Grim Dawn, a Diablo-style Action RPG

[KingOfPain]

Yup, installed and in the back burner. Got a sneak peek and liking the 3D atmospheric effects

Really busy for the next few days trying to scout and shoot the Perseid Meteor Shower. The bonus this year is that the view is inline with Milky way. Rare events like last years Super Blood Moon that was also on the night of the Chinese Moon Festival, which I drove 500 miles to shoot. Photo and some shooting detail in my photo thread Dark Side Of The Loon.

Also going to the White Lake Observatory and see if I can get permission to shoot on the ground with the radars and scopes as foreground. After all, it is the foreground that makes photos of these astro events special. These are 9 to 3am job every night.

[Sirian]

How's the Perseid Venture faring?


After finishing Act 1 Normal in coop with my wife, I started a new toon and clicked on the Veteran setting. This setting is apart from the three Diablo-style difficulty levels -- it's basically an optional mod that increases boss spawns and boosts some stats on the regular mobs too. I think it also increases drop rates (or perhaps you merely get more drops because you are fighting more stuff.)

Things got more lively with the Veteran mode on. I am playing a pure melee Soldier solo on Normal no vet, and the toon paired with my wife's coop toon is the hunter I described. This new toon is a pure glass cannon Arcanist (mage type) and I actually died in a tight cave around level 11 -- the one with the poison areas that sap your health when you walk through it. There was a 4-pack of champion-style boss mobs down in there, and two of the four were quite nasty. I stayed alive for the first five minutes of hte fight, on the run most of the time. I used half a dozen heal pots (at least?) and took down two of the bosses, but I got stuck in some mobs once, in a spot with a poison aoe, and simply went down because I was trapped. First "real" death for me in the game. (I died once to another INTENSE poison AoE spot in coop, but I didn't see the poison and it was hitting so hard I was dead in three ticks, before I had any clue what was happening.)

The bosses on Veteran are quite speedy, some of them. They have a WoW-style tether, though, so unless you are trapped in a small area, you can flee and get them off your back, regroup. recharge or whatever. And the penalty for death is not severe like Diablo 1, just some XP loss, so from a certain point of view, the game can be described as "easy". However, there are a good number of subtleties in the design. The enemies are a good mix of melee and ranged, fast and slow, large and small groups, with different threats. There are "variants" on the enemies, too, as for instance the simple zombie type mob comes in fire, cold, poison, fast and other varieties, and some carry shields or will charge you. Where my Soldier simply has to be aware and not get trapped or surrounded when a serious threat level is present, my arcanist is scared of even regular mobs getting hits on her so she requires more alertness and more frenetic activity, but also has more DPS power, especially vs groups. And her "magic missile" spell actually has some interesting properties, which are easy to learn but something interesting and different from, say, a D1 Rogue with just point and shoot (and stagger, if hitting hard enough). It's a good rhythm, I think, but weak vs boss mobs (at least it feels weakish -- but perhaps that is Veteran mode in action. Need more expleriences.) And though there is a visible gap between trash mobs and bosses, that gap does not (yet, at least) appear to be as wide and nonsensical as Diablo 3's gap.

There is also a lot of attention to detail evident in the design. Things like randomized cave-ins in some of the underground levels, so that the possible paths through the area change from game to game. Some cave entrances change, too, and so far the randomization seems more thorough and impactful than that found in Diablo 2 or especially 3, although it is not as much as D1.

Also, the early skills, rather than be replaced, tend to be "modified" by later skills connected to the early ones. So for example my magic missile spell has three modding skills that follow it (one of the most modified skills in the game) which add power and change behavior later on, and appear to render the skill viable on an ongoing basis in a way that, for instance, fire bolt from D2 is not.


Any Diablo vets from these parts might be advised to activate Veteran mode from the outset. If anybody is veteran enough to handle it, we would be among that group. And my fun factor went up once I did that.

The veteran mode is independent of the difficulty levels, so can continue to be used (or not) as one sees fit.


Also, my wife prayed that Act 2 would NOT be in a desert and Act 3 NOT in a jungle. (We're looking at you, Torchlight 2!) Because... yeah. There's such a thing as following Diablo precedents TOO closely. ... (Looking at you, Max. Not that you're likely to be pointed to this post ever. Still... desert and jungle AGAIN?? REALLY????!) ... No desert for act 2. Wife refrained from deleting the game off her comp. Actually she was mildly surprised and quite happy to find something not-desert there. And this is a pretty fair symbol for the game on the whole: it learned a lot of positive lessons from Diablo 2, but is not stuck in the rut of simply copying from it without a clue.


- Sirian

[KingOfPain]

I am not having much luck with the meteor shower, and have been seeing clear sky in the day and at least partly cloudy at night. That kind of disappointment is to be expected, much like it took 15 years to prove Einstein's Theory of General Relativity because they keep getting cloudy skies during total solar eclipses. Can you imagine that, the biggest scientific advancement waits 15 years for a clear sky to gain acceptance.

I did get a chance to play a soldier to level 6. Contrary to that I always start with a caster type because I wanted to see just how tactile the game feels. Although melee has a good feel as far as connecting with the monsters go, it felt all to easy, normal setting btw. It is a good thing around lvl 5-6 going into the next quest, my toon started to feel the hurts - Things can only getting more fun from there. And yea, I would probably wipe the toon and start again on veteran, good note, I have overlooked that setting.

[Sirian]

You may not need to restart the toon. Veteran is a toggle, not a core setting. I think you can turn it on and off, or hop in to MP games with it enabled or not. I could be mistaken. Haven't tested this yet.

EDIT: *Verified!* You CAN toggle Veteran on and off at will. Just started my Soldier in a Vet game, no problem. ... Can't imagine ever turning Vet off again, at this point, though.

[Sirian]

Still playing quite a bit. This game is definitely scratching my Diablo 2 itch. The feel is not identical, but it's strongly similar in numerous positive ways, and improves upon D2 in several details.

One of the best upgrades over D2 is the balance between ranged and melee. In D2, melee got pretty much no advantages. They suffered all the same challenges as ranged plus a bunch of melee-targeted challenges. Grim Dawn gives ranged some fits, in a way where just "stay ahead of the enemy" is not a cure-all. Some enemy abilities have to travel to hit you and these are dodgeable, but not all abilities are like that. Some are instant or near-instant hit, meaning ranged characters DO get hit no matter how well they kite, meaning the game is not erroneously balanced around the notion of perfect kiting. There are also some teleporting bosses that can't be avoided entirely by kiting, because they can blink to you. However, this isn't the only factor in the improved balance. Melee do still have melee attacks and some AoE effects that plague them but not ranged. It's just that melee tend to be sturdier, so the threat level to them from stuff that is dangerous to ranged is, on balance, lower, while some other things the threat is higher or more continual.

Another thing that feels better is ducking behind cover. Some of the bosses have a rotation of multiple abilities, and you have the opportunity to observe the pattern and duck behind cover for large-AoE or super-hard-hitting instant or near-instant shots. You may have to pick your poison, suffering through something unpleasant to avoid something even worse, because you'll never get in a shot of your own if you use cover to avoid all damage. However, the presence of effective cover does give you opportunities to let cooldowns cool (esp healing potion cooldown) and give you chances to dip in and out of contact -- and the details of "in and out of contact" vary quite a bit between the builds.

I also discovered what purports to be a high challenge area. You need special keys to enter, cannot use rifts (portals) while inside, and if you die within, you are ported out and can't return. Not tried it yet, but it sounds intriguing. Optional area, obviously.

Perhaps it is time to let T-Hawk do some forum magic and open this topic to a wider audience. Although I still haven't completed the game on the first difficulty level, it has done so many things right that my trust in it is growing, to where it seems highly unlikely that they will break everything later with bang-head-on-desk type of design choices.


- Sirian

[T-hawk]

Perhaps it is time to let T-Hawk do some forum magic and open this topic to a wider audience.

Done. For anyone that wasn't watching the Diablo forum, this thread started in there, and I split it out to Gaming Table here for visibility.

The real core problem with melee in Diablo 2 is how units lock in place during a melee swing, but running speed can take the target out of range before the swing finishes, guaranteeing a miss. This turned into the "tempting fate" tactical move for the player, but ultimately worked against players as Blizzard piled attack multipliers and speed and damage onto the monsters to compensate for players not getting hit enough. Which ultimately turned D2 into a game of kiting as you described.

[Sirian]

Apparently all of the friendly factions have Bounty tables, where (after you rep up enough to open them) you can get new missions each game, which will always spawn the targets at your level (a few levels above you, actually, but that's considered scaled to your level) and you get a minor material and rep boost for each bounty completed. And there are the negative reps with major enemy types, which the more they hate you, the bigger and badder stuff they spawn. This progression system feels neat at the moment. Whether it's a grind or a fun set of variable mini-goals to pursue would depend on whether you're having fun or not. Been fun for us so far.

My highest toon is about 2/3 of the way through the first run of the game. There's a limited number of skill path options per class (about 3 main builds per class on average) but plenty of interesting ways to combine two classes, some intertwining, some counterpoint, and some just crazyeyes mixing. But when you also throw in the abilities from the zodiac, which can overlay any class and be woven together with even more variance, you come out with quite a few more effective builds that can be put together. It has to be one of the richest variant-material content sets I've seen.

Since many of the indoor areas (caves, dungeons, labyrinths, cellars, etc) can scale to your toon, Hardcore mode doesn't present the option of leveling past the content to be safer.


- Sirian

[Rowain]

I must say Thanks for bringing that game to attention.
Bought, downloaded and started a vet+normal Soldier yesterday and had a blast . Currently just lvl 7 and finished the first Boss but I do like what I see so far.

[Sirian]

I'm getting close to the end of normal (Vet) difficulty with two toons. (One is solo, one coop with wife). Been holding off waiting to get there before commenting more.

[KingOfPain]

I'm getting close to the end of normal (Vet) difficulty with two toons. (One is solo, one coop with wife). Been holding off waiting to get there before commenting more.

Hehe, almost started to say something sexist (then I remember all dem awesome female gamers here). But yea, must not corrupt the experience of a solo toon.