Why is OFF discriminated against?

Grim Dawn Gameplay Discussion
1

I’ve not played in a long time, but the latest patch made me think of having another go. I played for 5 minutes and the game crashed, so that’s probably me done…

But I came back to try OFF again. I’ve always thought it’s the coolest skill in the game (screen-wide freeze!) but Crate have left it useless if the freeze effect is resisted, so no medium to high end build ever uses it as more than a 1-point wonder.

Why can’t they give us the damage and proc even if the freeze is resisted? And why not have some way of getting a freeze effect? There’s something about cold and freezing/slowing that gets every developer in every game nerfing it to be useless. All RPGs I’ve played have struggled to get a really good cold build.

As I say, it’s been a while so if I’m missing something or things have changed… it would be good to hear :wink:

2

Because frozen enemies deal no damage. When enemies deal no damage there is no threat to anything you do. When there is no threat to anything you do you are a god. When you are a god things get boring quickly.

3

The question included what happens when the freeze is resisted. Getting no effect at all seems wrong.

As far as I know, freeze is the only skill that GD has ALL bosses 100% resistant to? Why even have it?

It seems better to give the player some way to have the freeze happen for some amount of time. And to give the RR/proc when it doesn’t freeze.

One problem I’ve always had with GD is that all chars end up as melee - there’s no real way to kite or play as ranged and actually kill at range (or kite) as long as you play well. GD always has you toe-to-toe with the mobs sooner or later. May as well be a melee game.

4

Many people seem to forget that CC stands for crowd control, emphasis on crowd.

Try the updated Mageslayer set if you want to freeze bosses sometimes.

5

Are other CC skills resisted 100% by 100% of bosses? I’m genuinely asking - I don’t know.

I was looking at it as a skill, rather than CC or anything. Something that only works on crowds - no bosses at all - it feels a bit… artificial. Hard to ‘suspend disbelief’.

I’ll have a look at the set, but I’d be a few hundred hours away from getting it! :frowning:

6

Check GrimTools, iirc everything stronger than a hero gains more and more CC resist, bosses and super bosses are immune to most CC if not all.

7

Except when it concerns singular players. :eek:

8

For leveling as support to Calidor Tempest or fire damage from other masteries.

Idk what you mean… I have over a dozen legit toons in my GD and only 2 of them are melee. I’ve posted 4 builds here and none of them were melee. Lately I posted a thread with a list of imo 10 most op concepts (most people agreed with my choices) and not a single one of them was melee.

If you mean that eventually enemies always catch up with you in melee range that’s also not true. Many DoT builds function by kiting and not ever getting surrounded.

OFF is just not an endgame skill. Neither is Blade Trap and Horn of Gandaharr. No reason for such zealous rants!

9

Well, the problem there is that everything is tied to the freeze. The freeze being resisted by bosses and such wouldn’t be nearly as bad if the RR still applied, could even be really cool with that dagger that converts cold to fire. Unfortunately as it stands if the freeze fails then everything fails.

Also I noticed the awful “cool” pun that doesn’t even work for converting to fire after already typing this. I’m leaving it in anyway though.

10

Zealous rants? You must have had a sheltered upbringing. I only asked a question.

11

Yes that’s exactly what I’m saying - if the freeze fails you get nothing. That seems too harsh. If you at least got the RR you could build around the skill. It seems strange to exclude such a great skill from the end game.

BTW - If we could do this… what skill / class would be best with OFF? Obviously a fire skill… I’m thinking a strong aoe for trash groups and maybe a strong single target for tougher mobs?

12

Skills that don’t really effect bosses aren’t seen as good.

If bosses could be cc’d but have a charge mechanic that increases cc resistance for a duration that might help if done well.

13

I think you may have missed the OP - the question above was hypothetically assuming the RR element of OFF did affect bosses (but not the freeze).

14

Come on man, this simply isn’t true. Kite builds exist but they struggle because they have to kite. My 2 handed ranged purifier can kill Lokar before bourbon clones appear but this requires me to face tank him. Too much dps is lost repositioning and attacking again.

My rain build sorceress gets surrounded repeatedly, so does my Mortar Trap and ranged Savagery Elementalist. Both have to stay in melee range at points of the game that’s why MoE is lifesaver. If you are referring to Frenetic Throw or RoH builds. Well, they have such high damage output that getting surrounded barely occurs.

I actually used OFF to keep enemies in place at one point but late game the enemies heavily resist the skill and in my honest opinion, it’s not even good as a crowd control skill. I think the best crowd control skill in the game is “stun”.

15

That’s wrong, the best crowd control is Death, (since crowds die too quickly to bother with it, and CC affects nothing else) followed by fumble/impaired aim(used to be), then reducing their OA, then -x% damage, …

…and only then Stun or Confusion, and even further down the line is freeze.

As for every build being a melee build: why do you think that every other build you see is cadence or savagery? Melee leftclickers are the game’s target audience.

For kiting and crowd controlling players, you have to deal with the bullshit charge mechanics from Flesh Hulks and the derived, which homes in on you so you can’t dodge it (unlike horned demons from Diablo 1’s cave levels), autohit ranged attackers, sardine cans like the second phase of gargabol fight. and shadow strikes, which make mobs untargetable by your CC/AoE skills. You are in melee at the end of the day whether you like it or not. A pistol is effectively just a one handed melee weapon, a rifle is just a 2h melee weapon. :slight_smile:

As for “just get the mageslayer full set”, Zantai, have you ever legitly farmed up a mythical tier legendary set? by the time you get one the game is effectively over. Shows how out of touch your game design is when “just farming up a legendary set” is your answer to your game’s and skills’ design.

(well, makes sense since you can in theory get lucky with the blueprint and then use the inventor transmute that will only be accessible in Forgotten Gods to make a whole set.)

After all, even if you manage to have a legendary set waiting for your character (let’s say you really like the playstyle and have GDStash like most of our playtesters to cheat the set in), you can’t even use the playstyle until you reach level 94. Nada. There is no gradual build up starting at et’s say level 30 where you can find on MIs about 10-15% reduced freeze duration to OFF, no, there is no epic that will act as your stopgap until you get your levels done (See? Spectral 1hmaces would have been really nice if they had it.), no regular L75 legendary or quest drop, no, and it’s not like you’d get to top it with another 20-30% from a mageslayer set. It’s feast or famine. And for legit players, mostly just famine.

Of course, you can try out a truly STAGGERING quantity of cadence melee sword and board and dw (with pistols or other weapons) builds with staggering amounts of gear support, but more skilled, tactical play styles are left to rust.

PS. any playtester or dev playing a kite build who thinks it’s a fine, viable playstyle without facetank capability: Try kiting down Galakros, you’ll see what I mean.

16

CC on Bosses is a really touchy subject, Freeze especially. I imagine they’re being careful with it as they don’t want to overdo it and go back to the days where builds could almost perma-Freeze Bosses only to nerf it again.

There needs to be a fine line on what Freeze can do against Bosses and what it can’t do and with the Mageslayer change, it looks like Zantai wants it to be Freeze Rimetongue.

17

Duck_King and Boromonokli have said pretty much what I felt about the game when I played it.

I think the definition of crowd ‘control’ is part of the problem: it doesn’t have to mean that something is totally under control at all times. A group of trash enemies could be frozen for a while and no-one seems to have a problem with that. For a boss, it could be anything from that (obviously undesirable) up to having short bursts of freeze on each use of the skill. Or perhaps at low levels of resistance they are freezable, but at a certain point they could be slowed in proportion to their resistance.

With OFF, as I understand it, the duration is reduced by the level of resistance, so there’s already a design in place for having bosses affected for… however long… and that lets people either get some distance or do some damage (taking advantage of the RR).

And/or you could allow the RR to have some duration even if/when not frozen. There are so many possible designs here - I just feel that all or nothing isn’t the way to go with this. I’m glad to see some other people feel the same way.

To me, it’s not just OFF - it’s the fact that every build ends up as melee. My view is that ranged builds should be able to stay ranged. When they get caught it should be because they make a mistake in playing or the build doesn’t work.

When everything has to stand toe-to-toe, people who don’t like melee builds… will tend to play another game, as I’ve been doing.

I expect some replies will now say “Well sod off and play another game then” but that’s not a good way to treat constructive feedback - I quite like GD, I would like to play a ranged/caster build but… well, at range. I chose a ranged build for a reason. The clue is on the tin! :slight_smile:

18

Out of interest, has anybody tried out the updated Mageslayer set and can comment on how good it is? The ability to “freeze bosses sometimes” sounds a little promising, at least. Is it about as effective as Rimetongue in terms of affecting bosses, or…?

19

I strongly agree with this part. Sometimes i feel like the game is all about how tanky you are. What i like about ranged/caster is to play tactical. But in front of bosses is not the case. If you can’t take head on the crazy amount of damage they do, then your build is not viable. In the end, a SnB build will be the solution to deal with the frustration of dying before you have the time to drink a potion.

And about the freez part, i personally thing boss shouldnt be 100% resistant to that. And resistance shouldnt work as reducee freezing time, but more like reduced chance to freez, like any freez effect will always have its duration reduced by 75% on boss, but the resistance reduce the chance to be afected, this way freez can still be used against boss to randomly freez them and give u a short break to recover or move. And after each time the boss is freezd, they get a freez imunity for a short period, or the resistance go to 100%, and slowlt decay to the base freez reduction over a few sec.

20

Forgotten Gods is coming soon and makes it much easier to farm your legendary sets. You can transmute a set piece into a random other piece of the set. And I’m pretty sure almost every single set’s helm will be craftable so you’ll be able to craft your way into any legendary set if you don’t want to rely on RNG too much.

Also don’t subtly jab at playtesters just because you have a hateboner against the current drop rates. We GDStash to efficiently test the end-game state of things. I’ve leveled MANY builds 1-100 entirely self found. It’s not nearly as bad as you say if you’re an efficient farmer. At least a couple of our testers don’t even touch GDStash. Norzan for example.

There are a bunch of beginner builds in the build compendium that require like 2 legendaries at most and get through Ultimate fine. All your talk about how hard it is for legit players but it seems the thought that you’re just not as good as you might think you are seemed to eluded the realm of possibility in your mind. I’m not even great at GD and I find it pretty easy to go self found, no hand me down gear, thru ultimate. And your first character that does so can farm up a bunch of loot for your future characters making it easier from then on.

Well, regardless of our contention, what ails you should evaporate in Forgotten Gods. And I actually more or less agree with you about the lvl 94 thing. I feel like 84 should have been the final level for gear (with their current stats staying the same).