Welcome back to Grim Misadventures! Did you know that Grim Dawn is packed with deep gameplay mechanics that may not become obvious when you first start playing? Today we would like to shed some light on these features.
Work on the Arcanist mastery is progressing smoothly and we are preparing the final touches before it goes into closed testing. This is when we lock in the skill set and have the final icon art, spell effects and sound effects prepared. We expect the Arcanist, and Build 21 with it, to be available to the public by early October.
WYSIWYG
Now back to our lesser known features. Chief among them is the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) loot system. The veterans of the game will tell you that when you see an enemy wearing armor or weapons, they will drop that equipment. Many times, that equipment will drop as “poor” quality and dissolve, but when you see an outlaw hero approaching you with a sword that sparks lightning, you know you are in for a serious fight.
While the challenge may be greater, so is the reward. When you defeat this insidious lowlife, he will also drop his ill-gained Unique item. What this boils down to is that enemies can carry powerful equipment that can seriously boost their potential while also previewing to you the deadly arsenal soon to be at your disposal. This can also really change up how you approach a fight. If a boss spawns with a weapon that burns mana, you might suddenly find yourself low on precious energy. Likewise, an enemy wearing a ring that provides high resistances might boost their survivability. The possibilities are as limitless as the combinations of loot in Grim Dawn.
Ultimate Skill Levels
As you explore Grim Dawn’s loot-filled dungeons, you will eventually come upon items that grant bonuses to specific mastery skills or even a bonus to all skills in a mastery. As long as you have at least one point in a skill, it will benefit from these stats and the level of the skill will turn blue in the skill tree.
This serves as a great way to free up your skill points so you can spend them elsewhere, but you may notice that if your skill was already maxed out, its level will actually go beyond what you can normally invest in it. These are ultimate skill levels and the only way to gain them is through items with skill bonuses.
For the first few ultimate levels, skills will generally scale as they did up to the max rank, but as you reach the highest ultimate levels (all skills can go up to 10 levels above the maximum in the skill tree) you will gain higher and higher bonuses. Note that percent-based bonuses on skills will generally not scale this way and may suffer from diminishing returns as you continue to invest in them.
Reaching the ultimate levels of skills is a powerful way to optimize your character.
Crafting Enchanted and Rare Blueprints
With Build 18, we introduced a major new feature to Grim Dawn with the addition of Crafting. By visiting the Burrwitch Outskirts, you can recruit either Angrim, the master of martial weapons and armor, or his apprentice Duncan, the master of arcane crafting, to join you in Devil’s Crossing. Each of them comes with their own unique selection of blueprints as well as crafting bonuses which they apply to all weapons, armor and accessories they create.
What you may not have known is that there are some rules to how their blueprints work. Enchanted items are the equivalent of Grim Dawn’s gambling system. They are easy to craft and cheaper than buying items from the vendors, but you never know what you will get. However, what you can count on is a high chance of generating Rare items.
Though the color of the blueprint might imply that only Magical quality items come out of these blueprints, that is not the case. Enchanted recipes can create anything from a single affix Magical item to a double Rare affix item of incredible power. The odds of striking such a jackpot are significantly higher than when hunting the vendor’s wares, but how many iron bits and scrap you spend to acquire one will depend entirely on how fortunate you are! So good luck out there!
Rare-quality blueprints take some of the chance out of the equation by coming with some appealing base attributes. For this, they are more expensive to craft than their Enchanted counterparts, but you can always count on them having a few useful stats regardless of what affix they roll. However, to compensate for their base stats, a Rare-quality blueprint will never generate two affixes. This means that rolling a single Rare affix on one of these blueprints is the highest quality item they will generate.
Now go out there and craft some items!
Would you like to know more?
Is there a game mechanic you would like to know more about? Ask us in the comments below! We are actively working on a game guide which should answer many questions about the inner workings of Grim Dawn (it will be posted right here on our website). Your questions will help us figure out what it needs!
For our next development update, check back on 09/29/14!
And he also crafted me an amazing two-hander I can use at level 36 so I think you should boost the max level now.