Grim Dawn

But want to play more Diablo 2, this is the game for you.

And then I played Grimm Dawn. The original setting and gameplay are terrific. This is not a game I have ever hesitated in recommending. This post is made during the 6/14/22 sale for 4.99USD. You will only spend that amount on a game equal or better a few times in your life. Get this game. You will not regret it.

Grim Dawn is a game in the Titan Quest vein that aims to recreate the mechanical experience with a new setting. It checks all the boxes of an ARPG dungeon crawler: Isometric, voice acting, quests, classes, skills, elements, resistances, and the all-important loot. To this end, Grim Dawn successfully treads the waters of the ARPG genre. The elements (and by extension, resistances) part of the game adds several types to the genre tropes of Fire/Ice/Lightning/Poison by including Vitality/Aether/Chaos/Piercing. These make character Masteries feel simplistic—choose any two then find out what damage types they have in common, done. The resistances function the opposite way—you want as many as possible but rarely can get anywhere close to maxing them all, which forces true weaknesses. The damage itself feels like different flavors of the same thing and they all start to run together, especially when each type has an associated DoT (Damage over Time) that all function identically. Where the game begins to show its failings are with the setting. If the mood is "gloom fantasy", the setting would be "generic forest" or "generic mountain". Sometimes with a slightly gloomy twist. There are only two areas in the entire game that are memorable: the lower Cthonic levels and Darkvale gate just before the Act 3 boss. The areas never drastically change and it feels like you walk every painful step of the Lord of the Rings journey to Mordor in excruciating detail. This cut the game's replay value drastically as I couldn't look forward to doing it all over again. The Masteries lacked the same impact and uniqueness of Titan Quest since the skills are only loosely held together by a common theme. This makes character building much less interesting. Celestial points would have offered a bandaid to this but they are gained so few and far between with ridiculous specificity that they feel tacked on. Overall, it scratched that ARPG lootcrawl itch but didn't leave me coming back for more.

This is not the game you play for an epic, sweeping narrative, multiple dialogue choices, or cringe-worthy NPC romances; no, this game is your one and only stop for mountains of loot, nearly-endless character build options, and fast-clicking, monster-exploding ARPG fun. Personally, the main attraction for me has been the freedom you have in constructing your classes' skills/spells. The sheer number of possible class and skill combinations is already overwhelming, but then you factor in a literal galaxy of constellations - each with their own branching skill trees separate from your classes - and skills granted by items and item augments, and you may end up light-headed trying to conceptualize how many different ways you can take your character. Other than that, it looks good, runs well, and is very stable.

Never played Diablo 3, but I bet this is a good option, I decided to go with demolitionist for my first character and I feel I made the right decision, the monsters love to swarm you and throw missiles and aoe at you, so kiting is a necessity, and your best bet is to find a way to do a lot of aoe aswell with some degree of health steal (even 10% is good enough to keep you alive), and maximizing the resistances has a great impact, this game focuses a lot in health regeneration, it expects you to take and dish out insane amounts of damage and that's why you can stack up to 100 healing potions The devotion system is a bit overwhelming, but you can pay to reset your points which is great I'll wait for a discount on the dlc to try them out, now that I have a better understanding of the game I'd love to play as a necromancer ah, and for the love of everything that is dear to you play in veteran mode, normal mode is ridiculously easy