Basically I was addicted to Diablo 2. No telling how much I played it. Played some shooting games like Call of Duty, Ghost Recon, Counter Strike but always loved Diablo 2 which I could relax and play with mostly one hand while throwing a ball to my dog with my left hand. Was very excited for Diablo 3 but was very let down. I played it for a while hoping improvements came but when expansion came I lost hope. For everything it improved it also got worse in another way. Since then I looked for a new ARPG Diablo style game. D3 introduced some basic 21st century QoL features (potions and gold pick up, skill hotkeys) that I couldn’t just go back to D2 and have the same experience as I used to have so I needed a new game.
I played Torchlight 2 which I enjoyed thoroughly despite the terrible itemization system. Thanks to some mods I got some more interesting items to look at but which still kept the game feeling the same - but still it lacked the same item hunting thrill. I modded some of the skills myself to work more like I wanted and had a lot of fun making different builds and seeing if/how the work which is what the genre is all about to me. Just gearing wasn’t really a part of that.
I played X-men universe but didn’t like the online MMO aspect. I tried PoE but found it to be really clunky and socketing skills in my gear really pisses me off. Never gave either of those much chance.
Then I heard about Grim Dawn somewhere - I don’t remember where. Almost exactly three years ago. I bought it but my computer didn’t met even the minimum specs. I had to endure some serious stutter but nevertheless leveled a witch hunter and elementalist. Witch hunter was not very successful but I did better with the elementalist. Because my computer sucked it was hard to play - in particular a zone like loghorren and SoT and BoC end bosses were basically unkillable for me. So I took a break from GD for probably a year or more until I got a new computer. AoM had already come out but I didn’t buy it until recently because the base game still had much to offer me.