What do you make of 1.1.2?

Grim Dawn Gameplay Discussion
1

I feel like 1.1.2 has been the most controversial/hotly debated patch that I personally know of.

The 3 biggest changes which stick out to me are:

  1. Changes to SR ammy

  2. The warlord - arguably the crowd’s favorite - being slapped left and right with Zantai’s nerfhammer.

  3. The radical changes to AAR (which almost immediately resulted in a debate.)

Are these changes fair? Are they sufficient? Or insufficient?

Rules for commenting in this thread which I hope we can all be mature enough to adhere to:

  1. Keeping an open-mind
  2. Being respectful and polite (especially when disagreeing)
  3. Clearly stating which of your opinions are based on GT theorycrafting, and which of your opinions are based on actual in-game testing.
2

Way too much collateral damage.

1) Mythical Zolhan’s Revenge. The nerf on the retaliation damage added to WPS hurt every retaliation build that didn’t include Oathkeeper. The reason for this is Oathkeeper has Shattering Smash that has numerous items that add %retaliation damage to that respective WPS. So, while warlord can still carry 2 %retaliation damage WPS skills, most anything else can only carry 1.

Needed to remain 30% and add the retaliation damage to something a warlord wouldn’t care to take, such as Blitz, Blade Arc, or even Cadence at a reduced amount.

2) Physical retaliation damage nerfed across the board. Not sure if really necessary. I personally think the major problem was the fact that Oathkeeper has 2 stacking sources of physical resistance reduction than anything else. Of course % Physical Retaliation with all of that resistance reduction is going to melt anything.

3) Block Recovery/Overguard nerfs. The reduced block recovery in addition to the longer cooldown means tanks can’t tank as much as they used to now. I’m now forced to flee much more often in Crucible 150-170 whereas before I could reliably face down enemies gradually. It kind of ruined the vibe I wanted of an unrelenting tank. I’m now forced to flee much more often in Crucible 150-170 whereas before I could reliably face down enemies and outlast them.

My point being on this subject is if I’m going to be forced to flee this often, why wouldn’t I just make a higher DPS character that’d be doing that anyway? Pets seem very strong right now and the player doesn’t even have to engage enemies most times.

4) Retaliation Oathkeeper not hit where it hurt the most: too much %retaliation damage added to attack is available to the Oathkeeper. I think a big oversight is the availability of %retal on the skill trees and then you have items that do the exact same thing.

This right here was the major problem of Warlord pre-1.1.2.

a)42% (total available) retaliation damage added to Righteous Fervor, a default attack skill
b)2 stacking physical resistance reduction effects
c)2 WPS with 22-30% Retaliation Damage added to attack to those respective skills.

It wasn’t the tankiness. It was just the fact that they simply did too much damage for the tankiness they had. If it took them 15-20 mins to clear a naked Crucible 150-170, this wouldn’t even be a problem.

I think simply reducing the overall %retaliation to attack available to Oathkeeper, shifting M. Zolhan’s Revenge to a different skill, and making Shattering Smash reduce enemy Defensive Ability instead of Physical Resistance would’ve sufficed instead of this. Say if Warlord had to take Break Morale for physical resistance reduction would’ve balanced it out nicely as it would require heavy skill point investment.

But now, my retaliation based Tactician is not really as fun as it used to be from the collateral damage of these nerfs.

It barely had a 15 minute naked Crucible before these nerfs on a lucky boss streak, now likely to be much longer.

3

The SR amulet nerf is a bad hit for my blademaster, since none of the Conduit mods for either soldier or nightblade are worth anything to a DW physical attacker. All of the replacements either lack the defensive options (Beronath, Bloodrager) or have worthless skill mods (Spellscourge, Avenger of Cairn, every Conduit) that I’m giving up +1 skills for. It doesn’t help that Nightblade is quite points-hungry in that regard. Guess I’ll be GDStashing myself some double-rare Kaisan’s instead.

4

Certain things could have been nerfed more without much consequence, they went pretty light handed this time around.

SR amulet nerf was putting what should have been a filler progress piece in its place. The devs have more or less implied they wanted the set to be used, not for individual pieces to outperform other options.

Warlord overtuned, why wouldn’t it get smacked sideways? It was popular because it was OP, simple.

5

@dispassion: could you post your GT? And if you were Zantai, how would you have handled the phys retal nerfs

@xervous: I agree. But I also can’t state that as a substantiated opinion because I have not played phys retal builds. What in your opinion should be nerfed harder?

6

Unplayable with the controller/UI updates

7

Performance will tell in time, I need to check up on the exact performance of some builds but EoR didn’t really get nerfed (cyclone especially). The damage the skill can output is based mainly off your ability to convert it, and max the base skill (going 25->26 is a 10% damage increase on EoR). Weapon damage doesn’t play into it much, so any EoR build that gets showered in the +skills and conversion will have the damage. Cyclone is something of an outlier in terms of defensive values (physical resist mainly).

Devs said they were to be nerfing venomblade set, but the adjustments were rather minor and 7% more RR got handed out just like that (an overall buff). No strong feelings on that but it looks more like a slap on the wrist if anything

Inquisitor… I’m going to wait and see if this latest pass has knocked inquis down enough to the point where its passive bonuses are in line with the time demanded of other masteries to deploy their bonuses.

8

Agree with you on EoR, but shall refrain from commenting on cyclone as I haven’t played it. What I do know is that warborn EoR is still a monster of a build. I’ve suggested giving the warborn set a 5% energy increase to EoR to prevent nerfs from resulting in collateral damage to other EoR builds.

Regarding the inqui…dunno if I agree with you here. The inquisitor has now been made into a support class. While the passive deserved to be knocked down a peg or 2, to do that in conjunction with the previous nerfs made to things like storm spread and runes is quite devastating.

9

https://www.grimtools.com/calc/d2jYArnN

This is my tank build.

If I were Zantai, I would’ve kept the retaliation reduction to the Overguard transmutor. After that, I would’ve done 1 of 2 things.

  1. Tweaked the amount of % retaliation damage added to attack that’s available. Retaliation builds were not the strongest thing pre-FG. It was the addition of this mechanic that unbalanced things a bit.

or

  1. Introduce a damage type retaliation cap. This would introduce a soft-cap on total retaliation damage in that you can certainly branch out to other elements that would have diminished effect if you lack a reduced resist effect to that respective damage type.
10

Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot with 1.1.2 I’m happy with. The new FX are downright amazing and the new set reworks are highly promising.

I’m just partly salty that I was spending lots of my offtime theorycrafting my Tactician that seems to be partly nerfed.

I’m not angry at all, maybe just slightly disappointed, and I disagree with the direction of some of the nerfs.

11

About changes,one of the most positive is the reworking of how skills visuals.Also new conduits will create some interesting and unusual combinations.AAR is changed and some underperforming sets are buffed.Good performing combos are toned down.WL I will skip it,but Virtue suffered from Nerf.Aegis was OP,I have played with both Paladin and SB,reducing WD,crit and fire,basically everything.Virtue has multiple set parts nerfed,biggest loss is CDR to Aegis and CDR in general,meaning you have to use something in between casts of Aegis.Problem is both AS and CS are super low,WD is also small.Defensively also Nerf,because of Ascension change.With that and lower CDR you will have much lower uptime.Inquisitor was nerfed again patch after patch.Excellent as support class,but not a single offensive skill to carry a build.I will be totally OK if were deciding to buff damage to skills like both runes or box or WoP or FoI,but downgrade only(unless you’re using two hander),Mageslayer amulet Nerf will affect some of my build performances,mostly my Sabo.A lot of great changes,though I will be ungrateful if I am complaining:)

12

TL;DR of my comments from my patch analysis:

  1. Don’t like it. I did not find the SR amulet the end-all-be-all of amulets and it served as a nice new-player-friendly amulet to buff endgame characters as they grow out of the Lokarr set but want to continue to farm for other things. It was comparable to a base Kaisan Amulet, except Kaisan also gets other affixes which pushed it far beyond the SR Amulet. Now there’s very middling reason to use it at all outside the overly-generalist set.

When Zantai commented on how new players likely wouldn’t be able to reach SR60 to get the amulet or have Lokarr’s, I noted that reaching SR60 is quite viable with Krieg Death Knights, especially given the nerfs to SR Phys Damage across the board. And my reference to “new players” wasn’t necessarily “first characters,” but rather intended to describe players that didn’t have every other set under the sun.

  1. Well deserved, no complaints.

  2. A sound buff to the skill. It’s single-target is not overly reduced and if anything it becomes a stronger candidate for relevant on-death procs (not that there are many). AAR cleaving through hordes of enemies feels good and its no longer such a bitch to level with. A+ from me.

13

@Ceno:
Little correction:
Amulet isn´t Shard 60, that´s helmet.

14

Yup. I posted another thread trying to make a detailed case about why this new system is worse, but it’s so obviously bad I feel I wasted my time breaking it down. This game is not getting played again until they revert the gamepad stuff, and I’m just baffled as to how no one stopped themselves from pushing out something so half assed and terrible.

15

Mostly because noone noticed that controller had changes until right before release. The new system isn’t “worse” it just isn’t tweaked correctly. If the cursor navigation was repeatable (as in continuously moved with a single press and hold) it would hardly be an issue. Having to press the stick every single move makes it worse, make it repeatable tho and it’s golden.

16

Patch had me at

New FX

GOAT

17

+3% to all max res, 20% slow res, 500hp, +50% to all damage was huge IMO. Definitely was better than a base kaisan IMO. Would even go so far as to pick over a GG rolled kaisan assuming that I had sufficient skill points + good stats. While I’m personally undecided on whether or not it deserved the nerf, it definitely helped pushed a lot of builds struggling to hit SR 75 to that next level though and for that I am sad to see it go.

Regarding AAR - I’ve not seen the numbers yet, but can you shed some light on how harsh the damage reduction was?

EDIT: @dispassion - I wish I could offer some insightful perspective about your build, but unfortunately I know too little about retal builds to comment. :confused:

18

~15-25% damage reduction. Crit Damage on Disintegration was also reduced by 10% (flat) if I’m not mistaken.

Still enough to flatten bosses, but I won’t deny the dps change is noticeable.

19

In your opinion mate, do the changes in item sets compensate for the DPS drop adequately?

20

Only AAR set that got changed is Clairvoyant, no? Don’t think it is/was a great AAR set to begin with.

The pierce compensates for the DPS drop adequately. Your question seems rather loaded.