While first i kinda liked the quality of life these items add to associated skills, when you consider it, it doesn’t really mean much. Sure these items have other small bonuses to those skills, but duration bonuses are lackluster imo, considering that you probably use these skills on cooldown anyway. You, for instance, simply don’t want to forget to cast Blood of Dreeg unless you wanna insta die to some poison effect.
Should these duration bonuses simply make those effect permanent for some great quality of life bonus, or maybe just drastically increase the duration?
All for it. From what I remember, if they were to make GD2 the devs would want to change these heal + bonus skills to be always on for the bonus and then require a press for the healing. From that, I gather it’s not possible to make these skills actually permanent in GD due to some limitations (though I wonder if the Wind Devil duration trick they used on Mythical Codex of Eternal Storms might work), but giving them a loooooongass duration would certainly work just fine. The one issue I see is that even if they give a massive duration boost to these skills, nobody is going to use them for that. It’s rare that you have nothing better to use in a given slot and settle for a minor bonus to a heal skill.
Really? Thats how they should have worked here in my opinion too. So basically they encourage you to use those skills for healing constantly so you also keep their bonus permanently. However in practice, you never want those buffs to drop and use them prematurely anyway. I would say they should be looking for ways to make them permanent even without items but i assumed they won’t be doing at this stage of development.
Honestly, could just make PB, BoD and WoR last for 90 seconds as a base and increase those duration bonuses on items to 90 seconds, so you could get kinda-sorta-pseudo-perma buffs. Hell, there’s the skill called Herbal Remedy in Titan Quest, that is very similar to BoD, and it lasts for 8 minutes at softcap (6 points).
If it is mechanically not possible to make these infinite, then i would be more than happy to have these skills have 90-120 sec durations and honestly, i see no reason why it shouldnt be. I personally specifically avoid class combinations that have 2 of these skills (Deceiver etc.) because it feels a chore for me to keep track of 2 of those buffs entire session.
It adds nothing to difficulty, only to tedium. Some people even use auto-cast macros for those, far as I’m aware. I find myself “reapplying” them even on builds that don’t have such skills (e.g. Shieldbreaker), lol. It became a knee-jerk reaction to push the button every ~15-20 seconds even if you don’t have to.
Auto pick-up for Iron, pots and components are great for QoL, but one could say it “simplifies” the game as well (it’s not, it makes it much less tedious).
Same for me. After playing a nightblade for instance, even when i change characters, i tend to press W every 10 sec or so (this is where i put those kind of skills) for no reason. If people are using macros for these kind of skills, which they do, then there might be something wrong with it’s design.
I see your point, but I don’t fully agree. Following your logic - reapplying DoTs on enemies is tedious too. Why burn/poison/etc. last 2-5 seconds? Let’s make them permanent so we can press our buttons less often!
You get powerful bonuses - way too powerful to make those skill practically passives. But there’s cost - you have to put them on hotbar and manage them. It’s extra button to press and extra cooldown to keep track of so you can use when you need the heal. It’s tedious but it adds to difficulty, too - especially if your build really needs that “2nd potion”.
I have Infiltrator with 8 active buttons + RMB auto attack. All with cooldowns to manage so my rotation flows correctly and I don’t die. If I had 2 buttons less (PB and WoR) to press and manage, playing this build would be easier. I don’t have keep track of 2 important buffs because their duration is long and my 2 heals are always available. No more screwing up the boss fight because I pressed Word of Renewal before the boss fight and I didn’t have it when I needed it.
If you are using macro for those, you are losing “heal-on-demand” portion of the skill. Macros usually cast those skills on CD so you might get into a situation where they are on CD when you need healing. And if you set macro for the duration instead of CD and you use the skill yourself, you’ll screw the timing so you have to pause macro, wait for CD and restart it.
So macro isn’t perfect - unless you are not using those skill for healing (and if not - why you keep mashing them on CD instead when they are about to run out?).
I write this from experience. I use macros for farming mats and easy content but I turn it off for boss rooms/nemesis in SR so I have those heals available when I need them (and can rotate their cooldowns with potions).
But sure - let’s make a transmuter for those skills. -20% to skill effects and CD for full, 90s (or whatever) duration so you can’t use them for healing. I’d say it’s a fair trade considering now you have sacrifice item slot to get +30 s duration.
Also, in the time needed to write in this thread, all of you could simply set your keyboard software to press a desired button every “xx” seconds while Grim Dawn is running. You don’t even need to modify the game or install anything.
Grim Dawn doesn’t have a lot of development going (it’s surprising that they are still doing something with it, considering it’s a single player game…) - why waste development time with pointless problems that can have some undesired effects (QoL for some builds but easier piloting for other builds) when every player can fix this “problem” in a couple of minutes?
Completely different thing - picking up stuff happens after the fight. PB, BoD, WoR are used in the fights and if effects have longer duration then skill are available to use more often (because you don’t have to renew their effects so often) for healing but what’s more important - they are available at any time. No more dying to “out-of-nowhere Fabius” in SR, because you just renewed your buff so you didn’t have healing when he was wrecking you.
That was my impression too. 100% damage conversion medals or other gear are a lot more useful for builds. You usually don’t see that type of thing until end game sets. But now there are a lot of infrequents to convert damage type. It can really help you to focus damage type for maximum effect.