I’m not sure if this has been answered, but do the difficulty tokens give skill & attribute points for difficulties you’ve already or partially cleared?
I’m currently leveling a character, and finished Normal. I want to skip to Ultimate when the expansion comes out, but don’t want to start Elite if it’s going to prevent me from jumping to Ultimate. And somewhat related, will the token “clean up” difficulties already cleared for a character that’s already unlocked Ultimate.
From the 7th December stream:
“So the reason I’m opening up this guy today, notice he’s on normal difficulty, nothing substantial, he’s level 2, got a mastery to select, there’s Oathkeeper, got 3 skill points, I’ve already spent his attribute points, but oh look. In my inventory are two new items we’re going to be introducing with the Forgotten Gods expansion. What are these items you might ask? They are Merits, similar to the Crucible, you now get to use these items in the main campaign. What they do is allow you to unlock higher difficulties on your new characters. So I’ve got a Champion’s Merit that unlocks Elite and I’ve got the Saviour’s Merit that unlocks Ultimate. And that means you immediately get access to new difficulties, you immediately get all of the attribute and skill point rewards that any quest on lower difficulties would have given you which means you don’t have to go back to Normal, you don’t have to go back to Elite, if you want to start on Ultimate you will immediately get those points. You will immediately get all of the inventory bags which you would have unlocked and you immediately get all of the riftgates on the lower difficulties. Boom! 4 more attribute points, 7 skill points. Just like that. Now if I go to the main menu and click this little thing here, oh look I’m level 2 going into Ultimate difficulty!”
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77182
If you’ve already cleared Normal then you won’t get those quest skill/attribute points again, but would get the Elite ones when you move on to Ultimate.
Not sure what you mean by “clean up” difficulties already cleared.
A related, unrelated question regarding the Tokens:
Quests will remain untouched right? What about the Map, Rifts and Shrines?
Again from the stream:
"Thewordbearer : will we need to go to lower difficulties to get devo shrines?
And that is the other thing that comes with these tokens. In Forgotten Gods we are not only enabling every single shrine that is in the world on every difficulty in the game, we’re going to be adding new shrines to the world in places you haven’t before had shrines. And that means, if you go straight to Ultimate difficulty you will be able to get all 55 devotion points in one single playthrough. On top of that, with the upcoming patch we will be buffing the bonuses from Warrants, from Mandates and Writs so you can get your reputations up faster on your alts than ever before."
This means that those shrines which currently don’t appear in Elite and Ultimate now will (though you’ll still need to cleanse them). Unlike currently where Normal has 33 shrines and Elite/Ultimate 20 each, Ultimate will have the most shrines with Elite having less and Normal less than Elite when FG is released.
Map, quests and rifts will still need to be cleared/completed/found as usual.
"dave45788 : @CrateEntertainment can you explain a bit why it was so complicated with that tokens ??
So, first off the game’s inherent balance is built around you progressing from Normal to Elite to Ultimate. So there were some concerns there that things might be too skewed in terms of difficulty, but ultimately we decided that if you’re going to be doing this you’re probably pretty experienced in the game already, you’ve already been on at least Elite difficulty so if you accept the risks, there you go.
The second thing though, and the bigger concern, was the fact that we have those attribute and skill point rewards on Normal and Elite. For most players at the very least they felt compelled to do those quests on Normal and on Elite difficult for every character. Which means, even if you rushed through the campaign all the way to Loghorrean you still had to do those along the way. And if we added something to allow you to skip difficulties if felt like you should actually be able to skip them, not have to go back to Normal and Elite just to do those quests so that added to the problem to be solved. However, we couldn’t just give you skill points, we had to account for the fact that some players might have already done those quests and that’s kinda what came into making this work. We had a variety of ideas on how to solve it and ultimately we came away with this one. It seemed the simplest and since it was feasible, it’s actually in the game. So now what these tokens do, as I mentioned before, will give you those attribute/skill point rewards and those quests simply don’t any more for those characters."
Ah, so if you use the token to get straight to ultimate but find it too difficult for example, you can still go back to normal and proceed as normally with the only difference being you now have the skill and attribute points that you’d otherwise get from quests in normal+elite, right?
Yes. You’d get whatever other rewards the quests give, just not the skill/attribute points again.
This token makes me want to try out my lvl 1 Gunslinger build that went 1-170 (but died on 170) in crucible in 1 attempt… need to try this on ultimate from lvl 1 lol