I really hope not, because the recent retal builds I have seen posted have several impossible green items.
And I am sure that 90% of the player base do not even care about rankings anyway. 90% of the player base does not even play ultimate at all.
ARPGs have this tradition that in order to push the hardest content, you need to be somewhat of a nerd and spend time theorycrafting, testing stuff, farming etc. That is what I think is the most fun part about ARPGs - that I can really get into the details of the game and progress.
If you ājust wanna have funā you can play the other difficulties or just be content with SR 50 or something. If there was no challenging end-game and theory crafting etc, I would not play Grim Dawn.
But I have ābeaten ultimateā numerous times, with SSF characters. Not super hard, and there are plenty of beginner build guides you can study and also build journals one can use as inspiration. Such things narrows things down for lesser ambitious players, they do not need to reinvent the wheel but have something to fall back on. What I am trying to say, you do not need to have fully geared chars to beat ultimate, you need some carefully chosen core items, cover resistances etc and just play well.
i donāt think that they are impossible to get, according to my farming experience.
and even if they are impossible, than their impact over build is far lesser, than the sheer brokeness of retaliation and RTA. Other builds with so called āimpossible to get MIā arenāt performing as nearly close as retal does. so the nerf of it is absolutely justified.
Not surer how to label it. For now maybe just by a filler skill Chain Lightning Dreegalāanore by Valinov
as you could make a similar build around Winter Kingās Might / Voracious Reach.
I usually donāt get weigh in on balance discussions because Iām nowhere near a good player. Iām basically a 1 armed player with 4,000 hours in the game. The idea of nerfing retaliation builds disappoints me for maybe selfish reasons. I have a very hard time playing pianos, or the PoE flask type mode. With about 40 maxed out characters, retals are comfortable enough, but the trade off Iāve found is they seem to be very slow killers, some I made a year or 2 ago donāt work at all. Crate has been great at buffs and not too many nerfs. I keep all my characters and the non-viable ones just have to be rebuilt , which can be very expensive in materials. Whatever they decide Iāll happily accept and be thankful for, but I hope there remains room for players that are nowhere near āeliteā and still reach maybe recognized end gameā¦i.e Nemeses, 60 or so SR, some of the Celestials.
Or maybe donāt update your game and create The 1.1.8 Resistance Group in retaliation for the 1.1.9.0 retaliation nerfs.
Next, you make your own 1.1.9.0 patch / mod with various buffs compensating for old nerfs to lure thousands of players.
When eventually all play The Community Patch, has no choice but to abdicate once and for all.
Changelog is updated. Havenāt yet included there tqFans acid WK WH, because i want to test this one in SR. (and because itās similar to Valinovās one.)
It seems like youāve failed the paladin challenge, so how about a new one: make non lightning vindicator. The diversity of this class is garbage.
Cold ranged savagery is close to being possible, but needs some +savagery love (canāt wear korba helm and complete stormserpent set; northern wyrm doesnāt give +2 shaman; lightning -> cold to manually balance is then limited to 1 shoulder for 30%). Lord knows pierce can stack savagery to +50 by the time you get items completed somehow, so cold could use some love outside korba weapons carrying it all
Not sure how you reset Tributes but I used GDStash and found it very tedious / immersion breaking while doing Crucible runs.
Here you can find GDHacker that can freeze Tributes so that you can provide with even MOAR build performance tests to balance builds better or at least test MOAR comfortably.
You can either
use it alone as a command line tool / shortcut with arguments to freeze Tributes for one launch of the game
combine it with GDAutocaster that detects the game automatically and freezes Tributes when the gameās window is active
can be fully automated so that Tributes are always frozen without userās interaction whenever you play Grim Dawn even after computer restart if you add GDAutocaster to startup with proper arguments
All this assuming it actually works on machines other than mine which Iām not sure yet and be grateful for feedback.
Video
GDHacker + GDAutocaster can also dynamically change gameās speed while in-game.
you can try to cheat Crucible with it by speeding the game up here and there
to spare a few seconds hoping nobody can notice that in the recording
Added āAuthorā and āGame Versionā columns so now itās easier to navigate.
Deleted SR Speedrun, because only one person have submitted them, and i didnāt want to lower the reqs, hence that would be meaningless.
Added a couple of builds that iāve found on forum since 30th of November, yet iām more than sure that i missed some of them. Also I almost didnāt add anything from builds people iāve seen from āāāofficial (not official)((and now itās official again, goddammit))ā" discord. Sorry for that, my memory is quite a garbage.
Just reminding that submission form is still available and saves me a lot of time.
itās not all the changes, since i want to introduce major ones when the 1.1.9 is out, so itās not 1.30 yet.
This is not a Lightās Defender build. I repeat, this is not a Lightās Defender build 
Also worth repeating that it is not a cyclone set either 
has no choice but to abdicate once and for all.
with even MOAR build performance tests to balance builds better or at least test MOAR comfortably.