The biggest part was the latter for me. It meant I could skip a shrine or two and still hit cap. It’s also nice to start out a little high level to plow through the early parts of Act I after you’ve done it for the nth time.
Do you run through all the quests though?
Don’t think you could skip all the quests…for Act 1 I’m thinking the Blacksmith quest would be required even if you blew by everything else. If just run right to the Warden I can kill him though, right? I know there’s a quest chain but I don’t have to do any of that to enable his door do I?
Quests remain unchanged by Crucible so whatever you had to do previously you still have to do here. The requirements for the Warden I don’t remember so I can’t speak to specifics.
I do crucible until I get 5 devotion points, that usually is about level 12 or so? At that point I just start and play the game normally, including all the quests. The quests offer you a lot of things like extra bag space, extra resists etc, they also tend to lead you to more devotion shrines. Doing the crucible to 5, means the first quest you usually really do will unlock your 6th devotion, which means you can slot the “bat” devotion in your main attack. This is almost always my first devotion, regardless of what build I’m playing.
By the way, if you do play through the Forgotten Gods expansion on Elite difficulty, you can buy a trinket that you can give to a new character through the shared stash. Then with your new character, you can use that trinket and it unlocks all the portals in normal/veteran difficulty, and it also gives you all the quest rewards of normal difficulty like an extra point or two and all the expanded inventory space.
I played through this way with my current character, and it’s the way to go. You get extra inventory space right from the beginning, and if you want to skip any sections by going to the next waypoint, you can do so for any areas you’re not feeling like tackling at that particular moment.
I am the only one, but I don’t do the crucible on new characters because veteran is boring enough, no need to make it worse. Although I haven’t played since the rebalance.
Very different game.
TBH I just Crucible my way up to 10-14 or so just to have something to actually hit shit with. This ends me up with 1-2 devotion points with the way things are set up now.
I will say, I finally gave controller play a shot and it’s pretty great, depending on how you build. It wouldn’t be very good for my Nightblade, who needs to be running all over the place and charging specific monsters to be particularly effective, but leveling a new dude who burninates things with a big hammer it’s been great. Better than I’d thought it would be, for sure.
The controller implementation is largely great. It’s especially cool that you can switch between controller and mouse on the fly and the game just adapts.
So here’s another question for ye old Grim Dawn experts.
I have a stash which is literally full of blues and purples … and I don’t mean one tab I mean all the tabs (except the tab that’s full of potions and augments.
90% of it is lower than level 60 stuff, maybe only 10 or so endgame items (since I usually run out of steam before I get to endgame).
I keep the stuff around “just in case” but I maybe use 3 or 4 items total out of there when leveling a character. Is this stuff worth keeping? Is there something I can do with it? Do you keep or ditch items?
I’m in the exact same boat lol. I hope someone answers.
But I did notice while getting my first character now through Ashes of Malmouth that most greens seem to do the job pretty well, and the blues overall don’t seem that much stronger that the stuff you pick up off the ground.
The eternal question.
I don’t know the correct answer myself. Some days I think the lower level equipment is pretty much all that’s worth keeping.
After all, what is most of Grim Dawn, if not leveling up a new character through veteran and Elite, going up to level 80 or so before doing it again?
And yet, most of these pieces of equipment drop so frequently, I’m not sure if they’re worth clogging the shared stash with.
I should get rid of everything in there except the really good low level sets. Things like Herald’s, which has three pieces, is low level and gives +1 all skills when complete. Then there’s Praetorian. Serious, everyone should keep Praetorian if they find the set. If you find just two out of three pieces of Praetorian, you get +15% physical resistance. That’s HUGE.
So yeah, the rest, maybe we shouldn’t bother.
Ok, so then what about the high level purples and blue equipment? Should I keep that around? We all have two shared stashes. One is the hardcore shared stash, and one is the immortal shared stash. I feel like the hardcore one should be dedicated to helping lower level characters survive. It’s the one leg-up they get from other characters that can help them live. So I feel like hardcore stashes should not be filled with super-high level stuff. Not many characters will get up that high and use it anyway. So you can keep that stuff in each hardcore character’s private stash. And the shared stash can be dedicated to lower level stuff that helps characters survive and level.
But what about the immortal shared stash? After all, when you look online, all you see in the Build Compendium is build after build that’s basically based on a certain piece of equipment or set that someone is using. If you don’t keep that stuff in the shared stash, you can never eventually have builds based around a set or pieces of equipment, right? So I’m thinking at least one or two of the immortal shared stash tabs should go towards purple or blue high level sets, even if it means being harsh with culling otherwise nice blue and purple equipment.
For my money, it’s really not worth keeping twink equipment around. Especially now with the loot fountain shrines. You’ll find plenty of stuff.
If I were going to make any exceptions (I’m not), it’d be for exceptionally good weapons for their level and things that give movespeed. But again, you will generally find plenty of things even with yellows turned off by level 15. And honestly there are so many great leveling skills that add flat damage that you really don’t need to worry about even a twink weapon.
So yeah. I keep pretty much 50+ things that look interesting and sets. And still I have a jammed-full shared stash. There is a lot of loot to be found.
One of the toughest things to deal with in GD is the loot, because there are so many possible combinations of skills. It’s not just that you found some piece of gear with fire damage on it, it’s that it had fire damage AND vitality…or poison, or whatever other weird combo you may want to try.
I have most of the tabs filled, it’s tough to avoid that I think if you play a lot. You can actually salvage stuff and not just sell it, but all that does is give you components to collect instead of gear. It can be a good idea though because some of the crafted gear can be tough to fill out.
Huh. Salvaging loot. I never thought of that. Does it give you the really rare components that you can be short of, like Windigo Spirit thingies and Manitcor eyes? I swear I never have enough Manticor Eyes.
Fire Strike is hilarious you guys
Ok, so I’m thinking I could maybe play a WoW Hunter kind of character, something that attacks at range but has an aggro pet. Is there any way to build that in GD?
Splitting between pets and not-pets is tough to do in GD at higher levels, but the Shaman class has some good ranged attack skills and a quality pet.
Is Shaman a base game class? I haven’t committed to the expansions yet.
Base game.