For what it’s worth, it’s half off on GoG right now. And well worth it…
Rock8man
3022
I agree. Grim Dawn is really, really good so far. Much, much better than I was expecting. I love it.
It’s $12.49 at GoG, DRM-free. Or you can get it as part of the Humble Monthly bundle for the next few days for $12 for the Steam version.
I liked Grim Dawn but its the fact Titan Quest winds it way through a long childhood fascination with classical mythology and history wins it for me.
I’m running through it with some class combos I’ve not played before and ive tweaked the chars with an TQ Defiler to max out the skills, cash and some stats. Using nature/earth as its a nice combo of nukes and pets. I can die if but its mainly a sightseeing tour.
My problem with Titan Quest is that I want to make odd builds. I’m just Happy that Traps are now summons. I like Trappers, although I’m thinking my Melee Illusionist Trapper might not be the best build. But with Full Wolves and Full Traps, there isn’t much trouble in act 2 yet.
Really disappointed that my Diviner (Dream/Spirit) died yesterday for the first time in Act IV’s Cave of Whispers. I should have remembered how deadly that boss spider could be, trapped me in a web then the little spiders zapped the life right out of me. Sucks as I was going for another no-death run. I think that boss spider is one of the more deadly of all the creatures in the game. C’est la vie.
Soma
3026
The thing about Titan Quest is that you are EXPECTED to respec your character. At lower level there is not enough skill points to go around making a well-rounded build. So when you run up against brick wall you need to switch it up, get back to town and respec pronto.
In Legendary the resistance penalty is so steep it is pretty dangerous playing as pure melee. You have to switch it up with pets and/or have the right life-leech gear.
The problem I reckon is rather the game is a bit opaque about damage types. Vitality resistance is pretty damn important but they put it as a “secondary” resistance. So you don’t bother with vitality resistance gear, and you die, horribly. Basically every resistance is important, and “secondary” is only so because it is on the second page, not because it is less important.
Returning to this after a break, and I’m getting slaughtered! Did they patch up the difficulty or something? :) I’m in the Third Domain at present, heading towards Hades, and I’m chugging 3-4 Greater Health Potions per room, and currently dying every other room. I’m still dealing out heavy damage, but whatever the mobs in here are throwing at me, it’s going straight through my defenses. I may need to rethink this!
Heh. Welcome to all my playthroughs of Titan Quest.
I haven’t played the game in quite a while, but piercing damage used to be highly overtuned, both for the player and the mobs. It used to be packs of archer skeletons that would just insta drop you, when everything else in the level was perfectly fine.
Y’know, it’s funny: I played Titan Quest years ago, and loved it. But I also hated it. But the sands of time erased a lot of those memories, so all I had was vague warm fuzzy feelings for it.
But in reading through this discussion thread I do now recall why I hated it - the piercing skeletons… the super hard and annoying boss with the pillars…parts in Act3 where the mobs were so tough you’d start chugging health potions… I remember all of that! I recall having such fun with that game but on further thought I’m starting to remember that though the highs were really high, the lows were really low.
I missed the sale on it, and TQ is on my wishlist, but I might have gotten enough vicarious enjoyment out of reading about the fun/frustration people are having with the game (plus, who has time to replay old games from years ago… I barely have time put any significant time into the new games I bought… nor revisit the one’s I’m addicted to [Path of Exile, I’m looking at you!]).
The mobs in this section of Act IV are notoriously difficult, indeed, but I’ve found throughout the game that difficulty goes up and down. If I can just get through this section, I may be fine, but it does look as though I’m weak to piercing and also my poison resists are too low. Trouble is, my gear is like a jigsaw puzzle: if I try and increase my pierce resistance, I lose all the other buffs and benefits that came with that particular bit of gear. My shield for example is doing far less physical resist than recent loot, but it comes with a massive percentage STR and INT bonus which adds enormously to my damage output. Each shop visit I normally discard everything in my inventory, but every now and then I find something that hits all the right notes and I’ll swap that piece of gear out. Happens less and less these days.
Anyway, I think I can get through it by playing more strategically; stay on the move, dodge projectiles as much as possible, use ranged magic attacks. It’s my standard boss strategy.
I tired like hell to get them to address piercing when I was doing QA for TQ, and they actually did. If you can imagine it, at one point, the piercing damage was much worse.
Great game, but wildly uneven.
Damn, Cerberus doggy is quite tough! Or rather, I am quite untough. That poison keeps killing me, and when I go back he’s up to full health. Time to go and use those disease feather trinkets I’ve been collecting, I think.
So finally beat Hades, the transforming bastard. Actually, he was a bit of a walkover. Some of the earlier mini bosses were considerably harder, especially one of his generals who stunned me with a projectile and then poisoned me to death in short order. Repeatedly. In fact, I died quite a lot towards the end there. A total of 70 deaths for the entire game. So many? :o Anyway, I had fun. Immense amounts, actually. :)
I started again on Epic difficulty and, like @Rock8man, didn’t fancy ploughing through all those early satyrs again. I was still enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay though, so I figured I’d fire up Grim Dawn instead.
I have a level 17 pyromancer on the go, but I wasn’t particularly enjoying being a ranged weapon character, so I will probably start again with something more melee focused with some ranged / spell options. Trouble is, I can’t really play the game at 1440p unlike Titan Quest; the map judders around quite horribly despite a reported 50+ fps. I’ll have to drop it to 1080p which doesn’t look quite so good on my monitor. I guess I could turn the graphics down a bit instead. That suggestion fills me with horror!
Gendal
3035
Try turning off vsync and use nvidia’s adaptive vsync in their control panel. If you need more performance turn the lighting to low, it will get you all you need.
Thanks for the tips. I tried all kinds of combinations. Turns out vsync makes no difference, neither do any of the quality settings! Setting everything to Low makes absolutely no difference, except fps is reported as 60 instead of 57. Lowering the resolution helps, but then it looks rather blurry.
What makes the biggest difference is - and this is with quality settings on mostly High or Very High - turning off all the options in the lower right: triple buffering, detailed objects, alpha to coverage etc. I turned them all off (except vsync) and it fixes the judder. I tried turned them on again one by one, and the only one that doesn’t affect things is the post processing. Every other one adds distracting judder than makes it unplayable. Even something like depth of field, which isn’t visible if you zoom right out, causes judder. Bizarre.
This is the same engine as Titan Quest, and it’s behaving very similarly to the original version of Titan Quest which juddered like hell. The Anniversary Edition fixed it.
Gendal
3037
Odd. I would expect triple buffer to make/break judder but not the rest.
If you want to dick with it more make sure you have vsync off and working by reaching a framerate > 60 (assuming your monitor is running at 60hz). Different things like the nvidia control panel can force it on, as can other apps including the game itself. Once you have that working and nothing is forcing vsync then you can start trying to debug the judder issue.
No judder for me, it’s locked at 60fps for me but I did put lighting on low because in big fights my current character puts on quite the light show.
My monitor is running at 60 Hz, I turned on adaptive vsync as you suggested, turned it off in GD, and it didn’t make much difference. Stutter was definitely a bit worse if I switch GD vsync on, but without it I was seeing ugly full-screen tearing. So I tried all the above combos with adaptive vsync on, and then again with it on application control (on and off). Some googling suggests this isn’t a unique problem. Someone suggested verification of the Steam files, and using the Repair utility in the GD root folder, and bizarrely it does subjectively seem to make it slightly better, but keeping those lower right options off with the exception of vsync and post processing seems to work in my peculiar case.
So I decided to start fresh with TQ : Anniversary, and now I’m hooked all over again.
I’m attempting a playthrough as a Conqueror (Warfare / Defense). Anyone have a link to solid advice on such a build, specifically how to progress in skill point allocation? For stat point allocation I’ve been pumping STR and DEX with a point each at most level ups (currently 14th level), unless there was a shiny piece of gear that required both points to one stat for me to be able to use. But for skills I am at a loss as to how to proceed for maximum effect.
So far I’ve put several points into both Warfare and Defense general trees to unlock second tier skills and boost my stats and health. For skills I maxxed Onslaught and Weapon Training in Warfare and built Batter to 50% (6 of 12) and Armor Handling to max in Defense. I know I want to avoid Dual Wield as Defense skills are mainly shield-based, but I’m looking for a primer on how to allocate as I go so as to maximize my damage and survivability. With constant equipment upgrading through loot drops, greens/blues and applying relics/charms I’m doing fairly well, only dying to the Cyclops once and a few other times when groups of tougher mobs overwhelmed me. It’s all about equipment when you’re melee…got to maximize defense and DPS.
