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

Well, I used to rarely use them early on, since there might be better stuff later. Only now that I’m deep into the game, I’m confident on what the best components and augmentations are for normal, elite, etc. Plus when you augment, you soulbound the equipment to yourself, and can no longer share it with other characters. My purifier is the first who’s been using components and augments with wreckless abandon, and leaving a whole bunch of stuff that’s not usable by other characters in his wake.

Good point about making the items unusable for other characters, especially set stuff. But that doesn’t matter to me because I really want to play something else now…just after I make a few more levels with this character and make that sword and board tank…etc.

I did end up beating that Nemesis last night. I knew it would cost me all my experience in level 81 to do so, but it was worth it. What’s funny is that in doing so, I discovered a new way to lay mines for my enemies.

Normally I face my enemy and throw the mines in their direction. And then they step over them. But since I was facing an enemy who could kill me in one hit who barrels towards me at 60 miles per hour, I would run the opposite way, and throw mines in the direction I’m running in. That way I safely step over the mines, and the enemy eventually steps over them as well, since he’s chasing me. And then he doesn’t take any damage, so I had find a good spot to circle back and make him walk over the now activated mines. And when he’s there, there’s one ability I can activate where I can take one hit from him and survive, so I’d activate that, and a few other things, have him standing over the mines as he stopped and hit me (and got hit by some of my other abilities), and then I’d start running again.

I’d like to say that this method went smoothly, but I ran into some dead ends and go cornered and killed. Thank god for that limit on level 81, otherwise I’d have gained 5 or 6 negative levels by now in the swamp areas in this game.

I have to say, this is really fun, you guys. I’m just loving these swamps now. I know I’m getting my ass kicked, but it’s through my mistakes. I love this game so much.

I hear ya. As much as I’m loving this game, I want the Purifier to be my last character in a while. I want to take a break, otherwise I’ll never play any other games.

Removing the component also removes the augmentation, making the item transferable again.

Sweet. Good to know.

Came to the conclusion last night that I really don’t understand this game (I have come to this conclusion about 10 times now). From one of my best builds in Normal to early Elite, to my worst. I can’t stay alive anymore. I can’t even run through aether patches on the ground and live. I have a quest in the immolation, but I can’t get to the gate. I am just short of health. I don’t remember having that problem with other characters before.

I feel like I am doing damage fine, I seem to be able to lay down a lot of damage quickly, but a lot of things can kill me me in a couple hits. All my resistance are pretty good. Maybe I am underestimating defensive ability? Or I need better armor? I definitely need more hit points.

I did read up on equipment and crafting though. I never understood the affix thing until now. I have also not been crafting enchanted items, thinking they were just weak yellows compared to all the other items you can craft, but some guides were saying those have the potential to be the best items in the game. So I did mess around with it and did manage to upgrade a gun and a ring by crafting enchanted stuff. Went through all my scrap quickly though and I refuse to do the dup thing to cheat.

Defense is far more imprtant than offense generally in GD. Any reasonable build will still kill things fast even focused on a defensive style.

I mentioned before it is fine to put all points into physique. I am currently playing through a Mage Hunter (lvl 61 at the moment) which is Arcanist + Inquisitor. It is mainly Arcanist. This is my first non-hardcore character on this account so I have no stash to back me up and I easily obliterate everything with all points in physique, excepting a few bosses, which I just gently kite for a bit.

Regarding the aether on the floor: I believe, unless this has changed, for some stupid reason it is not resistable at all, aether resistance does not help here, so you must run through with a health pot and maybe an ability such as Word of Renewal. If you still can’t make it then you really need to up your health pool significantly.

Someone on one of the forums posted that floor aether can crit you, so DA is important. Don’t know how true that is obviously.

I think my health is low. ~4300 at level 78. If something catches me, it goes down quicker than I can react as well.

Did you go defense minded on a few of the devotion trees? That helped me a lot for survivalbility

I don’t think I did. The thought of redoing my devotions…ugh.

Maybe it’s time to start a new character?

Spent a good 45-60 minutes going over my character and its equipment. Made a huge difference in survivability and damage. I felt really good about it, so I tried the Loghorrean fight again. The boss isn’t my problem, I do fine until he starts spawning Chthonic Dreadguard heroes, and then I don’t have the room to run. These are still a huge weak spot for this character and I finally looked them up to find out why. 75% fire resistance. My character is 90% fire damage. I don’t have any backup. Early in the build I was doing a lot of pierce damage, but now I completely reliant on fire.

I don’t know if you are already doing this, but on particularly tough boss fights I like to load up on 3-4 different types of bug juice and also use the short-term buffs (the ones with 30 second durations) and maybe an Aether Cluster (8 seconds duration but prevents most damage). I can sometimes just charge in with some short-effect DPS enhancers and a cluster for invulnerability, and do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Even if it’s a suicide run it still does more damage than the boss’s post-death reheal will recover.

Not a good strategy for hardcore, perhaps, but works in regular.

This is exactly my beef with the game. The entire game, you are steered towards min/maxing, both defense and damage, and then they throw brick wall resists at you. The idea of retooling your character to meet these demands may be fun for some people, it’s certainly not for me. In general, this game pulls the same kind of crap all the time. You can be cruising along, facetanking bosses even, and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, blam, you’re stuck…and not stuck in a way you can fix easily.

Once again, the one thing I will say for Blizzard devs, is that they understand progression. To me, that’s this games biggest ongoing downfall, it’s very uneven.

Do you have access to Thermite Mines? I’m also somewhat Fire focused, and those help a lot, because instead of just doing fire and chaos damage, they actually lower fire and choas resistance. So for me, the key is to lure the enemy to stand on the mine and THEN shoot them as much as I can.

If they throw brick wall resists at you, how is that steering you towards min/maxing? Particularly towards min/maxing only one type of damage? Anyone playing this game (or any ARPG) knows that certain enemies with high resists to certain things is coming. Therefore, if you’re going to only min/max one damage type, you’d better have a way to lower enemies’ resistance to that damage type too. Otherwise, if you break up that monolith and have multiple damage types, how does that hurt you? My fire shot default attack does about 4k fire damage, 4k pierce damage, 4k lightning damage, 2k vitality damage, and a few more damage types. The reason I cultivated skills to break up the damage types is precisely because I don’t want enemies to be resistant to one or two damage types.

So I wear equipment that increases damage to all. I wear some equipment that increases fire damage. Some equipment that increases pierce damage, some that increases lightning. And I wear a chest piece that converts some of my physical damage to vitality damage. This has served me well. Better than any character I’ve made where I’ve been too focused on one damage type.

I disagree as well. Even with the demolitionist skills in this case, it does offer an alternative to fire damage by having utility skills that support lightning damage (eg: grenado). It is a part of any ARPG is that there will be mobs and bosses who are immune to some sort of damage. I guess an experienced ARPG player will expect that, I certainly did thanks to the gold standard that was Diablo 2 having bosses that were resistant to some sort of damage and I ensure my own toon’s damage always has some sort of backup. In fact, that is what steered me towards a purifier was the sweet elemental attacks that I could level up so I no longer had strictly fire damage from fire strike.

I had no idea either! That makes two! :)

Update on my Purifier’s Elite difficulty run: I just reached Malmouth last night, the part with the destroyed town and buildings. I love this area so much.

By the way, I’m now finding “Mythical” versions of purple loot now. I didn’t know this was a thing!

I’m level 83 now. I have 50/55 Devotion shrines, according to the Devotion screen. That means there’s 5 more to find total. I guess they remove most shrines in the run through Ultimate difficulty.

I’ve reached “Revered” status on both Homestead and Coven factions. Both of which require killing beasts. I guess there must be beast enemy types more than any other in this game, which is why those factions reached top tier first.

I’m tempted to go back to the Steps of Torment to see if I’m powerful enough to beat that guy now.

There are less devotion shrines in the higher difficulties, about half as many. Good news is there are more than 55 shrines available in total.

We couldn’t be more different. I move by holding the mouse button and all the little staircases and allys make it a nightmare for me. Going up staircase I didn’t want to or getting stuck in corners. And then on top of that all those walls mean I am always having to rotate the camera to see. It’s very pretty, but it easily my least favorite area in the game.

Yeah, it plays much better using the controller. Just like the swamp area. I haven’t tried Malmouth area with the mouse, but I agree that does sound bad.

With the controller, you just push in the direction you want to go, so there’s no worry about where to click. I’m enjoying the game a lot more than I already did, which seemed impossible before, but here we are.