Grim Community

grim-dawn-screenshot-2019-04-15-21-29-17-10

If you have been reading this blog over the last few days you will know that I have been delving into Grim Dawn.  At this point I believe I am 43 and after some advice that I received checked the Veteran box.  I am not entirely sure what this does apart from seemingly increase the rate of named mobs spawning, and as a result increase your chance for good loot in the process.  More or less it reminds me of the difference between Normal and Hard in Diablo 3, where you can pretty much instantly bump up to Hard and just go on with your life without much stress.  It appears the other difficulty ranks do not unlock until later…  I am assuming either associated with you hitting level cap or you finishing the main story.

I have officially been playing long enough that I have started trying to venture out and see what sort of community surrounds this game.  For a largely single player focused experience…  I was not expecting much.  The steam forums were not exactly a great resource, but then again they never.  However exploring further it appears that there is a fairly active scene supporting this game, so I thought I would spend some time this morning going into some of the resources I have found.  The at a glance takeaway seems to be that a lot of the same sort of folks that supported Diablo 2 and Diablo 3…  are supporting this game.

GrimCalc

grimcalc

This is the very first Grim Dawn resource that I stumbled across, because several build guides were linking to specs designed using it.  Ultimately it is at its core a spec generation tool that allows you to fiddle with your talent points and devotions…  and then links to a bunch of other resources not necessarily hosted on the same site.  I thought it was pretty great and exactly the sort of thing I had been looking for.  Unfortunately when you dip down into the build compendium, instead of having something more programmatic and searchable it links you to a forum post with a bunch of popular builds.

Grim Checklist

grimchecklist

This was linked to off of GrimCalc and appears to be a site that maintains checklists that you can create for your various characters to make sure you have hit certain objectives.  At this point I don’t really know enough about the game to understand this, and as such I have not spent much time exploring it but I thought it was worth noting.

Grim Tools

grimtools-calc

Then in my journeys I stumbled across Grim Tools which appears to be the WoWHead of Grim Dawn websites.  Effectively it does everything that the previously two links do… but adds a bunch more functionality as well.  It of course has a robust build calculator that you can see above that not only manages Talents and Devotions but also drills into possible item builds.  On top of that it has a database for all of the Items, Monsters and Pets…  their own version of the Checklist Functionality and a World Map.

grimtools-map

This later functionality was ultimately what drew me to the site.  I was searching to try and find a good map that shows all of the world and stumbled across this application instead.  Now given the limited area that I have cleared I had already thought that Grim Dawn was a really big game.  However based on this map it seems that I have not come close to seeing the full scope of it.  What is weird also is that as I go up through new areas… it appears like the areas themselves are getting much bigger in scale.  What I find really impressive about this game is that legitimately you can walk from one end to another and the zones actually connect and synchronize without having to do any hand waving teleportation magic.  This is something that Diablo 3 completely fails at with each act representing a disconnected island from the whole.

Grim Dawn Forums

grimdawnforums

Another interesting throwback with this game is the fact that it has official forums…  and they really are a hub of information about the game.  So many modern games have all but completely abandoned this concept, pushing all of the moderation duty to fan managed Reddits and the like.  However Grim Dawn has what appears to be a very thriving forum culture where folks congregate to talk about the finer points of gameplay.  All in all it does not appear to be super flamey either.

Grim Dawn Reddit

grimdawnreddit

Normally I am super leery of anything that advertises specifically that it is “Not a Political Correct Reddit”.  This usually means that a given reddit has very specific political leanings of its own.  However with that caveat it does not appear to be a bad place to find information.  Overall the threads I’ve read up to this point have been largely positive, and quite frankly I have not really seen much that made me cringe.  That said I purposefully sorted it towards the bottom of the list because Reddit is not always going to be the most useful place in the world… and I have seen subs turn on a dime when something shifts in the game.  Still worth knowing about, and I suggest that you use the “Old” reddit for this one given that they have done nothing to update it for the modern interface.

 

Are you a Grim Dawn player, and is there a major resource that I completely missed in this list?  Let me know about it.  I purposefully excluded Graceful Dusk because it wasn’t nearly as good of an interface as GrimTools and didn’t appear to be as updated.  If you want to try custom versions of Grim Dawn, the game supports modding and this thread on the forums appears to be the best resource for grabbing those.  Finally there is a Discord server community if you are so included for that sort of thing.

 

1 thought on “Grim Community”

  1. The official forums are the best place for info. The Fandom wiki is so-so in terms of data.

    The map tool is hyper useful, if only to track Devotion Shrines. You really want to collect those, as they provide a permanent skill point. The one-shot chests… well they scale to your level (and the cap for the difficulty).

    The map is also quite useful for finding rare spawns/dynamite/whathaveyou until you better memorize the layouts.

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