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Grim Community

April 16, 2019 by Belghast

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

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.

https://grimcalc.com/

Grim Checklist

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.

http://grimchecklist.com/

Grim Tools

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.

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.

https://www.grimtools.com/

Grim Dawn Forums

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.

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/

Grim Dawn Reddit

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.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Grimdawn/

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.

Heir to the Throne

April 15, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was largely about three things. Firstly watching the string of new releases coming out of Star Wars Celebration including a Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker trailer, a trailer for the game that EA has a high likelihood of cancelling before it sees the light of day, and some leaked footage of the strangely press blackout Mandolorian Television Series sizzle reel and trailer. It was also a weekend about watching the first episode of the final season of Game of Thrones… and I had honestly forgotten how good that show was after watching so many recent seasons of Walking Dead when effectively nothing much happens. Lastly it was a weekend devoted to playing heaps of Grim Dawn. When I started this recent stint I was sitting at roughly level 15 but throughout the weekend I pushed through to level 38 on my Warder character.

The only negative is that I found out this morning that running in Windows Borderless mode causes you to get some really fucked up screenshots. The above image is an example of this where it appears to be capturing only the tiniest square of the upper left hand corner of the screen where I would assume the 0/0 coordinators are located. This means that pretty much all of the cool screenshots that I thought I was getting over the weekend wound up to be duds, and I had to scramble around this morning to take a handful of relevant shots for the purpose of this blog post.

The big problem with Grim Dawn is it never seems to give you a firm boundary between acts, so it is very hard to track exactly where you are in the progression of the main story. As far as I can tell I am firmly in the middle of Act 3 and have managed to get my way to another large town called Homestead which appears to have everything that Devil’s Crossing has except maybe the Illusionist. I am now questing for a group of Inquisitors called the Black Legion that is now sending me out into the wastes to kill stuff. I like the look of Homestead a lot, but it is somewhat of a pain to navigate given its multiple levels and the fact that this game sometimes has trouble with ramps. Ultimately you have to take any sort of a subtle ramp or rise very slowly or you just keep hopping right back of it.

The only real negative take away from the weekend is the fact that Multiplayer is not as easy as Diablo 3. Even then there doesn’t really appear to be any multiplayer activity to do like Adventure mode and it would simply be either me joining someone elses game in progress or them joining mine. The deal breaker however is the fact that both players theoretically have to own the same set of expansions in order for it to work. I slowly picked up expansion content for this game as it was released and ultimately went on sale… and as such I have everything available. So it would take someone paying the $24.99 for the base game, and then an additional $39.97 for all of the DLC content to catch up to the level my client is so we could play games together.

As a result this is largely going to be a single player game for me, but I still feel like this is the real heir to the Diablo 2 crown. It is a happy medium between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile and feels just about right to actually go out and experience. What is most interesting about it is how well the story line plays out and who it is way more intelligible than that of Diablo 3. It actually has actions that make a difference on the world because in most of the quests you are given multiple paths to reach resolution. I am currently paying for my actions because the town I am visiting is apparently missing one NPC because I chose to enact my vengeance during the events of Act 2. Of all of the various NPCs I have chosen to take the combat route…. I am wondering which other ones will wind up making me miss something as a result.

Still a great game, still very much worth picking up. However given that this is a single player experience you can probably bide your time and pick it up when it hits a sale point favorable to you.

Faking Sealed Magic

April 12, 2019 by Belghast

This morning you are going to get a tutorial how to do something that likely no one has actually ever asked for. One of the more poorly documented features of Magic the Gathering Arena is the ability to directly challenge your friends. This is also one of the more poorly supported given that there is no construct for keeping a friends list or seeing who is actually online and available for dueling. Regardless… there technically is the functionality of being able to switch over to Direct Challenge mode and input your username + random digits BattleTag style handle in and purposefully link up to another human being that you actually known. Recently Tam, Mor and Lyle have been dueling each other and having a good time building decks with the limited pool of cards that they had available to them. This largely meant that the three of them were relatively on even footing, and playing some really fun and really janky magic that mimics a sealed environment.

The challenge is that both Kodra and I have spent a lot more of our time and by reference money on MTG Arena, which also means that we have a much wider pool of cards available for building decks. This also means that in theory we can build way more efficient decks that are probably less fair than having to be forced to play with the cards available and not necessarily the cards you want to play with. It got me to thinking… Magic the Gathering is a community that has an amazing set of web based tools to simple Price Lists like MTG Goldfish or amazing search engines like Scryfall. I thought surely someone had already come to the point of wanting to fake out a sealed pool of cards… and if not I would potentially be trying to build one myself and at least needed to research the APIs that would be available to me.

What I found was MTGen a website that allows you to replicate a lot of the common sealed formats and generate lists of cards replicating the experience of opening packs… including as you can see above the various seeded boosters that occur in pre-release tournaments. The site more or less gives me what I was wanting minus a few problems. What I actually want is the ability to simply say I want X of this pack and X of this pack and X of this pack… but for sake of this experience I deemed it good enough. Now the challenge that we have in front of us, that I experienced last night is that the default sealed formats expect you to take the pool of cards and build a 40 card deck with them. When you are doing direct duels in MTG Arena it requires both players to have a 60 card deck meaning we are going to have to increase the total number of packs opened. So instead of 6 packs for a normal sealed deck you would in theory open 9 packs as Kodra suggested to me last night. Again if doing the pre-release format you would be adding 3 more packs… and thankfully the MTGen site supports this sort of functionality.

The only NEGATIVE however is that MTGen does not support Magic The Gathering Arena as an export format… and of course Wizards of the Coast had to be difficult and could not simply recycle Magic Online. This again lead me to find a work around. I figured MTGO would be the most common format for converting deck lists from that online tool to Arena. So I rolled with that and found that ultimately I just needed a list of cards minus the Sideboard heading. So when you copy the cards out from MTGen make sure to trip that first line.

Now we move on to another website… MTGArena.Pro and more importantly their Deck Converter tool. This allowed me to paste in that list of cards that I got from MTGen and it converted it to the more contorted MTGArena format. You can assign a deck name if you so choose, because the default in Arena will simple by “Imported Deck” if you do not. I personally left it alone given that I would not want to accidentally pick one of these “Jank in Progress” decks for playing proper magic with, and at least I would know if it was still named Imported Deck I should stay away. The site provides you a handy copy output button, which will place it on the clipboard stack… which is important because Magic the Gathering Arena works weird.

Lastly you go over to your Decks section of Magic the Gathering Arena and click Import… at which point it will automagically try and import anything you have put in the copy/paste buffer. This is not the behavior I expected… I would have instead expected to be presented a file dialog to go find a text file on my hard drive. I guess in theory they have gone this route to eventually make mobile support easier? I guess at this point all mobile devices pretty much have robust copy and paste functionality.

I realize I said lastly on the step before… but you are presented with a list of your cards that have been plugged into Arena. Now you can simply weed out the cards you don’t want to play and build your own janky sealed deck. There will of course be problems if you don’t actually own a copy of the card and as such will have to craft it using the proxies you have earned up to that point. This is also why you might want to draft a larger pool of packs if you happen to have a smaller pool of cards available. It also might steer you to certain colors, but while this is not a perfect solution it does at least allow you to manually replicate sealed environments and play directly against your friends in this manner without having to hope to get into the same draft or sealed event on Arena.

Exploring Grim Dawn

April 11, 2019 by Belghast

Last night was the very first night since February 15th that I have played no Anthem. Up until this point I had attempted to get a little bit in every night even if that just meant doing a single contract. Since the drop of Elysian Chests I had been trying to earn a key every night regardless if I actually ran the Stronghold to spend it on. After yesterdays post I realized that my frustrations were reaching a level where I simply needed to let it drop for awhile for my own peace of mind. For awhile I had contemplated playing some Destiny 2 given that it is theoretically in a pretty good state right now… however my fear would be that I would spend the night comparing it to Anthem and still wind up frustrated. I have been playing a lot of Diablo 3 on the switch, but again… there is the whole comparison problem seeing as we all compare Anthem loot to that game. Instead I decided to zig and zag off in a similar but different direction and spend some time with Grim Dawn. The game was announced in 2009, went through a successful kickstarter campaign in 2012, entered early access in 2013 and finally officially “launched” in 2016. Since then it has released three major content drops… The Crucible which is a sort of horde mode arena thing and then Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods that add new story and additional functionalities.

In spite of liking the game quite a bit I have never really made it terribly far because I have never played it as a primary game for any length of time. This has been my “go to” for moments when I feel like playing something LIKE Diablo but not Diablo. The game does not do much hand holding or explaining of anything… which is to its detriment given that some of the systems are less than clear. Effective you are thrust into a Victorian era world where demon like creatures called Aetherials have taken back the world is a Shadowrun awakening sort of event called the Grim Dawn. Magic the Aetherials and the Chthonians began flowing back in the world and as a survivor and formerly possessed you are trying to do your best to fight back for the sake of humanity. It is somewhat or a madlibs style remixed version of a bunch of different tales, but the long and short is you are in a world with both magic and guns and playing a game that sits somewhere between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 as far as feel. You fight zombies and demons and weird floating not-quite-beholder things for the purpose of getting loot and progressing your character.

When first starting the game you are asked to choose one of six masteries: Soldier, Demolitionist, Occultist, Nightblade, Arcanist and Shaman. At level 10 you get to pick a second mastery and effectively set what “class” you are going to be as a whole. For example I chose Soldier and Shaman which is apparently a combination called the Warder and known for its tanky goodness. I somehow arrived at this conclusion without ever actually doing research… it just seemed like the class combination that fit me the most. There was a terribly unreadable diagram on the Grim Dawn site with a really unfortunate font… so I decided to cobble together something more manageable real quick in Google Sheets. The Ashes of Malmouth campaign adds two additional masteries in the Inquisitor and the Necromancer and the Forgotten Gods campaign adds Oathkeeper. The names are rather evocative and honestly make me want to try playing a handful of those specific specs at some point or another. I am almost always deeply drawn to anything called a Death Knight.

Last night I managed to finally finish the first act of the game, in part because some of the quests are less than helpful in their directions. It is a game largely without modern quest advisement, so you have to sort of wing your way through most of them. There will never be an arrow pointing you in a direction other than maybe marking what general zone something takes place in. I still have a ton of side quests to knock out in the Act One areas, so tonight I might spend some time trying to clean those up before moving forward. Some of them I have PART of the things done… like I have managed to gather up 2 pieces of fabric but I need 3 total to turn in with the person in Devil’s Crossing which serves as the main quest hub. Occasionally Diablo style you might rescue someone out in the wastes that will turn into an NPC that either grants you quests or serves a functionality back in town. I seem to be missing whatever NPC allows me to craft things because I have picked up some blueprints but have nowhere to use them as of yet.

Ultimately Grim Dawn does a really good job of being an Action RPG without being a Diablo clone. It definitely has its own ideas about some things and while complicated… serves to be way more approachable than Path of Exile. I guess for the forseeable future I am going to spend my evenings in this game and see how far I can manage to get. I greatly enjoyed last night and found the whole thing super relaxing. I do however also want to play some Magic Arena with Tam and Mor over the weekend, so that might be what is actually on the docket for tonight. The biggest challenge I have right now is the fact that I cannot be on voice chat while playing over parsec. There are some cludgy workarounds that only work for Discord but getting Tam on Discord is a massive challenge. Even at that it forces me to try and relay through a second account which is a mess that I have just not dealt with. Essentially if I am downstairs on the laptop streaming through Parsec… then I can’t be on voice. Last night I started upstairs but Kenzie screamed at me until I went downstairs so she could in my lap while I gamed. Cats are like that.