On "Farming"

Grim Dawn Development Updates
401

I don’t like monotony in games so i normally don’t do much farming, but i do think farming should be a part of the game for those that want to farm.

I do like the idea of challenge areas, would be nice to have fairly hard places with random champions in there for loot. Like the torchlight phase portals.

I’m just throwing out silly ideas here but what about bosses that got progressively harder with each run. Like you kill a boss then go to rerun him when you get back there it’s the boss and two champions waiting for you. Then the next run it’s maybe two bosses and two champions and so on.

The idea being that you’re removing some of the monotony of farming and offering a little more loot per run to match the challenge.

A good challenge could overpower monotony, for me at least.

Edit: I’d also probably vote for less exp
o exp from farming. These games become a lot less fun if your vastly over leveled

402

I think this is a very nice idea (but maybe with a slightly slower difficulty increase).

403

Why not implement some sort of Arena, with differant waves, that you can go to when you need more XP, and your feeling a little weak compare to the monsters around you.

The Arena, can have stages, this will allow you to farm, bosses youve already done, or monsters or both, or groups of monsters.

I used to play Kingdom hearts, and we would have stage 1 ,2 ,3 up to 10.

This was a cup… then you would move on to the next cup, but the second cup is only available, when youve progressed so far into the story.

eventrully you would fight bosses, and if that was easy, youl fight bosses mixed in with other creature’s.

But i think for a safe farming system, that isnt boring or repetative, have an arena system, quite a few games these days do, and i think it may be the first for a game like this.

I would like you to consider this ?

Thanks.

Add, I mean just imagine, your feeling a little need of XP, or you just wish to farm for big rewards, rather then travelling all over the place to complete each boss over and over…

Why not, travel to some city, that host Arena games talk to an NPC, and he/she is all like, come back when your ready… ( level 10 ) for example, or ‘’ you need a weopen to get in here… ‘’

or pay up so many coins or tokens what ever, this has alot of ways you can enter the cups, the best one i feel is seasons, or ‘’ come back in a few days’’ and you get so far into the story, you do a particular quest, and bang, arena is opened up again for the next cup.

you fight basic creature’s around your previous level, or you fight creatures slightly higher. ( proxie)

When you hit stage ten you will face a boss youve fought before, only this time with minions ( proxie or adjusted level )

when you complete this cup, you will feel satisfied, and youve would of gained XP through out all of this, and you would of gotten some treasure at the end.

By the end of the game you can do all the boss runs, and creature runs, and cups and alsorts, all over again it is after all something to do ?

Another thing i liked on kingdom hearts was that after completetion of the game, you can return to area’s youve previously been too, that proberly had nothing happening… you come back, and woah a big boss youve never seen before…

SURPRISE…

I don’t know, but in my opinion, this is a nice way to farm, by having some sort of arena system like this, rather then just killing the bosses over and over again, in a repetative way, and having to travel to all locations to do so.

What you all think and bare in my mind this is just my surgestion/ opinion.

Thanks

404

I can see why some people might see farming as a way of almost ‘cheating’ to get the right equipment. Obviously in a real believable setting the one boss who you’d kill would drop one set of stuff and you’d have to live with that. But I have to agree with Medierra, I think it’s a perfectly acceptable gameplay mechanic, and especially given just a short amount of time to actually play the game, I’m not going to get anywhere in 10 minutes.

Farming gives us the ability to put in the effort to be better for the upcoming obstacles and challenges, which is realistic in itself. With anything else this is already possible, it’s just called ‘Practice’ instead, so why should it be different in a game like this really…

On top of just agreeing with it I actually ENJOY, yes, enjoy farming. It’s fun, I know it’s easy and repetitive but the chances of getting the exact thing you want is unlikely and either you struggle a little with a boss fight meaning you deserve a reward again OR you can easily take him down which means you’re probably not in desperate need of whatever the reward is, but on the offchance you get something that is specifically useful then fair play again right? As a collector of unique items on TQ I repeat ad nauseum, it’s not so much for character development, more for the sense of ‘Look at all these shiny things I’ve accrued by playing repeatedly’. Which is kind’ve nice, I mean the chances of getting a full set of something in a level area that drops it is pretty unlikely… shouldn’t be impossible though, so farming is a nice way to pick up that helmet that adds another 20% to set bonus whatever.

Endless words finished.

405

I like to contribute on the topic of ‘farming’. I like the idea as a core gameplay mechanics and farming the right gear for appropriate encounters are also key elements and mechanics, in my opinion.

What i like to see is probably finetuning on the loot-drops. Farming more difficult monsters and encounters should alter the chances for better loot drops.

I’m not sure but i think implementing a global AI to assess how fast the player can particularly kill certain monsters or encounters and the casualty that the player is absorbing as well as evaluating if the player is using the correct counter mechanics or strategy against the particular monster or encounter should alter the chances of better loot drops.

Of course this just my opinion and ideas. Anyone including devs feel free to comment on it.

406

I think it would be cool to have an add-on mode called loot mode (or something of the sort). All drops in all difficulties would remain like they were in TQ, but with loot mode on everything would have a green or better (TQ colors). It could be played on all difficulties and would scale accordingly.
Now this would not be just for free things, by putting loot mode on everything has nice damage and armor… but also you would make the mobs and bosses a much higher level than you- maybe 5-10 so that loot mode was really tough. It would be like the whole game was a boss fight. This would be cool since you would have the normal game, the normal boss runs, and also this challenge mode for the diehards that want a solid playthrough and not just sitting there farming.
I think it would be ok to do this too, since you can make only a few blues and purples drop and mostly greens drop. The thought of starting with greens and blues sounds amazing and broken, but to trying to kill lvl 4~8 at lvl 1 would be really tough- but doable I suppose (if you can solo fight one enemy at a time). I am sure if anyone likes the idea they would figure out how one could start on such a mode…

Just an idea…

407

Hi all

As concerned the loot mechanics, it is possible to associate the specialisations to the type of loot found?
I imagine a sort of magic find modifier based on the different specialisation(s) choose by the player in order that you have a better chance to find an appropriate loot.

I ask that because in TQ, if you build a magic PG you can’t efficiently use melee weapons. Now, the *80% of the weapons found are melee weapons so it’s difficult for that particular character to loot something useful. This penalise magic players rather than melee players.

How does any one feel about that?

408

Casters will also wield regular weapons, so that magic find is not required. I think medierra did not comment “magic find” directly, but it seems to go against his design principles (see posts: “thoughts” and “hybrid”).

409

Well, offering different drops for seperate classes is great if you have class-specific weaponry (like in Dungeon Defenders), but for a game where you combine masteries and can make hybrids with all manner of equipment, skills and stat distribution, I don’t think it’s in the best interest for the player to limit the drops to the modal usage of the class.

As far as MF concerns; I do like the new MF mechanic they created in Diablo 3, where you stack mf by killing champions, which makes runs longer than the average 2-3 minute teleport-spamfest-restart games of Diablo 2.
MF on equipment though, is dreadful.

410

What if you made farming opportunities a drop from the regular game.

What I mean is, maybe borrow the map concept (or something similar) from Mythos.

So that as you play the game, or replay certain sections you would get every once in a while a very rare (and different grades) drop that was a map or a portal to a special map where bosses were tougher, maybe some unique and difficult mobs, and higher end loot drops.

So you gain the ability to farm, and see additional content from a drop in the game. This would also be a great way to add additional content to the game as you could add new maps and areas that have a potential to drop. I would think each map would be randomized but with a theme.

You could also have them as recipes instead of maps, so that you need to play the game and gather materials to build a teleporter or something like that to get to the “farming” area. It could also provide a fantastic challenge for hardcore players as higher level “maps” would also have much higher death possibility,

411

Something like this is in the works: Loot from side-areas

412

Not sure if it has been mentioned, but I feel a little influence from arcades could be the solution to boss runs, i.e.

The idea being, once you’ve beaten the bosses/game, there will be a mode in which to test yourself, but I feel this can be altered slightly to give a better effect to grim dawn.

Upon beating a standard normal boss within the story mode, make it unlocked for the player to fight in a boss mode, reducing the time waste and aiding in cutting straight too killing the boss and getting the loot. Possibly add options as discussed before of lowering the drop rate of rare loot, or if the player wanted, increase the level of the boss difficulty for a higher drop rate. Understandable with the idea of players trying to abuse the system, but that is entirely up to how you implement it, to which I think can be implemented well. Thinking on it, Monster Hunter games fair quite well in this regard, you have the option of doing a boss level as many times as you like, it isn’t required but you might want to do it for the drops on the boss to construct more equipment.

And for those who wish for more exp gain, maybe a horde mode which ranges between a certain level class where the player will go against an onslaught of enemies, it’s a better alternative to trying to score exp off of bosses, you certainly level up faster from killing groups of enemies. But I will leave that up to you to decide.

For the boss mode, I would really encourage it if you want to defeat the ideas of farming being forced.

413

YO! If there was a gladiator mode where they spawned stuff try to get some sort of item or just to grind exp that would be boss. Something like dead island implemented in the DLC. I would really enjoy a separate mode for this or maybe even just an area in the world that I can enter to try to conquer tiers of difficulty (like in Borderlands). Loot would still drop i think.

414

We were hoping to do a survival mode at some point. :wink:

415

Survival mode sounds good. Star Ocean 2 had one of those. There were 50 consecutive fights and they were super tough at the end, but not unbeatable. You had a chance to get loot from the fights themselves and a prize for finishing the challenge.

416

Somehow this sounds as you want to add it for/after release … or are you still considering it for the [post=33685]alpha phase[/post]? But the current context suggests you would like to implement a survival mode à la [thread=1314]Playthrough 3.5[/thread].

417

We were thinking maybe we could do that as a way to get the alpha out earlier but then decided it would be best to stick to progressing on the main game. Survival mode would require less content and could be released earlier but developing the features required for it would slow down development of the main game. We decided people might be unhappy about that and that survival mode was best left for an alternate game mode we could work on later. So, it would be something we might do after release. It is just an idea though at this point, not a confirmed plan.

418

This sounds like something a fan-mod could cover. :slight_smile:

419

Not the way we were envisioning it. It requires programming work.

420

Sounds interesting. A penny for your visions?