No, no it’s not. Players shouldn’t be expected to have to mod to get a rational game play experience. It should be on the strange people who wants an obscenely hard experience to make things harder on their own, not to ruin the experience for everyone else. Mods have never been necessary before to enjoy Grim Dawn and it should remain that way.
I don’t know why they decided “hey, let’s make everything ultra mega difficult all of the sudden!” But it was an incorrect decision. (That people who are happy with mods could have done on their own, modding the game to be harder.)
Sorry friend, you can build to ignore sunder up to SR 65 difficulty…or I have found via my own testing through all of the 1.2 PTR and current to this day on live. You can make the argument of “being forced to play a certain build” but…
I won’t even touch the skill issue debate. Because it’s not. It’s a knowledge issue and recognizing what to ignore and what to pay attention to.
Also with no context of what build(s) are being used…nothing can be even remotely determined as being an issue outside of knowledge/piloting.
You can hate the mechanic, apparently there is a group that does. But before stomping on sunder go and play Last Epoch’s endgame or do Uber Searing Exarch in PoE and see what a real brutal sunder is like.
I don’t think Crate could make it anymore obvious on what to move out of in terms of sunder without us going back to ignoring everything.
Sunder-dodge is… a difficult topic. 1.2 should’ve been called “the most controversial patch”. That whole dodging thing would’ve been totaly fine if it was in GD from day 1, like, you know, in Diablo 4 - the game it was inspired by, apparently? But it came out of the blue towards the end of game’s life cycle, when, it seemed like, the game was pretty polished.
Now we have this, another expansion on the horizon, and as a result - few more years of balancing and polishing. I just hope by that time the game won’t take another turn somewheres and become a P2W MMO, MOBA, Battle Royale or some such shit.
Shapeshifting is… a difficult topic. Fangs of Asterkarn should’ve been called “the most controversial expansion”. That whole shapeshifting thing would’ve been totaly fine if it was in GD from day 1, like, you know, in Diablo 4 - the game it was inspired by, apparently? But it came out of the blue towards the end of game’s life cycle, when, it seemed like, the game was pretty polished.
I certainly am unlikely to have bought a dozen copies for various people (seriously) and turned more onto it if it had released as a frame-perfect dodging game. RPGs – including ARPGS – should rely mostly on the character’s skills more than the player’s own precision motor control. That’s the definition of what makes it and RPG more than a full action game.
I, personally, am hopeful that Zantai and co will do the right thing and leave it in, but lower the numbers considerably (and make it actually telegraph… including aurally, with a legit pause and tell). Instead of listening to the uberplayers who want everything as hard as humanly possible. That way, it will be a small thing to give a little edge to those spry youths with their godlike powers, but not eviscerate the game for everyone else.
It’s surreal that all my my characters that have done full clears (full clear does not include celestials and SR, but does include the key dungeons for me) on Ultimate are struggling with everything now. And people are acting like that’s nothing.
There’s a handful of changes I don’t like in 1.2, but sunder is not that big of a deal. Just another curse, which can often be even ignored. I am still more afraid of some ground effects and crystals.
Shar’Zul and Morgoneth don’t even have it (when they used to have flat resistance reduction), and the sunder for Gargabol, Aldritch and Alkamos are in highly telegraphed, if anything too braindead easy to dodge moves.
I have done Skeleton Keys dungeons since Sunder has been introduced and the difficulty has been basically the same.
Because it’s a skill issue. We aren’t talking SR - good to know. Let’s go over roguelike dungeons.
Morgoneth doesn’t even sunder IIRC.
Gargabol doesn’t kill you with sunder - he kills you with his same old BS volcanoes, requiring you to react to the same much less pronounced telegraph as before.
Valburry trio still don’t do anything threatening.
Shar’zul I think has sunder now, somewhere? Not even sure, I still facetank him.
So that gets us to the only actual boss who got notably changed. Alkamos. He has a big-ass slow swing that puts a sunder on you if it hits, and can be simply stepped away from. I’ll agree that it’s badly telegraphed, other than the whole SUNDER icon overhead, but it’s absolutely avoidable, and is pretty slow. So slow in fact I stepped back into it on several occasions.
So it’s literally 1 boss who got marginally harder. You aren’t even dealing with Shattered outcast (fuck her all the way through aether and back).
We can go the same manner through nemeses bosses. Some gained in danger, some lost, most of it has nothing to do with sunder even (hello Valdaran).
I think it’s safe to say none of us here are professional CS/Starcraft players with crazy reflexes. Or even POE players for that matter. I know for a fact I’m rather slow with my reaction times. Yet the sunder telegraphs are way more reasonable than SOME other telegraphs in this very same game that used to kill us much, much faster, and didn’t give us tools to evade.
i’ve got post processing on and particles to high and can see stuff,
actually got the same settings as @medea_fleecestealer except Depth of Field is off, and my reflections on medium
without seenig actual gameplay footage i wouldn’t really know what’s going on/dont’ really understand the mentions i’ve seen about people struggling to spot it because it stands out so much to me. Which is why i’ve kept thinking/having the notion it’s from never getting past the “initial” adjustment point of spotting it and then getting used to the FX from there.
Maybe it’s because i was used to spotting other stuff already? like gargabol telegraph and Grava?
but another example would be MadQueen, her old aura i could spot fine, new aura is better, but i think i feel Sunder FX is actually better visualized to the player than old MQ aura perhaps, - so makes me wonder if people not spotting Sunder warning also don’t notice ex MQ aura or such
*oh yea, maybe i should mention, i’ve actually got poor eye sight too and use glasses - so it’s not a case of having fighter pilot top tier vision
Take 2 - just post your build, because as I run SR75-76 to SR85-86 I have builds that eat sunders for breakfast. And I have like 20 different testing builds lawl and get hit with sunders regularly due to being tired due to current sleep fun. Sure, some of them do die (i.e. Iron Maiden and Manifestations of Hunger), but I either have enough defences layered or enough healing or health regen that sunders can be shrugged off.
So, take whatever-count, no, it’s not a build problem. I’m sorry that you feel that even playing the game on ultimate should filter out so many builds and only leave a few going. Multiple builds that, prior to 1.2’s otherwise-minor-for-them updates, had no problems. It’s not a build problem. It’s a sunder-is-not-good-gameplay problem. Only some few of my characters have I built as a face-tanker. But this sunder thing is new and unwelcome in making you have to facetank or twitch-dodge. (I don’t care about SR at all, and I don’t care about the celestials. Of course it’s possible to create a tight highly-optimized character for those bits. One shouldn’t need to. Though I do sometimes duck into Crucible for fun and am dreading that based on the near-unanimity that sunder totally destroys that game play mode.)
I’d love to, but I can’t have fun anymore because of the whole sunder and evade stuff getting in the way of actually being able to enjoy the game. It’s now a stressful, sweaty twitch-fest where I have to be hyper-focused on the boss the whole time, and it’s miserable and lousy to keep dying like I did back when the game was new and I hadn’t learned how to make characters yet. Sunder-evade is the antithesis of fun. I can’t have fun with it in there as it is!
Imo this is absolutely ridiculous when a yellow mob’s debuff like e.g. spectral miasma is still way scarier than any sunder in the game during leveling when you don’t have proper overcap yet imo. Also what about arcanes, or timewarped? Those used to be arguably more annoying to play around in 1.1.9.8 than sunder is in 1.2.
Because of the evade button or sunder? Also I wonder if it’s stressful because of the sound effect and the orange screen or because of the 30-50% more damage you take, which on a good char is rather easily tankable no matter the playstyle unless you push the difficulty limits (SR 80+, Celestial Bosses).
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