let’s see: Random Disposable Username comes here, posts no substance other than inflammatory nonsense interspersed with personal feelings, and then attempts to pre-empt any criticism by self-fulfilling-prophesizing it’s own ban.
I’d like to know where this exceptionally erroneous train of thought grows so I know what part of earth to give a wide berth.
op should try doing serious shattered realm runs. there’s a lot of unexpected surprises there that could rival d2-d3-d4’s surprise elite mobs that would put even hardcore grim dawn players in life-or-death mode. and op should also try experimenting with builds so that every gd/tq bosses they encounter wouldn’t be slogfests. there’s a substantial number of speedrunners and hardcore gd/tq players that can easily breeze through even the hardest bosses as their daily routines.
this is the worst feedback I have ever seen
Oh yes, I remember fondly being trapped in with Duriel and dying repeatedly in my early times. Such fun.
Questions for OP:
Did you play GD Hardcore?
Did you beat any celestials in HC?
Did you recently play D4 and it made you sad?
Does trolling make you feel good?
Are you hitting on Zantai?
I wish to see the list of GD’s completed achievements on wjm1663’s Steam/GoG/in game profile.
Duchy… Is that you? Madlee coming back and you did not? /s
D2 was amazing for when it came out, and there’s some great mods for it, but this is amazingly low quality bait. Run a Blizzard sorc, a Tesladin, and any Barbarian (or, heaven forbid, bowazon) through vanilla D2 and let’s see how you feel about its balance.
As for boss fights… anybody else remember dying to Duriel on the load screen? 
We must be playing different games in all honesty, i lost count of how many HC characters i lost to random stuff on the game, not just bosses at all. You probably havent even played GD that much to have this opinion.
First off, Grim Dawn is freaking amazing and it engaged me for more than 1,300 hours in the base game and expansions. These guys took Titan Quest and brought it into the current century with great professionalism. They also took into account a lot of quality feedback along the way, which your post certainly is NOT!
Then I discovered the Modding scene and decided to give Reign of Terror a shot due to my disappointment with Diablo 2: Resurrected. According to Steam I now have over 3,100 hours in Grim Dawn. To me that is a testament to how great Grim Dawn is!
Honestly I think there are way more people that love Grim Dawn rather than feeling the way you do. However, feel free to just go away if you don’t like Grim Dawn. We won’t miss you or your negativity…
Now, okay, I know its still an incendiary topic…
…and no, the thread-split-inducing opener post has no merit whatsoever…
…but there are ideas that sparked to my mind afterwards, the core being that damage types are distinct in diablo 2. Yes, all damage types.
Just before anyone grabs a keyboard in fury, I’ll note that this is about vanilla, 1.0 design, and yes, expansion, 1.10, resurrected, and it’s 2.4, 2.5 etc. patches muddied things.
Damage types
Fire is the strongest in terms of raw potential, even more so per mana spent. This is balanced by massive fire resistances across the board in act 4, quartering damage against most monsters.
Lightning is random, and that’s all there is to it. Higher highs, lower lows than fire. Originally Lightning Mastery reduced mana cost instead of boosting damage too. Fewer enemies resist lightning than fire, but of course Lightning Enchanted bosses are doubly dangerous.
Cold is both more expensive per damage point than fire, and also has a weaker boost in Cold Mastery. It’s unique in that all cold damage slows enemies, and this includes bosses. It’s also unique in that it it affected the least of the three main elements by resistances either inbuilt or via cold enchanted, because cold mastery functions as resistance reduction.
Fourth is poison, and the uniquenes comes from being a pure over-time type of damage that doesn’t stack on enemies. Sure it’s calculations are esoteric to some degree, but it lending itself to a “cooldown caster” or “hit and run dagger” playstyle sets it away from the others. It also has the utility of canceling monster regeneration by “replacing” it.
Magic as a fifth, not much can be said about it other than there being little to no resistance against it offered on most gears. Offense wise it’s limited to the necromancer’s bone spear and spirit, for better or worse.
Finally comes physical, which is unique in being based on weapon enhanced damage and player stats (the only damage type to do so), and also the only type of damage that can life steal / mana steal. But also the only type that gets suicidal in melee when Oblivion Knights are present.
now before anyone mentions it, let me reiterate that the expansion with immunities, synergies, runewords, kittable mercenary, then resurrected with it’s sunder charms messed a lot of things up. For example, with Infinity on board, lightning became the most consistent in terms of how much content it can steamroll, and on average dealing the most damage, while Cold is in many ways the least consistent (although it caught up to fire with sunder charms), with fire being in the middle ground with lot of immunes all-round. And yes Iron Maiden was removed from the Oblivion Knights.
Now compare this to fifty shades of Cadenc…
Conversions.
Baiting aside, conversions existed to very limited degree in D2. Fire, Magic, Cold arrows and Lightning Bolt (the crappy one) converted part of the bow / javelin damage to their respective elements, and that was it. Oh and Berserk converted physical to magic. The expansion added Fists of Fire as another form of conversion, but that was about it. Skills like Vengeance and the auras added the elemental damage on top of physical, which remained as a base to leech with.
Yes, the above is only from physical to a single element. Yes Grim Dawn has a whole lot more conversions. Period. It has all the conversions you could ever want.
But what for? What does all this conversion accomplish? Aether to Physical, Elemental to Acid, etc. What’s the difference between the colors of the Forcewave rainbow (missing vitality and acid/poison as of now?) ?
Besides “shiny sparkly colors” and the amount of time Allminoxy is chained to his desk while Zantai stands behind him wondering what to nerf next (for example, he managed to nerf crucible from 6m to 4:00 - 4:40), the main thing is what skills can or can’t be used together while still performing within an expected metric bracket (e.g. 4:00 - 4:40 cr). And what did crate pay for the incredible build variety we enjoy nowadays? Item bloat and a lot of Zantai sessions with spreadsheets. How many primal strike sets do we have that accomplishes the same thing? How many PRM sets, how many Cadence sets? How many Aegis of Menhir sets? How many of them play differently from each other within the same skill? (Okay, for forcewave there are two inbuilt styles to choose from)
But diablo 2 achieved all of this with far less items back upon it’s release.
The reason it worked was because there was no way to scale damage other than skill points (non-physical damage), or weapon damage (physical damage, weapon-based elemental damage), combined the with relevant cast / attack speed. So the same gear could support a multitude of builds that played differently in the sense of piloting, and had different experiences in normal, nightmare and hell.
Important disclaimer here: Yes, it was unbalanced as hell too. Firebolt and icebolt being the absolute most garbage skills until psychic hammer came along are good examples. Also yes some classes had a higher “skill point tax” in their utility skills / one point wonders. Nothing new here, but worth noting.
Conclusion?
I don’t know. Maybe simpler is better. Maybe the fine control that the individual skill/type sets give are better (for fine-tuning balance). Maybe a larger stash or different type of stash would be better. Maybe fewer items to keep track of would be better.
At the moment I’m feeling nostalgic for the way D2 gave each element / type it’s own identity for sure, but at the same time I love how incredibly polished (aside from Korvaak’s Burning-Blade and Putrid necklace conversions regarding pets) and smooth GD is. 
And with that off my chest I can finally start thinking about the acid panetti’s warlock that I left on the drawing table many years ago…
having death at every corner?what is this a moba?its an arpg,your character progresses,eventualy you build to a point where a random snake mans spit doesnt 1 shot you
how about this,if you have such a boner for death at every corner,just dont hyper optimize your character and i promise you will die at every corner
also there are mods if you wanna play grim souls ring
…borne. GD is in the right time period
No, Diablo 2 did not achieve the ssme thing that Grim Dawn did, with fewer damage types and conversions.
Compare the number of builds in D2 and in GD. Case closed.
Oh, but those are not really different builds, amirite, because by the criteria chosen by you, they do not differ in game mechanics enough to be considered different?
Well, I disagree with your criteria. Yes, fire Forcewave is different from cold Forcewave. Those builds need different gear, different Devotions, different augments, different supporting skills…you know, all those things that make up a build.
And if the difference were purely visual, so what? This is a game, people play it because of its visuals (in part)
It achieved what I say GD achieved at the cost of conversions and item bloat: ability to reasonably pair most skills with each other.
Grim Dawn got six years of polish. D2 got about 2(?) years of being progressively more and more messed up, changing design philosophy multiple times, and about 19 years of complete neglect. No surprises here, six years of Z-polish does lend itself to more builds.
But to drive the point home, there are a few patches worth pointing out:
1.07 introduced immunities, meaning that unless you were a cold sorc, you had to pair your main skill with one with a different damage type.
1.08 removed immunity breaking.
1.09 re-allowed it, but at 1/5 effectiveness. Cold immunities were still calculated with CM in mind, except CM no longer broke immunities, making cold the least consistent damage type.
1.10 made things worse, by forcing you to pair your skill with not only a backup damage type, but also synergies to keep up with the monster life bloat.
Yes it was not pretty.
Fire FW tactician, Ele FW tactician, Cold FW tactician. What plays different? I know grimtools does, but what about GD? Maybe add lightning to the mix too.
And mind me, I like the visual differences. Allminoxy/Zantai’s nights were not sacrificed in vain after all, and my cold caster sabo was a fun project, even though I didnt realize it at the time.
It’s just that sometimes I wish for moar, or a different moar.
dis why you can do spam fw, coodlown fw, dot forcewave
that’s 3 different approaches/“playstyles” on the same singular skill
*i get your overall meaning, it’s why i think some of Ceno’s ideas for conduits were hilarious, because it’s significant or even fundamental skill alteration for the same skill, which would then switch things up pretty radically potentially
Blockquote
The devotions for sure.
Using Blizzard feels quite different than Fissure for example.
Ele seekers: different story again. Plus with Ele dmg you would opt out of -RR devotion, so wanna say:
Devotion wise it’s very different. And to me at least devotions play a bigger role.
And I didn’t read every single post here, but isnt the topic if GD or D2 is better? So when a powerful argument is being presented (number of builds), you just cannot - IMO - undermine it with “Grim Dawn got six years of polish. D2 got about 2”. Thats merely the very reason why GD - on this front at least - is indeed better than D2
glad you picked that up.
What do you mean “what plays different” in fire vs cold FW?
Like I said, you will need different gear, different supporting skills, different devotions. That’s a significant difference - gearing and skill planning is half the game in arpgs, if not more. This is not a Dark Souls game.
Sure, there are mechanical similarities in fire and cold FW. But I don’t think that makes them essentially the same skill. For the purposes of arpg standards, they are significantly different.
@Boromonokli I generally agree with your statement, that less is more. Damage types were more distinct in D2. Same with monsters. Maybe their appearance and behaviour in GD is just as varied, but somehow it rarely matters in combat. That’s why Diablol series from Carbot is so popular. D2 had enough unique, memorable, even if a bit absurd elements, that it works well as a base for parody. We have our share of fun in meme corner too, but I’m not sure if all that humour is as universally received.
I’ll add, that I don’t like the concept of conversions, but I like immunities or at least high, irreducible resistances. I didn’t know they were absent on D2’s release.
I’m also sorry to inform, that if I agree with you, it means you’re on the losing side of a debate.
@Res Not even D2 holds a candle to D1 monster variety. Charging demons down in the caves, hiddens, monsters closing in using evasive patterns, Succubi running away, mages teleporting away, uniques that have different mechanics due to AI are all very distinct there, out of which perhaps only Blood Raven’s movement behavior and the Duriel/Claw Viper’s short range charge remained. Funny how the former isn’t mentioned in carbot’s Diablol2 series.
Ironically, in GD we have a lot of charging enemies, and gimmicks on nemesis bosses, but the homing and infinite range nature of the monster charges turning them into autohits, and in general many nemesis bosses featuring autohits or unavoidable disables turns much of it into a spreadsheet rather than piloting question. This in turn reduces perceived variety, despite the bosses and nemeses formally checking all the relevant boxes.
This is made more notable by the incredible discrepancy between normal and boss enemies: Chances are that aside from the skeleton-moss golems, rylok-gargoyles, and aetherial titan-hulks you don’t even recognize the various yellow enemies in GD, which are apparently called “champions”, and heroes are minor speedbumps that register only when they are healers / timewarped or when you miss their loot orb.
In basic D2, chances are that act-bosses and act-minibosses are easier than random encounters in the field. Most culprits are combinations of cursed/extra strong/might-fana auras, cold enchanted death explosions, and former bugged interactions with Lightning Enchanted uniques. Many cases involve the above stuck in a small entrance area of a dungeon downstairs. Can you imagine getting a jumpscare in grim dawn from a few heroes and yellows? (I admit there is Loxmere, but for all the wrong reasons)
On the topic of irreducible resistances, for a lot of classes and damage types they were completely irreducible. Cold mastery sorc I mentioned, obviously Conviction on paladin (and ONLY the paladin, no fancy runeword used on 99.9% of heroes) was there, as well as Amp and Lower resist on the necro (and ONLY the necro, no fancy charged wands and procs).
And if the enemy in question rolled the correct enchanted and overcapped it’s resistances, then Lower Resist didn’t do much in that case. (Conviction and Cold Mastery could still push the enemies into the negatives) So, like much of D2, it was a mixed bag.