I’ve had this game for a quite a long time, but never got around to play it much - now that I’ve got some time I’m looking to jump back in and complete a full play-through.
The last time I played the game it was still early beta (I think), so I didn’t consider mods back then - but now that the community has been established for a while I wanted to know if there are any recommended mods for new players.
I’ve had a look at the forums here + nexusmods, so I know roughly what the most popular ones are - but I wanted to know if there were some highly community recommended ones I should install before jumping into the game.
I don’t mind if it adds new classes/lvls etc - just looking to play the game as most players most enjoy it. FYI I don’t have the dlc.
Whilt not necessarily a must have, The GD Stash could make your life much easier if you dedicate a lot of time to this game. I don’t use it at the moment, I might, in the future. An Expansion will come and I am curious if they will increase stash size.
Other than that some of th the most popular mods are some that add new classes/ skills, or some that balance them in different way but those I think won’t help a new player. You should go thro the game first I think and decide if you want anything different
You should know, that characters which are using mods are separate from the main list of characters. They cannot use Crucible mode and achievements do not work for them.
I´d recommend to play at least once through the story before trying out mods.
Even if it is just so you can tell the difference.
Imo there are no “must have” mods. The game as such is fine as it is. I for one am not using any mods, simply because I still have tons of fun playing GD unmodded.
There are no must have mods in Grim Dawn and as you can only have one mod active (this means if you want to have multiple mods you need to build one mod from them yourself) there are only 2 big mods I would recommend.
Grimarillion - A group of modders is working together on this mod
DAIL - One modder is merging other selected mods into one project.
Both are high quality mods, actively worked on but with a different goal, different masteries, different balance, different stash, different XP and loot. I would check out both mod threads, try them and see which one you like. Don’t get me wrong, there are several good mods out there and each of those two consists in fact of a several mods. However, by the nature of the GD engine I simply can not suggest any other mod than those two big projects at the moment, unless you have a very very specific problem to be solved by “just this one mod”.
Even better: Download both, try them, test which one you like more.
Also I think you should play the game once vanilla and if it is just for the first act (right side) to see mob density, amount of loot, leveling frequency and some vanilla masteries.
As mentioned there are no ‘must have mods’ and in fact the nature of mods in this game makes it impossible to come up with such a list with being limited to one mod at any given time, and a character from mod A frequently won’t transfer well to mod B.
That said if you want to play with a mod unless you really feel you need more classes I recommend Cornucopia by Ceno and Doom. Cornucopia is mostly a rebalance while trying to remain true to the base classes and really helps revive ‘dead’ (epic) items and makes the devotion tree run much smoother with the reduced requirements for many end teir devotions so it doesn’t feel like such a straight jacket if you want to pick up something like Oleron. Also soon to rebalance legendary items and if their work with epics is any indication they’ll do a really good job of it.
DIAL just adds in way too much in the terms of classes, and the idea of affix’d epic/legendary items kills it outright for me.
Grimarillion sounds interesting but still unsure if I’d want to play a mod that has so many masteries…seems either the loot system would be boring for many masteries or horribly over bloated with possible items making gearing difficult.
So I’ve been reading up more on the mods available and how they change things - I absolutely agree with you guys that I need to play the game as close to vanilla at least once (which is why I’m not going to install DAIL for now, especially since v60 is coming this upcoming weekend).
The recommendation for Cornucopia is great one, was looking over its changelog and it makes minimal changes (well, as minimal as possible without being pointless). Will download this and give it a shot.
GD Stash is also something that seems necessary in the long-run, but for now not going to run it.
