Idea: Purple Paragon Bar after level 100 to keep the game fun.

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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Hello! I’d like to share an idea that would solve the age-old motivation problem tied to gaining experience from killing enemies. After reaching level 100 and completing all the necessary constellations, for me — and I believe for many other players — certain important aspects of the game lose all meaning. Namely, combat and side quests. Waiting for a legendary item to drop from a minor elite enemy is, let’s be honest, not a great motivation, so in most cases you end up just running past crowds or inventing your own motivation. And when you do have to fight through packs of pointless enemies just to sweep them aside — that’s boring. With that in mind, I’d like to propose a solution, broken down point by point:

1.The maximum level remains 100, but now a secondary purple bar fills up on top of the main experience bar.

2.When it reaches its maximum, the player’s level doesn’t change. The bar starts filling again, and a message appears: “Return to a settlement for your reward.”

3.After the first fill, a chest with a purple glow appears in every town. This is a reusable chest — upon opening, it drops exactly as many rewards as the number of times the purple bar has been filled since it was last opened. The chests in different towns are simply different access points to the same reward, so the player isn’t forced to return to one specific location.

4.The experience threshold for filling the bar is now fixed.

5.If a player doesn’t open the chest for months, accumulated rewards could break the balance. A simple solution: a maximum of 10 accumulated cycles — after that, the bar won’t reset until you claim your reward.

In the past, the player accumulated experience points to become stronger, and that was genuinely worth it. That’s why I propose making the reward less random and more transparent than other chests — this will increase its value, as it becomes less ephemeral to the player.

My proposed reward:
One of the following:
- A random legendary item
- A random epic set item - (Rarely)
- An undiscovered blueprint
+ One of the following:
- A rare component
- A rare ingredient (Ancient Heart, Eldritch Essence, etc.)
- A rare consumable, e.g. Aether Cluster
+ Iron bits

This reward may seem too generous, but everything depends on how much experience is required to earn it. And overall, this is just my proposal.

Notes:
1.It would be great, of course, to explain this part of the game narratively. For example, by adding a character from whom it all begins.
2.In the base game, level 100 was unattainable, which means this feature won’t be available without the expansion.

Would love some feedback on this. Thank you for your attention!

3 Likes
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I made a mistake in editing where “- (Rarely)” referred to blueprints.

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Honestly, please no.

A huge part of the appeal of GD is playing alts and using the myriad of items to create one of thousands possible builds.

FoA already moved the bar far closer to spending countless hours on a single character to perfect it than was the original vibe of the game - and, frankly, than I like. There is a huge incentive now to play one character beyond what it used to be. If I would want to play a game like that, I can just try to hit level 100 in PoE, aim for 1k corruption in LE, infinite whatever-it-is in Diablo and then keep going to eek out minutiae in improvements over the course of days.

In GD a character is finished at some point, and that’s a great strength of the game.

5 Likes
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Best i can do is an orange bar, boss

Its rather outdated, however.

1 Like
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Welcome to the Forum!

Rewards of items and reagents / components / missing blueprints is a different approach, but generally speaking and for reference the development position on infinite growth is:

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I know the title is kinda misleading because it has “Paragon” in it but @vladimir.pavlov.alex is actually not arguing for infinite scaling in terms of skill or attribute rewards but rather another way of acquiring loot as a substitution for leveling.

So, basically, you’d just get a faux leveling bar that acts as a progression bar towards something like a Legendary chest.

It’s a neat idea, I think.

4 Likes
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Personally, I would love to be able to level items with xp gained after levelcap to perfect (certain) stats on items.

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Thanks for the reply. The idea itself doesn’t imply infinite progression. It’s simply an alternative way to obtain in-game loot, so that after reaching level 100, some mechanics don’t become a meaningless chore. Essentially, it should work in the background while you do other things to hone your character.

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I didn’t expect such activity when I woke up, thank you! I’d like to clarify my position on this topic.
I personally don’t like the concept of infinite progression. It would make the balance of progression intangible for both the developers and the players themselves. That’s why, in the first point, I immediately stated that the level remains at 100. This mechanic doesn’t affect the vertical development of the hero. I used the word “Paragon” only in relation to the endgame. Based on my own experience, I noticed that upon reaching level 100, an important part of the game for a particular character seems to disappear forever. My idea is simply a compromise that would help the developers preserve their concept while giving players an alternative.

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I did understand this point, you communicated it well.

However, it would still incentivise playing on a ‘maxed out’ character for additional gains past what levelling an alt would bring you.

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Which is true irregardless of if this feature exists or not.

A “Maxed out” character can farm faster and take on more efficient SR’s (Along with potentially being able to farm Superbosses and other end-game bosses for their unique loot)

It is already “Incentivised” to play a max level character in order to obtain loot, while leveling an alt provides nothing besides the one-shot chests.

The basis of leveling an alt is never to be efficient or to get additional gains. It’s to explore different builds and gameplay.

This will still be the case if more emphasis is put onto max level farming. “Maxed out” characters will continue to be better to get loot. While alts are for exploring alternate gameplay.

Meanwhile, nothing is explicitly forced. If you don’t want to farm on max level characters, you don’t have to. Yes, you’re “Incentivised” to do so, but you’re also “Incentivised” to use only meta builds and farm optimally, but you’re never forced to ever do that even if it would yield more loot per time spent.

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NGL at first I saw “paragon” and thought “Oh no, not another infinite progress”.

But reading through the post, I actually liked the idea. It’s a chest that “fills” with kills / XP gain.
So essentially a “free loot” once in a while. I really like the diea.

I do agree that as of now, killing regular non-hero monsters feels almost pointless. It’s gotten better in a way that now we can get multiple nemesis spawns in a session, so kill count works towards that, which is at least something. But rather than that, it feels underwhelming.

So either this or giving general / trash / “white” mobs a little chance of a random legendary drop would go a long way.
Killing mobs should be rewarding.

2 Likes