GD is one of the best ARPG, period. But everything can be improved.
Here are my suggestions:
Minimaps:
I heard you didn’t want to use an overlay minimap. Fine, but the current ones need to be improved. First, the corner minimap needs a zoom button to make it “smaller” showing more area, so you dont need to open the bigger map several times per minute. Second, the actual minimap that pops up with “M” hotkey should show all quest markers and other POI regardless of their distance from the PC.
Inventory:
Shame on you for the thousands of different mats that clogs the bags. Hopefully a dedicated tab will be implemented in GD2. In the meantime a transfer all mats button would be nice, so they can stay in the stash, where -thanks god- they still work for crafting.
AoM:
The passage from end of basic campaign to AoM is smooth gameplay-wise, but not difficulty-wise. In particular, the bosses are too hard, spamming AOE damage floors left and right.
I finished the campaign at lv48 (yes, I did not grind much bounties etc, because I wanted to check the expansion content). But I believe that the gap in difficulty does exist even with a lv55+ PC. Looks like it wasn’t playtested long enough. I’m afraid it is a little short too (dunno yet, but if isn’t 15h+ without grinding yes, it’s too short).
The minimap can be done away with completely if you want to see more, just click on the small triangle on the righthand side of the UI. As for quest markers and PoI’s - from the 27th July stream:
"enkrypter
:One of my biggest issues with Grim Dawn is that I get lost trying to find quest locations, are there any plans to improve map marking for quest zone areas? PS. I’ve never finished the base game because of frustration issues and lack of patience.
You’re not going to like my answer because we kind of deliberately wanted Grim Dawn to be about discovery and exploration and the quest NPCs who give you the quest and the dialogue and also the quest log gives you directions on where to go and when you get close to a quest target that’s when it shows on the mini-map. And that is by design, it’s not something like oh well we could still improve. We actually wanted it to be this way and I do realise that that isn’t for everybody."
Don’t think we’ll get a transfer components button. IIrc it was asked for in a dev stream and Zantai said no.
As for difficulty, it was playtested plenty (10 weeks in beta) and is at the level the devs want it to be. As for length, well if you run through everything without exploring then it’ll feel a bit short I guess. But you could say the same about the base game if you do that.
AoM is purposely made to be a difficulty spike from the base game. This is for people who want more challenge and hence why you unlock difficulties by killing the base game final boss, so you don’t need to go there if you don’t want to deal with it and just move on to Elite.
Well, you are trying to complete AoM with level 48, that’s one thing wrong with your approach. And something tells me that because you are new to GD your build is probably very underoptimized thus making it hard for you.
From my 1500 hours of GD experience, once you know how to build your char while leveling, everything even AoM is a breeze. I usually storm thru it on Veteran in full Lokkar set (leveling set with almost no armor value).