Three weeks ago, Sardoken and I were highly praising Grim Dawn in this blog, and yes, we had a lot of fun until we had reached the end of Act 5. While the game is beautiful, it quickly becomes very boring due to the new system of “resistances” they’ve implemented.

We’ve both been playing a character with the same build, practically the same gear, except for some difference in our resistances (fire, chaos, life,…). Yet, I could run the Void’s Edge (end of Act 5) without dying once, while Sardoken’s character died about a million times. So, we did a test, I equipped gear with other resistances and went back to the same place, and guess what… Where all went smooth before, I now got killed over and over again. This means that no matter the build or the gear, all that counts is the right resistance. It didn’t only become frustrating in the end, it was also extremely boring because it’s a huuuuuge run back without any possibility of placing a portal in the Void’s Edge.

Once I had reached Act 6, I understood that the resistances on my gear that helped me flawlessly through Act 5, were obsolete. This time I needed gear with Aether resist, and due to the lack of that, I was dying all the time.This was a complete turn down for me. The game would normally score super well, but this extremely boring grind for gear with the right resistance is just horrible. I’ve quit the game in the middle of Act 6, and I can’t even bother to go back to see the end of the story. It could have been so much fun, I actually love the Cthulhu-esque and witchy theme that they have going on there. Too bad they’ve completely ruined it with that “resistance” grind, maybe one day I’ll feel courageous enough to go back there, but I don’t think that will be any time soon.

The first expansion of Grim Dawn is out and it brought a lot of new stuff to this already great Hack’n Slash: new class masteries, increased level cap, 2 new chapters,… You can check the complete list of new features here.
After having spent most afternoons of our first week of Halloween holidays fighting our way through the game, here are our thoughts about it:

Sardoken

I had a few weeks of fun last year playing Grim Dawn, but the unoptimized graphic engine broke the game for me. In some zones, the game couldn’t get above 20 fps on a last gen PC with a 1080GTX…

The first thing I noticed with Ashes of Malmouth is that the graphic engine has been updated and never goes below 60 fps no matter the zone. To me, that’s a big green light.

Also, the classes I rolled back then were too squishy (dual handed soldier with 0 physique) or too boring (summoner). This time, like Soforah, I went for a balance between resistance and offense, a Witchblade (soldier + occultist).
So far (almost level 40), I’m having a blast. Leveling in heavy armor with a two hand and arc as main skill is insanely fun.

I know that I’m nowhere near the end game and that everything will change in ultimate but leveling is a big part of my experience, I’m not rushing, I’m on holidays and I wanna take it easy 😉

Soforah

Before the release of “Ashes of Malmouth”, I was playing a summoner in Grim Dawn. While I had a lot of fun leveling my character before this expansion, I’ve grown tired of summoning things and letting them do the job for me. Let’s face it, nothing’s more satisfying and rewarding in a hack ‘n slash than smashing all and everything around you with a bad-ass weapon. So, I went for another build this time. No more “cast and run”, but a “come at me bro” type of character that can take quite some damage before dying.

The last time I went for a melee class was in Skyrim and Diablo, and man, did I miss it! I’m having so much fun, I can’t wait to see how my character will perform in endgame content.

At the moment, I’m following a Cadence Witchblade build, partially from a build Sardoken found on the Grim Dawn Forums, the other part by improvising.

Until now I’ve followed most of his advise though… I needed to start somewhere, right? ;-p

Leveling guide byjajaja

Level with 2hand blade arc:

Start soldier, rush mastery to blade arc, max it, then rush to laceration, max it. 1 point in blitz for gap closer, then rush to oleron’s rage, max. then pop a point in occultist and max CoF. Afterwards get soldier passives then more points in occultist for the passives as you see fit.

Basically pop CoF and bladearc away.

Start with falconswoop/hawk, then lizard to get kraken. afterwards slowly work ur way up to oleron, getting dryad/assassins blade on the way to level those skill.

Get a high dmg 2hand mace from vendor on a high lvl char , or do the best you can if its ur first char, attackspeed isn’t that important, just high base dmg, a white one is fine. when choosing gear, make sure to get decent armor values and get armor absorption up with scaled hide/field of command. use ectoplasms if you need mana, if its your first char you can farm those from ghosts in A2 spined cave or something like that.

Go all physique early to use high lvl armor/weapon.

At lvl 75 spec to real build. devotions are straight forward and no backward speccing required.

So far, I’m having a blast! I can’t wait to see how this build will work when running higher difficulties, I’ll write a new post with my thoughts and ideas later on.