Hello everyone. Having played Grim Dawn for 3600+ hours (I’ve been playing since Early Access days, back when level cap was around 30), I thought I wanted to give an idea to Crate.
This is the first time I’ve done something like this, but I figured it would fit with the game quite well (at least in my opinion).
The idea is simple and it builds on already existing mechanics in the game so it wouldn’t feel out of place.
Over the years, Grim Dawn has gotten many ways of leveling your characters up faster - the increased reputation gain from mandates, experience potions, even item sets like Lokarr’s - all designed to escalate your next journey and not make you spend too much time on leveling your next character up.
And that’s all great, but it still makes you go through the game 3 times, pretty much. Or at least 2 and a half, in my experience.
Usually what you end up doing is buying a Merit, buying some iron bars so you could transfer them to your new character, then buying all the mandates and pretty much preparing your character to a nice road to level 94 when you have all of the legendary items and whatnot ready for the build.
What I propose is simple and it can come in different versions with mechanics that already exist in the game:
Option 1: Let players buy experience Merits to gain a certain amount of levels for a character. As simple as that, once you reach level 100 on one character, you will be able to buy a merit that levels another character to, lets say, level 94 (Because that’s the lowest level number to be able to use all the gear in the game). Before you reach 100, certain “Checkpoints” could be made. Like level 50 or level 84. This already builds on an idea of unlocking difficulties by buying Merits.
How is it balanced: You already unlock a difficulty with a Merit, so why not gain your character a higher level to boot? All the devotion shrines are not unlocked either: you will have to make a good use of a change Crate introduced some time ago: if you play on Ultimate all of the devotion shrines are in the world - including the extra ones. You rarely get to actually unlock points from them by the time you get to Ultimate - but now they will actually be useful. What this solves is the necessity for completing the game multiple times for people who just want a ready-to-go build they planned. And what’s great about it is that it’s just optional. You could still level the way you want, but by buying an Experience Merit, you could skip the lower portion of leveling (if you know what you’re doing), and get to the meaty build part.
Option 2: The same idea, but this time using an iron bars mechanic instead of merits. Just let us throw money to buy experience converted to some sort of useable item that is also transferrable through stash. Simple as that. Have millions of iron just piling up? A perfect use for it. Same rules would apply and this seems already balanced as it is: you can get a high level character, but you don’t have any devotion shrines. You don’t have any devotions skills leveled as it is, which is an extra challenge and a tradeoff for being able to use such a mechanic.
This seemed like a great idea in my head and it would fit the game as-is, without being too complex to design (at least from what I think, I am not a game developer). I love this game, and there’s so much to do in it, but it takes time to level a build. Maybe this mechanic could finally make me get all of my stashed legendary sets and make a character for each!
Thoughts on this?