League Ideas and Feedback

Grim Dawn Mod - Community League
1

I’m creating another topic here because the League Mod and the League itself are two different aspects.

As an introduction, I have to say that I view the way most people on these forums seem to approach ARPGs as completely bonkers.
Skip the game as fast as possible and clamour for “End game content”. WTH ?
I blame WoW for that madness as it started infecting ARPGs communities with the injection of former WoW players, but maybe I’m wrong.

Clearly, Crate don’t get what the modern ARPG audience want. They should buy GrimTools from Damnit, package them into a game allowing to play the character you’ve designed right away, through some procedurally generated and samey levels.
They could be selling Grim Dawn 16 by now, and instead they’re working on more hand-crafted skippable content. Noobs. Get Kotick to help.
</ rant>

And the League also largely promotes that kind of play (or non-play).
You quickly do the main game challenges, and then the main game gets ignored (I do appreciate that an effort was made with the low-level challenges, though).

There are more ways to play an ARPG than build the strongest character possible and zoom through all content. Once you’ve utterly beaten the game, all sorts of self-imposed challenges can provide new ways to approach the game.
Now, a lot of those would be beyond the technical limits of what the League can track (Gorstak, Monk, Yellow only for instance), but some could.

I’ll be suggesting some over the next posts.

2

First add a new type of Challenge, the “Competitive Challenges”.
For those, instead of getting a fixed amount of points for reaching a specific goal, you get points for being the best performer at a given task.
Say that a challenge is “Shattered Realm pushing”, if you’re the first to get to shard 105, you get, say, 500 pts.
The next competitor, with shard 103 gets for instance 400 pts.
The 3rd, with shard 102 gets 350 pts.
And so on. I would suggest attributing points to the top 20-25 only.
If the second player pushes to shard 106, he gets first place and the 500 points that go with it, while the former leader drops to 2nd place and is now scoring only 400 pts.

There would be a tiny element of racing involved, as the first to get to a milestone could only be overtaken by people reaching a further milestone.
In the previous example, if the second player had only achieved shard 105 instead of 106, he would have equalled the leader’s performance, by remained in second place.

Ideas for such challenges:

Shatted Realm pushing : highest shard beaten within the timer.

Scaling Dungeon pushing : highest level completed (any dungeon).

Speed-Leveling : shortest time to reach level 100.

OK, so far, you guys would be in familiar territory. Let’s move a bit beyond.

Speed-running : shortest time to reach and defeat Ultimate Omen.

Campaign Expertise : defeat Ultimate Korvak while have killed to lowest possible number of opponents.

Lokarr Noodism : defeat Ultimate Theoden at level 100 with the lowest average item level.
OK, that one might be tricky to implement, as you’d want to track the max for that value all along…

Lore Master : most lore notes read upon entering Ultimate difficulty.
OK, that one is for people who just like to full-clear the map, and leave so stone unturned.
It should be time-consuming, so that “experts” would be incited to skip that challenge.
With GrimTools being a thing, some creativity might be needed to add notes hidden from GrimTools.

Game Mechanics Expertise : highest damage dealt.

3

Next : Scaling Main Campaign.

Of course, keep the existing challenges, and maybe add a few.
But then add this:

Each Devotion Shrine cleared in Ultimate difficulty yields the following:

  • One devotion point (duh. No change there, in case you haven’t done them in a previous difficulty).
  • One extra stat point (ideally, the Hidden Quests shrine would provide a skill point instead).
  • One extra point to any subsequent challenge achieved (alternate tie-breaker)
  • Minus one to all max resists.

Extra challenge bonus:

  • +5 points granted to any challenge if achieved while wearing the Badge of Perseverance (make it soul-bound of that’s not already the case).