[Feedback]: Thermite Mines: it's high time this skill is fixed/re-designed

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Long before AoM and and the Chinese gamers coining the word “Stalwart”, before immortal Spellbinders and all kind of mighty Purifiers, before skill modifiers on one item could make or break a build, Resist Reduction skills were scarce and not easy to get for a lot of builds. Yes, Nightblades could do it passively, thus the whole meta of OP Spellbreakers and Blademasters and even Witch Hunters. Shaman’s Mastery Raging Tempest couldn’t stack with Elemental Storm and was more or less useless. Arcanists couldn’t offer any real usable RR (and still can’t really). So only two classes could do RR effectively - Occultists and Nightblades.

Game has changed drastically since then. Here is how RR skills can be rated nowadays (disclaimer, not gonna mention “broken” RR skills, like Absolute Zero or useless RR from Inferno or Foul Eruption):

Tier 1: Passive RR skills. Nightblade’s Night’s Chill, Inquisitor’s Aura of Censure, Necromancer’s Spectral Wrath. You just say “Hey, Monsters” and everyone’s around you suddenly has lower resists, no need to press any buttons or recast anything.

Tier 2: Active RR skills. Occultist’s Curse of Frailty - Vulnerability, Soldier’s Break Morale, Inquisitor’s Word of Pain - Death Sentence. Now some of those are just freaking awesome (like CoF) and super powerful. In one cast whole screen is feeling the effects (not only RR, but also all kinds of debuffs) if you use CoF. Other skills are also pretty effective, cast and forget.

Tier 3: Decent RR skills. Shaman’s Devouring Swarm, Raging Tempest, Demolitionist’s Agonizing Flames. Not as convinient as tier 2 skills, but they have their perks. Like Agonizing Flames being flat RR for every kind of resistance. Or Devouring Swarm having huge RR values.

Tier 4: Stubbing your toe against furniture while barefoot, lying to your mom, having an asshole in a big truck in front of you break check you because you didn’t like his country music bumper stickers

Tier 5: Thermite Mines

A skill that goes against the whole game design. Like it’s been copy pasted from some shitty iphone tower defence game. Clunky to use, counter-intuitive placement, short life span against monster’s heavy ground effect spells, low radius, hard to use as a kiter, hard to use as an auto-attacker. Absolute pain to use in Main Campaign. Extremely annoying to use in Crucible.

In short: Thermite Mines suck and nobody likes that skill. Because Grim Dawn is a beautiful game, and there are a lot of skills I love casting/using personally, but this particular one is just no fun at all.

What can be done:

  • Increase its radius and buff its hp. So at least we don’t have to recast it that much and beg nemesis for one last dance aground those shiny little beacons;
  • Increase RR debuff duration: monster stepped in it, too bad, now sticky-icky napalm fuel is stuck to his ugly limbs as he feels the effects of resist reduction for 3-4 more seconds after he stepped out of Mine’s radius;
  • Make mines immortal but decrease their life-span. Like 20 seconds life span, but no shitty ground effects can erase them. Especially relevant in Crucible where I can’t even see most of the time if mines are still there or not.

There are probably more possible solutions that would not be that hard to implement at this stage of Grim Dawn’s life span. Not even sorry for the wall of text. Been mad at Thermite Mines since I first tried them.

2

FG would definitely be a good opportunity to redo the mechanics of several problematic/unpopular skills, including thermite mines, grenado, blade trap, OFF, Big One, foul eruption, etc.

3

I’ve always thought it’d be cool if they acted like the mines in Steps of Torment - not the ones that already look like thermite mines, but the ones that continually lob projectiles at you. I know it’d make them similar to Mortar Trap, but I still think it’d make them a bit more useful - maybe a modifier that reduces limit to 2, summon 1 at a time, but transforms them to this style? Maybe that’s just wishful thinking…

4

There was a brief time when I really enjoyed using Thermite Mines. For a short time they had a detonation ability if re-summoned. This led to build possibilities where spamming thermite mines gave explosions everywhere. As it would explode the oldest existing thermite mines, you did have to keep track of your placement of earlier mines, which gave it a slight tactical layer which I personally really enjoyed.

Unfortunately in B27 hotfix 2 they removed this ability (not mentioned in patch notes) as Crate saw it as exploitable and too similar to Quick Jacks. So Thermite Mines once again returned to ‘Good-On-Paper-But-Too-Cluncky-To-Use’ status and has remained there every since.

I’d love to get the detonation ability added back to Thermite Mines, even if that means tweaking the damage values to make sense.

5

Also having transmuters for different damage types could be a thing.
For a newer player RR is one of the hardest things to learn, maybe simplyfying RR in general could be a thing to think?

6

Duration buff would be nice. But AFAIK its impossible unless Crete change mines mecanic.

7

Placing the thermite mines in triangle instead of a line would help I believe.

8

Big One - should be redone entirely
Foul Eruption - should activate off all kills
Mines - should apply a duration buff

What’s wrong with Grenado? I know damage to skill point invested ratio is inferior to other nukes but it doesn’t really need a mechanic change, does it?

9

deeemiigiii

on topic:

All for: radius/hp increase and/or duration if possigle

10

Foul Eruption - should activate off all kills

Even if it activate on all kills it still be useless cause you need RR debuff before you kill stuff, not after.

What’s wrong with Grenado? I know damage to skill point invested ratio is inferior to other nukes but it doesn’t really need a mechanic change, does it?

Grenadiers lack good gear to shine. Adversary Purifier can deliver 500K+ crits from grenade.

11

Sounds nice…in theory. I haven’t tried adeversary in campaign or crucible. I’ve only seen 250K from small arms with mods.

Atm i’d sooner do grenado with burn mods

12

Grenado’s main problem is the AOE radius, which is ridiculously small for the huge explosion it causes.

Maybe give it a shockwave effect, once the Grenado explodes, that will deal extra damage and hit enemies that are outside from the Grenado’s AOE range.

13

+1 to invulnerability buff on thermites. It sucks when it has 60 (?) seconds lifetime but you won’t even see it for 5.

14

The max MC hit from Grenado I saw was a under 300k so this is surprising. I never tried Adversary though

15

I remember reading a long time ago that the projectile could be shot out the air by gunfire before it reaches it’s target. Other than that, I’ve seen complaints about it and Canister Bomb being lob projectiles too. I haven’t used Grenado/Canister Bomb much but don’t remember having issues with them or if the first issue was fixed at any point.

I also agree in wanting to see Thermite Mine improved in some way. Personally, I’d be fine with just the resist reduction debuff persisting for 1-2 seconds.

16

That was one complaint, but the bigger one is that it explodes as soon as it makes contact with something. So with its small AoE, it doesn’t always affect the target you actually want. So the most effective way to use Grenado is in melee range. The irony of having to use a grenade in melee range is obvious.

17

Didn’t realize thermite mines are that bad… I almost always it as one of my debuffing skills when I have a demolitionist class…

I recast it pretty often though… so maybe that’s why I felt it’s not that bad…

I always thought just these RR skills are designed this way so they are not overpowered

18

Except we have debuffing skills like Ill Omen, Blood Pox, Aether Corruption, Word of Pain and Curse of Frailty that have high QoL and support both all playstyles.

Mines don’t support anything that requires to kite well.

19

Another thing that makes mines clunky is that they are slow to castcompared to (near) instant cast abilities so sometimes it doesn’t go off when you’re holding down an attack button.
This issue is compounded by how it also has a travel time before it hits the ground and starts burning, the mines would feel a lot better if they were thrown and activated faster and if the debuff was sticky for 2-4 seconds so you get the effect for a while even if enemies run out of the flames.

20

Out of all the suggestions here i like this the best - cast mines in a radius, maybe at higher levels you can get 4 or 5 in radius. not sure whether it should be round player or cast point or if either of these is doable though.

I don’t think people should always compare one RR skill to another (or any other type if skill for that matter), not all skills are made equally as they are part of a larger whole - the mastery itself, and balanced as such. The danger of creating them the same is homogeneity which will then be complained about of itself.