The one thing I really like about Grim Dawn that no other ARPG does

Grim Dawn General Discussion
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So, this topic is related to Masteries and skills in general, but I’m leaving it in the General area since it’s about the immersion of them and their place in the setting rather than the mechanical aspects of how they work in gameplay.

But, yeah. This is something I’ve wanted to discuss/say for a while now, but I really appreciate how every Mastery and skill/ability/spell feels like it has a place in Cairn. Maybe it sounds silly to say on the surface, but I like it. It adds a sense of place for the characters you play as and adds to the immersion. When you run around the world fighting enemies and look at the locales you can see where the abilities that you learn have come from. Quick example of this being Ugdenbog and the Shaman bleed / vitality leech abilities. You can see that everything you use belongs to the world; comes from the world(s). I’ve been playing ARPGs since D1 first came out and I don’t think a single ARPG that I’ve played does what GD does in this regard. The characters you play as tend to feel “independent” of the setting, if that makes sense. Which is fine, but as a person who values immersion and a strong setting with nice world building I think this really nails it.

I’m not sure what discussion there can around this topic, but I did want the devs to see that this is one aspect of the game that is appreciated.

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100% agree here. D2 has been a fan-hit for decades, but not so much because of build variety. Even with Blizz’s abomination of updates in D2R, the meta is pretty much that same. D3…even worse.

At least with Grim Dawn, I can throw any two classes together and have something that can run the entire game. Some are harder to pilot, some are simply weaker due to itemization, but the endgame never seems to be gated behind a meta. It’s refreshing to have a team of developers not driven by shareholders and CEOs who obviously never played an ARPG in their life.

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Titan Quest

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Only the new DLCs’ masteries have any relation to the game’s world though, Rune (Norse act) and Neidan (Chinese act). Other masteries are more general (warfare has nothing about Greece or Egypt for example).
Unless it’s about enemies using the same skills as players, but all arpgs do that.