Grim Dawn completed! Thank you Crate for years of fun!

Grim Dawn General Discussion
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Sappy backstory: I used to have a friend that played GD with me. We spent hundreds of hours pre-AOM just making builds and screwing around, abandoning most at 75 or so. My friend got sick, and ended up in a coma with extremely little chance of ever waking up. I couldn’t do much for him, so I decided to at least honor our times together by completing our favorite game.

This included:

  1. Beating the game and completing all the quests, duh!
  2. Completing all achievements
  3. Completing the “maximum challenge” (which was Crucible 170 with extra spawn, I guess)
  4. Beating all the hidden bosses - Clone of John Burbon, Lokkar and the dreaded Crate of Entertainment.

Since Shattered Realm is an infinite dungeon, it cannot be “completed”. Thus I just decided to clear just SR60 and buy the set to consider completing the content.

A quick note: I am firmly against copying others, so I didn’t do it with any “builds”, I never even read them (with the sole exception of yesterday, checking Maya’s summoner ideas for reference - but summoners bore me, so this was just research ;)). I cleared the content with my own ideas of builds, non-meta as they may be. Though, judging by the power of most of them (facetanking ravager, clearing cruci 170 without breaking a sweat) they are pretty meta without me knowing it.

Today, I completed the final task - beating the Crate of Entertainment, thus, finishing my quest.

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High points of the journey:

  1. Beating Crate of Entertainment! This devilish boss took me over a week of testing and changing my builds, which ended up with a sad conclusion that the mechanics of this fight are highly against my chars, all of them heavily invested in AoE and life stealing. So I created a new character, modifying the Warder (which became a lil uninteresting after reliation nerfs - it was a Dawnbreaker lightning retal dude) to become an Avenger set based healing machine, peaking at 14k HP regen per second if all buffs/procs were activated while maintaining safe stats (around 3.2k OA and DA, 22k HP and 100k DPS, 25% base physical resistance, 50% pr on avenger’s buff and 3300 armor with 100% sorb, finally - 80% stun/petrify/freeze resistance). And… I still couldn’t do it! But it wasn’t the build. it wasn’t my sloppiness. It was the new targeting system. You know how Crate often creates those “NAME ME” things? well they are easy to kill and on death, they do 75% health reduction to you and a massive physical/aether damage bomb, which usually kills you outright. And with non-classic targeting, when the boss moves (or worse, backdashes) you will attack the nearest thing and it’s REALLY easy to accidentally kill it and die. When I finally understood the issue and turned on Classic Targeting, I beat the boss in 2nd try. It still was pretty tight, but I managed, haha, despite a “shattered” mutator. A little hint: soldiers are privileged in this fight. The “Unassuming Crates” which are the source of problems in this fight have high resistance to all CC… EXCEPT disruption, IIRC they only have 18% disruption resistance. So “break morale” stops them from firing for the duration. It also forces them to move towards you, making it easier to hoard them in one place and then move to another. You can beat infinite number of crates if you have a cooldown reduction for war cry - such as Mythical Warborn helmet for -3 seconds. I haven’t used the helmet though.

  2. Beating Callagadra. I did it with fairly crappy Warlord, and I did it the “EZ way”. 100% chance to block, 100% recovery. Callagadra couldn’t damage me at all during Overguard+Absolution. So it turned into a blitz-land some hits for 6 seconds-backdash-kite-repeat kind of game. Callagadra would slowly kill itself against my high physical retaliation during those clashes. Sadly, this was done after retaliation nerf, so it took like 15 or 20 mins. Ugh.

  3. Beating the Hardcore. I was playing untwinked, so I selected the (IMHO) best untwinked build, Phantasmal Blades Trickster (though, as it was pointed to me, Reaper could’ve been a better choice). This build only needs an easy to get, green ghost crossbow to do powerful damage, which lifesteals, is ranged, and pierces through foes! Conquering Kymon on Ultimate scared me but went well (About to face Father Kymon on Hardcore Ultimate - untwinked) and SR25+ was even tougher, requiring some mutator fishing (ugh),but I lucked out with manageable bosses and not a single Nemesis during the whole run. I prayed for no Grava at SR 25-3 (the ultimate middle finger) and fortunately that’s what happened.

  4. Beating Cruci 170+extra spawn point. Honestly? my main build could just take all those nemesis, facetank them and laugh. It’s the same guy that lolwrecks ravager under 2 mins while facetanking him. Secret build! No nerf plz! :smile: For safety reasons I’m not going to say what it is haha. Sadly, he can’t take on Crate of Entertainment, at least not without losing his identity since there’s too much AOE here.

So… is this “THE END”? well, honestly, I am pretty tried after the whole Crate of Entertainment ordeal (honestly, it takes way too much effort to beat. And as a completionist, I had to beat it!). I wish it was a little less crazy (hint: CRATE NERF PLZ @Zantai) and possible to beat for a bigger amount of builds, not just summoners and high dps high regen builds. At least I devised the build that beat it myself, not copied others, haha :slight_smile: But enough of that Crate of Entertainment moaning. I’m pretty sure there will be 3 more achievements next patch (beat the Riggs dungeon boss, beat it at Ultimate, beat it in Hardcore), so I’ll be returning for that, and maybe for MOAR. I still want to finish my 300k DPS retal 2w Dervish and see how well it does against Crate of Entertainment. But for now, I need a vacation. A long one.

For now, thank you Crate for this fantastic game, years of fun, and thousands of hours sunk in. Hopefully, it’s not the end of the road for Grim Dawn, or Grim Dawn 2. Whether it’s a 3rd expansion, or GD2… I will be there, day one. Goodbye for now :slight_smile:

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Congrats on achieving your goals Kaiketsu and sorry to hear about your friend. Life sucks sometimes.

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Sorry to hear about your friend

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Man, so sad to hear about your friend!
You have my admiration and respect for carrying on like this in his name

GG sir!!

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Respect! Very impressive

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Well, done, man. And sorry to hear about your friend. I hope you’ve told your friend about your exploits, I’m certain even if he can’t tell you, he’s hearing it.

I’m working on getting all the achievements as well. Currently working on the HC side of things for those.

Best to you and your friend, and hope to see you back in the future.

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Congrats!!

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Wish you luck. GG Man

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Grim Dawn “re-completed” :wink:

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Some thoughts:

  1. Thank you again Crate for amazing FREE content. While other companies will attempt to monetize everything through DLCs/microtransactions, you’re delivering FREE quality content, which is nothing short of amazing in modern gaming.
  2. Finished the builds before going for the achievements. The dual wielding Acid dude does have unreal single target DPS, but suffers from insufficient endurance… I literally did all I could to make him as tough as possible but he still can’t solo Ravager even on Elite difficulty. Here’s the build:

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/dVbkG7OZ

  1. Also finished a Chillwhisper build I planned ages ago. It is quite damaging and unlike many mages it does not have that annoying “no reliable health recovery” problem. But like most of the mages, it can’t even put a solid dent on Elite diff Ravager. It’s something that troubles many non-facetanking chars: some of the resistance reducers are unreliable (like Rhowan’s Crown - short duration, ground effect - good for the Kraken, terrible vs. Ravager) and the others require you to be in very close proximity to your target (Veil of Shadow) which makes it fairly difficult to keep proper debuffs on a uberboss and those guys have 90%+ allresists, even more sometimes, so you desperately need them. Other than that, fun build. Would recommend for some fun.

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/pZrD1W52

  1. The “20k life regen Avenger” that smoked Crate of Entertainent suffers heavily against Arcane bosses deeper in the Eldritch Realm. Since he’s 100% melee, a big mob with an Arcane boss provides extremely difficult to deal with and once you get stripped of your buffs and auras you can get almost instakilled. And no matter how skilled you are… it can happen. Especially if you miss the boss due to the size of the crowd. Which makes him… pretty specialized, even in his “offensive” variant which includes swapping some defense for some offense/debuff (Korvaak’s constelation is pretty amazing with 3400 OA - you can almost keep your opponents perma-petrified).

  2. My good, old “secret build” has been buffed in 1.5 and is as awesome as ever, which includes facetanking Ravager and strolling through 70+ ER without problems. His only nemesis is Crate of Entertainment. My build does too much AoE damage, which means death against this particular uberboss. Hmph. I guess the only TRUE “do it all” builds are Bird/Briar based summoners, which feel dreadfully boring to play for me. Meh :slight_smile:

  3. My ridiculous playtime has been stretched to an amazing 2488 hours, wow I feel so “no-life” here. Obviously after this much play I suffer a burnout that will probably never go away, so… Unless there’s a 1.6 or 3rd expansion in the making, I’ll be going for now.

Cheers guys :slight_smile:

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There’s definitely a 1.1.6.0 on the way.

Tune in for the next Grim Misadventure on 9th December to see if Zantai will tell us more.

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Sounds great. “I’ll be back”, then! :yum:

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Of course! The world of Cairn needs you :slightly_smiling_face:

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Congratulations!

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I dont want to say congrats and goodbye cause you will be back very soon for the expa… oh wait

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Have you completed the Path of Perseverance quest? If not, then I encourage you to do so. One of the most rewarding and exciting experiences in GD. The idea is to play hardcore without choosing any class till level 100. Then reaching Vanguard of the Three in the last act and collecting a [top secret] reward!

Try it if you haven’t already done so.

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Because of the urge to play some Grim Dawn after a long break, I did things I didn’t do last time:

  • Beat the Avatar of Mogdrogen, Ravager of Minds (the Aether one - which I believe is the toughest one) and Callagadra at ultimate difficulty. I wasn’t aware of it first, because the Grim Tools says the are the same creature on both diffs, but they are significantly tougher at Ultimate, to a point where i.e. Ravager is no longer face-tankable by the same chars that don’t have to move an inch when fighting it on Elite.

It took a bit more of an understanding of their attacks and mechanics to beat them with a melee Warder, but I managed. I also defeated them with my two other builds.

Another thing I didn’t do was to finish all the quests on Ultimate with my main character. A minor thing, but I missed some and I had the opportunity to fix it this time.

I’ve also reviewed the changes between where I originally finished and now - and devised THE Ultimate character. I’m pretty sure it’s the most powerful build in the game. It’s absolutely crazy and excels in EVERYTHING - can beat Crucible, super high Shattered Realm levels, Ubers and that damn Crate of Entertainment thing. Seeing that it was NOT nerfed while Crate nerfed things like:

  • Mortar Trap
  • Blade Spirit
  • Wind Devil (esp. Maelstrom - countless times)
    etc

Makes me honestly question the understanding of the game’s balance in both the “meta” players here and our beloved Crate devs - do people really not know the best builds or are they just under the radar? Huh! Obviously, not sharing. I do not care for other people’s builds, so I - just like the last time - don’t know what’s “meta” and what is not. It is pretty funny however to, like, compare the overnerfed things like Cyclone Archon to both my builds (the old secret one and my newest invention) - I can only giggle as the power gap between those is HUGE.

I did reveal my Warder dude in this thread, tho. He’s nowhere near as good as those two mentioned above, but he still does the trick. I did upgrade him a bit so he no longer can beat the Crate of Entertainment, but does better in Shattered Realm. Still, he struggles to put as much AoE or single target presence as my top tier dogs. This is important because he’s not really able to comfortably pick off Arcane bosses from a distance like they can. And once that miltitude of buffs gets dispelled at even “low” SR of 60-70 - you’re dead. Bam. In the clutter of enemies, it’s sometimes hard to spot the Arcane ones. Especially if there’s more than one. I do avoid a lot of the problems by using the Eye of Korvaak constellation - which seems to perma-paralyze bosses due to my ridiculous crit rate with almost 3800 effective OA - but it’s still a gamble.

And of course, once you get to SR deep enough, you encounter so much DPS that it can break through 14-15k peak regen per second and kill you outright, requiring you to facetank less and do more hit and run - which is quite annoying.

Still, the animations of Zolhan’s and Markovian’s procs are super fun to watch.

What I didn’t do is to go for a world record in SR. Not trying to sound cocky here, but I’m pretty sure my uberbuild could have a shot at it with proper mutators and some “SR guardian arena” luck since some arena shapes force you to face almost all guardians at once and some don’t, and they seem to be picked at random. But the thing with SR is that I find it really boring after a while. It’s not Grim Dawn’s fault. Infinite dungeons were boring to me in other Hack & Slash games as well, such as Torchlight 1/2, Diablo3 or Path of Exile. It always feels a bit pointless to participate in an activity with no clear end.

My ultimate build is also not fully finished, as it would require double rare MIs to operate at peak efficiency. Very specific prefix&suffix. It would probably take months to drop that, if it would be possible at all. Oh well.

Hopefully, we’ll see more of Grim Dawn in the future. Will we? I mean, I obviously know there’s like zero chance for a third expansion, and at this point Crate is probably unlikely to release more free content, but… maybe, just maybe?

That’s about it for my little update. Cheers, friends.

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No expansions, no. But …

How’s your friend btw? Did he recover at all?

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Thank you for asking. Unfortunately, my dear friend died about a year ago, never recovering from the vegetative state.

Life can be a massive ***** sometimes :frowning:

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Sorry to hear that Kaiketsu. Life does suck big time sometimes. :anguished: Still you have good memories of fun times with him and they’ll always be with you.

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Yeah, well, that’s life. Sometimes your friend is the first to go. In the end, we all will. Eternity will not see us separated.

Great to see Crate is still planning to release updates with content. Maybe a revision of the underpowered masteries and skils, at some point. I’d love to play a dual wielding dude, but Nightblade is just… lacking. Meh! And don’t get me started on skills like Grenado. No amount of +damage from items can fix those, perhaps a complex rebalancing would be more in place so that you can make a build based on those that remains viable in late SRs.

One can only hope.