Grim Dawn Grim Misadventure #163 - A Rare Proposal

This month's “Grim Misadventure” update for Crate Entertainment's hack 'n' slash action-RPG Grim Dawn offers a brief preview of how the upcoming 1.1.5.0 update for the game will completely overhaul its Rare Affixes and Epic items in order to make them more desirable and exciting to acquire, especially during the early stages of the game. Check it out:

Grim Misadventures is here!

Last time, we explored some of the environments of the upcoming new roguelike dungeon.

Today, we are going to delve deeper into just why v1.1.5.0 will be Grim Dawn’s largest free content update ever!

But first, some quick news on the impending hotfix v1.1.4.2. The hotfix, which includes some balance changes, is all but finished and is going through final testing. We expect it to go live this week!

So, as you already know, v1.1.5.0 will feature Grim Dawn’s 5th roguelike dungeon. It’s going to be a grand adventure that sees you exploring new locales to unlock ancient Korvan secrets and, ultimately, the roguelike dungeon itself.

But that is not all that v1.1.5.0 has in store for you!

For our upcoming major update, we are working on an extensive balance overhaul of all, and we really mean all, of the Rare Affixes and Epic items in the game. Even the oldest faction gear will be receiving love!

As Grim Dawn grew with two awesome expansions, some of the oldest gear in the game has lost some of its luster by comparison. This became especially apparent as we playtested the leveling experience for v1.1.4.0’s Veteran difficulty update.

With v1.1.5.0, we wanted to go back to the beginning and make acquiring gear during the leveling experience even more exciting. We reached out to the community, you may recall the thread we posted a few weeks ago regarding Rare Affixes, and reviewed what some of the player-favorite affixes were and why. Apart from the obvious powerful resistance stacking and crowd control reduction, some of the fun elements of getting a cool Rare item were the skill procs and skill bonuses. Getting a Monster Infrequent that stacks up just right to give you +5 to a skill can be amazing as you level.

So not only did we pump underperforming affixes full of tempting resists, we also increased the proc rates on all Rare affix skill procs and added many more skill bonuses to rare affixes. And for those of you shivering at the thought of a balancing update, fear not: your favorite OP affixes will not suffer. On the contrary, we want to copy some of what makes them so tempting over to other affixes.

We are going into Epic items with the same sort of mentality. Flesh out what’s awesome, update what’s not. Make Epics feel epic again.

While the focus was on lower level gear, all of these changes will extend to the endgame as well!

Pumped for v1.1.5.0? Some of you are probably wondering if such a major update will mark the end of the journey for Grim Dawn. While we’re not ready to discuss details, rest assured. Grim Dawn still has a few updates in it yet!

Like knowing what is coming up next for Grim Dawn? Grim Misadventures are posted less frequently as we focus on supporting the expansion and its upcoming content updates. Check back on 09/30/2019 for the next Grim Misadventure.