Grim Dawn

You can do it on elite too, since all the bags are unlocked in normal. It also gives you the attribute and skill points from each difficulty you unlock, as well as all waypoints(so even though you still have to do the quests to progress the story, you can teleport all around the place and collect the devotion shrines quick and easy). Can basically unlock all devotion and get to ~50 in a couple of hours if that, speed running elite quests and devotion shrines. Then spend a bit of time fixing your resists with augments and components and you can start ultimate nicely.

Starting right away on ultimate is pretty rough due to gear drops not scaling properly for the difficulty, pets can fix the problem to an extent but starting 25-30 shit gets really slow unless you're full twinked. But doing the elite stuff+devotions, it's pretty alright at 50ish so far.

mkopec said:

Waht you do is start on ultimate with exp pot and lokkar set and do 1st quest, the one to kill the re-animator. Turn that in along with all the lore shit you find on your way to him, and ding lv20. Hand in scraps to water dude and hit up the reroll chick in prison, turn those in and ding lv 23. then spend points into your leveling skill. (If you wanna be all gangsta and shit, hit up all the lore pages in the new expansion starting area too, ding 25ish)

Then go to standard and only pick up the easy to get to shrines, there is like 20-21 of them. Dont kill anything just run your ass off porting around and hit them all up. Should take you less than 30 min with the opened portals. Bam, you have 20 points to spend in shrines for an excellent start to your leveling build.

Then go straight into elite and do your normal shit there story wise. This is of course if you have played this game before and have some leveling gear saved up like resist gear and lokarr set... and the writs for factions. If you turn in all quests from act 1 on elite with lokarr and exp pot, you will ding 50ish. complete the rest of the story on elite and you will be roughly 75-80 depending on how much killing you do. I tend to skip the malmouth shit because its a pain in the ass.

The go into ultimate and rest of leveling. You can do all this in less than 8 hrs, maybe longer if you dont know all the quests yet by heart, of course.

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Yeah I've rolled several chars since and I figured out quick it was more efficient to lvl on elite. Also you hit 31 if you do it with Lokarr and a potion. I do ~35mins normal for 28shrines and some quest xp on the way, hit around 40, then I start elite at 40/28 after less than an hour and just speed my way through that too. Takes less than 8hours to get to 100 this way(and really 94 is the only lvl that matters so it's more like less than 7).

Pretty much done though I think, there's just not much to do once at cap other than farming more to get sets for other classes but I've played most stuff I was interested in already. I still technically need to kill the new secret boss, but I tried a few times and that shit's retarded and I don't want to roll a Warlord or some other OP shit just so I can kill one boss that just spams stupid shit all over the screen so you have no way to dodge and all you have to do is tank up enough you don't die.

Dumped a bunch of hours into the expansion though, I'm at 339hours on steam and pretty sure I was around 100 before that so got my 15euros worth easily.

Borzak said:

I picked this up with no expansions or DLC. The first video on it I watched said follow a build guide. The only places I found build guides weren't all that informative. They weren't broken down just a list that went on and on of builds. Any ideas or suggestions for a new player oriented build?

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Hard to find info for the older expansion stuff tbh. The generally good starting builds are vitality caster, tanky melee and summoner. However expansions, it's hard to make a good tanky melee I think(the basic ones are death knight which is necro/soldier or warlord which is oathkeeper/soldier). Vit caster also usually is ritualist recommended(necro/occultist) but you can do cabalist(occultist/shaman) and work out ok, although you can't get the good set for it so I don't know. Summoner works fine but again you're forced into cabalist for that since no necro which isn't bad, cabalist is one of the more powerful variant and the necro variants generally require sets to work well.
You can do other builds too but they might require more luck on drops. For example Blademaster(soldier/nightshade) dual wield melee is great eventually, but it's fairly gear dependant. There's an easier version that is Infiltrator, but that uses Inquisitor which is again, an AoM class.

It's a bit weird because many builds use necro, inquisitor or oathkeeper as a secondary, probably because these classes were made later and are more complete in what they offer, so they fit many different builds and give you many options for them.

Still you can probably play whatever you feel like and be fine to clear the game and what not and start farming. I know warder(soldier/shaman) should still work fine with primal strike, blademaster should be ok if you farm the reputation weapons, fire caster with demo+arcanist should also be good.

Better question is what kind of char do you want to play, and then it'll be easier to find a build that fits that. That said, it might also be a good idea to grab AoM since it's on sale I think, the 2 classes they added complete many builds and they offer 2 farmable legendary sets, most items are purely RNG drops in this, but these are deterministic, the pieces drop from specific mobs so they can be target farmed in 4-5hours and give you a very solid starting point. But you don't really have to, if you just want to fuck around with the game first, you can just pick whatever feels interesting and not follow a build.

Only main advice is dump most of your stat points into Physique, only take the others as needed to equip gear(I like floating 10 or so points to dump into a stat if needed), and max your main skill early to make it easier to lvl, while putting 1pt into various stuff you want. Also max resists, as per usual in ARPGs, by the time you hit elite, you should look into using components on your gear for resists and augments from reputation to fix most resists.

And since the game isn't always online stuff, you can always just whip out the save editing to fix any problem you had when you made your character.

Mostly checking a guide will be good to figure out a basic devotion path, since this shit's is fairly complicated, kinda like PoE skill tree, but more confusing.