[Suggestion] Adding permanent Aura Transmuters to temporary Buffs/Heals (BoD, PB, WoR)

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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Hi! After almost 2.500 hours of playtime I finally decided to join the forums because there is something that is really bugging me since I started playing Grim Dawn back in 2015.

For the most part I enjoy rather lazy playstyles that often only contain one or two active abilities. And for that reason I often avoid classes like Occultist, Nightblade and Inquisitor, even if I love their overall themes and skills. I’m talking about skills like Blood of Dreeg, Pneumatic Burst and Word of Renewal.

To me their current mechanics appear to be leftovers from the past. Whenever I went into the endgame, all of my characters either had enough AdctH/life steal or passive health regen to sustain incoming damage (Summoners were the exception ofc). After all these years I still find it rather annoying that you actively have to monitor the duration of these buffs so you for example don’t die to some nasty damage spike because your buff ran out because you were busy with all the chaos that is going on around you.

Those skills remind me a lot of the forced gameplay Blizzard did with Diablo 3 (e.g. Focus & Restraint rings) without beeing engaging or adding anything of value to my overall gaming experience besides the nerve-wracking and distracting button-press every 20-30 seconds. At the same time those skills are just so essential for a lot of class combos that you simply can’t/shouldn’t pass on them.

Yeah, we have a some items that increase the duration of these buffs but it just makes them a bit less tedious without solving the underlying issue. We even have tqFan’s GDAutocaster Tool but I would love to have this in some kind of way added to the base game without having to deal with scripts or expired mod versions (Grim Internals).

My suggestion would be to add skill transmuters in form of permanent auras to these skills. So you could still use them actively if you choose to do so but you would no longer be forced to keep track of them. Maybe remove the heal on them or simply weaken their granted effects if transmuted. If it’s too much work I would even be fine with infinite duration on items like Basilisk Mark, Basilisk Crest or Mythical Dawnshard Grip.

This is one of the only (very few) gripes I have with Grim Dawn and I can’t be the only one who is annoyed by this. So, please make it happen in some form or another. You even overcame your reluctance regarding loot filters! Or is it just another device in @Zantai’s arsenal to torture the lazy players?

(I bought all Loyalist Packs and will continue to do so if this helps your decision making process :scorv::scorv::scorv:)

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You want to turn an active skill into a togglable aura. I don’t think that a transmuter or skill modifier can alter skills in such fundamental ways because of the limitations of the engine.

Beside that, I’m indifferent to this suggestion. It never bothered me having to constantly cast those skills. I’ve even developed a muscle memory for them and I find the sound they do along my health rising very satisfying.

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Would be nice to add for people with chronic laziness, I suppose if changing the skill entirely to a passive aura was a technical problem just adding a much longer duration and no burst heal could be a good counter-balance.

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This is a debate that has happened countless times over the years. There are people on one side who want the skills you mentioned to be passive toggles and people on the other that don’t want to see the chunk heal aspect of the skills go.

The bottom line is that there is no easy way to please everyone and while jamming transmuters everywhere would in theory do so, it also bloats up the mastery screen more and more - not an ideal solution either. Like toapeiron mentioned as well, I’d have to assume new tech/modifications to the engine are required to convert an active skill into a toggle skill as there is no other instance of this in-game right now.

My gut feeling is the existence of skill modifiers like these is Crate’s answer to the people on your side without upsetting people on the other side as well. There is also modding the game to increase the duration on these further if you so wish.

While I have no evidence to say so either, I do feel like Crate leans towards keeping player involvement and action in characters as well as opposed to promoting lazy/unresponsive play, this was a large reason in why Retaliation builds got Retaliation added to Attack in Forgotten Gods for instance. The above skill modifiers still require you to manage those timed buffs but less often as opposed to making the duration infinite/ridiculously large.

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That’s the main reason why several items lost their procs in the mythical version, to make the gameplay less “playing itself”. Sure, they did add back a few like Aethereach, but a lot of them still don’t have the procs from the previous versions.

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