We’ll know only if we hear from the devs, but, what the live streams I listened to, it sounded like Zantai described it the other way: He implemented evades because he wanted them based on other games. And then Sundered came from the game now having that. It could have gone the other way of course, though.
players wanted more boss engagement, this was already in the works (as i understood)
Z wanted an adaptable movement skill, “baseline” skill you could the modify and augment into leap teleport etc, so all classes had one - as i understood from the discord this was way after looking at better boss engagement/“fight difficulty” as requested by players, and the “baseline”+augment feature could then be used with that fight engagement.
^turned out because of sunder players didn’t like Evade “replacing” runes, because, A we still liked regular runes, B sunder was so dangerous it needed its own dodge so you still had rune left available for the old regular scenarios of surround or other avoiding attacks.
So evade couldn’t really supplant the runes (as of yet) because just the initial test of dialing up their cooldown (while still being a 2nd movement) went over really poorly in playtest. - unsure if FoA will change this even more or just go back to the regular idea of augmenting evade while still keeping both movements or ditching one
Sunder was the “simple” solution to the player’s boss fight feedback (i’m assuming developing 150 new animations and movesets + adding their own attacks would been more resource intensive than a switched debuff RR->Sunder), dark souls dodge then became the/its own tool for that improved boss fight solution
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You’re damned right. The game’s about builds and learning mechanisms. It’s not about honing fine motor control and instant pattern recognition. This game never needed this level of attentiveness and twitch before, and it shouldn’t, late in its life cycle, change into a very different game, a different genre even. It’s always had great accessibility (a good thing, despite what elitist gamers in some communities believe!), so long as you avoid the few things that didn’t (celestials, SR, higher Crucible). When I want that kind of game play, I play entirely other games. I have technical platformers, or Nioh, and so on, for when I want to sweat instead of relax.
There’s nothing about improving Grim Dawn skills (skill selection, item choice, etc) with the evade+sunder mechanics. It’s personal fitness training, effectively.
/thread
/10char
^one can argue that learning boss attack windup animations is part of the mechanics learning…
you’re right, it required more: because all the dangerous attacks had individual or even subtle attack cues or animations - many complained about deaths from attacks that could be avoided paying attention to those
now they all share a big bright FX and use the same one
it’s not, as you’ve been told by many players besides me too, it’s still pretty chill, more active than before, no doubt, but not remotely close to the level you’re trying to make it out to be; and more so can still totally make chars and builds playing equally or more facetank/fight chill as before
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Tbh, not a fan of sunder either and if there were 2 versions of the game, one with sunder and one without (but equally kept up-to-date), would pick the one without sunder every single time.
For me, the reasoning is simple - If I didn’t like the more “active” gameplay certain builds required pre sunder, I am not going to suddenly fall in love with the devs attempting to force the same active style on all builds.
Instead of adapting to the new pacing and playstyle, I simply made my builds tankier while discarding the ones that required faster reaction and response from me as a player.
So, from my perspective, all it achieved was to reduce the number of builds I play.
However, I must clarify that my gripe is less with sunder itself and more with the direction the devs wish to take the game and sunder coming into form as a result of that.
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LAWL
Sorry darling, but in my 37 years of life your actions here are definitely things I’ve seen other ASD people do, less so myself, since my ADHD management stuff helped with ASD symptoms as well lawl. So I suspect if I ran you through an ASD diagnostic checklist, the results would be very, very educational :3
Oh noes, your freeze peeeeeaches! /s /j
/ahem
Now that’s out of my system - you’re doing exactly the thing I suggested this thread should be locked over, namely you’re reacting to other people’s posts rather than thinking and so digging yourself in deeper to no real benefit to yourself. Because Crate’s not going to remove sunder from the game, no matter how much you whinge and treat anecdotes as data.
Of course, you know this already, which is why you cherry picked that line from the full paragraph to make it look like I’m trying to censor you. Unfortunately for you, I’ve seen that bit of stupid rhetoric before coming from Young Earth Creationists etc.
And you’d also have avoided it if you’d but think, but you’re still refusing to do so, so my suggestion this thread gets locked still stands.
Also - thanks for the near roflol :3
Except Sunder’s not getting removed, per the word of God. It’s also hardly player punishing, since if you’ve played a melee build you’d should have learnt to dodge boss’s heavy attacks by now. As sunder in essence if just one of those + RR rolled into one. Besides, with the right build you can ignore sunder in the campaign and it doesn’t take much in the way of modifications either from what I’ve seen and can model.
Also difficultly got a nerf in some respects, never would have gone past SR76 before, but now I’m hitting SR86 and SR75-76 feels a lot less punishing thanks in part to evade. Superbosses of course are still hardmode, but they are superbosses after all.
So the only help you will rationally get here is advice on how to adapt and blunt statements that it’s not that big an issue and easy to adapt to. But so far you’ve ignored that, for seemingly irrational reactionary reasons and continue to fail to do one thing that would help you:
- Namely, post your builds already.
As a certain cat from Saga would say - Liar.
You said previously that sunder is totes unpopular and you had the receipts to prove so. And yet when pushed on that you’ve tried to double down, after ignoring it before lawl. Unfortunately for you, years of chewing on YEC’s and other science denialists means I know how effective chasing points like this is. So no rhetorical escape for you here, only further dissections :3 If I have the energy for it of course, I feel a second 4-bag-1-cup o tea coming up…
But yeah - [CITATION NEEDED] kiddo, because I’m not seeing in the reviews or the community feedback, if anything it’s died off as players have learnt how it works, just as the “pets are deeeeead!” crowd have piped down as they’ve adapted to the new rules.
Anyhow, while Crate do respond to feedback (fire on Sigil of Consumption is my fault lawl), they also make deliberate design decisions. Like not including bows or staves/spears in the game etc, things often banged on the drums by very noisy people. /HINT-fucking-HINT - And as I said before - Zantai has said it isn’t getting removed. So no amount of circular arguing, reacting and trying to turn anecdotes into data will change that.
As for “having to go without Grim Dawn” - Are trying to get me to snark you to death? Dear Azaroth, that is bait par excellence in it’s wankiness of self-inflicted foolishness. Because you can mod the game to remove it or just roll the patch back. Meaning this is very much a “You Problem” and a self-inflicted one too.
Thus I end this post (nearly) repeating what I said before - Please use your brain and think instead of reacting.
[This post was brought to you by Aesop Rock - The Impossible Kid]
RIght, moar tea.
[edit] - Fixed a missing quote tag, somehow I missed that earlier /derp Brain’s working better from that 2nd cup of tea lawl.
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Oh yeah, before my ADHD makes me forget (like my brain meds, dinner etc lawl) this: -
Claiming Grim Dawn now requires fast twitch reflexes is highly fallacious. The windows for sunder have similar timings to those for the big hard hitting attacks we’ve been dealing with since the game release and learning the hard way to gtfo of the way of or die. I know this solidly, because for the last 7 years I’ve had sleep problems regularly, so most days I can’t do fast twitch, which combined with getting easily overloaded, makes this game frustrating at times when I’m too damn tired to function enough. But I can still handle those, and now sunder and all the other player-punishing mechanisms in the game. To the point I was running SR75-76 constantly for build testing and farming.
Though Crate is still a step to far until I do one of the uber tanks that can deal with him lawl. Now that’s fast twitch fight.
Also my ASD + sleep issues means I fumble key presses regularly, but with the right build that’s usually completely mitigated as long as I move away from danger 
Which I have a bad habit of not doing, because I Art Gumby.
Which once again, leads me to the hypothesis that OP’s problems are all down to issues with their builds, which if they’d only upload them to grim tools they’d either disprove us or get some pointers on build crafting/playstyle. For I live in [irrational] hope OP will use their brain, eventually.
And hopefully that 2nd cup o’ tea works it’s magic and I don’t faceplant into the keyboard + this post was brought to you by Aesop Rock - Spirit World Field Guide
I wouldn’t expect anything else from the Royalty behind Can-Be-Played-Drunk builds Fortunately there’s now a mod that provides game up to date + no-sunder, and tqfan will very likely keep it up to date too.
Personally though evade has opened up new options for glassy builds, as my 100% global Lightning to Cold TSS Spellbreaker laughs at SR75-76 in 1.2, whether as before it was a slog that was one mistake away from death. And looked like it was doomed to a SR65-66 ranking. Though some of the SR changes play a roll in that change…
Then again, I like playing glassy builds, so I’m used to more active playstyles that require more attention, and my ADHD still helps with that. Which is darkly funny to me given how much it’s fucking everything else up lawl.
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Responding to bolded points:
Yes it is. You’re not adding anything but vague, continually rebutted arguments and repeating yourself.
No it isn’t, you’re not taking on board any of the help. You’re just telling us all how right your opinion is.
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This +1
And to reinforce my prior statements - it’s also just them reacting, no sign really of them engaging with the arguments, which is a shame. Because reacting never gets you anywhere. Oh well, the end result will be this thread getting locked if they keep up with this.
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I suppose this is attempt number three to chill this topic, so I guess I have to say me piece…
As was mentioned, this does largely come down to philosophy, so I’ll go into how we got here and why it will not be changing. I will preface this by saying, we do realize this update was going to have contentious changes, not just in terms of difficulty and gameplay but also in some of the changes to how auras function and other QoL features that some players may disagree with. That is precisely why we left v1.1.9.8 available on the beta branch so that our direction for the game does not stand in the way of anybody’s fun.
Now, as for Sunder…
Over time, the game naturally went through power creep, resulting in significant power gains on the player side, but not much of a change on the monster side. As a result, the game had become much, much easier over time. This had the unfortunate consequence of trivializing boss mechanics to the point where face-tanking everything was the expectation, rather than a niche of ultra tanky builds. We had certain tools to combat this, but aside from making one-shots common-place, which I frankly do not think would be all that fun, we could apply resist reduction.
Problem with that is, alongside all that power creep, stacking resistances became easier over time. This is fundamentally a good thing. Resistances are largely mandatory so making that less stressful meant more builds could shine. However, it also trivialized all those resist reduction effects as you could ignore them thanks to overcaps. So one of our main tools of making special attacks threatening was effectively irrelevant.
Now here comes v1.2. The intention was in fact to bring back some of the challenge that was lost. I think we largely achieved that, although there is more work to be done. I actually think Sunder will need a bump on Ultimate difficulty, rather than what you’re hoping for 
.
Someone mentioned that you could lower the difficulty, which you balked at. On the surface, I get it. You played on Ultimate difficulty so why shouldn’t you continue on it? That is understandable and I get the frustration.
That was another aspect of v1.2 though. We rebalanced the lower difficulties and made them viable for endgame content. You can play on Normal or Elite difficulty and complete level 100 content and get (most of) the same rewards. We believe that this lets everyone enjoy the game at their own pace and skill level. You have nothing to prove to anyone else in this regard. The game is primarily singleplayer.
If that is disagreeable to you though, well…I suppose that puts you in the minority we did not serve with some of our latest changes. From our perspective, as the game’s curators, we’re talking about the hardest (ultimate) difficulty of the game. Until Fangs of Asterkarn comes out, that is the hardest game mode available and it’s lost a lot of its original appeal.
I saw the comment about how this is not a build issue, and that is 100% accurate. It comes down to piloting, not the build. The game’s difficulty had decayed so much that properly piloting around major boss abilities became irrelevant. That, to us, was a disservice to the game. I know you disagree with that, but that was our stance/thought process behind it.
As for what came first, Sunder or Evade, that is a bit of a chicken and egg debacle. We knew we wanted to add an evade if we ever did a sequel, but here we were working on some significant improvements for the game and thought…fuck it, let’s throw Evade in too. It’s going to be such a satisfying addition to the gameplay. And if we give people new tools, then we can get more creative with how we bring some challenge back to the game…enter Sunder. It is our answer to face-tanking that does not have to rely on one shots. From our end, it has been largely a resounding success. And given the trajectory of the game’s reviews (recent and overall), it seem that the changes we made to refresh the game have been very well received.
I’m sorry you are not among those satisfied. I hope with more practice, your view on this one small part of a huge patch will turn around.
P.S. Now I hope I am saying this for the final time, please cut it out with the insults, or next time I am coming back with bans. We live in a civilized corner of the internet!
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I also hope that the developers don’t take a step back with sunder, I really like the mechanics of sunder and evade and I feel that it added fun and life to the game, which already felt quite monotonous, hopefully this continues like this and they give us bosses with more mechanics in the new expansion.
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Thanks for the reply, and for keeping some of the aggressive (to outright hostile/offensive) replies in check.
Zero complaints from me other than sunder! I love all the other changes. I’ve seen little (but not quite zero) complaints from others online. Though 1.1.9.8 is going to become increasingly out of date… And incompatible with future content releases. That might bite you; hopefully not, though.
I like Ultimate. I like ultimate’s monster density and swarms of champions and heroes. I like the volleys of arrows from skeleton archers being a threat. I like the resistances penalties so I can’t just stack only damage into my builds. I don’t want to lower the difficulty because I enjoy the difficulty of Ultimate. There are a lot of reasons not to want to lower it. Except for how I now find it largely unapproachable versus bosses it has become because of Sunder. (And really, it’s only the bosses; the “kill box, door locked behind you” rooms are still a blast!) And of course I like ultimate’s drop rates with my precious few hours per week I can play.
A couple questions remaining remaining:
- Will you be adding the currently-exclusive-to-Ultimate content to the other difficulties for those who will not be opting into it?
- Why not save the big bump in difficulty for the new one that’s coming, that you’d already announced, instead?
- What about in Crucible? I’ve seen a lot about Crucible being largely incompatible with Sunder. I have not yet tried it.
- “Sunder scaling slider”? Because I’d leave it on. But drop it a bit. I do like what it does in general. I just don’t like the specific of “fail to dodge, you’re dead now because you won’t survive enough to run away and recuperate”. (Gone are the “oh damn! run away, run away! potion, recharge faster!” moments. Either you you make the dodge, or you don’t survive.)
- Or “sunder duration reduction” or something so it’s a core part of the game to interact with by builds rather than physical prowess, instead of just something that further reinforces the already-OP “physical resist” stat?
BTW – I basically never play the game single player. It’s only multiplayer for me and my mates. Don’t do yourself short. The game is awesome multiplayer. (Since we no longer kill one another with the bugged component auras.) – Which is part of why solving via modding is not viable.
I’m going to disagree with you here - as someone with significant disabilities (enough to land me on the Supported Living Payment) the type of build can make all the difference in difficulty when you ability to pilot properly is screwy. There are builds I can not play in SR because I don’t the capability to pilot them with the finesse they require due fumbling key presses, not reacting fast enough or I end up with overload issues and loose track of threats. Which incidently is one of the reasons I prefer SR to Crucible, because it’s easier to keep track of things. And don’t regularly go toe-to-toe with certain superbosses, because my uncontrollable mistakes eat up a lot of time on repeat tries.
But yeah, with good skills even a weak on paper build can shine and carve through difficult stuff and stay alive.
Fortunately of course, you and your fellow devs have excellent design abilities and allow us with problems to be able to build around our disabilities to a decent extent.
Can’t say I’m looking forward to Sunder being buffed though, but given it can be facetanked by some builds, it’s sadly needed.
But please don’t buff IM’s, because her tendency to bum rush in non-boss shards can be run ending and hard to see amongst the potential chaos. Plus she already hits like a tank as it is Likewise Benn’Jhar’s Sunder attack is fine to buff, since it’s easy to eat, but his mines are sometimes unavoidable as stacking trap resist is hard on some builds. Or in my case I fumble something and run into them 
I do enjoy the challenge though and finding out the hard way which of my mad builds work in SR80+.
Oh and thanks for Grim Dawn - it’s help keep me sane-ish over the last 9 years of depression kicking my arse and a source of joy when my ahedonia (and now ADHD brain) eats my ability to play and enjoy other games (hello Destiny 2). And also part and parcel of my standard skin picking disorder management stuff, because if I’m gaming it can’t do it’s thing. As unfortunately it’s linked the severity of my depression
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I like the Sundering mechanic and it’s fun because it makes one use the evade mechanic. My current build is a 2h bruiser Trickster with a strong Shadow strike. With most mobs it’s face tanking time but if I ever get hit with a sunder or get too overwhelmed by mobs it’s time to GTFO and wait it out. Honestly it’s a good mechanic as it makes bosses threatening to be near and forces players to pick the most gigachad of tank builds to laugh it off. That said, it would be nice we had the choice to pick between evasion or an active or passive defensive Ability.
Ha, touché. I’d take Crucible over SR any time. I choose to play Crucible, and not just for “new character devotions”. I do the bare minimum of SR to get it out of the quest log. I wonder if there’s a correlation in preferences? Probably not. But could be.
As I’ve said, we felt that Ultimate difficulty has been poorly served by power creep. Not everybody is going to be playing Ascendant Mode.
Ascendant Mode will have a whole other layer of additional challenges.
Sunder is less effective in the Crucible.
Sunder is exactly that: a chance to recover from a mistake. In other ARPGs you’d already be dead because you got one-shotted.
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applies powdered wig
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It might be an interesting idea to grant some sort of short, small debuff when the enemy fails to hit the Sunder.