Visual Skill Feedback

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Hey everyone! First-time poster; don’t worry, not just here to complain, I have very quickly fallen in love with this game.

Playing as an occultist though, I have to say that if there’s one thing I find other ARPGs have over Grim Dawn, it’s visually telegraphing what your skills are doing. So far my two main spells are Bloody Pox and Curse of Frailty.

Both of these skills say clearly what they do in their descriptions, but admittedly in the game I’m having a hard time seeing how they translate at times. An example is with CoF: its cast radius is, say, 3.5 metres, so you cast it, and its little sigil appears over the heads of enemies within 3.5 metres of the cast point.

That’s fine, but thinking of something like “3.5 metres” in an abstract game world is not easy. Skills feel like they’re a bit out of your hands in these cases. What if some skills like Curse of Frailty also created a brief appearance of a sigil on the ground to indicate its exact radius, and the like? Similarly, Bloody Pox is an incredibly fun skill to use, but surprisingly hard to tell who is being affected by it.

I realize that cluttering the screen with bright, colourful “indicators” is no good, but I feel like there could be some subtle ways of showing what your skills are doing when that aren’t too subtle, without cluttering your vision or detracting from the game’s rather “grounded” appearance. Agreed?

Anyway, thank you for the game! Nice to meet you all.

2

There are some more skills with aoe that could be displayed in a better way; one example being the Demolitionist’s Molotov Cocktail: Its range increases with skill level, but the flame effect keeps the same size. At max level it’s getting very obvious that the effect range is way larger than the visual range.
It would be nice if the whole ground was burning :slight_smile:

Of course I realize one has to be concerned of not including too many bright effects.

3

Then maybe making it darker is an option. If a radius of effect needs to be presented, reducing brightness on the ground in a circle around the player will not get in the way of other brighter effects.

Another problem here is if you have multiple skills that have a radius, then the indicators would get in each others’ way and there is no good way to resolve this unless you want to get each circle its distinct color which has to be tied to a specific skill.

Another option yet would be to display the radius only when you hover the mouse cursor over the skill. That way you can get a hint about the radius size but it will stay out of your face during battles. Finally an extreme customization option would be to allow the player to select which skill’s radius to display permanently. I doubt that is worth the effort of implementing though.