The progression hurdle - Your first level 100 character will suck for a LONG time

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
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Currently the progression system in the game has a big problem: When you first reach level 100 you get stuck in a hellish progression limbo for hundreds of hours while trying to acquire your first high end gear sets.

Basically when you hit 100 for the first time and your progression switches from XP to gear you realize very quickly that there are thousands of different legendary items in the game and finding ones that are actually useful to you is a incredibly rare. You might net two or three legendary items in a play session, but the chances of them actually being an upgrade for your character is extremely low. You are in fact just as likely to finish a set for a completely different character before ever seeing the items you need for the character you’re playing.

As a result there is a giant barrier to entry into the endgame content of the game. By the time you have stockpiled enough top end items to fully gear up one character you also have enough items to fully gear up all kinds of other characters. The difference in effort between finishing one character and finishing ten is relatively minor, but the amount of effort it takes to finish just one is so huge that most people probably never get there. Having some high end characters also enables you to farm for legendaries, while not having any means they are trickling in at one or two in a whole playsession.

The only somewhat decent solution to this right now is to go online and start trading with people, though even then it’s tricky to find people willing to part with whatever you’re looking for, and having something they want in return.

The transmutation system also doesn’t help much, because with over a hundred sets the likelihood of making a piece you actually need is low, and the reagents for transmutation aren’t much more common than legendary items themselves. The only way in which that system helps a lot is if a set has a craftable piece and therefore allows you to craft the whole set if you get lucky and find the blueprint for it.

I think the game needs to give you more ways to go after specific items or blueprints that you want. Maybe add some kind of system where you can keep gaining XP and invest it into researching specific items, but death wipes out a lot more progress in research than in level progress, so that being careful still pays after 100.

It would simply be nice if the path toward your first really powerful character wasn’t a hundred times longer than to your second or third. It feels like you’re locked out of that endgame part of Grim Dawn where you get to experiment with new builds and characters for far too long just trying to get your first character who can really tackle all the difficult content.

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The biggest obstacle is the low faction and experience gain you get on the first char not having mandates or experience potion available. Compared to other ARPGs you get almost all items (blue and purple) pretty quick - especially if you have the crucible.

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If there wasn’t difference between level 100 at beginning and fully decked build,it will be pointless to farm,right?

Plus there are lots of replacements for legendary items.If you build it right,you can farm even Crucible 150 with super cheap build.

And drop rate is very good.

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So, the majority of the endgame sets? At least 90% of them have an helm blueprint. And getting Eldritch Essences is ridiculously easy.

And you have to start somewhere, no one starts loaded with items. That’s why the first character takes much longer than the later ones to equip with endgame gear, and that’s the point.

Also claiming your character will suck for a long time is an extreme, absolutely extreme over exaggeration. A lot of builds aren’t too gear dependant to be effective and you don’t need much gear to farm Steps of Torment and Bastion of Chaos with ease.

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Getting the blueprints is not ridiculously easy.

Also I’m not saying people should get their items for free, I’m saying the fact that what gear you find is completely random makes it so that getting your first character geared up takes a huge amount of time simply because you keep finding gear you don’t need and it takes you longer to get gear in general with a weaker character. Getting subsequent characters geared up is much easier because you already have a stockpile of legendaries, plus all kinds of things to boost new characters.

It puts a giant hurdle right before you reach the actual endgame of Grim Dawn where you make new characters to experiment with the gear you find, which most players probably never pass. This forum is extremely biased toward the viewpoint of people who spend thousands of hours with the game because most people don’t even come to official forums unless they are extremely invested in a game.

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Vitality necromancer combos, death knight, battlemage, and spellbinders have fairly easily farmable sets, the dark one, and krieg’s. Something I wish I had known when I started my first char. Transmute has made the process of obtaining sets far easier also. It’s everything else that’s hard to farm now.

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Endgame is where the most of the fun actually ends, mate, believe me. The first playthrough, first time entering Roguelikes, first dificulty jump to Elite, playing around with skills and actually questing is the best time I had with this game. Then comes the shock from playing Ultimate for the first time and how brutal everything seems. First Nemesis encounters. Et cetera.

Not sure if you have been playing arpgs in 2000s, but I remember how actually impossible it was to find ANYTHING in Diablo 2 single player. And it’s still the best ARPG ever. Grim Dawn became MUCH easier for beginners over the last year and a half. There is stuff like Krieg set or Vanquisher set. There are plenty of great beginner guides. You can make an end-game farmer relatively fast these days. If anything, game has became very easy and beginner’s friendly.

EDIT: oh, and if you don’t mind trading, you can use this forum and get the set of items you want for a bunch of farmable mats.

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your first character will only suck if it was

  • built poorly (not putting every excess point into phys, not getting the right investment where needed, going over softcaps) wh ch can be fixed at the spirit guide.
  • unsupported by the faction vendor and lacking helpful monster infrequents.
  • uses raise skeletons and realizes they die to everything ( #buffskeletons2019 )
  • not built as a soldier, inquisitor, or oathkeeper, the latter of which even makes mediocre masteries like demolitionist thrive and shine.
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All the replies to the OP are valid. Crate has put in a lot of effort to help players with the transition.

Still, farming the right legendary (set) items for a build can take 100s and 100s of hours even with a fully decked out gladiator or SR farmer. That’s because the item pool is huge (iirc Crate increased the drop rates with the expansions). Rightly so, otherwise we’d be making threads about lack of variety. I’ve overcome the hurdle with a lot of trading, but that’s not something everybody likes doing in a single player game.

To me this looks like an issue of conflicting design goals which are hard to reconcile.

Things like Dark One’s, Krieg’s and Vanquisher are steps in the right direction, but they aren’t obvious to new players.

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Basically the reason why I still make new chars not using any item transfers (apart from faction mandates). Building up chars from scratch is what this game is about for me.

Might be a reason why I prefer to make budget/beginner builds with leveling tips rather than SR95 builds for the forum :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think OP is partially right, there certainly is a jump in end ultimate which is designed for endgame builds (expansions, roguelikes, Nemesis and the like). at that point you need good gear to farm and if you can’t farm you can’t have better gear :upside_down_face:

that said, a solid build (with good synergy between skills, focus on one damage type with corresponding rr, decent defense layers…) doesn’t need ultimate gear to farm Sot for rexample. that’s where you have to know how the game works to maximize the dmg output of your main attck skills while taking care of your health, da, res.
it’s also why it’s a good idea to level a few chars simultaneously, because at first playthrough you have one shot chests which give you a minimum amount of legendaries. so you’ll most likely find something useful for one of your char (even if it’s not that damnedd set which will ultimately define your build).

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I think the gear acquisition rate can be modeled by a logistic function:

image

In the beginning, you have very slow loot/time rate. And the better geared that char is, the better your knowledge with the game, the higher the loot/time rate will become, until it reaches is maximum rate where it stays practically constant.

The game already have implemented “guaranteed” items for you, to speed up this process.
Faction items, MI’s, farmable sets, secret items like fettan mask and the totally normal “shields”.
The blacksmith also have default recipes for items so you can always craft good greens.
Blue/Epic items have much higher drop chances than purple/legendariers and should not be dismissed.
So yes, these items exists in the game for a reason - the reason you adress.
And now with set-transmutation feature, try to complete a high level blue set like silver sentinel, mythical perdition set, blind assassin etc this will give your char a nice boost so that it can tackle on higher difficulty areas smoother and thus improving your loot/time rate significantly.

Personally, I think the “get the set and win” mentality is a bit lazy approach to build progression. I can understand that someone from Diablo III thinks it is a perfectly normal thing though - but itemization and char progression in Grim Dawn is much more nuanced and complex and I think it should stay that way - it is one of the things I really enjoy about this game that you can actually have a long gear progression rather than “get set and grind paragons endlessly to progress the build”: in Grim Dawn you also have to play smarter - not more.

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I can understand you OP, I have very similar experience, until very recently.

My own experience, there was a huge wall like you said, but I passed the wall not by obtaining gears, but by obtaining knowledge from this forum. Folded due to being a wall of texts

My first two characters sucked, the first was an infiltrator and I didn’t even finish everything in Ultimate with it, my second was a spellbinder which is still using greens and blues today (haven’t touched it for a while). It died like 30 times in finishing FG main campaign. After I played like 250 hours I have two characters, bunch of trash gears and ~1 pages of legendary that 90% of them I don’t use.

I was frustrated by such experience, so I did some research in this forum. I saw malawiglenn’s Perdition acid aegis sentinel, it’s based on a blue set that I already had 3 pieces, so I decided to level up my 3rd character, a sentinel. I got the last piece of the set in the skeleton dungeons after some farming. It was a pretty decent build, I could breeze through all four skeleton dungeons with it.

So at this stage my legendary farming speed already significantly increased compared to my first 250h, though still far from comparable to those crucible farmers you see in this forum.

Then again I did some research in this forum and finally am aware of the farmable sets (Krieg, Dark Ones, Vanquisher) and saw x1x1x1x2’s skater Templar. One of my friend also showed me off his own Vanquisher build. They seem strong, fun to play, and the Vanquisher set is something I can farm for on purpose.

So I theorycrafted my Vanquisher skater Sentinel, farmed the set with acid aegis build, updated the gears and made the skater build I want, and starting pushing SR. I have a whole thread about this (both the build and the farming process).

Now I can farm SR 65-66 with my skater reliably, and the farming speed is far far better than before, I guess it has become near-endgame. And just yesterday, I managed to finish SR 75-76 with a g2 setup (meaning using full blue gears except for the Vanquisher set and a cheap MI).

The points I want to make are:

  • There definitely exists a huge wall between finishing Ultimate the first time, and being able to farm legendary in end-game speed, for most new players;
  • But the huge wall is actually NOT made by the gears, but mostly by Knowledge;
  • It is not easy to obtain such knowledge, especially if you think “heck I played Diablo 2 for like 3000 hours why should I even read beginner build / knowledge posts” like I did.

The exact knowledge I really hope I knew when starting the game, and maybe you would like to know too, is:

  • YOU DON’T NEED A G3 BUILD (all purple gears) TO FARM ENDGAME EFFICIENTLY. Beginner-friendly and semi-budget builds are sufficient for the purpose (G3 builds just make it quicker). DO NOT IGNORE THEM WHEN STARTING THINKING ABOUT ENDGAME.

My G2 skater sentinel can finish SR 75-76 in time, and can farm SR 65-66 at ease. Many beginner-friendly builds can complete Gladiator 170 and farm 100-150. This is already very good for legendary farming, when you get into this stage you’ll soon start complaining about stash size.

I also want to point out that not all G3+ builds are C+ and SR+, so those beginner builds are actually quite competitive.

Most importantly, those beginner-friendly builds are super easy to gear up, it’s like you level up your first toon to 100 at the 100th hour and gear it up at the 101th hour. So if you have the full knowledge at the beginning, you will not hit a wall at all. Such is the power of knowledge.

You just need the right knowledge. I just needed the right knowledge. I wish it is provided in a more obvious way, both in game and in this forum. Anyway, I’m actually quite happy with my own experience, so not really complaining anything here.

p.s. I like posts with wall of texts, this make it legit to me to write my own wall of texts lol

edit: just want to clarify that I’m not suggesting that people should play a beginner build for their first playthrough, the first playthrough should be played in any way you want to. I’m suggesting that if you start thinking about endgame after finishing first/second playthrough, then the beginner builds are actually very good choices.

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I got an answer to all your troubles, my friend. It is hidden in this link: https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/tool-gd-stash

And seriously, despite the fact that drop rates in GD are better than elsewhere, it’s still a not fun to run a toon for 10 hours straight and find not a single upgrade. This is sad but there’s little that can be done about it. Drops are random, period. Would you rather have microtransactions?

However, more target-farmable sets and uniques wouldn’t hurt. Krieg, Dark and Vanq are only three. There’s nothing for nightblade or shaman.

Blueprints? I got 2000+ hours and I still found a blueprint from before FG a few weeks ago. I recently realized I can’t craft a freaking Conduit of Divine Whispers when my old trade friend asked me to help him out! I’m sure many people rage-quit because of Blueprint drops, especially relics, when you need a bunch of them to make one decent.

Those Eldritch Essences should be buyable (but expensive). There is still nothing to do with money in this game if you don’t craft Stoneplate Grieves.

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Yup, the game is so bad that you need to use tools to create items :slight_smile: * sarcasm *

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RNG gear on some bosses and champions usually leads to many of my unforeseen deaths. I had a skeletal knight hero which spawned with this shield during levelling

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When I realised I was taking too much damage I tried to run away but my guardians of Empyrion decided to hit him an extra 4 times and guess who ended up eating all the “physical retaliation”. Yup, the player.

I thought that was a “one of” but later on - different skeletal knight hero but same bloody shield.

I'm%20a%20dumbass
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There goes another death.

I’m not salty about it though. I don’t play HC. But I can understand OP’s viewpoint from a main campaign player. I make a lot of fire builds and Bolvar spawning with “insulating” gear which gives him +75% fire resist means the battle can take a long time but there’s no real threat from the boss himself. If Sentinel on the other hand spawns with “insulating” gear on a medium built character well, that’s another death to add to the count.

Just for the record. If you’re new, I recommend to ask for advice and just play the game. You don’t need a build decked out in “purples” to finish the game or farm end-game content. You can clear the game easily with decent blues and greens (you don’t need double rares either). You just need to build correctly and the rest will just follow. But I get everything is a matter of “time”. 4K + hours and I definitely don’t have all blueprints even from AoM, but I do have a decent collection and some sets look too easy for my liking. I like the grind…

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I agree with you that some more target-farmable sets and uniques will be great for beginners. There is a game called Borderlands 2 which is basically an ARPG + FPS, in which more than half of the end-game gears are target-farmable and have decent drop rate, so there is practically no gear barrier in that game.

The bad part of such design is, because endgame gears are not really balanced in that game, most people just farm the most OP gears and end up with exactly the same builds. So more gears being target-farmable means that the game is more sensitive to the balance. The gear system is far more complicated in GD than Borderlands 2, so I suspect the current state here is a deliberate design.

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welp… that looks really painful… i remember times in titan quest where some random common ranged skeletons does HUGE pierce damage on me. it turns out that skelly has the skeleton dart weapon, which has a small chance of dealing huge pierce damage… and i remember a thread once that has a player getting GIBBED by fabius who wield notched edge of something axe that has small chance of dealing huge damage.

this kind of rng loxmere-like-jumpscare’s sudden damage spike out of nowhere has made me watch my healthbar most of the time when fighting anything. except when running to farm spots.

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The problem isn’t that it takes a long time to fully max a character, the problem is that it isn’t a smooth progression. Gear in Grim Dawn is so overly specific to a set of skills and damage types that only one in a hundred pieces even goes on any given character, so you can go ages without an upgrade despite the fact that you’re playing and looting the whole time. Sure, all ARPGs are kind of like that, but in a lot of the older ones where drop rates were bad the gear was a lot more generalized. You didn’t get a lot of stuff like “Oh, this piece gives +3 to two skills I use… but also turns them into a different damage type so they no longer work with my secondary class”. That kind of gear is what makes Grim Dawn interesting in the regard that it makes you want to try out new builds, but you also find way too few usable items when you’re working on just one character.

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maybe this is what crate intended. to have players invest a lot of time on several max lvl char rather than one or two max lvl char. so crate wants players jump between their different characters, so that players have many different options available to them when a bis item drops. this also fits with crate’s design philosophy of wanting characters to have a ‘finished’ feeling to them, rather than endless progession like diablo3’s paragon system.
that also means players need a lot of time not to just grinding bis item with 1 max lvl char, but also try new different chars and max lvl them to have many different style of gameplay and gear options.