Grim Dawn Grim Misadventure #143 – Challenging Expectations

The latest “Grim Misadventure” update for Crate Entertainment’s action-RPG Grim Dawn announces a new feature coming to the game in the upcoming Forgotten Gods expansion – Challenge Areas. These new areas that take inspiration from the game’s Crucible mode will have their difficulty levels scaled up individually through a number of randomized modifiers and mutators, and in return for this added challenge, they’ll offer much greater rewards. A bit on that:

Last time, we had a big reveal for you as we lifted the veil on the Forgotten Gods expansion’s upcoming new game mode, the Shattered Realm!

Offering a new way to enjoy Grim Dawn’s content while getting showered in loot, we expect many of you will be spending a good amount of time in this new unstable realm of existence.

Today we’re going to touch upon some of the improvements we were able to make to other content thanks to the development of the Shattered Realm.

This brings us to: Challenge Areas.

Sounds challenging!

Challenge Areas unify the difficulty scaling mechanics across the game and bring features you’ve become accustomed to in the crucible into the main campaign. What this means is that we now have the ability to scale specific areas of the game independently of each other with additional modifiers and randomized Mutators.

To compensate for this increase in challenge, these areas also have significantly improved drop rates, particularly for items of Rare quality.

As you’d expect, the more difficult the area, the more Mutators you will have to contend with but the better the loot will be as well!

Roguelike dungeons will be a step up in challenge, particularly on Ultimate difficulty, with two to three Mutators active. In return, the final chest of each roguelike dungeon will always attempt to drop at least two Epic quality or higher items (one guaranteed to be Legendary) on Ultimate difficulty, on top of the significantly increased Rare quality drop rates across the entire dungeon.

In addition, each of the four roguelike dungeons will have a chance to drop a piece of a unique item set that appears nowhere else in the game, as a mark of your prowess in conquering these treacherous areas on Ultimate difficulty.

All this combines to making your loot hunt more dynamic each time you play, wherever you choose to go and slay monsters! These improvements are coming your way later this year with the Forgotten Gods expansion.