My Necro/Necro reached the Far Oasis waypoint this morning.
It’s so weird playing this game, because it’s a hit of extreme nostalgia, but at the same time it feels like something completely new. I can’t quite reconcile that in my brain.
The way the tombs feel is quite a bit different from Diablo 2. They didn’t give the sarcophagi enought hit points. I remember even with a part of 8, we’d be all pounding on those as the last thing left in the room when everything else had melted away. In this case, they go down as easy as some of the enemies.
I love how the Hollow ones/summoners look and feel. Very faithful to Diablo 2. But the designer(s) here made the mistake of keeping the doors open. Remember how you were nervous in opening the door to the next chamber, because you knew the room was completely filled with enemies? And you’d fight at the doorway itself for a while before you could get in? Good times. In this version, with the door already open, that’s not the case.
My Berserker Barb is level 43 right now and I’m on the second quest in Act V. A few notes.
The toughest area so far for me has been Travincal, and the Council Member mob was by far the most difficult section for my build to this point. I had to kite and separate them in order to take them out, but not without dying two or three times. All of the Act bosses so far, including Diablo himself, have been a cakewalk by comparison, where I was never really in any danger of dying. There were a couple other mobs that I ran into that had that one-hit kill brutality that I had to be very careful with.
I’m getting close to the point where I’ll want to select a secondary class, because I’m running out of skills that I want to put points into. I only have 1 in my main attack (Berserk) because raising it any higher doesn’t seem to do much except increase mana cost and attack rating (slightly). I’m still not sure what I want to do. I think I want to just maximize my tanking and melee damage potential, so maybe Paladin auras or Necromancer curses would be a good path.
Diablo himself seemed kind of jarringly cartoonish. Like the model belonged in Torchlight 2.
The Bloody Foothills is just…agonizingly large. It is absolutely non-stop carnage for miles.
Through A1 and the first quest of A2, my experience is that everything is laughably trivial until you hit an elite because they’re something like 20x the HP/damage of a normal mob and the minions are like 5x. Also they all run super fast at all times.
Really great work on the mod so far, but the balance is all over the place to say the least.
I finally figured out how to use the Horadric Cube. I know the description says to right click, but all that does it make a sound effect and seems to do nothing.
Anyway, if you are using a controller, press Y on the Cube, then close your inventory. Right there standing next to you now is a little anvil (or the Horadric cube?) and clicking on it takes you into a crafting screen with all the Cube recipes.
Holy shit! That’s a lot of recipes just for the cube.
The Horadric Staff, which you need to finish Act 2, is on the last Tab, near the very bottom of the looooooong list, below the runes and the gems.
I’m having a blast mixing D2 classes with GD classes. There are some really fun/amazing combos. My fave so far is a D2 Necro and an Occultist, poison/acid based.
My Necro Necro beat Duriel yesterday. How anti-climatic. I think his AI script is broken or something. He just seemed to stand there and take it. My skeleton army took him down, and I don’t think a single skeleton died.
Normal in general is very easy, probably too easy, but trying to balance a mod like this that is so far ranging is a very difficult task. Once you get up into nightmare things start becoming more lethal.
There is a huge disparity in skills as well, but that’s not out of character for the original game either so… it’s hard to be critical of something that is sort of baked into the original game. Duriel can be a cakewalk or a nightmare depending on class and spec.
Yeah, for my solo Amazons (my favorite character), he was a complete nightmare. My hardcore solo Amazons would always die there.
Then a couple of things happened. The expansion came out, and with it, better hirelings (or as we called them at the time, slaves). And the ability to do the console command “Players 8”. Players command followed by the number meant that the game scaled the difficulty as if that number of players were in the game. So if you played solo and did Players 8, it meant stuff had 8 times the hit points, but it also granted 8 times the experience. This also meant that by the time I got to Duriel on Normal, my Amazon actually had the levels necessary to have a Valkyrie, and that meant being able to Solo Duriel.
It’s a mod that makes Diablo 2 in Grim Dawn. The classes, the campaign, the gear. But it also keeps the Grim Dawn classes and loot and gear, and you can dual class, so you can combine classes from Diablo 2 or classes from Diablo 2 and Grim Dawn.
Yah there are some really crazy ones. Sorc/Druid, Sorc/arc, Sorc/Barb, Necro/Occultist…necro occultist is pretty absurd once you get it running with a might merc :P
Stuff I have played that’s turned out to be a hoot.
Sorc and…quite a few different combos
Druid and occultist
Necro/occultist
Druid/Necro
Zon/Palie
Zon/Barb
Zon/sorc
Current run is Sorc/Druid. Mostly elemental with dire wolves, it’s so much fun.
Is there a way to unslot my merc from the medal she is attached to? I know the weapon smith has the thing where you can remove enchantments or recover the item, but that isn’t letting me recover the merc.
Also, is there a way to respec your character at some point?
I can answer this one! (I don’t know the answer to the merc question, I haven’t tried yet). To respec, look around town. Each town has a place where you can respec. In the first village it’s by the sorceress Akara or whatever her name is. It’s the same symbol as in Grim Dawn.
Mercs cost 10-20k i think, and there are multiple types. By the time you have money to buy a new one you will also have a far better medal to attach a new merc to.
With several of my friends reconnecting lately over Grim Dawn, I’ve joined them the last few days for a few rounds of Hardcore crucible in regular old Grim Dawn.
I’ve been trying to make a couple of different Mage Hunters. That’s an Infiltrator + Arcanist. For one of them I wanted to concentrate on the Flamethrower ability that the Infiltrator has, and ignore the dual gun side of the Infiltrator for once. And for the other one I wanted to make a Enrique Panenieto’s Magic Missile build. Both characters concentrating on magic only. It’s been pretty fun so far, even at low levels.
The thing I’m still undecided on in both builds is whether to include any Word of Pain in that equation. Theoretically Word of Pain is pretty awesome if you can get it’s 3rd enhancement (Death Sentence), which lowers Pierce, Aether and Chaos resistance. But my character personally is not going to concentrate on Pierce Aether or Chaos damage in each case, so I’m a little torn on that. I suppose it could still help since we’re playing as a group. Plus I think Panenieto’s missiles actually do aether damage, so maybe that build in particular should include some Word of Pain+Death Sentence.
resists is pretty huge, and should be taken whenever and wherever you can get it, doesn’t matter if it’s only 1 of 3 skills it effects etc. -resists does way more damage than it feels like it’s going to because of the way damage is calculated in GD. Those global -% get really huge the higher all the numbers get.
If you have to choose between a skill that say…adds 85% damage, or one that has a -30% resist, the resist will end up doing wayyyyy more damage at mid and high levels.
Multiplication is better than addition. Even better, increasing your coefficient by manipulating the denominator in which it’s calculated can be shockingly powerful.
