hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3987.txt

Episode: 3987
Title: HPR3987: The Grim Dawn
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3987/hpr3987.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:22:13

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3987 for Tuesday, the 14th of November 2023.
Today's show is entitled The Grim Dawn.
It is the 50th show of some guy on the internet and is about 40 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Scoti Rambles about a video game called Grim Dawn.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q. We are airing it now because we had free
slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, some guy on the internet.
Today let's talk about gaming.
I love to play some video games.
I play on windows that's my gaming operating system and it's convenient that I'm able to
use Firefox and LibreOffice on windows.
Outside of that it's strictly just gaming.
I also don't use some of the same restraints that I would use for my Firefox browser on windows
that I normally use on Linux.
I'm a little bit more lenient there just because I'm not opening up anything that's super
secure so I don't mind leaving my YouTube logged in.
I like having some music or something from YouTube or if I'm streaming or whatever the
case is.
I don't mind it just being saved there on windows.
I play a wide variety of games.
Lately here I've been playing a lot of Grim Dawn and I've been watching coverage of another
game called Diablo 4.
It recently came out and people have been covering it.
These two games Grim Dawn and Diablo 4, they're both what's known as action RPGs.
RPG stands for role playing game.
Some people also refer to them as hack and slash RPGs or whatever.
But they're usually fast paced lots of big weapons swinging or a nuclear mage that runs
around blasting enemies to pieces with bright magical powers and all sorts of things like
that.
When I'm picking a game and a RPG, action RPG, well any game really, I like to have a single
player.
I can't always play online and by single player I mean in the traditional sense where I can
just play the game with no internet connection just on my system, no network required.
Diablo 4 claims it has a single player where players can play by themselves but the game
is mandatory online.
You cannot play it offline at all.
So to me that is not single player.
I don't know what you want to call it but it's not single player in my opinion.
If I have to be on internet to play it then you must that's multiplayer.
It's broken multiplayer.
So I'm watching the coverage of it and I'm seeing a lot of people who play the game professionally
meaning streamers, they stream on Twitch and other platforms like that.
And I'm listening to their coverage, how they feel about the game, the different game mechanics,
the story, things of that nature.
And these type of games I don't want to knock it for what it is but I have a consideration
list.
Games I would even consider purchasing.
Diablo 4 is not a game I would consider purchasing.
Mainly because one that will always online be to the aggressive payment model in the game.
I'm old school, I buy a game, I play it, I like it.
If it's good and the developer releases additional content for the game, I will purchase that
as well.
Even if it's just like loyalist packs, for instance in Grimdawn they release loyalist packs.
If you want to support the developer so that they can continue doing additional content
in the future, sometimes little balances and improvements over time, that kind of thing.
Because I get it, you need money to do this kind of thing, right?
You release a game maybe 10 years ago and people are still playing it today.
There's going to be some small things that they wish were done better over that course
of time.
And if, excuse me, let me clear my throat.
Sorry about that.
I'm actually holding my ubiquies down right now.
My ubiquies keep jingling as I'm moving around doing the shows.
Where was I?
Oh yeah, there we are.
So the developers will come back and you know begin tweaking things, right?
So say if a class was what we refer to as broken.
We mean broken, not that it doesn't work always.
That's not what it means.
But they mean sometimes when broken, meaning it is the most powerful class out there.
Like everybody chooses it just because it's so easy.
It can just cleave through tons of enemies with ease.
And an example of this in Grimdawn.
I'm about to switch the focus of the conversation exclusively to Grimdawn now.
We may revisit Diablo IV later on in the conversation.
But right now, let's just focus on Grimdawn.
They used to be a class, well, the class is still there.
It's called a cultis.
That's one of the classes you can pick.
And it has an ability or skill in the in the class called bloodypox.
It used to be so broken, you would hit enemies with bloodypox.
And what it does is it does a ton of vitality damage to your enemies.
Eventually, the enemies will die from it.
But the enemy's bodies will remain infected.
So as new enemies come rushing in to fight you, they will become contaminated by the already dead enemies with the bloodypox.
And it just spread over and over just wiping the screen of enemies.
Just it was so overpowered.
That's what we refer to as OP.
And then also in this case, when I said it was broken, yeah, like seriously, you just cast that ability once and walk around.
Enemies will just come rushing in to fight you, get infected and die.
So obviously they had to balance that, right?
You know, over time, they may settle adjustments not to nerf it down to where it would not be effective anymore.
But it just wasn't fun.
I mean, seriously, you just have one key and you killed everything on the screen. That's not fun.
So grim down, I think it has like, let me just pull up the website right here so I can have a little bit more information to go off of.
Let's talk about grim down a little closer, shall we?
All right. So grim down is made by crate entertainment.
In my opinion, they've done a fantastic job if they release a version too.
Normally, I would never preorder a game just because companies have just been abusing that system.
And I do not want to reward someone who's doing bad.
So I would not preorder.
But for this company who has proven themselves over and over and over again, they released a full product.
Then upon receiving the overwhelming praise from the community,
continue to release free patches and updates.
Then eventually, you know, they created like the DLC and loyalist packs and things of that nature for those of us who wish to pay more for additional development.
That kind of thing. Yeah, these guys are great. I would preorder a grim down to from them.
But enough about that. Let's talk about the classes or they also refer to the classes as masteries.
So I'll just call them classes from here out. So you got the arcanus.
The arcanus is a class that is that's the nuclear mage.
You're going to get a lot of a third damage, a lot of elemental damage, that kind of stuff.
And I'll go over damage types in a minute.
Or actually, I might as well now and I might as well talk about them now since we're talking about it.
Most of the damage types have two versions.
There's what we call the flat damage. So I'm going to use fire for this example.
Fire will say do an example number will be 100 points of damage.
So you will take a flat 100 say a fireball hits you.
You will take a flat 100 damage from the fireball.
Now you could also have the other type of damage, which is the tick based damage or damage over time.
They sometimes call it dot for damage over time.
But you know, if you played other games, they sometimes refer to it as tick as well.
So fire damage is the flat and the tick version or the dot version of fire is called burn.
So you may receive 100 points of damage of 100 points of fire damage plus 300 points of burn damage.
But that burn damage happens over the course of three seconds.
So every second you get another tick of burn.
So that's how the damage types work.
So you get your fire, which is accompanied by burn.
You have your ice or actually it's not called ice. It's called cold.
You have cold damage, which is accompanied by frost burn.
That's the tick version of cold.
You have lightning damage, which is accompanied by electrocution.
That's the tick version.
There's vitality damage accompanied by vitality decay.
There's acid damage accompanied by poison and last but not least, there's physical damage accompanied by internal trauma.
Those are the damage types that have in a company form, you know, a tick based form that is associated with that damage.
Hopefully I didn't miss any.
Now there's other types of damage as well.
Me personally, I love physical damage that I, or I'll go into that later, but right now.
Let me just try to cover them all real quick. I'm just going off the head.
I should have just pulled up a screen that labeled the damages, but you know how we do here?
It don't have to be perfect. It just has to be entertaining for hackers.
So the other forms of damage bleed.
Bleed is considered to be a physical type of damage.
However, bleed does not have a flat form.
Bleed is exclusively a damage over time type of damage.
And it is usually associated with physical as well.
So you'll have skills that'll deal a flat physical number.
And then sometimes it'll accompany, it'll be accompanied by either internal trauma and or bleed.
Same thing with vitality.
Sometimes you'll do vitality damage and it'll be accompanied by vitality decay and or bleed.
There's also pierced damage.
Now pierced damage is unique.
Most damage types in a game are considered magical types of damage, except for physical and internal trauma.
And bleed.
Bleed are, those are like true physical damages.
Piercing damage is different.
It is a type of physical damage that is governed by magical properties because piercing damage is physical that ignores armor.
So when you hit an enemy with a say fire damage, their armor will not protect them against the fire damage.
They need fire resistance to protect them against fire damage.
You understand?
Their armor will only protect them against physical damage and internal trauma damage.
However, if you want to go past their armor and infect them anyway with damage like just completely ignore their armor, that's when you use piercing damage.
So it works, anything that works against armor is technically a type of physical, but piercing is governed by magical properties.
So in order to combat piercing damage, you need to have piercing resistance.
There's also a physical resistance in the game as well.
It's normally overlooked because you just get better armor and you can resist physical damage.
Physical damage is the most common type of damage in the game, but like I mentioned, you just get better armor and you can negate a lot of it.
There's other flat type damages that do not have the associated tick forms like aether damage.
Aether is very powerful, it does not have a tick variant, but sometimes aether is associated with fire.
So you'll have abilities that cast what's known as aether fire.
There's also chaos damage.
Chaos damage does not have a tick form, but in order to make it viable, chaos normally just hits really hard.
So when you get hit by chaos damage, it's going to hurt a lot.
Lightning damage is a unique one in that it normally hits very hard, but it has a very, very wide scope.
So you'll have lightning damage comes in ranges.
Say for instance, it'll range from taking one point of lightning damage all the way up to like a thousand points of lightning damage.
So you see that's like an extremely wide range.
Most other damages will do something like between, you know, a hundred and a hundred and fifty.
So it's a very short range.
You know that the least amount of damage they're going to take is a hundred and the maximum is a hundred and fifty.
That kind of thing.
A shorter range.
Lightning gives you that opportunity to give them a big hit, but it's such a wide range.
That's the one thing I don't like about it.
I think the range is too wide on it, but when you do hit them with the big one, they feel it.
So the key with lightning is just hit them a lot, you know what I mean?
One of them is going to be the big one.
Alright, so now that I've went over all the damage types, you know, you need armor to protect you against that physical and physical type damages.
And you need resistances to protect you against all the other types of damage, which are classified as magical types of damage.
Physical damage is going to be governed by physique and cunning.
Physique is going to be more direct physical and internal trauma where cunning is going to cover bleed.
There's one last attribute.
So physical, cunning and spirit or the three attributes.
Spirit will cover your magical types of damage.
So the fire, the cold, the lightning, chaos, aether, all of those other types.
Now they don't only cover the damage, you know, to magnify your damages.
They also do other things.
So your physique, I don't know if I was saying physical or physique earlier, but your physique, one of your attributes.
It not only covers your physical damage, but it also covers what's known as a DA Delta Alpha.
That stands for defensive ability.
Your defensive ability reduces critical hit chances on your character.
So the higher your physique, the higher your DA, your defensive ability, the less likely you are to receive a critical hit.
It also means, you know, more physique means you can wear heavier armor and use bigger weapons.
So like if you're going to be using a lot of two handed weapons, you're going to need a lot of physique.
Cunning covers certain weapons that deal a lot of bleed and piercing type damage.
So swords normally have piercing conversions on the weapons.
So when you have cunning, you'll be, you know, you'll be able to use more swords and pistols and rifles as well.
There's rifles in a game, pistols, rifles, swords, axes, maces, you know, lots of weapons.
So cunning will also increase your OA Oscar Alpha.
That stands for offensive ability.
Recap, physique covers the defensive ability.
Cunning covers the offensive ability.
So with more cunning, the attribute cunning, if you have a lot of that, you'll have lots of offensive ability,
which means you have a higher chance of striking a critical hit against your opponent.
And if you have abilities that do bleed damage, obviously it's going to, it's going to magnify your bleed damage as well.
Spirit covers how much mana or well in this game is called energy, but it's the same thing as mana.
Spirit will cover how fast your energy regenerates, how much energy you have as a reserve, and the amount of damage your abilities that do magical damage like fire, ice and all that kind of stuff.
It magnifies the amount of damage those things do as well.
Spirit is also important for resistances.
The way you get resistances is you find items like gear, so it'll be helmets, breastplates, pants, shields, gloves, all that kind of stuff, including rings and amulets and metals.
All of these, they get randomly generated from loot that you kill, when you kill monsters and stuff, they'll drop loot.
You pick up the loot, the loot will have different attributes on them, so sometimes it'll be pure damage type things like do magnify your fire damage.
Other times it'll have resistances, so it'll magnify, it'll increase your fire resistance.
And then sometimes it'll have both, you know, it'll have a little bit of fire damage and some fire resistance on it, you know, as an example.
So it's not the game covers more than just getting skills running around doing a ton of damage.
You also have to resist a lot of the damage coming your way, and the game has these areas.
Most of the time you're going to be running around having fun, blasting enemies to pieces, exploring dungeons, you know, getting lots of loot.
It's such an enjoyable experience, and then you'll run across that one monster.
You know, you're going to be super cocky because most of the time you're just nuking everything on the screen, right?
Like, it's going to be so fun.
Sure, you got to kind of kite around a little bit.
Kiting means to just kind of, you know how with the kite, you pull the string, you hold onto the string and then the kite flies behind you, where you're doing the same thing to a powerful monster.
When the monster is trying to attack you, but say for instance, your ability is on cooldown.
You already used it before, so you have to wait like a second or two before it comes back.
You sort of walk around and lower the monster around in like this little circle where you don't want to just stand there and let him beat on you.
So you just kind of walk around and let him chase you around until your ability comes off a cooldown, and then you nuke him too.
So it's really enjoyable.
And then, you know, I know some of you might be thinking, well, that's too easy.
Well, trust me, there's going to be these moments where you run up against like a hero that, you know, the enemy's coming different levels.
They'll be the trash mobs, the easy ones that you blow to pieces really easily.
Then every now and again, you'll get a hero and then they'll be a champion and then they'll be a boss, right?
Don't let it fool you. Sometimes it's not always the boss you'll have to worry about.
Sometimes the champions will show up and because of the different damage types that are in the game, you may have most of your, let's say, fire, cold and lightning damage covered.
Just find no problem.
Any of the enemies they use that type of damage because you have high resistance to it.
They're not really affecting you, so you're just nuking them and moving along.
Next thing you know, a champion shows up and he's not doing fire, cold or lightning.
This guy shows up and he's hitting you with vitality and you don't have much vitality resistance.
So all of a sudden, he knocks the wind out of you.
You know, it's like that very, that, that surprise moment like, oh my god, I'm about to die.
So I love those moments in the game where you just sort of hit that wall real quick and it's like, well, let me fall back real quick because this is getting rough.
There's also potions in the game so you can take potions.
Say if you haven't found any decent gear that can cover those resistances so you can take potions to kind of boost them up real quick.
You know, they'll give you like 300 seconds worth of 25% more chaos resistance or whatever resistance you need at the time.
These potions of mending, they basically health potions, spirit potions.
So if your spirit runs down, you're just dumping your abilities all over the place and you run out of energy.
Well, you take a spirit potion and then, you know, now you got some more energy.
Keep going.
And because it is not that Diablo 4 model, whether they build the game to constantly milk you.
This is a game built on player, fun and excitement.
It will challenge you and give you every opportunity to either make the mistake and get yourself killed or improve continuously.
And it is wonderful. You can min max, you can come in as just a noob and just play, like I do, I play for fun.
You know, I'm not trying to build this awesome extreme one shot build, anything like that.
I have done it and it is kind of fun, late game.
Like when you want to go to the late game and fight like to celestial bosses.
Yeah, that, that you're going to want to min max on because otherwise they will straight a wipe the floor with you.
A lot of the bosses have the ability to heal over anything, especially in the late game.
The game offers health regeneration.
So there are certain skills that increase your health regeneration.
Obviously, there's loot. Different items come with the ability to do health regeneration.
And then there's what we call the devotions.
Your devotions just extra skills, extra abilities, extra health, physique, cunning spirit, all of that kind of stuff.
So just more power, more resistances, all of that.
And it's fun. It sounds complex though. I'll admit when I first got into it, I was little worried that I wasn't going to be able to keep up.
It took just a little while to kind of familiarize myself with the type of damages.
Because some of them look very similar. Like every, every damage is going to have a different color associated with it.
So cold damage is going to be blue. It's going to look like ice, you know, fire damage is going to be orange.
It's going to look like fire.
But then you'll have damage like vitality, which is red and chaos damage is also red.
But there's subtle differences between them. Like I think vitality will show like a skull over the person that gets hit with it.
And chaos will not that kind of thing, but they look very similar. Like they're almost the same type of red.
So when you get hit with one and you're not sure what's killing you, that kind of thing, you know.
So sometimes it gets a little tricky, but you know, for the most part, you'll be able to see it and know that all okay.
So another one is acid damage is green, but it's more of a darker green where a third damage is green.
But it's a, it's a lighter like a neon kind of green.
All right. So I went through all the damages and devotions and stuff.
Let me go back to the classes because I know I skipped over the classes.
So I talked about the arcane. That's your nuclear mage that's going to be doing stuff like one of the abilities is called Alexa's flash freeze.
Where basically you just generate this massive blast of cold energy that generates from your person and goes out in a diameter around you.
And you can go pretty wide. Like you can freeze a lot of things on screen with that.
Now bosses are resistant to certain stun effects like CC freezes, petrifies, stuns, routes, things of that nature.
So yeah, you'll have a lot of fun with the trash mods, but don't think you're going to be flash freezing a boss with it.
Then you've got another class called demolitionist.
Demolition specializing a lot of fire type damages with a, that's this primary type of damage fire.
Now it can also secondary enlightening or chaos.
Another class is called night blade. Night blade is very good. It does a lot of piercing and cold damage.
Now it can also secondary into poison damage. And I think a little bit of vitality I can't remember.
I don't play a lot of night blade. Night blades think of them like assassins. They normally run around with dual weapons.
There's a skill that allows you to do a wheeled melee weapons with the night blade.
Or I forgot to mention demolitionists. You can play it in one or two ways.
One with guns like demos very good with guns because that class gives you a lot of cunning.
Or you can play it almost like a mage where what we call them is casters.
So demo has a skill called Granado. It's basically a grenade and you run around you throwing that.
There's also black water cocktail and black water cocktail is super fun. It's a molotov cocktail basically right.
So when you throw this thing down with the different modifiers and stuff on it, you basically cover over a third of the screen and fire.
You have to put a bunch of points into it. Not the first point you put into it is going to be so amazing.
You got to build it up. But once you start putting a bunch of points in a black water cocktail,
man, you are burning things down. It is fun. There's also a relic that you can get.
Relics are not bound to classes, but I normally use like there's one called I think it's called conflagration.
The relic itself is called conflagration, but it gives you the ability like the skill of conflagration.
And basically you fire a jet of flames from the palm of your hand.
And anything that gets hit by that is going to have a bad time. It does a ton of fire and burn damage.
Now you can use that relic on other classes. So like I can use conflagration on soldier if I wanted to,
which is a different class. I'll get to it in a minute. But primarily you want to use a fire type relic with a fire type class.
All right. I already talked about the occultus. Occultus normally specializes in vitality or acid, but it also has the ability to use chaos as like a secondary damage type.
It does this chaos. It looks like lightning, but it's called chaos bolt.
Basically a massive thick bolt of it looks like red lightning strike sure enemy.
And when it hits them directly, it does double the damage. So you just wreck people with that.
There's Charmin. Charmin does a lot of lightning with a secondary of I think bleed.
Charmin also has the ability to command pets as well. Oh, I forgot to mention occultus is great in pet builds as well.
The occultus also can can summon pets. Charmin is mostly good for like two handed physical bills, like I mean, not physical two handed weapon bills.
So you're running around like a great sword or a great axe, just smacking people, you know, bashing them in the pieces.
And if it's Charmin also has this ability called primal strike. So when you're hitting people with your great sword and you're using primal strike as your attack ability.
That's my chair squeaking in the background. I'm trying not to move. This is an old PC chair. So I don't want it to squeak too much.
But when you're striking with primal strike, huge bolts of lightning just rain down just tear it is so fun.
But it burns a ton of energy. And then there's devotions you can get which do chain lightning on top of all that lightning.
So basically everywhere you go, there's just lightning just destroying everything around you. It's so fun.
Then there's soldier, my absolute favorite class. Soldiers meant for tankiness, right?
If you don't want to run around and kite too much, if you want to stand toe to toe with the strongest enemies and just get punched in a face and not flinch, I recommend soldier.
I run sword and board for those you don't know what that means. It means you're carrying like a melee weapon, usually a sword, but it can be an axe or a mix or something or a bludgeon, whatever you want to call it.
You can you carry a melee weapon, a one handed melee weapon and a shield. So we refer to that as sword and board or you can go to handler and you just run a mock.
Now you don't do a ton of damage like you would with some of the other classes, but some of the other classes are pretty squishy.
Now what we mean by squishy, we mean like low health like you can if you get hit by like a really big attack, it'll probably kill you.
So like the arcanus, that's a glass cannon type of class. It is a nuclear mage to the fullest extent. You will blow up a lot of stuff and kill a lot of things fast, but when you run up against a boss, especially those boss that have like a really high movement abilities.
So they can like dash or or something like that or rush you. Yeah, it's going to it's going to get rough. But with soldier, oh man.
I charge into into battle all the time. The soldier I take the hit soldiers great for retaliation builds in this game. We have retaliation damage.
I forgot to mention that earlier, but basically all that is is anytime an enemy hits you with a melee attack, they take damage for for damaging you, but it has to be a melee attack.
So if they sitting back shooting you with a gun, they will they will not receive retaliation, but if they strike you with a sword or an axe or something like that, then they will receive retaliation.
There's entire builds. I'm talking about very effective builds surrounding retaliation damage and retaliation damage comes in all forms as well.
So you can have fire retaliation, acid retaliation, et cetera, et cetera. Then there's the inquisitor. Sorry, my chair still move.
My sitting down for so long, my back side starting to get a little stiff here to sit in like this, but there's inquisitor.
The inquisitor normally does like a dual wielding pistols, that kind of thing, and it is also a glass cannon.
So you will just mow through enemies quick with the inquisitor, but it's you got to be careful you can have to do a lot of cutting if you run up against a boss.
Then there's the necromancer. The necromancer like you imagine, it's mostly a pet build type of class.
You have an ability to call rise skeletons, and basically you kind of hang back on it your skeletons do all the fighting for you.
Now you can play it in other ways, but usually that's what people do. So what they will talk to you more about that in a minute.
I don't want to spoil it just yet. Now the last class is called oath keeper.
It is also a fairly tanky class as well, similar to soldier, but it has a little bit more offensive type skills.
Soldiers very powerful don't get me wrong, but oath keeper is powerful in a better way.
Now you can still take some pretty good punches to the face with oath keeper as well, but I, like I said, soldiers just my personal favorite.
Now the unique thing about Graham Don, unlike any other RPG action RPG, is you get to pick two classes. That's right.
So you can start off with a soldier getting used to everything that's in there, build it up. Then when you reach level 10, you get to pick a second class and combine them.
So you have the skills of the first class that you invest your points into as well as some skills from the second class that you can invest points into and create this super powerful build.
Now you can avoid picking the second class if you want to, like you can just do single class if you want, but you'd be handicapping yourself.
Each class comes with a ton of benefits, even if you don't pick the skills within that class. So for instance, you can pick soldier and oath keeper to create what's called a warlord.
The combination of the two classes is known as a warlord and it will be a super tanky class.
Now you can also make soldier with demolitionist, which will create what's called a commando. It's very tanky and does a ton of damage.
So what you can do is use the cut the demolitionist class for all of your offense style abilities. So you can use a fire strike with like a two handed rifle from your demolitionist class.
And then use your soldier class for all the defensive, you know, big, tanky, meaty build stuff to make you nice and, you know, sturdy in the fight.
I've tried fighting in all these different ways, but my personal favorite, if not sword and board, I definitely get a big boy two handed weapon and I'll run in there and beat the crap out of them. It's fun.
The game also has crafting so you can craft certain, like those relics that I was talking about, conflict relation and loads of others.
There's another one that I use called juggernaut that I'm put with my soldier and it's a high sustained type relic.
Basically, it has a chance to heal you when you take damage.
So as you're fighting in like a swarm of enemies, they're all just smack and a crap out of you. If you have juggernaut, I forgot what the percentage is like a 15% chance to heal a certain percent of your total health along with all these other benefits of it.
There's that. There's other ones called trans, was it transcendent relics and stuff like that? Basically more powerful relics.
Another one that I use called cathedral or mouth is getting super dry here.
Cathedral is fantastic for a tanky retaliation build. Basically you run into the fight and this is the thing I like about retaliation builds.
You don't have to be that strong or even have a really good weapon because you're relying on your enemy hitting you to do the damage.
So the more of them hitting you, the more damage you're doing to them. Now you have to also be careful because I mean they're still killing you when they hit you.
It's not like the damage is not affecting you. It's just that you're so tanky, they cannot crit you because you have a very high DA defensive ability.
So that reduces the chance of them critting you. You want to make sure you have plenty of gear so that way your resistances are high, your armor value is high.
And if you're running with a shield, the shield is unique. There's shield block chance. There's shield recovery time.
And then there's, I forgot what the other one. The amount of damage blocked by a shield can be magnified.
So the shield may be rated to say block a thousand points of damage but you can have modifiers that modify that to like 1500 or 2000 or whatever.
You know, whatever the different things you find in the world. Also, shields don't have to be specific to a type of damage.
So like for instance, when you're getting hit with fire damage, you need fire resistance. When you're getting hit with physical damage, you need armor or physical resistance.
Well, actually, it's going to be primarily armor. So a shield will block all incoming damage. You know what I mean? Now again, if your shield is only rated to block a thousand points of damage,
but you're taking a fireball that's going to do like 10,000 damage, obviously you don't want to do that, right?
You don't want to rely on your shield to block that. It will block a thousand points out of that, but 9,000 more points of damage is coming your way.
And if you've got a character that's only got like 7,000 health, that's death for you, all right? You need, you know, so you need to be careful.
So there's a lot of really cool things that the game does well. I tried doing the pet builds as well, but I'm just not a pet build guy.
It feels boring to me because I'm normally with the pet builds, you hang back and let your pets go in and do the damage.
With the necromancer, there's a certain pet called the Gore Fiend or something like that. And that's going to be your tanky pet.
It has the ability to talk and do, you know, generate additional threat is what the game also calls it, so that way it keeps the enemy from attacking you directly or your more squishy pets.
So like the skeletons are pretty squishy. If they get hit, they're going to go down quick, but the Gore Fiends got a lot of health and he can take a lot of hits.
So he's going to go out there, generate additional threat, you know, top the enemy, get the enemy on to him.
What we normally refer to that, we refer to that as pulling aggro. So he's going to go pull aggro and then the skeletons are going to light up the enemy from the rear while the enemy is attacking the Gore Fiend.
So there's different techniques you can use. Now there are some bosses, like I mentioned, when you get to like the celestial bosses, it's very hard to keep your pets alive.
There are celestial bosses that just, I mean, they are just too dangerous. I have never been able to accomplish a real battle with them.
They just want to hit one shot all my pets down quick and then just charge toward me and I just leave, you know, you got to leave.
So you get to pick and pick how you want to play, you get two different classes and, you know, if you don't like this one, just make a new character.
You can make unlimited amount of characters. You get six bag slots per character. Like, well, actually you get five bags on the character.
Then you get a stash, which holds is six slots in your character slash. So there's five bags to carry around that six stash slots.
So you can go to a, let's just call them a bank, right? Like there's an NPC in the world. NPC stands for non-playable character, right?
So you go to the NPC, we're going to call them the bank. You go to have me, you deposit your really cool gear that you might want to use in another character in the stash, right?
And now the stash has two forms. There's the universal stash that you transfer items in between characters and then is the character's personal stash.
So it's going to be 12 slots altogether, you know, six universal, six personal. Now you have to unlock the different stashes.
They don't, they don't have any sort of level requirements on the stash spots. It's just money straight up, straight up money.
So you can go run through the world, kill a bunch of enemies, get a bunch of junk loot, sell all of that junk loot, get a bunch of money, and then use that money to unlock all your stash spots.
So no artificial limiters there, just get some money and go buy them. I recommend you unlock your universal stash first.
Just in case you don't like that character combination, you can still save that gear for another character combination that may use the same primary style of damage or benefit from that gear.
In the bag slots, the bags are just, you know, when you're running around destroying stuff in the world, picking up all that loot, the bags are just on the character themselves.
So you're just, you know, you got bags and bags of loot. All right, so I ran both here. Looks like for almost an hour, I'm going to have to trim this down.
And I hope you guys enjoy this show. I'm going to get out of here. I'll see you in the next episode. Peace.
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