds in the best gear a challenge

8

Re: Op

after some thought, I think your idea has some potential but all gear would have to be tweaked to get the same stepping % of phys.

Resistance gear might need to be capped at 15%, similar to augments. And maybe some devotion tweaks. With this, other types would pose more danger.

I’m not sure players like game-wide equipment changes, though.

9

So a ton of balancing and shifting a ton of things around this? You should have asked for this before the game was even officially because right now this won’t happen.

Not to mention more RR, which to me is easily the laziest way to add challenge. It’s a lazy way to increase the damage of an enemy and force the player to get even more resists when the game already makes a damn puzzle of capping resists.

10

Welcome to power creep. That’s all this adds.

11

^I don’t think it is likely, either. But if for some chance the devs do get on it…then some input on what is the core issue or how to tweak it is surely more helpful?

12

I mostly play MC Veteran, and therefore self-found - although I do have small stash of legendaries. I find the challenge level consistent and engaging.

13

You and I play this game very differently. :stuck_out_tongue: I settle for 92% Armor Absorb (2x Sacred Plating + AAP) and anything above 10% Physical Resist when building characters. You’re overkilling it a bit. :smiley:

This, this this this, this.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Physical Damage is the “scariest” damage type, hence our craving for more of its resistance in more areas. But other types can still kill you - Shar’zul, for instance, will burn you alive if you’re just barely over the edge of capping your Fire resistance. There’s been a lot of resistance to adding more RR to enemies, but it does seem like the logical solution to maintaining enemy identity and keeping things unique. Shar’zul’s Fire damage is dangerous because he can stack so much RR. Players want 200% Lightning Resistance for Mogdrogen because of the overwhelming RR the superboss slams our way. Some margin of RR is crucial to making endgame fights uniquely challenging.

Having said that, I don’t think it can just be thrown around willy-nilly. RR doesn’t belong on every enemy under the sun (cough AoM cough) because that makes everything feel stale as essentially the solution is just to bump your resists up across the board by a small margin and then proceed as though nothing was different from other content. RR is most effective, from a mechanical gameplay standpoint, in large, singular doses, and usually with some form of counterplay. This is - one of the reasons - why I think the Sentinel is the best boss in the game: his resist-shredding attack is well telegraphed and entirely avoidable, but often followed up by a massive nuke of damage afterward, so if you do get your resists cut, you’re gonna suffer dearly. I think one or the other should have counterplay; either the RR should be avoidable like with the Sentinel (or Shar’zul/Mogdrogen), or the “big damage nuke” should be avoidable (Zantarin). Or both.

Edit: To Norzan’s point, I think the ideal solution would have been to prevent an overcapping of resists a long time ago. It’s obviously not doable/balance-able now, but if enemy RR couldn’t be countered by getting more resists, players would need to consider different alternatives to handling various fights, such as getting more Regen or DA. That’d help to make the presence of enemy RR more unique, too. As it stands, though, I maintain that intentionally-unique enemies (bosses, special heroes like Loxmere, etc.) should have a good margin but not insurmountable amount of RR to possibly threaten players who don’t want to specialize on that particular resistance.

14

Yo, that’s rude! A tank-lover can’t overkill anything! >:(

Jokes aside, 92% AA is not that big, imo, and 10% physical resist is not good either. You effectively have 2% physical resist with 100% AA (armor absorption). To me, this is pointless (I still understand your idea of doing so, I just have different idea of playing the game).

I see everyone says that RR is a bad idea, so another idea (which definitely won’t happen because our lazy devs won’t waste time on that) is to reduce every resist that’s obtainable so we could “cap” the resists at (example) 50 by getting the full gear or just push it forward to 80 if we desire to (remove + to max resist, remove overcap). Basically, if the game had removed overcapping (250 fire resist = 80 and nothing more or less, RR would set it to 80 - RR, for example the enemy has 20 RR, so we have 60 resist) and gear resists would, at max, set all your resists to 50, or 80 and waste some points in other resist(s), the game could be better, but that is way too much work as for nowadays state of the game. So, in the end, if physical damage would be removed from some monsters, the other damage types would need to be increased (like, idk, take the physical damage value and make it the other damage, for example 320 fire damage, 720 physical, so make it 1040 fire).

15

Not sure if you are serious when you call the devs “lazy” for not changing to this.

Removing the overcapped resists to no longer work against RR would just make the game more biased towards Soldier. Sure, i have several builds that are not Soldier that can easily tank most thing but let’s not kid ourselves, the game is the most confortable with Soldier.

This suggestion just comes off from the bias of playing a Death Knight and a Spellbinder. Yes, Spellbinder is one of the tankiest classes in game because i have one. There’s no such thing as a “glass cannon” Spellbinder like i have seen you claim unless you just dump all points in Spirit and equip nothing but offensive gear.

16

Weird because whenever I joke about someone being lazy people take it seriously, and whenever everyone else does they take it as a joke.