First of all I’d like to express my gratitude for this fantastic ARPG; one of the best ever made in many areas. I feel good about the 600+ hours I’ve put into playing Grim Dawn over the years!
Let’s get to the point of my Thread, progression, and how I feel about it currently and my concerns for the upcoming expansion Forgotten Gods.
Level scaling is the main culprit for my concerns. Up until level 50 all is great, my character grows in power thanks to numerous skill and devotion points. The build and abilities become stronger and feel better with each passing level.
Most characters I’ve leveled felt “finished” between level 70 - 85 and each level after that felt like the character was actually losing strength compared to the monsters in the world. This effect feels even worse in Crucible mode. With the right gear upgrades this might be offset, but it feels as if monsters scale stronger in power than player characters after a certain point (in the same area, until the level scaling cap is reached). It feels bad enough that even getting Legendary upgrades at high levels (84) don’t feel like upgrades at all, but just enough to stay on par with the ever growing monsters…
Right now, the only way to combat this, is staying in an area that doesn’t scale beyond your character level. However, in the upcoming expansion, monsters will scale up to level 100 everywhere (at least in Ultimate Difficulty). This will feel as if your character is constantly losing power. Especially after reaching the maximum Item Level Cap (94 now I believe?)
I’ve never felt this negative power creep in any other Action RPG. Unless you actively pursue more difficult content; your character will stay the same in for example Path of Exile or Diablo 2. In these game getting to the level cap is almost impossible and a character is usually finished around level 85. High tier content should, ofcourse, always be challenging for most builds, difficulty itself is not the problem here.
Am I the only one who feels this way about leveling in Grim Dawn?
Well you simply can´t expect to waltz through ultimate and just destroy everything like you probably can at the end of normal/veteran.
If you venture into elite and ultimate, you will always have to keep up with the
monsters, get better gear, optimize your build and so on. That´s simply the nature of the game.
I don´t feel like the scaling is off, it´s just hard to keep up sometimes (which is a good thing imo), and some builds frankly don´t work that well in ultimate.
So if you feel like your going backwards, it might just be you.
Maybe post your build(s) that have troubles and ask the other guys here for their opinion. That´s almost never a bad idea.
I am not having trouble with my characters. My two handed vitality based ritualist feels great and still has loads of room for upgrades.
(Can’t post links yet sadly)
The only thing that bothers me, if doing the exact same content at different levels, with the same gear, the higher level character will always feel weaker. At lower levels one will still gain big upgrades from increasing important skills. At higher levels the skill points feel insignificant, but monsters get stronger every level.
progression past 50 is farming/rep-ing for gear to keep up with the scaling. This is a bit like oblivion in this respect
The rewards for increasing in level is the droprates for good stuff (in crucible, campaign is loot-poor) and with the faction guaranteed stuff you have at least a few endgame options unlocked for you at the start of your career. Also droprate is generous compared to some more mainstream ARPGs. (although Torchlight 2 is more generous and handles MI uniques a little better I think).
I think a lot of it is the -50 to resists at ultimate levels. That does require a bit of juggling.
Funny story: My first run through, I stupidly thought components and augments were exclusive (I don’t remember why). So I was juggling pretty extensively through each of the areas on ultimate for quite a while. But soon as I lost my stupid, things got drastically easier.
So my point is that resists have a huge impact in ultimate. The only one that should be tricky is physical, as it is hard to get that resist in large amounts - although armor has a big impact on non-dot physical. The mobs also do more damage and often scale with your level = bigger damage x less resists = not a linear difficulty increase if resists are not maintained at max.
In my experience, the hardest part during leveling is often between level 50 and 70 on elite (depends on build and available gear ofc). Like OP said it sometimes feels like level-ups make you weaker.
But once I can fix my resistances with augments, progress gets a lot easier, and even easier on 75 when seals and plating components become available.
Might be a good idea to enable armor augments at level 60 instead of 70.
try borderlands 2 ultimate vault hunter mode (uvhm) enemy level scaling… gd is more generous compared to borderlands 2.
in uvhm, all enemies REGENERATE. and their hp & damage are so HIGH that you need slag as a crutch to amplify your damage. the leveling are also becoming slower, the +health you got in new+50 levels are so negligible compared to what your enemies got with extra levels.
worst of all, unlike gd’s ultimate levels, the drop rates aren’t improved in uvhm afaik.
and your characters can drop from few hits if your build aren’t focused on defense and health recovery.
trust me, gd’s ultimate levels is quite generous. and many gd items have so much variety of +% resistances here and there. its quite easy to become tanky in gd ultimate.
It’s just the game design. Firstly shield block and armor scaling can reach absurd heights in this game at later levels, this is a reason for monster scaling to continue at a high rate (otherwise tanks take 0 physical damage from too many monsters).
Additionally the Level when legendary and epic sets become abundant cause player damage and defences to rise a lot because the gear/sets grant huge stats. So to compensate monster damage must continue scaling significantly to counter it somewhat and maintain difficulty.
I love GD but I really don’t like the mechanics of armor and shield block and the consequences they impose on game balance (or any skills with flat damage absorb like inquisitor seal for that matter).
