Its been a bit since 1.2.0 but I just wanna say that after those changes it sucks to have all buffs automatically activated. To be honest it feels like grim dawn doesn’t have buffs anymore. When something is automatically activated after putting points in it, that is a passive, not a buff. In my opinion it removes depth from the game in the form of having to actually buff your character and toggle things on and off yourself. I understand these changes were most likely to work controller into the equation more, however i’m not recommending to revert those changes, only to make it an option that the player can toggle in the main menu or options tab.
1 Like
I remember that there was a lot of talk about this at the time and the answer was a resounding no.
Surely a shame if thats the case. Strange to see a staple like buffs removed from an arpg game. Gonna be stuck between a rock and a hard place when deciding whether to update and run the dlc. By then so much will have changed. I think I will be rolling back to 1.9.8 because of things like this sadly. 
You might find it strange because it is subjective. I don’t feel like buffs have been removed from the game because toggling them was just a chore for me (I even used a macro for it before) that didn’t add any immersion / anything to the game. I don’t find pressing a few buttons at the start of a session to have “depth”.
Maybe it would have been a different story if it were an crpg like Baldur’s Gate where your party members cast spells on you with lengthy animations and you have to prepare your party before a boss fight. That is not the case in this game.
The only scenario where toggling buffs had some meaning was if you were nullified but most players hated having to toggle multiple buffs under pressure (or running away to do so) I think.
The great thing about buffs turning on automatically is when you swap your gear / run out of Energy etc which often caused you to run without some buffs until you noticed it. It honestly caused me a bit of OCD ad I’m glad it’s gone.
I mean that’s fair enough. I would assume many people do like the change for sure. But it definitely took away player responsibility and choice. It wasn’t just having to buff at the beginning of a session. Powerful buffs needed to be pressed more often because the duration was shorter weaker ones less often because the duration was longer. It was part of skill rotation and needing to time things correctly. Now the rotation is simply attack then move and attack. Severely lacking skill rotation and now there is no need for having the skill bar at the bottom cause one will never be able to even use those slots.
Only permabuffs toggle automatically. The buffs you mention here
are still temporary and need to be activated manually.
1 Like
@tqFan @Sunset_Creative What I would like to see (regarding the buffs) is the mention in Grim Tools that they are automatically toggled on. Now the buffs are difficult to recognize on gear from a skill, because the “toggle info” is missing (and they cost no energy, so another recognizable thing is missing).
I would go in more details about skills in GD (in the terms of a skill type indication).
- Active skills - a square (like it is now)
- Perma buffs - square standing on its corner / edge
- Temp buffs - triangle (pyramid)
- Passive buffs - circle (like it is now)
- Activated under condition - triangle (the top is the base)
sounds like something to suggest to Dammitt, there’s nothing Crate devs can do about that?
1 Like
Done. But I’ve mentioned it here, because it is connected to the debate over toggled auras / buffs 
IIRC the issue with toggle skills was a technical limitation.
So you could have toggle skills you manually toggled on/off, OR you have toggled skills which are always on.
I tried to find the posts, but haven’t been able to probably because they were in the testing forum which gets purged, or my search foo is off.
Perhaps @Zantai can provide more clarity.
This makes me remember this XKCD:
(Not that I’m suggesting your feedback is horrifying!)
In many softwares, including video games, updates will bring some people to ask for killed features to be optionally brought back one way or another.
The issue is that this often creates an additional layer of complexity and maintenance that adds cost to design and development. In the end, it’s sadly not as simple as adding a new button and being done with it. So the cost of adding and keeping it must be weighted against the gains.
What I feel is really cool about your feedback is that it’s about the way you enjoy your buffs. Pressing that button and seeing the effect pop up seems important, that rush of “okay now I’m boutta kickbutts” is lost and that’s a shame.
In general buffs in Grim Dawn are fairly underwhelming, and even more so now with this change. Maybe that’s the lesson there?
2 Likes
It just makes me sad that you can no longer choose when is the appropriate time. It’s something that gets baked into your skill rotation and gives you something to make sure you are always doing besides just ‘attack everything, then dodge now and then’ I will admit I definitely cannot even imagine how much extra work it would take to make it an option and maybe its simply a mountain of work and I don’t know about it.
I just really don’t wanna let it go. I hope other people over the next several months bring it up here and there too because like I said, these skills aren’t buffs anymore. They are listed improperly now. a buff is something the player themselves activate. A passive is something you put points into and its always active.
Its problematic for me because when the dlc does come out there will be a choice of whether to update or stay back to avoid these types of things. I completely understand that some find it a chore and that is fine. But will we just remove everything perceived as a chore in the end cause that could just be everything honestly in some peoples eyes. In my opinion its not a chore to have some responsibility in how you run your timing and skill rotation.
What appropirate time? Did you activate toggled buffs outside of the start of a game’s session? Because i’m gonna assume everybody else always activated their toggled buffs at the start of a session.
Honestly, buffs that require a single button press and then stay active until you decide to deactivate them have been always pointless busywork. Specially in a game where you have passives that do a lot of what these toggled buffs do but don’t require a button press to activate. Basically there is no depth to pressing a button to activate a buff that is basically permanent.
The only reason i assume both buff types exist is because toggled buffs can be nullified by enemies, while passive buffs can’t be. This also means that toggled buffs are allowed to be stronger than passive buffs, but i’d argue some passives can do a lot of what toggled buffs do with just one node.
Yeah what I don’t understand on your point is that you really have two kinds of buffs:
- Things like a Soldier’s Field Command, which is a flat bonus to many stats → Permanent buffs, cast once before the update and is now permanent.
- Things like an Occultist’s Blood of Dreeg, which only lasts for a few seconds → Temporary buff, hasn’t changed.
As @Norzan said, no one ever turned Permanent buffs “sometimes”, it was always all or nothing on the permanent buffs. Builds which used only some buffs and not others were extremely rare and kinda a meme. You could imagine having two exclusive skills at once and switching between one and the other… but no one did that.
So you do still have to be careful about your skill rotation. Forgetting your Blood Of Dreeg and losing 100%+ acid resistance in the middle of a fight is an efficient way to die a sudden death.
1 Like
I agree with the OP. Having just started the game again after a 6 month hiatus, it was strange to not be able to toggle on the buffs. For a casual player as myself I always felt that it was a sense of achievement to have finally reached an active buff on the skill tree, and I enjoyed activating it and see the animation and the visual effects, and also see how much more powerful my character would become when the buff was activated.
It also puts more responsibility on the player, and more of a challenge in lack of a better word. I would sometimes start my play session and wonder why I was so squishy, before I realized that I had forgotten to activate my buffs. And sometimes a boss would deactivate them, and that made it more challenging as you had to pay more attention to what was going on. If I could choose, I would have it so you could enable it in the options. That’s just my rambling on the subject, coming from and old player that remembers when the max level in the game was level 18.
1 Like