My one and only hope for the expansion!

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Been loving all the previews for Forgotten Gods we’ve been seeing, and I know I’ll be buying it and thoroughly enjoying it. Though the one thing that will make me fall in love with it would be if the the devs took a quick gander at the mastery combos in the game and give a quality of life update to those whose leveling experience is worse than a root canal. To illustrate what I’m trying to say, let’s go with the most infamous combo of them all, Defiler.

Defiler (Demo/Necro) is a horrible drag to level. Nearly all of this combo’s synergy comes in the form of gear sets which only become available at very high level. Before that point, you’re presented with these four options:

  1. Go pure Demo and pretend your Necro tree doesn’t exist.
  2. Go pure Necro and pretend your Demo tree doesn’t exist.
  3. Lean extremely hard on Raise Skeletons with flame torrents attached.
  4. Try to make something else work and be pretty mediocre.

I’m not much a stickler on being ultra optimal on everything; I love exploring what wonderful and weird little things you can do while leveling a new combo to make it feel like a fresh and unique experience from every other character I’ve leveled previously. With classes like Defiler and Apostate, though, I just don’t feel that. They feel so boxed into a single mastery choice which becomes really hard to break out of until you hit endgame sets with damage conversion. Because of this, they feel so uninteresting and bland.

Easiest way I can see this being fixed without screwing around with their endgame power level too much is to throw a trasmuter skill in a tree somewhere that offers damage conversion. Stick a transmuter effect on Ravenous Earth to make it spew molten lava (fire damage) instead, or maybe a transmuter skill that imbues canister bombs with explosive aether damage instead of fire. Just anything to throw a lacking combo a bone that makes them feel a bit more unique while leveling.

Regardless, thank you for taking a moment to listen to my rambling. Bestof wishes for your upcoming release! =)

2

Admittedly, I have only theorycrafted it so far and haven’t played it, but…

  1. Conduit of Destructive Whispers: Fire Strike --> Vitality
  2. Take Necromancer WPS and Harbinger of Souls
  3. Try not to suck

Blazeheart offers vitality to fire, but I think fire to vitality has more and better gear options.

Still probably won’t be great.

3

Some reasonably-easy-to-get MIs with skill modifiers that support less synergistic class combos dotted around the early FG areas would be nice. Since you can access the new expansion as early as the beginning of Act 2, it wouldn’t take long at all to get hold of them either (…though I suppose this solution would require you to own FG, unless they add a few things like this to the AoM version of the game too).

4

The defiler should be called the defiled because that’s what crate has unfortunately, and unintentionally done to it. :stuck_out_tongue:

This is a topic which has been brought up time, after time again.

Fingers crossed, the defiler (and the saboteur) will get some love in FG.