Patrons, readers, enthusiasts, this is Zantai and I bring news from beyond the veil of development. For those of you eager for another collection of screenshots, I’m afraid this is not your update.
While I had continued some environment work over the past two weeks, my primary focus was on dissecting and absorbing all that there is to know about the skill system for Grim Dawn. Skills in Grim Dawn had been structured upon a large set of use cases, which we then manipulate to create the player-hating hero and boss monsters. While the system gives us a lot of flexibility, it is not immediately intuitive. Given that I am already insane, this had little impact on my wellbeing and health.
I learned by doing, and we now have dozens of barebones skills with clear descriptors and use cases. This also translates to some documentation I will be compiling, with the benefits passed off to the modding community when our tools are released to the public.
This process naturally progressed to the creation of item affixes. Do you like cool items? We like cool items. We should probably have cool items! I’ve taken my skill-creating skills to craft some really out there stuff for our item pool. It’s too early to reveal it all, but I’m excited to wield them against the forces of “people who dislike my character”. Hint: it’s not only Legendaries that get a special treatment.
Having tackled environments, skills, and item affixes, not much remains before I am fully ramped up on all that entails Grim Dawn’s development. I am a jack-of-all trades after all. Soon, all that will remain is to tackle Medierra. I imagine it will go something like this:
I’m wondering how much direct relation there is between skills and affixes. My immediate thought has been ‘affixes with +skill bonuses’ - mostly for single skills, if this is for early (not legendary) items. On a second thought I can image other affixes which increase damage, range, AOE, skill-activation-chance or lower recharge time, energy costs or improve (de-)buffs … ah, maybe too powerful, if they work globally. On a third thought I remembered Affix Skillz. medierra mentioned you might find items with affix skills starting from level 18 - what will be the minimum quality of such items?
will eagerly wait for the upcoming update. from the title i expected a glimpse like a 5% chance of 200% damage, 10% ADCtH :p! well, its great to be informed of the progress and development.
I’m still waiting to see a piar of Partialy Digested Greaves of Gastric Acid after harvesting them from the bowels of a monster unfortunate enough to cross my path.
That said i’m eager to see what ‘specialness’ treatment the non-legendaries will recieve.
And when you and Medierra do your lightsaber posturing, remember not to look directly into the lightsaber. It’s like staring into the sun and can make you go blind.
I can’t elaborate on what level you will start seeing affix skills, but you are fairly close on why skills an affixes are related. The stat data tables used for both are virtually the same, so while learning one I essentially learned the other. (ex. a self-cast buff that increases Cunning uses the same data field as would an item with +Cunning).
Thanks for the update Zantai. At first I was disappointed that there were no screenies and it was hard to get excited about affixes without having an example of the new flavor you’re adding to them, than I read how a certain other company deals with its community and realized that we should be happy to have these. Good luck with the progress of dissecting/interpreting the tools!
I’m looking forward to the unveiling of the more interesting modifiers
woah, did i read that right (eisprinzessins question plus zantais answer) that there’s the possibility for item affixes to modify general skill attributes such as damage, area of effect etc. pp.? on a per specific skill basis or in general or am i imagining things?
We don’t have the means for such fine skill modification on items.
Even if we could though, the sheer amount of possible computations would be a nightmare to balance around, and would probably just be a headache for you guys.
thought i read that wrong, just had to make sure… my mind seemed reluctant to imagine the (amount of) possibilities anyway. carry on… hm… actually, can you tell us which item skill activation methods there are? is there a way for stuff like ‘chance on hit’ to take into account a weapons’ base attack speed or has that to be done manually? or how about the other way around: ‘chance on get hit’ could maybe increase against slow heavy hitting attacks (for some reliability against lone bosses)? (i only ask this because i have to calm my imagination now, nothing important… ;))
also, may i suggest drunken grizzly bears (maybe other wildlife, too) when dealing with med?
heh, that was a bit of an obvious ruse to play into his hands, wasn’t it? back on topic - though i should probably stop pestering you with questions right now… think i could go on with this longer than even i would feel comfortable with.
