I may have to give poe a fair chance just because of the no sets idea. I’m just not fond of sets. Kills that feeling of playing self found.
I thibk most GD sets are in a pretty good place… as long as players can acheive much of the power of the set without actually having it - say 80% - it can give something to work towards without being mandatory like the D3 sets are. You can clear all the game w/o the set even using a set supported build.
And sense we have sets the kinda ‘need’ to be powerful in their niche otherwise what is the point?
That’s true – if we’re talking about Grim Dawn specifically then we’re talking about a game which already has some of the most uber-powerful legendary sets that many have spent meticulous time collecting and completing.
I’m not sure what to suggest there – I would have preferred the opposite that sets are an easy way to get powerful (say 90%), but not the most powerful way. The most powerful ways are undiscovered and would often require mixing and matching gear in very unique and creative ways the developers didn’t think about – that’s what I like when players are exploring ideas not thought about before by the designers to find the most optimal builds possible. I love procs because they feel kind of that way with the level of possibilities. You know when you’re wearing a set that you’re just wearing a precise combination of gear the developers thought about in advance – a “preset outfit” they made specifically.
The downside for me with sets is just that they are an outfit handed to you already, carefully mixed and matched by the developers themselves to provide synergies. When the set bonuses are so powerful, then there is little incentive to abandon a large portion of the set in favor of seeking your own imaginative ways to create a very effective gear setup among your collection. Some of the sets are so powerful that they make it virtually impossible to compete for a lot of builds by wearing a totally eclectic collection of gear you carefully chose yourself. I already know when I collect one piece of a legendary set that, if I collect the rest, it’s very, very likely to be more powerful than any outfit I coordinate myself even though I have a fairly large collection of legendary equipment (but not legendary sets).
For me it comes from that yearning to try to find ways on my own to design the most efficient gear setup from the gear I’ve found, and for endgame, from all the gear available in the game. With sets it’s just like wear the exact outfit the developers handed for me in combination.
It’s hard in the pursuit of an effective build to be quite as creative when whole set outfits dominate a lot of the most powerful gear combinations towards the end game. And once you’re wearing a set, it often discourages trying a new piece of equipment you found in one of the many slots the equipment is occupying, unless the very final set completion bonus is just “meh”, in which case we still want to wear all but one piece of the set.
Since nerfing was mentioned, one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of nerfing post official release and prefer to play games mostly after nerfing has ended (years after or however long it takes) is that at that point, you know if you discover a very, very effective combination of ideas (gear, procs, whatever) to dominate the game in ways the developers never expected (like creating a character build of a kind no one expected to beat 150 waves in solo gladiator mode), you know it’s not going to be nerfed away. Sets powerful enough for endgame make the game easier to balance and keep under control since the developers can know the most powerful outfit combinations will be worn repeatedly by a lot of the most powerful players. But I’ve always liked a bit of chaos in games that provide so many unexplored possibilities that they seem impossible to balance.
With regards to the OP, regardless of the APRG, people will have the tendency of following a certain “meta” especially when the “BiS” items are defined for a certain build, and this is not limited to just set items in general. Once a BiS for a very popular build is defined (say after a recent patch), sooner or later you’ll see more people of that build running around with that geared on.
“Bandwagon”-ing isn’t all that surprising. We’ve seen it as early as the D2 ladders, D3. Heck I see it in P2Win MMOs and RPGs as well.
With Regards to the actual sets themselves and their “power” it seems to me that in comparison to TQ this game has limited +skills to prof, and no +skills to all sources. From what I’ve been seeing in my end game research, it’s that the Sets offer fairly balanced and integral attributes for certain build paths; which make it attractive to go 4/5 or 5/5 since the +2 skills to prof is a guaranteed. If you’re a 2 hander/1h+shield you just need 2 copies of a +1 and you get +4skills to prof; and by TQ/GD game mechanics +skills enable you to be more flexible with your limited number of skill points, especially when you don’t intend to max+10 a certain skill
Absolutely, especially if the build is shared and published. I’m not thinking in terms of extremities or even utopian game paradise where no one wears the exact same outfit – merely that, say, Diablo 2 pre-expansion (predating sets) seemed to encourage more variety in player gear choices.
It always felt like you had a bit more maneuvering room to combine gear your own way and find a new way to conquer the end game if the game doesn’t start handing you pieces of the most powerful legendary sets. Actually Diablo 2 expansion still felt like that to some extent since sets weren’t that powerful there – they were decent for intermediate players but some of the most advanced gear setups didn’t necessarily involve any set pieces.
Where Diablo 2 to me was kind of weak and had rapid convergence was that they often had single items dominating the endgame with no suitable alternatives. For example, javazon with Titan’s Revenge – there’s no freaking alternative. Any other choice of javelin was absolutely inferior – not arguably inferior, obviously inferior. But at least that was just convergence of the player base towards one gear slot – not multiple slots being identical all over the place as you quickly get with legendary sets. Not every high-level javazon used the exact same armor pieces with Titan’s Revenge as would rapidly be the case if it was a set.
Imagine if Titan’s Revenge was part of a set and the benefits of Titan’s like being auto-replenishing, +2 to amazon skills, and life steal were no longer properties of the javelin but set bonuses for completing a 4-piece set. With that we would have had javazons in Diablo 2 that were not just using Titan’s Revenge all over the place, but wearing the whole set. Their entire costume would be largely identical and very quickly – not years after the game was published, but perhaps even by the time of release. The discovery of the ideal Javazon gear/build would have been drastically simplified if Titan’s was a set. Of course earlier players would still have to spend the time to collect all pieces of that set, but it would have been very, very quickly known in the community what the optimal gear combination, hands down, would have been for a Javazon.
To me convergence is inevitable. Players will converge, copy ideas, builds, outfits, but to me the game feels fairly fresh still if it still feels like you can mix and match your own combination of things in ways that might be as effective or more than what everyone has previously thought about. It also feels fresh if you can take someone else’s idea and tweak it (ex: changing the gear setup slightly in ways that might be more optimal). Sets are like a coordinated costume combination already handed to you – they accelerate that whole process of everyone wearing the same combination of things.
All games will lose their freshness at some point provided they stop being updated and stop being expanded. People will exhaust every last corner of what seems like an optimal idea within the game rules at some point. I think GD still has a fantastic ability to stay quite fresh because of dual masteries and such a complex nodal devotion system to explore, as well as new legendary sets being introduced. And procs – geez, I love procs. They allow so many possible combinations to explore. But to me having the most powerful legendary sets kind of dominates endgame gear choices in ways that accelerate that process.
You can’t tweak a set-oriented build so much where the power of the build comes primarily from the set. To replace just one or two slots occupied by the set will often destroy the build in ways where you are often stuck with no room to do anything but have a less powerful build.
They speed up the process of cookie cutters arising because sets are already cookie cutter combinations handed to you. When they’re so powerful it’s hard to compete without wearing at least a good portion of a legendary set, then the game officially encourages cookie cutter outfits – to not only copy the exact combination of gear pieces that another player thought up and discovered to be effective, but an exact combination of gear pieces the developers officially designed and handed for the player to wear.
If you like playing self-found, PoE is not going to be your game. Their item economy is built around an assumption of active inter-player trading; it’s a lot less generous than GD’s.
One thing I was thinking was that I don’t want to throw out very intrusive ideas to Grim Dawn that would disrupt its entire system – to do so would be intruding on one of my favorite games in years. It is just something to accept that legendary sets as whole indivisible gear combos do dominate the endgame and will promote a lot of cookie cutter gear choices all over the place among the seasoned players.
What I’m thinking to subtly mitigate that is just perhaps some legendaries here and there to compete for optimal play – more of those set-breakers that are tempting enough to use to break not just the full set completion bonus, but possibly more than one slot – or maybe making the entire set fall apart.
Also just given sets and taking them as a fact of Grim Dawn that they will largely monopolize optimal builds and endgame play, I’d like to see more sets that are useful to more builds. When you complete a set which is so obviously geared towards an Aether-oriented arcanist mastery, or another which is so obviously geared for a dual-wielding nightblade, that has such limited utility for something which was so difficult to collect and organize in our stash. A lot of the sets I’ve completed after the tedious process of collecting duplicates all over the place across multiple characters but not the piece I needed are just hoarded in my stash and mules as something I might try in the future if I had a character for which they are actually useful. Even the sets themselves are not suitable for a wide range of utility for a wide range of builds – which again kind of discourages creativity and variations. It would be so much more interesting if a particular set might be worn by a wide range of characters – or not, instead of an entire combo of gear screaming, “This set is obviously the cookie cutter for AAR sorceress!”
As a simple example, +2 to devastation is obviously making the set tailored towards an arcanist mastery with aether. +2 to arcanist is at least a bit more generalized. +2 to all skills is really general – suddenly more builds might use the set in creative ways. Expanding the utility of sets might make people utilize even the sets themselves for builds that people didn’t think would go together with that set. That doesn’t work so well if we have sets so blatantly screaming that it’s not only for a particular mastery but for a specific set of skills within that mastery and even leaning towards certain devotion choices. Tailoring sets towards specific builds and reducing their applicability to lots of builds discourages creativity even within a game that is dominated by sets. It makes sets too obviously go with particular builds, making it too easy for people to discover what the cookie cutter optimal gears are given a particular build.
I like sets, but I do not want any set to be the clear choice for a build. Individual items should be good competition for the slots and a build mixing and matching pieces from two sets and some non-set items for optimum performance encouraged.
Sets should be more the no-brainer solution in the sense that deciding on one and sticking to it should be simple and give a good boost, just not the optimal one you can arrive at by giving it some / a lot of thought
I’m precisely thinking the same way. I like sets well enough when they are the “no-brainer” solution to be powerful (but not necessarily the most powerful) – not so much when they feel like they monopolize multiple gear slots for many builds as the way to be powerful. To me optimal gear choices should require careful thinking and creativity on a slot-by-slot basis – not just wearing an officially-approved gear combination already designed perfectly for you which fills up multiple slots.
Naturally I like smaller sets better than bigger ones as well – since they free up more slots to encourage creativity. Something like a 5-piece set where the set completion bonus is irresistible isn’t exactly the type of thing that encourages mixing and matching and trying new things to tweak and seek something more optimal.
I’d be a pretty happy camper, for example, if I saw more people posting builds conquering 150 waves of gladiator in Crucible wearing not even two pieces of any given set – every single gear slot was individually chosen and not already pre-coordinated by the developers with set bonuses. That, to me, would highlight that extremely creative gear choices can compete with sets.
to me you got the order reversed, I come up with a build and then I equip the items that best fit it, I do not look at the items / a set and then wonder what skills would work best with it.
I grant you that the end result is probably similar, but not because a set shoehorned me into a build but because the skill synergies did and the gear boosted the already established build
But I guess I just never understood the rationale for sets from a game designer’s standpoint all the way back from Diablo 2 expansion that introduced them. I never understood the end goal.
for that matter, why are there uniques at all and not just random items ? The rationale is the same, to get rewarded with an easily recognizable good drop and get closer to completing a collection (ie a finite number of specific items rather than infinite randomness which does not really allow you to work towards a specific goal).
I do the same which is why the vast majority of my completed sets (mostly just mediocre, only two legendaries) are just hoarded in my stash and mules.
My characters have no use for them, they just hog up space until I decide to build a character around them one day.
Set collection often leads to lots of duplicates – inevitably by probability, so I actually have 3 dawnbreaker helmets but only one of the chest piece. I always have to weed through them at some point and make more space by carefully examining which one has the best rolls. Everyone trying to complete big sets is bound to collect just duplicate after duplicate of pieces they already own before collecting the last one they need. They are not exactly the type of thing we tend to collect at the time we need them on first playthroughs of a build that could most use the set.
The thing is that when I’m playing any shaman-based melee build (warder, conjurer, etc) and I find a piece of the Ultos set, it starts quickly becoming obvious that it’s BiS or close. If I completed the set a large portion of it would dominate my entire outfit unless I find something way better, which is only likely to be an even better set which again dominates my whole outfit. Individual pieces rarely ever compete for the slots the set is occupying, unless the set bonuses are mediocre (which is usually not the case).
Set collection is kind of a totally different issue from the one I was bringing up but the inevitable issue with collecting duplicates of pieces you already own time and time again before completing the set is quite annoying, especially with such an absurdly limited stash. If I kept all duplicates I could probably fill up my stash with just duplicated set pieces. I think that could be mitigated if set items (any level) only dropped as blueprints and that the game ensured that duplicate blueprints were never dropped. Even if it doesn’t do the last part, since blueprints understanding is shared for all characters, we can quickly see that it’s already learned and not end up hoarding duplicates all over the place without knowing it.
this implies that finding the mix-and-match items is easier, which in reality it is not
Yes, to me aside from finding them, to compete with the power of a legendary set without wearing even two pieces of it should require not only discovering some very good and rare items that coordinate well together but also an incredible amount of thought required on the player and understanding of the mechanics to coordinate an outfit even more effective than what the developers came up with (the set).
It should require both an incredible amount of creativity but also a lot of experience and deep understanding of the game mechanics. The latter to me is essential, not everyone thinking up funny combos should be rewarded with a very optimal build that can, say, solo gladiator better than those wearing legendary sets – only those who really explore the boundaries of a build and really come up with effective ideas. Sets could be a way for all but the most advanced players to be powerful without an outfit already coordinated for them by the developers.
Basically I think it’s the type of thing only experts like Nine or some of the people publishing some of the most effective builds on here can do: to come up with an outfit that is more effective (maybe slightly but enough) than any legendary set combination without using two or more of any set pieces.
I just feel at the moment that this is not even possible for the most part – that sets dominate most of the endgame slots for very optimal builds. I see people mentioning exceptions where someone might break one slot in a set for a double-rare green (which to me with desirable affixes is like winning the lottery) and some legendaries, but they’re such exceptions to the rule, and most will still be wearing a large portion of a popular set because sets, coordinated already by developers, really do seem to monopolize optimal play for the most part.
my experience is the opposite - my rifle commando doesn’t use ulzuin set as i think they are bested by other individual pieces (i use hellborne, shadowflame mantle, clairvoyant’s hat, divinesteel hauberk and peerless eye of beronath in place of the ulzuin pieces). what’s funny now is that i find this setup to be inadequate for fighting the iron maiden (perhaps because i can’t tank enough the burn this setup does because of the reflect) so i switch to an EPIC set (keeper of the flame) and bam i have no problems killing her. i used ulzuin set on a sorc and it was underwhelming there as well. but my non-set setup gives me better balanced resists, more HP, better stat boost distribution due to +skills.
even for my valdun set commando i find that using empowered eye instead of valdun rifle (therefore not completing the set and missing out on the granted skill) is quite competitive. i haven’t really decided on which to use because both have their pro’s and con’s.
i haven’t tried ultos or deathmarked set though (those are BiS for lots of shaman/nightblade builds), and i am aware ulzuin set is pretty underwhelming.
That’s awesome! It’s exactly what I’d like to see more of where truly optimal endgame gear squeezing the smallest of edges requires abandoning sets. I just wanna see more of this and less sets involved in the top-tier builds.
Ultos and Deathmarked are among those uber-popular sets I’d like to see people being able to compete against with eclectic gear of the type you mentioned where you carefully chose something unique for every slot to really balance out your build and make it more effective than what any set can provide you.
I love it when a really good player can come up with something that beats Ultos or Deathmarked due to sheer skill that doesn’t just involve swapping it for another set.
balancing is pretty difficult because of the sheer number of items and stats you have to consider. it’s what i find fascinating to do though. also sometimes it’s hard to just look at the numbers and you really have to test it yourself to have a feel for clear speed and survivability 
in my case clairvoyant’s hat might seem not the best helm to me (i actually used mask of infernal truth before, granting more damage, armor and HP) but the +skills, energy regen and aether resist just cover much of my weaknesses.
now i wish work was over so i could go home and playtest more on 1.0.0.6. 
For sure. I’m wearing eclectic gear at the moment that I’ve tried to balance out as best I can for my cadence witchblade, but I still feel like optimal is thoroughly dominated by Markovian fortress (which I don’t have a single piece of – on my dream list). Getting a CD reduction on overguard to have it up most of the time is about the closest thing I can get to god mode that I can imagine, and I cannot imagine any substitute – double green rares, or any of the top legendaries, being able to compete with that (though I would be ecstatic if some expert found a way).
I wish Belgothian’s Carnage wasn’t tailored just to dual wielders. That would compete with the whole Markovian set if it did with a single relic slot, letting people really get creative with all those extra slots when Markovian is kicked out, and would yield whole new build ideas outside of nightblade line. That would be an example of a single legendary item that could allow people to abandon a legendary set – if Carnage worked for every build – though it should definitely not work in combo with Markovian or else it would really lead to god mode. It’s probably bound to be OP in some cases, but that’s the thing to me with a game that provides a lot of maneuverability for players to discover effective build combinations the developers didn’t anticipate – they’re always at risk of being OP in some cases (but I prefer that to one where we just play the game the way everyone else does). A game that truly seems to provide infinite possibilities without being too quickly constrained to fewer and fewer possibilities as we figure out what is effective is one that can never be balanced too well, and I’d take that over the most perfectly balanced game.
To me a single item yielding whole new build ideas tends to be a lot more interesting than a whole set yielding build ideas. In the latter case the build ideas are usually too obvious and occupy too many slots to leave room for extra ideas. Sets to me kill some of the joy of thinking up a build – too obvious. Markovian Fortress – like already implying shield-based tank. It doesn’t take long to see how it synergizes with skills like overguard, probably the developers already intended it for that purpose. With all due respect to jajaja who discovered that combo for witchblade AFAIK, I don’t think he truly came up with the idea to have overguard refreshed by Markovian. I think the developers did and left a toy for him designed for that purpose – sets tailored too specifically this way tend to do that. We’re just playing the game the way someone else already designed it exactly to be played – we’re not being as creative as we think. Sets and items too specifically tailored to a particular purpose stifle creativity to me.
A world without sets to me is like lego world. Everyone can be creative and use individual lego pieces to make their own lego building or sculpture or whatever. They might combine the pieces in such a creative and effective and beautiful way that impresses everyone that even the Lego Group never anticipated. Of course some people will copy that, but it took someone outside of the Lego Group to come up with that lego sculpture. A world dominated by sets is like one where everyone is just buying an already-built car, already-built skyscraper, helicopter, etc – some of which are too professionally built and welded perfectly for anyone at home to craft something better with their own lego blocks. It’s why I don’t like sets very much.
Nerfing kind of ties into those ideas. I’m not a big fan of it when it doesn’t seem to be used in an absolute minimal fashion post official release. It’s because nerfing can imply that some player got really creative, thought outside the box, and discovered a build that the developers didn’t think at all about. He should get a medal. Instead his build gets destroyed by the nerf. I don’t like seeing people running around invincible in the game since it would skew the mechanics, but at the same time a lot of nerfing and balancing implies to me that the developers don’t like it when skilled players get too creative with their ideas and discover a combination better than anything they ever anticipated. “A lot” doesn’t tie to the quantity of nerfs but nerfs applied late to things which don’t even make players invincible or close.
Have you done any definitive testing yourself to see if you could create a build that would succeed without the use of set bonuses? Not to be rude, but it seems as if your argument stands on the notion that legendary sets are the only optimal way to play, rather than speaking from any sort of first-hand experience.
I haven’t read through all of this thread or all of your responses, so please forgive me if I’m speaking out of ignorance. It just appears that you are making bold claims about legendary sets without being truly cognizant of what it means to use (or not use) one.
For me uniques (single-piece epics/legendaries) are wonderful if there is a wide enough diversity of them. If I tie it to the lego block idea, it’s like rewarding the player with a very unique lego block that he might be able to combine with his existing pieces to create his own unique lego sculpture. Sets to me are like rewarding the player with a lego helicopter that only flies if you don’t disassemble it.
For maximum build creativity of the kind I’m suggesting, a game would seek as many equipment slots as possible. On the extreme end, you might even be able to wear 10 different rings, get tattoos which gives bonuses/skills, have multiple layers of armor on every part of your body (wearing light armor undearneath heavy armor). Of course that’s the extreme case – too much of anything good is bad, and the more freedom and creativity is given to players, the more difficult the game becomes to balance to even sane levels.
I actually feel like GD strikes a perfect balance of equipment slots to give lots of room for creativity (with components and augments on top!) but not too much that it becomes unwieldy and impossible to even remotely balance. The problem is that those slots quickly get filled up when sets get involved, undoing that room for creativity.
Sets are the creativity killer to me since they immediately start filling up multiple slots leaving the player no other effective choice for those slots unless he’s willing to abandon more and more set bonuses. They are creativity stiflers. Single-piece epics and legendaries aren’t so much to me since they only occupy one slot and leave it up to the player to come up with effective combinations.
I’m not the most seasoned veteran for sure. A lot of my thoughts are built around what predecessors before me have explored and tried in seeking optimal builds and following in their footsteps.
I understand enough about the mechanics of the game, for example, to realize that no double-green affix item let alone any legendary would be worth abandoning the CD reduction on Markovian for a cadence board-tank witchblade for the overguard refresh.
I am pretty certain even if any pro found an Incorruptible Fleshwarped Cuirass of Readiness or any other affix combo they desire that they would not abandon Markovian Platemail and the set bonuses on a solder-line board tank, let alone any legendary one-piece armor. I would love to be proven wrong though because that would highlight some extreme creativity from a master being able to top the best of the best without using a gear combination preset handed to him by the developers. I might even pose this as a challenge for players better than me – the ones that have been following since beta. Try to come up with as many builds that destroy the most popular set-dependent ones without using any set pieces. Beat 150 waves of gladiator solo without depending on any set with as many builds as you can.
I am not talking about all legendary sets as being BiS, let alone for any build. Just within some of the most popular builds among the elite endgame players and within the constraints of particular builds, I would claim, there’s no feasible alternative that can warrant abandoning all or most of the set. In particular cases the sets absolutely dominate and monopolize the endgame gear builds, and the problem to me with that versus one great legendary item everyone wants is that it fills up too many slots to leave a lot of room for variations.
As far as I’m concerned the absolutely optimal gear for a cadence-based board witchblade is largely solved. Markovian fortress – done. There’s room for variation outside of its slots, not so much within. And again I’d so love to be proven wrong! We could go into other sets as well but that’s my top dream set on my personal list, and it bothers me that I don’t feel like I have room to deviate even subtly for many slots without doing anything more than significantly ruining the effectiveness of a bulwark/overguard build.