Welcome back to Grim Misadventures! Excitement is already stirring on the forum for the impending release of our sixth and final mastery: The Shaman; but that is not the only feature coming your way with Build 27.
Grim Dawn’s next major update is absolutely packed with great improvements to the game, including an extensive balancing pass on itemization. Take a look at the exciting new features coming your way to Grim Dawn with Build 27.
Fully Detailed Skill Damage Info
Kinree has been busy with the latest update to the character sheet, and what he has in store for you next has been a long-requested feature. Knowing exactly how effective your gear is for your skills has been a challenge in Grim Dawn, at least without doing extensive math on your own. That ends with Build 27.
The Damage Per Second entry has been overhauled…again! This time it will show you the DPS of any skill you have assigned to your Left Mouse Button. The tooltip will also show the DPS of the Right Mouse Button skill.
But wait, there’s more! The Char II tab will have a new section called Damage Per Hit, which will show you the damage dealt by your LMB and RMB skills. The tooltip will give you a detailed breakdown of the damage by type.
But wait…we’re not finished. Skill tooltips have been overhauled as well. With Build 27, skill tooltips will update dynamically with your gear and skill bonuses, showing you exactly how your gear improves your skills, including a total value for the elusive % Weapon Damage.
New Side-Areas Unlocked
Venture forth into the East Marshes, a treacherous area to the east of Burrwitch intended for high level characters, and face off against two new mini-bosses. In addition, the Grobles of Tyrant’s Hold have discovered a way into the depths of the abandoned keep. Bloodfeast has moved inside this vast dungeon. Adventurers should beware its many traps, but the allure of treasure can be too tempting to resist.
Component and Item Skill Rebalance
One of Grim Dawn’s best features is the huge list of skills you can acquire via your equipment, and now that feature is getting even better.
We took a look at every single granted skill on gear and Components and made them Better, Faster and Stronger. You can look forward to significantly reduced cooldowns on item skills (in many cases the cooldown was removed) as well as more competitive damage with their Mastery counterparts.
Enhanced Loot Tables
Getting a duplicate unique item in the same play session can be fun, if you’re looking to dual wield a particular weapon or are hoping for a better roll on an Epic, but often-times it can become a frustrating experience of getting gear you already have when instead it could be a new item.
Thanks to the latest in quantum algorithms coming with Build 27, we have dramatically reduced the frequency with which you will get duplicate uniques in the same session.
On the Magic item front, we have completely redone the loot tables such that lower level prefixes will fall off sooner, resulting in a significantly increased probability of getting level-appropriate bonuses. In some cases, we introduced additional tiers to affixes so that the upgrades come more consistently. This change will impact both Monster and Crafted loot, which means less junk loot when crafting and when hunting monsters.
Weapon and Armor Rebalance
As we took a look at the balance between various character builds, we decided that the time had come for a long-overdue update to the base values on armor and weapons. For a long time, the difference between weapon tiers has been minimal, and a large portion of your damage actually came from the affixes rolled on the weapon. What this often meant was that finding a new tier of weapons was really underwhelming, as the upgrade would be nonexistent if the new weapon didn’t already have the exact affixes you were replacing. With Build 27, we have made the difference between weapon tiers much higher, while also reducing the magnitude of flat damage bonuses on all equipment. What this change means is that finding a weapon upgrade will be a lot less reliant on good RNG.
However, we realize that this change can have a negative impact on hybrid character builds that deal both Physical and Magical damage, as the values on the magic affixes were reduced. To compensate for this change, we are making two changes. First, Conversion on gear will happen before any % damage bonuses you have on your equipment and auras/passives, which means the converted damage will scale with your bonuses. Secondly, we made Conversion a lot easier to acquire via Components, Item Prefixes and Epics, meaning that not only a portion of the physical damage dealt by weapons will instead become your desired magical element, any skills that deal heavy physical damage will become viable options for hybrid builds as well.
The weapon rebalance will also include an update to Caster weapons, two handed gun damage, and the balancing penalty on Pierce Ratio, so there is much to look forward to for pure casters and gun-wielders as well.
As the development of the game progressed, we felt that armor fell increasingly behind the incoming damage characters take. As such, Armor values have been significantly increased on equipment. This has two major ramifications: melee will have an easier time surviving where they belong, in the thick of it, and upgrading between armor tiers will become much more rewarding.
And more…
Build 27 is shaping up to be one of our most extensive updates yet, with a changelog so long we had to increase the forum post size limit to accommodate it. Stay tuned as we near its release later this month!
Like knowing what is coming up next for Grim Dawn? Check back on 08/17/2015 for our regular development updates!
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(There is more right? :D)