YMMV / Grim Dawn

• Broken Base: The Savior sidequest in Act 6 has been divisive among fans. Nicoh, a crazed survivor has been protecting two children in Malmouth for weeks. You can offer them to find refuge with the Resistance. However, there's a chance Nicoh will give-in to his paranoia and attack you, forcing you to kill him. You can rescue the children, but they'll naturally be upset at you for the remainder of the game. The outcome of Nicoh attacking you or not is completely random and dialogue choices have no effect. Some fans were upset because they couldn't give them a happy ending and have no control over how it was going to end. Other fans point out that it's a realistic reaction on a Crapsack World and after all, you did break down their door to reach them, effectively removing their only defense.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Fury, a type of Aether Corruption (zombie) that, unlike most of its other ilk, can and will sprint towards you faster than anything in the game by the point you encounter them, also possess a percentage health reduction attack and leech back incredible amounts of health on hit.
  • The Undead have skeletal knights who have the ability to cast a reflect damage buff on themselves reflecting a large portion of damage back to your character. Skeletal Priests who have a wide area heal spell that can heal even boss monsters up to full health in one cast and they also like to hide out of sight so you don't notice them healing other enemies. Made worse in Arkovia by appearing in the same area as hard-hitting ranged mobs like the Haunted Noble and Deathbolt Archer, not to mention the tendency of more enemies to spawn underneath you while you fight.
  • The Order of Death's Vigil is an entire faction of demonic spiders, for those who side against them. Particularly their ability to zerg rush you with skeletons. Then there is the Dreadlord, a champion unit of the Order, who has an unavoidable vitality element attack and can summon elite mook skeletal revenants of two varieties, a frost revenant who can freeze you, or a lightning revenant who can stun you. The faction was subject to a few nerfs but they can still be a pain to fight sometimes.
  • The Stonewart Behemoths are gigantic trolls that just won't die because of their huge amount of health. Worse, your damage won't even slow them down.
  • In the same vein of the stonewart behemoth there are also flesh hulks, and their stronger variations ironside and rage hulks. These things end up having more effective hp than bosses due to their absurd hp pool and resistances.
  • With the Valbury update adds Possessed Archmages to this group. While somewhat annoying beforehand due to using Mirror of Ereoctes(the same skill the arcanist mastery has), but now they have a debuff called Mark of Aetherfire. Have no aether resistance? enjoy taking 40% more aether damage. have max resistance? It's now cut in half. Worse still is it deals damage every second the mark is on you.
  • The expansion adds in yet another one with any hero with the Arcane modifier. These enemies have an ability to dispell nearly every buff you have on you including elixir buffs.
  • Aetherial Behemoths, Colossi and Titans are just as dangerous and hard to bring down as flesh hulks.
  • Ascended Myrmidons in Malmouth can summon aether Whirlwinds. If you've been in Port Valbury, you know what this means.
  • Forgotten Gods adds even more gigantic fat bastards that like to rush at you like freight trains, get in your face and refuse to die in the form of Korvaak's Rageflames, Chosen and Champions. Except these can also call down meteors and belch masses of flame at you.
• Friendly Fandoms: Fans of Titan Quest and fans of Grim Dawn get along just fine because both ARPG use the same game engine and there are many similarities between both games. Some of the people who used to work on Titan Quest now work on Grim Dawn.
• Funny Moments: There's one or two in what's otherwise a very dark and, er, grim game. One such example is when you finally catch up with Elsa: the 'Damsel in Distress' you thought you were going to save turns out to be surrounded by dead trolls, eagerly making her way back home.
  • Finding some of the joke items can be this. Notable examples are the Finger of Gar'Dalvur, Pretty Great Pants, Totally Normal Shield (and relatives), and some particularly filthy items like the Soiled Trousers and Cauldron of Excitement.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Firearms have an edge over other weapons. With the right character build, you can rapidly spam loads of bullets on monsters before they can even touch you. Firearms also do piercing damage, bypassing armor altogether. In the Ch'tons' realms such as the Bastion of Chaos or the Obsidian throne, projectiles can fly over barriers and kill monsters without any of them being able to attack you, while other weapons and magic are stopped by the barriers.
    • They get even better if you are playing as an Inquisitor, who not only gets plenty of skills that boost or make use of ranged weapons, but also the Inquisitor Seal skill that provides damage absorption (directly removing a fixed portion of an enemy's damage), one of the most potent defensive measures in the game, as long as you are standing on it. This allows a normally squishy ranged build to facetank just as well, if not better, than most melee builds.
  • The Shaman's totems are this. They can't be destroyed, their attacks never miss and they can hit multiple enemies in a single stroke. Just drop them around the battlefield, run in circles and watch monsters drop like flies. Combine them with Celestial Powers and the massacre is even more fun to watch.
  • Death Knight, equipped with Krieg set and the Mythical Mindwarp sword. Capable of killing even superbosses.
  • In Forgotten Gods, the Warlord (Soldier + Oathkeeper), when equipped with the Ardor of Octavius set, is the strongest class combination, capable of reaching even the deepest parts of Shattered Realm.
  • Builds based upon the Eye of Reckoning were extremely strong after the introduction of Forgotten Gods.
  • The Oppressor build, which used the Mythical Avatar of Order amulet in order to add retaliation damage to the Drain Essence spell. It had a very high DPS (207 thousand) before the nerf.
  • Spellbinders were the number 1 (or close) mastery combo in the game for quite a long time owing to the incredible synergy between Necromancer and Arcanist. While the class is lackluster if not using the Aether Damage type, with it it can enjoy huge damage boosts, respectable health, powerful magic defenses and several deadly spells. But the real reason behind Spellbinders' dominance was the combination of Mirror of Ereoctes and Mark of Torment: the first is an Arcanist skill that makes you temporarily invulnerable, the second is a Necromancer ability that can redirect over half of the damage you take onto an enemy of your choice. Already strong on their lonesome, together they allow any player with just a hint of tactical skill and decent cooldown reduction to pretty much never die, regardless of what is thrown at them. Both skills were nerfed in the games big overhaul in 1.2 to be much worse without heavy point investment and unaffected by cooldown reduction, dragging down the damage potential of spellbinders using the combo, while also nerfing the already good uses of the skills individually.
  • The Stoneguard set coupled with a Retaliation-focused build is the secret recipe to deal with all those pesky Celestial superbosses that bullied you before with ease. While Retaliation builds by their very nature are particularly effective against aggressive bosses due them setting off their hard-hitting counterattacks very frequently, the Stoneguard items take everything that makes retaliation good and turn it up to eleven, allowing you to chew through superbosses' health bars in no time while soaking hits like a pro thanks to their immense armor bonus.
  • Before a nerf, builds focusing on Pierce Damage that used many double-rare items were this full force. This is because Pierce damage generally suffers from 2 problems: low % boosts on items and comparatively few sources of it in masteries. However, using third-party software to generate rare items with hand-picked affixes and prefixes could allow one to utterly abuse the little fact that Pierce damage is substantially boosted by Cunning, which is otherwise usually a dump stat compared to the almighty Physique: with the right gear and the Cunning boost from Nightblade, one could make a character that triple-dipped in Cunning to receive gargantuan damage boosts, extremely high Offensive Ability and just enough HP to get by. Coupled with items converting all Elemental damage to Pierce this allowed for character that used the Blade Spirit summons and powerful attacks from masteries with no Pierce support to utterly delete any enemy from the face of the earth. Before the nerfs, builds like these could clear the most difficult Crucible waves in little more than 3 minutes, while most top tier builds struggled to go below 5.
  • Generally pet builds are considered the most powerful builds in the game. They manage this because most high end pet gear gives damage to the pets, but gives defense stats to the player meaning they have huge damage while maintaining the survivability of dedicated tanks and a wall of disposable meat shields to eat up even more damage. The Cabalist and Conjurer summoners in particular are considered the top contenders for 2nd and 1st place builds based on the depths of Shattered Realm they can reliably reach. Most builds cap out around 90-100, both of these can push beyond 120.
  • With the introduction of the sunder mechanic, sunder counts as a debuff. This means the Necromancer's mark of torment can reflect it. Because it's only intended for killing the player, it can be up to 80 percent extra damage if it comes from a superboss for a few seconds.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Cold Ones. Slow-moving zombies with weak attacks, but have a chance to freeze you. Very annoying especially when flanked with more dangerous monsters. In fact, nearly any enemy that can freeze you is potentially this or worse unless you heavily stack up your freeze duration reduction or pop a Hoarfrost Ointment.
  • Burning Dead are fire zombies who aren't much of a threat at a low level. At a higher level, however, they can be an annoyance in great numbers when they throw their fire at you. For melee players, they can be a pain because they explode when they die.
  • Ghouls aren't that difficult to kill, but the stronger varieties leave a pool of liquid that causes bleeding damage. You have to patiently wait for the pool to dissipate before you can move on.
  • Troll Hunters aren't hard to kill, but their thrown nets are so annoying, you will sometime wish you've invested more on entrapment resistance or were part-Arcanist to use Nullification. Skeleton Golems and Obsidian Chthonics with their bone/stone traps can also be potentially annoying to fight against for similar reasons.
  • Any enemy that creates damage over time fields. Some do this on death, some as an attack, and a few do both, but it's always annoying. Pretty much every hero and boss in the game has at least one of these, but the biggest annoyance comes from mooks because they can layer their attacks together for some unexpected and alarming damage.
• Goddamned Boss: Hero enemies with the Timewarped trait have a tendency of petrifying you if you let them live for too long. They are frustrating to fight against for the same reason as freezing and trapping enemies.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • An old bug during the early access builds spawned mobs in the prison cell behind the smuggler. For the most part, it was a harmless thing save for the few times they would spawn in the town itself and potentially kill you. This bug was eventually corrected during early access.
  • Another unintended behavior was the fact that weapon damage modifiers on skills amplified the effects of resistance reduction modifiers, most commonly found on the "of the Abyss" suffix. The combination of a 400% weapon damage shadow strike and a weapon with at least 25% reduction to resists would strip all enemy resistance to 0 and render them susceptible to all forms of crowd control and more importantly health reduction damage, which bosses normally have 500% resistance to. Again this was fixed in a patch.
  • Another resistance oversight is that player resistance has no hard cap in place. Although only achievable with the use of mods you can get your maximum resistances to exceed 100% and this will in fact make you impervious to the form of damage you have 100% resistance to.
  • The Sentinel could sometime leave his arena and go after you, which is a good thing since you could now fight him in the whole dungeon rather than the confined space of his lair. This has been fixed, now he returns to his place if he ventured too far.
  • Two of the game's Steam achievements call for you to get kills against six and ten Nemesis monsters respectively. One of these Nemesis monsters is Kupacabra the Endless Menace, an Asteroids Monster that splits in half when killed, and each of those halves do the same for a total of seven enemies you must deal with. Due to an oversight, though, every one of those counts as a separate Nemesis kill for the achievement, meaning fully killing Kupacabra automatically grants you the former achievement and takes care of the majority of the ten kills needed for the latter.
• Heartwarming Moments: Throughout the game, you can come across survivors in the wild and, if you make the right dialogue choices, can convince them to come to Devil's Crossing for shelter. These survivors are all unanimously appreciative of you giving them this chance, and in Stephen Skinner's case, for showing him that there is still hope.
• Narm:
  • A unique axe is called the "Crescent Moon". It's a shaft with a crescent moon on its top. However the aura around the moon makes the weapon look like a giant lollipop.
  • It can be hard to take the game's "ruined world, humanity dying" mood seriously when you can't smash an urn or kick over a junk heap without finding a pile of magic items.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Gaining a level makes a very nice satisfying metallic sound. Assigning a star also makes a good sound effect, signaling that your goal to complete a constellation is getting closer.
  • Certain enemy death sounds can also be pretty satisfying to hear, a notable one is the distorted choking/gargling noise that Reanimators and bosses based on them (i.e. Valdaran or Van Aldritch) often make.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Aetherfire and poison water. Both are Dangerous Terrain that doesn't hurt enemies but will hurt the player. Despite being aether and poison in appearance, and both of those damage types having resistances, the terrain actually deals percentage-based life-reduction damage, against which almost no items provide any kind of resistance. This means it's guaranteed to kill you in seconds and having more health does nothing to mitigate it. Several areas of the game require you to run through it or fight around it. Poison water is much worse in this regard because it doesn't stand out in any appreciable way and it shows up in Act 1 long before any new player could be aware of it.
  • Aether Whirlwinds. Found primarily in Port Valbury, these whirlwinds function as traps found earlier in the game. Unlike those, Whirlwinds follow you around and take a long time to disperse. These occur in an area with a lot of aetherfire mentioned above, which can make the simple act of moving around very dangerous.
  • Unmarked caves and transitions. Most caves and entrances and area transitions will show up on the map. A few of them don't. This can get frustrating when there's something important hidden in one of them, such as a devotion shrine or a quest objective, and doubly so if it also spawns in a random location.
  • A class-specific one, but pet-heavy builds will learn to hate the random land mines scattered around the Plains of Strife because your pets will set them off constantly. You'll probably step on more than a few yourself since you can't see the tiny little mines with both your pets and your enemies raining spell effects.
  • Grim Dawn is, in general, very bad at communicating what is damaging or debuffing the player. There are a wide variety of resistances, status effects and damage types, not all of which are immediately obvious which is which. Most attacks are color-coded, but some are not (Aetherfire and poisoned water being the best examples) and at least three damage types (Chaos, Vitality, Bleed) share the same color making them difficult to distinguish. You may also run into specific enemies that do damage types outside what their group normally does, such as skeletons that do Chaos damage normally associated with Chthonians. This can lead to a lot of head-scratching 'What just killed me?' moments, and since there's no summary to explain it the player will never know (unless they look it up online or used Grim Internals).
  • Devil's Crossing is notable for not having many options for reputation grinding, unlike other factions. The only regular enemy that Devil's Crossing gains reputation for killing is Cronley's Gang, who are only relevant in earlier maps. Furthermore, the Devil's Crossing bounties will often send you back to early areas of the game where enemies are so low-level that you won't be getting any experience or loot to make it worthwhile, and the enemies in those areas often won't give any reputation for Devil's Crossing.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Playing the game with a single mastery. While this puts a greater amount of focus on that class, this also makes that character very specialized, and can round out their abilities. It's "Self-Imposed" because, unlike in Titan Quest, there's no Achievement awarded for doing it. You do get an item for it though in Forgotten Gods.
• Squick: There's is literally an item called Soiled Trousers. You dig fecal matters from the pants' pouches and throw them at monsters for poison damage. When you wear the pants, you see poison gas constantly coming out of your butt. The expansions don't help by adding other scatological equipment, such as the Cauldron of Excitement, Fewmets of the Questing Beast, and Fewmet Grips.
• That One Attack:
  • The ghosts' Shadow Strike which allows them to disappear and reappear next to you by hitting you really hard for massive damage. There are not many ways to defend against it.
  • The Port Valbury update gave Possessed Archmages a new skill; the Mark of Aetherfire. This debuff sharply drops your aether and fire resistance; even if you're at 80% on both, effectively halving resistance unless one were to go over with both. Worse still, archmages are everywhere in Valbury, making an already difficult dungeon harder.
  • Grava'Thul's nullification attack, which dispels your buffs and inflicts a high amount of damage. Certain enemies, usually Heroes of the 'Arcane' archetype, are also capable of using a similar attack that strips all of your buffs.
  • Archmage Alexander's meteor. Anything less than ten-thousand health and deft move will guarantee that respawn or an end to a hardcore game.
  • Zantarin, the Nemesis boss aligned with Death's Vigil, has an attack that is vicious for melee builds, especially if they don't have a lot of vitality resistance. Similarly, Commander Lucius, an Aetherial boss you encounter in Fort Ikon, has a similar, aether-base attack that also has consequences for those that get too cocky.
  • Any damage reflection is guaranteed to one shot yourself if you don't have the proper way to mitigate its damage.
• That One Boss: This game has several memorable and frustrating bosses. Some examples include:
  • Ilgorr, the Eternal, a Skeleton Golem that spams bone prisons that immobilize you and summons endless waves of skeletons. Skeletons range from knights, revenants, priests to warlocks with all the annoying abilities listed above. When you finally kill him he revives into a far stronger Skeleton Titan and you have to kill him again.
  • Alkamos the Lord Executioner. A ghost warrior with a Sinister Scythe that loves to freeze you in place and make use of shadow strikes, which cause him to disappear and strike right next to you for a huge chunk of damage. More irritating is that he's in a roguelike dungeon, meaning if you're killed, the dungeon is locked up and there's no way to return unless you start a new session and craft another skeleton key. Alkamos however, has a Weaksauce Weakness in the form of Hoarforst ointments which grant freeze immunity for several minutes, along with capped cold and vitality resistance, will gimp his damage against you.
  • The Herald of the Flame. An aether monstrosity that must be fought in two stages. It deals waves of aether damage (hope you stock on aether resistance) and summons huge mooks after you. The whole area is infested with aetherfire making positioning very crucial.
  • Bolvar, the Bloodbinder. He deals massive chaos damage, Life Drain life and has a nasty habit of summoning swarms of Void Fiends and Chthonian Devourers.
  • Loxmere Nightmage, an aetherial hero who possesses several Arcanist and Nightblade skills. You'll know you've encountered him when you've been immobilized with Blade Trap, had your buffs stripped with Nullification, and executed with Shadow Strike. Before he was confined to one specific area in the Plains of Strife and toned down it was not uncommon to see most builds killed before they could even do anything. He was considered by players to be worse than some nemesis bosses and even Crate themselves had the thought of making him a second nemesis boss for the aetherials.
  • The Herald of the Stars is very similar to the Herald of Flame, except it throws ice meteors at you. As if the freezing wasn't annoying enough, he constantly spawns two high-level hulks at you.
  • Rashalga, the Mad Queen, is a DPS test on legs, as she has an Area of Effect Life Drain attack that heals her for dozens of times its damage, that also spits massive acid pools and spawns groups of enemies who also spit a massive acid pool and explode into one on death. This essentially makes sitting still for more than a few seconds a free ticket to death, which then lets Rashalga heal while you're running away.
  • All Nemesis bosses make enemies from that list look like ordinary Hero monsters. The expansion added two especially hard to kill foes: the rylok named Grava'Thul and Reaper of the Lost.
  • Slathsarr Aethergaze, a corrupted basilisk from the Ancient Grove, is a nasty mage and have abilities to debuff your offensive and defensive capabilities. He is especially hard to fight for melee builds and only slightly weaker than Nemesis bosses.
  • Sylvarria, Queen of the Undergrowth, is one for mobility-centered builds. She's immobile, but she's also fought in an extremely small, cluttered arena with unkillable plants that attack you if you standstill. She also summons large adds to help her, who may summon adds of their own. This can easily leave a player with nowhere to dodge or recover.
  • Grand Magus Morgoneth is a nasty boss who has quite a number of debuffing spells and deals very high damage. Player characters fighting him will suffer a resistance reduction, a damage reduction, and a defensive ability reduction.
  • Father Kymon himself, who acts as the penultimate boss of Forgotten Gods. On Ultimate difficulty, he is probably several times more deadly to fight against with most builds compared to the god he serves, being fought in a small arena of metal grating suspended over a pool of lava, not only do you have to avoid the lava spouts that he summons in said arena, but you also have to contend with his very hard-hitting fire and physical attacks, some of which can reduce your elemental resistances and a significant amount of your offensive/defensive ability and armour.
• That One Level:
  • The Blood Grove and its surroundings are rather annoying. The forest is very dense and the foliage make it very hard to see enemies who just love to throw themselves at you. Demolitionists particularly have a hard time because whenever they hurl their explosives, there's a chance they might get caught in the trees and set off prematurely. To make matter worse, there are many obstacles blocking your path, forcing you to make several detours.
  • The Conflagration and the Immolation are damn annoying because the whole area is flooded with aetherfire, meaning positioning yourself carefully is a matter of life or death. Easier said than done with all the monsters charging at you.
  • Port Valbury is The Conflagration and Immolation up to eleven. The place has aetherfire all over the place and is also a freakin' huge maze. You need to backtrack a lot and you can't stay idle too long because of those damn aether Whirlwinds. The Whirlwinds chase you down relentlessly and can only be destroyed by procs that occur when you get hit and target enemies, even then it still takes minutes of this to make them dissipate. Pray that you don't die, 'cause it's a rogue dungeon: meaning you won't be able to return in the current game session.
  • In the Crucible the last waves (from the 151st to the 170th) are extremly brutal. Have fun fighting four Nemeses at the same time.
  • The Shattered Realm is a hard trial for the majority of builds.
  • Crate Entertainment outdone themselves with the Tomb of the Heretic rogue dungeon. Indestructible portals that spawn infinite number of hounds, forcing you to constantly move out of the area. Those accursed portals seem to always open at the most inconvenient time, like in the middle of a mid-boss fight or picking up loot. And of course, those damn pulps will always follow you to the end of time.