So, why was the “difficulty change” thing made? I really don’t get it, all it did for me is making my starting feel like a slog… and it already usually feels that way. Isn’t this difficulty thing what Veteran was already supposed to be, for people who “want it to be more difficult”.
Now casual players have no incentive to go forward and someone like me who makes a lot of new characters have… less of a will to do so, because the pacing is that much slower in the beggining.
Seriously, I was wondering why my character was having such a bad start because I didn’t read about the “difficulty adjustments”. To ME, is just took the fun of starting a fresh character completely out of the game. It’s not fun just having to hit a monster that many more times and kite it that much more with a new character (again, to ME). It’s not even more “difficult” tbh, it just became tedious. =(
Yeah, I’m finding everything up to Burrwitch at least to be tedious now. After trying to slog through one particularly long cave I ended up just exiting the game. Not because I was dying or couldn’t kill the mobs, but because it wasn’t actually all that much fun.
It just killed the drive to play the game. I don’t get why this new setting wouldn’t be an optional thing for people wanting a different challenge, like veteran mode is.
That’s why I stopped playing PoE, damage sponges are just not fun for me. Gonna be rolling back to 1.1.3, too bad my coop partner plays on Steam and I have no idea if there’s any way to roll the versions back there.
I know some people here have way more playtime than me, but after about 500 hours this was just really disheartening.
Veteran difficulty is once again a challenge mode, not a joke that it turned into over the years.
If you want a more relaxed first difficulty, Normal exists for a reason.
Majority of the changes were in fact to make special abilities dangerous again. In my paythrough after the changes, I had no issues one-shotting packs as before, but dodging enemy abilities actually matters again.
You discovered that Normal is actually more your speed.
At first (during testing of the new new Veteran) it took a little bit of rethinking my approach on character building in Veteran. The gear you are choosing to use also becomes significantly more important. Once you come to grips (or if you come to grips) with the new mentality Veteran demands of you the pace can pick up a bit because you have become a Veteran and no longer suck at piecing a fresh build together.
Really, it gets pretty easy after experimenting with a character or two and because your build no longer sucks it begins taking down mobs and heroes and bosses much quicker.
I AM playing normal… enemies are just spongy. It’s not challenging AT ALL, just tedious. Bosses just take a lot more hits to die and it’s really boring.
As I said, this being an optional thing like Veteran mode would be fine to me, but the way it is it just killed the drive to level any character. I’m not demanding devs to change their visions, just giving my honest feedback, by the way.
Then how about you make it NOT tedious by making your build more capable of destroying the so called tedium? Increase your damage output and get over it perhaps. /shrugs
I find Veteran much more engaging - like it used to be once upon a time. Taking a wrong turn into the wrong Hero mob group is actually challenging again in the early game.
Need to play more to figure out how much things have changed, but previous to this patch new characters ended up just melting everything in their way below Ultimate to the point that I wasn’t playing the game so much as just moving through the areas checking off quests.
Having to actually think and pay attention again might be nice. After all, the quote “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.” is very true for me.
Sounds like you may like it then. You will find that resistances are important from pretty much the very beginning in Veteran now. Keep that central in your mind and you should do well with it. You will also be putting much more thought into skill selection out-the-gate. Keeping damage up and not neglecting heals and defenses is paramount. You’ll find that you are putting much more thought into your gear as well at the start.
Note: I am coming from the vantage point of a new, untwinked character. I find that I am enjoying whipping a character into fighting form considerably more now.
Here is a quote from someone on Steam concerning the new Veteran and his words pretty much sum up how I think of it as well:
What I take from that is he probably needs to put an eye toward his resistances now since his damage sounds like it is doing good. In the interim tho he adapted by becoming more reactive, more involved in what was going on. The game was forcing him to think more about his situation and to me that says Veteran is on the right track.
Interesting, because the health changes on Normal were very minor.
Bosses did indeed get the largest health gains, but that is because they were woefully behind their expansion counterparts. If anything, it seems they could stand to be more threatening to match their health if it’s “tedious”.
It would also largely depend on your build though.
you are playing on Normal (Non-Veteran mode) and still monsters feel ‘spongy’ for you? Excuse me but I find the Normal non-Veteran mode to be very easy. Maybe your build is awfully wrong?
Have you played after the update? I wish my build was awfully wrong… and again, if it was a challenge that “made me think” about positioning and how to approach a boss as others have said it would be fine, but it’s just a buff to hp that doesn’t really increase the challenge. All I’ve had so far is lenghtier fights, really.
I’m not meaning to offend anyone or be aggressive, but still, things only take longer to die and at the beggining of the game I just don’t have the tools to make my build shine. I don’t see “having a leveling build to change it all to a real build” later as a fun experience. That’s just MY vision of the game and the reason I stopped playing games like PoE, for instance. I know I’m the minority here and that ARPG gamers usually like this kind of stuff, and tbh in Grim Dawn I was having no issues with the endgame, even being not a real veteran at it and having basically one character capable of doing it. Elite and even Ultimate aren’t MY problem here, just the slow starting, which in MY OPINION and mine alone just doesn’t add anything to my gaming experience except more time.
Making the leveling experience slower just doesn’t make it more challenging TO ME and prevents me even more from going all the way to the endgame with various characters. Noone here has to feel the same “tedium” or “boredom”, it’s just how I feel about the subject and have already rolled the version back.
If you start in elite you can level to 100 in like, 6 hours. I don’t understand. You’re entitled to how you feel but there are people on the other side who felt the early game was too easy because everything was made out of paper.
If you really want to teach end game fast, elite start is the way to go. Also if you’re not an experienced player, the new difficulty stuff is definitely more challenging for people purchasing GD and jumping in blind.
If even veteran was too easy you make it sound like veteran didn’t give the enemies enough damage. Well, I’ve been enjoying veteran more now. Can’t make everyone happy.
My question is: why having the OPTION to play a non competitive single player/coop game the old way or the new way would make the game any worse?
I don’t want to “reach end game fast”, I just don’t want to have a leveling build that works from the start to change it to another one just to level up. I wanted the game to challenge me when I had the tools to make my build work. But again, I know I’m a minority in the ARPG community and by no means think “my way” is the better one, just the better one for me.
I see sense in his words. In my opinon changes to the Veteran mode are good. So keep them. But revert any changes done to Non-Veteran Normal. So it would please both sides. There is a small group of ultra-casual players who likes to one-shot everything in sight and that is not bad. To each his own. let em play like they want and did before 1.1.4.0
