Upcoming Changes to the Shattered Realm (v1.1.9.0)

Grim Dawn Development Updates
143

I can attest to this, multiplayer CR is a fucking blast.

Im glad GD is an offline, single-player game first. But lots of people sleep on multiplayer- The best experiences I’ve had in the game have been multiplayer ones. Ill never forget being new to the game, and joining my first multiplayer session. The group was about to enter the Steps of Torment dungeon, I happened to join right before they popped the seal on the door.

Id played through the game almost up to Homestead, but had been too scared to even attempt the dungeon on my own, so had never even witnessed the door opening. I remember the feeling of excitement and adrenaline, passing through that entrance and losing my connection to rifts. The other members of my party, 2 melee builds and a pistol/shield commando, made sure I knew if i died, i couldnt return to the dungeon.

Naturally being brand new to the game and not yet a member of these forums, my mind started racing, as i thought if i died inside the dungeon my character could be locked out of it for good, not just in that session. My adrenaline peaked and oh my god what an awesome experience that dungeon was- i was a DW blademaster and using Riftstones in both weapons, so 4 mobility skills (shadow strike, blitz, and 2x rift strike or whatever). It felt like a true MMO experience, particularly that first room that the doors lock behind you and those waves of enemies spawn. I was like a rogue, backstabbing everything. God it was great.

I have tons of stories, i could write a book about them. Maybe i should. Crucible multiplayer is the shit, but ive found SR multiplayer to be less exciting due to the focus being kill as fast as possible and if others cant keep up oh well, then in boss rooms noobs get booted from the session for dying in there and causing bosses to heal up, smart noobs wait in town while the real players defeat the bosses, which also kills the fun.

CR on the other hand, like @fordprefect mentioned, due to its stationary arena environment, can be played like a tower defense using the banners/beacons, and this allows for better tactical involvement from all parties. Noobs will still struggle and youll get the occassional XP leeching scumbag that stick on the sidelines while everyone else is fighting, but the best parts of this mode stem from the fact that everyone is always together, in a set location that affords the ability to strategize in a cleaner more reliable way than in SR. And if a douchebag is leeching XP on the side you can quit and rejoin using your retaliation witchblade with warcry and bloody pox (fevered rage variant w/o the enemy debuff nodes) to pull all enemy aggro to your position and just follow the douchebag around everywhere so theyre forced to contribute.

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144

Hello! I wanted to ask if there are plans to buff the hellhound pet. Its probably the only pet that underperforms. Like increasing the Summon Limits number through the skill itself or buffing it to be a bit stronger? Maybe a Hellhound focused Set :wink: ( I have to say that I dont like the idea of sets increasing the numbers of Pets)

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145

Except the lags… Try playing with people that 10000 km away from you :smiley:

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146

I honestly havent had many exoeriences with multiplayer lag and ive put a lot of hours into multiplayer. The only lag ive really noticed was the ol’ “player is joining the session” lag. Outside of that its been fine.

147

So if people are worried about build diversity, why not add a few boss encounters that specifically address that?
Say, a boss with slightly less damage, with a debuff ability of -10% total retal damage and -2% all resists,
Or a melee boss with a telegraphed attack that can penetrate shields, or a speed/cd debuff aura that isn’t active within 5 meters?
I never even played SR, but “non-tank melee dies in high levels” seems to be the problem of so many ARPGs out there, one could almost take posts from one forum to another.

Also, I am positively surprised (though I suppose I shouldn’t be, at this point) that crate is still supporting and patching this game.

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148

Offering my few cents regarding pushing deep SR with pets, I don’t think any of the pet builds doing so, would be able to do it like this without camera abuse.

I cannot speak for other players, but personally I have used it extensively even SR 80+ with my builds.

Now, another reason regarding pet builds is something that should be no secret to you. Having Pets tank for you means that as long as the player can avoid aggro and keep pets alive long enough or rotate their summoning in such a way that atleast some of them remain in the field always, it is rather easy to whittle down the boss.

Hence why Iron Maiden, Fabius etc are widely considered to be major threats for Pet builds in deeper shards. If they aggro on you, chances are you will get one-shotted.

And I very much doubt that all the SR pushing pet builds, even now with Camera abuse will be able to boast such performance consistently.

Regarding that, I am sure you are also aware that most builders only post their best results even if said result happens to be 1 out of 10 scenario or something with incredibly low success rate.

Now, I know that if the nerf hammer is going to drop, it will. But if SR performance is the reason, I would like to ask that the dropping of the hammer on pet builds be postponed until SR balance changes have come to pass first.

And even then, I would like to ask that instead of merely looking at numbers or the posted results, the “why” and “how” be also looked into. Yes, you guys have the necessary data, atleast math wise and no, I don’t need to tell you how your own game plays.

But I personally would hate to see something nerfed because some of us decided to abuse every single thing we could and then threw ourselves at each bosses until due to stroke of luck (or skill…) they somehow fell after the hundredth time we died…

Another thing to note would also be that HC SR plays vastly differently due to not having the luxury of repeatedly dying. While HC might not be the major consideration when it comes to balance, I believe that any balance change to builds based on the volatile and abusable nature of SC SR will end up hurting more than helping.

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149

Huh. This is news to me. I never really rotate the camera during battles - especially during boss battles when I need to be on my toes - so I didn’t even know about this. I did notice that in some boss rooms the whole lot of bosses does not rush me instantly, and those are nice refresher areas to me where I can try and be clever and only deal with one or two of them at a time -even if it is still hard since you have a much smaller area to fight them if you don’t want to trigger the others.
I frankly feel the arenas in the shattered realm are detrimental to non-melee builds. With my casters, ranged attackers and especially summoners, all I can do is run around clockwise the arena - if I can - or teleport everywhere if I cannot, and try to stay alive. Which is hard when you face those rush-capable bosses like the Aetherial Colossi types or the Warden, or those that love to fire rapid projectiles everywhere. I don’t feel like every build is supposed to facetank bosses at melee range - wizard types are glass cannons in most ARPGs. That’s why everyone hated Duriel in Diablo II, with his tiny confined arena, dash attacks and freezing.
While I agree that cheats like these should be removed, I hope the change won’t mean that you can potentially get rushed by say, Theodin Marcell and Gargabol as soon as you enter. 'cause that leads to running around and triggering all the other bosses.

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150

I been playing the game for years since the alpha, and I still don’t have all the sets or blueprints. I find it hard to believe you can get everything so fast without some app/mod. Not to mention how many resources you need to farm to make said items, and especially those damn sigils are not easy to get as cultists have a rather random way of dropping them.
For example, I been farming the Sentinel for ages by going back to Elite so that he might finally drop the blueprint for the 75th level version of the caster helm (I already have the 94th level version). No luck so far. Got the blueprint for the fighter helm and gotten more of the Epic helms he drops than I could count, but this one eludes me to this day. And it is not a fast run, getting to the temple from Burrwitch, navigating the mazelike corridors (which are blocked off at different points in every run)… it’s a chore and I don’t care much for chores. So I retry it every few months for a few afternoons when I feel bored and listen to a podcast while I do it, but I prefer to have fun with the game while I play, so it is not enjoyable.

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151

I can’t help but to echo a lot of what is said here.

Nothing, build wise, should be blasted out of existence with some sort of knee jerk reaction but be steady handed.

The more I think about it the more I feel all over the place in terms of how SR should be.

Some of me wants it to remain 1v1 for all bosses to maintain the playability that others are wanting as to not limit their fun and what they have come to be use too.

Another part wants Crate’s initial design to remain true and let 4v1 reign but balance it or tailor it in a fashion that is similar to boss waves on CR.

The middle ground is seeming less and less ideal IMO…which was my initial feeling.

Throwing a bunch of random, hard to counter, Un-nerfed bosses in a room with random mutators isn’t always what’s fun for everyone and it seems that the players do want some predictability of what they are going against my opinion). Balancing ever boss room isn’t the answer but the “mapping” mentality of adding modifiers to runs seems to be the route that most games are taking (which likely won’t occur).

Unfortunately you might have to put a ceiling on SR and balance down the way D3 did or how CR is. This might be a terrible idea but at least it helps with what the standard is…truth is only a very small group is ever going past 80 right now as is.

Lastly, as Maya mentioned…please keep HC folks in mind with changes.

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152

If you farm in efficient way you can get items to make almost every build existing in really short time starting from zero. Dungeons MIs can be problematic altough. Just rush Krieg/Dark One set with spellbinder or conjurer/ritualist/cabalist and spam sr75 ultimate over and over in one game session. Legendaries and MIs are dropping from the sky.

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153

And now we even have monster totems, very good farming for low-geared chars.

I restarted patch 1.1.7 with PS warder and SS infiltrator. When those chars were at level 100, I basically got them almost fully geared + got almost all legendaries and BPs in the game in about 2 weeks farming.

BTW this “same game session” is also a abuse of game mechanics and should be addressed just as with camera rotating trick :wink:

Sure some purple MIs like world eater, alkamos rings etc can take time to drop. But isn’t that what makes us keep playing and farming? Now I only lack some Magi rings, so I can now limit my MC farming basically to Morgoneth dungeon (unless I want some other roll on a skeleton key green MI… or Kaisan amulet)

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154

I don’t get why this is a problem for melee builds, who are ideally/logically made for hitting enemies in the face at close range, I assume, with heavy armor and good defense and lots and lots of points into Physique? In my experience I had far less trouble staying alive with my Markovian set based Commando than with my summoner Cabalist or Conjurer when enemies gang up on me… and even less so with a channeler type caster who has to stand in one place and spam Albrecht’s Aether Ray. I am surprised people complain about melee builds not being able to facetank… why would caster or ranged builds be better at it? Just because Arcanists have a skill that makes them immune to damage for a few seconds, it doesn’t matter much in a room with 2 Nemeses once the skill ends.

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Wait you mean build a specific character just so you can use that for farming? But building up a character to max takes months. I don’t get to sit and play all day. And if I make a character to the max I prefer to do it for fun, not for grinding. Grinding is work, if I wanted to make my spare time into work I might as well play an MMO, LOL… :smiley: I prefer to make fun builds and once I levelled them up to be powerful, use them to get more set items for other potential builds I want to try (easier now thanks to transmuting).
The Dark One set… I never got why people like it. It boosts Bloody Pox, but then what? You use that skill as your main damage dealer? Does not seem like fun gameplay.
Also I think the highest waystone opens into the 45th shard. Doing it to 75th would take a lot of time just with running through 4 levels of each shard up to 30 more… and at the end you get the same amount of stuff as if you quit after 10 shards. Only the potential quality of the items changes, not how many chests you get. I found that most of the time for investing this much time in running the shards, I could have cleared out most of the Ugdenbog and Malmouth, ran into Cubacabra and Alexander, and ported over to catch Iron Maiden and Fabius, and likely found a few monster totems on the way that also drop good loot. To me doing the shattered realms seems more tedious and repetitive - and also slower, but it also forces you to rush to beat the timer. It’s why I never liked the Rift system in Diablo 3

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The thing is as caster you can avoid facetanking at all and still dish damage. Take a look at @dmt casters for instance. They are more skill dependable but have great SR records. Pure melee builds are much rare in deep realms, minus few exceptions ofc.

Other than kiting, casters have huge % CDR, which mean you can have great uptime of your defensive skills/devotions and casters usually are classes with damage absorb/mitigation. Spellbinder can chain Mirror /Torment, Sorc have Mirror+Blast Shield boosted by Star Pact and Maiven on top. Mage Hunter can count on Maiven, Mirror, with Censure and Seal on top. So caster is more versatile archetype than melee.

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157

No.

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Agreed. The number of people who do this MinMaxing and gamebreaking builds and try to get to beyond the planned end of the Shattered Realm are a rather small bunch compared to all the players who - usually casually - play this game. However since it is also the same subset of people who are obsessively playing the same game for years now over and over and posting here, they are also the most vocal and most often heard by the developer - even if they do not in any way represent the average GD player, IMHO. And I say this as someone who has been playing this game for years obsessively (yet casually as I prefer to make up my own playstyle and builds rather than base them on those posted on the forums).
I see this same aspect in many other games. Age of Wonders Planetfall has a very small multiplayer group -maybe 50 people at most - but they are the most vocal on the forums and their outcries against ridiculously complex exploits (like only buying one type of unit and using a unique selection of mods makes them unkilleable)… stuff that normal players playing against the AI would never experience in their lives, nor would they use them even if they came up with the idea because frankly it would be rather boring to do in a strategy game to always use the same strategy against everything…
However because these players are so vocal, we often had changes to the game forced by them that were frankly, detrimental to those who only play single player - which is the vast majority of the players.
I am not saying this particular decision is similar, because most causal players will never reach these high level Shattered Realm levels so this would not matter to them. I am just speaking in general, because we have seen sets and skills nerfed for exploits that most casual players would never have thought of…

I had to check quickly on the crafted/quest items table and them being level 1, they were all over the place. Okay, so then you just run 1 level or what? Or 5, up to 80? Does anything drop above 80? I never went that far, only knew that these Deathly Waystones exist but did not check the mechanic.

Versatile is a nice thing but when you have super fast melee enemies literally charge into your face or unleash area off effect hell on you, it helps little… and in most of the arenas - other than the Korvan one that is mostly circular -your movement is severely limited. In the other arenas you need to quickly run away from the melee enemies before you can unleash hell, and in that time you will suffer damage as you will need to run around them - and also might trigger the other bosses lurking on the map. I dunno why you guys think Mirror of Eorectes is so great. Unless you have some constellation or special item that might - I stress, might -reset the cooldowns, Mirror buys you 3 seconds, but then you need to wait like 20 for it to recharge, and in 20 seconds these bosses will tear you apart.

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Melee builds? Does it exist? :scream:

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160

I don’t min-max or make gamebreaking builds tho :frowning:

I often accuse Zantai of not heaing our pleas (well, more like protests, but still…) :rofl:

True, since most of the balancing comes as a result of comparatively small playerbase and builds whose results others might not even get close to.

I am not sure who said it, but I am sure someone did… that because of this reason, it is better to give the devs, or Zantai in this case, as much info as possible on how a particular build achieves certain results, its consistency etc so that nerfs if made, can be made accordingly if possible, in such a way that most won’t even notice it having a detrimental effect on their games.

Hence why 2 of the builds I ran SR with for the challenge also included post on exactly how the game played out and what sort of difficulties I had to face.

Cross posting from their own threads:

&

As you can see, both cases are not something easily replicated nor remotely possible without exploits and even then, requires a lot of luck to actually pull it off.

If on the basis of the results alone, pet builds were nerfed for eg; that would hurt everyone as the results are in no way indication of the build’s strength, but more about the pilot’s perseverance and having too much free time.

But if fixing camera exploit were to bring everything into line for eg, then no need to nerf the builds themselves.

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161

Lost Souls set does that, gives you +1 of them. I have a Cabalist focused on that + Skeletons. You need some other voodoo to change the Hellhound damage to Vitality but from there on, they become pretty potent.
But I agree we should have other sets that maybe focus more on their fire/chaos damage. I experimented with using Veilpiercer or Dracarris with them, but the latter works mostly for hybrid summoner builds. I have plans to try to make a hybrid Chaos damage focused caster/summoner with the Unholy Covenant set (the mythical version) but I am far from trying it out, only at level 55.

I hate Gargabol, with all my heart… I have so far had every build from summoner to caster and ranged and melee and it was a major pain to fight with all of them in its natural environment. You have this gigantic mound of rock walk after you (it is faster than it looks) while the fire jets can randomly erupt from anywhere and kill you instantly even with max fire resistence unless you move, and then if you try and stop to attack, the spawned lava plants will bombard you with even more fire! I never met Gargabol in the Shattered Realm, maybe without the fire jets he is not so bad, but those plants are a major detriment to every class that needs to stop in order to fire/cast spells…

I can concur to this. Iron Maiden is somehow worse because she also stuns you and lets slower melee bosses close in and finish the job while you cannot do anything.
Heck, I noticed even just during regular play that there are certain monsters that seem to ignore your pets more than others, and rush you at the slightest provocation (meaning for me, Curse of Frailty or vines). Yetis and their Ugdenbog Leafmane cousins, and the more dangerous ones, Cronley’s Murderers. They always come and hurl that damn spectral dagger right at me, ignoring the pets, and I bet that thing does % life reduction because even with max vitality resist it does hurt.

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162

I know about Lost Souls and it still underperforms. My point is if you play without gear as I do every 4-5 Months its kind of bad to level relying on the hellhound. Even with Lost soul the hellhound its still… how i put it… shit :wink:. It can clear all content though. I dont like the idea having more pets behind sets. If you had a second hellhound through skills and even a 3rd through the Lost Souls it would be for sure stronger. Still Lost Soul Set blocks so many better options for hellhound but you kind have to use it since you need the second hellhound.

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