I am a recent refugee from Last Epoch, and just gearing up my first character (Primal Strike Warder) for endgame. Since Grim Dawn 2 is in the early planning stages, I wanted to leave some thoughts for the devs about what I enjoy in Grim Dawn and what I feel could be revisited.
The difficulty progression is exceptionally smooth, and this means that even minor upgrades in equipment can have a noticeable impact on game play. Really grateful for the efforts here.
There is just enough complexity in the character design that designing a build outside of the obvious ones supported by sets is challenging but achievable. Well balanced.
The emphasis on resistances feels a little oppressive. The first and most important rule for build design is always to cap your resistances because being even one percentage point below the cap is so punishing. The way this is implemented right now could be reducing build diversity.
For the same reason, sources of resistance reduction are the first concern when thinking about a build’s offense, maybe even before OA. This limits choices of classes and damage types to those that have sufficient RR support.
DOTs are confusing and mysterious. I have not really studied them yet, but that is partly because I have only a fuzzy idea of what counts as a separate source and the ways that increased duration work.
This would of course raise the power ceiling, but one of the things that I really liked about Last Epoch was the crafting system. Allowing limited item customization could allow for more creativity in build design.
Welcome to the forum
I won’t respond to points that I agree.
3- Although resistances are important, they are very easy to max overall (augments, components, gear, devotions) … wayyy easier to max than in Titan Quest (the first one)
4- Resist reduction doesn’t limit builds much, there are hundreds of builds in Grim Dawn (literally hundreds !) and more to come with the next expansion
6- I personnaly prefer finding gear into the world over having an arpg focused on crafting. Grim Dawn focuse more on MI (Monster infrequents) for exemples which enhance the world by making you go on different locations depending on the build you wanna make. Last Epoch and POE focus more on a randomized end game which goes a litle bit better for the crafting they are going for.
Is there something else that could be done over what exist in Grim Dawn for crafting ? Maybe !
One thing for sure, we will be able to reroll affixes (prefix and suffixe) and the seed quality (seed quality = how high the stats rolled) in the upcomming expansion Fangs of Asterkarn. You can read it in this misadventure.
Also on the point that Grim Dawn focus more on the world, Fang of Asterkan will make the campaing more the end game with the Ascendant Game mode, you can read more about it on the this misadvanture if you didn’t see it.
Thanks for the references to the misadventure. The proposed changes in FoA will completely satisfy my hopes for item crafting.
With regard to resistance capping and RR, my intention was to be brief for the benefit of the devs, but let me explain. What I find interesting about build crafting in LE, and now in Grim Dawn, are the ambiguous choices that need to be made. As a concrete example, should I sacrifice a devotion proc to pick up constellations with more attack speed and ADctH, or should I instead swap out gear and sacrifice percent health? When there is not a clearly correct answer, that leads to people making different choices, more build diversity, and a more engaging game.
Conversely, where there is always a single correct choice, this feels more like a tax. Resistances must be capped, end of story. Yes, there are plenty of ways to do that, but this is a tax that must be paid. When you are 10% below resistance cap in GD you take 50% more damage, whereas in LE you take 10% more damage. While this doesn’t significantly detract from my enjoyment of GD, this feels like a missed opportunity for player choice because the penalty in terms of damage taken when not sufficiently overcapping is so ridiculously high.
I want to use this opportunity and propose again that (for GD2 at least) it would be nice to have bleeding as the DoT component of piercing damage and to have DoT components for aether and chaos damage (aether/chaos decay).
In a way, this is going to happen way sooner than Grim Dawn 2!
The next expansion (release date to be announced in May) is going to introduce affix rerolls. This will allow you to craft items or take items from the wild and reroll them to perfectly suit your character.
I do not know what sort of control there will be on this crafting system but overall, Crate has been exceptionnaly good at pruning features from the game they deemed useless. For example, when I first started playing (way after release), components were looted in shards (or whatever the name was) and you had to combine shards to get better components. This was deemed unnecessary by the team (if someone has a source about this I’d love to read it) and now components are just components.
So what I mean is, if the system is cumbersome for one reason or the other, I fully expect them to make it better after and closer to a targeted crafting system.
It’s not the same as the bonkers customization levels you get in games like Mount & Blade Bannerlord or some other ARPGs, but for a more than 10-year old game on an engine twice as old it’s pretty dang great.
Right, there is a reason that I am playing GD and not something else right now. The attention and thoughtfulness that Crate pays to game systems and balance shows everywhere.
And maybe this is just personal preference, but I really am looking forward to affix rerolls as a way of introducing slightly more player agency around equipment. GD is very generous with item drops, but right now it mostly feels like a slot machine (despite things like relic crafting and transmutation).
Excessive item customization introduces a completely different set of balance problems, and I am not advocating for the kinds of things that you see happening in LE whether or not the engine would support them.
