Hi, this is going to be a bit chaotic, but I would like you to understand me.
I’ve been playing grim dawn since the early access phase, 2015 to be exact, and I still don’t know its mechanics and how to play.
A few days ago I created a new character (purifier) and I don’t know how to play. I found some ready-made builds, but I don’t know which build is the strongest and why.
Also during the game I completely forget about components, but I don’t even know which ones I could use and why.
I don’t know what to pay attention to while playing and while collecting items. I also heard about items with two or sometimes three affixes. I don’t know what it is, I don’t know where to look for it, I don’t know what to choose or how it looks like. I don’t know anything.
All I know is that my character is weak and does little damage, even though I seem to be playing well.
I really want to finally understand this game after so many years, but it’s so hard to understand that I can’t. Help me, please.
my first 200 hours in game was exactly “chaotic” like you right now. no mod, no help, no guide or build searching, just play like every single game i played before. use whatever i found and very simple: i want to play fire dam, so i use only items i have with “+ Fire dam” on it, and pick up skills/ devotion with “fire dam” of course. the mechanic of GD is very complicated, and my only suggestion for you is just play it. you can read some guide here: https://www.grimdawn.com/guide/ , or search for some “builds for beginner” in the forum. no one can take you every single step to learn and play except yourself
For me, the main campaign is pretty straight forward, but I’m pretty new to Crucible / Shattered Realm, and that introduced a whole new level of difficulty and challenge.
That being said, there are general principles that apply to the game as a whole. Some, however, are perhaps more relevant to endgame content. I recently learned to appreciate the importance of armor as a stat after getting my ass kicked by certain monsters in SR (my Purifier gets his ass kicked by late-stage SR Reaper of the Lost but my Tactician, with natural Soldier/Inq armour/phys resist boosts, kicks HIS ass).
Overall, I’d describe the game as a kind of balancing act between offense and defense. But, since there are more than two factors to each of those elements, it can get complicated and come down to narrow margins. Basically you want to boost DPS as much as possible, whilst retaining good health, max resists, and having some form of healing (ADctH and/or healing skills) and damage absorbs (flat absorb and/or % absorb and/or good armor). Compromise too much on either element and suffer. Achieve both and succeed (and I reckon the essence of the best builds is that they EXCEL in both).
But this leads to the obvious problem of equips. You do need good equips to achieve all this. Luckily GD has a fairly generous drop system. Bosses and totems along the way usually provide something serviceable, whether in the short or long term.
I’d say you want to have a kind of “pilot” build that can complete main campaign without difficulty (and without TOP tier gears) and then can run deep into Crucible/SR to help farm some more equips. For me, that character was Tactician, backed up by Druid. I was pretty lucky though to have a couple Havoc guns laying about from Vanilla GD days which I put to use on the former (obviously I’ve upgraded to mythical now). Good lower level purples and a solid build will help tremendously.
Perhaps let us know exactly where you are at on the game and we can assist more specifically?
