GM #159 gave us news of some upgrades to 4 older sets, new fxs for some skills and AAR will have pierce capability in patch 1.1.2.0 and there’s a new rogue-like dungeon on the way in a future patch.
The stream on the 19th April showed off changes to some of the sets from GM #159 plus some skill changes. It also had some interesting background to how some of the characters went from insignificant NPCs to major players in GD’s story.
Hillhome : how is Dawnshard not a set?
Primarily so we could put in some separate bonuses that didn’t necessarily align perfectly between them so we could support different classes. But visually we wanted them to have a matching appearance because have a full Dawnshard look seemed like a good idea to me.
Patch out towards the end of this month, if not then early May for sure.
Sinful_me : xbox one release date?
Can’t give you a date. I can tell you it’s probably coming later this year, still needs to go for certification, still some tech work to be done. Basically we had to wait for the Forgotten Gods expansion to be finished and then we could proceed further with that.
freakgallery : @CrateEntertainment I know it’s too too early but , did we get 3rd expansion ??
I definitely can’t promise you anything like that at this time. I can tell you that collectively, between all of the DLCs and the base game, Grim Dawn has now surpassed 3 million copies which is incredible for an indie company.
rebel7254 : Merit tokens work for mods in next patch??
Merit tokens will work with mods just as the programmer told you in the thread that you’ve asked.
So there are 4 sets we’re redoing for the next patch for Forgotten Gods which actually apply to Grim Dawn and Ashes of Malmouth so those who haven’t been keeping up with our dev updates we’re reworking the Clairvoyant set, the Ulzuin set, Iskandra set and the Bloodrager set, which coincidently are sitting here right in front of me.
smokeejoe : Don’t change ULZUIN!!!
Well, here’s what I have to say about Ulzuin. I found that the original idea could be made to work if we kept forcing it, but there’s a lot of other options for Fire Strike already and those that were hurt by the changes to Ulzin we’ve actually shifted over to other items so you can still have that skill bonus support, and instead we’ve tried to make Ulzuin a lot more unique and interesting and I’ll show you guys in a bit. I think it’s one of the more fun ones of the 4 that we’ve done here. It definitely brings out the meaning of what it is to support Ulzuin.
rgScupper : Will hand shrine before Eldritch Gate have its secrets?)
The hand shrine before the Eldritch Gate is used to worship Korvaak back in the days when the temple served its purpose. That no longer happens since the temple’s a ruin and the people who worshipped it are dead.
valaki8 : any plans of fine tuning the loot filter? like some kind of AND condition instead of OR?
The philosophy of the loot filter was to keep it straightforward. Not to make it so complex someone would have to look up a guide on how to use the loot filter. So there’s definitely some more powerful options that you guys are asking for; I’m not sure we’re going to go through with adding them because that might start to get way too complicated.
deathspank139 : Hey Zantai, could you check Valdun commando? It kinda feels underwhelming and besides Valdun tactician is way more powerful
I think we made some adjustments to Valdun, not sure they’re Commando specific.
Corvekson : If the question hasn’t been asked/answered already, did FG meet or exceed your expectations in regards to sales, etc?
I will tell you Forgotten Gods is doing very well for sales. It has certainly already paid for itself in terms of development costs so at this point we are making a profit on the expansion which is great. I think last we talked about sale numbers for Forgotten Gods it was over a hundred thousand copies sold which was excellent. I’m not sure it pushes us into oh my we have to make a third expansion, but we’ll see how that goes.
sheem999 : about sell of Fg copies, are you happy with it like did it sell over your expectation or?
I would say it’s pretty much on par with what we were expecting. It’s done very well, first for us so far. As I mentioned earlier it’s currently making a profit for Crate which is excellent. So keep spreading the word to your friends, guys, and get those copies out there.
CrystalNix : will there bi any changes to shattered realm ?
Yes. That is one of the big things we are doing in this next patch. First up is we’re actually rebalancing the loot distribution, kind of pushing it back towards the lower shards so it actually starts out considerably more rewarding then it smoothly progresses back to the same rewards it has now at shard 60 or so. So if you haven’t been getting quite up there you’ll find the Shattered Realm much more rewarding.
In addition we actually shifted the difficulty a bit as well. We’ve lowered the health scaling started at the first shard all the way up to 60 and we reduced monster physical damage all the way through all the Shattered Realm.
In addition we’ve revised the monster spawn for bosses so that you’re not going to see some of the really tough ones early on and you’re not going to see duplicates of really tough bosses ever. For example Grava’Thul with his dispel, you’ll never see two of him. Or I don’t think you’ll ever see two Kaisans or two Korvaaks.
First up we have the Clairvoyance Set. It’s been reworked almost completely, it still supports some of the skills it did before, but it’s much more focussed as a set now. It no longer does the generic bonuses it did before and instead it focusses on vitality and aether damage.
Softlight : Is the piercing AAR only exclusive for the Clairvoyant set?
It is not. As I mentioned it is baseline to Aether Ray.
gachibass_chechnya_kavkaz : Could you share with us what’s gonna be in the next expansion/GD 2 in terms of storyline/lore, at least a bit?
I’m not sure I should really talk about that because I’m not sure when or if it’s going to happen. I mean I can give you some ideas of threads we might pursue. For example there is the whole thing with the Emperor, the capital, with the Sun (son?), Ulgrim seems to be a special guy too. The Witch Gods seem to have gotten their way - what does that mean for the future of Cairn? What will happen to the future of Kymon’s Chosen? That Sigil?
FinnigansBread : Can you tell us where in FG we’ll enter the 5th rogue-like dungeon?
You will enter it from a place you can’t access yet because it doesn’t exist.
FicWader : @CrateEntertainment why did the witch gods run away like they were scared of us when we took care of korvaak? Were they scared we’d usurp eldritch realm from them?
In that case I suggest you kinda think about what happens when Korvaak is defeated. And what that really means.
deathspank139 : Last question from me for today and a humble request - Can Maw of Enaht be entered or will be in the future? and request - add Olerons set in the future, please Thank you in advance
Um, let me give you a little sneaky. If I can find it.
How about that. So, still a work in progress keep in mind, but I’ll let you figure out whether you’ll be entering the Maw of Enaht or not in the future.
Now that Aether Ray pierces, is damaged nerfed?
Yes, on the base skill damage is actually going to be lower. We needed to do that because otherwise you would have a crazy high damage skill that pierces through the whole screen.
Nitrocide17 : Drain essence doesn’t pierce though, because it branches out to nearby targets, correct?
Correct.
apouche_ : what is the process of updating items and skills? who and how do you decide what needs to be updated and what not
I suppose it’s sort of a reactionary process. Some of the things we want to update visually is just looking back at the older things in the game and do stuff ourselves because we’ve done better at making that stuff or we made things a long time ago that we didn’t have time to update and now we do actually have some time to update them. So Aether Ray looked okay, I think it could have been done better so we updated it. Doom Bolt in sore need of a visual update considering how much we’ve done to lots of other similar spell effects. So we took this opportunity, particularly as we were reworking the Clairvoyance set. Because we were reworking the set the philosophy there has generally been to try certain playstyles, if they pan out make sure they’re viable. If they’re not panning out then might be time to consider a rework. And we’ve done that on several items in the past, it just seemed like those sets in general have always been either struggling or they just weren’t that powerful or interesting to play with so that’s why we finally decided to take a look and update them.
rgScupper : any news about City Builder?
It’s turning out great. We recently got a website up and running for it internally. It still needs some content added to it, but it’s getting to the point where we can hopefully show it off to you guys pretty soon. That’s ultimately up to Medierra though.
SkrunchyCakes : @CrateEntertainment How come the shrine in Steps of Torment (Ultimate) is 10x more difficult than any other content until one gets to Malmouth? Seems to be very off-balanced (and has killed every character I’ve hit it with).
There’s actually a story with that particular shrine. From beta there was actually a bug with that shrine that made it spawn a cluster of these bone monstrosities that would attack you all at the same time and that shrine was insanely difficult, but people actually kind of liked it. So we kinda of left in a more subdued version of that as an homage to beta if you will.
skipperx83 : is the CDR reduction chance gone @clairvoyant set?
It’s gone as a general bonus, but it’s still there for Doom Bolt.
apouche_ : what is the one thing you wish you could do (or redo) if you had all the resources in the world?
I would definitely redo the bounty system.
Corvekson : Any chance of Conflagration getting a little boost in damage as well? Really awesome fire beam spell that I feel gets left behind in regards to 90% of the fire stuff already out there.
Well Conflagration has pierce now so it’s damage is comparable to Aether Ray in that regard.
lurking_btw : would you ever consider adding a pvp mode for grim dawn?
Well, pvp exists. We’re never going to balance the game around it, but you guys are welcome to make a mod to balance pvp.
windymindy : is there any reason to get more than 135% movement speed?
It does actually give you a buffer against movement speed reduction effects so that is an option. Of course slow resist is a better option, but that I guess is why you could push over the 135% as a buffer to slow resist.
Right Ulzuin set. So Ulzuin previously supported Fire Strike which is fine. Fire Strike isn’t the most dynamic playstyle, it’s an auto attack build. It worked, I think it was okay. We tried to push it a little bit more in previous patches to improve it’s support, but at the end of the day it was just okay. I wasn’t very excited about it and I kind of thought about what it means to embody Ulzuin’s rage and the answer to that is fire everywhere. Fire from the heavens, fire from the ground, fire around you in explosions, that’s what it would be to worship Ulzuin in a set like that. So, with that in mind we set out to do this. Now this set is set to support Canister Bomb and it’s kinda pretty fun, not to mention giving you a ton of points to Ulzuin’s Chosen, you know a set called Ulzuin should probably support Ulzuin’s Chosen.
SkrunchyCakes : @CrateEntertainment Are you considering adding Alternative Advancement to the game for people who love playing their L100 character? Reputation and Items are great, but once one has BiS gear and maxed reputation, there really isn’t much of a reason to continue playing the build. Curious if you want people to be able to progress their actual character beyond 100.
Fundamentally no. I personally dislike the endless progression that other games have done. I feel there actually should be an end point where you look at a character and say this is awesome and I made it as awesome as possible. And now I’m going to move on to a different character, a different playstyle and make that as awesome as possible.
Dino_Thunderlung : So these changes to existing items, are they retroactive, or do we have to find the items again to get the updated changes?
These are retroactive. I don’t feel it’s really fair for you to re-hunt items you’ve already acquired just because we decided to redesign them.
Alarius : @CrateEntertainment are u going to expand a bit the boss arenas in sr, as of now to me they seem a bit too small
They vary in size. I think they’re in a pretty good place. The most difficult shards for example have arenas that are potentially as big as the Crucible arenas are.
Corvekson : Will the meteor effect from Herald of the Apocalypse and Ulzuin’s Torch receive this meteor visual change? Or is that being kept to Ulzuin’s set?
This particular visual is in Ulzuin’s set.
bigpapabear888 : I think we’re getting close to the point where GD2 makes more sense than another expansion
That is honestly probably true. In terms of telling a nice big chapter of the story it probably makes more sense to start a sequel.
FicWader : @CrateEntertainment will you consider making the game one bigass act if you add another expansion, like PoE did? Cause atm, if you want to play for “completion”, it gets a bit bloated with 3 diffs now with 2nd expansion
Here’s the thing. In terms of difficulty progression I actually don’t like the setup of having one difficulty because then we have to actually make the game really difficult even for casual players. I wouldn’t want the endgame of the main story to feel like Ultimate difficulty for a casual player, I don’t think that would work at least for our audience. However, with this edition of the expansion you don’t actually have to play them to Ultimate difficulty. And finally, we’ve added difficulty skip tokens in Forgotten Gods so if you want to roll new characters you can just send those tokens over to them from your main characters that have already been in those difficulties and you can just skip right ahead.
apouche_ : how do you evolve the lore ? is there one of you that takes the lead and other give input or is kinda of everyone throwing ideas kinda thing!
Some of it is organic as we develop the game, things kind of float to the top that seem fun and interesting. For example, the best example I can give you that comes up whenever this question is asked is Daila Thornsbury from Homestead, was originally just a little flavour NPC. All I did was I wanted to come up with a side quest just to add a little bit more to the world; she wanted her diary back. And in the diary you get a lore note that talks about this, you know, crazy story underneath the weeping oak and people liked that so much that they wanted to know what the next chapter is. So when we worked on the secret quest for the base game I thought, well why not keep going with that. And then we added her brother Dravis and his pursuit of power and that kept building on until Dravis become a core part of the main story in Forgotten Gods. I think that’s kind of awesome.
Similarly with Order of Death’s Vigil and Kymon’s Chosen, those came about organically as well. They were originally this sort of cult that formed in the Arkovian Foothills and all you did was find their abandoned homes because they moved on to some other place. So that was a story that was started then when we were adding factions to the game during beta we thought why not expand on that. So we added Kymon’s Chosen as zealots, the fervent worshippers of Empyrion (or Korvaak) and then we needed some to kinda counter that, offer people an alternative so that’s how the order of Death’s Vigil came about. And playing off of that we already had this character Uroboruuk that was created for the lore of Old Arkovia so why not read that into it and then he became sort of the founder of the order of Death’s Vigil.
In terms of creating the ongoing lore I’d say Medierra has the final say on things because it envokes the world he created originally. I stumped up a lot of the lore for the expansion, the course of where the story went, talking with him, discussing what works and what doesn’t. There are some ideas that were supposed to be in the first expansion, but we cut them because the expansion was getting too big and it was way too big, even after we cut those things. But then some of things ended up in the second expansion, some things didn’t make it in at all yet because they were too big. So yes, a sort of innovative back and forth process, all the designers had their share of writing lore notes as well.
weertangel : yeah, about those Tokens, isn’t it better to add some devotion points to them? course to get all dev points u pretty much need to replay the skipped difficulty anyway which seems a waste of the token @CrateEntertainment
There’s actually enough shrines on Ultimate difficulty you can get all 55 points. We made sure of that.
Right, the Bloodrager set. This did not require as much reworking as the other sets, but it did need just some tweaks to make it just that little bit better. So first off, the big thing we’re doing here is adding Nightblade support for the set. It might seem like a logic choice to add to a bleed heavy set so that’s what we did. The other big thing the Bloodrager set bonus. It used to be that it would trigger on killing a monster which is cool in the Crucible and works pretty well generally in the campaign, but if you’re fighting one on one against a boss and that boss doesn’t have adds whatsoever then that set bonus does nothing for you. So to improve on that what we ended up doing is creating two Bloodrage effects. First you have the Bloodrage on the set bonus. That now triggers on crit so if you crit an enemy you’re going to get this boost to your damage and you can keep it perpetually going as long as you’re critting enemies. Second, we’ve added the same “on kill” effect that you used to have on the set bonus to the helmet. And what that does for you, if you do a little bit more damage, it also gives you sustain. It gives you health regeneration and it heals you. So every time you kill an enemy every 5 seconds you’re going to get that little bit of health, you’re going to get that health regeneration and once again you can keep that going perpetually and we increased the duration of it to 15 seconds so you can actually keep it going quite a bit longer past a dead enemy. What it does mainly st make this set much more predictable in terms of its damage output. You’re no longer reliant on other adds in a boss fight.
chazinomaha : Have you considered adding Reflect Damage Reduction on this set? Bleed reflect can be brutal
I’m actually surprised no one’s asked. The biggest thing changing with retaliation stuff is there are some items that are over performing, it’s no surprise to anyone I think, and I physical retaliation is a little too easy to stack which again we expected was going to happen when we changed all the pierce retaliation to physical. But mostly we wanted to get it out to you guys, get you playing physical retaliation, see how the retaliation mechanic worked and come up with some builds. As expected, some of them were a little bit too strong so we’re going to reel those in, hopefully without hurting anyone else’s builds too much or at all.
footballgate : Will you show one of the new set?
I can’t because they’re not in the data yet. But I can tell you they’re coming in patch 1.1.3.
FicWader : @CrateEntertainment does our character “ascend” just along his journey as he amasses power, or is there something else to it also from lore perspective?
If you’ve read some of the lore notes, I think the one you’re referring to is Inquisitor Creed’s speculation that the main character may be on their way to ascendancy as well. What comes of that I guess we’ll see.
Darkstalix : Man please rethink making Wind Devils like blade spirit…so boring to keep spamming them
Well, Blade Spirits and Wind Devils fulfil different roles and Wind Devils are a spell.
ldhh902 : @CrateEntertainment is there any fix for people who crash in SR? lootwise
Yes, we have a fix in the works. It required some significant changes on the code end because of what it was caused by, so it wasn’t just something we could just throw in a hotfix. So it’s coming this patch, I hope it resolves this issue for you guys, it’s obviously not affecting everybody so was a little bit more difficult to find than your average crash. But I do hope it fixes this issue for you guys when the patch comes out pretty soon.
chloroformcongo : can you tell us more about how the Boss constellations are generated with the new Patch?
By constellations do you mean combinations? So the way bosses are selected in the Shattered Realm, we have several tiers. We have easy bosses, medium bosses, hard bosses and very hard bosses. Very hard is actually a new category we’ve added specifically for this next patch. Certain bosses in that category will only ever appear once on a floor and they will start appearing much later in the Shattered Realm, but that’s part of the issue as well as some of the hard bosses were spawning pretty low in the shard levels so we decided to move them out of there. So you’re not going to be encountering that occasional spike in difficulty, it’s going to be much smoother.
dasQuintus : Will there be more cold retaliation support in the future?
If you were paying attention to the recent patch notes we consolidated all retaliation effects into effectively 4. You’ve got physical, you’ve got acid, you’ve got fire and you’ve got lightning. If it’s not one of those 4 it’s not going to get more support. We’d like to keep it focussed on those 4 so that when you are making a retaliation build you know there’s gear support for it, you’re not making a really niche attempt.
Chorripan : may have been asked already but do you have any plans to tweak 2 handers a bit to make them more competitive?
I think that’s something that’s going to have to be touched on in a case by case basis. We have updated several two-handers for the next patch to make a bit more competitive.
359Titus : any chances for steam workshop support in the future?
Probably not. We looked into it and it seemed like more work than it’s worth at this point.
woodjh : Would you as a developer at Crate, at this point would you like to make Grim Dawn sequel instead of more expansions?
From a business perspective we’d do whatever made more sense. I’m not sure a sequel would happen any time soon in any case, but in terms of story telling a sequel probably makes more sense than an expansion. If we did an expansion it would probably be more of a side story like expanding the world lore rather than proceeding with the story of the Aetherials and Chthonians. The Witch Gods still kinda fit, they tied into the war of the gods, they tied into some of the threads we started in the base game and Ashes of Malmouth so that was a great story to tell. I think it was a great point to stop on, but in terms of progressing the main story further I think it would make more sense to do a sequel.
Sashischade : Who is Gogo the Chaotic Mellon?
So during beta we had some people who reached out to us, there were two instances of that where someone had passed away and they were a real big fan of the game and one of their friends wished to kind of put an homage into the game to kinda immortalise them and their enjoyment of the game when they were still around. The first was Praetorian Zedlee, it was a pretty touching story of someone who’s father was unfortunately passing away from cancer, I believe it was cancer, and he was hospitalised at one time, but he would ask his family to give him updates on what was going on on the forum, the game was just left running on his computer whenever he couldn’t play just so he could get back to playing where he had stopped. So we just wanted to give back a little to that guy and it was the best we could do. Unfortunately, the game wasn’t going to be done in time for his father to play, but at least we could have that NPC in there forever defending humanity against threats. Gogo the Chaotic Mellon was actually a similar situation, but someone said he wanted his username to be immortalised which is why the gravestone.
(For those who want to know more about Praetorian Zedlee the thread link is here)
angelskar : Isn’t the next decision you have to make which game to develop the hardest to do in your business?
That definitely has a lot of thought going into it in terms of what we should as a company do next. We had already discussed that prospect a long time ago and what that would be so I am actually starting to ramp up on something else that will hopefully some day be a project you’ll be playing. When, we’ll see and what it is, we’ll see. We’ll talk about that when we’re ready.
RektbyProtoss : what will the overguard nerf exactly be ? @CrateEntertainment
Big change Overguard. First stop, reduced cooldown. We’re going to reduce the stun duration scaling starting at 100% and going up in rank and finally the shield recovery is going to be nerfed, but you can get some of it back through Markovian’s Defense. In addition Markovian’s Defense is actually going to reduce the cooldown more, but it’s going to affect retaliation damage. Markovian’s Defense is going to be the tanky option. If you want to be a really tanky character, for example you might want to be tanking for other characters in multiplayer, this is your choice. But if you want to do damage then Markovian’s Defense is not going to be ideal. And that is something players were actually taking advantage of in their retaliation builds. They would take this transmuter, get all the perks but none of the consequences because the skill modifier did not affect retaliation. Now there’s a new stat that does.
RektbyProtoss : these changes have you considered buffing shield devotions a bit to make shields a little bit universally better?
To answer your question yes, Shield Training is going to be a little weaker and devotions supporting shields are going to be a little stronger. So we’re taking some of that Soldier shield power and giving it to everybody.
princexavier123 : when will you stop supporting gd1?
We have several patches lined up for you guys so there’s still a lot to look forward to. How long we support GD really depends on how GD sales are going. As long as sales are coming in it makes sense to keep things updated to keep the community engaged and keep sales going. Ultimately it’s a financial decision.
GM #160 gave us a preview of the new sets coming our way in v1.1.3.0 plus there’s also a new Loyalist Pack being made.