Much appreciate ! The correct name should be text_enA6.arc . Are you using the latest version v0.8.1.1 ？
I am using it.
Perhaps I should try to ignore this file
After I updated the game, the screen gets stuck on loading when I select a character to enter the game.
I’m missing the source file to fix this. Has been the case for over a year now. Sadly, no fix in sight anytime soon.
That’s because you’re on the playtest. RoT doesn’t seem to be working with the 1.3.1 at this moment.
If you go back to live patch, it should work again.
Ah, so that’s why the game was constantly crashing with my high level characters. Indeed, that was such a discouraging experience I almost gave up. Are those items now fixed?
Anyway, since I leveled 3 characters to 90+ in the mod, I figure I should provide some feedback of my experience. Sorry if a lot it is in the form of criticism. I liked a mod a lot, otherwise I wouldn’t have leveled 3 characters to endgame, but most of the stuff that stuck in my mind were frustrating things.
- Difficulty
Subjective, I know. I believe the scaling increases too fast for a solo self-found playstyle.
- Normal difficulty is pretty good, feels just right.
- Nightmare felt like a slog until I got a lot of +skill/mastery items to get me through it.
- Hell felt like I hit a wall, even with maxed out skills. My character was a Classic Necro summoner (I really wanted to solo class, but eventually was forced to dual another summoner class).
I dunno, the campaign didn’t feel this way in base game GD or classic/reforged D2. It’s like starting a new character on Ultimate in the base game. Everything takes so long to kill and does so much damage. But even then, you catch up eventually. I never felt like I could catch up in Hell.
Sure, if you’ve got end-game gear it feels like the right difficulty, but… well, that’s why the base game got the Ascendant difficulty and Shattered Realm. Maybe shift this scaling towards Ascendant and tune down Hell.
I eventually ended up tuning down the HP of all mobs by 30% on Nightmare and 50% on Hell. That made the campaign feel much better for the subsequent characters, closer to the right difficulty.
- Skills
I was pleasantly surprised to realize that while in classic D2 different skills would replace each other (like curses application) in this variation some were actually combined. Pretty cool, and definitely like it. Especially being able to use multiple auras makes the Paladin much more appealing. I’m not a big fan of the Assassin’s Fade and Burst of Speed being global exclusives, however. If they could only be exclusive to each other like in D2, that would be great.
I was quite disappointed that Bone Wall and Bone Prison don’t actually block mobs. Any rare or boss would just walk through it without even noticing it. I ended up refunding all points in the skills because they felt functionally useless.
I would’ve loved to use Bone Spirit and Bone Spear, like I did in classic D2. But the mana costs for them are insane, I ran out in 3 seconds or less. I dunno, I feel like their cost should be cut by 60-70% or something. Ended up refunding all points and forgoing them completely in favor of curses only.
Golems… oh boy. I loved them in D2, and I would love them here, if not for one thing: their Devastation attack. It’s certainly effective, but once you get 3-4 of these guys, it absolutely destroys the framerate. Sadly, I had to give up Golems entirely just because of this, it made my game unplayable basically. Not to mention the constant loud sound and distracting animation.
I’d strongly suggest either taking out the ability completely and cutting the cooldown / increasing damage on the nova (that’s pretty good too) or replacing it with something that’s less visually obliterating. Until then, they’re a lost cause.
Lower Resist curse needs to lower elemental resistance too, otherwise that point to convert Skeleton Mages to elemental isn’t worth it if you lose the RR.
I also played an Amazon. I first tried to build for Cold/Freezing Arrow, but the AoE was kinda disappointing, and the itemization support worse than for Fire/Explosive Arrow, so I went with the latter.
I compared the Valkyrie to the Master Assassin. There’s really no comparison. The latter does its job very well, the former can’t even scratch enemies on Hell. Refunded all points since it wasn’t doing anything.
On the Assassin side, aside from what’s already mentioned, I wished that the iconic skills: Blades of Ice, Claws of Thunder and Fists of Fire would have cooler animations than just round novas on the base skill. The procs are pretty cool, I really like that you managed to replicate the D2 feeling. It’s just that it looks weird when you combine those with the novas.
I wanted to go full elemental at first, using all 3 + Phoenix Strike. The visual clutter was too much and it didn’t look good at all, so after experimenting I eventually settled on just Blades of Ice and Phoenix Strike. Currently, I think that’s the best looking combo.
- Items
It was lovely to see the D2 items again, some even with their original art!
It was less lovely to realize that a lot of them, while great for the GD base game difficulty, are definitely not capable to getting you through Hell, despite the high level requirement. I would say that’s more a problem of the difficulty scaling setting than the items’ balance, but then you look at stuff like the Mythical iconic sets, and the difference in power to other lvl 90+ sets (from the base game) is staggering.
There’s a lot I could say about the itemization balance, but I think we already know that it needs significant work.
Instead, I’ll just mention a few things I’d like to see improved.
- A lack of skill modifiers on the non-end game sets. For example, the classic D2 sets like Tal Rasha, Natalya’s etc. They’ve got basically no modifiers on them, which is quite sad. The Disciple gives class bonuses to Night and Oathkeeper but doesn’t boost any of their skills.
- Too much focus on retaliation. It’s far from the most popular playstyle, even in the base game. I’d even wager it’s along the bottom in the ranking. So why so much retaliation stuff? But if you’re going to do retaliation, at least give some serious bonuses, not this half-baked stuff of “15% chance of 200 Retaliation damage”. Which brings me to my next point.
- Too much chance-based damage. Having this “X% chance of Y” is fine on a few items, but it’s literally everywhere. Why? I really don’t see what it adds other than confusion and unpredictability to a build. Hitting an enemy shouldn’t be a lottery ticket.
- Stronger pet bonuses on items. Except for Mythical Trang-oul and Mythical Aldur’s, every other non-base game item has way too weak pet bonuses. The bonuses on the sets I mentioned should be the norm, not the exception. Sure, there are runes for total speed and rainbow facets for flat damage, but what’s missing is “all damage”. My end-game Nephalem Ritualist, wearing 6/7 Mythical Trang-oul + 3 pieces of Mythical Aldur’s and with 40 points in the summon skills still does half the damage of my Assassin / Sorcerer OR my Amazon / Paladin. In the GD base game, end-game summoners are on par with melee or ranged classes. Better in some situations, worse in others, but certainly not half the effectiveness.
- A stronger identity to sets. I feel like a lot of the added ones just don’t focus enough on one or two main skills, but spread themselves too thin. Same for the bonuses: focus on one of: pet bonuses, direct damage, DoT, retaliation. Not a mix of them.
I think I’ll stop here, since this post ended up quite long anyway. Hopefully this doesn’t come across as too negative, because there’s a lot to like here as well, even if I haven’t mentioned it as much. The mod is truly a great piece of work, and I dearly hope it will continue to improve.
2 Likes
This is an interesting take. Even on my first walkthrough of the mod, as well as thousands of hours later, personally I still think that Nightmare difficulty is a formality. Normal difficulty always felt much harder than Nightmare.
Hell is a difficulty of it’s own. Keep in mind, that unlike base Grim Dawn you can grind Hell for countless thousands of hours on end on one character and keep improving it. That’s why the entrance ceiling is set much higher. Also yes, this is subjective, but I think most of people who are playing the mod enjoy the fact that Hell truly lives up to it’s name of “Hell”.
You can, but it takes way way more hours to do so. The baseline Hell acts are already endgame quite literally.
Personally I think that Ascendant difficulty in RoT should be ever harder than current Hell. Balanced around those whom had ultimately finished gearing up their characters and are ultimately only interested in quality of drops/grail stuff. I thought this was supposed to be the same for base game, but much to my surprise you can just do fine in Ascendant simply by reaching level 100, and you don’t need to have any good gear whatsoever, since a rat of a character can still farm the campaign easily and there’s already plenty of guides around budget Ascendant gearing for the base game. This is flawed design where a supposedly endgame difficulty has quite literally turned into a baseline difficulty.
But Burst of Speed is the single best aura/exclusive in the entirety of RoT. I don’t undestand?
Fade is underwhelming compared to BoS. In fact every single other exclusive in RoT is underwhelming compared to BoS, but Fade suffers the most from being inside the same mastery. Maybe thanks to Fangs of Asterkarn it’ll get a proper rework now by usage of new stats. Personally I think that there could be added some item that would turn Shadow Warriors into being pet-scaled instead of player-scaled and have the Fade aura be changed(not by item but normally), to work in an aoe range (to support allies) and get some bonuses to pets, which Assassin has zero of. Fade will never beat Burst. It needs to focus on a different gameplay niche entirely.
True. Surprisingly though, the ones that Bosses use such as Uber Leoric are able to completely surround an entity with them.
Yes. I remember it was tough to play RoT before I upgraded my PC to modern standards. And it still does feel like this. The optimalization sucks, but what can a team of mostly one do about it?
It’s not only this skill problem though. There are dozens of abilities like that.
It does with certain item skill modifiers. Also there are items that have it reduce elemental instead of vitality and magic, like Medusa’s Gaze. In the highest endgame items start dropping with the Of Lower Resists suffix that gives a versatile Lower Resist curse version, that every 8 out of 10 builds in this mod are using.
The resistance reduction from 2 classes + devotion in this mod is not enough for highest endgame content. You need way more sources of RR on pretty much almost every build.
It exists because it is easier to convert 100% elemental damage to xyz, instead of trying to convert acid and magic at the same time. Also that transmuter gives them total damage modified, so technically improves them on the long run.
People did Valkyrie oriented builds in this mod that could do all content even without having crazy rare items equipped. Maybe it’s bugged?
Agree. A lot of the new items introduced to RoT feel underwhelming and stats starved. They only really support some one specific gameplay style, and not more than a single build in the mod. I understand that we’re talking about most of the Mythical Sets. The old D2 sets are good (such as Mythical Immortal King, Mythical Tal Rasha’s, M’avinas, whereas other ones feel stats starved for their required player level) I agree. Reducing their required level also feels pointless (though other items or Ist runes - why would you sacrifice even more stats to equip items, that are already stats starved to begin with?)
That would absolutely kill the D2 itemisation and turns this mod into a copy of Grim Dawn, which is not what people are playing it for. Personally I’d rather have a choice of 10 different items for each slot at any given time and shuffle around options, instead of feeling like I’m forced to equip the “one item/set to rule them all” that gives the skill through item skill modifiers 10 billion damage, and you feel like it’s the only item worth ever using all the way till level 100 and completely invalidates any other item in the game.
I agree. Well maybe there’s a reason for it, but I wouldn’t be able to tell. I never tried out a retaliation build in the mod yet.
Personally I think it’s cool and I love it, but it shouldn’t be thrown around and bloat the game like that +1.
Hard disagree. I did quite a few pet builds and the itemisation for them, arbeit limited (as it should be unlike the retaliation bloat) is very good. Pet builds are easily among one of the strongest archetypes of builds in the mod. I think your problem is that you are too much focussed on bonuses to all pets. On all the pet builds I’ve made half of the items that I’m using do not even have pet bonuses in them. I’m using those items for the debuffs or auras that they grant. Also typically a +1 to all skills is a better stat than any set of pet bonuses. Pet bonuses you mostly use to grant them resistances - even some auras are used to grant them resistances. But a signifant most of the damage your pets do comes from stuff like stacking skill ranks and stacking multiple Might auras and whatnot.
True.
No, that would be boring and kill the usefullness of specific items across different builds. Why should an item X be only for pets or only for retaliation. I agree with your previous points given only in terms of stat bloat, but I don’t think that we should have only-pet or only-retal or only-dot or only-xyz items, because this creates a foundation of very uninteresting and boring drops. The current way items work in RoT is Imo better than the base game, because you get much more choice in what could be a possible upgrade for you, instead of skipping through 49 other items, because only 1 in 50 turned out to be the upgrade you were possibly looking for.
Don’t worry. Much appreciated feedback!
I noticed that the beam effect works correctly in RoT 0.7.8.4, but I can’t figure out where that texture file is located.
Of course the previous versions wouldn’t have the source file, unless the mod has raw data. I’m not a Grim Dawn modder whatsoever.
So Ram and other former project team members also don’t have the source files?
This reminds me of when Onyx lost the source files of his own mod, Back to Hellfire. Didn’t really matter. He got remarried and found a new life and lost interest in gaming.
And David Brevik talking about losing the source code for Diablo II.
You are in good hands. 
LOL
More humorously the modern D2:R team issuing a statement that they did indeed have the D2 sourcecode or they’d not be able to do what they did.
Thanks for replying. I won’t address all of your points, but I do want to make something clear.
Diablo 2 was, and still is, a game for many different types of players. So is Grim Dawn, and I believe, so is this mod. It’s not exclusively, nor should it be, for hardcore fans or players who are willing to invest, as you say, thousands of hours grinding Hell. I think trying to restrict it in that way would actually damage this mod’s accessibility, and what a mod can always benefit from is more players.
That’s why I suggested making use of the Ascendant difficulty, to address both crowds of players. The best thing about it is that Ascendant doesn’t require you to replay the campaign, it’s basically just a toggle like Veteran. So it’s even technically feasible to rebalance the difficulty taking it into account.
Yes I agree, we could say make Hell difficulty somewhat more accessible and easier, feel like /players 1, while making Ascendant feel like /players 8 (or whatever the developers will find fitting) and so make the loot drops different for the two settings. This was not possible before, but now it is.
Yes, most people don’t want to spend countless hours grinding for collecting items and such, so making Ascendant way tougher instead, but also way more rewarding for time spent on the challenge would be ideal.
This should’ve been the same for base game Grim Dawn but it isn’t. Hardest difficulty and most boosted up altar is not really the best loot yield per hour in any way.
And Ascendant alredy became the baseline difficulty, not something you are supposed to get ready for by first playing on Ultimate for longer and having your character mostly done/finished.
Has this mod become much more difficult in the last few years? I’ve not played of late, but since the addition of act 6, it would help me prepare for nightmare and hell and it wasn’t really an issue with most characters. Often times my inability to copy with Hell difficulty was user error, and I’d try to reassign skills, etc. Maybe I underestimated the function of a few items that would help in hell, or maybe I need to farm a bit in Normal/Nightmare. Power leveling, like doing cow levels when your character can’t gain more levels when you are already a very high level, is a great strategy. If you waste them early you will regret it. The cow level is a finite resource.
The Cow level is currently fantastic for farming the new Ashes of Terror - used to Hellforge(Awaken) items! (Fangs of Asterkarn feature) And obviously to get 6os socket bases within reasonable time.
The best source of experience to reach level 100 as fast as possible remains either Trial of the Ancients or to fully clear Forgotten Sands, Furnace of Pain and Matron’s Den. (Locations of where Uber Duriel, Uber Izual and Lilith are at). Monsters in there are always like 20 levels above the character or something similar. 
As for the difficulty it hasn’t really changed for the last 3 or so years aside from the Final Boss being able to summon a larger variety of other Uber Bosses now, and the sunder mechanic being added, which makes few endgame bosses such as for example Tirion GoldHammer somewhat more lethal than they previously were.
Yes, I do recall that the cow level is somewhat useless at late endgame. I do as you do.
Thanks! I’ll look out for these new challenges! 
I remember in the past my main issue with Hell difficulty was actually trash mobs, basic enemies.
No worries. Feedback is typically about what people want to see improved.
I’ll quickly touch upon a few points:
Normal and nightmare I both find easy. Using SSF characters, that is. So I don’t see a reason to change that. The hell is definitely a big jump, but this is intentional and also loosely based on the jump between nightmare/hell in D2(r) where suddenly you encounter immunities etc so the kill times drastically go up. One awkward thing here is the high Attack rating/defense requirements which aren’t a thing in d2r, especially for casters. Melees do ofc need AR in d2r.
The mod, like base GD assumes you’ll be using 2 classes, so a single class run is a gimped run and not indicative of what a play through should be (though it’s still possible). But it’s really a check on having enough AR/defense/RR as a check to also prepare you for the world bosses and Ubers. What most people also tend to forget is to use components and augments. Or don’t realise how strong some easy runewords can be.
Not possible but also not needed. They’re plenty strong as they currently are.
Me too but apparently that’s just not a thing. At least keeps bosses somewhat dangerous so I don’t mind, honestly.
People will riot😄 I don’t really have much on opinion on this though. Afaik most people enjoyed these additions as it makes golems a lot more viable in terms of damage and they require a lot of points investment. You usually pick golems or skeletons but not both (unless single mastery, I guess).
It doesn’t. I’ve made the adjustment to the skeletal mages to have poison/magic damage ones and elemental ones, so that you could at least have only skeletons that work with lower resist (before they were always elemental+poison). Not every class needs RR to every damage type. You pick the elemental one if you go for elemental pets which depends on your secondary class.
Imo there’s enough. This is a rough area to get right. Too much modifiers on sets and it’s boring d3 style sets, and then for non endgame sets it’s perhaps too much already. The stats and skill bonuses they offer imo are enough power addition for their level.
I don’t really know how to interpret this and when a set has identity or not. I think they all do have their identity.
People kept asking about it and because it was underused, I tried to add to it as a more viable playstyle. Retaliation setups can do serious damage though.
Either way, thanks for sharing your feedback. Some balancing is still due. Though with the recent bigger changes I’m prioritizing bugs and issues first.
And 1.3.1 is loomimg so I’m worried about that too.
That reminds me, you can’t save all your rare resources to enchant gear for late endgame on many builds. You have to craft to progress TOWARD late endgame. Attack rating especially. You keep playing to find more upgrades to enchant new items.
Good news—the source file has been found, so you can start working on the fix right away.
The source file path is:
Items.arc > shrines\teleportshrineilluminations01.tex
Items.zip (69.9 KB)
3 Likes
Could you also try to find out what happened with Shadow Warriors, Assassins NPCs (Natalya, Asheara), Hatred Runeword Shadow Master and Moreina mercenary chest armour models? They all got broken at some point - lost their armour “shapes”, and this visual bug has been there for a long while now. (4th screenshot is what it looked like in the old versions and got lost)
