Impressions of Grim Dawn After Beating it on Ultimate

Grim Dawn Gameplay Discussion
1

I just beat Grim Dawn on Ultimate on my level 85 Conjurer. It wasn’t easy and I died several times, but the end boss is dead. Here’s what I take away from this game at this point.

Impressions

  1. If loot drops is your thing, this game isn’t. The drops are terrible. You can go 20 levels or more without ever getting a drop that is totally relevant to your class. So basically you kill, kill, kill, and see loot, loot, loot, but none of it is good for your character. I’ve finished the game on it’s highest difficulty and there are three armor slots for which I’ve never gotten a relevant drop, and four others where I’ve gotten one. That’s through 85 levels and three difficulties. That’s absurd.

  2. Outside the frustration of horrible drops, the game is fun. The combat is enjoyable, the monsters can be challenging at the higher levels, and you can progress through levels at a reasonable pace. So if completing a game and enjoying the story is your thing this game is fun. However, after the first time through, if this is your motivation, there is no real reason to try the higher difficulties, so the long-term enjoyment of the game is diminished.

How would I change Grim Dawn?

  1. I would make drops more relevant to your character. Rather than having gear drop for 15 possible character classes, have at least a significant portion of it be at least somewhat relevant to your build. That doesn’t mean you get everything you want in a a day, but at least you can see a potential upgrade every level or two. It also doesn’t mean every piece has to be relevant to your class; just enough to keep it interesting.

  2. BIS gear should be at least somewhat attainable. Anyone who tells you they got BIS gear on their own without trading is either lying or cheating. I got to level 85 without ever legitimately farming one BIS piece of gear. Through various means I’ve been able to come up with approximately 120 legendary items. Two of those were BIS for my build. To get the rest I’d have to literally farm thousands of them, and I’m not even sure that would suffice. Why not make BIS gear more attainable and make the mobs more difficult so you don’t just destroy them with no threat of death? I’m not asking to mow through stuff and destroy bad guys with no challenge. What I want is to able to get relevant loot drops while still making the game challenging at it’s highest levels. Is that asking too much?

That’s my take on Grim Dawn at this point. I really want to be able to play this game long-term, but the loot drops will kill that for me. Hopefully Crate will see this as an issue and do something about it. I can think of another game that suffered from this at one point, and is much more successful after addressing the issue.

Regards,

Tarkus

2

+1 as it relates to item drops.

3

I prefer it the way it is. The game wouldn’t be able to tell what is best for you, some builds make use of weird combos and it would be annoying to keep getting gear just focused on what you are supposed to play.

Also getting a veriety of loot means more loot for other chars, if you only got loot for the char you where playing then many of mine would not have been created. I got my gear for my current char by farming with a char that didn’t require high end game gear.

The factions and shops alone can get any build to complete ultimate, just farm rep and buy lots of strong gear and if you really need to still you can always farm for gear.

4

The drops are to influence you to make other characters. Most people don’t make a single character, push through to Ultimate, then uninstall the game (unless they really hated the game). If you find good gear (empowered epics and above) then most people stick them in the transfer stash (because that’s what it’s there for) and transfer them to other characters. You first few characters are going to have a rough time because you will have to rely on what the game throws at you - that’s ARPGs 101. Ever since Darkstone and leading up to PoE, Grim Dawn, and other dungeon crawlers, that’s how it’s been.

Now, with this game, the more you play, the more gear you will obtain and be able to outfit new characters earlier and with better gear. Some people don’t like to do this but the option is there for those of us who like to keep gear in case we decide to make X-based character.

With all that being said, it sounds like you need to make another character and start amassing some more loot to transfer over to new characters.

5

I’ve been having a completely different experience in terms of drops and i just reached Ultimate with my Druid. On Elite i dropped a legendary belt, chest armor, boots and shoulder guards that were perfect for my Druid. Not to mention the aumont of stuff i dropped for my Witchblade and Saboteur.

It could be a lot worse. They could easily make legendaries extremely hard to drop like some games i have played.

6

I like the drops…

7

I got BiS gear without cheating… It’s actually relatively easy as long as you know how to farm efficiently. I wouldn’t make blanket statements about the state of the itemization in the game if you don’t have the experience to back it up. Regardless, I agree that some aspects of the drop system and itemization could be improved, like Monster Infrequents

8

I have a pretty fair idea how to farm in this game. Outside of my normal legitimate game play, I have farmed hour upon hour getting a legendary drop approximately once every 4 minutes. I’ve also crafted thousands of the accessories I need. For all this work I’ve gotten exactly two BIS items, which I’ve never used in actual game play. Again, zero of these were gotten during normal game play. I’ve also farmed nemesis bosses, but not too many because my gear made it extremely difficult to kill them. And everyone keeps ignoring the fact that during the course of 85 levels, three difficulties, and more than 40,000 drops I’ve gotten zero relevant drops for three slots, and one drop for four slots. How can anyone possibly say that makes sense?

The argument that you get drops so that you will be motivated to play other characters is silly. I’m not going to pick what I play based on drops. I also don’t want to have a set of BIS gear waiting for a new character. I want to play the characters I want and get appropriate build-based gear for them to level. It’s not all that complicated.

Regards,

Tarkus

9

What’s your build via grimcalc.com and which slots did you get zero relevant drops for?

10

Once you have a few chars able to farm in ultimate you will have most of the stuff. Some classes like summoners have a much harder time getting relevant legendary as they are very small in number in the whole pool of legendaries

Farming is basically shrine of forgotten god + fabius, even elite fabius will do for many parts

11

This game is not about BiS items, it never was. Drops are fine where they are.

12

As it was my first major character I pretty much followed this excellent guide.

http://grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=24703

The slots that were problematic were one-handed weapon (1), helm (1), chest (0), pants (0), shoulders (0), boots (1), and gloves (1). Now I was able to use some rep vendor gear in several of these slots, but that is beside the point.

It could be the build, as I do get legendary drops, just none that are used for the straight pet build.

Regards,

Tarkus

13

It doesn’t make any sense. Because you haven’t explained how you’ve farmed and what you’ve been looking for. Getting a legendary “every 4 minutes” for hours might mean nothing if you weren’t also using the legendary blacksmith to narrow down the pool of drops, but even then, with enough drops you should’ve gotten something you could use, if not BiS. It sounds highly exaggerated that you could farm legendary for hours at such quick pace without getting a single upgrade. Once again, it would help to explain your case better if you list what you’ve got and what you were looking for, as well as your farming methods.

For the “thousands” of accessories crafted, if you were looking for a specific combination of prefix and suffix on a rare accessory, then yes, getting exactly the right combo out of all the possible prefixes and suffixes is close to an exercise in futility, if not a giant waste of time. Here’s an example: all the possible prefix and suffix on a ring. If you don’t want to calculate the odds of getting “the one,” then just understand that crafting thousands of rings for one exact combo isn’t nearly enough attempts. You might as well use GD Stash to craft the exact prefix/suffix combo. Someone else on the forum posted that it took him 8 hours to get just 2 rings of the combo he wanted. I value my time way more than that.

Also, 0 relevant drops out of estimated 40,000 for three slots? What were you looking for, what did you equip, and what upgrades, if any, did you get? Your statement claims that you got absolutely -nothing- for those three slots and you basically finished the game from 1 to 85 with default items or nothing on those three slots, maybe you misspoke.

You do realize that there are legendaries in the game that actually define a build, yes? Whether you make such a specialized build or not is entirely dependent on the availability of those legendaries. Is that still silly? The RNG nature of the loot drops is meant to give you more things you can’t use for a class you are currently playing, while there are far more possible classes and builds that could benefit from various gears that you may have gotten throughout a game. To say that you only want things you can use from RNG is to deny that and go the way of smart drops in D3. This is simply a matter of understanding RNG, odds, and probability.

Finally, just because you don’t want to save a set of BiS gear for your new characters doesn’t mean that’s not what the game encourages. The long lists of prefix/suffix for most items, the shared stash (larger than personal stash, incidentally), and the variety of classes and builds all point to storing and transferring gears/supplies/components. You can play against RNG but you won’t walk away happy.

The moment I discovered the legendary blacksmith I tailored my farming to get my drops through him. Being able to narrow down drops from the entire list of possible options to specific categories is insanely advantageous. Why farm hard when you can farm smart first? It’s not all that complicated.

14

Let me try to answer your questions.

Regards,

Tarkus

15

To the OP:

  1. First of all, you are following a build created by a person who has more than 700 hours in the game. Even if he didn’t use the shared stash, he still has high-end recipies collected through previous playthroughs that allow him to craft whatever items he needs when he needs them (i.e. relics, helms, etc.).

  2. The term “BiS item” is vague. A general definition would be something like this:
    BiS item = an item that maximizez the damage output of a character (or clear time, more generally) while minimizing the risks involved. Because there are 2 elements in this definition you will quickly come to the conclusion that BiS items are only globally BiS. To give a more articulate answer, the term refers to what is ON AVERAGE optimal for a character. Ipso facto, there are situations where a “BiS” item is not BiS at all.

Examples:
Golemborn greaves - BiS for Fabius, not BiS for Valdaran. For Valdy, the underpowered wyrmscale boots give you, on average, a faster clear time since they will protect you vs his lightning shotgun, thus minimizing the risks.
Empowered Essence of Beronath - considered generally a BiS item for 80% of the builds presented here. It is NOT BiS vs. Anasteria or in the Conflagration/ Immolation areas, where the Avenger of Cairn will give you a much needed overcapped aether resistance.

I could go on and on about the global optimum vs local optimum character of items, but the general idea is that the semantic perimeter of “BiS items” is ill-defined and in order to achieve a true min/max you won’t need just one set of items, but secondary gear that is catered to specific situations and farming routes. As such, your first 4-5 characters will not be optimized no matter how hard you try.

16

The fact that you cheated your way into getting the items you wanted and that you actually like the crappy D3 smart loot says alot. Also that obsession about BiS items.

This game is about building characters and leveling them up just like D2 was. Whether you farm legendaries at the end of that road or start a new character and thus a new journey is up to you. If you cannot enjoy the game for what is it does not mean the game is broken in some way, it means it is not what you are looking for.

17

85 character levels, three difficulty levels, 40,000+ drops, and a grand total of 4 pet bonus drops for 7 slots. As it applies to pet bonus, the loot drop system is broken. And I never cheated while leveling my character from 1 to 85 and beating the game on ultimate.

Regards,

Tarkus

18

Yes, I used the term BIS for this build and that obviously can be somewhat subjective. However, it’s irrelevant in terms of the point I’m trying to make. This is a pure pet build. It’s not unreasonable to assume that whatever you feel is the BIS gear for the build, each piece is going to impact your pets. While playing through the game I got zero, that’s right, zero legendary items that directly applied to this build. I haven’t played 700 hours, but I’ve played close to a third of that on all my characters and I’ve gotten almost no weapons or armor loot from drops. Almost no magic items, no rare items, no epic items, and no legendary items with pet bonus for the weapon and armor slots (outside of off hands). So it really doesn’t matter what I think is BIS, pet bonus gear for this build rarely drops. If you are going to create a game that drops you 40,000+ items while you play through the game, don’t you think more than a handful should apply to your build?

Regards,

Tarkus

19

The only broken thing here is your perspective on the subject. You expect to have everything you consider BiS in every slot just because you beat the game.

Because that did not happen for you, you blame it on the loot system.

As far as cheating goes, these are your words, not mine!

To sum it up, if you are looking for something like D3, you are into the wrong game my friend. My suggestion would be to play the game for what it is.

20

I like the drops in Grim Dawn.
And I don’t want them to be Diablo 3 like…and this is not a taunt but this is the exact kind of posts there were on Diablo 3 forums before.