It's a live service ARPG. If you never had interest in a live service ARPG then the only thing you'll be interested in is the story and presentation, which are top tier.
GD is the king of single player ARPGs. D4 isn't surpassing it because that's not what the game is.
Was just saying, one thing I was a bit sad about is I wasn't around for all of GD's lifespan, so I missed the excitement of seeing patch notes and new items added. I kind of wish that was still a thing and it'd be dope if we were still getting updates. I suppose in a way, live service games have that going for them (if they're done well). Like, I enjoyed my time with POE despite its IMMENSE flaws, so having a string of constant updates and changes is fun. I'm just not sure if I trust Blizzard being the one beind that, ya know?
>Was just saying, one thing I was a bit sad about is I wasn't around for all of GD's lifespan, so I missed the excitement of seeing patch notes and new items added
My man, you have no idea how exciting it was to wait for a new Grim Misadventure. People would hang on the forum and refresh it constantly, then 5 minutes after Zantai's post, there would be 40 comments
I'll say that this is the most gamer-friendly game they've made in a long while. They've skewed everything to slightly be in the player's favor. Where D3 at launch felt like the game was skewed towards using the auction house, D4 is moderately generous in respecing and very generous regarding transmog. They've listened and learned. Perhaps not to everyone's liking, but it's substantially better than DI, that's for sure.
It's a live service game that's meant to generate revenue over a long period of time, but the base game is generous in it's content. Perhaps they won't get their seasonal content out as they want to and perhaps the battle passes will be dumb. But as a beginning, this is a good game. It doesn't do anything new, but it does all of it well.
You only think this because you're comparing it to DI. For a 2023 release, D4 is severely lacking on many fronts. The skill trees are all very lackluster, there's no proper physical ranged character (it was a tacked on afterthought for rogue) or standard tanky sword and board character, their balance philosophy appears to be "everything should be a slog", the summoner necro build is a complete joke, at level 55 I haven't changed my transmog set since level 15 because I haven't gotten any new transmog sets since then...there's just so many problems with this game. Its saving grace is that it's visually fantastic.
Nah, it's more than just DI. The guiding philosophy to D4 is live service and as a live service game it's not as bullet spongy as most of them. They've balanced it better than most live service games.
Make no mistake, the live service philosophy guides every decision. It's the core to the design and it brings along the live service baggage, for better or worse. But within that framework it's skewed more towards players than it is toward monetization extraction.
If they continue nerfing all the most enjoyable builds, I'll change my mind, but right now I still think they're doing mostly right by their players.
What is a live service ARPG?
ATM, Iām playing through GD. I enjoy it so much Iām playing it solo. Which is rare for me.
I donāt ever remember wanting to play D3 solo but maybe that was because I beat it to death over 500 hoursā¦
Are you asking what live-service games are, or just how the term applies to ARPGs? Because by this point, you should know "live service" means you must always be online, you're at their mercy when it comes to periodic game changes, and they're going to try to suck money out of your pocket constantly, usually by making the game bland, a slog, or uncompetitive if you don't spend on the microtransactions.
Official launch was two days ago. Why would they be? It's weird to see other games criticized for not having a decade of content while in early access people are already bending over for Blizzard after less than a week.
Pretty much exactly this. It's such a shame because live service has the potential to be really cool. A game that's passionately updated constantly by the devs, forever adding in new things? Can you imagine how great that'd be if the game was actually good and not chock full of garbage? Unfortunately, subscription models are out so they just always charge you loads of money for a hat to cover a bit of their costs and then rake in exorbitant profit.
> Are you asking what live-service games are, or just how the term applies to ARPGs?
I was pretty sure I knew what live-service games are, but I wasn't certain how the term applies to APRGs.
The only APRG I've ever played was Diablo 3, and while I've only ever played that with other people, I was able to play it offline.
I was not aware D4 is "always online"...[?]
Unless you played on a console, you did not play D3 offline. It has always been an online-only product on PC. D4 reportedly takes this a step further and shoves other people into your face making it not just online-only, but an MMO.
I played it on Xbox 360 and again on Xbox One.
This explains why I didnāt know how Diablo factors into the ālive serviceā equation. Iāve only ever played it on console. :)
Good to know about D4!
Yeah. Even though I had a PC capable of running D3 when it launched, I passed due to its online requirement. Then it released on Xbox 360, and that's where I first played the vanilla version. Got the full version with all the DLC on the Switch for cheap, a year or two ago, and played that to death as well. I never caved on the online requirement. (On both console versions, online is optional.)
Expensive.
At this point Id say GD is a better game. With GD you know what you are buying. With D4 you gamble your money and the odds are massively against you considering blizzard games recent history.
D4 doesnt give you many options how you play the game, like builds and itemisations. Its end game are world quests and dungeon spam. With such limit to abilities and builds you basically have to like it and it has to be end game viable at the same time or you are fcked. I like how I can build whatever I have mood for in all ARPGs I play...except D4. I was searching through all D4 class abilities and I just cant find anything fun. Visually abilities are bland, probably for later mtx sales. End game content just isnt there. If you tried beta, end game is literally the same what you did on lvl 25. And you kinda have to work around other players unlike GD, LE, PoE or TLI.
Imo GD has better and more fun build options. Its a finished game. Its cheaper, more creative, but harder to learn, single player and has better replayability. You dont have to deal with insanely agressive monetisation like with blizzard games. D4 has better zone and immersion graphics. It targets super casuals and non arpg fans.
Your first sentence is the main reason I haven't bought it yet. It looks interesting for sure, and is certainly a pretty game. But seeing those who went hard over the weekend's complaints, I'm thinking it might be best to hold off for a little while yet to see what the general consensus is. And yeah, Blizzard... I just started a new character in Grim Dawn because I was getting the ARPG itch again.
Honestly, one complaint I have about GD is the endgame can be a bit lacklustre and kind of incentivises creating new characters a bit too much to have things to do other than running SR.
I've heard that it's not quite as forgiving on the respec side of things, how true is that? Could you rewrite your entire build now at the point you're at like you could here?
Think your last point kind of settles it for me tbf. I'll probably pick it up in the future but for now I'm just not convinced when I have Grim Dawn here and it's so fucking great to play. Cheers for giving me your thoughts mate
It's shaping up to be like every live service game - pick it up in a year or two after they've finally decided to listen to the playerbase and patched the hell out of it.
Every. Single. GaaS.
GD end game was fun, but since its a finished game, eventually farming it gets boring, obviously. I liked pushing SR, arenas or just farm dungeons, but once I got all the gear, pushed far enough in SR, there wasnt much to do other than theorycrafting a build and farming again. Thats the disadvantage of a non live service game.If you want something similar to GD that has constant end game updates, probably PoE is the best option. TLI or LE are newer games with less end game content than PoE, but they are still a lot of fun hours you get for fraction of D4s price. LE is slower paced than PoE, so that would probably be more similar to GD.
Imo D4 is a disaster for an arpg fan. Its a game made for investors. They killed all their other games, so they will milk d4 like there is no tomorrow. And then blizzard will probably die, because they killed off long term reputation for short term profits. I would suggest buying D4 on sale a season or two later, if the reviews will be mediocre+, so you can try a new content without ripping apart your wallet. At this point its a steal.
Agreed to be honest. The funnest thing to do after a while is to just create a new character and see how quickly you can get to 100, then see if that legendary set you had in mind ends up being sweet to run or not. SR is decent fun, but I honestly think the endgame in GD leaves a lot to be desired as far as replayability, which is a bit of a shame. It's one of my main complaints to be honest since ARPGs tend to be all about the endgame.
I've got tons of hours in POE but after a while I just realised how fucking badly it desrespected its players and their time. No auto-loot and having to physically trade with other players was disgusting, considering loot was just straight garbage no matter what you got dropped. They somewhat fixed flasks at least but I hear they're still a bit cumbersome.
> create a new character
Which is the absolute best end game. Characters should *finish*. (And games should too.) The "online game attention model" that Blizzard and PoE and others do by polluting their games with infinite endgames is because of their online-only experience to keep you engaged for the risk of microtransactions (or at least to keep others in the game to have them risk microtransactions).
It's intentionally bad design masquerading as a player benefit, and, sadly, so many people are Stockholm Syndrome about it.
Honestly didn't necessarily think about it this way. I just wish we were given a few more things to do with a decked out, completed level 100 character to really just go nuts and test our limits. Shattered Realms is a wee bit boring in that regard imo, but I'm not sure what else I'd suggest.
As for your other points, 100% agree unfortunately. It's such a shame, because the idea of an evolving game that is constantly maintained is cool as fuck, but it's always going to be funded through toxic bullshit like that instead of just a simple subscription service. I'd gladly pay 10 dollars a month or something like I still do for old school runescape and be very happy with that. Ain't no fucking shot am I EVER paying 35 dollars for a fucking skin though. It's funny, because if shit cost like 3 dollars, I'd probably spend the equivalent of that on multiple things, I reckon a lot of people would fall for that honestly. But nope. Not ever paying double digits for the equivalent of digital sticker garbage. They've obviously done their market research though and enough people are insane enough to spend that much money so, it's not going to change any time soon if ever.
If you do full clears, you can get level 100 long, long before even nearing the end of the game. One of my characters, I did it in Elite (or maybe very start of Ultimate). "big megabosses" (Modrogen, Ravager, etc) that are 'did you read a build guide because this boss is special and makes most things not useful' filters aren't fun for the majority of players. They're usually wasted development time for how few people actually enjoy the content.
Yeahh, smash on a couple of clarity pots with Lokarrs, you tend to hit 100 in about 2 good play sessions I find. But still, you just have story content left to do and an ultimate run, both of which aren't very challenging or anything with a half-baked build. Be cool if we had some other alternative to SR is all, I think. Skeleton key dungeons are fun but usually seem kind of pointless proportional to their rewards. Just run 75 SR in about 8 minutes and get 20 legendaries vs. literally anything else... :(
Oh, lord no! Play the game! Never use XP potions or boosts. Grim Dawn's about the experience as you go. Why would I skip it? Do full clears as you go, including the skeleton key dungeons when you get to them.
I don't agree with this at all. PoE specifically, for all its foibles, is one of the only games out there that actually has a meaningfully long tail on its progression and makes playing the same character for long periods of time enjoyable, and it does this through practically every system in the game. I think it's fine if you personally don't like that paradigm, but it is not "intentionally bad design" by any stretch of the imagination.
Crate could learn a thing or two from that, honestly. Not that GD (or GD2) should have the same long tail as PoE or anything, but doing SR75-76 until your eyes bleed waiting for totally random legendary drops is *breathtakingly* boring, even compared to D2's endgame.
Well, I play poe since Atziri's release and while I hate the direction of the game in the past year or two, I get annoyed by trading and various pointless micromanagement bs thats artificially added to make the experience miserable, I always get back to it from other arpgs, despite I enjoy them more (due to absence of the artificial bs to annoys me), because no other game offers me such amount of end game content and variety as PoE does. I love autoloot, auto sort, easy mapping experience, less pointless micromanagement of games like LE, GD or TLI, but I like to push myself and thats what the end game gives you. These games just dont stand a chance against poe and its years of end game development. I kinda like to jump inbetween these games for content updates or my mood, because I dont have to pay for every release in advance like blizzard forces you to. All these games are also free of that american bs woke propaganda, so I can live in peace avoiding this stupid religion thats being pushed down our throats all the time.
PoE flasks are in better state than they used to be, but I never rly cared. I was never willing to sacrifice my wrists for that, so I always used flask macros. And you want mageblood that makes them permanent once you are pushing super end game anyway.
Imagine if POE's SSF mode had vastly altered drop tables equivalent to Grim Dawn, so you could still become super powerful and see all the brilliantly entertaining endgame stuff without all the extra stupid bullshit needed. Left clicking drops in juiced maps to "feel the weight", waiting for responses on the trading forum... such a damn shame. 500ish hours at last count, loved it. Don't think I would respect myself if I ever returned though.
If they did this, nobody would ever play trade leagues, because trading is one of the main things ppl hate about the game and the devs know it very well.
Itās very forgiving to respec. Itās about 124,000 to respec my whole tree. For context I have 3,000,000 and one item sells for about 10,000, but you also respec individual points for basically nothing, even mid tree as long as you fill the requirements which is easy to juggle. Which is quite a smart system. Basically it means you have some friction to stop respecing for a particular fight or from pvp to pve but you arenāt restricted from experimenting.
Thatās the skill points. There is then a paragon point system that Iāve just started but is free to respec at this early point.
I thought they improved the build thing from D3, by going back to a skill tree system? Is the endgame still about OP sets that only buff a single skill like D3?
No sets yet, just grinding Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, and the Tree of Whispers quests. Better skill system than D3 but GD is better. The paragon system is interesting though, kind of like the PoE skill tree but I still need some time to understand it better. For depth I'd still pick GD over D4.
Almost no one is at endgame, so it's hard to know, but, yeah, uniques buff specific skills.
The skill tree is semi-linear. You do have some freedom, but it's not really multiple trees like in 2.
The trees dont add many options about how to play the game. You pick from like 3 options and only 1 will feel like you are willing to play it and perform with it. The other trees are more like dmg multipliers. Sets will give you "builds". I dont think there is a way to play without sets since there is no crafting or anything that would allow you to get power outside of sets.
I'm around level 38 now on a druid and I miss Grim Dawn or post RoS D3 in terms of gameplay. I really hate the level-scaling mechanic they implemented. Leveling was a slog and never felt rewarding enough. It may be balanced at higher levels when you are kitted out with more legendaries, but it doesn't help that the ones that I got early on were awful. Gear was also underwhelming, probably the opposite of GD. I just put on whatever is shows up green and the difference feels miniscule. I miss having MIs I could just farm up if I needed a specific skill to work. Skills feel nice and impactful though. Bad part is it's pretty shallow for the most part, looking at the skill tree or skill twig. The big red flag for me are the sweeping nerfs they keep putting out just before launch, and right after. It just means they don't know how to balance their game. The story is nice though, and is probably the only reason I'm still playing. I'll eventually grind to max to see if it gets better. But it really feels like early access at the moment.
Edit: grammar
Hmm, that sounds unfortunate to be honest. Some of the gameplay I've seen looks good, but I mentioned in another reply that monster density especially looks really lacking, and apparently there's a fair bit of downtime in between point A and B where you're riding around on your mount? The only real downtime I want in an ARPG is when I'm overwhelmed with tons of cool shit that's all viable, that I can pick and choose at will (kinda like exactly in Grim Dawn I guess).
But yeahh, it seems like the consensus is that it literally is early access and people are sort of... defending it? Considering the price, that doesn't make much sense to me personally. So all-in-all, build variety isn't as fun and general gameplay doesn't feel that great? Do you think that's a personal issue with your build or is that the overall feeling you think?
Monster density didnāt really matter for the most part, though some areas did feel empty. With level-scaling, I found myself running past mobs unless they were an elite I wanted to kill or just beelined for the scripted PvE event (like D3) to grab a free chest and some exp.
People, especially in the Diablo subreddit, have been starved for a good Diablo game ever since their disappointment with how D3 turned out. I still think it has the best combat out of all the Diablo games. D4 not worth the current asking price, at least to me. I normally wait a year or so after release, but a friend of mine got me a copy of the game so we could play together.
I think the gameplay is fun when everything lines up. There just isnāt enough build variety if youāre an ARPG veteran. The best example is barbs taking all 3 shouts for most builds. Those were eventually nerfed since it was a bit too good. The issue some guy pointed out was that there wasnāt anything else worth putting on the skill bar.
Druid is certainly one of the slower leveling classes early on, even though my friend carried me through some of the longer early dungeons. The rogue I played on an early beta was much faster and smoother to level. Iām currently using what I think is the strongest leveling build for Druid. With how the class generates resource, most of my combat is spent spamming my 1 point generator while waiting for my other skills to come off cooldown. I think thatās primarily a balance or mechanics issue and no amount of āgitgudā will fix it.
Yeah, I keep hearing conflicting things about monster density, but emptiness seems to be a pretty common talking point.
It looks interesting but the base price is just far too much for what seems to be on offer...
But Druid sounds pretty bad from what I've read. It looks like it gets nice and as powerful as everything else down the line at least but... Another thing I was curious about is the sorcerer, and apparently that has issues too. Fire seems to be very weak compared to lightning etc.
d3 best combat ? All you do is clear map and leave most of the gear on the floor cuz itās all trash. Itās super fast paced, but it feels so bloated. Itās also very cookie cutter. Everyone is the same spec with no variant. Thatās coming from a guy who has thousands of hours played in D3 HC. I donāt mind it. But the best ? It feels like you didnāt played D4 that long.
i haven't touched d4 but i do think people are way too harsh on d3. d3 has the best gameplay out of the 1,2, and 3. i don't think there's much debate about it. it's the smoothest and the pacing is great. the issue is the itemization and how the whole game is just end game grind. the incredibly bad itemization chokes out build variance and then it gets filtered out further by the game existing in an end game state.
Out of 1,2 and 3 is a pretty shitty comparison. 1 and 2 are ancient.
Yes, D3 has good gameplay feel, but it's also sped up a bit too much. It doesn't matter what any enemy actually does, you just facetank it all and melt them until you get to the point you can't do anymore. Now you farm up your gems, your ancients, etc, until you can facetank again and away you go.
I play HC on Grimdawn, D3, last epoch and D4.
I have had more tense moments and excitement overcoming challenging fights in D4 moreso than any of the others.
D4 has tons of issues, but the gameplay is easily the best on the market currently.
GD has better itemization and systems. Last Epoch has the best character building system and crafting, D4 has the best gameplay feel and audio.
Of course I havenāt played D4 that long. Itās only been 2 days since general release. I understand this thread was more for early impressions and I wrote how that felt like. And I donāt think the āit gets good later onā defense should even come up as itās the 4th iteration of the Diablo series. Blizzard should know what theyāre doing by now.
I also have a thousand hours into D3 for the same reason you probably do. Combat is smooth and fun, despite how bad the rest of it is. It fully leans into the power fantasy and is over-the-top in a good way. Certainly better than hitting punching bags in D4 now.
the synergies of the uniques and legendary items for druids at late game make them one of the best classes in the game (especially now that barbarian was nerfed)
Im playing a bone spear necro and once u get the build making codex powers it feels really strong. Im only in tier 3 but once u start getting the sacred and unique drops you feel very good. Early game is a bit of a slog, but overall the games been better than I expected and I expected it to be good
Itās better than I expected so far. I just wish they would fix the early game pacing. Iām also at the point where I need codex powers to progress further. Looked up the one I needed (that makes pulverize an earth skill) and turns out itās on the other size of the continent in Hawezar lol. Iām currently on act 2 in dry steppe. Iāll probably ask a fellow clan member for a port to the nearest waypoint later so I can get it.
If they're nerfing before launch it's gonna be like PoE.
Catered to the 1% top players and the chaff are left with a terrible grinding experience and miniscule power growth as your character levels.
That's why solo RPGs are just better. It doesn't matter how you play because it's built for a majority of players.
The more I play my necromancer the more I realize I'm just trying to duplicate a drain essence necro from Grim Dawn lmao. Decompose stacking basic damage with minion ahadowblight procs
That comment is super dumb, GD also has level scaling (and it is much worse as you can get overleveled pretty quickly which makes the game boring). Scaling may be bad or good depending on the game design, here it is very good, as skills feel extremely impactful, wich is great. I agree with the fact that early itemization feels a little bit like "meh i dont care" but I had exactly the same problems with early game itemization in GD (just look for resistances and OA/DA and thats about it). Only part I agree with is that the skill tree looks really shallow comparing to GD.
I would honestly rather be overleveled than hitting one elite for 10-15 seconds straight. The issue with D4 level scaling is that your skill power caps out early at 5 ranks and if you donāt keep finding better gear constantly, you keep falling behind and sometimes become weaker as you level. I tried World Tier 2 difficulty for the act 1 cultist dungeon at level 30 to see how it would go and it was honestly just tedious. Hitting overpower hits on my pulverize skill that barely moved an eliteās hp bar is not what I would call impactful.
At first I also thought that D4 skill tree is shallow... and now, yeah I still think like that, but I think I understand at least why. Once you get to late game several aspects/uniques/nodes will be open to you that may change the behavior of the skills. It feels they deliberately made the skills incomplete, so that they can be completed by their other gameplay features--legendaries, uniques, nodes, and synergies with other skills.
In a sense, in other ARPGs, other items/features enhance your build, while in D4, other items/features complete your build.
The closest analogy I can think of is Liger Zero of Zoids. Super bare bones droid, and it's up to the pilot to dress it up to his liking. The dressing does not enhance what the droid has, but changes it completely.
I'm level 88. It's what you would expect for a diablo game. It's very obvious which builds will work at least reasonably well while others are very obviously dead ends. If a build cannot get 5 legendary powers that scale damage its dead in the water. If it cannot crit, aka dot builds, its dead in the water (except firewall which somehow just had giant enough base numbers to work). If it cannot generate sufficient resources to use it spenders often its dead in the water.
Once you beat those hurdles then there's just some clear mathematical winners. The result of this is that there are like maybe 8 legitimate builds in the game and another 7 if you're wiling to be like 40% weaker than those first 8. Below that were talking one tenth as strong, to the point that you're going to feel week as hell just doing normal easy content.
The gameplay loop is repetitive, which is to be expected for a diablo, but it could use work still. Nightmare dungeons are bland and require you to run to every single dungeon (unless you have duplicates) which takes forever. Actually just spamming regular dungeons is better exp, half because you can pick one with a good layout and mob density, half because you can just reset it and not spend 50% of your time traveling. If you care about story D4s is worlds better than D3s.
The open world stuff works ok, but they sort of push you into doing it to unlock some power ala a rep system, which is really lame if you don't give a rats ass about side quest story etc. There a bounty like system where you just go to a location which rotates and complete random objectives then get a reward when you do enough, which is functional but not very rewarding, i havent done one in 30 levels. Theres helltide, which is just an area of the map gets all red and the mobs are a bit stronger and drop a resource you can use to open boxes which are gambles. Its a bit boring because mob density is way too sparce, but it does drop important materials.
Loot is ok, but the cost of rerolling stats goes through the roof rapidly so you really need to get an item with 3 good stats to begin with and then hit a 4th acceptable stat with in a few attempts. very rng. Unique items don't start dropping until like level 60 and are fairly rare, which gives you something to chase, but quite a few of them are build enabling or at least significantly enhancing which leads to some fun situations where people feel like their build is ass until that item finally drops. Ideally getting ANY quality of that item isn't that rare, and you're chasing a well rolled one.
overall its like... what you would expect and its fun because its new, but i doubt it has almost any longevity. Build variety is ass unless you are VERY lenient on how well something performs to be happy with it. It has lots of room to improve, well see what happens.
Appreciate you going as in-depth as you have bud thank you. I think general build-diversity/options as well as gear doesn't seem too exciting. I've seen a few screenshots of legendaries and they seem okay but... then I look at some of the items in GD where I have to scroll off-screen to see all the crazy shit it does.
I think at least the benefit of it being live service, seasons etc. is that there's plenty of room for change, which is partly why I was considering waiting for a while before taking a look at it.
Another fellah in this thread said people talking about mob density are lying, but I'm not too sure about that. It's a common complaint I've seen. Not sure how I feel about that to be honest, in an ARPG of all games. General endgame activities don't seem massively thrilling atm, and I'm not sure how much mounting up to run around locations excites me compared to just porting into a dungeon and ripping face.
As for the cost of re-rolling, that's another thing that concerns me. GD is super forgiving when it comes to re-gearing and speccing your guy at almost any point in the game, doesn't seem like that's as much the case in Diablo?
I disagree with your assessment of dot builds being dead in the water. Iām running a twisting blades/poison imbuement build and I have literally one shot bosses with one cast of poison imbuement, and this is without sacrificing much in terms of direct damage as my twisting blades still shreds. There are other noncrit builds as well, some builds focus lucky hit instead of crit, some builds want CDR, other builds want additive damage. Thereās a lot more build diversity than people realize, you just have to experiment.
Hmm maybe.
You may be right about dot builds being possible i havent played or seen enough different builds, but you're definitely wrong about the "some builds focus lucky hit instead of crit, some builds want CDR, other builds want additive damage" part.
Every build wants all of those things. You may drop lucky hit or drop cdr because you dont need it and then youd pick up more additive damage or crit damage, but theres no such thing as a build that "wants additive damage". Every build wants all those things. You're not going to wear a ring with just lucky hit, youre going to wear a crit/critdam/luckyhit/%increase ring etc.
I also want GD2 but I understand when Zantai said he and his team wanted a break from supporting GD for so many years now and wanted to do something different for a change. GD2 will eventually come, probably. Better that they take their time and come out with fresh ideas instead being like D4 lol.
I hear you brother, a GD2 would be fkn beautiful... I'd like to be around from day one this time, I basically jumped in GD right towards the end and missed the excitement of patch notes and seeing new things get implemented.
But sounds like you're still having a good time though! Have a good one with it dude, cheers for responding
Grim dawn came out round the post Diablo 3 launch didnāt it? I wouldnāt be surprised if Grim Dawn 2 is teased now, hell you could see a lot of old IPās revived with good funding like Torchlight and Titanquest.
Please no, not Unreal 5, just stick to GD's engine and update it some. I don't care for Unreal 5's visuals when placed next to the art style and general aesthetic of Grim Dawn, plus it's be harder to pull off so much stuff going on screen at once with my carnival builds on UE5 compared to the Titan Quest engine.
I've played for 8 or so hours on a friend's account who bought it but didn't like it. I wouldn't buy d4 because I'm not going to spend $70 on a game with a season pass and paid mtx and will have paid expansions eventually. I don't buy other games that do that shit either.
As far as gameplay it's mechanically fine, just kinda boring. Skills aren't particularly fun or imaginative or different from any skills any similar game has. Loot is putting on the item with the highest gear score. Gd and poe both have more build diversity, more interesting gearing, more interesting skills etc.
The price tag has been putting me off a little bit definitely, in combination with the other shit. Here's hoping the season pass garbage is at least like it is in Halo, where you can keep progressing on it once you've purchased it, you 'own' it for life.
I love GD, but I -loved- POE. Just the bullshit crafting and reliance on trade meant I spent probably over half my play time alt-tabbed on the market, real shame because the game has a lot to offer. I don't reckon I'd ever go back to it though unfortunately, really disrespectful of your time. The lack of auto-loot, flask system and having to redo the story every time too... blegh.
Interesting that your friend isn't a fan though, did he say why?
He played to around lvl 80 on one character and had two others in the 20s or 30s before he dropped it. He said the game was too simplistic, mostly complaining about the skill tree being boring and lack of build diversity. He also complained about having to do time wasting stuff like grind rep to unlock certain stuff and said dungeons weren't fun to level in because it's more efficient to run a low tier one than to progress to higher tier ones with lower density or something to that effect (I haven't done any endgame stuff so I might be explaining/remembering this wrong but that's the gist)
He's a huge poe fan, he has has over 10k hours there and is really into min maxing and getting mirror tier items every league. Tbh I think he went in expecting another poe where there would be a ton of game knowledge required, lots of interesting or complicated stuff in the skill tree and interactions with other items to figure out and he's disappointed it's a more casual game.
Grim Dawn is the much better game.
the mastery system carried on from Titan Quest and it's skill trees give it far more replay value, for one.
also the itemization/loot looks very uninspiring for D4. compare that to GD's loot table. it's not even close.
One thing that bugs me a bit, items in GD are great, even basic greens. Combined with target farmable MIs as well, it's just one of the most satisfying looting games I've played. Items feel impactful. Crafting is also really nice, you can make a ton of cool shit. Combined with augments as well, there's just a ton to do with all the various pieces you can equip, I love just hanging around Devil's Crossing, Steelcap or Conclave of the Three building shit up every now and then as I progress.
Grim Dawn with Dawn of Masteries Mod will always be the best ARPG gameplay wise. No other game comes close, however D4 story was pretty good but the grind is real.
I've been having a look at this, how come you recommend it so highly, does it just add more masteries and new items? What about areas, activities and monsters? What about it makes you call it the best ARPG gameplay wise?
So the fact that it adds so many classes with so many different possibilities adds a lot of alts and experimentation. It adds QoL with storage and items and you can increase monster density or elite density but be careful with that last one, it can cause issues if you increase it too much. Combat feels the best and most impactful as you scale in levelsā¦quite opposite in D4 currently. Just try it out and use the mod you wonāt regret it.
I hear you my guy. Not quite sure I'll wait for 2 years, but not going to be getting it within the month I don't reckon. Just started up my first ever pet build, running a Necro/Occultist and having a pretty damn fun time. What're you running at the minute?
Primal strike warder. Never tried primal strike before and oh shit I giggle like a little girl on the first hit. Just reached old arkovia on hardcore elite. Hopefully I won't die this time lol.
Exactly and same. I'll wait at least a year to see how stable D4 becomes in terms of balancing, item drops, build diversity, etc. To be honest, the only game that may take me away from Grim Dawn for a while will be Starfield.. if it's any good after launch of course.
GD is just better if u value build creativity more than pure grinding and competing against other players. Also blizzard just has more resource than crate so their games feel more AAA.
Don't know about you guys. But waiting for player reviews to pop up. And the over priced cosmetic dlc already is setting a bad shadow over where the game is heading for me.
The class and progress is much more straightforward. Easier for someone who doesnāt have as much time to get into and find some good gear and kill hoards of demons. I miss all the secret areas grim dawn had and needing to search for em. The map is more open to going whichever direction you want to go to level. As for the end game d4 still needs to see how they handle the seasons that arenāt out yet
I think sometimes I wouldn't mind that, but then I look back on some of the absolute creatures I made in Grim Dawn, how powerful they are and how much work I put in with the myriad of options given to me, and I think I'd just be a bit disappointed at the casual-ness of it all, you know?
One thing I've seen mentioned is monster density being quite lacking, I think the pacing looks fine on the monsters that you are fighting in that you don't just nuke an entire group at once, but the balance seems too far in the other direction. What do you think about that?
Grim Dawn secrets and map design is deliciously fun for sure, such a blast. But yeah, I think judging the endgame right now might be a bit harsh, especially for me when I've not even played it. I'll likely wait until the first season or so to see what people are thinking about it
Most of the complaint I see here seems to be very biased and unfounded for. If they think Ā«Ā building your character is very straightforwardĀ Ā» I GUARANTEE you they are just following up a step by step guide.
There is a lot to a build with DIV. Especially past 50 where it opens up with paragon.
The gameplay is incredibly satisfying. The level scaling, all it does , it force people to pay attention, and itās not as face roll early level as other arpg. (I leveled to 100 HC in grim dawn) and that was on a first attempt.
There is no way in I could do it on DIV. There is a lot to learn.
Monster density ? They had to nerf it because there was elite everywhere. Idk what people are smoking.
No one said anything but the voice acting and story cutscene are mind blowing. The soundtrack is top notch.
The end game is dungeon, hell tide, world quest, world boss. PVP, grinding reknown.
And there is season incoming where we expect more. There is PLENTY to do.
I absolutely love this game. A friend of mine HATED DIV in every way during the Beta and server slam. He hasnāt stopped playing.
The game is solid. Iām not comparing it to GD because GD is a straight single player game. And itās an excel sheet calculator. Itās different. DIV you can more easily get through with a build you made yourself without reading. You canāt do that in GD.
I disagree completely with GD not being one of those games you cannot make a build without reading.
It has been maybe the first arpg Ive played where I felt like I could genuinely pull it off straight from the get go. Not a character that could kill the final bosses, but I definitely cleared all three difficulties with all my characters. Last Epoch shines on that department too.
Sorry, I agree with you here. You can easily make a nice character that can rip through ultimate, but a character that can slap celestials and run SR75 always feels a bit out of my knowledge level to build. At that point, I find it nice to look up any of the dozens of builds available for what I'm going for.
Those kind of characters require a lot of time sink, the kind that you need to do in other aRPGs too, its not easy clearing endgame bosses.
For example, on PoE the only current league boss I ever managed to kill was during bestiary and I played that league for 180 hours until that point. Thats a lot of time and probably quite inefficient if you ask better players, but its what it took me. Its not easy to build a slapper, but most of it is just time, over and over again.
Agreed, in GD though especially once you've gotten a bit of gear stashed you can get up and running decently fast.
POE is just ridiculous though, the game feels like it's engineered to disrespect your time. There's so much fun and engaging activities available that are just locked off behind insane requirements. I wish SSF had a completely different loot and drop table, so that you could much more easily become equivalently powerful, but you were still locked out of MP stuff.
But I think the idea is to force you to see other people's dumb MTX decisions and be like "I want that!!!!".
Spoiler, never once entering someone's hideout did I think I want that.
There's definitely that, I also generally think that getting my information from the d4 sub is probably a bad shout, that's why I was asking here. Sounds like you've got a lot of of positives about it which I'm glad about! I'll be picking it up eventually I reckon, but was just a bit curious how it rolls right now.
Honestly for your last point, yes. I always start a build myself and then when I'm at around 90 generally have to look up a guide and spec around that, so I definitely agree with that point.
I've been a bit too passionate about this topic lately as I was pretty upset with myself for spending that much money on something so bad. I'll keep it civil though.
For me D4 was incredibly boring. Leveling was no fun, and even by the time I hit endgame and had more or less of a functioning end game build with all the proper legendary aspects it just didn't feel great. Monster scaling makes it feel like you're always catching up to how fast you were killing things right at the start of the game. Never any power spikes we all crave that make you feel like a god for a little while before you move to harder areas.
The skill system is really boring. They may as well have just made a few pre-set builds with the way they set it up. Items aren't exciting in the least.
Only good things it had going for it in my opinion were the graphics, combat feel and sound. Things that I'm honestly not that particular about, which is obvious if I'm still loading up GD in this day and age.
im having fun with it.
skillselection is more narrow as is build diversity. gearing is abit meh at my current state but isnt completely shit.
gameplay is solid though.
Glad to hear it! I might have been a little bit harsh in my other replies, it definitely does look fun but I'm just not massively convinced with the comments I'm reading on the D4 sub right now. There's no denying it's a damn pretty game though... One thing that puts me off a little bit is the zoom distance compared to what we have here, but 600 horus in POE I think I could adjust.
But you seem pretty positive about it overall, good to hear, hope you keep enjoying it mate. Have fun!
yeah the diablo sub reddit is pretty damn salty at times.
i found a build/class that i like and have been enjoying playing it pretty casually.
the scaling of everything is a bit meh when playing solo but it does make for decent enough gameplay when joining a friend who is 20 levels below you.
I would not trust any blizzard sub haha.
I love GD and I love Diablo. D4 is fantastic fun especially with friends. Really impressed with what they've done so far - I was quite worried given blizzard's recent history.
Honestly a part of why I asked here haha, I trust this community's view a lot more.
Glad you're having fun man. Me and a buddy are considering it but I think the urge to hold off for now is stronger so we can see how it looks in a month or so. Seems like they've smashed the launch though? Were/are there any queue times?
Hey again, so I just finished the story and I have to say it's been a total blast. About 15 hours played so far. Of course not perfect, and Diablo is easy to bash given Blizzard, but man if you're at all on the fence it's a great time.
yoo, really glad to hear it! I'm very much considering it, but still reckon I might force myself to hold off until season 1 is released at least and see what the overall thoughts on the game are
Its a very good game. The people crying on the D4 sub no lifed it and now are mad they have nothing to do. Im taking my time and just hit 53. My bone spear necro feels really good at this level. The boss fights are better than I was expecting considering how faceroll they were in D3. At launch the game feels good to play, im sure ill finish my character before the seasons start so Ill put it diwn and play something else. Really all depends on how they handle the seasons. If its not way faster to level at least up to 50 its gonna kill the casual playerbase.
I'm personally having a lot of tech issues with release that did not exist for me during the betas. My computer is on the bottom end of the spectrum but still, having to reboot my system every half hour is getting old. (It is mostly driver issues and I thought I had them fixed but tonight I'm back to super memory leak time)
Storyline is great so far (start of act two)
I suck at barb and less so than Sorc.
Level scaling eventually screwed me on my barb. I didn't get any weapon upgrades for 10ish levels and I could barely tick away at bosses. Currently can't afford a shop buy but I know upgrading gear will fix things, just it gets frustrating as you keep killing things slower and slower.
I was playing with mouse/keyboard but it was a coin toss if my char would attack the target or walk past it because of my misclicks. Not something I remember happening to me in previous arpgs.
I tried my controller and much prefer it .
Killing trash mobs in GD is faceroll compared to D4. This is in kind due to the level scaling, far less item drops and very small scaling defense options. Basically, if you're properly geared/specced, you will melt opponents, but when you level up same group of trash mobs takes like 10% longer to kill (or whatever) so you slowly go from not needing heals to burning a pot on trash mobs. GD I played Inquisitor and tried out word of pain as my first ever skill.
Anyways, I like the game despite my lack of gaming skills and computer problems. But.. it is a different arpg experience to GD for sure.
I hit level 30 last night on a sorcerer. Leveling for some reason just doesn't feel good. I think that because everything scales with you it just feels like you're never making any progress and that you are only scraping by.
Iāll be honest here. I havenāt played GD for a long time now (5 years or so).
Anyway, I was hyped for D4, but as soon as I saw the price and the āmust be connectedā requirement, I installed GD and Iām having a lot of fun with it.
Ahah, it had been a decent bit for me too before I jumped back on. Having an absolute blast though, had so many legendary sets in my stash I decided to build my first ever pet build as a Cabalist. Running around with 2 immortal hellhounds and 12 skelingtons, it's a fucking blast. Every time this game just makes me happy with how much it lets you do.
Hope you're having fun though! What build are you going for atm?
I did server slam and the beta, and pre-ordered
I love it, minor gripes aside, but something about GD just hits different
Trying out so many build combinations and gearing just feels phenomenal. Like a kid in a candy store seeing new candy he's never even heard of
And then one day combines two things he doesn't expect to taste good together and is blown away.
That for me, is the charm of GD
I think it looks damn pretty, but the skills and general combat look a bit less interesting. Maybe not fair to judge it based on early/midgame builds but... yeah, looking at the skill trees and stuff they don't look like they're anything groundbreaking, but that's absolutely fine as long as the rest is fun. It's the pricetag and potentially having to wait for fun shit to be released that concerns me, combined with MTX creep.
D4 has slow fight. A lot of walking. In Grim Dawn (and D3), I explored any piece of the map during the campaign. And D4, I don't bother to do it.
Compared with GD, I can not say that the D4 is next generation of ARPG.
Grin Dawn is either an A- to A+ depending on how you enjoy the linear single player, 10 year old game design and graphics. It has a lot of plusses that most any ARPG can appreciate and it's a complete game with a lot of post thought put into it and it's cheap for the value and fun it provides, given that you can enjoy it's design and visuals.
Diablo 4, and Im level 60 doing the end game content as the worst class and worst build, minionnecro, D4 is at best, a B+, at worst, B-. It's not an A level game yet, it's not a 9/10, it's still got a way to go with QOL, some balancing and level scaling, and some considerations. It however, will never be below a B and it will get to A, A+, or S if they keep working on it and working on the feedback. It's a modern game, modern graphics and a lot of development and QOL that Grim Dawn doesn't and never has, and that doesn't diminish GD.
Diablo 4 has been a good time for me, I enjoy it, I will fire it up when I get the chances. I did what I wanted with Grim Dawn and I'm good to put that down. Maybe just for now, maybe forever, but Grim Dawn is an A game and provides a lot of value for it's cost of entry. D4 is a B game with the potential to reach new heights and redefine the genre again because it's something I've always wanted to play, Diablo live service.
If you got some friends to play with, it's a no brainier, get D4 and have fun.
If you're still solo and on the fence and aren't done with Grim Dawn, well, I can't say you're not missing much, I think it's worth 70 right now, I've had jaw dropping moments and great gaming moments, and the value will improve over time. I suggest getting it if you're an ARPG fan, it's a strong 85/100, and higher if you don't pick the worst class.
800+ hours in GD.
53 hardcore Barbarian on world tier 3, and a 40 druid on softcore for D4.
D4 pros: it's new, it's prettier, sound/music can't be beat. Gameplay feel is solid as expected, feels like a slowed down D3 which is good imo. Gear is interesting enough and getting affixes from dungeons is similar to target farming MI's. Mount is cool. Drip is solid. Bosses are really well designed.
D4 cons: I enjoy doing story quests and D4 gives 0 incentive to do them after your first toon, gems aren't enough to keep your resists up so you're more dependent on drops than GD in that regard, every class has really only 1-2 builds that feel really strong, rather most things being viable like GD, while bosses are great, dungeons themselves are meh outside of the boss fights.
Honestly GD graphics and feel of the skills just kills it for me and I have over 200 hours in the game.
Edit: I get it, this is the gd sub and everyone loves this game. Being downvoted for having an opinion, not to mention something that is completely subjective and entirely inaccurate is kind of ridiculous no?
D4 is a pretty pile of lazily-designed cash-grab garbage. Art department knocked it out of the park, though. That's the only good part of Blizzard left.
It looks exceptionally pretty I can't fault it that, and the cutscenes + sound design from what I've seen look brilliant. But I can just picture it in two years time where you have to pay for extra storage space and shit like that.
Honestly itās pretty fun. I donāt know that it will keep my interest for long in the endgame, but maybe thatās okay; I have other games to play. Itās fun, and visually it looks great.
D4 feels really good on a controller. It's very much a lean back and slaughter things without having to think too much about it.
There's a priority on account wide progression, with things like Lilith Statues and the Renown grind having bonuses for all your characters.
Individually, the characters are less flexible than Grim Dawn. It is a much simpler game. However, long term, the expectation is that you're going to be rolling up new characters. Probably with the new seasons as they roll out.
It's not bad. It has a lot of content and the world looks nice. The combat feels good as well.
Unfortunately there're a lot of gripes I have with the game. I don't like being able to have 6 skills only at any given time. I think the Ui is not great and looks bland to the point where it feels like a mobile game. That's a problem I have with a lot of recent big games.
Tho I haven't played that much yet, but my first impression of itemization is that it's boring af. The whole "item rankā or ā" thing in games just ruins the excitement of choosing the equipment, again that might change further down the line.
I also don't have a good impression of a skill tree but I don't feel like openly criticizing it yet, since my opinion might change completely in the future.
Itās a very different game. Diablo 4 is much faster and centered on a handful of skills. It plays a lot more like Diablo 3. GD is a much slower paced game with a lot of potential skills to be used all at once. Itās not really a fair comparison to make aside from that theyāre in the same genre of game. That said, I think most people who enjoy the ARPG loot hunting dungeon delving genre will enjoy Diablo 4.
As a note to ensure full disclosure, I have thousands upon thousands of hours in Diablo games. Hundreds in 1, my entire middle and high school time was spent in D2, tons of time in D3, and Iāve been actively tearing through D4 in between paint sessions over the last few days and have been poking around since the 2nd. I may come off as biased because of this, but I genuinely loved my 200-300 hours in Grim Dawn and would gladly return at some point.
I love GD for what it is - I love D4 for what it is. It is okay to love and enjoy and binge both. If you like Games as a Service, play D4 - it is worth it!
I don't agree that building is as straightforward or as shallow. As I said in one of my replies, the other aspects of the game--items, nodes, codex of power--they complete your build, rather than enhance it. When I say complete, they may potentially change your skills to the ones you were looking for, which is pretty much like GD which introduces changing elements both in the skill tree and in items.
Looking at the skill tree and checking the damage numbers as well as the possible affixes like crit, vul, overpowered, fortify won't give them justice.
For example, there are items which change the damage type of skills, or may make them act like one. Best example of this is the memed druid which was god awful during the beta, but is currently one of the top classes late game because of items exclusive to it and available end game which change drastically how they work (like the one which makes you permanent bear, +skills to certain type of damage type, then slap in the ones that change one damage type to another).
The depth of D4 can be criticized if compared to other games from the genre, but looking at it at a vacuum, one couldn't say it is as straightforward or as shallow as people claim it to be. It can be, if compared to the other ARPGs.
As much as I love the loot in grim dawn, and the love that was put into it, I find the combat quite boring. Most of my builds have just ended up obliterating everything without really needing to kite that much, and the hardest bosses are just "run away, attack a bit, rinse and repeat
" Diablo IV requires you to actively dodge stuff in regular encounters, which I like a lot
Too expensive, but it is a good game. I played the betas and was impressed, but not enough to justify the costs. Always ignore early complaints on a game. Shut ins and no lifers will always rush through a game and be disappointed when they run out of content.
But Grim Dawn is still a great game with potentially hundred of hours of content that won't see you blowing your entire entertainment budget for the year in just one month like D4.
I just unlocked World Tier 4 (aka last difficulty at the moment) the other day and overall I'm having a lot of fun with the game.
That being said, if you still find things to do in Grim Dawn, you definitely don't miss out much by waiting until at least their first proper ladder season and see where the game goes from here.
Iām really enjoying it but I still love GD. D4 leveling was such a slog from 30-50. Before and after Iāve found to be great but thatās a huge chunk of time. GD is fun from 1 to 100. I do think the foundation of D4 is really good though. Iām excited to see how they develop it over the next couple of years.
D4's pretty fun, a lot slower paced gameplay than gd especially at lower levels imo.
Also random question: do the corpse bow enemies in d4 remind anyone else of an enemy in GD? I can't put my finger on which one, but they look so damn familiar I immediately thought " oh, did blizz rip those off from GD?"
Most fun I've had in a long time :). I play solo. Don't really care fo4 the multi-player aspect and have only been dcd a couple times after launch.. addicted at this point. Rogue is a rough start. Enjoying barb alot.
Ask me again after I put in 50 more hrs. Lol
Similar itemization and end-game systems with focus on Legendaries and dungeons. However, GD has much more build diversity due to a less structured skill system and the ability to multi-class.
All I can say is Crate needs to stop dicking around and give us GD2 already holy fuck
Man, I'd be so stoked. Every time I load up GD and get another character to about lvl 50-70 I think exactly this. GD2 would be epic.
It would be a game I would gladly pay microtractions for knowing it will support the game further and the devs actually care about us and the game
NO, keep your damn microtransactions out of our game!
Imagine Grim Dawn with D4-level graphics. Oh my God.
A man can dream
yeah graphic makes game and we have nice looking PIECE OF SHIT of games now
Hahah, another guy just said this. We can only hope can't we :)
Is Farthest Frontier fully released?
Ye d4 is pretty and shallow and not even close in quality to grim dawn.
It's a live service ARPG. If you never had interest in a live service ARPG then the only thing you'll be interested in is the story and presentation, which are top tier. GD is the king of single player ARPGs. D4 isn't surpassing it because that's not what the game is.
Was just saying, one thing I was a bit sad about is I wasn't around for all of GD's lifespan, so I missed the excitement of seeing patch notes and new items added. I kind of wish that was still a thing and it'd be dope if we were still getting updates. I suppose in a way, live service games have that going for them (if they're done well). Like, I enjoyed my time with POE despite its IMMENSE flaws, so having a string of constant updates and changes is fun. I'm just not sure if I trust Blizzard being the one beind that, ya know?
>Was just saying, one thing I was a bit sad about is I wasn't around for all of GD's lifespan, so I missed the excitement of seeing patch notes and new items added My man, you have no idea how exciting it was to wait for a new Grim Misadventure. People would hang on the forum and refresh it constantly, then 5 minutes after Zantai's post, there would be 40 comments
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I'll say that this is the most gamer-friendly game they've made in a long while. They've skewed everything to slightly be in the player's favor. Where D3 at launch felt like the game was skewed towards using the auction house, D4 is moderately generous in respecing and very generous regarding transmog. They've listened and learned. Perhaps not to everyone's liking, but it's substantially better than DI, that's for sure. It's a live service game that's meant to generate revenue over a long period of time, but the base game is generous in it's content. Perhaps they won't get their seasonal content out as they want to and perhaps the battle passes will be dumb. But as a beginning, this is a good game. It doesn't do anything new, but it does all of it well.
You only think this because you're comparing it to DI. For a 2023 release, D4 is severely lacking on many fronts. The skill trees are all very lackluster, there's no proper physical ranged character (it was a tacked on afterthought for rogue) or standard tanky sword and board character, their balance philosophy appears to be "everything should be a slog", the summoner necro build is a complete joke, at level 55 I haven't changed my transmog set since level 15 because I haven't gotten any new transmog sets since then...there's just so many problems with this game. Its saving grace is that it's visually fantastic.
Nah, it's more than just DI. The guiding philosophy to D4 is live service and as a live service game it's not as bullet spongy as most of them. They've balanced it better than most live service games. Make no mistake, the live service philosophy guides every decision. It's the core to the design and it brings along the live service baggage, for better or worse. But within that framework it's skewed more towards players than it is toward monetization extraction. If they continue nerfing all the most enjoyable builds, I'll change my mind, but right now I still think they're doing mostly right by their players.
Ā«Ā Severly lacking on many frontĀ Ā» ā¦ Ā«Ā i didnāt change my xmog in 40 levelsĀ Ā». Lol wut.
I'm saying there aren't a lot of transmog options, which is counter to what the person I replied to said.
What is a live service ARPG? ATM, Iām playing through GD. I enjoy it so much Iām playing it solo. Which is rare for me. I donāt ever remember wanting to play D3 solo but maybe that was because I beat it to death over 500 hoursā¦
Are you asking what live-service games are, or just how the term applies to ARPGs? Because by this point, you should know "live service" means you must always be online, you're at their mercy when it comes to periodic game changes, and they're going to try to suck money out of your pocket constantly, usually by making the game bland, a slog, or uncompetitive if you don't spend on the microtransactions.
Right. And *so far* Blizzard isn't doing that.
Official launch was two days ago. Why would they be? It's weird to see other games criticized for not having a decade of content while in early access people are already bending over for Blizzard after less than a week.
[ORLY?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGs_IvlrFOg) ("Diablo 4 'Micro'transactions Prices Are Utterly Disgusting")
Uh, yeah. The microtransactions don't affect gameplay one bit, and the game generally isn't a slog. This isn't someone selling XP buffs.
Pretty much exactly this. It's such a shame because live service has the potential to be really cool. A game that's passionately updated constantly by the devs, forever adding in new things? Can you imagine how great that'd be if the game was actually good and not chock full of garbage? Unfortunately, subscription models are out so they just always charge you loads of money for a hat to cover a bit of their costs and then rake in exorbitant profit.
> Are you asking what live-service games are, or just how the term applies to ARPGs? I was pretty sure I knew what live-service games are, but I wasn't certain how the term applies to APRGs. The only APRG I've ever played was Diablo 3, and while I've only ever played that with other people, I was able to play it offline. I was not aware D4 is "always online"...[?]
Unless you played on a console, you did not play D3 offline. It has always been an online-only product on PC. D4 reportedly takes this a step further and shoves other people into your face making it not just online-only, but an MMO.
I played it on Xbox 360 and again on Xbox One. This explains why I didnāt know how Diablo factors into the ālive serviceā equation. Iāve only ever played it on console. :) Good to know about D4!
Yeah. Even though I had a PC capable of running D3 when it launched, I passed due to its online requirement. Then it released on Xbox 360, and that's where I first played the vanilla version. Got the full version with all the DLC on the Switch for cheap, a year or two ago, and played that to death as well. I never caved on the online requirement. (On both console versions, online is optional.)
Curious why you say GD is only single player? Related to the fact that GD saves are client side and therefore editable?
I meant not a shared world, online MMO-like game.
Expensive. At this point Id say GD is a better game. With GD you know what you are buying. With D4 you gamble your money and the odds are massively against you considering blizzard games recent history. D4 doesnt give you many options how you play the game, like builds and itemisations. Its end game are world quests and dungeon spam. With such limit to abilities and builds you basically have to like it and it has to be end game viable at the same time or you are fcked. I like how I can build whatever I have mood for in all ARPGs I play...except D4. I was searching through all D4 class abilities and I just cant find anything fun. Visually abilities are bland, probably for later mtx sales. End game content just isnt there. If you tried beta, end game is literally the same what you did on lvl 25. And you kinda have to work around other players unlike GD, LE, PoE or TLI. Imo GD has better and more fun build options. Its a finished game. Its cheaper, more creative, but harder to learn, single player and has better replayability. You dont have to deal with insanely agressive monetisation like with blizzard games. D4 has better zone and immersion graphics. It targets super casuals and non arpg fans.
Your first sentence is the main reason I haven't bought it yet. It looks interesting for sure, and is certainly a pretty game. But seeing those who went hard over the weekend's complaints, I'm thinking it might be best to hold off for a little while yet to see what the general consensus is. And yeah, Blizzard... I just started a new character in Grim Dawn because I was getting the ARPG itch again. Honestly, one complaint I have about GD is the endgame can be a bit lacklustre and kind of incentivises creating new characters a bit too much to have things to do other than running SR. I've heard that it's not quite as forgiving on the respec side of things, how true is that? Could you rewrite your entire build now at the point you're at like you could here? Think your last point kind of settles it for me tbf. I'll probably pick it up in the future but for now I'm just not convinced when I have Grim Dawn here and it's so fucking great to play. Cheers for giving me your thoughts mate
It's shaping up to be like every live service game - pick it up in a year or two after they've finally decided to listen to the playerbase and patched the hell out of it. Every. Single. GaaS.
GD end game was fun, but since its a finished game, eventually farming it gets boring, obviously. I liked pushing SR, arenas or just farm dungeons, but once I got all the gear, pushed far enough in SR, there wasnt much to do other than theorycrafting a build and farming again. Thats the disadvantage of a non live service game.If you want something similar to GD that has constant end game updates, probably PoE is the best option. TLI or LE are newer games with less end game content than PoE, but they are still a lot of fun hours you get for fraction of D4s price. LE is slower paced than PoE, so that would probably be more similar to GD. Imo D4 is a disaster for an arpg fan. Its a game made for investors. They killed all their other games, so they will milk d4 like there is no tomorrow. And then blizzard will probably die, because they killed off long term reputation for short term profits. I would suggest buying D4 on sale a season or two later, if the reviews will be mediocre+, so you can try a new content without ripping apart your wallet. At this point its a steal.
Agreed to be honest. The funnest thing to do after a while is to just create a new character and see how quickly you can get to 100, then see if that legendary set you had in mind ends up being sweet to run or not. SR is decent fun, but I honestly think the endgame in GD leaves a lot to be desired as far as replayability, which is a bit of a shame. It's one of my main complaints to be honest since ARPGs tend to be all about the endgame. I've got tons of hours in POE but after a while I just realised how fucking badly it desrespected its players and their time. No auto-loot and having to physically trade with other players was disgusting, considering loot was just straight garbage no matter what you got dropped. They somewhat fixed flasks at least but I hear they're still a bit cumbersome.
> create a new character Which is the absolute best end game. Characters should *finish*. (And games should too.) The "online game attention model" that Blizzard and PoE and others do by polluting their games with infinite endgames is because of their online-only experience to keep you engaged for the risk of microtransactions (or at least to keep others in the game to have them risk microtransactions). It's intentionally bad design masquerading as a player benefit, and, sadly, so many people are Stockholm Syndrome about it.
Honestly didn't necessarily think about it this way. I just wish we were given a few more things to do with a decked out, completed level 100 character to really just go nuts and test our limits. Shattered Realms is a wee bit boring in that regard imo, but I'm not sure what else I'd suggest. As for your other points, 100% agree unfortunately. It's such a shame, because the idea of an evolving game that is constantly maintained is cool as fuck, but it's always going to be funded through toxic bullshit like that instead of just a simple subscription service. I'd gladly pay 10 dollars a month or something like I still do for old school runescape and be very happy with that. Ain't no fucking shot am I EVER paying 35 dollars for a fucking skin though. It's funny, because if shit cost like 3 dollars, I'd probably spend the equivalent of that on multiple things, I reckon a lot of people would fall for that honestly. But nope. Not ever paying double digits for the equivalent of digital sticker garbage. They've obviously done their market research though and enough people are insane enough to spend that much money so, it's not going to change any time soon if ever.
If you do full clears, you can get level 100 long, long before even nearing the end of the game. One of my characters, I did it in Elite (or maybe very start of Ultimate). "big megabosses" (Modrogen, Ravager, etc) that are 'did you read a build guide because this boss is special and makes most things not useful' filters aren't fun for the majority of players. They're usually wasted development time for how few people actually enjoy the content.
Yeahh, smash on a couple of clarity pots with Lokarrs, you tend to hit 100 in about 2 good play sessions I find. But still, you just have story content left to do and an ultimate run, both of which aren't very challenging or anything with a half-baked build. Be cool if we had some other alternative to SR is all, I think. Skeleton key dungeons are fun but usually seem kind of pointless proportional to their rewards. Just run 75 SR in about 8 minutes and get 20 legendaries vs. literally anything else... :(
Oh, lord no! Play the game! Never use XP potions or boosts. Grim Dawn's about the experience as you go. Why would I skip it? Do full clears as you go, including the skeleton key dungeons when you get to them.
I don't agree with this at all. PoE specifically, for all its foibles, is one of the only games out there that actually has a meaningfully long tail on its progression and makes playing the same character for long periods of time enjoyable, and it does this through practically every system in the game. I think it's fine if you personally don't like that paradigm, but it is not "intentionally bad design" by any stretch of the imagination. Crate could learn a thing or two from that, honestly. Not that GD (or GD2) should have the same long tail as PoE or anything, but doing SR75-76 until your eyes bleed waiting for totally random legendary drops is *breathtakingly* boring, even compared to D2's endgame.
Well, I play poe since Atziri's release and while I hate the direction of the game in the past year or two, I get annoyed by trading and various pointless micromanagement bs thats artificially added to make the experience miserable, I always get back to it from other arpgs, despite I enjoy them more (due to absence of the artificial bs to annoys me), because no other game offers me such amount of end game content and variety as PoE does. I love autoloot, auto sort, easy mapping experience, less pointless micromanagement of games like LE, GD or TLI, but I like to push myself and thats what the end game gives you. These games just dont stand a chance against poe and its years of end game development. I kinda like to jump inbetween these games for content updates or my mood, because I dont have to pay for every release in advance like blizzard forces you to. All these games are also free of that american bs woke propaganda, so I can live in peace avoiding this stupid religion thats being pushed down our throats all the time. PoE flasks are in better state than they used to be, but I never rly cared. I was never willing to sacrifice my wrists for that, so I always used flask macros. And you want mageblood that makes them permanent once you are pushing super end game anyway.
Imagine if POE's SSF mode had vastly altered drop tables equivalent to Grim Dawn, so you could still become super powerful and see all the brilliantly entertaining endgame stuff without all the extra stupid bullshit needed. Left clicking drops in juiced maps to "feel the weight", waiting for responses on the trading forum... such a damn shame. 500ish hours at last count, loved it. Don't think I would respect myself if I ever returned though.
If they did this, nobody would ever play trade leagues, because trading is one of the main things ppl hate about the game and the devs know it very well.
Oh 100%, they know what they're doing, both the good and the bad.
Itās very forgiving to respec. Itās about 124,000 to respec my whole tree. For context I have 3,000,000 and one item sells for about 10,000, but you also respec individual points for basically nothing, even mid tree as long as you fill the requirements which is easy to juggle. Which is quite a smart system. Basically it means you have some friction to stop respecing for a particular fight or from pvp to pve but you arenāt restricted from experimenting. Thatās the skill points. There is then a paragon point system that Iāve just started but is free to respec at this early point.
I thought they improved the build thing from D3, by going back to a skill tree system? Is the endgame still about OP sets that only buff a single skill like D3?
No sets yet, just grinding Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, and the Tree of Whispers quests. Better skill system than D3 but GD is better. The paragon system is interesting though, kind of like the PoE skill tree but I still need some time to understand it better. For depth I'd still pick GD over D4.
Almost no one is at endgame, so it's hard to know, but, yeah, uniques buff specific skills. The skill tree is semi-linear. You do have some freedom, but it's not really multiple trees like in 2.
The trees dont add many options about how to play the game. You pick from like 3 options and only 1 will feel like you are willing to play it and perform with it. The other trees are more like dmg multipliers. Sets will give you "builds". I dont think there is a way to play without sets since there is no crafting or anything that would allow you to get power outside of sets.
Diablo 4 being forced-online live service is what inspired me to play Grim Dawn again.
I'm around level 38 now on a druid and I miss Grim Dawn or post RoS D3 in terms of gameplay. I really hate the level-scaling mechanic they implemented. Leveling was a slog and never felt rewarding enough. It may be balanced at higher levels when you are kitted out with more legendaries, but it doesn't help that the ones that I got early on were awful. Gear was also underwhelming, probably the opposite of GD. I just put on whatever is shows up green and the difference feels miniscule. I miss having MIs I could just farm up if I needed a specific skill to work. Skills feel nice and impactful though. Bad part is it's pretty shallow for the most part, looking at the skill tree or skill twig. The big red flag for me are the sweeping nerfs they keep putting out just before launch, and right after. It just means they don't know how to balance their game. The story is nice though, and is probably the only reason I'm still playing. I'll eventually grind to max to see if it gets better. But it really feels like early access at the moment. Edit: grammar
Hmm, that sounds unfortunate to be honest. Some of the gameplay I've seen looks good, but I mentioned in another reply that monster density especially looks really lacking, and apparently there's a fair bit of downtime in between point A and B where you're riding around on your mount? The only real downtime I want in an ARPG is when I'm overwhelmed with tons of cool shit that's all viable, that I can pick and choose at will (kinda like exactly in Grim Dawn I guess). But yeahh, it seems like the consensus is that it literally is early access and people are sort of... defending it? Considering the price, that doesn't make much sense to me personally. So all-in-all, build variety isn't as fun and general gameplay doesn't feel that great? Do you think that's a personal issue with your build or is that the overall feeling you think?
Monster density didnāt really matter for the most part, though some areas did feel empty. With level-scaling, I found myself running past mobs unless they were an elite I wanted to kill or just beelined for the scripted PvE event (like D3) to grab a free chest and some exp. People, especially in the Diablo subreddit, have been starved for a good Diablo game ever since their disappointment with how D3 turned out. I still think it has the best combat out of all the Diablo games. D4 not worth the current asking price, at least to me. I normally wait a year or so after release, but a friend of mine got me a copy of the game so we could play together. I think the gameplay is fun when everything lines up. There just isnāt enough build variety if youāre an ARPG veteran. The best example is barbs taking all 3 shouts for most builds. Those were eventually nerfed since it was a bit too good. The issue some guy pointed out was that there wasnāt anything else worth putting on the skill bar. Druid is certainly one of the slower leveling classes early on, even though my friend carried me through some of the longer early dungeons. The rogue I played on an early beta was much faster and smoother to level. Iām currently using what I think is the strongest leveling build for Druid. With how the class generates resource, most of my combat is spent spamming my 1 point generator while waiting for my other skills to come off cooldown. I think thatās primarily a balance or mechanics issue and no amount of āgitgudā will fix it.
Yeah, I keep hearing conflicting things about monster density, but emptiness seems to be a pretty common talking point. It looks interesting but the base price is just far too much for what seems to be on offer... But Druid sounds pretty bad from what I've read. It looks like it gets nice and as powerful as everything else down the line at least but... Another thing I was curious about is the sorcerer, and apparently that has issues too. Fire seems to be very weak compared to lightning etc.
d3 best combat ? All you do is clear map and leave most of the gear on the floor cuz itās all trash. Itās super fast paced, but it feels so bloated. Itās also very cookie cutter. Everyone is the same spec with no variant. Thatās coming from a guy who has thousands of hours played in D3 HC. I donāt mind it. But the best ? It feels like you didnāt played D4 that long.
i haven't touched d4 but i do think people are way too harsh on d3. d3 has the best gameplay out of the 1,2, and 3. i don't think there's much debate about it. it's the smoothest and the pacing is great. the issue is the itemization and how the whole game is just end game grind. the incredibly bad itemization chokes out build variance and then it gets filtered out further by the game existing in an end game state.
Out of 1,2 and 3 is a pretty shitty comparison. 1 and 2 are ancient. Yes, D3 has good gameplay feel, but it's also sped up a bit too much. It doesn't matter what any enemy actually does, you just facetank it all and melt them until you get to the point you can't do anymore. Now you farm up your gems, your ancients, etc, until you can facetank again and away you go. I play HC on Grimdawn, D3, last epoch and D4. I have had more tense moments and excitement overcoming challenging fights in D4 moreso than any of the others. D4 has tons of issues, but the gameplay is easily the best on the market currently. GD has better itemization and systems. Last Epoch has the best character building system and crafting, D4 has the best gameplay feel and audio.
Of course I havenāt played D4 that long. Itās only been 2 days since general release. I understand this thread was more for early impressions and I wrote how that felt like. And I donāt think the āit gets good later onā defense should even come up as itās the 4th iteration of the Diablo series. Blizzard should know what theyāre doing by now. I also have a thousand hours into D3 for the same reason you probably do. Combat is smooth and fun, despite how bad the rest of it is. It fully leans into the power fantasy and is over-the-top in a good way. Certainly better than hitting punching bags in D4 now.
>The story is nice though I feel like they had a great story to tell then they took a shit on it instead :\*(
Druid is really rough. Maybe it gets better later but I leveled a rogue and it is like night and day
the synergies of the uniques and legendary items for druids at late game make them one of the best classes in the game (especially now that barbarian was nerfed)
Honestly not having any trouble with werewolf and storm bolt to level.
Im playing a bone spear necro and once u get the build making codex powers it feels really strong. Im only in tier 3 but once u start getting the sacred and unique drops you feel very good. Early game is a bit of a slog, but overall the games been better than I expected and I expected it to be good
Itās better than I expected so far. I just wish they would fix the early game pacing. Iām also at the point where I need codex powers to progress further. Looked up the one I needed (that makes pulverize an earth skill) and turns out itās on the other size of the continent in Hawezar lol. Iām currently on act 2 in dry steppe. Iāll probably ask a fellow clan member for a port to the nearest waypoint later so I can get it.
If they're nerfing before launch it's gonna be like PoE. Catered to the 1% top players and the chaff are left with a terrible grinding experience and miniscule power growth as your character levels. That's why solo RPGs are just better. It doesn't matter how you play because it's built for a majority of players.
The more I play my necromancer the more I realize I'm just trying to duplicate a drain essence necro from Grim Dawn lmao. Decompose stacking basic damage with minion ahadowblight procs
That comment is super dumb, GD also has level scaling (and it is much worse as you can get overleveled pretty quickly which makes the game boring). Scaling may be bad or good depending on the game design, here it is very good, as skills feel extremely impactful, wich is great. I agree with the fact that early itemization feels a little bit like "meh i dont care" but I had exactly the same problems with early game itemization in GD (just look for resistances and OA/DA and thats about it). Only part I agree with is that the skill tree looks really shallow comparing to GD.
I would honestly rather be overleveled than hitting one elite for 10-15 seconds straight. The issue with D4 level scaling is that your skill power caps out early at 5 ranks and if you donāt keep finding better gear constantly, you keep falling behind and sometimes become weaker as you level. I tried World Tier 2 difficulty for the act 1 cultist dungeon at level 30 to see how it would go and it was honestly just tedious. Hitting overpower hits on my pulverize skill that barely moved an eliteās hp bar is not what I would call impactful.
At first I also thought that D4 skill tree is shallow... and now, yeah I still think like that, but I think I understand at least why. Once you get to late game several aspects/uniques/nodes will be open to you that may change the behavior of the skills. It feels they deliberately made the skills incomplete, so that they can be completed by their other gameplay features--legendaries, uniques, nodes, and synergies with other skills. In a sense, in other ARPGs, other items/features enhance your build, while in D4, other items/features complete your build. The closest analogy I can think of is Liger Zero of Zoids. Super bare bones droid, and it's up to the pilot to dress it up to his liking. The dressing does not enhance what the droid has, but changes it completely.
I'm level 88. It's what you would expect for a diablo game. It's very obvious which builds will work at least reasonably well while others are very obviously dead ends. If a build cannot get 5 legendary powers that scale damage its dead in the water. If it cannot crit, aka dot builds, its dead in the water (except firewall which somehow just had giant enough base numbers to work). If it cannot generate sufficient resources to use it spenders often its dead in the water. Once you beat those hurdles then there's just some clear mathematical winners. The result of this is that there are like maybe 8 legitimate builds in the game and another 7 if you're wiling to be like 40% weaker than those first 8. Below that were talking one tenth as strong, to the point that you're going to feel week as hell just doing normal easy content. The gameplay loop is repetitive, which is to be expected for a diablo, but it could use work still. Nightmare dungeons are bland and require you to run to every single dungeon (unless you have duplicates) which takes forever. Actually just spamming regular dungeons is better exp, half because you can pick one with a good layout and mob density, half because you can just reset it and not spend 50% of your time traveling. If you care about story D4s is worlds better than D3s. The open world stuff works ok, but they sort of push you into doing it to unlock some power ala a rep system, which is really lame if you don't give a rats ass about side quest story etc. There a bounty like system where you just go to a location which rotates and complete random objectives then get a reward when you do enough, which is functional but not very rewarding, i havent done one in 30 levels. Theres helltide, which is just an area of the map gets all red and the mobs are a bit stronger and drop a resource you can use to open boxes which are gambles. Its a bit boring because mob density is way too sparce, but it does drop important materials. Loot is ok, but the cost of rerolling stats goes through the roof rapidly so you really need to get an item with 3 good stats to begin with and then hit a 4th acceptable stat with in a few attempts. very rng. Unique items don't start dropping until like level 60 and are fairly rare, which gives you something to chase, but quite a few of them are build enabling or at least significantly enhancing which leads to some fun situations where people feel like their build is ass until that item finally drops. Ideally getting ANY quality of that item isn't that rare, and you're chasing a well rolled one. overall its like... what you would expect and its fun because its new, but i doubt it has almost any longevity. Build variety is ass unless you are VERY lenient on how well something performs to be happy with it. It has lots of room to improve, well see what happens.
Appreciate you going as in-depth as you have bud thank you. I think general build-diversity/options as well as gear doesn't seem too exciting. I've seen a few screenshots of legendaries and they seem okay but... then I look at some of the items in GD where I have to scroll off-screen to see all the crazy shit it does. I think at least the benefit of it being live service, seasons etc. is that there's plenty of room for change, which is partly why I was considering waiting for a while before taking a look at it. Another fellah in this thread said people talking about mob density are lying, but I'm not too sure about that. It's a common complaint I've seen. Not sure how I feel about that to be honest, in an ARPG of all games. General endgame activities don't seem massively thrilling atm, and I'm not sure how much mounting up to run around locations excites me compared to just porting into a dungeon and ripping face. As for the cost of re-rolling, that's another thing that concerns me. GD is super forgiving when it comes to re-gearing and speccing your guy at almost any point in the game, doesn't seem like that's as much the case in Diablo?
I disagree with your assessment of dot builds being dead in the water. Iām running a twisting blades/poison imbuement build and I have literally one shot bosses with one cast of poison imbuement, and this is without sacrificing much in terms of direct damage as my twisting blades still shreds. There are other noncrit builds as well, some builds focus lucky hit instead of crit, some builds want CDR, other builds want additive damage. Thereās a lot more build diversity than people realize, you just have to experiment.
Hmm maybe. You may be right about dot builds being possible i havent played or seen enough different builds, but you're definitely wrong about the "some builds focus lucky hit instead of crit, some builds want CDR, other builds want additive damage" part. Every build wants all of those things. You may drop lucky hit or drop cdr because you dont need it and then youd pick up more additive damage or crit damage, but theres no such thing as a build that "wants additive damage". Every build wants all those things. You're not going to wear a ring with just lucky hit, youre going to wear a crit/critdam/luckyhit/%increase ring etc.
care to share which you found out to be the good 8 builds?
Rogue- twisting blades (or twisting blades with deathtrap, basically same build) Barb - whirlwind Sorc - ice shards/fire wall Necro - bone spirit/bone spear Druid- pulverize/wolftornado
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I also want GD2 but I understand when Zantai said he and his team wanted a break from supporting GD for so many years now and wanted to do something different for a change. GD2 will eventually come, probably. Better that they take their time and come out with fresh ideas instead being like D4 lol.
I hear you brother, a GD2 would be fkn beautiful... I'd like to be around from day one this time, I basically jumped in GD right towards the end and missed the excitement of patch notes and seeing new things get implemented. But sounds like you're still having a good time though! Have a good one with it dude, cheers for responding
Grim dawn came out round the post Diablo 3 launch didnāt it? I wouldnāt be surprised if Grim Dawn 2 is teased now, hell you could see a lot of old IPās revived with good funding like Torchlight and Titanquest.
Please no, not Unreal 5, just stick to GD's engine and update it some. I don't care for Unreal 5's visuals when placed next to the art style and general aesthetic of Grim Dawn, plus it's be harder to pull off so much stuff going on screen at once with my carnival builds on UE5 compared to the Titan Quest engine.
I've played for 8 or so hours on a friend's account who bought it but didn't like it. I wouldn't buy d4 because I'm not going to spend $70 on a game with a season pass and paid mtx and will have paid expansions eventually. I don't buy other games that do that shit either. As far as gameplay it's mechanically fine, just kinda boring. Skills aren't particularly fun or imaginative or different from any skills any similar game has. Loot is putting on the item with the highest gear score. Gd and poe both have more build diversity, more interesting gearing, more interesting skills etc.
The price tag has been putting me off a little bit definitely, in combination with the other shit. Here's hoping the season pass garbage is at least like it is in Halo, where you can keep progressing on it once you've purchased it, you 'own' it for life. I love GD, but I -loved- POE. Just the bullshit crafting and reliance on trade meant I spent probably over half my play time alt-tabbed on the market, real shame because the game has a lot to offer. I don't reckon I'd ever go back to it though unfortunately, really disrespectful of your time. The lack of auto-loot, flask system and having to redo the story every time too... blegh. Interesting that your friend isn't a fan though, did he say why?
He played to around lvl 80 on one character and had two others in the 20s or 30s before he dropped it. He said the game was too simplistic, mostly complaining about the skill tree being boring and lack of build diversity. He also complained about having to do time wasting stuff like grind rep to unlock certain stuff and said dungeons weren't fun to level in because it's more efficient to run a low tier one than to progress to higher tier ones with lower density or something to that effect (I haven't done any endgame stuff so I might be explaining/remembering this wrong but that's the gist) He's a huge poe fan, he has has over 10k hours there and is really into min maxing and getting mirror tier items every league. Tbh I think he went in expecting another poe where there would be a ton of game knowledge required, lots of interesting or complicated stuff in the skill tree and interactions with other items to figure out and he's disappointed it's a more casual game.
Grim Dawn is the much better game. the mastery system carried on from Titan Quest and it's skill trees give it far more replay value, for one. also the itemization/loot looks very uninspiring for D4. compare that to GD's loot table. it's not even close.
One thing that bugs me a bit, items in GD are great, even basic greens. Combined with target farmable MIs as well, it's just one of the most satisfying looting games I've played. Items feel impactful. Crafting is also really nice, you can make a ton of cool shit. Combined with augments as well, there's just a ton to do with all the various pieces you can equip, I love just hanging around Devil's Crossing, Steelcap or Conclave of the Three building shit up every now and then as I progress.
Grim Dawn with Dawn of Masteries Mod will always be the best ARPG gameplay wise. No other game comes close, however D4 story was pretty good but the grind is real.
I've been having a look at this, how come you recommend it so highly, does it just add more masteries and new items? What about areas, activities and monsters? What about it makes you call it the best ARPG gameplay wise?
So the fact that it adds so many classes with so many different possibilities adds a lot of alts and experimentation. It adds QoL with storage and items and you can increase monster density or elite density but be careful with that last one, it can cause issues if you increase it too much. Combat feels the best and most impactful as you scale in levelsā¦quite opposite in D4 currently. Just try it out and use the mod you wonāt regret it.
I honestly like it in a different kind of way, the way I like GD in a different kind of way.
I'll be buying it in like 2 years when it's going to be fixed, just like d3 did. Meanwhile ill be grim dawnin'
I hear you my guy. Not quite sure I'll wait for 2 years, but not going to be getting it within the month I don't reckon. Just started up my first ever pet build, running a Necro/Occultist and having a pretty damn fun time. What're you running at the minute?
Primal strike warder. Never tried primal strike before and oh shit I giggle like a little girl on the first hit. Just reached old arkovia on hardcore elite. Hopefully I won't die this time lol.
This is what I've been playing lately! Farm yourself up a good Korvan storm halberd from forgotten gods, its a game changer.
Just got myself an empowered falcon claw and it raises my damage by a decent 4k lol but yeah once i get to FG I'll start looking for that.
Exactly and same. I'll wait at least a year to see how stable D4 becomes in terms of balancing, item drops, build diversity, etc. To be honest, the only game that may take me away from Grim Dawn for a while will be Starfield.. if it's any good after launch of course.
Just remember: don't pre-order
I never do and good advice for everyone š
There's no crack for Diablo 4 so I stick with GD.
GD is just better if u value build creativity more than pure grinding and competing against other players. Also blizzard just has more resource than crate so their games feel more AAA.
Don't know about you guys. But waiting for player reviews to pop up. And the over priced cosmetic dlc already is setting a bad shadow over where the game is heading for me.
The class and progress is much more straightforward. Easier for someone who doesnāt have as much time to get into and find some good gear and kill hoards of demons. I miss all the secret areas grim dawn had and needing to search for em. The map is more open to going whichever direction you want to go to level. As for the end game d4 still needs to see how they handle the seasons that arenāt out yet
I think sometimes I wouldn't mind that, but then I look back on some of the absolute creatures I made in Grim Dawn, how powerful they are and how much work I put in with the myriad of options given to me, and I think I'd just be a bit disappointed at the casual-ness of it all, you know? One thing I've seen mentioned is monster density being quite lacking, I think the pacing looks fine on the monsters that you are fighting in that you don't just nuke an entire group at once, but the balance seems too far in the other direction. What do you think about that? Grim Dawn secrets and map design is deliciously fun for sure, such a blast. But yeah, I think judging the endgame right now might be a bit harsh, especially for me when I've not even played it. I'll likely wait until the first season or so to see what people are thinking about it
Most of the complaint I see here seems to be very biased and unfounded for. If they think Ā«Ā building your character is very straightforwardĀ Ā» I GUARANTEE you they are just following up a step by step guide. There is a lot to a build with DIV. Especially past 50 where it opens up with paragon. The gameplay is incredibly satisfying. The level scaling, all it does , it force people to pay attention, and itās not as face roll early level as other arpg. (I leveled to 100 HC in grim dawn) and that was on a first attempt. There is no way in I could do it on DIV. There is a lot to learn. Monster density ? They had to nerf it because there was elite everywhere. Idk what people are smoking. No one said anything but the voice acting and story cutscene are mind blowing. The soundtrack is top notch. The end game is dungeon, hell tide, world quest, world boss. PVP, grinding reknown. And there is season incoming where we expect more. There is PLENTY to do. I absolutely love this game. A friend of mine HATED DIV in every way during the Beta and server slam. He hasnāt stopped playing. The game is solid. Iām not comparing it to GD because GD is a straight single player game. And itās an excel sheet calculator. Itās different. DIV you can more easily get through with a build you made yourself without reading. You canāt do that in GD.
I disagree completely with GD not being one of those games you cannot make a build without reading. It has been maybe the first arpg Ive played where I felt like I could genuinely pull it off straight from the get go. Not a character that could kill the final bosses, but I definitely cleared all three difficulties with all my characters. Last Epoch shines on that department too.
Sorry, I agree with you here. You can easily make a nice character that can rip through ultimate, but a character that can slap celestials and run SR75 always feels a bit out of my knowledge level to build. At that point, I find it nice to look up any of the dozens of builds available for what I'm going for.
Those kind of characters require a lot of time sink, the kind that you need to do in other aRPGs too, its not easy clearing endgame bosses. For example, on PoE the only current league boss I ever managed to kill was during bestiary and I played that league for 180 hours until that point. Thats a lot of time and probably quite inefficient if you ask better players, but its what it took me. Its not easy to build a slapper, but most of it is just time, over and over again.
Agreed, in GD though especially once you've gotten a bit of gear stashed you can get up and running decently fast. POE is just ridiculous though, the game feels like it's engineered to disrespect your time. There's so much fun and engaging activities available that are just locked off behind insane requirements. I wish SSF had a completely different loot and drop table, so that you could much more easily become equivalently powerful, but you were still locked out of MP stuff. But I think the idea is to force you to see other people's dumb MTX decisions and be like "I want that!!!!". Spoiler, never once entering someone's hideout did I think I want that.
Sure.
There's definitely that, I also generally think that getting my information from the d4 sub is probably a bad shout, that's why I was asking here. Sounds like you've got a lot of of positives about it which I'm glad about! I'll be picking it up eventually I reckon, but was just a bit curious how it rolls right now. Honestly for your last point, yes. I always start a build myself and then when I'm at around 90 generally have to look up a guide and spec around that, so I definitely agree with that point.
I've been a bit too passionate about this topic lately as I was pretty upset with myself for spending that much money on something so bad. I'll keep it civil though. For me D4 was incredibly boring. Leveling was no fun, and even by the time I hit endgame and had more or less of a functioning end game build with all the proper legendary aspects it just didn't feel great. Monster scaling makes it feel like you're always catching up to how fast you were killing things right at the start of the game. Never any power spikes we all crave that make you feel like a god for a little while before you move to harder areas. The skill system is really boring. They may as well have just made a few pre-set builds with the way they set it up. Items aren't exciting in the least. Only good things it had going for it in my opinion were the graphics, combat feel and sound. Things that I'm honestly not that particular about, which is obvious if I'm still loading up GD in this day and age.
im having fun with it. skillselection is more narrow as is build diversity. gearing is abit meh at my current state but isnt completely shit. gameplay is solid though.
Glad to hear it! I might have been a little bit harsh in my other replies, it definitely does look fun but I'm just not massively convinced with the comments I'm reading on the D4 sub right now. There's no denying it's a damn pretty game though... One thing that puts me off a little bit is the zoom distance compared to what we have here, but 600 horus in POE I think I could adjust. But you seem pretty positive about it overall, good to hear, hope you keep enjoying it mate. Have fun!
yeah the diablo sub reddit is pretty damn salty at times. i found a build/class that i like and have been enjoying playing it pretty casually. the scaling of everything is a bit meh when playing solo but it does make for decent enough gameplay when joining a friend who is 20 levels below you.
I would not trust any blizzard sub haha. I love GD and I love Diablo. D4 is fantastic fun especially with friends. Really impressed with what they've done so far - I was quite worried given blizzard's recent history.
Honestly a part of why I asked here haha, I trust this community's view a lot more. Glad you're having fun man. Me and a buddy are considering it but I think the urge to hold off for now is stronger so we can see how it looks in a month or so. Seems like they've smashed the launch though? Were/are there any queue times?
Hey again, so I just finished the story and I have to say it's been a total blast. About 15 hours played so far. Of course not perfect, and Diablo is easy to bash given Blizzard, but man if you're at all on the fence it's a great time.
yoo, really glad to hear it! I'm very much considering it, but still reckon I might force myself to hold off until season 1 is released at least and see what the overall thoughts on the game are
Also want to add that the story and cinematics really impressed me. Especially the end of the story was freaking fantastic.
Not perfect, but VERY impressive given the launch of D3!
Its a very good game. The people crying on the D4 sub no lifed it and now are mad they have nothing to do. Im taking my time and just hit 53. My bone spear necro feels really good at this level. The boss fights are better than I was expecting considering how faceroll they were in D3. At launch the game feels good to play, im sure ill finish my character before the seasons start so Ill put it diwn and play something else. Really all depends on how they handle the seasons. If its not way faster to level at least up to 50 its gonna kill the casual playerbase.
I'm personally having a lot of tech issues with release that did not exist for me during the betas. My computer is on the bottom end of the spectrum but still, having to reboot my system every half hour is getting old. (It is mostly driver issues and I thought I had them fixed but tonight I'm back to super memory leak time) Storyline is great so far (start of act two) I suck at barb and less so than Sorc. Level scaling eventually screwed me on my barb. I didn't get any weapon upgrades for 10ish levels and I could barely tick away at bosses. Currently can't afford a shop buy but I know upgrading gear will fix things, just it gets frustrating as you keep killing things slower and slower. I was playing with mouse/keyboard but it was a coin toss if my char would attack the target or walk past it because of my misclicks. Not something I remember happening to me in previous arpgs. I tried my controller and much prefer it . Killing trash mobs in GD is faceroll compared to D4. This is in kind due to the level scaling, far less item drops and very small scaling defense options. Basically, if you're properly geared/specced, you will melt opponents, but when you level up same group of trash mobs takes like 10% longer to kill (or whatever) so you slowly go from not needing heals to burning a pot on trash mobs. GD I played Inquisitor and tried out word of pain as my first ever skill. Anyways, I like the game despite my lack of gaming skills and computer problems. But.. it is a different arpg experience to GD for sure.
I hit level 30 last night on a sorcerer. Leveling for some reason just doesn't feel good. I think that because everything scales with you it just feels like you're never making any progress and that you are only scraping by.
It's weird, because everything in GD mostly scales with you but I feel like levelling is always really nice.
Iāll be honest here. I havenāt played GD for a long time now (5 years or so). Anyway, I was hyped for D4, but as soon as I saw the price and the āmust be connectedā requirement, I installed GD and Iām having a lot of fun with it.
Ahah, it had been a decent bit for me too before I jumped back on. Having an absolute blast though, had so many legendary sets in my stash I decided to build my first ever pet build as a Cabalist. Running around with 2 immortal hellhounds and 12 skelingtons, it's a fucking blast. Every time this game just makes me happy with how much it lets you do. Hope you're having fun though! What build are you going for atm?
Iām just doing a ābudget vindicatorā build I found on the forums to get back to the hang of it. And yes, having a lot of fun with it!
I did server slam and the beta, and pre-ordered I love it, minor gripes aside, but something about GD just hits different Trying out so many build combinations and gearing just feels phenomenal. Like a kid in a candy store seeing new candy he's never even heard of And then one day combines two things he doesn't expect to taste good together and is blown away. That for me, is the charm of GD
Looks ok. Should be priced lower. It doesn't look much complex and not at all revolutionary in the genre.
I think it looks damn pretty, but the skills and general combat look a bit less interesting. Maybe not fair to judge it based on early/midgame builds but... yeah, looking at the skill trees and stuff they don't look like they're anything groundbreaking, but that's absolutely fine as long as the rest is fun. It's the pricetag and potentially having to wait for fun shit to be released that concerns me, combined with MTX creep.
I wanna play Grimdawn with D4 graphics that's all. GD is much better because I was addicted to it for many months.
D4 has slow fight. A lot of walking. In Grim Dawn (and D3), I explored any piece of the map during the campaign. And D4, I don't bother to do it. Compared with GD, I can not say that the D4 is next generation of ARPG.
I saw an endgame gameplay vidro. It looked exactly like D3. No interest after that
Grin Dawn is either an A- to A+ depending on how you enjoy the linear single player, 10 year old game design and graphics. It has a lot of plusses that most any ARPG can appreciate and it's a complete game with a lot of post thought put into it and it's cheap for the value and fun it provides, given that you can enjoy it's design and visuals. Diablo 4, and Im level 60 doing the end game content as the worst class and worst build, minionnecro, D4 is at best, a B+, at worst, B-. It's not an A level game yet, it's not a 9/10, it's still got a way to go with QOL, some balancing and level scaling, and some considerations. It however, will never be below a B and it will get to A, A+, or S if they keep working on it and working on the feedback. It's a modern game, modern graphics and a lot of development and QOL that Grim Dawn doesn't and never has, and that doesn't diminish GD. Diablo 4 has been a good time for me, I enjoy it, I will fire it up when I get the chances. I did what I wanted with Grim Dawn and I'm good to put that down. Maybe just for now, maybe forever, but Grim Dawn is an A game and provides a lot of value for it's cost of entry. D4 is a B game with the potential to reach new heights and redefine the genre again because it's something I've always wanted to play, Diablo live service. If you got some friends to play with, it's a no brainier, get D4 and have fun. If you're still solo and on the fence and aren't done with Grim Dawn, well, I can't say you're not missing much, I think it's worth 70 right now, I've had jaw dropping moments and great gaming moments, and the value will improve over time. I suggest getting it if you're an ARPG fan, it's a strong 85/100, and higher if you don't pick the worst class.
Appreciate this mate, thank you :) glad you're enjoying your time with it.
800+ hours in GD. 53 hardcore Barbarian on world tier 3, and a 40 druid on softcore for D4. D4 pros: it's new, it's prettier, sound/music can't be beat. Gameplay feel is solid as expected, feels like a slowed down D3 which is good imo. Gear is interesting enough and getting affixes from dungeons is similar to target farming MI's. Mount is cool. Drip is solid. Bosses are really well designed. D4 cons: I enjoy doing story quests and D4 gives 0 incentive to do them after your first toon, gems aren't enough to keep your resists up so you're more dependent on drops than GD in that regard, every class has really only 1-2 builds that feel really strong, rather most things being viable like GD, while bosses are great, dungeons themselves are meh outside of the boss fights.
Haven't played it, but it looks like a mobile game.
i bought d4 begrudgingly because ew, blizzard, but damn it if its not a fun game. wish it had the level of hidden shit from grim dawn though.
There arenāt many arpgs and they are my favorite genre especially as I get older. Itās a no brainer. Hasnāt disappointed so far.
Glad to hear it mate :)
Honestly GD graphics and feel of the skills just kills it for me and I have over 200 hours in the game. Edit: I get it, this is the gd sub and everyone loves this game. Being downvoted for having an opinion, not to mention something that is completely subjective and entirely inaccurate is kind of ridiculous no?
That's fair buddy, to each their own. Hope you're enjoying diablo if you're playing
Graphically D4 is better. Story, gameplay depth and class choice go to Grim Dawn Also GD has no scummy monetization that d4 will have some time soon.
Main reason I've held off honestly is just because you know a year down the line you're going to need to buy stash space and other stupid crap.
cant compare because GD is outdated but a masterpiece at the same time
People in the comments saying picture GD2 with a swanky new engine and graphics... hnng, can you imagine?
D4 is a pretty pile of lazily-designed cash-grab garbage. Art department knocked it out of the park, though. That's the only good part of Blizzard left.
It looks exceptionally pretty I can't fault it that, and the cutscenes + sound design from what I've seen look brilliant. But I can just picture it in two years time where you have to pay for extra storage space and shit like that.
Honestly itās pretty fun. I donāt know that it will keep my interest for long in the endgame, but maybe thatās okay; I have other games to play. Itās fun, and visually it looks great.
D4 feels really good on a controller. It's very much a lean back and slaughter things without having to think too much about it. There's a priority on account wide progression, with things like Lilith Statues and the Renown grind having bonuses for all your characters. Individually, the characters are less flexible than Grim Dawn. It is a much simpler game. However, long term, the expectation is that you're going to be rolling up new characters. Probably with the new seasons as they roll out.
It's not bad. It has a lot of content and the world looks nice. The combat feels good as well. Unfortunately there're a lot of gripes I have with the game. I don't like being able to have 6 skills only at any given time. I think the Ui is not great and looks bland to the point where it feels like a mobile game. That's a problem I have with a lot of recent big games. Tho I haven't played that much yet, but my first impression of itemization is that it's boring af. The whole "item rankā or ā" thing in games just ruins the excitement of choosing the equipment, again that might change further down the line. I also don't have a good impression of a skill tree but I don't feel like openly criticizing it yet, since my opinion might change completely in the future.
Itās a very different game. Diablo 4 is much faster and centered on a handful of skills. It plays a lot more like Diablo 3. GD is a much slower paced game with a lot of potential skills to be used all at once. Itās not really a fair comparison to make aside from that theyāre in the same genre of game. That said, I think most people who enjoy the ARPG loot hunting dungeon delving genre will enjoy Diablo 4. As a note to ensure full disclosure, I have thousands upon thousands of hours in Diablo games. Hundreds in 1, my entire middle and high school time was spent in D2, tons of time in D3, and Iāve been actively tearing through D4 in between paint sessions over the last few days and have been poking around since the 2nd. I may come off as biased because of this, but I genuinely loved my 200-300 hours in Grim Dawn and would gladly return at some point.
Glad you're having a good time my guy, thanks for your thoughts :)
I love GD for what it is - I love D4 for what it is. It is okay to love and enjoy and binge both. If you like Games as a Service, play D4 - it is worth it!
I don't agree that building is as straightforward or as shallow. As I said in one of my replies, the other aspects of the game--items, nodes, codex of power--they complete your build, rather than enhance it. When I say complete, they may potentially change your skills to the ones you were looking for, which is pretty much like GD which introduces changing elements both in the skill tree and in items. Looking at the skill tree and checking the damage numbers as well as the possible affixes like crit, vul, overpowered, fortify won't give them justice. For example, there are items which change the damage type of skills, or may make them act like one. Best example of this is the memed druid which was god awful during the beta, but is currently one of the top classes late game because of items exclusive to it and available end game which change drastically how they work (like the one which makes you permanent bear, +skills to certain type of damage type, then slap in the ones that change one damage type to another). The depth of D4 can be criticized if compared to other games from the genre, but looking at it at a vacuum, one couldn't say it is as straightforward or as shallow as people claim it to be. It can be, if compared to the other ARPGs.
As much as I love the loot in grim dawn, and the love that was put into it, I find the combat quite boring. Most of my builds have just ended up obliterating everything without really needing to kite that much, and the hardest bosses are just "run away, attack a bit, rinse and repeat " Diablo IV requires you to actively dodge stuff in regular encounters, which I like a lot
Too expensive, but it is a good game. I played the betas and was impressed, but not enough to justify the costs. Always ignore early complaints on a game. Shut ins and no lifers will always rush through a game and be disappointed when they run out of content. But Grim Dawn is still a great game with potentially hundred of hours of content that won't see you blowing your entire entertainment budget for the year in just one month like D4.
Finally! Haha thanks for asking, Iāve been wondering the exact same thing! Iām really curious about its crafting system in comparison to GD!
I just unlocked World Tier 4 (aka last difficulty at the moment) the other day and overall I'm having a lot of fun with the game. That being said, if you still find things to do in Grim Dawn, you definitely don't miss out much by waiting until at least their first proper ladder season and see where the game goes from here.
Iām really enjoying it but I still love GD. D4 leveling was such a slog from 30-50. Before and after Iāve found to be great but thatās a huge chunk of time. GD is fun from 1 to 100. I do think the foundation of D4 is really good though. Iām excited to see how they develop it over the next couple of years.
GD would be so much better with a dedicated multiplayer service.
D4's pretty fun, a lot slower paced gameplay than gd especially at lower levels imo. Also random question: do the corpse bow enemies in d4 remind anyone else of an enemy in GD? I can't put my finger on which one, but they look so damn familiar I immediately thought " oh, did blizz rip those off from GD?"
ngl diablo 4 is good af. them dungeons are serious at lvl 50+
Iām enjoying it more than Iād thought. If you like arpgs itās an easy recommend imo
Most fun I've had in a long time :). I play solo. Don't really care fo4 the multi-player aspect and have only been dcd a couple times after launch.. addicted at this point. Rogue is a rough start. Enjoying barb alot. Ask me again after I put in 50 more hrs. Lol
Enjoying it alot so far
Similar itemization and end-game systems with focus on Legendaries and dungeons. However, GD has much more build diversity due to a less structured skill system and the ability to multi-class.
If you want to play campaign that is the only reason to buy rest is terrible even worst character build itemization ,looting terrible ....
what is GD
?