I personally hope Sunder will only be buffed on weaker Bosses, not for Iron Maiden SR75+ for instance 
But we’ll see…
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let’s get it bois.
Ye buff Iron Maiden SR90 instead, I feel like she needs to become truly titanium.
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I would like some leak on what awaits us in ascending mode
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Buffed sunder? Yes please.
Excited for the ascendent mode and hope it influences the chances for double rares. We need some sneak peaks of what those additional changes might be…
I mean to be honest, my build is pretty weak (casual player with only one Witch Hunter character) and except the Celestials like Ravager I can usually stand Sunder attacks on Ultimate at least for a while before dying even though I don’t pay much attention to my surroundings, so I really don’t think it’s that Sunder is that powerful and needs that much micromanaging as you say. Yes, sometimes you need to use Evade, but not that much that it would change the whole game.
And just to clarify - I was never able to kill Ravager even before 1.2 - I just suck at killing Celestials and I’ll complain about them forever. So honestly I really don’t think Sunder is such a deal breaker even for casual players like me.
you could always just outstat them before (wasn’t that difficulty on a technical level), but good news is, you can still pretty much just outstat Ravager and Cally still with phys res armour high hp and regen as usual 
Someone posted a, "less than optimal"build shall we say, complaint about struggling against ravager, (build obv wasn’t set up well enough for that fight), but made me curious if on 1.2 i could solve the build deficiency by making very few tweaks, focusing on HP and good old Armour and bit more DA. And to my surprise it worked. Still had to run if sundered because build had low dmg and low effective leech, and still had to try evade sunders to reduce running time (melee build), but still managed to kill him just stacking more stats/base defences even if slow kill because low dmg 
So there is totally hope for you being able to kill Celestials on 1.2 too 
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This is some serious main character syndrome. Learn to phrase things a little better please man.
These are your opinions. " sunder has sapped nearly all the joy out of the game " For you sunder may have sapped nearly all of the fun out of the game. It’s fine to voice your complaints but do you also really believe that the devs will just do a “serious, deep, rework” or “officially remove” it from the game just because it is your desire? You really do think you are the main character in this world dude. This isn’t meant to be rude but seriously maybe try and consider why the mechanics were put in the game ya know. Like you are in ultimate difficulty which is do or die and you are listing reasons you can’t look at the boss? Im sorry but you sorta gotta look at bosses on ultimate. If ultimate was easy enough that you don’t gotta look at bosses then how easy would normal be?
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I wanted to add to this thread as a casual player. If you looked at my sparsely populated profile you would see I only really started posting during 1.2 playtest.
Grim Dawn was set in stone before 1.2, and it was all about overcapping resists. IMO, a person would only know they needed to get +max resistances and 85-90% resistances if they hung out here. I hated that.
I’ve never used a build posted on the forums, I find sets and items that drop and build around those. My first level 100 was a Defiler I was trying to use the Runebinder set with because I found it late into that character. It was terrible.
My first level 100 that could handle decently high SR was built around the Mageslayer set. I think it is somewhere around SR 50 on Ultimate at the moment because I don’t have other items I want for the build.
I have never beaten any of the superbosses. My Mageslayer I mentioned doesn’t even dent Mogdrogan on any difficulty. But SR? Crucible? Story content? It’s fun. I now actually have to occasionally look at the screen with sunder.
If you really can’t see the sunder warning, than I would love to just see a screenshot from you because I would guess it’s your settings. It is objectively one of the most obvious effects on the screen even during busy battles.
If none of your builds can survive anymore in Ultimate story content and SR, than I would honestly be led to believe that there is some major feature of the game you are not taking advantage of. Are your resists even at 80? Do you enchant your gear with both charms and powders (I literally can’t think of the correct terms right now)? Are you distributing stat points?
I ask, because I once saw a reddit post of someone complaining the game was too hard with their first character on GD or TQ, and going back and forth with people like you have been, only to find out that person had never chosen a second mastery.
I honestly don’t understand how sunder could be ruining the entire game for you. There are invulnerability skills, escape skills, rush skills, and damage reduction skills across all of the masteries. These are in addition to evade and runes.
I also don’t know how people beat Calla, Mogdrogan, or the secret quest bosses. But the other content is absolutely 100% attainable with squishy builds that don’t follow guides and just go based off of info the game provides, like item skill boosts.
Not posting a build at this point is absolutely trolling. People have been pretty reasonable, and some haven’t, but you haven’t been at all.
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I said I strongly, strongly prefer playing and [used to] have success in Ultimate [except for now during bosses].
This thread is about sunder+evade being a bad mechanic and how I do not like how the game is now suddenly a twitch-reflexes technical action game because of all the timed dodges now. I’m still fine outside of bosses, but playing the game without bosses not a possibility, just as “just play down on elite” is not a solution. Boss fights used to be fun and exciting. But now they’re just dreadful, exhausting things that make me quit the game as soon as I complete one. I don’t know why “dodge or die” apparently has to be a thing in every game now. There’s a reason it was denigrated in other games.
The game’s been around for a long time and all of a sudden one update decides to make it a very, very different experience.
What’s the point? The developer’s already come in here and said it’s set, and likely going to made even worse, and that people should just cope with it and be content with dropping difficulty settings and missing out on things. None of the other posters have shown any ability to step back and think about how making the game suddenly about precision reflexes is possibly a bad thing, or to consider that “maybe an evade button is fine and fun for a player to use when they might want to, but why does it have to be forced in specific circumstances”.
It’s clear that Grim Dawn, after being my #1 played game since its original release is no longer meant for me to have fun with.
The game isn’t about that now. Most story content and SR and even Key bosses should have 3-4 sunder opportunities on you before they are dead if you have an ultimate endgame build. If you can’t be bothered to look at the screen for 2.5 minutes and press dodge, than what is the experience you are seeking? There are games that are just meant to kick back and afk relax, but this is an action RPG. Not just RPG, but as you yourself have mentioned, action.
And honestly I guess so, but I’m not sure how you were playing this game before where you were completely ignoring the screen. There are lots of other ARPGs with more and less action. Also there is turn-based games which sound more the speed you are looking for.
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Here’s my 2 cents:
Zantai is absolutely right that the game became much easier. This might not seem to someone who has 100 hours or so in the game, but I have close to 1000 hours, I am a very inefficient farmer, and for me, the game became too easy. If you simply grind enough (and I stress how inefficient I am in that), with the amount of drops this game has and resistances on those drops, the majority of content becomes rather easy.
I think that Sunder is the best possible solution for that. Let me explain.
There are two more obvious paths that the devs could have taken, to increase the difficulty:
First, introduce one-shots, that no amount of build min-maxing can handle. Then you get PoE (current), or D4, where i have seen players extremely frustrated because of that. These one-shots often come from off the screen and they have to - to keep the game manageable, one-shots need to be compensated with player’s damage, and when a player notices a monster that does these one-shots, they immediately kill them (unless it is a boss). So this requires (in the soft sense) that these one-shots be hard to notice).
Another option is to wildly reduce the resistances that you can find on gear. What do you get by doing that? You get Diablo 2. You heard that right. You get a game where it is a huge struggle to get your resists to anything approaching decent level, and in which gg items, at lvl 90 or so, have +15 to all res (yes, there are exceptions, I know). I find this very frustrating also, because it means my char gets slaugthered by the lowest rank Fallen monsters when I go to a higher difficulty, and makes the game too hard, in a way which is not fun at all.
I think Sunder is a very good compromise. It does somewhat reduce the value of resists, but that does no negate them. It doesn’t result in one-shots, and it doesn’t allow zombies outside of Devil’s Crossing destroy you. The Evade mechanic does require some piloting and reflexes, but it really doesn’t seem to be anything too demanding.
If one pays attention to what is happening in the ARPG world, it is easy to see that the genre in general is moving closer to Soulslike territory, or better said, incorporates some very light SOulslike elements. All the videos of PoE2 I have seen show it will be somewhat slower, with great importance given to movement and evasion of dangerous boss attacks. In the announcement for Titan Quest 2, they said, if I remember (I won’t go googling for it now, lol) that the game will be somewhat more tactical than other popular ARPGS and will not be a clickfest.
It seems that players simply put don’t like this zoom-zoom-obliterate-screens-then-get-one-shot gameplay of D3 and POE so much. Or maybe it’s just a current trend thing, and maybe in a couple of years, the games get faster again.
I am very happy that Grim Dawn introudiced some elements that make the game into something more than a stat check before fighting a boss.
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The version prior to this last release is still available. If you can convince your team to revert, then that can be your final build. Sunder is absent. The many hours spent perfecting personal or team builds is still relevant.
Otherwise, if you are motivated to carry on - sharing a build will promote a discussion on new ideas for dealing with changes.
There are options. I’m still impressed that Crate has provided consistent updates since the release of the last major content. Because that is unusual customer support for a game this old.
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This is a non-option and I don’t know why it’s regularly getting parroted. “Miss out on all the other great updates and features and also the opportunity for any future content to” is not very redeeming.
And that’s a great thing. Zoom-zoom fests weren’t at all my style. Grim Dawn was nice and felt great. And now is a giant step in the direction of zoom-zoom with this evasion skill. I wasn’t a fan of FG’s glyphs either, but at least the game wasn’t designed around them.
Sunder is OK – but the numbers need to be reduced A LOT. It shouldn’t be “dodge or die [unless you’re playing an ultratank build]” like you just pointed out other games do, but it really feels that it is in play. Make it something the elite players have an edge in, but only a small edge. NOT a prerequisite to have lightning reflexes have competency in the game. I miss “oh shit, run away!” moments. They’re gone. Now, because of sunder, when I mess up I die.
I donno. I felt AOM and FG each felt progressively harder than the previous, and not in any bad way. Maybe “make GD match the FG level of balance” would have been enough.
I think maybe you just love hyperbole? If you want to be taken seriously than maybe just tone that down, and give us even a hint of what character type you are playing. Even a class name with your toggleables would be great.
Because you really really really don’t need anything approaching lightning reflexes in a game with multiple teleport, rush, and temporary invincibility skills.
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I do not appreciate you attempting to invalidate my actual experiences.
It’s been stated it’s not a build problem since it’s universal… But I’ll humor you: The latest one is an infiltrator with decently overmax Aura of Conviction that has a total PhysRes of mid 30s% and Pneumatic Burst to add extra healing on top of the inevitable potion-drink-when-sundered.
Edit: And no, I’m not posting more. It’s not a build problem (even the dev agreed). And I explicitly do not want any commentary on my builds, because then it’s not my own build from my own mind and skills selecting points and items. I have no problems with builds and have lots of acceptable characters (and some crappy-but-fun bad ones ones too). I obviously don’t optimize to the level of celestials on ultimate/high SR (though I’ve done them on elite with multiple characters) – and don’t care to (especially since that usually requires far more grind for gear than I do). I also like variety and that kind of play filters out a lot. But I’m also not complaining about those. I’m complaining about things I’ve never had problems with before the addition of sunder. And I do have a character that can cope (an Overguard/Blast Shield/retal Commando), but one should not – and never needed to before – build to that extreme level of defense to have even basic chances of success.
Honestly, I wanted to see if there was a way to get you to enjoy GD in its current state, because your experiences don’t match a lot of other people’s (including mine). If everyone is looking at a cube and someone claims it is a sphere, then that perspective may be invalidated. I thought maybe your perspective might just be skewed by silly build attempts or missing a feature like devotions or something.
But, it seems like you have just given up on Grim Dawn. That is fine, but I also am going to give up on discussion here.
Edit: Also at face value that build sounds like it shouldn’t have huge problems in most key dungeons with a medium level of piloting, so that is additional confusion for me.
And I don’t. Until the boss totally wrecks me because of the new precision dodging requirements. Not even the “door locks behind you” kill rooms that I love. I haven’t had time to try TH since patch yet, but people are saying Sunder’s not in there. Sucks all the more because I really wanted to farm a Vanquisher set to make a build with it for my next dude.
I don’t want to, but they’ve already said it’s likely sunder will be even more potent than it is currently. Better to give up than to suffer and wallow with a miserable experience and undo years of joy.
Sunder doesn’t kill you. Sunder is the “oh shit, run away!” moment.
It’s when you ignore that and take the hits after Sunder that you die.
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