Gearing up to get busy again soon and need some user feedback from people that want to play Grimmest but cannot due to lag.
As of now, Grimmest could use some love but it is pretty much where I want it. Grimmer, on the other hand is basically vaporware. It is just a small downgrade akin to Normal vs Veteran.
Not promising anyone anything here, but I will read what everyone has to say and try to decide what to do about Grimmer mode over the next week or so.
You could do what is in Dail(B) mode?
“(B) = Medium Grimmest - this is essentially boss script upgrades and x2 heroes with regular other spawns”
I haven’t tried it personally; I play in (S) mode. But it sounds like fewer trash mobs would help with lag while still providing challenging hero and boss encounters.
Grimmest - I uh, walked away from all that. 
^Yeah, maybe a boss/hero multiplier version alongside a complete multiplier version of the mod could help with that. Lag would certainly dissipate a bit but it should still maintain the overwhelming Grimmest feel.
I am playing with B with an aetherfire arcanist self-found, and seriously, it’s been a damn while since I enjoyed games session that much.
I’m lvl28, died 6 times, I just killed Crowley and overall it feels pretty damn well balanced! I could’ve survived a few deaths if I didn’t extended and paid more attention.
The elite pack are challenging yet not too overwhelming. Since it has less trash mobs, meaning less xp, the game keeps being challenging and feel much more balanced than full grimmer/grimmest.
I don’t have a super CPU but the game runs smooth as hell compared to full…
I play a lot of DAIL B.
In short: increased heroes and bosses is interesting, a bit more challenging and rewarding. Fields of trash that offer no threat, no loot and slow down my system… not so interesting!
Is it Grimmer or Grimmest that causes Bourbon to split to 16 in total? That was a tad on the crazy side (maybe it’s okay since it’s a one-off kind of challenge!). And summoners to summon entire armies? Usually that’s not a challenge, just a good way to kill FPS.
I think, that early stages should have less drastic density changes, so you don’t meet sewage spill of 40 trash mobs at once when you are still sub lvl15, and you don’t yet have enough firepower to deal with it in reasonable amount of time.
A bit less trash mobs overall, they don’t pose much of a threat and are just not valuable enough, in terms of items, just nuisance. Smaller packs near each other, so there is not much downtime between combat encounters, but also you don’t walk into screens of everything that just bum rush you at once. I like the gist of ‘surrounded by 1000 mobs’, but not 100% of the time, without any breathing room. It doesn’t need to be so intense all the time so long as there is a good pacing between mid to high density areas. At later areas, greatly increasing elites and how often you meet them should scale up the difficulty rapidly.
Also, I think the problem here is that big clusters of mobs just devalues single target skills too much, so there should be at least portions that are dense like sardine cans but also portions where single target matters more. Second problem is that by adding a boatload of trash constantly, you can get significant performance hit and fps issues.
Don’t get me wrong, huge hordes of mobs does up the challenge, but I think more interesting approach would be if they are a special treat that appears occasionally, rather than a constant state of affairs. Just my .02 cents. Although this is of course my personal preference, the fun factor depends entirely on preferred play style.
That’s vanilla Grim Dawn. 
Good ol’ ‘plain grim’
Personally I’d like to see a difficulty where mob spawns are maybe a factor 1.1 to 1.2 denser than in vanilla, except for pita spawns like traps in BoC, heroes spawn at max and bosses stay as they are, i.e. a single spawn, but maybe slightly stronger.
Thanks for feedback. Keep it coming. This is pretty close to the top of the todo list. Should be trying to put something together in the next couple of days.
It alsmost sounds like I could acheive this through a playersX modification. If, in SP, the game treated you like you were in a party of 3, I suspect that it would be harder, without major performance issues. Might take the easy route, if playersX turns out to be easy…or I might just try to point Grimmer to the middle of vanilla and Grimmest.
Somehow, I have seen feedback that Grimmest is not challenging enough…So I am not really willing to nerf much from Grimmest. Still cannot decide on Grimmer though. But I feel like just pumping heroes will devalue them and alter the feeling of the game. The point of the massive fodder is that you cannot just run around and hunt hero packs. Ignore too many trash mobs in Grimmest, and you will get yourself into a situation that either you or your PC cannot recover from.
Maybe something similar to the current DAIL X mode, toughen the mobs but increase rewards. Then with Grimmer and Grimmest, you would have the choice of increased challenge through tougher mobs, or increased challenge through mob density.
That’s just awful, terrible game design. The player should never be playing against his own hardware.
I realize your username suggests it, but “what planet are you from?”
Grimmest is a mod, not a game. Your feedback makes me want to just drop Grimmer altogether. If you do not like it, play vanilla. Or better yet, make something you would like and provide it to others.
Could be Planet Alienware with moon called Dell.
Sadly, Alienware became the moon and the planet Dell is rotten to the core.
While I get the joke, I doubt anybody else has a clue what you are on about.
(exceptt that it is Off Topic - but not so much, if you knew that GD playtesting melted my GPU in my laptop, twice.)
You’re not the only one (not me, not twice).
Yes, a mod of a game, to claim game design is not relevant is simply ridiculous.
I should have been more clear. I killed Bourbon and obtained 16 copies of the armor. I killed 16 lots of 16 bourbons.
It was in DAIL. I can’t say for sure it’s a Grimmer/Grimmest thing, but I think that’s what causes some dudes to split into 4 new things from time to time. Aether teraformers when they’re half dead have an animation, then 4 half dead ones appear, the first Cronley hero outside of Devil’s Crossing has 4 near-corpses to talk to on the floor, Moos splits into 4 when he comes back to life, etc. Bourbon seemed to go through the same process each time he split.
I’m not absolutely sure I killed 256+ Bourbons in total but it was a ludicrous battle. It wouldn’t surprise me if I killed that many.
Well, one of the biggest problems that modders face is that we feel that we get next to zero feedback nor bug reports in the main thread for the mod. And a bug report that is qualified as, maybe due to DAIL, when we have no real clue how DAIL is done, nor what other changes are happening, makes us reluctant to even check it out.
But I will recheck the ondeath spawns for Grimmest. There was a time where one of my scripts did really stupid things, I thought I fixed them all, but maybe I missed something.
Yeah, DAIL does muck things up a bunch when it comes to bug reports, a lot get thrown into the main DAIL thread itself.