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

As usual, I did it. And I got past the first room! Only one character has ever done that before. Not just the first room, I actually got to the final room in the whole 3 floor dungeon. And the last purple guy was distracted, looking at something else in the room. So I laid down a couple of traps. Uh oh! He noticed me. Before I could pull the right trigger and start shooting he walked up to me with his sword and killed me.

Arrrrrrrgh. I had one job: to make sure he didn’t get next to me, and I couldn’t even do that for that last battle. Oh well. It was actually a fun dungeon this time because my character is such a badass at offense. Sucking at defense didn’t matter as much because I could usually kill the slow undead before they got to me. Kill them pretty quickly. Until the end there, of course.

Wait, are you saying it wasn’t all level 50 (on Normal)?

I did Steps on Normal with my level 70 something and it was all green, I basically just walked through the place. I guess it could have changed with Malmouth.

No, I did the Steps of Torment dungeon on Elite. Originally when i got there, I alt-tabbed out, and did that one post where I was wondering if I should open the door or not, or go to normal difficulty, but if I’d gone to Normal, I’d have to fight all the way down to that door again, which is a pain in the ass. So I just alt-tabbed back and did the dungeon on Elite.

Ah ok, then it sounds like you did awesome then. Hell, making it past that first kill room (forgot the name) is pretty impressive.

My pure Arcanist is lvl 62 now, killing that Act 1 boss on Elite was a b*tch. Those poison darts he threw killed me innumerable times and he can’t regen-ing his health each death. Lost probably 3/4 of a level worth of experience at 59. Should’ve dinged the next level farming areas and then fought him.

Yeah, Mirror of Ereoctes doesn’t help much against bosses like that since it only protects for 3 seconds and then leaves you vulnerable for 20 seconds or so, 15 seconds even if you build it up. And Maiven of Protection helps a bit, but not all that much against a big boss.

You definitely need a second class to be able to stand up to those guys. For me it was Demolitionist, just so that I could put on Blast Shield, which lasts much longer than the spells above.

I have to disagree - my pure Arcanist is tooling along in Ultimate. (I’m not playing hardcore, so she has died in boss fights, but ultimately prevailed.) She’s actually been the smoothest sailing of my three toons that made it to Ultimate (the others being a pure Nightblade and a Soldier/Demolitionist).

So how did you make it past the above described fight? Do you remember? I remember dying there a lot.

My current character, the Purifier, is actually pretty good at surviving. The dual combo of Blast Shield and Prismatic Rage, or whatever it’s called is pretty good at absorbing a few big hits while I lay waste. My best defense is offense though. The cold Rune I lay down freezes enemies for 0.7 seconds. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it really helps keeping enemies away from me, since I can lay down that rune again and again. And the Fire Rune helps a lot too, because it causes them to fumble and fall down, and they have to get back up. This gets me even more than 0.7 seconds with each enemy. So the combination of the two usually means that if an enemy is not immune to fumbles or stuns or being frozen, I can usually keep them away from me and kill them pretty fast with my other abilities.

I’m at level 71 now. Just from memory, this is approximately what I’ve got now:

http://www.grimtools.com/calc/JVlMOqxZ

Including the devotion points.

Overall, I can go into Flame-touched/Temper to build up either fire damage or pierced damage. Or I can put 18 more points into Demolitionist, so that I can get more base stats (Physique, Cunning, Spirit, health, energy). I think the latter might be more beneficial overall.

Elite Warden? Nah, I don’t remember. I may have filled up on bug juice as I do with tougher boss fights. Otherwise it was probably just run around spamming Trojan’s Sky Shard or Blizzard (or both? are they separate spells?) and then on Mirror cooldown, pop it, run in and Albrecht’s Aether Ray. Lather/rinse/repeat as they say. But it was a while ago.

Also, and I don’t remember if I did it in this case, but sometimes you have to lean in to the twitchy and act like you’re playing Dark Souls a bit. I think those green darts, for example, move slowly enough to be dodged.

Yeah, back in the keyboard and mouse days (like when I played the Arcanist), I found dodging to be almost impossible. But I have to admit, it’s a lot more viable now that I’m on gamepad. I still wish they had a dodge move like in Diablo 3 though. It’s pretty essential when the bosses have a one-hit-and-you’re-dead move.

I think in the next month or two I’ll pick up the expansion and get back into this. Any suggested builds that work well with a gamepad?

They do, except my 53yo aged reflexes weren’t quite up to the task 100%. So I used that hallway that leads into the boss’ room and its corners to avoid those missile attacks.

Because you can never get enough Grim Dawn, I created yet another character, a dual-wielding Nightblade. That’s level 23 already and I’m having a blast with it.

Steam says it updated Grim Dawn. So I went looking for the changes.

Sounds like a lot of them!
http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=219990

I see a few notes in there about increased drops. This could just be luck, but I played for 20 minutes this morning, and I found 4 purple items already.

Also, I’m tempted by the Crucible again, since a lot of the differences in this patch seem to make improvements to the Crucible. OTOH, I still can’t envision myself playing the Crucible instead of the normal campaign.

I think I may have already said this earlier in the thread, but my take on it is that you don’t play it instead of the main campaign, you play it alongside the main campaign. If you ever find yourself with only 20 minutes to play or you’ve hit a dry spell with gear or you want to snag a few Devotion points, it’s a great fit.

It’s also fun and challenging in its own right, trying to see how many waves you can go with your current build. Do you cash out and grab your rewards now, or do you think you can handle 10 more waves?

The biggest thing that makes that sound fun is that with the Purifier, I’ve finally found my first character that actually stays alive against most big difficulty spikes in this game. So before the Purifier, I can just see myself dying all the time. But maybe my Purifier can actually take 10 more waves. It’s actually a possibility! :P

The Purifier works beautifully with the gamepad. Unfortunately, I haven’t tried other classes with the gamepad yet, so I don’t know who else works well. Basically the Purifier is a dual-gunslinger. Demolitionist + Inquisitor. It’s very satisfying to put your main attacks on the triggers and pow pow pow, the monsters are pushed back before they get to you.

I can see the gamepad working well with any class where you only need to do 6 abilities at the most. If you regularly use more than 6 abilities, it gets a bit iffy.

Right Trigger
Left Trigger
A
B
X
Y

These are really easy to press, and should be the main abilities you use.

Right Bumper - Health potion
Left Bumper - Mana Potion

These potion buttons are preset. You could change them, but I figure that’s a pretty good setup.

Right Stick Click
Left Stick Click

I use these for abilities that I don’t use as often as the main 6. Stuff that I need to do relatively rarely. The sticks are not all that convenient to click all the time.

And I definitely don’t assign or use the d-pad for anything, though I suppose I could. I’m pretty sure there’s a default assignment for the d-pad already, but I hate d-pads in general, and the 360 d-pad is notoriously not great anyway.

For everything else I switch to mouse and keyboard. So for example, when I first start up Grim Dawn for the evening and log in as a character, and I need to put on my buffs, I do that with the mouse. No use wasting buttons on the gamepad for buffs when the mouse will get the job done. You can put up buffs that toggle on while you’re in town. You can trade with merchants and sort inventory using the mouse while in town, so don’t try to mess with that stuff with the gamepad. It can be done, but it’s so much easier with the mouse.

I think the next character that I’m going to try with the gamepad will be either my Warder (Soldier + Shaman) (level 61), who I haven’t played since last year, or my Nightblade (level 25 or so). Both are melee characters. One uses two handed weapons (the warder) and the other dual-wields swords (nightblade). Both should be interesting to try out with the gamepad.

This is one of my favorite aspects of Grim Dawn. New characters start kicking ass with unique abilities and moves early on in the game. You don’t need to sink countless hours in the game to get a unique-feeling character.

I highly recommend that aura that reduces your enemies’ cold and pierce resistances. I had that maxed out pretty fast. It doesn’t show up in your DPS number, but it helps you slice and dice through everyone much faster.