Thanks for your opinion guys!
Sounds like I might be better served giving Grim Dawn another run, I played at launch and haven’t looked at the expansions or anything, it looks like it’s grown alot in that time.
It’s a much more mature game, obviously. That’s a safe bet.
I finished at three and I’ve gone to the endgame activities. The endgame stuff is definitely not as polished as the storyline, but it works. There is a form of mapping or rift running which will be your main activity. Each expedition, as they’re called, can go down three levels worth. When you start the expedition has a base level of 40. Each level you go down in an expedition increases the level of the mobs by one. If you complete an expedition fully… That is complete three levels… it adds the ability to start the next expedition at that level. So for example when you start at level 40, if you complete all three levels of the expedition, the next time you start an expedition you can choose to start it at level 43 and so forth. So it’s sort of like increasing your rift level in D3
@Tim_N there is at least one build defining unique… There is a two-handed melee weapon which lets you cast lightning spells. I’ve also seen a shoulder piece that has a lot of strange force field modifiers but I’m not sure it’s build defining. A couple other unique cytosine just look good but not great. I’m sure there are many others though.
@misguided I agree that they need to present more information. For instance, I have an ability that makes dead mobs sometimes drop green globes, and if I consume them they boost my toxic damage. So it’s a short term buff, but I have no idea how long it lasts nor how much damage it adds.
Also, my character took this defensive ability that boosts your characters stats based on the type of chest piece they have, and also the helmet since I added another point to it. It’s in the red defensive tree… I think that’s praetorian. The downside is it gives you a negative to run speed so my guy runs like he is in molasses and although the defensive buffs are incredible (I have 65% resist against everything) the run speed drives me batty. I’m not sure I can stand it.
I uninstalled in frustration last night trying to beat the chapter 2 boss with my mage character. I’m pretty sure, it’s not possible because you have to be on the move constantly and I need willpower and the only way to build it is to stand still and use my staff attacks. I’m not doing enough damage to destroy the wall nodes when two of them flash at once, the extra adds are overwhelming my summon and myself, and I can’t get past her first form.
Then I watched a YouTube video for tips and saw one guy spend almost 10 minutes just on her second form - no deaths, it just took him that long to beat her, and I was just fucking out what the fuck.
Decided to install it again to try Story mode. I guess I’ll try a melee this time, since it sounds like anything except plague mage builds are under-powered. Figures all the skills I was having fun with are considered “not great”.
EDIT: Is there a story mode? I thought someone mentioned there was but I don’t see it in the options so I assumed it was selected at character creation, but I don’t see it there, either? How do I play Story mode?
EDIT2: I found it, it’s at the main menu in Game Settings on the left of your character, so I might be able to try Story mode with my existing character, which is good news, potentially.
EDIT3: There seems to be no difference whatsoever between story and normal, at least in regards to this boss. The fight played out just about exactly. I did better but only because I re-worked my summon to be the derfault tanky, gave him increased threat, and directed a portion of my damage to him. But I didn’t even come close, and I think I hate this game now. Also, I hated this fight when it was Belial in Diablo 3, you wankers.
EDIT4: Okay, I beat it - it was easy once I realized I could turn my Tear of Etheliel into a larger area of effect and make it a DOT spell - I missed it when I hit that milestone, but I was reviewing my options and thought I’d try it (and a few things) out and holy shit, this is devastating now, I was dropping named champions very quickly (in Normal) with it. Oh man.
I went back to Normal, there didn’t seem to be any difference between Story and Normal. /shrug
Yeah, the act bosses are crazy spikes in difficulty. I’m not fond of that aspect of this game. You can have a build that chews through normal mobs, then hit a wall at bosses because you’re not used to that kind of slog.
My wife has been carrying us through all of the smaller bosses so far. I am melee and tend to die first and she continues to kite/finish them off. I don’t believe we have hit an Act boss yet, though, so that may not work as well when we get to them.
In other news, after a recent patch, I joined an MP game again with my wife and my stash contents were all gone. I haven’t checked to see if it is a known bug, but that was a bit of a bummer… EDIT: It also made me pay the purchase price for the first stash tab again, so that may have been why and it got reset somehow on my character.
@Scotch_Lufkin I hear ya - I ragequit when I couldn’t beat the Act 1 boss with my Ranger character. And then I rerolled a melee guy who was able to steam through it (and my Toxic mage with the Livor Mortis summon did just fine too). I really hate the difficulty spikes for the end of act bosses.
I have to say though, I don’t even recall the Act 2 boss, I beat him without much of a fuss (and I don’t recall any walls!). Is it the guy that’s like Kitava in POE? The gigantic demon dude?
The melee guy I played for a while is quite tough, he’s got some sort of main attack and I attack with right click while simultaneously spamming the frost bolt spell (the one with the 0.3 second cooldown). That means you’re constantly pinging your resources back and forth between Rage and Willpower so you only rarely run out of both. He has that bulwark heal spell and Juggernaut for a shield so he is quite tanky. He was fun but you know how games like this sort of favor mages over melee - I got sidetracked by the toxic mage around level 31.
I have been copying my player file between computers so I can switch between my desktop and my laptop. It works fine (albeit it’s a pain in the butt) but this morning I found out the endgame stuff is tracked in a separate file (which makes sense because it’s a global modifier for all toons). So now I have to start copying that file too! And there is a file for the storage chest, which I’m thinking about copying over also, since it’s dumb for me to have different loot in storage on the two machines. If I do those two files it’ll be like I have my own cloud storage solution for local play!
I know you already beat the boss, but if you’re going to use a staff you’ll need every bit of Willpower regeneration you can get. You can find it on most (all?) armor/accessory slots.
For me, I think it works better when you have a way of converting Rage into Willpower. I use a Catalyst instead of a staff for that reason. When my Willpower is empty, I just start dropping turrets that A) put pressure on the bosses and often breaks their CC bar and B) refills my Willpower. One of the Gems increases willpower regen as well… amethysts I think?
I will have to show my wife those ideas for Willpower generation. I find that she only does things like 15% of the time (I may be exaggerating a little).
I am playing a dual wielding melee guy and have two skills that generate rage, and two that use it up. It seems to go well in that I almost always have some skill I can be using. I also tend to forget to use my Rage potion as that is a good thing to keep up as they refill automatically to keep popping skills with.
In addition to looking for +Willpower generation you can also look for stuff that has low +willpower to rage generation time. Or you can do what Scott says and go one hand melee and one hand catalyst (pistol works fine for ranged damage). One of my toons uses Havoc Orb as the rage spender - at its basic level it’s like a grenade launcher and it uses a lot of rage so one or two shots with that when you’re full of rage and you can go back to willpower-ing.
Scott, I know you are past it now, but you can break the pods before they start flashing, hit the boss for a few seconds, then repeat. If you aren’t breaking the pods in a couple of hits, damage might be an issue (though I haven’t used a staff).
Yeah, in theory. It was taking me a lot of resources to break the pods (I have felt my damage output was super low the entire game, I think I’ve had three total different staffs the entire game and even though all my gear has +elemental % damage on it, it still takes a LOT of fireballs to kill many of the larger/normal enemies). I could break one before it split open, but NOT two. And I can’t stand still long enough to work on refilling my willpower/potions, because the floor is constantly red or about to be where an attack comes in, so I could maybe attack once or twice, roll away, repeat until I’m out of stamina - it was a nightmare.
But I have some better gear from that fight and some grinding to hit level 34 I did before my last (successful) attempt, so I’m hoping Act 3 goes better for me. It would be nice to actualy find a cool purple item, or a red that isn’t for melee (I have literally 2 boots, a chest, and a pants Legendary that all have “bonus damage to attack” and “+% melee” damage and other melee focuses bonuses - I have yet to get a Legendary that helps me specifically, and the only Unique I have found is a tower shield).
Tried rerolling those?
I spent all 5 rerolls on the staff I have right now, it’s pretty solid with +42% elemental damage and 15-20 Aether damage added to spells, but it’s like level 27 or something and no better staves have dropped in the last couple days of playing.
I’m doing champion 90+ expeditions with my 65 mage. Mage tips:
- Spells scale badly, unless you invest in plenty of +flat damage modifiers. % based modifiers are much, much less effective
- Direct damage mages really struggle later one. Go ailments or go melee
- Despite the above, Ferocity/ Toughness works well, though I prefer Wisdom/ Toughness
- There are nodes in Cabalist and Timeweaver that allow +5 ailment stacks. Get all of them
- Timeweavers “That Which Time Cannot Heal” Node is good, as are the ones in Cabalist that allow more ailments per application
- Force shield builds are awful. That’s partly because leech with force shield is broken. Wear heavy/ bruiser gear
- Spells that tic quickly do the best damage (if you’re an ailments build and stacking +flat damage modifiers). Anomaly, Annihilation, Tear (modded as damage over time) and Parasite are standouts
- Parasite is awesome. The pets can be useful, and it also works as a primary boss DPS spell if you have modded it for “faster ticks based on ailment stacks”
- The golem can grab aggro on bosses and even hold it for a while, if you use his taunt a lot. He’s the only good summon (Livre Mortis). Note, when you hit endgame and can duplicate spells, you can have three different versions of him up at once (that’s not a good build idea, but Mortis and Parasite are the only useful summons. The zombies are all awful)
That’s how to do damage as a mage. Survival is a whole different thing :) Or… you could just run 2H Melee Bleeding Edge, which is the current OP meta.
I really like this game, despite the many many bugs and broken skills. I hope the devs can iterate well and at a good pace.
I really wanted to love Parasite but my experience was that while it was fine for clearing random mobs, the parasite’d organism died in a boss fight. So it sort of felt like a “win more” button rather than a good skills.
It’s a single-target damage spell, and a top-tier one when modded right in an ailments build. It also happens to mind-control potential minions, but that’s secondary :)
Funny, I think of it more as a possession spell. Does it do more damage than Annihilation when its specced for Toxic damage I wonder. That might be worth looking into.