Grim Dawn, a Diablo-style Action RPG

[CelticHound]

Congratulations on the baby, Sirian!

Also glad you are enjoying Grim Dawn.

I'm kind of avoiding it in favour of the updated Titan Quest. (along with Path of Exile)

--- CH

[Jabbz]

I actually got really into POE with Azarius a while back, but there have been a number of updates since I last played. I have a level 83(ish?) maurader with some pretty sick gear (did all but a few of the top maps) but now I have no idea how to do a build. Plus as is the case late game your gear is tailored around your build, so I'm not even sure my top level shit is useful or wearable anymore. It's pretty frustrating so I just haven't played.

Beat the first diff of Grim Dawn today with my arcanist/soldier though. Got really excited when it showed me a legendary ( i double checked it said legendary) recipe that turned out to be epic :/

[CelticHound]

Plus as is the case late game your gear is tailored around your build, so I'm not even sure my top level shit is useful or wearable anymore. It's pretty frustrating so I just haven't played.

Well, I'm not a great player (for example, Sirian is an order of magnitude above me in both build planning and dexterity of execution), but I have the Realms Beyond perversity of thought on my side.

For the Talisman league, I managed to do 32/32 of the challenges and half the gear I had equipped at the end had come from Act I Normal difficulty.

Pure self-found can be a challenge, but if you use poe.trade, then gearing to an acceptable level is easy.

I would think the huge number of combinations for builds in PoE would be an attraction for the RB crowd.

To get more on topic, I said I'd been avoiding GD in favour of TQ. I understand GD is an update of the TQ engine with a much darker setting. It's the darker setting part I'm not interested in. I already have Diablo and PoE for that. I think the world needs another ARPG "in a dark, gritty fantasy universe" the same way it needs another series of books about teenage vampires and werewolves dating each other.

TQ, on the other hand, has this bright, heroic feel for me. To take an offering to the Oracle at Delphi! To speak with Leonidas outside the gates of Athens! To venture into the Labyrinth of Minos! So much could have been done with this.

Unfortunately, the 2nd act is set in Egypt, which I understand would cause some people's heads to explode.

The 3rd act makes me wish for a game set in the world of Barry Hughart's novels.

[KingOfPain]

CelticHound ....but I have the Realms Beyond perversity of thought on my side.

That you do

Jabbz ... I actually got really into POE with Azarius a while back, but there have been a number of updates since I last played. I have a level 83(ish?) maurader with some pretty sick gear (did all but a few of the top maps) but now I have no idea how to do a build. Plus as is the case late game your gear is tailored around your build, so I'm not even sure my top level shit is useful or wearable anymore. It's pretty frustrating so I just haven't played.

HAHA I know how that feels
I was recently building a Double Thrower in D2 so naturally I looked up Throwology to refresh my memory and hope to gain some guidance. I honestly smacked myself and said "WTF wrote the gibberish!" and gave up

[Sirian]

Near the end of Elite diff with the Arcanist. I have been pushing her because of the opportunity to buy +100% rep scrolls for other toons. Just today she got the last rep to Honored (max) and also got the last Rift point open.

Death count has swelled to over 50. I bit it 8 times vs one boss (Lucius) and I had on resist gear and even used my first potions ever. Probably would have done somewhat better if I had farmed up max Aether resist first, but I am doing mostly Trial and Error ™ research. Not trying to die, per se, but not trying much more than basic tactics and use of whatever alt resist gears I already have on hand.

I can say that resist gear (getting Lightning resist to max) made all the difference vs Herald of Destruction, where I only died 3 times (twice to trash getting there, once at boss with regular gear) but none after the gear swap.

I bit it like five or six times to trash mobs in the Plains. That was somewhat enlightening. I mean, once or twice, anomaly. Half a dozen, flawed approach.

I have died maybe 8 or 9 times to bosses using "drop from the sky" D2-Meteor style attacks, which rain down at a rather fast speed all in a cluster. If you were not already moving by the time you see any graphics, it is already too late to step out of the way, so this is an EASY way to die in one shot, sometimes with little to no warning. Luckily, the number of bosses who have these type of spells is small. The ones with instant-hit lightning strikes might be one-shot kills to those sans all resistance, not sure. Have not purposely tried to find out!


Mind you, although my Arcanist is considered by me to be a glass cannon, she is no Softcore Wussie. She's not eschewing vitality (Strength) -- has put 31/70 stat points there -- has on a +500ish life item, makes liberal use of the 3-seconds invulnerability skill, has a level 6000 Flash Freeze which stops everything not frost immune-- well, um-- stops them COLD-- in their tracks. And the magic missile DPS is just insane, too. Maybe close to half my kills occur off screen.

The character is probably suffering some from being a pure single class, though. Dual-class who level both to 50 get a lot of extra health that way. But that is the only designed weakness for her.

And fifty deaths? And still rising. And not even reached the top difficulty yet.

The deaths are mostly to stuff that feels a bit silly to have in a game with Hardcore mode. But my fight with the Herald shows that most everything has options for bringing threat levels down to manageable levels. (There are players out there who've completed all three diffs on Hardcore.) But unlike Diablo with its 3 or 4 resistance types, Grim has a full dozen or more. It's really, REALLY hard to gear up to resist everything, which leaves you in the position of needing tons and tons more inside baseball knowledge to prevail via risk and resistance management. It's clearly not meant for you to stumble through in lazy mode on low information.

There ARE also attacks that prevent immediate use of the 3-Sec invuln. Might be limited to Stuns, but when hard-hitting trash can kill you in 3 hits and bosses in 2, a stun or mis-step can spell the end.

Where Diablo 2 felt like I needed variants to keep it fresh almost from the first run I played, this game is definitely tuned higher. Just playing regular builds and even trading drops back and forth across the account, there's no sense for me (yet) of lacking for threats to my characters -- and not just from the bosses alone, like poor miserable Diablo 3.


- Sirian

[Jabbz]

My big issue with the gear on POE is that I worked damned hard to get it, and some of that stuff is crazy good and expensive (solid 6s5l chest with awesome stats and a crazy 1h & shield). If I can't use things that I spent scores of hours working for.. Meh. I have 850 h into that game according to steam. Trying to get the motivation to go back into that at a subpar level just takes more energy than I have right now.

[darrelljs]

Once or twice per year, I get nostalgic and take a look at Realms Beyond, which used to be my digital home for so long, to see what RB is up to these days

Well, there is a new Adventure gearing up .

Darrell

[Jabbz]

Ok, take that back. I just reinstalled out of curiousity. I'm level 88, have a 6L chest, was built as a very tanky high hp regen marauder. 105 points to spend, and I don't even remember what I had them in the past, plus the skill web has changed. Ugh. Damnit now I want to play but fuck that's a lot of work.

[CelticHound]

Ok, take that back. I just reinstalled out of curiousity. I'm level 88, have a 6L chest, was built as a very tanky high hp regen marauder. 105 points to spend, and I don't even remember what I had them in the past, plus the skill web has changed. Ugh. Damnit now I want to play but fuck that's a lot of work.

If he's a Marauder and not a Juggernaut, Berserker, or Chieftain, then you don't have am Ascendancy class for him yet. Have to run the Labyrinth for that. (Yes, they embedded a "frogger" mini-game.)

Path of Exile is a game that requires dedication to master. I don't have that dedication, so I just mess around with whatever entertains me.

Fortunately, I'm in a guild that is not bent on people being gg-leet. We have a couple theory crafters who enjoy "hey, if I put this mechanic together with that it ought to break the game". (Reminds me of KingOfPain, actually.)

But now I'm off to visit the Labyrinth of Knossos - so I'm spiritually an ancestor of you Grim Dawn people.

[Jabbz]

Yeah I haven't played in a LONG time. Don't have an exact date for last game, but last achievement was January of 15. So much has changed. I think the hideout patch had just come out when I quit.