Crucible and its wave of monsters! This challenging arena gameplay is a harsh battleground filled with waves of Grim Dawn’s deadliest fiends, not to mention hearing Lokar’s annoying voice makes it fun or boring depends if you like the dude!
Or do you find pushing your builds to face off against Cairn’s foes in ever more challenging shards of an unstable reality a much better way to waste time on?
Enjoyable could mean that you feel you are more rewarded with either loot and or testing your builds to the limit!
Since i like this dungeon crawler as a fast-paced game I really prefer rogue dungeons. I like to rush to bosses + not running from them in endless circles and call it victory after a 20 minutes run like a coward. I can do that once to a (super) boss to see if I could kill him, but I never did it twice. What’s the point running from a boss for 20 minutes or even worse being denied because the god of builds tells so and only lets a handful builds pass? I usualy just avoid these fights, but the more content arrives with the intention of hand picked builds should be able to complete, the less tasty it is to me. my trickster completed stage 43 SR after an endless run, why would I even consider to repeat it?
Campaign, I like a story and travel, not just hitting mobs over and over again in almost the same room (crucible) SR is more preferable to Crucible as it does have some different features, but Campaign is my main pleasure.
Main Campain has a set difficulty, which means once a build performs better than this set difficulties, things get less interesting.
I hate Cruci because I not only have to manage Tributes, but Benedictions also skew the performance of my build. Plus I really don’t enjoy spending 10-15 minutes in the exact same arena.
Positives of SR, for me, are :
since it scales infinitely, you can always find a spot where the content is challenging for your build, you just have to know when to stop
three trash chunks/ one boss chunk offers a good variation in term of rythm, I feel. Trash chunks are relatively easy, with the occasional Nemesis/tricky hero combination/special encounter to spice things up from time to time, and then you have the boss chunk which is the real challenge.
Crashes make shattered realm inaccessible, but from what I’ve seen it looks like there is something wrong with it, just like with crucible. Its a challenge to overcome with reward in the end. Not a steady loot hunt when drop can come from anywhere. Such challenges make me exhausted in short time. I’m afraid it might not last.
Challenge dungeons are sort of loot hunts like what I like, too bad they are easy and cannot compare with guaranteed rewards with GD overbloated gear tables.
Had hoped for more from SR. I know people around here don’t care for the comparison, but if there’s one thing I loved about D3 it was the rifts. Greater rifts were fun too, but the regular rifts were the perfect build-testing, gear-farming content for me, that lasted for either a short spurt or a marathon session. The droprates were a little too high admittedly, but everything else was right up my alley.
My biggest gripes with SR are how much of a time investment it is to feel like I’ve accomplished anything. Don’t like the chunks at all. Personally, I like an above-average difficulty that I can farm and tinker on without traipsing all over the same world map constantly, even better if it’s semi-random layouts. In my mind, that’s all GD was missing so I was ecstatic about SR. Rifts in GD? Fuck yeah. The reality disappoints me, which is just a retread of how I felt about Crucible: almost, but not quite.
Initially was enjoying SR, however even after last patch most of my game experience in there (more often than not) is pure frustration and rage building - which is what i play the game to escape from.
The RNG is honestly way too much, you can get your entire run worth zero if you get swarmed by more than 1-2 bosses or get some of the insane boss combos possible + mutators which remove huge core elements of your build (like -30% crit…).
The only good boss arena is the Lava one - provides opportunities to play with the terrain, kite etc. Completely opposite of the statue arena - where quite often you have to restart the game as once insta gibed bosses down go to starting points and their gazillion summons and shit dont go away.
Also pure tests have proven me that running 75-76 as fast as possible (lets say <15min which is exclussive to only a handful of builds with BiS stuff) yields quite less Greens & Iron vs doing triple runs in Crucible:
Crucible 3 runs - 23-24 mins total ~400k+ Iron + inventory and a half full of greens
SR 75-76 1 run - 15min with high chance of zero yield due to above reasons which results with loss of 100k iron and mats for the waystone: 250k iron + 3/4 Inventory of greens.
Might be increase substantially higher shards double rare green spawn chances?
Legendaries yield is OK for both Cruci and SR - no need to change that.
Overall i have moved back to Cruci - its more fast, more rewarding, much less stressful, i can enjoy many more builds which get squashed in an instant in SR or are so frustrating to play that it defeats the point.
Have never liked Crucible except to get the early extra devotion points. To me it’s just a stress-fest with no story or flesh to it at all. Shattered Realms is marginally better, but the rewards are not nearly enough at lower levels to keep me wanting to play endlessly in pursuit of loot the RNG will most likely not give me. I prefer the roguelikes, or campaign farming, where a self-found character is not disadvantaged compared to those created with a mod to have BIS or MI godly gear.
Shattered Realm in singleplayer is an absolutely slog. Hate every second of it. Playing with my friend when we can clear faster and take turns taking aggro during boss runs makes it more bearable. Crucible is also pretty boring but I’d say it’s better singleplayer than SR simply because 150-170 comes and goes a lot faster in my head, enemies die faster in it so it’s more fun to watch them melt.
Crucible for sure. I haven’t played a lot of grim dawn. I mean ok, I had like four characters, but two out of them made it to elite.
The thing about shattered realm is the you-neva-gonna-kno-where-the-portal-is scenario. And that you have to walk around quite a lot. You never run out of time, at least it hasn’t happened to me, but damn it feels fustrating knowing that a timer runs down while you walk endlessly from portal to the next.
But I do have to admit that the fake treasure chamber was a pleasant surprise. Though I had a heart attack when I first saw it after I went through many shards in one go.
