yes, that’s why SR is totally fine as it is in HC 
Except for multiplayer boss rooms, the aggro system still kinda sucks.
You haven´t leveled a toon for a long time, have you?
Look at the last 3 entries here: https://www.grimtools.com/checklist/quests/ultimate
3 Skill Points and 1 Attribute Point is not Main Campaign?
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It might have been strong words but I did it with the squishiest Silver Sentinel with 9k health, zero armor and hardly any sustain. Some others do it with 2.4da. And why wouldn’t they? The game allows for it. And timer consistency is golden as long as aggro abuse holds. I really don’t know why so many people are opposed to the idea of balancing SR.
3 chars on hardcore legit last quarter.
Gracious thanks for the refresher. A little misunderstanding. I meant SR is not main game, and you said it is main campaign. We were both right.
But just because main game and SR are a part of main campaign, doesn’t mean you can draw parallels between these two completely different game modes and demand that one be in the likeness of the other - and in contrast to Crucible just because Crucible happens to be accessed from main menu and not main game NPC and give devotion points and not attribute points. These things have nothing to do with how SR itself should be balanced.
The only consistent argument I heard today is that beginner players should not be penalized because of the whims of advanced players. That’s right, they shouldn’t. But instead focusing on the negative side of things and speak about penalties, let’s talk about rewards. Why shouldn’t players be rewarded for no-death SR runs? Why should they receive the same reward as those who die many times from carelessness, buildcrafting errors or dps greed?
TLDR: SR is definitely a different game mode, and it’s by far the easiest content, and yet most rewarding content, ever added to the game (unless you play Hardcore, where SR still has problems because there is too much RNG at deep SR depths)
Virtually no one is going to vote to make things harder on themselves. Only the rare few that enjoy a challenge (myself included)
Grim Dawn has become far too easy over the years, in my opinion. But Forgotten Gods really lowered the bar.
First, it added the ability to transmute sets, but at least that came with some cost. And then SR came along and made it so that virtually any build, no matter how weak, could farm gear. This is even easier than main campaign because in the roguelike dungeons, if you die, you don’t get to go back!
Shattered Realm is most definitely a different game mode. Claiming that SR is Main Campaign because it rewards skill points/attribute points, is like saying Crucible is Main Campaign because it rewards the same loot you get from the actual Main Campaign (gear). It’s not the rewards that make a game mode. It’s the mechanics. SR mechanics vary enough from both Main Campaign and Crucible that it warrants being called its own game mode, IMO. SR has enough unique mechanics (shards, boss levels, timers, shrines, shattered souls increasing damage, filling a meter with souls, randomness in general) to call it a different mode.
My personal suspicion is that SR is as easy as it is (virtually no penalty for death) to increase sales. Unfortunately, that makes for a far less rewarding game for people who like a challenge, and like to be rewarded for overcoming that challenge. With SR, you don’t really need to learn the game. You can just keep zerging until you get your loot. The only exception is if you push so far that you literally cannot advance; which is a very easy problem to counter (don’t push that far!)
I think about all the people who were posting about how difficult Morgoneth is. They couldn’t beat him because they weren’t good enough at the game. Once they understand the mechanics (got better) and geared/skill appropriately, they could beat him. But you don’t even really need to do that for SR softcore.
A weak build cannot farm Crucible because a weak build will die in the Crucible. Really weak builds cannot farm roguelikes because really weak builds die in the roguelikes. But given enough persistence, even really weak builds can farm Shattered Realms. I have friends who never beat Crucible 150 in their life (even with buffs/banners); yet they are happily farming SR 65.
I do think that at minimum, any death should remove timers. You still get rewarded, but then at least dying in SR has some real meaning, which would also reward better builds (builds that can finish 65-66 without dying can farm better then weak builds that die). I use 65-66 because I believe Crate has basically said there is no balancing after 65.
All that said, I think that the chance of death penalty being increased for SR is very close to 0%. Non-free games with high replay value (like Grim Dawn) tend to get easier over time - because it increases sales. Compare to free games (like the original rogue likes: Nethack, Angband, etc.) - they are just as hard today as they every were. Because the people making those free games have no financial incentive to make things easier. Just my suspicion.
The real issue here is that build strength matters less in SR than it should; other factors (player persistence, RNG) matter more. IN SR, weak builds are not punished enough; and by comparison, strong builds are not rewarded enough. There is a reason the top builders still use Crucible as the standard/testing grounds : in Crucible, build strength matters a LOT.
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i 'd like to see the end fight of SR so the boss room to be set up differently. either by creating waves of certain boss combinations or by making a map where you face certain nems together but not this small room bullshit where you have to mess with your camera and i see these painful movies where people are crawling through the edge to fight one nemesis.
to me this 
is much more an exploit than the diying penalty. granted the reward isn’t exactly the same in Normal and Ulti, but you’ll most likely run the shards not only safer but also faster, so the difference may not be so big in the end.
while i’m here i just read the post above claiming that SR is easier than MC and i have to say i could’nt disagree more. SR is obviously way harder.
EXACTLY. That’s what I wanted to say but couldn’t find the words. SR = Noobocracy of Grim Dawn.
But I wouldn’t go as far as to accuse Crate of that degree of commercialism. Money is always a factor but I don’t think it affects decisions on game mechanics in such intricate ways. Or I choose to believe if doesn’t…
You have a skewed view of the average player if you think farming SR for loot is somehow not a challenge. Too many people here seem to forget how much effort it takes to create a powerful endgame build (without GDStash), which is what it takes to survive at the Shards that rain loot down on you, not to mention the skill level required…
If you have a character that can best the hardest content, there is no point in giving out a trickle of items for that effort or you’ll literally never find an upgrade.
You also underestimate the psychological penalty of dying to an encounter. Sure, some people don’t care if they zerg a boss fight and eventually win, but the average person becomes flustered and upset, some even going as far as to post on the various GD forums to let us know how unfair and “badly designed” a fight is.
The Shattered Realm is a different beast to the Crucible and offers different challenges. That players can ultimately overcome its challenges despite repeated failures and still get rewarded for the effort is not a flaw, it is a feature. Shattered Realm is about pushing farther and farther and seeing the limits of your abilities, as evidenced by the incredible coordination we’ve seen of groups besting Shard 160 recently using Death’s Waystones.
That said, the static 30s penalty to the timer that’s currently in effect inside the Shattered Realm is not proving adequate given higher shards do give you more time to clear them, so we will have that penalty scale up to 90s with increasing Shard #.
That is indeed a problem, and one we’ll be addressing by shifting the ratio of Epic to Legendary drops on Normal difficulty Shattered Realm in favor of Epics.
I can tell you what increases sales, quality new content with fun gameplay that people enjoy. As it turns out, people enjoy the Shattered Realm. There isn’t some algorithm where decreasing difficulty over time boosts sales. That’s just nonsense.
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I 100% agree with this and will tattoo it in small print on my forehead.
I think SR is great but that’s only because GD is great. SR itself could’ve been done so much better. Boss shards should have had different modes just like normal shards do (hunger, levers, desert, chests) and focused on fighting bosses in different, carefully designed settings. Boss shards seem to me kind of - really no offense - lazy design. Draw a circle, drop four enemies on the other side of the player and see what happens. And what happened was aggro abuse with impossibly imbalanced difficulty spikes when it fails.
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If someone want death-penalty in SR just Play Hardcore 
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It’s funny to see this topic.
The majority of builders with SR+ tags post those mighty videos where they camera and aggro abuse SR 75 with some lame Fabius, Benn, Zanti or smth else almost dying 1 vs. 1 to such easy bosses.
I have never seen vids with Gargabol, Grava, Korvaak and others difficult combos.
AND after that people say that SR is easy, lol
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SWISH!
WHOOSH!
BAM!!!
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Fixing that blatant abuse would sure put a nail in the coffin of “SR = Noobocracy of Grim Dawn”, now wouldn’t it. 
People seem to enjoy this exploit, I guess cause they feel like they outplayed the game in doing so successfully, but if these joke threads about SR being easy mode keep popping up, I hope you can guess what we will do to address it…
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See? No exaggeration or strong words like “noobocracy” needed.
Now the penalty for 6 times dying is 9 minutes (not 3 minutes) and some loot is lost in higher shards. But the fun fact: Most people don´t care for loot anymore while playing this.
You will fix the camera issue and make the boss shards like the non-boss-shards with plenty of room to kite, hide and run away? 
Just kidding. 
Funny enough I have never seen Korvaak in SR. But you’re right. Some builds can’t beat 5% of possible combos in SR 75, some can beat only 5% of them like Benni and Moose combo. But SR+ tag means you finished 75th shard and you did. Job well done! 
But now problem is that players that use that or camera “method” will oversell their builds and try to prove how easy is SR. It’s not though. It’s not that easy for most players, builds or against most bosses combos deep shards.
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you lucky guy! he’s one of the most annoying bosses in SR ever as only at SR65-66 he has ~15 millions hp for both phases which is about 3 nemesis’ health bars.
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you can keep all that in tact. Just arrange the bosses a bit differently its in no way proportional to the rest of the SR experience. And you still have to fight all those nemesis just not in a 10 by 10 m bathroom
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