[Mod] Central GD-Zenith Thread

Romashkin · January 28, 2017, 12:08am

Sorry for my english - I’m russian.
My question is about demolitionist and elementalist masteries. I like fire gunner, but i want it to make lightning damage. I choose elementalist as second mastery - Lightning Affinity skill (3 points). Does this skill convert ALL fire damage to lightning damage? I mean fire strike, explosive strike, static strike, brimstone, flame touched and others. If it does, then what about burn damage? Does the skill convert it to electrocute damage?
I just want demolitionist gunner with totally lightning damage and sometimes with cold damage.

Strigvir · January 28, 2017, 12:31am

There is no Demo mastery in zenith. But DoTs (outside of Bleeding, because it is its own “element”) between different elements convert just fine. Piercing, Chaos and Aether don’t have a DoT associated with them so DoTs don’t get converted.
Take note that conversion applies after skill percentage modifiers but before the same modifiers from items. So in your case you can max out the whole Fire Strike line just fine, but have to wear a +% lightning/electrocute damage equipment.

Romashkin · January 28, 2017, 1:12pm

Thanks for answer, but i need some details to be explained. Fire and burn damage from whole fire strike line totally converts to lightning and electrocute damage, thanks again for explanation.

Brimstone Fragments with lightning affinity do lightning+chaos damage instead of fire+chaos, am i right?
Now what about Flame Touched fire damage, +%fire damage and +%burn damage? Lightning affinity converts it to ligthning, +%lightning and +%electrocute damage?
What abour flameblade from elementalist mastery? Fire damage from it now converts to lightning damage?
I dont need Fire Aura from enchanted flint and fire damage from enchanted flint or flintcore bolts or deviltouched ammo because it simply useless in my case? I dont need coldstone for same reasons? Should i prefer hell’s bane ammo and others lodestones to increase my lightning, +%lightning and % electrocute damage?
I dont need some fire damage constellations because they are useless too? I have to choose only +lightning everywhere except masteries?

mamba · January 28, 2017, 1:21pm

If you have conversion on items, then all sources of that damage type get converted. If it is a skill transmuter (e.g tainted Power, Corrupted Storm), then it applies to that skill only.

Romashkin · January 28, 2017, 3:11pm

Well, i have conversion on elementalist skill Lightning Affinity. And i have five questions.

Ceno · January 28, 2017, 4:06pm

All flat damage is subject to conversion. Conversion does not affect % damage.

system · January 30, 2017, 8:05pm

Major bug with the RiftStalker Drain Augment. Instead of giving the large aether % buff and life steal it instead give mediocre lifesteal as well as a flat 10% aether damage at all levels. This also persist whether or not “Sap” is active or not.

Ceno · February 4, 2017, 10:28pm

One day after the release of Cornucopia and I’ve turned my sights back to Zenith…

Mastery overhauls are coming…

Nightmare · February 4, 2017, 10:40pm

A rough date on release?

Sent from my 0PJA10 using Tapatalk

Ceno · February 4, 2017, 10:58pm

1-3 weeks, depending on how creative I can be.

Kathanious · February 4, 2017, 11:27pm

I need shooty shooty bang bang shotgun style. No rest for you.

Nssheepster · February 4, 2017, 11:35pm

What happened to relaxing?

Ceno · February 4, 2017, 11:46pm

Making tangible skills to play with is much more relaxing than implementing hundreds or thousands of little changes here and there in Cornucopia.

…except for when the damn engine prevents one of your skills from working. :furious::furious::furious:

Modding is fun. Usually.

ASYLUM101 · February 5, 2017, 12:29am

Modding is fun. Usually.

Only when it works, and only when it doesn’t require a ton of ass backwards techniques to get things done.

Ceno · February 7, 2017, 9:33pm

First post updated with a look at Zenith’s Itemization and Crafting systems!

Previous first-post content:

[spoiler]Hotfix Alpha v0.5B

Moved the skill reallocation cost and total iron text/textboxes up several pixels in the Spirit Guide window. It presently looks awful but I’ll fix the size of the text later (probably reduce the font size a point or so). This is being done because [FUTURE CONTENT].
Necrotic - Defender of Death: Is now a rank 40 skill. If you have under 40 points in the Necrotic mastery, you will be unable to put points into or out of this skill after updating the mod, so please plan accordingly! Also reduced granted damage absorption by 10%, and the skill now reduces your DA while it’s active. This DA reduction scales up (down?) until rank 12, and then it starts scaling down (up?) in Ultimate ranks. At 22/12, you’ll receive a very minor amount of positive Defensive Ability, and at rank 21/12, you’ll break even (+0DA).
Necrotic - Claws of the Beast: Changed targeting to (theoretically) enable stationary untargeted attacks (shift-toggling). I haven’t had time to test this, so let me know if it behaves irregularly.
Necrotic - Malice: % Current Health Retaliation reduced by 50% on the minimum, and 33% on the maximum.
Terror Knight - Soldier of Madness: +All Skills bonus received in Ultimate ranks removed. Let me know if this resolves the multiplayer lag that this skill presumably induces. If it doesn’t, I’ll add the bonus back in and look into the issue further.
Elementalist - Elemental Armoring: Fixed a small typo in the skill description.

End Hotfix Alpha v0.5B

Zenith v0.5 - Necrotic and Balancing Update!
Changelog:

Added the devastingly evil Necrotic mastery to the mod, rounding out Zenith’s mastery collection!
Added unique FX to many existing skills. More will follow with subsequent updates.
Renamed Outrider’s ‘Cadence’ skill to ‘Marksman’
Fixed a bug where Zenith’s custom skill ui wasn’t showing for some masteries.
Customized the mastery training bar colors for the Zenith masteries.
Terror Knight - Blood Siphon: Reduced Life Leech/second by 40%.
Terror Knight - Evocation of Terror: Cooldown reduced from 35 seconds to 25 seconds.
Terror Knight - Entropic Reign: No longer gives % Damage Absorption.
Terror Knight - Blood Rage: Reduced Active Life Cost by 2 per rank (-24 at 12/12). Removed Defensive Ability bonus. Increased Offensive Ability bonus by 50% at all ranks.
Elementalist - Rupture: % Chance of Elemental Resist Reduction reduced from 33% to a scaling %, reaching 25% at 22/12.
Elementalist - Breath Fire: Minimum Fire Damage reduced by 60%. Maximum Fire Damage reduced by 20%. Now features a 40% chance of 66% Crit Damage (at all ranks) to help endgame scaling.
Elementalist - Exhumation: Reduced Burn Damage by 33%.
Elementalist - Ice Surge: Increased range from 16 to 20 meters.
Elementalist - Citadel of Ice: Energy Cost increased by 25%. Damage absorption reduced from 100% to 90%.
Elementalist - Sprite: Radius increased from 2 meters to 3.5 meters. Cooldown reduced from 25 seconds to 20 seconds.
Elementalist - Chain Lightning: Increased maximum Lightning Damage by 15%.
Outrider - Kick: Added 80% Weapon Damage (all ranks).
Outrider - Fury of the Deserter: Increased % Weapon Damage from 100% to 120%.
Outrider - Line `em Up & Fragmented Assault: % Chance to proc now scales much more quickly to 40% Chance at 8/8 (does not increase in Ultimate Ranks).
Champion - Battery: Is now a default attack modifier (e.g., Fire Strike, Savagery). Works with all weapons.
Champion - Army of None: Cooldown decreases by 2 seconds per rank invested (continuing into Ultimate ranks).
Riftstalker - Korvoranian Tactics: %Chance of % Crit Damage reduced to 15%, from 25%. Energy cost/second doubled.
All masteries - All masteries now have a (hidden) passive skill enabling Dualwield Melee and Ranged weaponry. As consequence, Outrider’s Gunsligner and Riftstalker’s Intangible are no longer required to dualwield; however, their bonuses still require dualwielding weapons to work. This new passive skill is automatically at rank 1/1 in all masteries and provides no additional effects.

Brace yourselves, for the Reaper of Cairn is here! I present to you the Necrotic, a creature that feasts upon the life force of the living and spreads carnage in its wake. Few have managed to see the Necrotic and lived to tell of it, but thankfully there is a creature that can give you some advice about the Necrotic’s malevolence…

And so, at long last, I have concluded the first stage of development for Zenith. The mod has its six masteries to parallel the vanilla campaign…but the mod still has no campaign of its own, nor do the masteries have items or a devotion system to complement them. The road ahead will be long, and paving it will be slow. But don’t fret; Zenith’s transition from a simple mastery collection into a fully-fledged gameplay overhaul is finally underway!

Cheers!

-Ceno

P.S. For those of you who love tweaking mastery skills and making zany builds, don’t worry; Zenith still has surprises in store when it comes to its masteries. :)[/spoiler]

Heathen · February 7, 2017, 9:46pm

Smart.

I too am doing away with yellow items. Ugly color, useless tier of items. It’s funny you’re taking a Dark Souls approach with Zenith, as it is also one of my “Inspirations”, though Zenith would be the truer comparison.

The weapon swap idea is pretty clever too. It’s a mechanic that, at least for me, might as well not even be implemented. You can generally complete all ARPG’s with just a single weapon type throughout the whole game. I can see the strategic benefits pretty clearly.

Have you modified certain animations and speeds/ added larger enemies? I can see that being clever if you want skill-based gameplay.

Also, considering how different your mod is, it sounds like fun to make tough, animation based Hero/ Boss enemies. If you were interested in a small collab, l would be happy to make one or two for ya. I know Insanity is pretty absurd, but I know the difference between the two mods, so if I did make one, I don’t think it’d be out of place.

Ceno · February 7, 2017, 9:52pm

That’s a topic for its own devblog entirely. I will suggest, however, that Zenith’s enemies will have some telegraphed animations that will bury players that ignore them. Of course, not all attacks will be of that manner; those will likely be special cases. Edit: Except for a particular boss…

Heathen · February 7, 2017, 10:09pm

Insanity is a travesty under the hood. As the tools become more and more second nature, i’m gradually cleaning it up. But I definitely have an opinion on the enjoyment factor of modding Insanity.

Zero.

The only real enjoyment I get is seeing my taped together templates actually make a working, sturdy mechanic.

fotosintesis · February 7, 2017, 11:18pm

Ceno:

Grim Dawn - Zenith
^ Download Link ^

Don’t forget to follow along with the Grimarillion project, which features the Zenith masteries!

[i]The work of a hero in the West surely saved all of Cairn from annihilation. But Erulan was not the only region assaulted by the Aetherials and Chthonics. To the East, and at the Zenith of Destruction, another apocalypse begins…

Welcome to Enolis.[/i]

Welcome (again) to a Grim Dawn - Zenith thread. In the announcement thread I tossed about some basic information about the mod, particularly along the lines of what the mod is (an entirely new custom-campaign) and the general concepts going into its development. Here, however, you can look to actually testing it out and, eventually, playing the full campaign.

This post will update over time with changelog information and previews of things to come. I would rather clutter up one thread with this information than the entire already-cluttered modding subforum. I’m sure you guys as much as the moderators of the forum could appreciate that.

Version:
Alpha - v0.5B
Beta
Release

Post History:

Terror Knight Overview!
Alpha v0.2 Preview
Alpha v0.2 Release - the Outrider!
Lore Preview!
Alpha v0.3 Release - the Champion!
Alpha v0.4 Release - the Riftstalker!
Alpha v0.5 Release - the Necrotic and Balancing Patch!

While Zenith’s masteries are being slightly tuned up with more skills and more inter/intra-synergistic skill lines, development of other areas of the overall gameplay overhaul mod are slowly trekking along as well. In this miniblog, I want to talk about Zenith’s itemization and crafting systems.

To do that, we first need to consider Grim Dawn’s existing item and crafting systems. While probably mindnumbingly familiar to most of you by now, Zenith’s systems are so different that it’s worth remembering the fine minutiae of their basis.

Common items are generally not of use to anyone past a very early level. They are the base items used to apply the vast majority of affixes to so as to make more powerful versions of themselves.
Magic items are simply Common items with one or two Magic-tier affixes. Nothing too special.
Rare items are where things get interesting in the Vanilla GD system. They are either Common items with one or two Rare-tier affixes, or they themselves are Rare-tier monster infrequents with heightened base stats relative to their Common peers.
Epic items are the first ‘uniques’ players will find and have higher base stats than even their Rare counterparts, feature innate variable stats comparable to a Rare/Magic affix combo, but for the most part cannot be affixed themselves (exceptions being Decorated Pauldrons, for instance).
Finally, Legendary items are the fantastically powerful ‘uniques’ one shoots for at endgame. They sport much superior base stats even to their Epic counterparts, several variable stats on par with even two Rare affixes, and sometimes can be affixed themselves (e.g., Badge of Mastery).
Crafting any of the above is very simple, aside from Common items, which can’t be crafted (why would you, anyways?). Crafting Magics and Rares requires only some scrap and sometimes some components, and Crafting any of the uniques requires some components, rare crafting mats, and rarely a Rare base item or a relic. Unfortunately, this sort of crafting system is very one-to-one; that is to say, you rarely take one crafted item and use it elsewhere in crafting (exception being using relics to make some Legendaries). This seems very unfortunate for an otherwise fully-fleshed out crafting system.

Zenith is heavily inspired not only by Grim Dawn but also by Dark Souls. Those familiar with the Dark Souls games likely know what that entails for Zenith’s items/crafting, but for those unfamiliar, here’s how Zenith is looking to approach the system:

Zenith first suggests that ‘Magic’ items are irrelevant clutter. So Yellow items will not be seen in the mod (although perhaps they may be used for special non-gear items? Hm…). Zenith also endeavors to more clearly make the different item types separate from one another while also allowing the types to compete with each other. How is this accomplished? Improvement (aka crafting).

Improvement is a crafting system that takes as input one base item and some other reagents and spits out a higher-quality, more potent, and more customizable version of that item. More importantly, the same item may go through several steps of Improvement, and each stage may have branching choices associated with it. For instance, suppose we had some base hammer (Generic Hammer I) dealing solely Physical damage that we managed to drop from an enemy. If we took this hammer to a blacksmith, we would be able to pick and choose between one of several ways to upgrade it. We could give it some Fire Damage, if we wanted to, for instance. We would then be using a higher-quality but same-loot-tier item (Enflamed Generic Hammer II). If we came back later, we could take our Enflamed Generic Hammer II and possibly choose between giving it some more Fire Damage, some Burn Damage, some Conversion, or even a Fire-based proc, for instance. We would then have one of any number of Enflamed Generic Hammer III’s. But wait! What if instead of making our Generic Hammer I into an Enflamed Generic Hammer II, what if we made it a Glacial Generic Hammer II? Or an Aetherwarped Generic Hammer II? Being able to customize and improve any item several times allows for a small pool of base items to grow into a vast collection of powerful tools to pick and choose from, provided you have the materials.

Zenith is intending to divide its four tiers of items up as follows:
Common items are intended to have 1-2 variable stats associated with them by default. A variable stat is one other than Base Armor or Base Weapon Damage, for instance. All Common items will also have 5 tiers of Improvement associated with them.
Rare items, much like our current Monster Infrequents, should have 2-3 variable stats, but only three tiers of Improvement. However, each tier will be more costly but also more rewarding than the 5 of Common items.
Epic items will also be much like our current Epic items, with approximately 4-5 variable stats. Like Common items, they’re intended to have 5 tiers of Improvement.
You can probably figure out the intention with Legendary items at this point. 6-8 variable stats, 3 tiers of Improvement, but again each more costly and rewarding than those of their Epic item peers.

“This is all well and good, Ceno, but I’ve spent 800,000 hours in Diablo III and hope you’re going to have some awesome sets for me to hunt down.”

I won’t judge your life choices, but I will confirm that Zenith will have its sets…

…however, it will NOT have Weapon sets or Weapons as part of sets. Why is this? My intention with Zenith is to engage Weapon Swapping as an active part of play, so I don’t want players to lose some degree of power by choosing to use one weapon type over another when the situation demands it. In fact, I would much prefer rewarding such aspiring players. This means sets will only involve Jewelry and Armor pieces, though it’s also worth noting that the two will not be mixed (i.e., a set will not have both Jewelry and Armor involved in its completion). I like that concept because it allows Jewelry and Armor sets to be distinct from each other and guaranteed to be capable of being paired with one another to completion.

One thing to note, however, is that there will be no set bonii until the very last ranks of a set (n/n or n-1/n). It’s (mostly) all or nothing. This is heavily inspired by Dark Souls, too, of course. I’m doing this because I want to make individual set pieces strong and unique in their own right and to kill a meta where players just assemble partial sets upon their character in every way, shape, and form. That just feels yucky to build AND look at. Set bonusii will also not be exceptionally powerful, but they will be distinct. I don’t want completing a set to ever be required for an optimal character, but I do want to offer some incentive to trying out the full set.

Finally, while we’re on the topic, I’ll note that ALL armor will be a part of a set. Yup, even Common and Rare armor. How will sets interact with Improvement? You’ll have to wait and see…

I’ll leave you with a little glimpse of a testing, Improved weapon while you’re here. I present to you, the Enflamed Generic Hammer II:

Acknowledgments:

Grim Dawn, from which I took and modified some art, animation, and sound files.

Guild Wars 2 and DotA 2, from which I took and modified some A TON OF art files.

Risk of Rain, from which I took and modified a sound file.

cftx, who - through the Fangshi mastery - helped me make Elementalist great again.

ASYLUM101, who taught me how to mod.

y-mir, mabuart, and artofty, whose art I shamelessly took for the class images. Check them out on deviantart, they’re pretty talented!

BREATHING INTENSIFY…

Tbh, it’s been a whole year since my last with GD, I’m stuck with path of exile… In awe with their ubiquitous mechanic, gear perk and just how easy lv10 gear work on latter part (skill exploit).

Only 700h later, I’ve found all these mod content.
Your mastery work on the different approach, and its not just some stat blender. Love all the touch blessed, done in zenith/ cornucoppia / grimarillion… Thanks for the perseverance and enjoyment shared with your creation.

Ceno · February 8, 2017, 9:19pm

Coming to an Outrider near you…Chemical Warfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tTqYlcP-pU