Grim Dawn - An ARPG from Crate (ex Iron Lore aka Titan Quest devs)

I do believe this is sarcasm!

That mechanic sounds pretty lame.

Well, it’s an attempt to integrate iron-man mode into normal play, in a limited way. As it only applies to optional content, I don’t really mind. GD’s whole design philosophy is based around the idea that some content will not be easily reachable. There are some significant zones and at least one big quest chain, for example, that you could quite easily play through the game several times and never know existed.

My only gripe is that the rewards for the behind-the-doors zones and quests don’t seem all that hot compared to what you can get normally.

The mechanic doesn’t bug me really, though I do agree the rewards seem out of whack with the effort. What does bug me is that the zones simply aren’t that enjoyable. If they were really cool but hard, or if they paid off in really phat lootz, that’d be different.

Last night I realized that my Necromancer was in the exact same spot in the Elite campaign as my Purifier was in the Normal/Veteran campaign (level 15), so I switched back to the Purifier. This character is the Inquisitor + Demolisionist. The first character I’ve played where guns actually do a decent amount of damage.

Playing the purifier was pretty fun. I think I’m going to continue on this tangent for a while before going back to the Necro.

I still can’t decide whether to do a pure Shooter, or to keep using Rune of Hagaard and Rune of Blahblahblah. (The cold rune and the hot rune). Both are really fun to use, but will require some serious points investment later. If I don’t diverge too much, my pure shooter points can go a long way.

I respecced my Purifier when I went onto Elite difficulty to give up the Demolitionist attack skill (Fire strike tree) and invest points into the Inquisitor passive attack skills (Ranged Expertise and the other skills on the top line). It meant a massive drop in my DPS but I believe I am still killing enemies just as fast without having to down spirit pots all the time and fire resist enemies aren’t a problem any longer. In fact, I believe I have over 200 mana pots now because I don’t use them! Bursting round, chilling round and storm spread each have a devotion skill attached to them, so if any of those rounds go off, it’ll have a chance to proc meteor strike, tsunami and falcon swoop respectively.

Survivability is still tough. Grim Dawn is the first game though where I’m using the bags to hold resist gear that may not be optimal most of the time, but needed for certain areas. Obviously, the swamps mean I have a set of poison resist, and for the occult which is mostly chaos/bleeding damage I believe, it’ll be resist gear for that. I seem to do ok just getting elemental resist quite easily.

The Candle District just isn’t fun. It’s neat looking, but it’s a just one big patchwork of hallways and bridges. All too often roofs or walls were blocking my view, or my character got hung up on corners as I was trying to move around. My computer doesn’t do well with rotating the camera in battle, so that usually isn’t possible for me.

On top of that the difficulty has gone off the deep end. Outside of a few side quest bosses that were tough, I had been doing pretty good, but I can’t count how many times I have died lately. The final boss for the Candle District could kill me in 2 hits, so I had to cheese it. Run up, dot it, and run out of range. Repeat a dozen times hoping I didn’t get caught up on a corner as I ran away. I died about half a dozen times.

I am pretty sure a huge part of my problem is aether resistance, but I am not finding anything worth keeping that has it. Also maybe I need to level up some more? Think the Candle boss was level 66 (I am 60).

I really just want to be done with the game at this point. Usually I can’t wait to start the next difficulty, but now I just want to beat the DLC and be done. Scared I won’t be able to beat the final boss though.

Has anyone else tried the new gamepad controls?

Here’s my impressions:

Cons:

  • It’s still only a half-measure. Dealing with inventory using a gamepad is a nightmare.
  • When there’s a bunch of junk on the ground, and your inventory is full, don’t do a portal home right there, because the game will make it impossible to go through the portal, and will instead focus on the loot on the ground.

Pros:

  • I do like the navigation of the screens through the Skills menu and the map
  • Using the actual gamepad for the meat of the gameplay is definitely satisfying in the same way that it is in Diablo 3
  • Using buttons like A and RT and LT to fire off abilities is really fun, especially with the character I’ve tried so far, which is dual pistol wielding Purifier. Bam bam bam bam bam. So much more satisfying to pull the right trigger to shoot than the physical click of a mouse button.

So overall, I still wouldn’t recommend it to people, just because a lot of the busy work in a game like this still has to be done with the mouse. But when you get out of town and go through a portal and start killing things? I highly recommend trying out the gamepad for that core gameplay loop. It’s meaty and visceral and even more fun than using the mouse.

Yep, can’t beat the final boss. He isn’t that bad, there is room to run, but he is spawning stuff that is 6 levels above me that beat me down quickly. I am not sure if I want to just start elite and level up and get some better gear, or if I am done. Kind of tempted bring my Ultimate 81 Shaman/Soldier through the expansion at normal though. Everything would be green to him though I think.

Created a Commando last weekend and just hit level 57. Picked up the Malmouth expansion while it’s on sale too. Love the game, it finally after all these years gelled with me. All it took was reinstalling TQ and wanting something a bit newer and less stale for me.

I see a lot of Black Cocktail Commando recommendations, but I love the mortar. Probably 70% of my skill points have gone into demonologist, with the remaining in Menhir’s Will, Overguard, and a few other skills in soldier.

I just can’t stop playing this game again even when it is making me mad. I took my character who couldn’t beat the final Malmouth boss to Elite difficulty at level 62 and the game is cake again. In Malmouth my pets could barely stay alive and I was having to be really careful about getting myself into difficult spots. Purple named bosses usually meant at least one death. But back in the swamps at Elite, everything is level 61-63 so far and nothing kills my pets. I can pretty much charge into anything so far (I am sure that will change).

There really is a huge difficulty spike from the regular game to Malmouth. I wonder if they intended it for higher level characters with good gear?

I am a little frustrated at not having some of these sets yet. I’ve played this game for hundreds of hours now, I should have the basic sets sitting around in my shared stash somewhere. But I looked through all my character’s personal stashes as well this morning: nope, no one has the fire and ice set with the ammo belt. I’ve found one of the two guns for it over and over but never the second gun. And I’ve found the gloves in that set, but never the belt. Damn it.

It’s not as if the set is all that great, it’s just that after so many hours, I just feel like all these low level sets should be accessible for me to try out if I want.

I don’t have any full sets either, lots with 2-3 pieces. I never got far in Ultimate difficulty, which would probably have increased my chances a bit. Even on Elite I am already seeing better drops though. Got two legendary items already in the swamps.

Yeah, but on Elite difficulty (i’ve never made it past Act 2 Elite) I mostly get “Empowered” Blue drops or Purple drops. So that’s stuff with a minimum level of 50 or 65. So that doesn’t really help my early characters.

TQ was the same way, very hard to get full sets of gear. Best way is to trade with a friend. We used to swap save files for TQ, dump everything in to the shared stash once you load your friend’s file/character(s).

You’re right there, I don’t get enough set items on normal to make twinking characters feasible. On the other hand, on normal you don’t really need it anyway (excluding Malmouth), as long as your build is semi competent the bosses are all pretty easy. Elite is where your gear really starts to matter, and I have a ton of set stuff for 65+ characters.

Interesting philosophy. Since my stash space is so limited, I usually don’t store level 50+ stuff in the shared stash. Most of it just stays in each character’s inventory, so I don’t even know what they can share without going into each character, which I don’t usually bother with.

For me, the vast majority of the game takes place with each character on Normal, so that’s what I concentrate on. I don’t really care about the Elite loot, usually.

Finished Malmouth today. Surprise! I didn’t even realize what I was doing was the end-game and it finished without any fanfare. Huh. I didn’t think it was the end because I had found an area I couldn’t get into in my exploring and figured it would unlock when I completed my current mission. Whoops, I obviously wasn’t paying attention.

With my Apostate at 65, maybe I’ll just do some bounties and difficulty level advancement as I’m still really enjoying the character, especially now that I have the Necro tree at 50 and unlocked a top level skill for my pets.

And yeah, the only set I think I ever had was Maurader’s which was perfect for my early dual-pistol Apostate, but shifted it out piece by piece and eventually ended up with a two-handed purple crossbow anyway.

That’s how the main game used to end too. Luckily, the expansion added a cutscene at the end of the old main campaign. So I guess in order to see the ending of Malmouth, we’ll have to wait for the next expansion.

The only full set I’ve found/made is the Explorers Gear set. It’s a pretty nifty set to power level early-ish characters because my progression through the 20’s with the Necromancer was fast.

For item storage, I’ve moved onto a third party program called GDStash. It is nowhere near as elegant as the TQVault I used for that game, but it still functional and allows me to quickly see what set items I have kept. One mistake I made was to acquire all the recipes when clicking around the program, so I’ve lost the fun that comes with finding blueprints. But at the same time, it saves having to farm areas trying to find blueprints.

Yeah, I have the Explorer’s Set too. I used it for my Necro, and now my Purifier is wearing it. It’s nice to have a set like that at low levels. It’s not super great, but for a few levels, it’s pretty nice.

I also had the Eastern Pledge. I actually moved around my Sorcerer’s abilities around for that one, since it gives a bonus to the frozen meteor abilities. I didn’t have any points into that, but after getting that set, I moved skills around and went full force into the frozen meteor. That set works well with that.