I must admit, I found a nice level 26 pistol “marauder’s fury” (epic) that I want to use. 
Man I really can’t wait for this game. Even with all the new ARPG’s out I still keep coming back to GD alpha.
It’s this. With three difficulty levels (three playthroughs?) we’ll probably hit the cap in playthrough 2 or even early in play3, and the rest of the game will be a gear hunt - we’d have to wait for the next expansion to resume level-based character development. This is why I had initially thought that a cap of 75 was intuitive.
I don’t really care either way, however; if the cap is 50, that just means I’ll be able to perfect my builds faster and accumulate a ton of awesome items near the cap. It’s not like plans to extend the level cap to 200 have been canceled. 
(If anything, this could mean more expansions? So 50 is better than 75?)
All right, to answer Zantai questions :
First of all, I misunderstood aaaaaaaages ago that the level cap would be of 100…Or even 200, dunno why…Then 75…So suddenly hearing 50 is like a rock falling on my head. :rolleyes:
TQ had a high level cap with a veeeeery slow progression…I’ll be honest, I never reached the highest level ever in TQ…I’ve actually finished TQIT only once. So at least the good thing about a low level cap is that you will reach that “ending” rather quickly, as well as the proper ending of Grim Dawn’s campaign.
…But maybe too quickly : It’s rather easy to reach the alpha level cap with a bit of farming. And, as my previous paragraph might have suggested it, a lot of players (myself included) see the last lockable level as the “end of the game”.
I am also indeed concerned about the possibilities to explore builds: 75 levels in TQ would not allow you to max out two masteries at 100%, you still needed to think about your build, choose your skills carefully. Still, you had enough points to really create a build and enjoy it, even with the original cap of TQ (60 levels, if I’m correct).
Now, Grim Dawn has a longer skill tree…With more skills…So the 50 level cap ends up giving you waaaay less possibilities, less opportunities to play with builds than TQ.
I’ll be honest by saying that so far I haven’t really tried a dual-mastery because of the level cap. I find pure one-mastery characters to be more viable, while dual-mastery ones are rather weak. I was hoping that the final cap will erase that problem, like in TQ : you end up having enough points to create a nice build. Right now, with the level 50 caps, chances are I will only stick to one mastery and max it out…Or select a second mastery that will barely get a couple of points here and there…Unless if I decide to invest all of my points on both skill trees, but then I’ll have to play with little to no skills until I reach 50 on both skill trees.
I don’t think that grating more skill points per level is a good choice, since it will unbalance the whole game at this point. Raising the level cap to 60 could be a nice choice, mainly for those continuing in Legendary, Epic, Whatever (yes, I forgot the names of the difficulty levels!)
Now, if you guys at Crate do believe that a 50 level cap is the right choice since it:
a) will force players to be very careful about how they spend their skill points.
b) force players to create new characters to try out new builds.
…In that case, it’s an artistic choice. We’ll have to accept it, even if we don’t like it ^^.
Exactly what I said 
Sure a maximum level of 50 may sound not as impressive as 75 but beyond the alpha we don’t know how the pacing will be when it comes to leveling in higher difficulties.
Also, I’m sure the devs have done play through’s from level 1-50 so I’m certain they know what they are doing.
I thought it was kinda odd seeing all the item requirements being level 50 in the localization files.
The game’s system supports 200 levels which we will eventually get to with expansions. I guess the whole “level 75 is the maximum” was some sort of rumor or misinterpretation that wasn’t corrected soon enough to stop this confusion.
Leveling starts out to be easy but as you continue to get higher in levels it will take a bit longer to get the experience to level up. Plus the fact that you can die and lose exp (the loss scaling to your level so you’ll lose more exp the higher level you are).
Level 25 you can definite put enough points to unlock all abilities and then invest some more points in some skill that you want (like execute with my NB). Since 50 levels is double that I think it’s safe to assume that we’ll be able to invest fully into one mastery (depending on skills) and half on another mastery. Or simply max out both mastery’s to get a ton of stats and then pick a few skills to fill out with the remainder points. OR just stick with one mastery and get the skills that you want and put the rest of the points into that one mastery.
With 150 points (not including points from quests) we can fill out two mastery’s with 100 points and put the remaining 50 in the skills that we would want (if you want).
Anyways, like I said in an earlier post: worrying about something that you haven’t yet tried out is rather pointless unless you have full proof in that the “thing” is flawed. We should continue to trust the devs since they have probably played the full game through 1-50 multiple times and I’m sure they know what they are doing (otherwise GD wouldn’t be as good as it is now).
Nothing really. But from feature list.
That made me believe the cap would be 75.
There earlier we hit the cap the better will our chars fit into expansions.
DeMasked, thanks. I was writing and deleting trying to put my thoughts down. You did it better.
For me it is mastery points management. Personally, I have this itch to “fill the masteries” early on. 100 points would leave me with 47. And buildwise, what then? So many delicious 16 point skills. Take 3 of them? Only?
Seems now mastery points are actual build dynamic balancers instead of two notched point sinks that “you just fill anyway”
@lidden - your quote refers to the number of skill points you can put into each mastery. And currently to bar goes up to 50, but you can apparently sink up to 100 points in it.
The relevant part is:
But this will be for future expansions.
More expansions = more variety = better game! It’ll be great to choose a favorite area in the future to play around in.
Yep, that’s pretty much what I said at the end of my post haha.
Most of us are level 21+ after the full content of Act 1, even without farming. Usually, leveling speed slows down progressively. We gain maybe 10 levels in Act 2, maybe 7,5 in Act 3, etc. This way we would be hitting the level cap very early.
At least this would provide a fluid reward system throughout the first playthrough. It would probably lead to me “parking” most of my chars after they hit the level cap though, and wait for the expension.
Or will we reach a certain point easily, say level 40-45, and really have to work for the remaining 5-10?
I doubt the experience tables would work that way - if the maximum level ever reaches 200, the only way we’d ever hit the cap is through cheating (unless the tables would be adjusted each time the cap is raised).
As always interesting ideas, items and skills. Can’t wait to see the artwork for these and of course find them in game.
I like what I see but my sharp eye detects that Chillwind shot is miss aligned. Which reminds me that this is a more general problem in Grim Dawn.
But what’s the alternative? You can’t really have the leveling progress suddenly drop to… 3-4 levels per Act. Especially after leveling up 25 times during the 1st.
It’s quite common in arpgs to have a progressively slower leveling speed. You will level very quickly from 1-10; slower, but still quickly from 11-20, etc. but will take a very long time from 71-80. If GD applies this concept too, we can safely assume that we will be somewhere in the early- to mid-40s around the end of Act 3.
If we assume that the expansions will be playable for each difficulty and not just legendary+, then the tables will have to be adjusted anyway. Which means you will be at a much higher level at the start of epic than you would be in “vanilla” GD, hence you have to adjust experience gain and experience needed to level up.
Maybe leveling during the 1st Act is just too fast in GD? In Diablo 2, you were usually a few levels short of 30 when you reached Diablo (I remember this clearly, because I always went back to grind to level 30 to unlock the most powerful skills before the battle with Diablo). That’s level 27-30 after 4 acts. Here we’re at 25 after just one act, which leaves very few levels for the remaining 8 acts when the cap is at 50.
It takes quite a bit of farming to hit the current level cap of 25. Most players will probably be around level 16 or so by the time they kill the Warden - and the leveling curve begins around 20, from what I’ve experienced so far. The only reason we’re hitting level 25 in Act I is because there’s nowhere else to go at the moment.
I usually finish Act1 around level 16 - once Act2 is open, people will tend to move on sooner and not linger around until they reach 25, so I wouldn’t look at Act1 as covering up to level 25.
You also have to consider that a lot of leveling will take place in higher difficulties and that we’re building the game so that, while you may not linger overly long farming each Act in normal difficult, as people currently do in alpha, that will become more the case in Legendary difficulty. Part of the reason we’re building a lot of side areas like Hallowed Hill and Depraved Sanctuary is that we want to provide a lot for people to do beyond just the main story line to level in higher difficulties.
Level 16 is reaching very low. My lowest char was level 18 when he killed the warden. More usually I’m between 19 and 20. And that’s before doing any farming, or trying Depraved Sanctuary, Gutworm, etc.
It’s very easy to reach level 22+, even without excessive farming. Sure you can follow the roads, rush to the Warden and kill him at level 16. But from my own experience, and what I read on the forums, the average level seems to be 18/19 at first kill.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing with you. And I absolutely love Grim Dawn so far. I’m just a little concerned that I will have to wait till 2015 before I can continue leveling past 50 in Epic and Legendary. I’m really not looking forward to being at level cap for 50% of the game’s content.
That makes sense. I always wondered how much “headroom” we were given, and if it was normal to farm “extra” content before proceeding to the next act.
I asked before for a rough estimate of difficulty levels. 25N 40V 50E??
Thanks for the clarification!