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.
Congrats!!
Wish you luck. GG Man
Grim Dawn “re-completed” 
Some thoughts:
- 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.
- 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
- 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
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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).
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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
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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
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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.
Sounds great. “I’ll be back”, then! 
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Of course! The world of Cairn needs you 
Congratulations!
I dont want to say congrats and goodbye cause you will be back very soon for the expa… oh wait
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.
No expansions, no. But …
How’s your friend btw? Did he recover at all?
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 
Sorry to hear that Kaiketsu. Life does suck big time sometimes. 
Still you have good memories of fun times with him and they’ll always be with you.
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.
Since it ended up as a blog-kind of topic anyway, I guess I can share the final entry.
I wasn’t satisfied with me kinda sliding through Shattered Realm, but at the same time, I had a hard time selecting a “satisfying” level to end on since it’s, well, infinite.
I finally settled on 80, as this is the level which unlocks the final waystone, so it kinda marks the end of the content.
This is by no means an achievement, since people went way above 100. I am very sure however I could do way above 100 with my main character as well, since 60-80 was easy and I just went through it like a hot knife through butter. Maybe one day… the problem is, that infinite dungeons are just… meh for me. I’m not exactly a fan of things you can’t beat, or complete… it lacks that satisfaction of completion. You have to decide yourself that reaching level XYZ satisfies you. Oh well.
Side notes:
- Why on earth does the portal open up far away from my char at times? it’s just 20-30 seconds of pointless walking through an empty SR level. Huh.
- I also don’t get why, after you beat the last guardian, the music doesn’t change. Keeps going. Where’s the triumphant ender? I killed the guardians already!
- Why is there no Steam Achievement for SR higher than… umm… 25 I think? The quests end up at 50. The SR armor unlocks fully at 60. The final waystone unlocks at 80. Any of those would make a fine achievement. @Zantai any explanation?
Even more side notes: I retired my #2 (Wildblood Ritualist) after the nerfs and will probably check how my buffed Warder fairs against SR now. Still don’t have a clue what else can he do against Rashalga spawn at high SR except fighting her after eating Aether Cluster for 10 seconds, then running in circles when it is on CD. Rashalga’s “shotgun” does around 500k damage on SR65 already if you eat all of it. Lol. He’s pretty much purely a left-click kind of character focused on physical damage. Yeah, same guy that I used for killing Crate of Entertainment for the first time… Back when it was quite an achievement, haha. With only a couple lame youtube videos about it Either way - now I’m fully satisfied with my completion, since I unlocked the final piece of content I guess I can say GD is now REALLY completed, haha.
Have you found all the new areas and defeated the new bosses that were introduced in 1.1.8.0?