Grim dawn with the best mod in history

I'm talking about the diablo 2 remaster mod, also known as reign of terror. For those who haven't played it, this mod adds:

1. All seven diablo 2 classes, slightly tweaked and with some new skills to fit the grim dawn engine, but also make them balanced between each others.

2. Several buffs across all grim dawn vanilla classes to keep up with the diablo 2 classes - most skills go up to level 20 now instead of the ordinary 10-12 to be competitive with the diablo 2 classes' skills.

3. The entire campaign revamped - you now get to play diablo 2 AND diablo 1 campaigns in HD - five diablo 2 acts and the diablo 1 campaign as act 6. You get 99 total devotion points, 1 per each diablo 2 quest and 6 per difficulty in total from act 6.

4. Itemization is almost completely reworked and improved - you still get to find grim dawn items (which may still be bis for some gd builds), but in addition, almost all runewords and unique items have been ported into this mod from both diablo 2 and diablo 1. In addition to that, all diablo 2 classes also have their own mythical set which greatly improves most skills in special ways (added projectiles etc.). You can still build a ton of competitive builds without those sets, so don't worry that this is anything remotely close to diablo 4. There are also custom MIs which are very powerful, potentially bis for many builds.

5. Endgame completely revamped - the mod adds tens of hidden ubers which can drop special relics for all diablo 2 classes, the diablo 2 ubers and uber tristram are also here in addition to various diablo 3 fight that have been ported here, as well as . You can also run Trial of the ancients, which is a reworked crucible to fit the mod's difficulty, cow level, world bosses and much more.

6. Build diversity is absolutely insane. Devs really hit it home with this one. If you have a modicum of grim dawn knowledge and diablo 2 knowledge, you can put together almost any build you want and still be able to complete the whole endgame (the difference being how fast your build can do that). That still doesn't mean you'll get to faceroll everything with anything - just that most builds you can come up with are indeed competitive.

A few disclaimers:

1. This is not monetary motivated post in any way. In fact, the devs refuse to accept any donations whatsoever (the head dev basically invested 5k+ hours in creating this mod for absolutely nothing) to avoid any cease and desists from blizzard for using their assets.

2. There is no massive multiplayer in this mod, unfortunately. There are no private servers because grim dawn doesn't support that. You can still join games by IP as you used to be able to do in diablo 2 and there's an active trading community for this purpose on the mod discord if you choose not to play 'ssf'.

The reason I wrote all this is because I genuinely want people to try this mod out. It's simply amazing and I would like more people to join the discord community. Personally, I haven't even played grim dawn before trying this mod out, so you can definitely jump in even if you didn't play grim dawn before. Good luck and have fun :)

Links
Official forum post: https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/mod-reign-of-terror/35347
The discord server (you can find absolutely everything you need here, including help): https://discord.com/invite/fCPNJZF

Is the mod still being updated? I played around with it probably 4 years ago or so. It was interesting but still needed a ton of work at that time.

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aggromagnet wrote:

Is the mod still being updated? I played around with it probably 4 years ago or so. It was interesting but still needed a ton of work at that time.

Yeah, it received several major patches since then and it's much more balanced and has more depth now. It's still being developed and it's still in beta (0.7.0.2, 1.0 being a definitive version I suppose, but there's much to go until then).

This again? It has one of the most boring starts - the initial maps are incredibly big with only 1-2 different monsters. The den of evil itself forces you to kill champion packs which takes time. You have no skills initially, nothing interesting. Like a wise man said: if the game can't entrance you in the first hour it doesn't matter whether it can be played for 100 hours or 1,000 - play Diablo 2 instead.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

This again? It has one of the most boring starts - the initial maps are incredibly big with only 1-2 different monsters. The den of evil itself forces you to kill champion packs which takes time. You have no skills initially, nothing interesting. Like a wise man said: if the game can't entrance you in the first hour it doesn't matter whether it can be played for 100 hours or 1,000 - play Diablo 2 instead.

What? It mirrors diablo 2 clear speed in that regard and it only gets better. You're probably used with the hyper zoom that poe has - one tap and kill one pack, even very early game. It's just a different type of arpg.

The den of evil has only 1 champion pack - corpsefire of course. There are various builds and while some are slower at first (amazon), some clear extremely fast (sorceress).

'Like a wise man said: if the game can't entrance you in the first hour it doesn't matter whether it can be played for 100 hours or 1,000'

Well, thank god I gave poe a chance cause it was extremely slow a few years back.

I come back to D2 every once in awhile. The areas in this mod are much bigger which is not a plus

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Johny_Snow wrote:

I come back to D2 every once in awhile. The areas in this mod are much bigger which is not a plus

Some are bigger (act 4), some are shorter (act 3 - the easiest act now). Overall, it's about the same. If you include the fact that zones are static, you can clear much faster cause you won't be fked by map rng.

Tried it out again with a few different builds...stopped after Act One on each. Progression feels like at least as much of a slog as vanilla Grim Dawn, even more so in some parts, and the overall balance between difficulty/reward seems pretty bad. Way too tedious for me. Better to just play D2 or wait for D2R.

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aggromagnet wrote:

Tried it out again with a few different builds...stopped after Act One on each. Progression feels like at least as much of a slog as vanilla Grim Dawn, even more so in some parts, and the overall balance between difficulty/reward seems pretty bad. Way too tedious for me. Better to just play D2 or wait for D2R.

There are some builds that start off slower and act 1 is indeed pretty sluggish, but once you get to act 2-3 and manage to craft yourself the basic runewords (weapon, stealth), you should have a much easier time until act 5. For example, amazon starts off horribly slow, but once you get to act 2-3 and get a zephyr + strafe + a few mana components on jewelry for sustain, you can pretty much faceroll everything, short of bosses.

I'll talk to the devs to see if they plan on speeding up the act 1 a little.

I didn't read the thread, but I'm excited to hear that The Stanley Parable now has a Grim Dawn edition somehow.