12th July stream:
"berax22 : when can we see the patch notes
When the patch comes out because the community has shown that showing you patch notes in advance is not good for your health.
RektbyProtoss : just give us the patch notes with a disclaimer "read at own health risk
Yeah, cause that’s worked before.
rebel7254 : does waiting until patch is out to release the notes really reduce complaining?
Yes,it actually does."
quote not quite working within the preview, but for those who need a refresher.
That wazzz FUN!
BTW if it wasn’t for that Hungering Void would’ve had 16s uptime.
If that preview didn’t happen hungering void will still be better, but it would be added on 1.1.2.1 instead of 1.1.2.0
Honestly the one thing that trivializes veteran / elite difficulties was the leveling process WITHOUT xp pots and/or gear. You would vastly out level almost everything if you fully cleared all zones which most new players love to do…especially in a game like this that has so many secrets spread throughout the maps.
First playthrough of all the areas and all content without FG xpac would get me around level 70-75. That’s only 25 levels off the max and makes elite mode just boring and easy.
I think the leveling curve needs to be adjusted so that you are at least level 50 by first playthrough of everything and level 92 by end of elite. This addition along with the new difficulty curve would make the game a lot more enjoyable and challenging.
Or we could just get rid of Elite. It doesn’t have much sense at this point anyway. Make normal harder (or tweak Veteran to be), then move to Ultimate.
The progression is already quite weird, for example Elite FG is harder than the majority of vanilla Ultimate.
It’s a mess, let’s be honest here.
Another problem is that by any form of twinking, it just becomes a snoozefest till you reach ultimate content. But that’s quite a few hours of life wasted on ragdolling helpless mooks.
Devs have said that is it pretty much too much work for that
Savior’s Merit already does it for future chars. Ultimate is scaled to accomodate twinkers or those who rush 55p from shrines very early.
I think for a first time player, playing through elite is beneficial since you get more experience with the game that way. Repetition is the mother of knowledge.
Well I think it’s a persistent problem with ARPGs. You want to try a new endgame build, but you have to play through hours of pointless content if you’re twinked just to be able to do it.
It surely scares me off and I devoted over 2400 hours into this game. At a certain point you just don’t want to play through the game again (the early content that is), I probably did so a couple dozen times with different characters.
I am aware of Savior’s Merit, but it’s still a while to get to level 100, even with xp potion and lokkar’s set.
I think very good players can get to level 94 in 6-7 hours.
I know the feeling. I have leveled 15 different characters form 1 to 100. And at some point it’s become annoying. For long time leveling was my favorite part of the game. New patch will change the difficulty, so will level new guy, my Warlock the bringer of Doom 
yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing more of these situations.
Can’t upvote this more. On my first playthrough i basically rushed through elite not doing anything on the side whatsoever. It’s completely pointless and adds nothing to the game at it’s current state.
But to be honest, that’s the Reason why i love such Games as for today. How many Games are actually out there (nowdays), where you can actually spent hundrets up to thousands of hours and really invest your time to it. Not arguing that other Games are per-se bad, but since Gaming opened up to Mainstream-Gaming and Casuals, the Majority of Games out there can only keep you interested for an short period, because it’s made easy and handholding, and god forbid if a Game is really time-consuming.
And if i look at leveling in Grim Dawn, they kinda nailed it for me anyway. As much as i love Diablo 3(yeah - there are people like that out there as well, even folks who are Fan of the Series since the first hour back in the day of Diablo 1), as fast you get Level 70, i really, really hate even the short period which i spent on leveling said characters, which is one of the reasons why i despise Seasons so much, because this whole Leveling Process of Diablo 3 is so freaking boring. The Concept / Idea was cool for the first playthrough, because unlike Diablo 2 where i didn’t want to waste any points, i rather save it up for the skills which i want to use, in Diablo 3 you had actually almost every level something to play with and that made an really amazing expierence for the first playthrough, but once you start an second character of the same class, this gets old, really old, and that’s different with Games like GD with proper skilltrees and such, because every level up you spent point etc which kinda let’s you interact with your leveling.
Also i don’t find Leveling in Grim Dawn either to fast and to slow. It doesn’t take month or even years to hit max-level, but it also doesn’t feel to fast… and with things like knowledge, exp-potions and lokkar set you can even be more efficient if you want too.
#Difficulties:
Yeah it’s interesting to see, that a Feature, which was back than a more “unique” features is something which annoy us today. And i’d argue it’s games like Diablo 3(, Torchlight 2) etc spoiled us too much in this direction. Also this Adventure-Mode is something which i really love about the Game and wish for many other Games in this genre to be added, due modern HnS 've gone pretty narrative and offer many Quests… and often tend to deliever handcrafted Maps instead of randomized, which makes playthrough feel repetitive.
Though i’ve to point out that the skip-token does a good job on that, due it unlocks als waypoints and skip through normal / elite, so it’s feels sandboxy similiar to the Adventure Mode and helps.
Good? hmm. Optimal, perhaps - as there is no difficulty or even manual challenge in this, you just need to know what to do exactly and be devoted to it.
Still, 6-7 hours of doing something you probably don’t want to do at this stage of the game’s life is still painful. And at the same time, I know that there’s literally no ARPG that really offers a solution. A big part of the fun is just playing through the game. In fact most of my playtime has been in the 1-75th period, as at that point I’d either “feel” the charcter or dislike the gameplay and move on.
I am 100% sure I will not be making any new chars unless there’s a new exp/new class added 
I was lucky enough to have a Warder (which was a lightning retal dude wearing Dawnbreaker but it got a little unimpressive after the nerfs) when I wanted to test out the avenger (and I’m glad I did just change the skills and tried it out… it kinda underperforms, despite being fun to play 
).
Gods above and below, how many times does it have to be said. They are not removing difficulties.
From the 19th April stream:
"FicWader : @CrateEntertainment will you consider making the game one bigass act if you add another expansion, like PoE did? Cause atm, if you want to play for “completion”, it gets a bit bloated with 3 diffs now with 2nd expansion
Here’s the thing. In terms of difficulty progression I actually don’t like the setup of having one difficulty because then we have to actually make the game really difficult even for casual players. I wouldn’t want the endgame of the main story to feel like Ultimate difficulty for a casual player, I don’t think that would work at least for our audience. However, with this edition of the expansion you don’t actually have to play them to Ultimate difficulty. And finally, we’ve added difficulty skip tokens in Forgotten Gods so if you want to roll new characters you can just send those tokens over to them from your main characters that have already been in those difficulties and you can just skip right ahead."
Remember that the majority of players only finish Normal, if that, and then move on to something else. Making that even harder for them would make a lot of sense business-wise now, wouldn’t it? 
Not to mention all the work in rebalancing for two difficulties instead of three.
Have you forgotten what it is like being a new player? Especially for hc players elite very much has a purpose…
All these people complaining should just gdstash a lvl 100 character if you detest the levelling experience so much. No suffering for you
We may as well add (create in Gdstash) all the gear and call it a day. Cheating isn’t a solution.
Perhaps an autolevelup token to be dropped from high Shattered Realm levels. If you got there, you’re certainly a) not a noob b) spent a lot of time on this game.
