Is using tools considered mandatory for longterm players?

Grim Dawn Public Test Discussion
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I have around 15 builds, that I am trying to somewhat maintain. Not a massive number, but also not nothing.
I also don’t use mods or cheat-tools in these games, after experiencing how that shattered the Diablo communities.
I don’t think anyone using these is necessarily doing anything wrong by default, it’s just not for me.

Summer 2023, I jump onto the playtest for 1.2 and start adjusting my builds to the developing patch.
It took me 6 months, until January, until I had most of them in working condition.

Now we see another round of heavy-handed, sweeping changes across the board that would require me to do it all over again.

This game has very limited item space, so i cannot just pick up and keep every item that might, in some future patch, maybe have a use.
It also requires me to grind materials for components each time I want to make a change of that kind.
And when affixes change, I have to grind for new greens, which can still take dozens of hours. Per item.

As a result, many builds I make have “flaws” in their itemization, that have to be abated by taking sub-optimal components, devotion paths etc.
I think that is pretty typical for most legitimately made builds.

Despite that, it seems the changes are evolving around a balance based on very optimized builds, who can test a variety of gear choices that just aren’t available in that quantity (and sometimes not that quality), to be tested and assessed by average players.
And then expects that players can just pivot on a dime when it comes to gear changes.

So my question is: Are GDStash and Item Assistant considered required to make a “balanced” build?
Or to even keep playing the game through the years, so you don’t get so thoroughly disappointed by a preliminary changelog?

Because I reinstalled GD for this test patch, but within 2 hours I figured I had neither the time, nor the mental energy to contribute anything besides first impressions.
It’s too many changes at once, too recklessly implemented, too poorly thought through, for me to get invested into.

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Game balance evolution naturally obsoletes many optimized builds, that’s life of updated aRPG.

But some games handle it well, like PoE with its free market and leagues, where you can reach the endgame ready state of your build within days.

GD’s problem is it’s still stuck a little in the diablo 2 age in terms of farming. Most good gear still takes ages to farm. I hope FoA will somewhat solve the issue with affix transmutation. Leagues and free automated market is probably a pipe dream.

But you can still reach near top performing gear on your build within 2 days in most cases, thanks to balance this game now has. It’s just tricky to know what to do and optimize your time investments, and there is hardly any guides for it on the forums. So no, in short, you don’t have to cheat.

My personal problem (and why i’m playing with GDstash for years now) is that GD’s building content and potential FAR exceeds GD’s endgame modes and campaign. Modes are too repetitive and have pretty anticlimactic reward structure. You never feel like you are chasing the treasures, unless you are willing to invest hundreds of hours to run around the final of act 5 looking for Kaisan farming BiS amulet for your build. And without leagues and ladders the competitive component doesn’t exist.

So while it is possible to reach good performance with your builds in reasonable time frame, the farming process itself is just not interesting enough, and in some cases it’s offensively boring: for example, for some bizarre reason the chance of double rare item is much higher at vendors than from farming bosses and you can get a very strong double rare weapon or gear piece from the vender just by refreshing it for a few hours straight. It’s an optimized start and it’s ridiculous that it exists.

I’ve been playing GD for years, on and off, hoping in the back of my mind that the best and the most elegant building constructor it has would once gets proper and iteresting to farm gameplay application it deserves.

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It always good to hear the perspective of a legitimate GD grinder. While us builders are fighting the endgame balance at the top end most of the GD players that reach endgame prefer the grind to GDstash, so for them those significant changes might mean that hundreds of hours of that item finding/crafting grind are nullified on a whim.

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this will prob be a game changer.

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I started using Item Assistant instead of mules a couple of years ago and I really can’t imagine going back. For me, it’s an essential quality of life tool at this point because mules are just miserable to use. I still can’t create an item that I don’t have out of thin air, so I actually do have to grind and find the item. I don’t consider using IA instead of mules to be cheating, nor do I consider using the cloud stash that the community league provides to be cheating. If you do, fine, but I do think there is a difference between storing items you legitimately find and creating them yourself on demand.

I enjoy playing the game and the leveling process, and I don’t mind doing some farming, so this works for me. I’ve put together close to 75 level 100s on hardcore (and a good number on SC before that). If I had to give up IA, I would probably use some mules and in-game storage for things like rings and triple rare MIs (maybe a few key non-set, non-craftable items), and just farm the heck out of crafting materials to craft set items. But why on earth would I do that to myself?

If your goal is to play scientist and see how things interact, I get why one would like GDStash. For me, it would destroy my enjoyment of the game. But obviously the folks who are putting together builds and seeing how far the envelope can be pushed with GDStash are enjoying what they are doing and are contributing knowledge to the community.

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I think the larger gap, as far as time investment goes, is the last 10% of performance gain.
So if a balance pass is aimed at reducing those 10% of power, I may have never even gotten there to begin with and still get hit by a broadside of nerfs.

And then there’s the knowledge gap.
Mad_lee showed me the version of FW Commando that uses the Thermite Mine medal. So, thinking that might be a small upgrade to my build, I tried to farm one alongside some other items on my farming route.
But for a week I couldn’t get a suitable replacement, so I figured whatever, not worth the hassle.
So now I’ll never really know which is better.

So for creating, testing and showcasing builds, I can 100% understand why you’d want to use GDStash.

But as far as balance goes, that’s a tricky dilemma. Because I am pretty privileged when it comes to item selection, but it’s still “the best I can find” and not “the one I find best”.

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Yup. Looking at the number of “Formidable,” “Overseer’s,” “Overlord’s” etc. that I’d found and stored over the years is kind of depressing.

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NiceBigOof

I feel ya.

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Wait until you think about all the “stonehide” and “ancient” you sold because “formidable” and “dominator’s” was better anyway :skull:

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I believe I spent 2 year hoarding stuff green, blue, and purple that I found before using Item Assistant and later GDStash where I started using them after I reach SR65. Is it mandatory to use that tools? At first I say yes, until I familiarize myself with grimtools and learning which items or affixes worth keeping and what goes straight to the dynamite, perhaps you’ll be suprised of how many epic and legendary that is just better be scrap material than collecting dust in the stash.

Now, if I were to start a new SSF character without those tools, I might be just going with faction equipment & MI till reaching 100 then push normal SR, dynamite those I definitely didn’t use, and perhaps mule some good item that may be used by other build I want to play in future. For example: I for one don’t want to play DEE, Inqui Runes, Stun Jack, Canister, Pox, PB, Blade Trap, OFF, Trozan, Vines, and Judgment. So items with that have lower priority for me to keep and simplify my muling choice.

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I wouldn’t say I’ve found them a required part of gearing but they became a welcome convenience eventually. At least that’s been my experience.

I don’t usually just create one character on a whim and play that until I’m done with it, I tend to make a plan on what characters I’m interested in making for the foreseeable future and theorycraft those so I know what gear I’m looking for for the next few playthroughs. So I tend to naturally accumulate gear ahead of playing a character. In that environment, I never felt the need to use tools.

Where GDStash came in is in cases where “last minute changes” became necessary. Like I’ve levelled the build, tested it at endgame and it started faltering at SR75+ so I needed to rethink some gear pieces. Or when a patch made a piece of gear less desirable than one of its alternatives, which has sadly been happening a lot more recently than before. Theoretically I could get around that issue by taking into consideration what possible alt gear the character might want to try and save that ahead of time too, but that’s not really realistic, both for space reasons and for just how many possible alternatives there are to consider. At that point I’m in a situation where I have a “finished” character, with nothing to do but test in endgame, and I have to put that on hold until I randomly find that one item I’m looking for. Unless it’s craftable or target-farmable there’s nothing you can do to influence how long it’s going to take to get that item. I’ve legitimately put a character on hold because I was missing a piece, and I’ve finished 6 other builds before I found the piece I was missing. That was like a month and a half of waiting for a drop. At that point GDStash just makes things way smoother.

So yeah, in those last last minute changes, those last 10 % of character optimisation, tools do become a pretty hard-to-resist shortcut. Or when you run out of crafting mats. I’m not gonna put my crafting on hold for 2+ hours to menially farm Sigils or Aether Shards to get a few more crafts in. But I only ever use GDStash for these situations and nothing else. I’ve never fully geared a char by just creating the gear I need via tools, and I’ve never just skipped MI farming by creating the perfect piece with the right affixes. I only ever GDStash Legendaries/Epics for replacement, and restock on crafting mats. So for me tools were a massive convenience for sure at the very end of a character’s life cycle, but I wouldn’t say they were truly required. I could easily just put that character on a shelf and play something else until I get the gear I need, if don’t have a specific reason why I NEED to finish this character now.

But that’s just because of the way I play. If I suddenly had an epiphany that I want to try this or that character, and I had to build it up from scratch without having had the chance to get the gear naturally ahead of time on previous builds, I don’t even want to think how long it would take to put that character together without tools. I’d say, if anything, my levelling style is probably the best case scenario for NOT needing tools. Their importance probably only really goes up if you play in any way differently.

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I would argue that changes we’ve made over the years and the addition of affix rerolling in Fangs of Asterkarn would indicate our stance on cheats being mandatory is anything but.

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i think GDIA is widely considered to be “the” non-cheat solution ?
i realise there are purists out there that still consider mules the only true way (or even more hardcore purist without mules @_@) - but since it’s devoid of “filthy GDstasher features” i personally don’t see how GDIA would really divide the GD community in terms of cheating
technically/on a semantic level i don’t think infinite storage is “mandatory”, having used mules before i switched to infinite stash, but, the value can’t be understated - being able to hover up every MI without a thought/concern is pretty huge

i think it comes down to how attached someone is to an existing build vs keep making new. I no doubt have bunch of chars i’d have to completely overhaul, and legit haven’t looked at dozens and dozens of them in ages; the phys res overhaul did get me interested in looking over some stuff tho.

i think patch changes probably hurts the non-infinite stash players the most, but the GDstasher testers are probably able to provide a larger amount of feedback/tests which is probably pretty valuable for balance changes/buff considerations too, not sure if that means GDstash is mandatory in GD tho, just very useful :thinking:

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You answered a question about vendors I’ve had for a while, thank you. But also…I like that vendors sell double rares pls don’t change that. I like money being useful and not just something to disregard :confused:

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Money is very useful for crafts. The only thing you are investing in vendor refreshes is time and in some cases one skeleton key. Imo it’s not healthy when the optimized way to farm the strongest gear is Death Stranding incarnate instead of fighting actual bosses for loot.

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Vendors do not have any bonuses to rolling loot. Meanwhile bosses have a factor of like 100x on Ultimate difficulty. Confirmation bias at best.

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@modal did extensive research on game data that suggested vendors having increased chance of double rare spawns: 2% and for target farm - it’s only around 0.5%.

We did a lot of vendor refreshes and target farms that seemed to confirm the numbers he gave us. Of course there is always room for error cause you need very large data samples to confirm this manually with certainty.

Can you shed some light on the drop chances of regular and nemesis green items? What are the chances for double rares?

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To chime in, it’s definitely very very possible that I’m wrong. But what I saw in the game files is exactly what Zantai says – Bosses, Hero enemies, etc have modifiers to affix chances that vary depending on difficulty & challenge layer. Vendors don’t appear to have any such modifiers.

However, the base chance, with no modifiers (for most but not all rare monster infrequents), is 2% for rare prefix and rare suffix. After modifiers, it’s lower than 1% even for bosses on ultimate difficulty in roguelike dungeons.

So while vendors have a much lower chance to roll at least one rare affix, their chance to roll both rare prefix and rare suffix is actually higher than any boss drop. I found this very surprising when I initially discovered it, and assumed it probably meant that my interpretation of the game files was incorrect. However, subsequently I found that my actual experiences vendor farming seemed to back up the 2% rare/rare theory.

I haven’t carefully collected enough empirical evidence to really support the hypothesis, but unless there are modifiers that do apply to vendors somewhere in the game files that I’ve missed, it really seems true that rare/rare chance is highest from a vendor.

Edit: to be very very specific, here’s the basis for the claim:

Here are the base weights in records/items/loottables/weapons/tdyn_focus_b105_aetherialfleshshaper.dbr (it seems that almost all rare non-nemesis MIs have the same base weights).

combo                  weight
bothPrefixSuffix         7400
brokenOnly                  0
noPrefixNoSuffix            0
normalPrefixRareSuffix   1200
prefixOnly                  0
rareBothPrefixSuffix      200
rarePrefixNormalSuffix   1200
rarePrefixOnly              0
rareSuffixOnly              0
suffixOnly                  0

These sum to 10,000, meaning that (I assume) you can convert to % chance just by dividing by 100, meaning that rareBothPrefixSuffix is a 2% chance, unmodified.

The modifiers in records/game/gamerandomizerweights.dbr include:

modifier                                   value
bothPrefixSuffixUltimateModifierBoss        1500
normalPrefixRareSuffixUltimateModifierBoss 40000
rareBothPrefixSuffixUltimateModifierBoss    4000
rarePrefixNormalSuffixUltimateModifierBoss 40000

I make the assumption that the modified chance is the relative weight after multiplying base by modifier. But that gives the following modified chances:

combo                     base    modifier  modified weight   % chance
bothPrefixSuffix          7400        1500         11100000     10.29%
normalPrefixRareSuffix    1200       40000         48000000     44.49% 
rareBothPrefixSuffix       200        4000           800000      0.74%
rarePrefixNormalSuffix    1200       40000         48000000     44.49%

0.74% < 2%, so that’s where the claim that vendors have a higher chance to roll both a rare prefix and rare suffix is coming from. Would love to know if my assumptions are wrong.

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19

Of course there are many many MI items that are simply not available from vendors so the grind will always be a requirement for those (or a GD Stash cheat for the optimal affixes). Wendigo gaze, ascendant cowl, etc.

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I’ll take a look at the modifiers next week once I have a programmer confirm how they all interact with each other. Definitely should not be a case where a vendor is more efficient than killing a boss.

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