And this exact thing has been said and/or implied by people in this thread alone multiple times. And some people still don’t get it.
You say that when most of the people who post these ravager videos are the ones this forum has been calling the “crucible crowd” for the longest time. The nickname might have fallen off but we know you know most of what we’ve been playing is crucible. You’re clueless.
Now many of the builds with ravager vids posted in the past day may be bad in the other game modes. That’s actually true because most of the posted vids are from builds who just lost 30-50% of their damage after the patch!. Of course you expect them to be bad in the other game modes!
9.8 was indeed walking simulator but 1.2.1.6 gave hard time to a lot of builds that end up with 0 physical resistance and low life pool . That patch in particular punished a lot of off meta builds and class combos when in 9.8 everything was viable as much as you press buttons
Most people here are just talking hearsay, opinions, and shit without giving actual examples. People been talking “use crucible”, “use SR”, “use ascendant campaign” as your benchmarks and stop giving us ravager vids.
My question is, has anyone who have actually said those things played a build in all those game modes? The only one I could see that can answer “yes” is fluff. And not because I’m currently in contact with the guy but at least I knew his historical competencies. All the others I either don’t know the person that much or I can just tell they’re talking bullshit.
NOW FOR THE ACTUAL EXAMPLE
at the risk of getting this build nerfed even more (though it’s not like my vids aren’t public).
Let’s consider this build - Pierce RoS Reaver. This is nerfed in the test patch via Onslaught, both the stacks and the AA itself. Technically this also got affected by the avalanche nerfs but this isn’t a WPS build and that part is negligible.
This lost 2-3 seconds ravager time. Went from approx 24-25s to 26-27s. Not a big deal, right? It’s 11% damage loss at most. And wtf does 3 second slower ravager even make you do?
Crucible? Meh it basically lost nothing. My uploaded vids show it went from 4:37 to 4:39. It essentially lost nothing. Crucible doesn’t have that healthbars that high.
Build is surely just the same right? right? right?
Full Altar Ascendant Campaign. Looks like it’s all the same. But then you meet dread and you notice something. Before the nerf I always killed him before he releases the second pool.. It made me think that if your build is good enough, you can basically tank everything except the pool. But now with the nerfs I can’t kill dread before the second pool. What’s the implication? That means I shouldn’t tank the sunder now, because now the second pool will kill me.
Note that I’m not complaining about the nerfs here. This build is still very strong. It just means I have to dodge one more thing. What I want to illustrate is that when people like @mad_lee or @banana_peel say losing 10 seconds on ravager is a big nerf, it is actually a big nerf and not just toxic swamp people trying to further their agenda. If a 2 second ravager kill loss is the difference between facetanking dread and dying to it, then how much more would doubling ravager timers affect your ascendant runs?
Before AoM people were boasting MQ or Fabius timers already. Crucible was all about just completing it cause it was that hard at the time, but it’s not like people already weren’t trying to go fast. That said, I only started playing a couple months before AoM release so I don’t know what the game was during the time of the dinosaurs.
Then came AoM and crucible was almost impossible then the chinese discovered 5k DA and then they were starting to speedrun crucible with broken runes until zantai nerfed DA. Then it was hard again until zantai finally caved and nerfed content but it’s not like speedrunning ever stopped. During the TD spellbinder era people were cooking like 20 variants of spellbinder just to see what was fastest cause it was the only stable class at the time. And then I think it was fluff who started playing actual glass cannons that wasn’t binder.
Hell the entire swamp/crucible crowd/top 20 group was born early in FG because @sir_spanksalot (dude we miss you) wanted to standardize guide titles with timers and stuff.
That’s a good practical example of translating Ravager>real world. Ease of killing the Dread is probably the most desirable quality a build can have for a lot of players.
To show, as you said, that it can. And most builds, even some mediocre ones, can.
The timer to show off the speed of the build ( 4min SR 30-31 no short rooms - an arbitrary roll of the dice that SR was never really designed for anyway).
That’s all fine but getting to the boss room is easy in SR 30-31. It’s mostly just about how fast you navigate the maps you ought to know by heart. I wanted to move this to a context where the players shows it can do SR as a whole in a consistently adverse environment.
One ideea was to increase mat drops at higher level. The argument against that from crate would be that it will make players feel of if their build is missing out if it can’t do that part of SR, that it’s purely made for challenge. But i’ve seen comments from people who follow builds and videos that say hey, can it do more challenging stuff like SR 38+
It’s a valid question.
As @RektbyProtoss said above. It didn’t used to be about timers, but about the build being able to do challenging content well and consistently so. The tiemer was kinda there, but there wasn’t such a massive emphasis on it.
Don’t forget, even if you see some 5% pshys res builds doing for example Crucible 200 in like 4 min, bhind that successful video, rest assured death lurks at every second of 180 to 200, no matter how good you are. And now Crucible too is getting an enemy phys dmg nerf, leaving more room for glass cannon timer craze
When it comes to forum feedback, people often post Ravager times as a form of “here’s how much single-target DPS the build has.” It’s the cleanest 1-to-1 comparison we have since dungeons / SR / Crucible have mutators which throws more wrenches to the mix.
When people decide to post a particular build to recommend to players, they often have a combination of super-boss times, SR or Crucible times, and occasionally they’ll even do a 5-straight SR run to show consistency and to demonstrate that they’re not just cherry-picking this data point or that. The Chinese GD playerbase in particular is very thorough like that if you know how to search BiliBili or however you spell their version of Youtube.
I think this part is getting less attention cause we’re a bit too focused on the wps nerfs currently. But at least to me and some people I know, if your build can complete 180-199 consistently with no buffs, then it’s tanky enough because no one is consistent at 200. There’s too much bullshit there that even some of the tankiest builds will fold.
And the topic of buffed vs unbuffed have some different opinions too. Before FoA i never liked no buffs cause it’s impractical as hell when you have all these tributes but right now I never play buffed because wave 200 is still bullshit and losing your tributes and buffs will mean you have to refarm them or gdstash them.
^ this is 1.3.0.8 opinion, not current cause there’s a lot of changes happening
To Rekt’s point again, there is something to be added here regaring timers and the word “Bs” which can be quite losse.
Yes in FoA Crucible there is a lot of AoE crap that is not condusive towards balanced builds and offense is your only choice.
Bot how did it get here? Wasn’t it that because of people complaints with crucuble it went from 8 min to 7 then 6 then 5 min to even 4 and below, making room over time for this “against the clock” race?
You want to know what the vision for FoA was? Sure…
The ideals were extremely straightforward, to build upon the momentum the game regained following Diablo 4’s release and expand the world’s lore with a new culture and people we were working on for the RTS. To take the vast amount of underutilized campaign content and turn it into another viable pillar of endgame for those that are sick of, or were never interested in to begin with, the Crucible and Shattered Realm.
On both counts, I would say we were successful. I’m sure plenty of internet opinions would fight me about that.
Stuff like the customizable altar and even the ascendant affixes came much much later in the process, but ultimately amounted to a huge portion of the work required, both in terms of coding and tuning.
Which isn’t to say everything was perfect.
I think we went overboard with making the new zones big and vast, which actually did us no favors despite taking more time to make. People complained about stuff feeling stretched thin and a “lack of content”. When people started saying FoA felt smaller than FG, that was a real mind blown experience. I mean, we can post all the charts we want with actual numbers and facts, but that sort of thing means nothing versus user perception. As we often say with design, perception is reality. So we kind of shot ourselves in the foot there, but ultimately I feel that will ease up as content updates happen.
In regards to making the main story require going to Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods, I mean, sure, that was probably a mistake in hindsight? But the reasoning for doing that was pretty straightforward: to tie the world’s events together and to nudge new players towards that content as well.
What I was definitely not anticipating was the outrage, how could we stretch out the campaign in this manner? How could we force players to do this? We’re just “padding the game time”. Like it fucking matters to me what someone’s playtime is, as if we make money per hour people play. I guess it was a mistake to assume “play game more” was a good thing?
The content was tuned, as happens with every expansion we’ve done, too high. This is where the majority of the negative reactions stemmed from, which…fair I guess? We went through this with every expansion. What I found comical was all the people saying devs played PoE2 and now want to ape it. Like, guys… pre-release Grim Dawn was wildly more difficult. The game is a shadow of its former self after getting systematically nerfed so some internet main characters could play on a difficulty called Ultimate, a difficulty in name only these days.
When it comes to build balance, I suppose everyone expects me to present some master plan. There isn’t, nor has there ever been, one. We’ve always developed the game through a combination of personal experience and community sentiment. This applies to the content, the features we work on, and yes, the balancing. By the seat of our pants, if you will. We are, quite literally, reactionary to your whims, even if we do not necessarily solve a problem the way you would.
You are asking me for benchmarks and numbers. I don’t have any for you. Like the community at large, I think we are all still staring at all the new plates spinning in the air and seeing how things shake out until we find a new balance point that feels good.
Now some things were obvious outliers and needed to be addressed. The Berserker mastery and the raw power of the wereform buffs, the effectiveness of onslaught, global cooldown resets, and yes, WPS activation stacking. Some of that we nipped with hotfixes, and some we approached in this first major balance pass.
When we hit up balance, we try to look at things on the grand scale, how will a change affect endgame, leveling? What will happen to those that don’t own the latest DLC? What is the domino effect of changing this item on its other more niche uses? Sometimes the answer is straightforward because a change will benefit the targeted goal with minimal to no impact on the other stuff, or something was simply universally out of line. Those are easy changes to make.
With the WPS changes, WPS builds were obviously fine before FoA, so the problem was clearly in what was added since. Now I will fully admit that the first approach was too aggressive and has been rolled back. We did let that genie out of the bottle and now have to live with it. Fine. I don’t feel great about nerfing old items (ex. Boltthrower) to compensate, but I guess we just have to look at this through the lens of long-term health of the game.
But the reactions to the initial numbers were so dramatic. Like oh my god, 12 damage to Execute? Are these people brain damaged? It’s a number during an active playtest, guys. I could make that 12 12000 and it’d be the best most sought after ascended modifier in the game. Everything eventually finds its sweet spot, even if it takes a few updates. Relax.
And here is honestly where I go from “well mistakes were made” to “what the fuck?” What vision of the game did we promise and fail to meet? Did we overhype this expansion or something?
What the actual fuck did I destroy myself for 6 months for only to be met with this kind of “truth bomb”? Because we didn’t create someone’s particular ideal of an ARPG? Were you hoping for us to reinvent the game at the 11th hour? Give me a fucking break.
Here I am also honestly at a loss. What was undercooked?
The tuning? Sure? That wasn’t going to come out perfect no matter how many extra months we tinkered with it for though.
The bugs? Honestly less major issues than I was expecting from a gargantuan effort as FoA was.
So what exactly was it? Again, expecting Ascendant mode to be something we never said it would be?
And here we get to something else entirely. I don’t know if it’s the enshittification of everything consuming the world, but over the last year or so I’ve observed all our forums becoming much more…angry? Like there is too much pent up pressure and any opportunity people find to lash out is taken, like a relief valve. People seem way more eager to jump at each other’s throats and the tone towards the team has turned much more hostile. Every action taken by the dev team is a personal affront to somebody. I’ve seen this both in our Frontier communities and here, so it’s not unique to just Grim Dawn.
It used to be that the occasional asshole would come along, and we would shut them down with a dose of their own medicine. But when suddenly everyone seems eager to be an asshole, not only has that strategy rapidly fallen apart, it made us part of the problem.
But also, when almost every interaction feels like I’m fighting for my and my team’s dignity, where I’m having the same tired debates over and over with people acting like us adding Evade and Sunder was some kind of betrayal of our old values, it starts to beg the question: why am I doing this to myself? This isn’t worth it. Honestly, I’ve already pared back my online participation significantly in the last couple months because it feels like wading into a pool of eagerly awaiting sharks with cuts all over my legs. Where I’m doing “damage control” with people that don’t actually give a shit about having a constructive discussion on the topic anyway.
In my 15 years doing this, I never imagined there being a time where I’d stop interacting with our communities, but lately that question has been crawling in the back of my mind.
And I wonder if people realize that there is a world where we don’t bother to anymore. A world where everyone can just scream into the void, and occasionally someone may, silently, listen.
I honestly didn’t expect you to write here precisely because of what you wrote in that final portion. As people have already said in the earlier posts, you don’t really owe us an answer. In the end, what happens to the game is you and your team’s decision and we’re just here to play, complain and then give feedback.
As for people getting more angry, idk I feel like more people wanted to kill you back in the first few patches of FG nerfs but that was also what, 7 years ago? so it’s harder to remember. I haven’t been here since 2021? until when FoA released so I can’t tell. What I do know though, is that the people who have been here for a long time seem to have been acting same as what I can remember from back then.
It’s good to have some more clarity though and I hope the community appreciates it regardless of each person’s stance.
12 damage to execute (personally to me it’s more the 8% WD to cadence) is something I can make fun of till the end though. At least until I can remember it exists/existed.
Nobody’s gacha quoting developers on some promises they didn’t fulfill. I went into the expansion with a rather blank slate, hoping for some stuff, and some I got some I didn’t, nothing dramatic about that.
I think the game has (especially now) the potential to provide this “new scalable endgame content”, with a clear structure and diverse engaging challenges that would be encompassed in some sort of a vision for what a player should do after finishing the campaign. I’m sure a lot of players would love to get it. But nobody gave us this promise, and nobody has any obligation to do it. Nobody promised us this vision with capital V.
We could be playing D4, could be playing PoE2 or whatever the fuck is out there in this competition packed industry. But we are here, are we not?
I was just personally puzzled by this number, it was D4’s “14 damage Druid” moment for me. You know that invested into WPS are dealing hundreds of thousands of dmg. What does extra 12 * ~35 give you? Any generic mod is better than this for a build that got to ascended mods.
Brace yourself, brother, it’s a crazy world out there. I blame the info consumption overload, our brains haven’t evolved to handle this much of info stimulation, that’s mostly negative in media and social media to stimulate even more. Everything nowadays has to be either the best thing that ever existed or the worst thing in the world, nothing inbetween. And that leaks into people perceiving spontaneous negativity as a norm.
On behalf of myself and, I’m sure, of my friends in this game I can say we love you and your team, and we thank you for the game you keep developing passionately. We may come off as rude and radical sometimes, but it’s not from a dark place, it’s a combination of our own passion, lack of filters and internet brain.
I won’t aim anything against you (we are super passioned altogether) but sometimes I see peeps just being here to complain about everything resulting no progress or resolving anything at all just to hurt devs work.
And if I imagine myself in devs shoes rn it’s really hard to distuinquish genuine feedback (altho it’s their job but in all thisheat!).
What I am trying to say is we have to still reamin as we are but more compasionate torwards who we want to help.
Oh wow, I honestly didn’t expect to get such a comprehensive and thoughtful answer so quickly, thank you very much for taking the time.
I was frankly a bit disheartened to wake up today and see how my attempt at starting an honest dialogue had been taken as an excuse to offload their negativity. That was very much not my intention and I would much see some of these opinions be kept to themselves.
I really appreciate the honesty here, it is good to know we are all in the same boat here, even though the steering isn’t fully figured out yet. Pandora’s box has indeed be opened in many regards and I can’t blame you for initially having the odd knee jerk reaction to that. Seeing previous endgame content cleared in seven seconds was… something else.
Maybe this was a bit premature to post and a more stable direction will become clear over time? Who knows. I certainly don’t envy you for having to balance this behemoth of a game, nor for becoming a target for every decision, good and bad (and by and large, I think they are mostly good).
My deepest gratitude for still caring. Your game means a lot to a ton of people, and I am very much convinced you are among them. All the best for any future content, tuning, and forum interactions!
Discussions on the internet have unfortunately peaked in toxicity, and the people enjoying the game have no motivating factors to come type positive mentions or comments since they are enjoying the game in their own bubble (the whole “most people who bother to leave feedback do so because they are upset”). I haven’t been playing gd long but having a good time, I almost never engage with video game forums because of…well, I think we all see why from some of the deranged comments in this thread but I hope you stay strong, you are doing gods work.
I was gonna add something to the discussion, I do have strong feeling about certain things (strong enough to make an account here recently at least). However when I read through this thread, including seeing something among the line of someone should be fired, I just think “what the fuck is all this accusation and aimless rage?” and I want nothing more to do with it.
But if I gotta say anything now, I guess it’s that yea, you guys need to be more chill with your complaints. I’ve seen some real messy game launch like No Man’s Sky and Darktide, and those game’s complaints don’t even get this vile.
