[POLL] Should dying get a bigger penalty in SR?

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
105

Read some more guide/tutorials/threads (on Crucible for example) and then you’ll understand Grim Dawn is not only stat/gear check but experience/skill/piloting/knowing your enemies matters a ton and you would die constantly even if you had the same setup. You know, how to approach enemies, what attacks to avoid, checking the cooldowns of skills like Ghoulish Hunger or Mirror of Ereoctes and using them at the right time etc. I’m writing this from the same position as yours btw.

Unless you play one of those Maya’s ‘can be played drunk’ builds of course.

4 Likes
106

Also to point something else regarding SR vs Cruci thing, If you can’t complete a wave in Cruci and die in SC, you still get loot even though it would be much less than otherwise. In SR on the other hand if you can’t complete the last wave, you have no option but to reset SR and thus lose out on all the loot upto that point.

Crucible also has its own currency compared to SR where you have to Craft Waystones. For a new player I assume that the cost won’t be irrelevant until they can make a build that can farm SR with consistency to cover the cost.

Also the sheer inconsistency of SR’s difficulty (On one run, I have had to resort to Camera abuse on 85 while 90 passed without any struggle or aggro abuse) makes it incomparable to Crucible interms of difficulty and such as Cruci draws from a Set which you can predict for the most part. Add to it the leeway provided by blessings and banners and you have 2 entirely different game modes.

If the complaint be that SR+ tag has lost its meaning due to nearly every build capable of achieving it, the easiest solution would simply be to increase the requirement for the tag. Even then, with the existence of aggro and camera abuse (which I use SR80+, personally) and the wildly inconsistent nature of SR, I doubt what it would stand to achieve.

3 Likes
107

You are right, except you are forgetting that punishment for dying in Crucible is losing your Tributes which throws you back quite a bit in terms of farming speeds. If you farm SR 75-76 and meet an absolutely ridiculous boss chunk you can just reload your run and your losses will be one waystone + 10-15 minutes of your time.

108

That is also true. I guess it depends upon how fast the player can farm up the cost of a waystone vs the lost tributes. Though for someone who has played the game for quite a bit and thus have plenty of iron and materials in the bank, the loss of tributes will indeed be harsher since you can’t save them up.

109

exactly. Waystones are pretty cheap. Farming back 87-88 tributes so you can get into the cycle of 150-170 buffed/bannered farming can take quite a lot of time. It’s also very tedious to go back to wave 100 or lower.

2 Likes
110

Very few builds will allow 100% success rate in Crucible irregardless of your players skills, so that means you’ll lose occasionally tributes. When I started playing Crucible was doing mostly 100-150, cause 150-170 was very often killing my Infiltrator and lose of tributes sent me back a lot. Crucible is the most efficient method of tributes farming but only if you can sustain your tributes, eg having good enough build and survive too.

SR dying and even failing have less pronounced penalty with minimal costs and even lower shards grant you good rewards. I think even for farming only you don’t have to get to deeper shards with big increase of difficulty but not rewards.

Also I want to note that any changes of SR will affect early shards, which encourages new players to play them in order to get skill/attributes points.

1 Like
111

My biggest gripe on SR is tangential to the death penalty discussion but we seem to have branched away from that. Souls buff. What exactly is its purpose, what was the design intent and what behavior is it currently fostering?

As I see it the souls buff is a win more feature, speeding up chunk clear so long as a build can meet a minimum damage threshold. This makes the chunks with the souls buff mechanic easier and faster, it keeps them from being the prime limiting factor on the scope of SR runs. Then you get to boss chunks and… nothing. No helping buff, this is what builds must be tuned for, the first three chunks just don’t matter.

1 Like
112

Souls buffs were allowed at first to go into boss chunks but all it did was allow the player to obliterate the whole boss room extremely quick.

113

This mechanic would’ve actually made sense with aggro abuse fix. But right now I agree with xervous, pre boss chunks are really easy and souls are probably the main thing that makes them so easy. Maybe sth like another small soul nerf+being able to transfer souls into boss chunks without aggro abuse would make SR feel more balanced overall. But it would be quite the big and maybe too risky change.

114

Do the souls really make that much of a difference?
Because I see no change with or without Souls with my Pets. I am assuming that they affect only the player.
Either way, I rather remove the soul mechanic altogether tbh. The non boss chunks would be easy regardless and if the timer becomes an issue (due to no souls for faster runs), that can be fixed via enemy kills adding more extra time or something.

115

Souls provide a (can’t remember ballparking) <50% damage buff that (apparently slights pet builds for whatever reason and) puts the functional difficulty of pre boss chunks somewhere… 10-20 floors lower than what you’re pitted against in the boss room.

1 Like
116

I would argue that the penalty for doing rooms in the allotted time limit should have a much heavier hand in how much loot you get. Not necessarily have SR loot reduced, but right now completing SR within the time limit nets you two extra chests. I feel like that’s too little of a reward to complete a difficult shard in a manageable time frame.

I feel like personally, the timed reward should be three additional chests in addition to the 5(correct me?) chests you get regardless.

I’m an SR/GD newbie (300 hours, 1 level 100 char in roughly 150-170hrs) and I’ll be honest, if my char cannot complete the shard within the time limit, I’ll quit the shard post boss run, maybe run it again if I had some bullshit modifiers, make build adjustments, and try again.

Only exception is on waystone shards where I will quit without finishing the shard. Why would I continue with a shard that I am struggling with? If I’m struggling in that shard, I’m obviously gonna struggle in the next one.

On the topic of the SR tag, would it be impossible to implement that the SR UI stays with you when you go into the Splendors room? That way you could just send screenshots as opposed to videos for people who are unable. That would help with build legitimacy issues. Although I can’t understand why for the life of me that someone would upload a build that wasn’t legitimate. People would eventually find out anyway.

EDIT;

You could also take screenshots in the boss room after you complete it. It wouldn’t help with rating builds on completing the shard within the time frame, but atleast you know that build has atleast SOME SR feasibility. You could even upload only the boss shard clip and not record the whole shard to make the clip smaller and more reasonable to upload.

117

I often do that. First there chunks are lot easier than boss room, you have steeper difficulty curve and generally boss chunks are your real challenge.

Plus less size of the video and faster upload are always welcomed. And it’s better way to show build’s true potential than screenshot.

But SR tag is more or less testimony of achieved shard and if there’s no video it’s up to build poster to be honest about performance. For example Maya don’t post videos but you know that these pets builds will carry you in same way as written in guide.

But would you believe some unknown poster claiming of SR 90 solo with glassy build and no videos?

1 Like
119

Remember cancer combos that completely lock you out of the loot despite you already doing 8 shards? This is a hard no from me.

There are still combos that can wipe a fully geared team constantly.

120

Are you responding to death penalty or the nerfing of souls buff?

121

Well both really, SR is hard as it is. Not long ago you get a thread complaining about it every week.

122

The complaints seem to be exclusively
A: muh buffs arcane
B: boss chunks

Souls Buffs having zero impact on B, decreasing the steamroll effect of souls doesn’t make A significantly worse

123

This argument has been addressed. If you’re being locked out “completely” by RNG, it doesn’t matter if it’s 4 deaths that zero the timer or 6 deaths.

BTW what combos can wipe out a team at 75? If you farm loot on multiplayer, and get wiped out, then can choose to farm more efficiently (as in aggro abuse) so that you don’t have to deal with combos. If you go leroy jenkings for fun or climb SR with Death Waystones, then the whole discussion on balancing loot is irrelevant.

Most threads were about RNG inconsistency and difficulty spikes, not about SR being hard in general. Those spikes have nothing to do with this thread, and they can be minimized with the right application of aggro abuse - for those who are bothered by them - making SR more consistently easy (instead of mostly easy and sometimes extremely hard - which might make an impression that it’s actually hard).

124

It’s not that SR is hard per day but rather the hard RNG spikes in terms of boss combos, plus mutators, and visual clutter make for an experience that can wreck anything.

My most recent example. I have stopped playing this character as I died with it even if it’s SC. It’s a mule for now; no not posting the build.

SR 65 boss room
3000+ da/oa, 15k health, 121k sheet dps
46% phys res
All other res over capped by 30, 80% res to all cc minus sleep of course
10% life leech 25% dodge across the board
Ghoul, shattered realm set proc

Instagib from double Fabius + basilisk and ana
Full room rush unable to pull one at a time don’t know why they all came either.

Things that were my fault: 3 super bad mutators, extra mob crit, extra mob oa, and -da to me. No, this was not a piloting issue.

So I suppose the question is should we just leave every time something is stacked against us. Kinda not fun. I mean this was the meta in D3 for pushing ladder. Dump keys until you get a good rift. I want to move away from that. I also don’t want to use esc exit as a crutch

Wanting finish the 65-66 run I continued before leaving the character.

66-1: double unavoidable gravaspawn in a huge mess of heros and trash. So much visual clutter I could even see the dispels. I kited for 2 minutes in order to kill trash to get out of the rift and still died 3 times. This was a piloting issue of course but still just wasn’t fun. I think I had given up after that death and was pissed off so the skill set went out the window.

Was this all my fault? Sure I’ll take the blame. Took over 18 minutes to finish. Now here is the problem that I agree with in terms of the timer. I still finished on time. Now that’s wrong and when I looted everything it was very very very very unsatisfying.

It felt cheap to die that many times it felt cheap to still win.

However, the main issue here is the boss floor and the rng. Sure I get that rng is core to many people in games like this, but it really isn’t fun to have characters like that one get obliterated when you’ve done everything you can to stay alive in SR.

I do t have any solutions and my point of view is mine and I am sure others hate it but I will say the experience is wearing thin now.

125

I have a hard enough time just making it past 50 on my own. Albeit, I am a noob and not endgame savvy.