I have a lot of thoughts when it comes to the leveling process and most of them are incongruent with each other. So forgive me if my replies below seem a little haphazardly constructed - I generally chose my words and points with specific intentions, but I get quite wordy when it comes to things I’ve spent a good deal of time pondering on…
This is all fine. I want it at the top of this post as a bit of a theme for the post which I’ll return to when I address a little something else…
For people like the first poster and myself, Grim Dawn’s ‘endgame’ is making new characters. Theorizing something on grimtools, making the character-ingame, and then stress-testing it at the limits of campaign content or the Crucible. The issue for us is the in-between involved. And it’s not as though we want that in-between deleted or outright minimized, but I think a means to mitigate the repetitive drawl of the 60-85 level range is what we’re after. It seems there’s a misconception in this thread about what’s being asked for. Neither kidpid - the first poster - nor myself have suggested a means to physically skip content.
My endgame takes other forms, too. I like Grim Dawn because it has a lot of ‘mini-goals’ I can set for myself that I can achieve with a focused, dedicated grind on any individual character. Here are some goals I’ve set for myself in the past and enjoyed:
- Craft an Oblivion relic with every +% Racial Damage Completion Bonus
- Ultimate: Kill every available Nemesis in one session
- Ultimate: Full-clear every Roguelike Dungeon in one session
- Ultimate: Full-clear an entire Act in one session
Some of those might seem a bit lofty, arbitrary, or utterly useless to complete, but here are three self-imposed but entirely-optional goals most of us here on the forum have probably completed:
- Beat Ultimate difficulty
- Reach Level 85
- Reach Revered/Nemesis with every faction
Not a single one of these is required of you to play through the game in its entirety. Beating Ultimate is no different from beating Elite or Normal (unless you include the super-secret quest in your definition of ‘beating’, which I don’t). Reaching Level 85 does nothing for you as a player (other than unlocking an intangible, irrelevant achievement). You don’t need to reach Revered with any faction, though the augments may make gameplay easier for you if you do.
But the issue with leveling as an optional goal is how potentially mandatory it is for other things. If people set a goal for themselves like competing in high-end Gladiator Crucible, or completing a min/maxed build here on the forums, reaching the highest echelon of available levels will be a necessity. This is a problem with Grim Dawn that was not present in Titan Quest, where the latter featured characters and players that rarely ever reached levelcap. This was the case in Titan Quest not because it was incredibly tedious to do so (although it was…) but because it was never a requirement. In planning a build for TQ/:IT, you generally can finish whatever you want to do around the 63-68 range. The remaining leveling process to level 75 is entirely optional and arbitrary. (Which is why I enjoyed setting a personal goal to reach 75 on various characters in TQ - because I could, not because I needed to.) In Grim Dawn, however, you need to reach level cap to do a bunch of other things. This is the case for a multitude of reasons…
- Many mastery combos are heavily starved for skillpoints (chiefly Tricksters, Blademasters, and Saboteurs, for which there are no real existing sets to cover the gap created by their skillpoint-intensive skills)
- Many mastery combos are heavily starved for Devotion points (in my experience, mainly anything with Arcanist or Demolitionist)
- Some optimal gear requires the maximum level (-of Attack has a maximal roll at Level 85)
This means that to even partake in an endgame with others, you do in fact need to go as far as physically possible. In light of that, having ways to mitigate the repetitiveness and duration of this “quest” is highly desirable.
As an aside, I’m pretty sure that characters in Path of Exile, too, do not need to reach levelcap to be finished and that the community advises making builds for some sub-cap level. I appreciate and respect this, but don’t think it’s presently viable in Grim Dawn, so our situation and approaches to a solution need to be considered differently.
Going back to my quote from Gibly, I’m still fine with a ‘Mandate’ sort of thing because it would most certainly be a form of mitigation. But I do still think it’s only a bandaid solution. The current state of Grim Dawn leveling is this:
- Rush to Ultimate
- Complete Ultimate quests that can be done reasonably
- Grind out numerous rounds of Bastion of Chaos OR numerous rounds of Wasp nests if BoC is too hard on your eyes (like it is for yours truly).
The ‘Mandate’ idea would only shorten that ‘numerous’ grind without addressing the facts that
- Rushing to Ultimate is optimal
- Ultimate Quests offer the highest rate of XP/minute
- Two-three places in the game offer a respectable return rate on XP per unit of time invested in clearing them.
I would like to be able to level appreciably so in Elite/Normal such that I could actually enjoy the presence and existence of these difficulties. But I don’t think there’s a way to adjust this in a way that doesn’t upset the degree to which one would advance in levels under ordinary play, as Gibly describes.
I would like not to need to rely on unrepeatable Ultimate-tier quests just for the sake of filling an experience bar. I’d actually prefer to do the quests because I want to, to enjoy the content itself.
I would like to be able to farm other pieces of content as I willed rather than repeating X dungeon over and over. Growing tired of farming X, even if it’s the most efficient? Well at least A, B, C, and D are viable too…except, presently, X is really the only respectable option. And I feel that specifically addressing A, B, C, and D to be more like X is more work for a less-satisfactory result. A broader stroke to minimize the difference between X and everything else - even if it makes X a little stronger in a vacuum - is much more preferable and would likely be less work.
A ‘Mandate’ solution would have minimal impact on the first issue and do literally nothing for the other two issues. Unrepeatable Ultimate quests would (likely) still be the primary source of experience for new characters. X dungeon would still be the only thing to do as its relative ‘leveling power’ to other dungeons would remain unchanged.
There is and never will be a perfect solution that satisfies everyone. I do truly believe that making heroes and bosses in Ultimate much more rewarding would go a long way toward making the leveling grind less tedious and just generally more fun. As for those sorts of people that OCD-clear everything in every difficulty and reach 85 halfway through Ultimate after Empyrion-knows how many hours of time? Sure, they’ll reach 85 a little earlier into Ultimate. Congrats to them for having the time to burn to do all of that, but I don’t mind ‘worsening’ that situation because the end result is the same regardless, it’s just a time factor that changes…which is the point.
I hope I got my points across in a comprehensible enough manner. I spent about 4 hours thinking about and working on this post and there’s bound to be some confusing stuff up there, so feel free to quote me on anything you’d like more insight/clarification on. :rolleyes: