The bloat in a potential GD2 would be significantly reduced by having fewer damage types. Crate has really tried hard to make every damage type used by a large number of skills, and that contributes to complexity of the game.
Out of my head, here are some revisions to damage types that could be made:
Internal Trauma removed
Physical and Pierce merged
Acid removed
Vitality, or Vitality Decay removed
The number of components should be significantly reduced (cut in half, at least). The overall number of item affixes and drops in general could also be reduced.
Devotions shouldn’t be touched. They could even be expanded, it’s a great system.
And, this will be controversial, maybe we don’t really need so many builds in the sense that almost every skill supports almost every damage type - this doesn’t mean that I’m against that design, it’s just that I think that sometimes it’s even thematically out of place. Cold Grenado, Fire Bone Harvest, Physical Doom Bolt - are they really necessary?
Maybe it would be easier to create variety by creating more skills within a certain mastery than to make sure that every skill within a certain mastery synergizes with almost every damage type present in the game?
[quote=“Evil_Baka, post:20, topic:112727”]
we wouldn’t need Light’s Defender for Lightning Storm Totem and Valguur’s Hunger for Vitality as is the current
It makes sense from the numbers perspective, but there’s one huge problem here. There’s a thematic difference between a lightning caster and a vitality caster, and the difference is shown in the design and appearance of gear. Vitality caster should have dark red, creepy looking armor, helmet…while a lightning caster should have bright, blue gear. By making conversions function the way you describe them here, that difference would be lost.
Unless the conversion would change not only the damage types supported by the gear , but also the appearance of the gear.
Complexity of the game means you don’t get bored of playing it by finishing the game with only one character. Making it simple is equal to making it easy to digest and move on.
I agree, but there’s good complexity and bad complexity. There’s also complexity from the dev side and from the player side. The idea is to reduce the bad complexity and the dev side complexity, with as little effect as possible on the good complexity and player side complexity.
Example of bad complexity - the amount.of components this game has.
Good complexity - dual classing, devotions, conversions…
I don’t know if amount of components is example of bad complexity.
Lots of them have some niche which they fill, some are overused and some are maybe not meta but not everybody have to play “the meta way”
I like that there is plenty to choose from and in My opinion even more would not be a bloat.
Uh? This is a classic damage type in RPGs, why would you remove it? Same for vitality. And chaos and vitality aren’t the same thing before anyone attempts to compare the two.
Zantai has said that if he’s gonna remove damage types in GD2 it would be aether and chaos. More specifically leave it enemy only like it was meant to be at first in GD1.
No, it’s not. Poison is a classic damage type in RPGs, not Acid. I think Acid could be removed. Poison should definitely stay in the game.
As for Vitality, I wrote Vitality or Vitality Decay. I think one of those should definitely stay. Maybe both, make Vitality the only type of damage that has both burst and DoT variants.
Zantai has said that if he’s gonna remove damage types in GD2 it would be aether and chaos. More specifically leave it enemy only like it was meant to be at first in GD1.
I think this would be a catastrophic mistake. Adding Aether and Chaos damage as available to players was a great idea, and it separates Grim Dawn from other RPGs by having damage types which are well integrated in the story of the entire game, and don’t sound cheesy like ‘‘Holy’’, ‘‘Dark’’, ‘‘Shadow’’ or some other generic name. Aether and Chaos definitely need to stay in the game.
I don’t know what RPGs are you playing, but i have played a lot where acid is a damage type. I also fail to see the point of removing acid and allowing Poison to exist given that they share the same exact resistance. This also applies to Internal Trauma, it’s already shared with physical.
Removing Acid and Internal Trauma hardly does anything to remove bloat given that they are always paired with their respective damage type.
When it comes to DoTs, the only thing that should actually change is making bleed the pierce DoT.
Missed this, this makes no sense. There’s an huge difference between hitting someone with a hammer and stabbing someone with a sword.
The reason Zantai would want to remove them from the player’s damage pool is because it doesn’t make sense in the context of the game for the player to have access to them. Why would the player be using the villains’s damage types? It’s just looks incredibly awkward and kind of ridiculous to be using aether and chaos when you spend the majority of the game fighting aetherials and chthonians.
Reminder that humans using aether was one of the reasons the aetherials even managed to enter Cairn.
Maybe Crate could implement different quest paths with one of them being joining the bloodsworn. Then you would have access to chaos damage.
That is my biggest dream to be able to work for the Dead one and fight pesky aetherials !
i dunno how they’ll remove aether and chaos damage from players in gd2. since it has been shown there are many human npcs both living and dead (and also just from item descriptions) that can control aether/chaos/both. unless there will be some cosmic event that purged the aether/chaos influence on player characters of gd2.
i’m sure the arcanists/occultists/inquisitors/necromancers would have suffer alot from that kind of event, and they’ll be forced to adapt the saltiness.
I have played Diablo 2, Dungeon Siege 2, Titan Quest, Torchlight 2 and Van Helsing, before playing Grim Dawn. I cannot claim with certainty, because my memory is not that good, but I think that Poison was present as a damage type in all of those games, and Acid wasn’t. I have also followed, without playing, D3, PoE, Wolcen and Last Epoch, and I am again udner impression that they all have Poison damage, and not all of them have Acid damage. So I’d say that POison damage is more prevalent in Arpgs than Acid damage.
The fact that all DoTs apart from Bleeding share a resistance type with some burst damage does not mean that eliminating the DoT would not remove bloat from the game. There are weapons and skills focused primarily on the DoT, rather than burst damage. And their bonuses often come together, which means additional lines of stats in the item description. Removing those would remove some of the bloat, I believe.
Missed this, this makes no sense. There’s an huge difference between hitting someone with a hammer and stabbing someone with a sword.
Yeah, no sense. Apart from the fact that in the second tab of the character window, under the tag ‘‘Physical’’, the game lists bonuses to Physical, Pierce, Bleeding and Internal Trauma damage. Which suggests that even the devs consider these damage types to be somewhat related.
Look, we don’t have to agree on which damage types are thematically siilar enough to justify merging into one. I do see your point - bludgeoning someone with an axe is different than slashing them with a small dagger. But if we describe the means of inflicting damage to enemies in enough detaiils, we can come up with dozens of different damage types (e.g. someone can say that there is a difference between Slashing, Puncturing and Blunt Force damage…). To me distinction between Physical and Pierce damage is not as impressive or vivid as the distinction between Physical and Bleed damage. You may disagree, that’s fine.
The reason Zantai would want to remove them from the player’s damage pool is because it doesn’t make sense in the context of the game for the player to have access to them. Why would the player be using the villains’s damage types? It’s just looks incredibly awkward and kind of ridiculous to be using aether and chaos when you spend the majority of the game fighting aetherials and chthonians.
Hard disagree.
First, enemies use all sorts of damage types, from Fire to Lighting, to Poison, not to mention Physical. So if the fact that villains were using damage type X is a good reason to not allow players to use it, players shouldn’t use any type of damage at all.
Secondly, in all Arpgs I’ve played, players can play as an archetype of an ‘‘evil’’ character of some sort, usually under the name of Necromancer, Occultist, Dark Mage, Wizard…ARPGs have such ‘‘dark side’’ characters, CRPGs also have it. I don’t understand how it doesn’t make sense that the player character can use such damage and magic types that are also used by the villains. It makes perfect sense to me. In many RPGs there’s a motif of people using forbidden knowledge, ‘peering behind the veil’, balancing between the power that comes with such magic and loss of control over it…Literally, the class description of the Inquisitor in GD refers to that. Both the Luminari and the Giildam Arcanum are explicitly described as studying the Aether and the Witch Gods and Chthonians, the former in the attempt of controlling it, the latter in the attempt of protecting the Erulan empire from it. So I wuld say thet there are perfectly good explanations in the game of why the player is able to use such damage types.
Now, Crate can do whatevere they want with their game and its potential sequel. They can decide to remove swords as a weapon type if they want. I wouldn’t like that, and I think it woul be a bad business decision, because people like swords in ARPGs. Similarly, I think removing Aether and Chaos damage from player character would be a bad business decision, that would irk a lot of potential buyers of GD2. These damage types are well integrated into the larger story of the game, there are good explanations of why players can use it, they are thematically and visually appealing, and in lack of better word, cool. After being available in GD, I would find it hard to understand why they would be removed in GD2. They are so much better than the standard alternatives to natural and elemental damage types in RPGs (Magic, Shadow, Holy, Umbra…). But, I don’t work for Crate, what do I know.
(I wouldn’t be suprised if Zantai thought to himself that removing Aether and Chaos from the game in v1.1.9.5. would be a good compensation for reverting the Rah’Zin nerf…but, since I failed to tag him, Aether and Chaos are safe. For now)
I’d much rather see elemental DoTs removed. Basically, I’d be perfectly fine with these damage types:
Physical
Bleeding (DoT only; alternatively, Bleeding can be the DoT version of Physical, to simplify the resistance side of the equation)
Fire
Cold
Lightning
Poison (DoT only)
Vitality
Vitality Decay (I guess it’s okay that one damage theme has a burst version and a DoT version)
Aether
Chaos
When you already you have fire, lightning, cold, physical, pierce, vitality and acid at your disposal, why you would use the damage types that the villains highly resist? Yeah, chthonians don’t resist aether, but they also don’t resist pierce, physical and overall don’t resist the others (there are a few enemy types that highly resist one like some chthonians resisting fire).
It’s also silly to use damage types that are highly corruptible against enemies that also highly resist them (humans being corrupted by either is represented in the game by enemies like Abaddoth). So why risk corruption fighting them when you can just use the other damage types that don’t cause corruption and kill much quicker? Seems like a much better strategy.
What a bizzare concept for humans - using every tool they can decipher and learn? Especially enemy’s.
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