Is it just me or does it feel like the game needs more mobility skills that aren’t target locked? It’s not fun having to albercht ray and then run and then albercht ray 0.5 seconds later 
Just my opinion.
If blink + shadow strike give players way too much leeway, maybe lock skills? E.g. you can have this OR that, not both skills
Some teleport abilities may be nice, yes. The game is quick and has fast action enough to make some teleport relevant. It may help the game to unstick to some extend from that “go-tank-or-die” syndrome.
Generally, with AAR, you do one of two things. A, you do so much damage that as long as you start firing from range, nothing will live to reach you. That makes you rather squishy in boss fights, but some people prefer it to B. B, build tankier. Lose some damage so that you can channel AAR in a monster’s face as it hits you, and ignore the damage.
As for teleport abilities… That is a slippery slope. Right now, the game’s pace is pleasant, without forcing a rush or making people feel bad for stopping to loot. If we start adding movement skills, how are we going to avoid exactly what POE did? Hell, GGG even said that their movement skills are too busted and are affecting the game negatively, but they’re too well loved for them to remove. What exactly are WE going to do with our movement skills that will somehow defend us from that same fate?
You can actually mod in teleport though it’s rather quite wonky when it comes to bypassing areas or getting inside environment objects and stuff. At least it’s good to port around checking out what works in a map and so on.
Can you tell me please, how movement speed skills are affecting negatively POE? Thanks.
False problems:
Enabling the players to get in places where he is not supposed to be at this stage can be easily solved by either restricting the teleport target to places that the character can reach by simply walking as he would normally do, exactly as the shadow strike can only be used to hit targets that could be otherwise reached by simply walking up to them, or by level design by walling the whole area with invisible, unreachable collision dummies, to prevent any teleport abuse. Wall dummies that will then be removed when the area access will be enabled. Another option would be to create no-teleport areas around the places that could be abused this way, by simply disabling the ability around them.
Getting inside environment can be easily fixed by either ignoring the issue, since that if the guy can get in by teleport, this means that he likely did it on purpose and that he can also get out all by himself, so that is not really a problem, and otherwise by simply again walling the whole area with invisible collision blocks to prevent any access to places where you don’t want the player to be able to go.
That’s basic game design now. Many games fixed most issues with teleport before they even occured a decade ago. The D2 Teleport was smooth, perfectly fitting with the class and also perfectly closed to any abuse as far as I can remember, and therefore fun and fitting well in the game (I do ignore on purpose the case of abuse by bots and skill granted by item that enabled the skill to be used out of its primary frame).
Grim Dawn is too much into action and fantasy to ignore the teleport option. Teleport abilities can be very useful to enable one to escape swarms of enemies, to take shortcuts and rush fights and lootings (assuming the ability setup is well balanced), to save allies in troubles (multiplayer) etc.
The problems aren’t false as my comment is pertaining to Grim Dawn as it is now. I know as I’ve modded an item that provides Valdaran’s Teleport for map testing purposes - and I’ve worked in map making as well and the Teleport does as I stated when it comes to porting into objects and past restricted areas.
“Easily solved” or “Easily fixed” is easy to say but harder to do. Could be engine limitations, a difficult fix or like you say something “easy”.
One possibility would be to use Terrain Damage to either make it instantly kill characters that teleport to restricted areas, like aether fields partial chunks of damage over time, however you’d have the problem with hardcore characters dying and still teleporting into environment objects which I’m not sure of a possible way to fix. Also relying on Terrain Damage is more of a band aid then an actual fix and could present other problems.
Diablo 2’s teleport was good when it came to the boundaries you were restricted to however it still had the issue of bypassing level design to quickly traverse though the game and do boss runs (which i find at least to be a bit of a problem).
Now I have thought about seeing if charge skills can simply click on the ground as opposed to a target - or summoning a target that you can use to charge to. Hoping the second option will at least be feasible. Otherwise making buffs that give large amount of movement speed / defensive stats for a short period of time would be easy.
Also Leaps/Dodges/Rolling are also not possible at the moment (that I know of) due to limited animations. I also looked into the idea of using an enemy rolling animation (rift spawn enemies) but I don’t think that would work 
And no collision radius. If the teleport feature has to be implemented, the teleporting character has to has zero collision during the teleport as he would otherwise be stuck if he ends up being completely surrounded by mobs and environments parts, which is precisely where the teleport is the most relevant.
A dummy charge with invisible display, maximum speed, all damage ignored and zero collision would probably be the easiest and safest way to set it up yes. This enables the skill to only be able to target the places that can be reached by walking, which prevent any abuse.
I know that it is easier said than done. I would have probably really enjoyed modding for Grim Dawn if I was 10 or 15 years younger, but modding nowadays require a massive amount of time if you want to do it right, which can only be achieved by a teenager or an unemployed person, which I am not. I used to be into mapping with CS 1.6 and WC3 and into modding with AvP2 and WC3, but those days are over.
Leap options were great in D2, but I am not sure that the Grim Dawn engine could enable such feature. I don’t think that there is such thing as flying in Grim Dawn: the familiar (raven) and the harpies are displayed flying, but they are still stuck by ground units around, which means that this is nothing more but an animation. The leap was great to jump into messy battles and then leaving them when they were getting out of control. The barbarian was so much fun to play.
The “instant kill abusive teleport” idea is way too harsh to make any sense.
At least some sort of ranged version of riftstone is needed imo.
Let’s speak in generalities.
Melees dive onto their foes, instantly closing the gap and deals damage.
We have SS and Blitz on Nightblade and Soldier and even for melee characters which include neither of those classes, we can still get another decent gap closer - Chaos Strike from the riftstone.
Ranged on the other hand, are supposed to keep enemies out of their reach and kite them. If melees are granted to have the engaging type of mobility, I think it would be fair for ranged classes to have a peeling mobility.
I don’t need skills that can hover all around, ignoring terrains, but for ranged classes like gunners, archers and casters, having skills like tumble or short distance blink will do no harm. They will spice up their combat mechanics instead while adding some extra comfort in traveling as melee ones do.
Thank you, yes. That would be awesome 
No, Im very sorry, I wanted to write:
That would be 
A W E S O M E
Feasible, but impractical. Won’t work with ranged.
And for melee.
Not just because your build is officially pure melee means that your assessment of the situation is always flawless and you never end up being surrounded by guys a little bit harder to deal with that you previously thought.
A WC3 Blink (screen teleport) could also give the option to melee builds to escape from being completely surrounded.
An instant town portal could also be nice. Especially when you play hardcore.
This is true, but… Isn’t that kind of the point? If you can immediately leave bad situations, you don’t really have any incentive to avoid getting INTO those situations. I’m all for lazy gameplay… As long as that gameplay eventually punishes you if you’re TOO lazy. I feel like an escape teleport/blink will just encourage sloppy play.
That said, it’s OFC a SP game, so it’s no skin off MY nose if you use it… Just doesn’t seem in keeping with the game around it for it to be included.
As for the instant town portal… If you have one, you really don’t need the other, right?
We already have skills like Shadow Strike/Blitz that require a target and move towards them for melee, i think the opposite for ranged would be acceptable.
What about a skill that requires a target in close/melee range to activate that pushes your character away from them some fixed distance (though it could increase with levels) in the opposite direction to where your character is facing and operates on a long but modest cool down so it can’t be spammed or relied on heavily but is available as you need it. Somewhere around 6 - 8 seconds.
Is such a thing possible within the engine :p.
I am talking about game options and strategy and you are talking about laziness and sloppiness. This is amazing how people here on this forum are able to talk about what first looks like to be the same topic and yet end up talking about completely different topics up to the point where one could wonder if they really play the same game.
You select a class for its strengths and weaknesses. The soldier is tough but slow and short range, the arcanist is long range and AoE but weak etc.
What I was trying to introduce here was a mastery dedicated to stuff like mobility, illusions etc. An alternative caster into ninja/telepath stuff with psy, teleport, stealth, mind control abilities etc, but also weak in the common fields such as melee, direct ranged attacks, direct survivability etc.
You fear that a given game mechanics could encourage “sloppy play”. I value that.
But now please name me a common game mechanics currently acknowledged and used by most people here that is not sloppy play.
Tank builds? Ranged builds? That’s it? That’s your “not sloppy play”?
In a game where aiming and dodging and planning has so little value, please define what is not sloppy plays among the most common current strategies.
Grim Dawn is sloppy as fuck and the fanbase here loves it precisely because of it. The most viable build in the game is by far the facetank. Please name me anything sloppier.
A Blink-like ability, if well designed, and among so many other abilities, would not make the game sloppier but actually less sloppier.
I dont know how well something like this could be introduced in Grim Dawn, but yes, absolutely. Who would not love a backflip on a ranged char or a blink for a melee? I cant rely on my ~30% evasion, and zenta still would one-shot my BM with or without that blink in glad cruc if I would play “sloppy”.
If you are trying to introduce an entire new MASTERY, then I see no issue with it. You’re deliberately trading an entire mastery for, basically, a way to make mistakes with impunity. Go for it. IDC. If it was simply a granted skill on some component, I’d have an issue then.
As for “not-sloppy”… Tank builds still DIE. Ranged builds as well. As for “dodging having no value”… You realize that, as long as you avoid Nemeses, and Uber Bosses… You can manually dodge EVERYTHING in this game. In fact, if you move fast enough, you can even dodge Flesh Hulks’ charge. It’s hard to do, but it can be done. Aiming doesn’t have particular value on SOME skills, but some it does, and you’re certainly welcome to avoid using the name locking feature if you’d prefer. Regardless, I was hardly referring to offense in my comment, was I?
This game is extremely well made, enforcing a base modicum of skill, and successfully linking increased clear speed with either build-making skill at an extreme level, or with personal skill, sometimes both. There are very few builds that specifically clear well and take minimal skill, and those are all very much seen as such, and take quite some time to gear and make properly on your own(Pet builds, mostly).
Generally, I can’t call the game itself sloppy. It’s not perfect, of course, and there are some things that should be changed IMO, but it’s certainly not sloppy.
FTR… “Game Options”… And I responded with sloppiness, because some options promote bad choices. If you run into a mob, for example… Right now, you would die, because it was a stupid choice, that you should not have made. With a blink? That stupid choice is no longer fatal, it’s merely wasted time. It’s inconsequential, really. I’m not one of those people who loves “difficulty for its own sake”(Cough, Dark Souls), but there does need to be a base level of difficulty for a game to remain enjoyable. The difficulty of this game is being killed by a monster, of course. So removing the punishment, IE death, for getting too close to a monster… Kinda defeats the game’s whole purpose, because suddenly anyone paying even a bare smidgen of attention can avoid death indefinitely, without cost.
If it’s an entire mastery, presuming balance of CDs, point costs, and things like that are handled well… I doubt it will cause an issue. If it something that can easily be taken on a variety of builds, I expect it will cause problems. A LOT of problems.
I completely agree.
Such ability granted out of any balancing choice would indeed unbalance the game.
A blink-like ability available to any build through a cheap component addition would sure cause problems and indeed enable “sloppy play”. Such ability has to come with a price, which cannot be I think anything else but a specific mastery with its its own strengths and weaknesses.
But this way, it could give additional options to the game which could be very interesting.
No, you can’t.
I am particularly knowledgeable on that matter since I have tried various troopers (focusing on ranged DPS+mobility/dodging/positioning) and glass casters (AoE+freeze/stun/slow etc) builds, and I can tell for sure that it is just not possible, hence my statement that the game is sloppy on that matter and my main complaint that Grim Dawn is basically nothing else but go-tank-or-die philosophy.
Grim Dawn is an APRG, which means that most abilities are auto-aiming, which takes away the requirement for accuracy in the delivery of the damage output that one can have to face in other games like FPS game. No problem here, this is a feature very common for this genre. But in Grim Dawn, you also have very limited options regarding the dodging challenge. Most attacks can just not really be avoided. That is just the way it is. I have tried improving my move speed as much as I could and really try playing hit-and-run, positioning etc, it just doesn’t work. I lose most of the time 50% of my health bar and I have no idea where this come from. Half of the attacks in this game cannot really be identified. As soon as the fight start, the health bar keeps on going down, whatever how fast and careful one can try to be.
The only challenge in Grim Dawn is to get all resistances to 80%+. That’s the only core point of the character evolution. Since the health will go down regardless of the player’s strategy and reflexes, the only thing to do is to make sure it goes down slow enough to have the enemies die before you do, that’s it. Everything else are details. I play video games for 25 years and my only fun now with that kind of game is to check how good the game performs on the good sides) and how bad it fails on the bad side(s). And in games like D2, it was possible to some extend to play a glass but careful character, very challenging and exciting. But in Grim Dawn, that is just not possible. The action is too fast and too messy.
No, it’s not. Grim Dawn looks more to me like a collection of missed opportunities than a well-made game. Only the abyssal lack of video game culture very common here and the poor standards it causes can lead one to such judgement.
I know it is very easy for me to state this comfortably sitting on my chair in front of my computer and referring to an independent studio who may have very limited support from the major publishers in this industry and likely struggling with budget restrictions, but while Grim Dawn fails in my opinion as an APRG game in 2017 regarding the options, balance and mechanics, it also performs pretty well in the display, atmosphere and experience, which makes me under the impression that what we are talking about may simply be no priority for the developers, who are more into the production of some sort of interactive Cthulhu-like media than the delivery of that ARPG that some players around are waiting for that will definitely, finally, make D2 and D3 history.
I understand your point, but we are not talking about the same thing: the “promotes-bad-choices” thing is cancelled by the “I-have-made-specific-choices-to-precisely-not-have-to-deal-with-those-bad-choices”.
If you go soldier, you make the choice to lose speed, range, AoE etc to gain survivability. The same would go with that mastery I was referring to, where you would precisely get that “escape-out-of-all-bad-situations” ability, but with the price as matters of health, offense ability, resistances etc.
I completely agree that such ability cannot be given to easily to any builds around. It has to come bound with a whole package, with its problems, to make it a choice, with consequences you will have to deal with up to the end of the game.
Here is how I would see it to have it both relevant (understand useful and fun) and fitting with the other mechanics of the game (understand balanced):
Blink is bound to the illusionist mastery. You cannot get it out of any item.
Effect : Teleport the character to the closest place to the ability target on the screen (ie where the player clicks) that the character could otherwise reach by walking. The collisions caused by the monsters and allies is not considered regarding the reachability of that place, but the place itself has to be free (not occupied by anything having a collision radius large enough to prevent the teleport). The teleport cannot be used to move/push something else. The destination has to be free and directly visible by the character (cannot go through walls).
Mastery level requirement: 20
Skill features at first level (level 1): 80 energy cost, 3.0 seconds “charge-up”, character cannot move during charge-up, all resistances and defense are reduced by -50% during the charge-up, 90 seconds cooldown.
All damages reduced by -50% for 5 seconds after teleport. Move speed reduced by -20% for 5 seconds after teleport, All energy regeneration reduced by 100% for 5 seconds after teleport.
Skill features at max level (level 12) : 100 energy cost, 1.0 second charge-up, res/def reduced by -25%, 10 seconds cooldown.
All damages reduced by -33% for 5 seconds after teleport, move speed reduced by -15% for 5 seconds after teleport. All energy regeneration reduced by 100% for 5 seconds after teleport.
Skill features at ultimate level (level 22) : 120 energy cost, 0.25 second charge-up, res/def reduction -0%, 0.5 second cooldown.
All damages reduced by -25% for 5 seconds after teleport, move speed reduced by -10% for 5 seconds after teleport. All energy regeneration reduced by 100% for 5 seconds after teleport.
What about that? Sounds balanced enough?
The guy who just invest 1 skill point into the ability has something just functional enough to escape a situation before it is too late, and the complete expert is a teleport master and can enjoy a very specific blinking build, and yet cannot abuse it because of the energy consumption and blocked energy regeneration during blink-spam, and can also not use it offensively because of the all damage/move speed reduction. This makes it an emergency-escape-only ability at low levels, and also a move-quickly-throughout-the-levels ability at higher levels, as long as the player knows what he is doing (if he ends up in the middle of packs of monsters with low energy and reduced damage and move speed, that’s goodbye mister blinky).
The illusionist mastery would be very weak into physical and cunning attributes, making it a poor choice regarding survivability and offense, but would give the options of very challenging and funny abilities, such as shadow clones, mass confusion, (real) mind control, phase-out, energy drain, decoy etc.