Arpgs are generally about farming though so I’m not sure why you would think that you’d get everything you need on a silver platter right off the bat.
Some dungeons are meant to be challenging and perhaps for new players or specific builds, will require some more time in looking for specific gear/components.
Some builds you probably don’t need to worry about gear or components.
If you ever have an issue with your build it may simply be your build in which case it would be wise to post a link to your build so that you can get some input.
Plus Grim Dawn to me is about creating several characters and since the transfer stash is so large that means what you find which may not be perfect for one character can be given easily to another character. People who have those amazing characters that can clear everything easily super quickly probably took quite some time to farm for those characters.
Cadence missing may mean that you don’t have enough Offensive Ability. May want to spec into Field Command, Oleron’s Rage, Fighting Spirit, and perhaps Markovian’s Advantage if you don’t mind the combination of procs with Cadence taking every 3rd hit.
Plus Veteran Mode is supposed to be more challenging. Challenge = components/gear/skill/build to rise to that challenge in order to meet and beat it.
edit: Just saw your recent post… Veteran AND SoT? A challenge dungeon on the harder difficulty and you expect to clear it easily without farming?
I farmed for 100 hours now, Is that enough to at least have a chance to finish SoT as a Soldier with Cadence?
From my experience it’s not.
Or should I farm more ? How much more for the game to allow me to finish the area, and allow me to have a working, fun build?
I don’t want to farm, I don’t want your legendary Items, if my Soldier Skills/Build doesn’t work anyway.
And I get poor drops anyway.
It takes forever to kill stuff as pure Soldier.
That is the problem for me.
A Build/Skills should be rewarding themselves, not just loot. I explained it in original post.
Then, also Game wants me to farm forever and for what ?
It will not make Cadence work better or my build work better, unless I completely change it up.
Skills are not good enough for the “challenge” and farming more is the only way to fix some of them, while other skills will be “meh” anyway.
And I don’t disagree. I leveled all the skills you mentioned, yes.
But I don’t enjoy farming like crazy for days, just to beat an area.
For me, It’s not challenging, its tedious to farm for hundred of hours just to complete every area the game offers.
PS.
ARPG’s are about many great things, and farming is just one of them, It shouldn’t be the only thing. Some prefer crafting/farming, I prefer a working Class with Fun Skills what are sufficient to NOT farm, I prefer Coop.
That’s what my original post here is about. Preference.
Yes its challenging, arpg’s got challenging areas. It’s not the issue. It is awesome.
Again, I listed the Arpg’s I played and Finished. It is in my original post. This genre is NOT new to me.
Yes, and every RPG gave me that choice to enjoy the game and finish ALL areas without insane amounts of farm. Why can’t Grim Dawn ?
I do enjoy finding a good item, naturally.
But for instance in D2 (again, in my original post) I didn’t need to get anything, silver platter or not, my classes worked anyway without farming and WITH generic loot.
It’s also your choice to play Veteran mode which increases the difficulty and thus the requirements to deal with that difficulty. You can easily switch Veteran to Normal anytime you want if completing all the areas is your goal.
D2 didn’t have any challenge dungeons (that are optional) where you couldn’t use a town portal or were trapped in a small room with swarms of enemies/heroes. Plus in D2 Hell Difficulty you would definitely need to either use a specific build or specific items to get through all the content since you had to deal with immune enemies and enemies that could easily destroy you.
If you are talking about the one time play through of Normal D2 then sure most classes would work and it would be reasonably easy to get through that difficulty. Like D2, Grim Dawn has a Normal Mode. Veteran Mode is for those who want the extra challenge which may indeed require farming.
Again perhaps you should post your build via Grim Calc so you can get some feedback.
Again, I agree with you. And understand. It’s just sad what farming is the only option. That is what my original post is about.
Example1 : D2, Necromancer, Poison Nova/Corpse Explosion. Lower Resist Curse. Fire Golem and Fire Companion (for second damage type). Done. Any difficulty. No need to farm. Skills work.
Example2 : Paladin, Fire/Frost Auras/Zeal. same idea. No need for loot to farm for skills to really work with generic loot. Skills work.
etc.
Yes, I play only on Veteran and I find it tough but fun. Finished it many times now. Still, SoT makes my Soldier take forever.
Oh yes, it definitely requires farming. Question is: how much more should suffer trough it to finish an area?
Why can’t the Soldier Skills carry him damage vise, why it must be 100+ hours of farming what I don’t find fun.
I don’t look for debate really on a preference in ARPG’s, all Im saying I wish Skills would matter as much as farming, not less.
Yes but D2 not all builds are optimal and will work in all difficulties.
Lightning or Fire Sorc for example do not have -% enemy resistances like an Ice Sorc (and even then your damage will be quite lousy against ice immune enemies). This is why a lot of people ran around with an Act 2 hireling wielding the Infinity rune word which lowered enemy resistances and defense. Infinity requiring ladder and a lot of farming to acquire.
Soldier in general deals a lot of physical, bleed and internal trauma damage. The latter two being less effective of a DoT in SoT - just like Poison damage for the Occultist or a poison based Nightblade.
Plus each mastery is different when it comes to their roles. Soldier in general is more of a tanky mastery but with items/skill builds can also deal damage. Same goes for Nightblade in that initially it is a damage based mastery but can also be defensive depending on items/skill builds.
Higher difficulties are added for people to continue to farm for items. Diablo 3 is a great example with all of it’s difficulty levels. I’m sure PoE is another good example.
Skills will carry you only so far but only up to a point in which case items will be depended on more - just like in Diablo 2 in many cases.
Hm, thank you for the insight, I was probably very lucky with my builds in D2 then, as I didn’t encounter a need to farm extensively, like in GD now, to complete SoT area etc.
1.But in D2 like I sayed, Lower Resist curse made any elemental build viable ( and as Necro I rolled with 2 elements, Poison, and Fire (henchman + golem)).
Yeh, altrough I really not enjoy extensive farming, I can see that as an endgame requirement (and endgame itself) for high lvl areas now imho. I just wasn’t expecting it in Act 2 (“midgame”)you could say and as Im a completionist it really shocked me, what an Area just resisted to be conquered on solo. But yeh, I like it that the endgame areas come already in Act 1 (DS) then Act 2 (SoT) etc.
Markovian/Zolhan/Cadence seem not working for me, or just in general ?
Now that we’ve sorted through all the self pity/RNG hates me etc and have gotten down to the build in question after numerous requests, Here’s my take.
Level your mastery up to 50! Stat points are good and you are missing out on the level 50 skills.
If you want to crush bosses like your ninja-farming Nightblade brethren, Oleron’s is THE primary skill that helps make this possible.
Get rid of so many points in fighting spirit, Forcewave, Mehnir’s will, Blitz, and Field Command. Each of these has pretty significant diminishing returns, so I typically treat them as 1-3 point wonders which can be further boosted by easily available items like Frizzick’s Utility Pack (I have found almost 50 of these in 500 hours of playing grim dawn)
Invest heavily in Cadence (The best 1h single target skill in the soldier line, especially if you have below average gear which you seem to continually indicate) and think about boosting it’s secondary skill Fighting Form up to level 12 which allows every Cadence proc to hit two additional enemies.
Zolhan’s deserves at least a couple points for it’s crowd clearing proc potential.
Reduce target’s defense using Blitz/Warcry/Forcewave, then crush hard targets with Oleron’s range + Cadence. The level 12 Fighting form has eliminated the need for any aoe skill on my sword and board soldier plus it’s entirely skill based and not acquired after hundreds of hours of farming which should please you.
Sheet dps is also a TERRIBLE indicator of how much damage a cadence character does in reality.
Assumes zero + skills, mix and match details as you wish. Go Heavy on cunning.
The vast majority of my gear (which is decidedly mediocre at best) has been found from leveling characters, not “farming”. The one shot chests you get during leveling guarantees some type of rare item and based on the number of characters you have leveled, it is a large statistical anomaly that you do not have at least good enough gear to complete SoT.
Character’s get stronger by leveling, which is a byproduct of killing things. Loot is also a byproduct of killing things. Go out and kill things. I would suggest looking at it in that fashion instead of the insurmountable item hunt.
Always check your vendors, try some crafting for woefully undergeared slots, and most of all keep killing monsters!
Are we running through the same level, killing boss, repeating? Or are we farming randomly generated dungeons in the end-game, full of surprises and loot? Farming can be fun in one game, and boring in the next. Farming can be as stupid as quitting game to reset a vendor, or killing the toughest boss in the game.
Linking the rewards, drops and experience gains seems like a bad idea to me. “Farming” is not just for players who want to easily grab all the best gear. It also serves weaker players that CAN’T gain experience and need better gear. E.g “I just need a couple more pieces of gear to make this crazy build idea start to work”.
If you combine both aspects of reward you may as well get rid of gear completely and just add the mods to the character after a level. This analogy is an exaggeration, but you get the point.
I vote for (end game): Random dungeons, random loot, random bosses with random mods.
That kind of farming is exactly the opposite of what us old TQ veterans like/enjoyed in TQ and hope to see in Grim Dawn. Back in the day:) you farmed certain areas for a certain boss for a specific drop they had ie Stonebinder’s Cuffs.
I find the total randomness boring as there is no direction to it. I like that you can farm a certain area for a specific item, gives a person goals and places a purpose.
Skills do matter but I agree that some skills are currently lacking. It would probably take some rounds of balancing to have all the skills perform on par. It’s tedious work to balance skills for multiple classes, esp. in the case of Grim Dawn’s dual class system, so let’s have faith in the developers while giving them feedback to work on.
Until then, it might be better to build a character specifically for farming, in order to get items for builds which are more gear dependent. I went with pure Demolitionist, and without specific gear but maxing Canister Bomb and Grenado, I could do SoT with ease (not on Veteran mode though).
Maybe there could be a way to have the best of both worlds ;).
First we know that monster infrequents are already on some bosses and double rare affix monster infrequent will be some of the best items so there will always be incentive to farm specific bosses.
But we know that there is always a better route to farm efficiently because it is faster (not a lot of walking or hero monster on the way to the bosss…).
I think to really have a good endgame you must have a choice to what you farm but avoid the player to have a monotonous experience following always the same route.It can become quickly boring to repeat the exact same thing with the same pattern even if sometimes there are heroes monsters on your way or some blocks.
What can we propose ?
I would like to see all different environements and to fight against each different bosses in order to maximize the work of the developers and to enjoy all the content of the game.
How to encourage players to fam all bosses if they don’t want all monster infrequents and if some are more rewarding (easier to defeat, closer to the rift gate…)?
Maybe have a specific blueprint recipe that uses tokens/trophies/souls that you farm on bosses. Each boss has a unique soul.
When you combine all bosses souls you can craft on orb/chest of your choice that only spawns the items types of your choice.
For example :
Orb of Amulets will need 2 Warden’soul, 1 Salazar soul, 1 Gutworn soul, 1 Darius soul
Orb of Ring will need Warden’soul, 1 Salazar soul, 1 Gutworn soul, 1 Darius soul
Orb of Shields, orb of weapons…
The goal is for players to farm all locations and all bosses and still be more rewarded than farming always the same boss and reseting the game.
Of course in this case Boss Souls are like a currency, like gold you can see how much you have collected in player’s information but it dos not take place in inventory slots (not enought space already).
Doing what Dark Ages of Camelot did with XP camp bonus and camp degradation antibonus XP and applying that to regular mobs for a given area of the game while taking the same principle idea for loot and applying it to boss mobs of the same given area of the game would help reduce excessive farming of the same locations.
The other thing I’d do is create a randomized fog of war section swaths on the map even if it’s been previously explored in another game that players are encouraged to explore where mobs give bonus XP and loot. This would defiantly help provide incentives to exploration and disincentives to the idea of farming routes.
games require time to progress. Just because you have less of it does not mean you deserve to drag the progression down for every one else and ruin the experience. If you want to progress in a game you should actually have to put time and work into it, and as such little kids or those without a full time job should be allowed to progress further than those who have a full time job and play a game in their spare time. That being said efficiency is everything and just because some one has more time than you, that doesn’t mean that they can progress much faster or better than you, if they are using their time inefficiently. As such even an individual with a full time job can still progress as much as a teenager or child if they use their time wisely. While they don’t have jobs adults and children and teenagers all for a good portion of the year spend 8-9 hrs at school or work. Over an extended period of time sure maybe younger individuals with less responsibilities will progress faster in a shorter time span but over time it will even out. (And younger individuals are more likely to burnout and stop playing the game all together compared to some one who plays in their spare time).
Finally this is essentially a single player game that happens to have multiplayer functionality. It is not competitive in any way. There is no pvp, there is no leaderboards, nothing. As such it does not matter how fast others progress. Quite frankly all you need is a little CE experience and you can instantly catch up or surpass others. If Grim Dawn ever makes dedicated servers and adds leaderboards and ranking systems to promote competitive game play maybe then you can complain about available time being unfair. (Combining Diablo 3 and Path of Exile competitive elements could make this game truly great. Currently its just fun to play. But that’s my opinion, I enjoy competitiveness even though ultimately it means nothing)
I resort to farming and I find it fun. Personally I farm the boss in withering fields which I believe drops better loot.
No no no. This is the whole “let’s make Torment #9 difficulty” power creep bull****. The only thing you need to worry about is how it feels like to play the game for the player. I’ll take an example from Titan Quest, which is probably the best ARPG made.
In Greece you fight Maenads and Turtles. Maenads are agile fighters who poison and run away. Turtles are slow, lumbering beasts that have thick armor and kick your butt if you get close. Each enemy has a flavour and character. This flavour is further enhanced by overkill damage making weak enemies fly across the screen. This makes sense because maenads are lightweight characters, and powerful hammer smack feels powerful when it creates this effect. Occasionally normal enemies are stronger, because they’re carrying powerful equipment, not because developers just decided this monster type should deal fixed damage. This is ingenious!
What if you replaced this with color-coded version of generic enemy type? Blue pig-man is the one you kill with couple of hits. Red pig-man is the one that deals flame damage. That would be just stupid. Yet this is just what mediocre games like Diablo III do. Slap a multiplier here and another there and ta-da you’ve created “difficult” game. When playing Diablo III you’re asking yourself should you farm Diablo is Torment #3 where you can kill it in 1min 25 seconds, or Torment #4 where it takes 2min 50 seconds to kill. The whole notions of difficult content and immersion are thrown into garbage can and the game becomes some kind of math quiz. The monster is not strong or weak, you’ve just chosen your difficulty level that way. It’s immersion breaker and big turn-off for me.
Some Satyrs were specialists and veterans in Titan Quest. It makes sense, if they’ve been raiding villages for a while. There was occasionally a hero monster, which felt like they were leading the forces. Make sure you have proper justification for everything you do. Creating another power class just to shovel better loot to player is no justification at all.
No I haven’t. Is playtesting behind paygate? I’ve watched some streams of Grim Dawn and read developer comments on this forum, some which make me deeply concerned of priorities.
There is a pay gate to test their game for them, yes.
Two things to note:
I bought in to the early access awhile before Act II was finished. Having tried Diablo II, III, and POE, I still vastly preferred Grim Dawn even at that extremely unfinished state. As of B26 the game feels extremely well done to me. I do want the level cap raised, but at the moment it is open enough to me that I have a lot of fun trying out new builds endlessly. Even though Crate seems to actively want to discourage me from making my frost mage. But they can’t stop me, you’ll see!
You could wait till the game is in final release. I believe they stated it should happen before the end of 2015, so you’d only have to wait ~5 months at most. If you’re truly worried about their priorities before paying for early access then you could simply wait till the final release when all priorities have been carried out.
I’m happy to hear that you hold Titan Quest in such high regard and I can also counter with example from it - we also had hero monsters and higher difficulty challenge bosses in TQ, which work along exactly the same principals as those in Grim Dawn. Their extra power comes in the form of unique skills, not simply some generic modifier. So, if you enjoyed it in TQ, I don’t see why you’d be concerned about the same sort of thing GD.
The only difference is that on TQ, the publisher and company owners wanted to ensure that even epic and legendary difficulty were not too challenging for the average user, so we had to limit how challenging any enemy could be. While I think it still makes sense for the main content on normal difficulty to not be overly challenging for the average user, we have more freedom now to create greater levels of challenge at higher difficulty and in the more peripheral challenge content like Steps of Torment.
and as Im a completionist it really shocked me, what an Area just resisted to be conquered on solo. But yeh, I like it that the endgame areas come already in Act 1 (DS) then Act 2 (SoT) etc.