Generalized items vs. build-tailored items

Grim Dawn Gameplay Discussion
1

One of the things that bugs me a bit in GD is just how many freaking items there are that scream that they have been tailored for a very exact and very narrow range of builds.

On playthroughs I end up using, say, a PRM sorceress and come across epic armor giving high piercing damage modifiers and +2 to blade spirit or something like that – so, so obviously tailored for a nightblade… or like I’m playing a trickster and discover a sword or boots or something which gives a major physical damage bonus and +2 to blade arc and +1 to blitz, e.g.

It seems to maximize the amount of unusable loot I end up stashing on a character that’s useless for that character but too potentially useful for others to simply leave on the ground or sell… but lack of usability and stashing isn’t the issue that bothers me the most.

Of course all games like this will have characters collecting unusable gear that they still want to keep for other characters – a melee build is obviously going to run into some ranged weapons, tomes, caster-based robes, things like that, and when it’s to a healthy degree I don’t mind. But this one has even the most generalized kind of base armor and accessories often tailored too much for specific builds IMO that makes this issue more pronounced than ever before. I never noticed how limited the stash space was before GD because I was often finding more equipment worth using than stashing in similar games prior.

What I’d like to humbly request, and not drastically by altering existing items and pissing players off, is simply to consider when expanding the item database the introduction of more generalized items (armor, accessories in particular) which are arguably useful to almost every single build, and to try to avoid introducing ones that scream that they are for a trickster, e.g.

A blatant example of properties which degeneralize (“tailor”) items too much are ones that add to specific skills within a mastery. More general is adding +X to an entire mastery. Totally general is +X to all skills of any mastery. Another example of a tailored property is focusing too much on one damage type. A more generalized property is improving all damage. OA and DA and resistances are useful to all builds, that’s an example of a generalized property. Healing procs are useful to all builds. One that deals aether damage is not. Attack or casting speed bonuses are slightly less generalized than total speed or run speed.

An example of an early-game item that exists that does this well is Frizzick’s Utility Pack. That’s a belt I’ve collected a dozen times and have worn on so many characters around level 25-30 because you can’t look at the belt stats and say it’s made for any specific mastery or combo of masteries. It’s just generally useful.

An example of a late-game item that I’ve recently crafted which highlights both the problem and the solution is Mark of Divinity. To me the item is almost brilliantly generalized and is arguably useful for any build – but there are two glaring, gigantic warts: +3 to Flame Touched and +2 to Ulzuin’s Chosen which makes it feel kind of retarded when worn by someone who doesn’t have demolitionist. Why, oh why, does such a brilliantly generalized item have to have such a wart as to scream that it’s made for demolitionist? Is there any item like this that’s made for a soldier, an arcanist, occultist, nightblade, shaman? It fortunately doesn’t detract from the general utility (the item achieves what I would like to see in spite of this) but that item shows both more of what I want to see and what I don’t want to see.

The reason I want to suggest this is less about undesirable loot stashing and more to encourage diversity once a build is chosen. This game is brilliant when it comes to build diversity when it comes to masteries, skills, and devotions. However, too often it feels constrained at the very last stage which is gear selection. Too much gear feels too tailored to exclude most builds, and I think that limits the diversity of gear we can see worn once someone has chosen their masteries, skills, and devotions. Having more general-purpose gear available of the types I mentioned above should help encourage people to mix things up and see the very last stage of build design (gear design) take on a wider variety. It should also help keep our stashes and mules from becoming cluttered with things our particular build can’t use but are too good to pass up.

2

You would have liked Grim Dawn Early Access, in the days when Frizzick’s Utility Pack and Mask of Delirium each gave +1 All Skills and where almost universally used. >.>

I find your post largely confusing. I think, as particularly evidenced with your complaint about Mark of Divinity, that you’re getting to caught up on one or two stats of items that seem as though to force an item into a narrow usage spectrum. I’ve used Mark of Divinity on tons of characters. Probably around 20 at this point. Only 3 or 4 have included Demolitionist. I have very rarely used any item to its fullest extent, and I think that’s a good thing. If no build can use 100% of an item, then that probably means there’s several builds that can make decent (70-80%) but different usages of an item, which in turn means that that item is helping diversify character design.

Don’t get me wrong, I get your point about wanting generalized items and to some degree I can relate. But Grim Dawn hasn’t had a solid track record of such items, as they usually turn out being overpowered. The Clairvoyant’s Hat is a good example of this. It’s still arguably too strong as it covers too many bases that a lot of builds need. Same thing with the Clairvoyant’s Mantle, too. Justicar’s Handguards are another all-encompassing item that are borderline overpowered.

3

The Mark of Divinity to me is brilliant in practice because it does achieve generality. I wear it on a character that doesn’t have demolitionist at all. I just wanted to highlight how the demolitionist skills pull the item away from a generalized realm and tailor it to a demolitionist (that part was more of an example for the devs of how items lose their generality if you do that too much). Fortunately the other properties are too good to pass up to make the item lose its appeal for those who aren’t demolitionists – so the item highlights both what I’m suggesting to have more of, and what I’d like to see avoided. Fortunately it has enough going on the general front and wasn’t too skewed towards demolitionist. Imagine if Mark of Divinity lost its resistances and replaced that with massive bonuses to fire damage – that’s where it starts going too far, too tailored for the demo (right now it’s not so much to lose its appeal to a wide range of builds, thankfully).

4

A lot of my suggestions tend to kind of cross a dangerous territory when balancing is concerned, since they focus on player creativity and freedom and diversity. Balancing difficulty is a definite glaring con with everything I suggest. The more diversity the game allows, the harder it becomes to balance, since the more effective possibilities there are, the harder it is for the developers to anticipate what players will do and make sure the game is balanced in that scenario. A game filled with players combining things in the most creative ways the developers never expected is ripe for imbalance, but on the other side a game where the developers have already anticipated and tried almost everything everyone else thought up sounds incredibly dull. :frowning:

Balance to me was never that big of an appealing point to me in RPGs. If one was advertised as the most well-balanced game in the world, I would probably not even want to try it. It almost seems like a level of imbalance is necessary to spark interest and rich variety. I like it when the most effective ways of playing the game themselves seem to offer plenty of other alternatives (possibly some not yet explored because so many possibilities exist that don’t quickly become filtered away as being sub-optimal) to be just as effective. With enough freedom and diversity will always come the feeling that there are ways to exploit combinations in ways that yield vastly more optimal results, but the game still has a lifeline to me as long as all those ways do not feel rapidly exhausted.

The easy solution is to constrain and constrain effective possibilities which makes the game easier and easier to balance when everyone who is a blademaster is sharing largely the same gear choices and when the game promotes things like sets tailored for them, e.g., but it reduces variety. :frowning:

Variety to me is the spice of life and balancing the game definitely does become harder with it. I think the game has a boatload of variety in a brilliant way when it comes to character builds, but feels a bit like it highlights its constraints when it comes to gear choices and applicable equipment for that build. It’s something that screams out to me every time I visit my stash and my many mules along with almost every time an epic or legendary drops – how many items just don’t apply to any but a very narrow range of builds.

5

I was mulling over your point a little bit more (for which I overall agree that giving more builds a wider range of options about gear risks imbalance)…

But let us imagine a game where every single item was totally generalized – every single item was useful for every single build. To me that would kind of be boring (I’m not suggesting extremes like this – all my suggestions are always about more subtle expansions to the game to kind of dial certain things down a notch and without affecting anything that’s already there).

In that extreme case it’s not necessarily harder to balance so much because that would put the spotlight on balancing the character builds – not so much the items. All the builds could all potentially use the same items, so that pulls the focus away from the items themselves and more towards the builds. It arguably simplifies balancing.

On the flip side, take an extreme case where every single item was made for a specific build – maybe even making it so like a witchblade is absolutely required to use a certain shield (warder or commando or battlemage couldn’t, e.g). In that case the balancing focus has to shift not only on balancing every single possible build but balancing the items designed for every single possible build. Such a game would also require so many items to offer enough variety of choices for every possible build out there (ex: you would need 15 times more shields in the item database if each one only worked for an exact pair of masteries).

So I’m not absolutely sure it would be so hard to balance GD if it had more (not all) general items. If so it might highlight more IMBA issues with character builds themselves more than the gear.

6

I can see where you are coming from, and generally agree; however, the latest patch has put most of my fears to rest in regards to itemization as more sets and items are released for more classes and builds.

What I have a real problem with is the amount of items and devotions with pet bonuses, as very few builds outside of the pokemon master conjurer make any use of pets at all, yet there is a massive amount of things that help pets and no one else. I think this is something Crate should focus on, not so much the very specific bonuses but the sheer amount of them for very specific builds that do absolutely nothing for anyone else.

7

The problem with having generalized items is that you end up with a very select few items that everyone uses and an enormous pile of crap no one uses because X is always better than Y. I would much rather have a wide variety of items wherein a given item is good for a small handful of builds and there’s only a slight bit of overlap than have “are you melee? here’s your shopping list. Deviation will just make you worse. Are you a caster? here’s your shopping list. same precaution as melee. Everything else in the game? Hot garbage! Ignore it.”

I’ve played games like that and it was awful. Everyone wanted the same dozen or so items and no one traded anything they didn’t have extras of. I’d much rather have a variety of specialized gear over uniforms.

8

2 OlerOnion:
Man, the more I read you the more I believe you should write a book. Too bad I didn’t meet you when I was squishing mandatory 100+ A4 pages of diploma out of a single math formula adjustment.

Jokes aside, generalised items are a bad thing to do in most cases.
Either they are good for majority of builds and therefore are OP, or they will always fall behind items with specific build in mind. First makes them mandatory, second makes them useless.

9

That’s assuming you have a handful of items in the game that is OP for every single build. It is not the most difficult thing to prevent.

Take Diablo 2 pre-expansion as a comparison. I played that one for over ten years (not constantly, but off and on), and it did not have the problem you suggested to the extent that this game suffers. Also in the ten years of playing, I never really felt like my stash space was extremely limited. I had some mules but that was over the course of ten years of collecting things – so many things I could just use quite quickly. The things I was stashing were mostly weapons – like I found Titan’s Revenge one time on a sorceress playthrough in hell difficulty – I stashed that for a javazon to use. Armor and accessory-wise, so many uniques I collected were useful for that immediate build as well as so many others.

Meanwhile in Grim Dawn, already on my first playthrough, I’m dying for more stash space. This is just my very first chest-piece mule (I have 6 mules just for chest armor now in just 7 weeks of play):

Why do I feel like the stash is so limited? It’s simple: I’m collecting all kinds of things like nighthunter’s chestguard, bloodreaper’s coat, gunslinger’s jacket, miasma robes, etc., along with their empowered variants – all which apply to very specific builds. I can’t even immediately transfer them to one of my existing characters (and I have many) because they don’t have much use for it either – they’re so, so constrained in utility. Even bloodreaper’s coat which screams nightblade didn’t apply to my nightblade so well leveling up since it’s heavily focused on piercing and bleeding, and he’s focused on fire and burning (saboteur). It’s like how many builds have immediate use for a gun that focuses on poison damage or cold damage? In fact, the only unique mid-level chestpiece I’ve collected that is arguably really generalized among my 6 chest-piece mules is Explorer’s Tunic and the set overall. Is Explorer’s Garments one of the most OP sets in the game?

I don’t do any trading so this issue is exacerbated for me. Those who engage actively in trading, I can see, won’t have the problem to the same extent. If this game’s focus is heavily on a trading economy among the player base, then designing a lot of items which are narrow in terms of applicability does make sense with players trading things they don’t find useful all the time with those who do. It does heavily penalize self-found play styles though as our stashes get filled to the brim with items for some very, very specific build to use that doesn’t apply to any of our 20 characters.

The real world analogy of what Grim Dawn does to me is like a world where if you’re a surfer, you should only wear surfer clothes – they’re the only acceptable ones for you… unless you surf a longboard, in which case you should wear longboard surfer clothes… If you listen to rap music and practice martial arts, you should only wear hip-hop kung-fu outfits. It doesn’t encourage diversity that goes beyond the diversity of cliques available. Of course if people hand me hip-hop kung-fu clothes in such a world and I neither listen to rap music nor practice martial arts, my closet is gonna get full of junk while I look to make kung-fu hip-hop-loving friends who might actually want it as a gift I can pass to someone else.

This game still manages a great deal of diversity in spite of the very constrained gear because character builds have lots of diversity. The game is beautiful in that regard. Yeah, vanilla shamans are all wearing Ultos all over the freaking place, but there are a lot of other builds so a lot of other outfits… but those builds also have a very narrow range of gear they can find useful to wear in their closet.

Meanwhile going back to Diablo 2, what javelin should Javazons use? Yeah, the answer boils down to either Titan’s Revenge or Thunderstroke – the player base does converge there and endgame variety is limited for that one and only weapon slot. All games outside some ideal, likely unachievable paradise will suffer this issue when it comes to a single equipment slot or two. But what chest piece? What helmet? What belt? What amulet, rings? There the optimal choices when designing a lightning-oriented javazon are so rich and varied, arguably far richer and diverse than Grim Dawn, because a lot of the item database doesn’t scream: “This head piece is for a Javazon. This chest piece is for a blademaster. This belt is for a soldier.” And fixing the lack of diversity problem there for javazons all using the same javelins is much easier: all the developers have to do is introduce some more equally-useful (with different pros and cons) javelins to the database. They don’t have to introduce a whole set of javazon armor variants or accessory variants to compete for every single other slot just to encourage more diversity among Javazons.

To me GD is brilliant when it comes to encouraging a very diverse range of character builds. But the equipment choices within a particular build boil down to a lot of the item database screaming that “This outfit is not for you, trickster. This one’s for a saboteur. This one’s for an occultist specializing in poison damage. This one’s for a soldier focusing on Menhir’s Will and Bulwark. This one’s for a dual-wielding pistol shooter…” until we’re looking at an extremely limited set of choices when it comes to suitable uniques for a very specific build. The issue of stash space isn’t even the big issue to me, it’s just a symptom of a deeper root problem (though of course having a near-infinite stash would at least mitigate the symptoms).

10

In what world do you need 6x Obsidian-Plate Cuirass?

11

Yeah, I have lots of dupes among my mules admittedly! Though I think the number of dupes I collect tend to kind of make me feel stronger on this issue about just how many items have such a narrow range of purpose – it tends to get reinforced with each duplicate I find that isn’t for any one of my single characters. One of the problems for me as a newer player is that because I don’t have much use for many of these, I don’t know what ones have the most desirable rolls for those who do.

So it’s difficult for me to eliminate duplicates until I’ve really discovered their utility and found a build that wants to wear it. It’s one of the problems to me that gets exacerbated a bit in GD with so much tailored gear.

I collect so many dupes which I save for some future character and only then can I start to realize which ones among the dupes have the best rolls and which ones I might as well just toss away. It’s also just laziness because it doesn’t feel right to just leave an epic or legendary on the ground or sell it, so I end up stashing it and then sort it all out later.

I think I’ve collected like 40 Guardman’s pieces already (probably completed the set at least 2 or 3 times) but they’re scattered across multiple characters (not all in my mules) and I get lazy sorting it all out. I also played for the first few weeks without Crucible so I didn’t have such an easy way to mule and get a level 1 mule without doing any quests. TBH one of the top practical appeals of the DLC for me is the ease of muling. I love the arena fights but probably the number one reason I use Crucible is for muling.

My latter mules do have less duplicates. I’m starting to get to the point where I just don’t pick up a lot of epics I’ve seen before because of the duplicate problem. That was my first mule so it was made at the point where I wasn’t sure how valuable everything was, and what rolls were desirable on everything so I just cycled through all my characters and put their chest pieces into the transfer bin without bothering to filter out dupes.

It’s like I got a boatload of slith necklaces on my very first playthrough, far more than needed for that rover guy quest in Wightmire. But I ended up hoarding it anyway instead of tossing it since I had no idea whether or not they’d be useful later. I tend to hoarde the most when I’m not sure whether my immediate character or future character will have need for an item. Same with chtonic seals and so forth – the game is pretty greedy on inventory space, especially if you don’t know exactly how valuable everything is. Fortunately I realized later that they were valuable crafting components. Meanwhile I sold my first set of troll bonecrushers and spectral longswords only to realize painfully later that they were valuable components, so for a while I was paranoid about even selling or ignoring MIs.

12

Apologies, I’m verbose in nature! One of the problems for me is that English is not my first language but I know it well enough having worked for American companies for years but not to level of confidence that I’m sure I am being understood. I am not 100% positive that I am using the right words or sentence structure let alone writing in a way that makes perfect sense. Human communication is riddled with ambiguities even for the language I’m most fluent in, let alone English.

Jokes aside, generalised items are a bad thing to do in most cases.
Either they are good for majority of builds and therefore are OP, or they will always fall behind items with specific build in mind.

Do you like the devotion system? Because all builds can use all devotions. Do you like being able to pick a second mastery? Because that allows a shaman, for example, a wide range of choices as to what else he might choose.

To me if devotions were designed kind of like a lot of the gear in GD, shamans would not be able to use the same devotions as soldiers… and you would only be able to pick one mastery – that would emphasize specialization over generality and it is less prone to balance issues for sure, but tends to push people to make more of the same choices given a particular build.

Flexibility and rich diversity are the arch-nemeses of game balancing and I imagine the game had its share of balancing issues early on (which I regretfully missed) in the most flexible and rich areas when it comes to player choices (being able to choose two masteries, being able to choose any devotion with any mastery, and being able to combine procs in so many creative ways), and yet the game’s appeal would be largely lost on me if it weren’t for these types of flexible choices so prone to imbalance (devotions, two masteries, procs). Imagine how much more character build diversity we would have in spite of having so much already if we could choose three masteries instead of two, yet also how much more difficult the game becomes to balance, and there I’d think that three masteries is going overboard and would be way too difficult to balance to any sane level – being able to choose two is already extremely interesting.

I believe a lot of the most brilliant parts of the game are the result of being able to mix and match ideas among generalized options available to all builds (like procs, geez I love the idea of procs from a game design standpoint) – the less brilliant parts to me are the parts that feel tailor-made to a particular build. The rich diversity we find now within character builds in the game comes largely from the former – from effective choices available to everyone.

A lot of what I desire is a similar kind of flexibility when it comes to gear choices, and not to an extreme extent. Just the introduction of some more generally-useful gear to me would mitigate it a bit. It doesn’t even have to be so powerful and maybe not even endgame gear from a priority standpoint where balancing becomes most difficult (Explorer’s Garments and Frizzick’s Utility Pack in its current state as an example of the type of ideas I’d like to see more as the developers expand the item database) – where I felt I suffered the most was on the earliest playthroughs. Endgame players can farm a lot, stash, mule, trade among the vast, vast array of items they might possess that none of their characters want to use. Self-found early playthroughs is where I felt the most that I was collecting and hoarding the most amount of not junk, but stuff that I just can’t use in any one of my characters.

I would like to see more endgame variety for sure. It does tire me to see shaman after shaman build using Ultos, e.g. That is different from Diablo 2 and seeing Javazon after Javazon using Titan’s, because the Diablo 2 example was only converging on one weapon slot – not on an entire outfit. The Diablo 2 convergence is more analogically equivalent to all aether-based arcanists converging on Agrivix’s Malice, not an entire outfit – just a one-slot convergence of the player base which isn’t monopolizing player gear choices quite as much as an entire outfit. But that’s not as big of an issue to me as the mid-game unique gear, which seems so sparse and riddled with duplicate drops, constantly emphasizing that among the vast array of items available, only a very, very small fraction are really useful for a given build even during a player’s very first self-found playthrough.