So after a month of playing and 60+ hours I finally finished Grim Dawn with expansion at character lvl 74. So suffice to say I’m pretty casual player.
Even with such experience i can safely say that way in which skill operate is weird.
First of all there is not enough skill points to go around. 244 isn’t bad number, the problem is that good hundred of them will be spend on mastery tax. This have effect of lack of tangible sense of progression, and well, fun. It’s even worse after lvl 50. Considering that on average you have 340 + 50 skills to spend in single mastery…
Secondly skill themselves are often have diminishing gain per point, this is something that encourage spending only few points in skill and getting rest from items. That it’s bad thing IMHO, player should be encouraged to max skills.
Thirdly skill bonuses from items incentivise you to put single point in lot of skills to get benefit from them.
So what be my solution? I’m not a fan of great overreaching changes so what I would do is rather simple:
1). Increase skill gain after lvl 50 from two to three. This in effect would mean net fifty point gain to 294, also it would equalize all levels.
Additionally as small thing you could rise skill reward from quest to three points from one. After all you get one level attribute gain from quest, why not one level of skill gain?
2). Flat skill effect gain for all skills before and after cap. This is to avoid tiresome metagaming of knowing exactly when to cut off skill to gain maximum benefit.
3). Remove need to have one hard point in skill to benefit from +skill items. This would dis-incentivise all those one pointers.
The devs want us to have to make decisions on what skills to use and we’re certainly not meant to use all of them. Since you can hard cap skills at +10, for example Soldier’s Cadence to 26/16, it often makes sense just to soft cap them so you get the maximum benefit and then have spare points to use elsewhere.
Not sure you’ve got your info right. You get 3 skill points from L2 to L50, then 2 from L51 to L85 (base game) or to L90 (AoM expansion) and after that just 1 skill point from L91 to L100.
If they increase the skillpoints gain, the game will lose its beauty. Not only you’ll be able to overload your character with strong skills, but you’d also have a overdose of skillpoints for some characters, for example Tricksters and Spellbreakers with a two handed weapon. Furthermore, items with bonus to all skills would be pretty useless and most likely avoided sometimes. Most of the time, your characters end up with +4 to all skills (in my case, at least 5 as I focus hardly on that), which might even be +30 skill points sometimes. For my “stand still and just watch” Infiltrator build, I have +26 skillpoints from two items, and my total bonus is +3 to inquisitor and +2 to nightblade, for a total of 65 skillpoints. You can even have +6 to ALL skills, period, and this would result in 23 skillpoints for 1 bonus to all skills, for a total of 138 skillpoints, and this is for a Clairvoyant Mage Hunter (proof).
All in all, your idea would basically kill the idea and feel of Grim Dawn. I don’t see any reason of increasing skills per level, this would result in a total mess and editing all items to remove bonuses to skills would just be an idiotic idea, because it’d make the game worse and cost Crate time to remove bonuses from every item. Also, there’s no need of hard-capping one skill, you can easily add some points to a skill and use it as a rotator skill, combined with other stuff. Basically, I doubt any Grim Dawn player would say your idea is cool. There are MANY people that hate pressing buttons, and GD offers that, you can make even a one-skill character that requires you to press one button or don’t use the keyboard at all - which is very comfortable for many people. I, myself, think that the idea of skill distribution from Titan Quest and Grim Dawn is a super good idea, because you not only can focus on one skill, but also add some skills to your rotation, maybe only for proccing stuff, but also to deal additional (sometimes massive) damage.
Like Medea said - there needs to be some choice in what skills you take. You also have to take item bonuses such as +1/2 to all skills in x mastery into consideration here as these have the potential to free up a ton of skill bonuses and are prominent on several item slots - weapons, headgear, belts, relics. Item sets can also feature them as well for even more.
Depends on the skill in question. Some have diminishing returns as you invest into them or into their Ultimate ranks (Vindictive Flame is a notable one), some skills actually gain more per point as you invest into them normally or into their Ultimate ranks (Lethal Assault, Inquisitor Seal as examples).
I don’t really see a problem with one pointers. I don’t think any skill in the game is broken or overpowered (or can’t think of any immediately) with 1 point and + skill bonuses, many of them are just nifty or nice bonuses.
I really don’t understood all those “this will ruin the game” declarations. Currently there is overall about 780 points in both masteries to spend. My idea would rise overall points from 244 to 304 (thanks medea fleecestealer for correction), that increase from about 31% to 42% of maximum masteries points. Be aware however that this include mastery bar itself which is boring by itself.
That its not looking like total change and ruination to me just about 25% points more to spend.
Also you must remember that not everybody will grind like crazy to get best items for character. I will grant you that GD is much better in that aspect that D2 where I still got flashbacks to belial farming…
But there aren’t. If we had enough points for everything then yes, but we don’t. It’s all about choices, making the best use of the available points for the build you want to make. And there are plenty of builds out there that don’t max the second mastery bar so that’s more points to spend elsewhere too.
It’s the same for the devotion system. Atm there are 59 shrines in the base game, 73 with AoM, but you can only have a maximum of 55 devotion points to spend.
When I first played the game I had the same idea what OP has, there’s not enough points for everything, but then I realized it’s like TQ, choose your path and build it, not choose all possible paths and build them.
There are? All builds I have seen maxed both mastery bars for attributes and Life/Energy.
And seriously even with proposed increase there is still 60% skill tree that you can’t take. Take this however with rest of my proposed changes, so all skills would have flat effect modifier from 1 to 26. In such case more skill would always be better choice.
Devotion is okay because is something additional on top of you skillset. It’s mostly also self contained.
That’s just a sample. I’ve seen some builds where the second mastery only goes up to 32 and a few where it’s as low as 10.
Again, we’re not meant to use all skills. It’s about choices which increase the build diversity. You only have to look in the Build Compendium to see how many different ways a class can be built.
Making all skills available would simply defeat that game objective.
Also don’t forget that many items grant skills as well. If you had everything you’d never fit it all on to the hotkey bars. My lazy Conjurer pet build uses only 3 active skills yet one hotkey bar is full and the second is half full and one of those active skills is on the RMB.
Thanks for links. Hovewer they all take at least 40 points in second mastery bar…
Problem is that currently players are using lot of skills, they just do it after +skill items, and exploiting skills decreasing gains per point.
Seriously you will not have all skills even with proposed changes. Take a look at typical pet cabalist, you would need about 325 points to max all pets plus some passives.
I am probably in the minority regarding this, but I actually liked D3’s Skill system.
However GD is balanced around how it works atm. If it had 50 more skill points as you suggest, pretty much every build would become extremely overpowered that the game will lose any challenge unless they also rebalance everything to compensate for it.
Eh, Maxing any pet is a good thing if you can afford it. Maxed Familiars, Briarthorns, Blight Fiends are no joke. Hellhounds could however use some buff if they ever want those to be more than support.
As USER_NAME_01 said you rarely max pets and all their stats as you can see in the Build Compendium if you look at the Conjurer, Cabalist and Ritualist builds.
You do max pets. It’s priority one in pet builds. Isn’t it? :eek:
60 more points is fanatical. Trust me, op, you’ll come to the same conclusion once you play some more. But I think 3 would do nicely. Make Allostria give one on normal too and add another two in FG (for example).
If, however, you don’t wish to spend so much time in game to learn to “appreciate its limitations”, there are mods and tools that will give you more points to play around with.
Ah, and that doesn’t strike you as rather weird? I mean logically speaking pet build should want to max those. If mechanics is against such thing then there is something wrong with mechanics.
More points and builds start to look far too similar to each other because you can pick up everything you need and the only difference being the main skill used. No two different builds of the same skill.
