This is definitely a problem with your builds. Example and explanation in 15 frames (feat. Benny from SR80):
Build.
As you can see, it’s very far from the designation “tanky”. And now show me your endgame build, which is afraid of sunder from key dungeon bosses.
Or:
well, I’ll just note a number of contradictory statements and logic in your complaint. You stated that GD was in a good state and you enjoyed it.
Now you can’t, because … ? Seems “cake and eat it” argument to me.
I’m not sure what you find contradictory about it. The 1.2 update was great except for the sunder+evade crap. But that sunder+evade part is overwhelmingly bad. Someone sticking with the old version is not a reasonable ask because, 1.2 had a tons of other changes that many of us have waited for for years (like dedicated potion UI). And there are even more changes, like entire expansion packs, coming to invalidate “just stick with 1.1.9.8!” It’s the same argument with “just drop the difficulty you play at”… no, it’s only with the sunder bosses that Ultimate no longer works. And I don’t want to deal with the reduced quality and rate of drops, miss out on content, and generally have less fun because of the lower spawn rates of Elite.
I can’t find myself currently getting desire to play GD at the moment because of the sunder change. It indeed has lost so much with that addition. Which sucks, because, otherwise, I love GD and would love to play more. With the effective genre change with the requirement of reflexes, I would never initially have gotten into GD to the level I have spent years doing so.
What statements are disharmonious?
It’s like you’re all trying so hard to discredit me individually through any minutia rather than accept that, at least for some people, sunder and timely dodging is a poor thing to make so critical to the core game experience, especially so late in its development. And that it would probably be good for be something done to make it not so overwhelming.
The expansion wasn’t even predicted 6 months ago, let alone any changes. As far as much of the community was concerned, any of the latest patches could have been the last.
So either you bought the game in the last short while, or you had expectations/predictions that 90% of the community did not.
I don’t think, “I expect the game will update to add a precision dodge mechanic with a serious punishment if you fail to execute it timely” crossed many minds until it was announced. I do not expect games to change so wildly that they require entirely new skill sets.
How is Sunder any different than getting hit with flat resist reduction skills from enemies? At least with squishy builds you have to back off or you get blasted. There’s no difference here in this aspect, but i will tell you one big aspect that there’s a difference: Sunder is far more telegraphed than many skills that had flat resistance before Sunder was a thing. A lot of the time you would get hit by it because you were busy dodging something else due to the fact several regular enemies had it.
Ugdenbog Wraiths still having a -30% stacking resistance reduction (which Reaper of the Lost has as summons) is far more egregious than Sunder will ever be because melee builds have to take that shit. There’s no way to avoid, they die and you get the debuff. Sunder is far more forgiving than that.
Since the dawn of ARPGs having to move out of way of specific attacks from bosses has been a thing, this is not new.
Very different, because flat res reduction was often meaningless for magical damage due to resists being overcapped. I am very glad that magical damage has become more of a threat to players than before.
The same effect could have been recreated by simply altering the former Res Reduction debuffs by adding in -max res %, that would force magic damage to always deal more to the player as well. I’m guessing they considered such a change instead of Sunder, but still decided to go with the evade/Sunder mechanic.
They made the previous patch before the change available to play on.
You keep making unreasonable excuses to justify refusing to play the game in a way you clearly would enjoy. Such as refusing to use mods/tools, refusing to play on lower difficulty, refusing to play on the prior patch because it is missing only a little bit of QoL etc. The existence of patch 1.2 does not suddenly doom all previous patches to be a garbage game experience.
I think if Sunder was changed to just a little debuff symbol down above the UI like others, the OP wouldn’t even notice it existed, but would just wonder why he dies suddenly sometimes and we’d get more reddit threads asking “why did I die?”
I think the issue is more the big flashy warning sign it presents, causing panic.
Forgetting that flat resistance reduction also affects physical resistance. And squishy builds aren’t swimming in that.
So yes, basically the same, both forced less tanky builds to back off.
Confused why this is still a thing.
@Ceno, myself, and others have already pointed out that sunder hits, typically, don’t kill. It is the damage after that becomes the issue.
You could literally eat every sunder causing hit (providing you have built somewhat competently) and gtf out of the way before dying. In a one on one scenario this is very easy. It is only an issue in places where there are large swarms of champion mobs with sundering mobs + lots of trash.
To further showcase this go and take a look at @AlexGoldFish_322 storm totem build. Assuming that nothing was staged, he takes sunder applying hits from bosses with 2400 da and nearly no phys res…relying solely on armor and piloting (and in high SR as opposed to campaign).
This is compounded more by the OP clearly stating how (paraphrasing) “damn right I don’t wanna learn new stuff.”
I mean that’s cool, don’t learn, play soft core and just die a lot or build tanky if you want to eat sunders. But seriously, don’t come here spouting misinformation about sunder needing twitch like reflexes to avoid when you can just learn to move out of the way once the edge of the screen is red. You could literally hit the evade key bind and then your rune key bind and be far away from anything dangerous, especially if using a disengage rune in conjunction with the evade.
thing is, it’s not really “needed”, in the sense OP just straight up repeatedly rejects it everytime regardless
one thing is when it’s early on and only arguing with me, but when then has like half a dozen or so more other players chime in “it’s not a twitch reflex game, it doesn’t invalidate builds, it’s not insta kill, etc etc etc, you’re highly exaggerating”, and it’s still basically rebutted by “nuhuh”,
regardless how many players chimes in, casual or experienced, with regular builds still playing and surviving sunder fine, can even stand in sunder sometimes, clearly demonstrating it’s nowhere near as bad/in the realm OP is trying to make it out to be. No amount of evidence will “prove” OP is objectively wrong or at least extremely exaggerating the change/impact, so there is just no “debate” to be had and it’s entirely futile now for us to try do anything to “help” let alone convince mqstout…
I don’t really see why you keep stating this when it’s clearly not the case and hasn’t been the case since sunder was introduced? This is why people think you’re trolling. You keep stating this when anyone with the game can just take 10 seconds to test and see that it isn’t true. For what purpose?
Well, this is also classic Autie behaviour, as we can get stuck in a mindset and not be able to change it until someone dynamites it + the difficulties with seeing things from other’s perspectives = $FUN$ that others mistake for trolling.
In my case I have depression to thank for getting in the way of that shit, because it’s a “luxury” I can’t afford when my own brain is trying to kill me lawl. Though usually most of us learn to work around it by our 20’s through self-awareness etc, if not earlier due to autism-positive therapy…
Can also be conservative brainworms, but they usually don’t get obsessed over this sort of game, in theory. While a troll would have yucked it up or run away by now, since trolls these days are mostly total weaksauce and unable to stay the course for the greater lulz.
Oh yeah, I was going to reply to this bit lawl - bloody ADHD + disrupted sleep.
/ahem
Right then - I’ve seen this a lot in science denialism, where the denialist makes a-priori assumptions about how the world works that the world must always conform to. Which is not how science, never mind any field that uses empiricism works. So no amount of clue-by-4ing them with science ever fucking works. Instead you’ve got to drill/carve/dynamite down through the bs to those assumptions and show how they’re wrong. Sure, it might not get the denialist to change their mind (personally, better living through chemistry would probably be more effective), but if you can show those assumptions are utterly flawed and counter-factual you can get the peanut gallery to see the truth.
Unfortunately if dealing with [REDACTED] you’re not going to get through to the true believers, because those assumptions are seen by them as a bedrock to who they are. But there’s other tools for that area 
Same with conspiracy bs.
In this case though, there’s only mqstout and their detachment from the facts of Grim Dawn. Speaking of which, I ate a lot of sunders yesterday in testing in SR85-86 due to tiredness, as the build I was using had high adcth so could keep hitting away through them. Mostly. SR85-86 proved to be to hard for it sadly.
But even recording it would not be enough to change OP’s mind, because it’s already made up and that assumption armoured against reality. For what I think are more autistic reasons than standard denialist ones.
…Which come to think of, might actually explain some denialism. Which is not a pleasant realisation, as the whole ASD = smart + science nerd meme is still with me lawl. As after all I have a BSc in molecular and cell bio and I’m generally a science bastard, plus would have gone on to post-grad if depression hadn’t ate my life. But I’ve seen my fellow auties fall into some bloody stupid things over the years, on top of those unwilling to accept Aspergers is just Autism Spectrum Disorder, with some turning into Aspie supremacists. So I should have known this already lawl, for ASD is not a protection against standard human cognitive flaws, no matter how smart you are.
For only knowledge and wisdom can save you - Aiat.
I started playing on 1.2 recently, got to 100 a few days ago. This is my first character, enjoying the game a whole lot.
I always wondered what that screen effect is, and I kept thinking it was just Menhir’s Will activating, but I was never really sure. I am playing a 2H Melee Physical Witchblade, now on Ultimate. I reached SR 66 on Ultimate, too. I can farm it consistently. The only thing I am doing is dodge a bit when I notice getting overwhelmed. I did not even know what Sunder was until now, and I was doing fine. Mistaking it for Menhir’s Will I still recognized the effect to be an indicator for danger.
The thing is, I am not an arrogant man who thinks he knows better than everyone, so I consulted this forum when my own build wasn’t working well, and when I could not decide the best approach into endgame. The result is an incredibly successful melee build that face tanks everything I got to so far on Ultimate. I am not particularly agile, so it is my build and some basic thinking doing the work. With this much, I can take a Nemesis with a swarm of elites also surrounding me. I have also been consistently facetanking Sunder if I’m not surrounded. But if I was, I just got out of the way for a bit and regrouped.
Haven’t tried any of the celestial bosses yet, though, but that is extremely late content anyway, comparatively few get that far. I will reach there soon, and I’ll enjoy trying to figure out how to beat it. If I can’t, I’m still not above asking for some help here.
Maybe banging your head against the wall, and when it doesn’t work, demanding a new core mechanic that was designed carefully to be removed, is not the best idea. I mean, why not accept some help, or just download the mod that was very specifically made for this exact complaint? Why is that not sufficient, why does it have to be removed for everyone else? Just take the mod, seriously.
Nevermind Lokarr kicked my ass lmao
EDIT: nevermind again, all it took was a bit of adjustment, thinking (remembering that consumables exist), a few tries (I think 5?) and I beat Lokarr on Ultimate with a melee build. For me there is no issue with the mechanics, Sunder included.
Trollololololololololol!
My troll blood laughs, for I have created a non-polished build that eats sunders lawl:
Teh Build:
It was a bit surprising, but that’s layering defences and adcth for you 
Ate the sunders initially due to having crap sleep yet again, and then went whole hog.
sry, bit too twitch reflexy for my taste 
Hah!
Given how crap my sleep was last night* it wasn’t that twitchy to play 
But then again, I love playing glassy builds despite my amazing ability to gumby things up with button presses. So it doesn’t feel twitchy, just slow to kill things lawl. Usually the boss room doesn’t take 3 minutes in SR75 for me… But that’s hybrid damage type builds for you.
Did see some near 200K DoT ticks though 
Which is pretty good given I haven’t fully spec’d into bleed damage like I should have. Much better than the Vitality DoT’s I’ve seen with the other 3 build of Wendigo’s Howl too. As the mace needs more vitality decay added to it frankly.
*I think it’s time for a break from amitriptyline, as sometimes I get set into heavy nightsweats, usually due a fever. Fortunately I have a script for melatonin, so that should make it very easy to do the standard 3 day break.
Thanks for the tips. I’ll probably do my second build to focus on Celestials anyway as my current build is really more about fun than efficiency - and I am fully aware of that.
I plan to play GD at least for few more years to come, so plenty of time to actually start my second build at some point. 
Originally I didn’t even want to play Ultimate, and yeah, it happened, so kinda expect similar thing with more builds. Still saying no to Hardcore playthrough for now though.