The mod tools are coming soon and I would like some feedback from players interested in pure increase-of-difficulty mods. What kinds of things are you hoping to see?
Well, I loved X-max in TQ…but that wasn’t JUST because of the increase in difficulty. A big part of it was how much more of everything you were able to get with that many enemies to cut through. Pure RNG is actually almost tolerable when you’re rolling so many dice at once. If something like that is made here, I certainly hope it retains the increased rewards to go alongside the increased difficulty. “Pure increase-of-difficulty” and nothing else just sounds less fun.
Jiaco please don’t be offended, but increasing the difficulty is the last thing I want modders to do.
I’m not the best player in the world and I find the game (as it currently is) much too hard. Ordinary mobs are just fine, but bosses are stupidly overpowered.
And as for that green ‘instant kill’ crap on the ground, don’t even get me started :furious:
So my goal is to create mods that will make the game ‘fairer’.
The first thing I’m going to do is increase the number of summons that I can have. I think that change alone will make the game much more enjoyable (for me anyway).
Then I think I might tweak some boss stats so that they’re not quite so tough.
But as for making the game more difficult, please don’t!
Well, to be fair, the whole idea of mods is that you can decide for yourself to use it or not. I see nothing wrong with mods that do nothing but make the game harder existing, since I’m sure there are people who would love that. If it’s not appealing to us we can just choose not to use it. I was mainly just offering input on what I personally would like to see from an X-max type mod in Grim Dawn.
You’re right Llednar, I shouldn’t be so negative. That’s the beauty of mods, you can do what you like.
But I just can’t understand this need to make everything harder and more challenging.
Getting killed over and over is not my idea of fun. But I’m just weird I guess :rolleyes:
Took me an hour last night to get to Wightmire rift. I ran straight to Kyzogg and then to the two rifts. Had 1039 kills.
At the end of that run, I asked myself, are there any other people out there that will even consider this enjoyable? I mean I was grinning ear-to-ear having the best time I had had gaming in quite some time, but I can understand that not everyone is going to jump on this.
Anyway, I was not expecting replies like “NO, please do not do this”. Was more expecting people to comment on how high we should go with increasing spawns of fodder, heros, bosses. If we should reduce the XP gains so we can keep the toons leveling in line with the normal game. Should we redo quests so instead of 15 zombies, you have to kill 100, since it will take only about 15 minutes to do so with the increase in spawns.
A first version will basically be an xmax type deal, but with these tools, there is lots we can do. Place new proxies on the map (Warden spawns in DC?), make every rift like Wightmire and the Village with spawns. Make quests harder. Reduce skill points, remove devotion shrines. There are tons of things to discuss, if there is anyone else interested in this.
@Llednar Twem - yeah, for an true difficulty mod, this should be fixed. But there will always be a version where it is not fixed, cause I like that too, from time to time. But honestly, the game does not end up that much more difficult due to the rapid collection of BIS gear.
I totally agree, death by the floor is not my idea of fun difficulty at all. Might just remove it entirely.
I think if its damage is lowered by 15-30% it’ll be fine
I’ve got nothing super specific, but I just want things to hurt 
White/yellow monsters are like 1hp roadblocks that do no damage and just get in my way of faster clears, they should have some significance. As it stands I can walk into some sizeable mobs and just stand there and take no damage D: Heroes should be stronger and spawns of multiple heroes in packs should be a lot more common, as well as lowering their legendary drop rates with that change. Not sure how much is possible with tools, but bosses/nemesis should be stronger and it’d be cool if their was some sort of actual mechanics/strategy to beating them. Ultimate used to be more fun, but it’s just become too easy after nerfs.
Blademaster is by far my most played class and I have a blast playing it, but I must say I’m pretty sick of steam rolling as hard as I do with 9700 health and pretty crappy resists. I have 70 lightning/fire res without pneumatic burst up, 39 poison, 71 bleed, 64 vit, 72 chaos, and 21 aether res. Yet Sharzul, Fabius, Moosi, and Bennjar are the nemesis I farm the most and I just facetank them possibly using a single blade barrier vs sharzul or fabius with some sicko weapon. That shit just ain’t right
Oh yeah nerf that stupid pneumatic burst heal 
I haven’t even reached max level yet, so probably have no business posting here… but I can say that what I would like to see more of is difficulty through mechanics rather than difficulty through numbers.
Grim Dawn already does this better than most of the ARPGs I’ve played, so kudos to Crate for that. But it still has the occasional stat check fight that basically just says "do you have over X max hp? No? Then enjoy being 1 shot, because this guy can’t be crowd controlled, has bucket loads of HP, and hits like an 18 wheeler on a highway with basic physical attacks you can’t stack a resistance for. " I despise that crap. If I die because I failed to understand a boss ability or have a resistance needed or a play mistake mid fight then shame on me. But stat check fights just choke your build options and lead to the “stack phys” mentality .
To me, any ability that hits extremely hard needs to be able to be countered actively. Active mitigation is fun and skill based mitigation. Passive mitigation is boring, restricts build diversity, and is often largely RNG dependant since you just need to rely on gear for a sizeable chunk of it.
edit:
To give an example:
Kilrian, the Tainted Soul in Arkovian Undercity. I enjoyed fighting him. Killed me twice, but that was because I screwed up. He had some patterns to his most devastating attacks, and I realized that after the first death and some time observing him. I learned to time when to go in and smack him between his blinding bolts and volleys and when to run behind a pillar or strafe to avoid those attacks. That’s what I remember most, but I don’t think he was CC immune either, so even on his basic attacks you could mitigate damage with well timed CC to interrupt his swing timer. Solid fight. Very much enjoyed it.
Balegor, the Swamp King in East Marsh. Did not enjoy fighting him. Basically involved me running in circles for about ten minutes waiting for Mirror of Ereoctes to be off cooldown so I could engage for 2 seconds at a time. Because there was literally nothing else I could do to ensure I wouldn’t be 1 shot through my 5k HP (epic difficulty). He completely ignored all crowd control, and his mechanics involved a poison nova, a charge, and simply walloping you over the head with outrageously hard hits. This is the kind of difficulty I never want to see more of. I have gone for a pretty even distribution of cunning and phys, and fights like this basically just mock me for not going 100% phys and stacking HP through the roof.
Jiaco, I would enjoy something with more of a challenge. If I see a mod that brings up the difficulty level, I say bring it.
Can’t wait!!!
Maybe some tweaks around playstyles.
I.e. Ranged XGrim - slower mobs, faster base player run speed, really high damage from melee scaling with slowness of monster, more melee monster spawns.
Melee XGrim - faster monster speed, lower monster hp, more ranged monster spawns and greater density in general
Summon XGrim - higher monster density with increased ranged spawns, double heroes, higher summon limit, faster monsters, triple player CC skill durations
Etc
I.e. Make it harder, but focused on making you better at the mechanics of each playstyle.
Also, if it did a % of your current health instead of max hp. That is probably significantly more work to change though 
I want to remove the damage but have it apply a slow or some other sort of debuff, if possible. The world killing you isn’t fun. But having to factor in environmental concerns during combat is, in my opinion, great. A slow might make the Conflagration too tedious, though…
@jiaco: Less damage, more mechanical difficulty. Make me have to think, not get more numbers.
what do you want to see in difficulty mods?
Progressively less, please. I have no great trouble with Veteran, but the few times I made it to Ultimate it took me a very long time to kill anything, while everything could one-hit me. The obvious solution would be to add modifying difficulty levels like Veteran which make the game easier and harder than the base difficulty, but for some reason Crate hasn’t done that. So I eventually gave up and have been waiting for mods to come out.
Also, it would be best if you can make your difficulty mod useable at the same time as other mods. It was the mastery mods that made TQ so replayable, so a difficulty mod to make GD playable plus an enormous selection of masteries to make it REplayable …that’d be perfect.
And a note on more monsters: there are builds and situations where more is easier rather than harder, and this is in addition to the fact that more monsters give more loot, which means better gear. There’s not much you can do about the former, but consider keeping the overall loot and xp rate the same if you go monster-happy.
Increased difficulty? GD needs a difficulty overhaul first; There’s a lot of really bad “difficulty” design in this game (like debuffs you can’t avoid, unavoidable damage, poor monster stat inflation, enemy difficulty in Acts 2-4 = 5000% movespeed berserker swarms, the list goes on…).
In regards to increased difficulty though, something like Bastion’s modifiers might be really cool. Turn on a modifier, monsters now explode on death but you gain a little more EXP and droprate. That kind of thing. I don’t even know if this would be possible to do (checkboxes like Veteran on the main menu?) but it’d be super rad.
You’re not weird, you’re just not a masochist. Dying over and over isn’t my idea of fun either.
This guy gets it.
I would love this. Having to earn every rift even in the lower difficulties would be awesome.
And as for that green ‘instant kill’ crap on the ground, don’t even get me started :furious:
Yes please! It’s probably the thing I most dislike in the game. I was going to try getting rid of it myself, but if you do it, that’ll save me some work
Glad we can agree about some things