LogFAQs > #953446126

adjl posted...

Personally, I think I like Grim Dawn's loot philosophy better than PoE or Diablo 3's. With PoE, the lack of targeted farming and the preponderance of build-defining Uniques pretty much requires players to trade in order to be able to use many builds, which is a cumbersome system that ultimately limits build flexibility a lot in a game that has such massive potential for variety. Diablo 3 avoided that issue by having build-defining legendaries drop often enough that pretty much any build was accessible, but the sheer quantity of skill-specific bonuses offered by those legendaries (and particularly by set bonuses) pigeonholed those skills into being used in certain ways and ended up really only allowing a fairly limited number of different builds. Those builds also came together so quickly that there was rarely any room to farm for more meaningful upgrades than getting the same legendary with better stats, which is kind of boring.

Grim Dawn, on the other hand, has relatively few items that would be considered build-defining/enabling, and the majority of those are target farmable. That means there's a ton of build variety available just from guaranteed drops, but even so, there's still enough room to improve on those budget builds and/or enable more gear-dependent ones to make farming feel worthwhile. Some of those builds end up feeling a bit samey (often just different elemental flavours of similar skills, or sometimes even the same skill) after trying out enough of them, but ultimately, I think it's my favourite approach to loot of the three.

Of course, the other approach is to just eschew the idea of build-defining gear pieces in general so that's never an issue, but I'm less keen on that. Finding a piece of build-defining gear is exciting because it meaningfully changes the way you play. There's a fine line between offering that excitement and making it mandatory to get those drops in order to function (which D3 crosses), but when it's done right, I find it to be a much more interesting philosophy than having every gear piece just make the numbers get bigger.

I mean I think both games are great, Grim Dawn is a far better solo game but the challenge of SSF which I do on occasion in Path of Exile is also fun. I think if I charted my most two played games since both of those came out those two would easily win it, Grim Dawn has also a good number of great mods that add a lot more replay value to it.

Path of Exile's focus is more like an expanded Diablo 2 and in that game even if you farmed forever it was far more difficult to find top tier gear for your own build. You were usually forced to work with others trading for the gear you wanted so not a surprise to see it work like that.