I played it a while back when it was available on Game Pass (I don’t think it is anymore). It was surprisingly fun. I did not come close to finishing it. I really liked the puzzles in the dungeons, I think that was my favorite part.
I have about 3 more dungeons and I will have done all of them.
I hope they make a sequel. It could use some improvement and I bet a sequel could improve it quite a bit.
Best I could find was a Steam link
Oh, thanks! It’s City, not Country.
Sorry about that. My brain was misfiring all day yesterday. I blame sleep deprivation.
It really is a fun, relaxing game though. 
We just started playing the base game last week and oh what a breath of fresh air. I’m a level 27 soldier. I really have zero complaints at this point.
Okay - one complaint (I’m a gamer, after all.) When you put a component into a piece of equipment, you can’t see the stats of the component anymore, or what it does. This is very annoying.
Otherwise it’s been an absolute blast.
You should absolutely spring for the DLCs. They add a lot of content.
The one thing about Grim Dawn though, the only really big drawback IMHO, is that while it is easy to get into, the mechanics of the game are very deep and pretty non-intuitive. Resistance reduction for example comes in a few different flavors. Some of them stack, some do not, making it worthless to invest in certain multiples of the same type, but absolutely critical to invest in multiples of other types. Stuff like that. This is mostly irrelevant at first, but starts mattering at very high difficulties when the game becomes much harder and you become resource-constrained.
Also many things (like actual scaled pet damage) are only calculated internally by the game and are not viewable in game by the player - they were very deliberately left off tool-tips to prevent UI clutter
But it is still easily my favorite ARPG.
Are you on a PC? Hold ctrl while the cursor is over the item and the column will expands to show everything including the stats of the add-ons 
. Dunno about console versions, but I suspect there is a similar method (I’d hope so, anyway).
The millions of types of damage and resistances is a bit ridiculous. I’ll admit I’m not a very thoughtful player. My husband is already researching this game and I’m just hacking my way through. He keeps lecturing me that I don’t respec often enough.
I mean this is working right now. If I start dying all the time I’ll figure the rest out. Right now I’m just pouring points into passive defense which is what I always do. I’m very predictable. Give me a large melee weapon and the ability to heal and I’m happy (bet you can’t guess my favorite class.)
I’m on PC. I’ll try the ctrl trick. I thought I tried that, but maybe I missed something.
It absolutely is 
. Here’s an older cheat sheet for your husband. Can’t guarantee everything is up-to-date, but it should mostly still be relevant.
Another thing the developers do, and good on them in general, is constantly re-balancing skills, items, even base mechanics with patch updates. Sometimes very extensively. So be wary of old build guides and older forum advice - they may no longer be relevant.
Well. Let’s be honest, I’m probably going to be playing this game for a while. I may as well start figuring this stuff out now.
Thanks, I passed the link along to my husband too.
I’m still adulting my way through Starfield, with a number of issues due to how CPU intensive it is, and worried about playability of anything more recent in the next few years where replacing my PC is out of the question.
So I just ordered an Intel® Core™ i9-11900 Desktop Processor 8 Cores up to 5.2 GHz to replace my i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz (2.59 GHz). More threads, more cores, with the draw being within the limits of my existing power supply (unlike the overclocked i7 I was looking at instead).
Hopefully, two more cores and the general improvement will keep my desktop viable for a while yet, because things look to keep getting worse through 2028 at a minimum.
I’ve double and triple checked that it should be compatible with my existing Mboard, and even if it’s a gently used (Intel refurb) it has a 30 day refund if it isn’t.
Should have it and install in by the end of the month. We’ll see if Starfield and other CPU heavy games work a bit better!
I just finished replaying Jade Empire (from 2005). It’s still pretty fun (bullet hell! kung fu! John Cleese!). The worst parts are some of the ugly low-poly faces (not Morrowind ugly, but bad enough) and terrible camera placement in fights, but it holds up well enough.
Grim Dawn: My husband was dumping points into his class rather than his skills, which I found baffling. Meanwhile I was struggling along with low physique. I told him the problem and he said “that’s why I’m putting points into my class.”
“WTF do you mean, putting points into your class?”
Ok well it turns out if you put points into that bottom bar you get a bunch of bonuses, in my case physique. I thought it just unlocked skills!
I figured that out at level 30. I told Spouse Weasel “nobody can know about this.”
This morning I started a solo Shaman because I heard it can specialize in two-handed weapons. I’m level 11 and I’ve yet to find a two-handed weapon.
It’s a cool class though. I enjoy having my own personal tornadoes following me around.
I’m not sure what attributes to put points into for this class. I’m putting most of them in Cunning right now. What do you recommend for a two-handed weapon build?
In Lower Crossing, the very first area you enter, there are always three rare starter items. Somewhere to the right (the map varies) will be a little shack with a body in it. Loot the body and you will find the lightning-themed Hevill’s Greatsword, which is ideal for a starter two-handed Shaman . The other two items that can be found are the fire-themed one-handed Francis’ Gun and cold-themed one-handed Olman’s Axe.
I hereby accuse you of the sin of not being a compulsive completist that visits every nook and cranny and loots every body and box .
ETA: A common leveling method is to pick one attacking skill and max it one point at a time, while putting two into the class bar for stats every level and try to fill it out to reach all the skills. Deviating to pick up one point utility skills as desired/needed. There are several classes however where it can make sense to max a skill first. Necromancer with the base skeleton skill for example which will then wipe the floor with everything around them in early levels.
ETA 2: If you weren’t aware you only get three points/level until level 50. After that it drops to two, then eventually one. So you really can get point constrained. Also do not ignore devotions! That’s something I didn’t understand or pay attention to for quite awhile when I first was learning to play. They will significantly boost stats, resists, damage, everything.
Missed this on my edits.
Physique is always most important, because health is everything. Many builds will optimally mostly ignore cunning and spirit completely, relying on stat increases from the character bar and devotions. The exceptions are pure caster builds which can need spirit early on and builds using cunning-stat items like guns and swords that need cunning early on. Then often only as much as needed. A lot of people recommend hoarding points while leveling and only using them as necessary to equip gear. Or splits like three or four physique to one or two spirit or cunning for builds that depend on those stats. It depends on how glass cannon you want to go - there are people that go more all in. But there is a lot of debate about all of this.
re: Devotions - take a look at the Fox for example. You’ll note it is bleed-focused, but also that its nodes add a total of 40 cunning and 15 spirit. It’s nodes like that that can make up for using leveling points mostly on physique.
Re: Grim Dawn, any tips on making the earlier levels more fun? I’m around level 10 or 12 right now, I think, just the first couple of hours towards Burrwitch Village.
I’ve played the game several times since it came out, but the earlier levels seem to be so devoid of, well, gameplay. I wanted to play a pet build, so chose a shaman, but so far I only have one skill (summon the big root pet)… and that’s it. Out of desperation for more to do, I eventually invested one point into the totem skill that buffs the pet. But the entire gameplay loop so far is walk, put down totem, wait, put down totem, wait. Even on Veteran difficulty, it’s kinda mindless… was a pet class the wrong choice to start with?
I’m excited about the higher-level potential options (especially after dual-classing!), but I feel like the skill system actively fights diversification early on… not only do you only get 3 points per level, you have to divide them between the base class (to unlock new skills), ranks in the active skill (just to make them a tiny bit stronger), and ranks in passive skills (same, except doesn’t add any active gameplay).
It feels like an archaic design decision, reminiscent of Diablo 2’s points system. Later ARPGs have largely moved away from that sort of system, to give you more meaningful/tactile feelings of progression every few levels or skill gems, and so your passive stat boosts don’t compete with your active skills and their variants/modifiers.
Is it just a deliberate design choice, with Grim Dawn trying to be old-school on purpose, and that’s that? Or am I doing something wrong with my character?
I really want to love this game — I buy every expansion for it that comes out — but keep falling asleep at the keyboard after a couple hours…
See I love pet classes, especially early on. But I genuinely love gameplay where I can metaphorically stroll around sniffing the flowers and gazing contentedly at the clouds while my pet(s) whirl around me killing everything in sight. I find that deeply satisfying. But not everyone does.
There are more active pet builds - for example Necromancer skeletons can be very heavy damage-dealers en masse but are much more fragile than a Shaman briarthorn (the absolute tankiest of pets). So you end up recasting much more often and can be engaging in using the complementary damage spell Bone Harvest, the last node of which buffs your pets, so you are simultaneously damaging things while buffing your pets. Occultist/Shaman is probably the strongest pet class and with Occultist you’ll be spamming Curse of Frailty to debuff enemies and Blood of Dreeg to buff your pets. And so on.
But pet classes will always be more passive gameplay and since hybrid damage-type classes aren’t really strong in Grim Dawn (i.e. pet-scaling pets/melee, caster/melee, pet-scaling pets/caster - player-scaling pets are a different thing), maybe you want a more active character. There are a number of “piano-key” builds that rely on rapidly rotating multiple attack and debuffing skills. Something like that might be more your style. However all builds are a bit limited in complexity in early levels when you don’t have a lot of skills yet.
So an early fast-leveling solution. I really don’t recommend doing this on your first play through(s). However if you want to level quickly in game with no external cheats to experience different skills a little quicker, make a new character. You might want to start it in normal difficulty and just gain one level so you have some damage skill. Then back out to the main menu and choose the crucible option, which is just an arena where you fight waves of enemies. It levels with you to some extent, but the difficulty increases with each wave. Starting with a first level character, defeating the first wave will immediately level you to level six, the second to eight and so on. You can keep doing more waves without pause for greater treasure rewards or just stop after each initial wave take your meager earnings and level up. It is pretty easy to grind a lot of levels that way and you can get the satisfaction of near-instantly having a number of skill points to play with. You also accumulate “tributes” which can be exchanged for devotion points at one of the arena vendors to give an early boost in devotion-building as well. Of course as soon as you switch back to the main campaign your character will be massively over-leveled and will annihilate everything by just breathing on them and gain no little or no experience for ages. Which also might annoy you. But it is an option.
Grim Dawn shares designers with the earlier Titan Quest, my second-favorite ARPG and it shows. They’re both build-design engines with a loot system. Some really veteran players like to just theory-craft level 100 builds, cheat them into existence with programs like GDStash and then run them against uber-bosses. Others will play normally, but use an optimal leveling-skill until high levels then completely re-spec into a “final build.” That’s not me - I endlessly start and re-start a hundred different classes and run them level 50-90 then start over again. I’ve never actually slogged a character all the way to 100, I think 97 was my max.
But early leveling will always be a much slower grind, just because you have less fun things to experiment with at level ten than at level 50.
Thank you for the incredibly helpful information!
That game is screaming for a true remaster. It’s such a fantastic game though, as far as gameplay and story.
Thank you, @Tamerlane!
I will try a different class for now — maybe collecting some items for the pet classes — or fall back to the Crucible if I really just need a few levels.
I bet it would be a lot more fun if I could get my partner to play too, like the Weasels Not her type of game, alas.