Here it is. My long awaited opnion about 1.2. How negative can it be this time?
It’s harder to see the cooldown shade on new, circular health/energy pot buttons. This immediately made me switch to…
Cooldown timers on buttons is a good idea mostly because they are easier to see at a glance than the previous dark tint. However, this makes me wonder why there are no numbers on recharge icons displayed above health bar. Unfortunately, timers have a side-effect of making combat easier. Now I have absolute numbers telling me: “3, 2, 1, press this thing!”, I no longer have to pay attention to tempo of dark tint vanishing.- Why loot beams? They were an option in a very optional mod, so keep them optional. These items are visually screaming: “I’m important!”, but I often leave them on the ground anyway. Same problem with these items being marked on the map - it’s just clutter.
- MI and double rare icons feel out of place. As much as I wanted the game to mark MIs in some way, I still think Rainbow did it better. I already saw new players confused about icons’ meaning. If I started playing now, I would probably think I found a very important item, a piece of puzzle, that I have to wear with some other symbols to unlock special powers.
- Sound effect when legendary is dropped. When I hear it, I always think: “Wow, this item must be heavy. Made of solid steel too!” And just like loot beams - it doesn’t make the item any more useful to me. It will usually remain on the ground. When I heard about “new drop sounds” in 1.2 I hoped for something like in Diablo 2, where every TYPE made a different sound, regardless of quality.
- Now some items have beams, some have special sounds, others have icons or are marked on the map - make up your mind! Pick a street and stick to it.
- Universal evasion should not exist. Just like we don’t have e.g. universal pet for everybody from level 1. If I want a skill, I’ll go get it.
- Potions should be more scarce or expensive to make me hesitate before using them. I should want to wait as long as possible before healing to get the most out of a pot. Making them infinite simplifies another little aspect of the game. Now I find myself routinely using health pot at the BEGINNING of combat for some extra regen to help me facetank. That’s not what they are for.
- No music in base menu. This has to be a bug. Please restore it from 1.1.9.8. I reported it here: No music in base game menu in 1.2
- Sundered border effect has to go and its sound effect is too pronounced. Sunder rarely is even the most dangerous thing in a fight. I understand it is new and you want everybody to notice, but after all it’s just another curse.
- Evasion does not enter cooldown when used while trapped. And yes, it is a bad thing, because all other movement skills do. I died many times due to movement skills being unreliable like that, but I swallowed it thinking: “It’s all part of the game. I have to pay closer attention and be prepared in case it doesn’t go off.” And now Evasion comes along and proves that it wasn’t a bug?! This skill knows if player can move! So why the hell older skills don’t? Just make it consistent one way or another.
- Nerfed arcanes - I don’t fear them anymore. Their temporary nullification feels like any other strong curse now. In case it hits you, just wait for it to wear off. No special actions required. If you’re lucky you won’t even notice that anything happened.
- Buffs no longer have “energy cost per second”, which removes the danger of running out of energy. Especially when fighting energy-leeching monsters. I swear 1.3 will remove energy bar altogether.
- Buffs are auto-cast, but Empybros aren’t? Why? That’s inconsistent.
- Auto-cast buffs are so similar to passives, that we have to explain the difference to newcomers. Turn them into passives or whatever, just remove the confusion.
- Fog removal! Yes! I didn’t realise I wanted it so much. Despite all my negative remarks, this one feature wins me over to 1.2 camp. Sneaky devs. Now Grim Dawn is properly grim, dark, black instead of grey, especially at night. I feel like my monitor re-gained lower half of colour palette. I’m no longer pushing an artificial grey/green/red wall when running north. My character is not named Harry and I’m not looking for Cheryl. My main problem with fog was that it felt slapped equally onto all locations, no matter if it made sense or not. Also it was simply tied to distance from camera, not from character. All in all, it was more of a post-processing trick, than realistic part of the world. In some vertically complex places it looked good, but these were exceptions from the rule. Let me show you.
This type of fog was good:
But this was not:
If I didn’t mention something, then I don’t care about it too much or haven’t encountered it yet in this version. I’m staying on 1.2, but there are still things to fix, options to add and trends I hope 
doesn’t follow.