Grim Dawn: AoM

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suchbalance
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Just saw on mahitovec's screenshot there is an NPC called Kasparov :lol:

I'll prolly get this over the weekend and give it a go since there is so much praise for it and I liked TQ.
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Anonymous:
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Kasparov is searching for Karpov. Help him :)
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so i guess i finished first act. very decent so far.
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Russian version? What a casual :mrgreen:

I've been playing a Demolitionist + Soldier "ranged wdm" class combo over the weekend and yesterday I managed to finish the game on Veteran + clear both of the "uber dungeons" on the first try. Here's my "review":

Stuff I liked


- The setting. It's always a relief to not have to play in some Tolkien derivative world. And while the steampunk + magic combo is nothing new, it is underused in the genre and works well in this game.

- The combat feels slick and satisfying. The collision sounds and character animations (at least for ranged combat) are good. Character movement is responsive and speed is finely balanced so you are not too slow / fast compared to other enemies. Probably the only game I have played so far that has a "screen shake" effect that is well done and did not make me turn it off the instant it first occurred.

- Faction & reputation system. There are several friendly and hostile factions. Every time you do quests, and later bounties, or kill certain types of enemies your reputation with a friendly faction increases - which unlocks different tiers of rewards to be purchased from vendors which are exclusive to that faction. When you kill members of a hostile faction they dislike you more and more which leads to them spawning in greater packs and later increases the spawn of boss monsters. A nice progression system that is external to your character development, I like it.

- Quests often have two possible solutions which leads to slight variations in rewards/outcomes and often times integrate nicely with the lore where you can find useful info for the "better" solution in journals around the environment.

- Crafting system seems capable enough. Also every item can be customised in two ways with a socketable + an enchant. Several rare ingredients/resources only drop from certain factions or areas which encourages playing in more areas.

- UI is very nice, especially compared to TQ. Auto charm completion, fast teleportation through world map, more detailed stat information, item drop filter.

- Uber dungeons have a cool roguelike concept. It takes a semi-expensive reagent to unlock entrance and once you are in you cannot leave via tp until you beat the final boss or you die. And if you do die you cannot return and have to remake the game and start from scratch. Although it is a bit disappointing that they still use the same enemies as the regular game simply of a higher level.

- The world map is well designed and encourages exploration to find optional areas with side quests. Personally I would have liked a bit less "green fields" as map tilesets but it's not a big deal.


Gripes


- Weapon itemisation on rare/epic loot is lacklustre. The attack speed affix is budgeted way over the top compared to others so if a weapon does not have it, it will probably be junk. Also caster affixes like FCR spawn on all melee/ranged weapons for some reason and vice versa - lame way to decrease drop quality.

- Quality of drops seems a bit stingy for normal difficulty. At lvl 54 I am still using bracers with a lvl 30 requirement and boots & helm with lvl 20 req etc. Also I had to go without a single gun upgrade for 25 levels to the point where magic guns sold by vendors were basically the same dps as my weapon. Seems to promote twinking a bit too much.

- There are 8 primary types of damage and another 9 (!) secondary resistances, for a total of 17 possible resistances. This has the effect that many passives/buffs/skills/items end up being extremely similar but just source shifted. Did we really need that many?


- The character skill tree is extremely inflexible and limited. You need to spend 50 skill points in a tree just to unlock all skills and the vast majority of the skills/synergies require 12 or more points to max. You gain 3 skill points per level until 50, after 2. There is only 1 quest skill pt reward per difficulty. This leads to extremely straightforward and plain builds.

To give you an example - my build's primary attack requires 4 skills to be maxed for 12 points each + another 50 to unlock them all. This is a total of 98(!!!) points or 33 whole levels just to use 1 skill. My second skill requires 40 points to max and when you throw in an aura for another 28 points you have nothing to spare for your second skill tree. I.e. maxing two synergised skills + a passive from one tree requires you to be at least level 71 (final difficulty)... why was it designed this way? It only succeeds in limiting choice and introducing snoozing.

The devotion system is ok, but you can only assign 1 proc to an active ability. Since there are so few active skills (due to point constraints above) you only have a choice of a few cool constellations, where you can min max which procs they grant, and everything else is just more boring + stat increases.


- The story was very undercooked. Throughout act 1 it is good - you go on this journey where they build up the main antagonist. A race of some sort of space ghosts which possess humans and want to enslave humanity. The act boss has interesting skills and cool dialogue while you fight. Then once you progress suddenly a random Cthulhu inspired cult pops out of nowhere and suddenly become the main threat and we just forget about the previous baddie. From act 2 onwards all the bosses also have very lame build up and no interesting dialogue.

- Lack of replay value (for now). I mean sure there are two more difficulties after veteran, but they are exactly the same just with better drops and more stats on monsters. While this was okay 10 years ago, nowadays even D3 has massively more endgame content than two 3-level dungeons. Especially when we compare to the rich Median engame, it's just hard for me to muster the desire to progress my character further.




So while I am mainly disappointed about how they implemented the skill trees - they could have been a lot more ambitious rather than relying on boring skills that take huge dumps of points to max (they regressed on TQ's skills imo) - and the lack of engame exclusive content, I still liked the game OK and it is worth playing through veteran difficulty at least.
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mahitovec
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russian because im reading all dialogues and letters.
have to agree, 50 into skilltree is huge overkill, takes alot of time to max and stats are boring and trash (str/dex/ene/hp/mana)
and obviously you cant talk about lategame since you finished only first diff lol. compared to median everything gonna suck.
hopefully thats only beginning, if they get enough profit they gonna upgrade with time i believe
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Made some progress on elite through the week. So far it's not too bad, the biggest problems I had was with poison damage dealing bosses. Poison res seems to appear very rarely on gear, and if it does 99% of the times it is on caster pieces for some reason. So I had to spam many of my slots with that 20% poison res charm - not optimal but gets the job done for now.

Making second level relics is a pain in the ass. This one requires 3 basic level ones + 3 charms and a rare monster specific item (had to farm trolls for 20mins to get one). The stats are amazing however and even though it was meant to be for a dual pistol build, the proc scales way better with a 2h rifle because it fires off an extra 2 free shots when it occurs. RNG completion bonus was nice too
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This is also the first GG drop I got. So far from the end of Veteran through most of A2 Elite I only dropped two meh legendaries (exactly the same pair of boots twice :mrgreen:), but this rifle is absolutely massive even though the lvl req is a proper cockblock. Also goes to show you how inaccurate the comparison dps tooltip is - once equipped it will probably give me at least 3k more dps (not to mention procs are not counted).
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ia uvazhaju tebja
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mahitovec
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finished normal
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got all devotions from normal
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kirza4i
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so far its really decent game
why i cant choose veteran elite? i need to compete just elite first or what
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suchbalance
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Veteran is only for normal so its not too easy.

Elite and Ultimate have no extra veteran. Did you try steps of torment and bastion of chaos? Otherwise nothing more to do but go to elite.

New patch is pretty cool, drops a lot less junk loot.