How to give player more control over their own preferred difficulty

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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1

difficulty in grim dawn has always been an issue for me over the years, (too easy) to me difficulty can mean more than just enemies are stronger, or they can 1 shot you, sometimes difficulty ( to me) means having a harder time getting the items i am looking for,

BASTION had the idol system where you could give yourself challenges for extra buffs,

i would love it grim dawn had something like "reduce the amount of items dropped by X%, but increase the quality of items by x% ( huge tradeoff but would be fun for me)

(if something like this already exists in grim dawn let me know please)

this next idea is probably stupid, but if it gives the devs more ideas of their own that would be a positive

if my pervious idea would be considered, there could be an NPC that could “curse” you items, giving it % bonus on some stat, but the item cant be removed ( taken off your character) from your character until a condition is met, like getting X amount of exp ( killing enemies) or something like that

this would be cool because it would make yellow items and items you would never use, more viable until you found something better, possibly this could be restricted to only yellow items?

what do you guys think of this? how would you make the idea better?

2

if you want to take that idea even further you could add a “durability” system to this cursed items idea,

give X% bonus to item, but add % chance to reduce durability to that item every time its used, this also works well for yellow items because they are not worth anything if they break, so there is not much risk,

3

(edited fist post)

when i say grim dawns difficulty was an issue for me i meant it was too easy

4

Aside from specific MI items (like the cursed Alkamos Rings or any specific double rares), gear is actually pretty easy to get in Grim Dawn already. I’ve noticed many people don’t seem to know this, but the game doesn’t drop duplicates during the same session (at least not blues or purples), so you could for instance do 20+ Shattered Realm runs in a row and pretty much get most items in the game already. Though in my experience, the game crashes eventually if you do this for too long.

5

what if you say reduce item drops by 50% but increase quality by 10% so fewer items drop, the drop rate cost would heavily out weight the quality increase benefit but that could be a fun challenge

( that could even be an “idol” bonus)