So I'm in the final stages of the Malmouth expansion, and I think it's easily the most boring part of the game so far. Vast, endless mazes of tunnels through a blasted cityscape, yet there's only One True Path through it all. The only dungeon I've seen which is worse than Malmouth is Port Valbury, which takes this to the extreme. Malmouth at least offers some side tunnels to go down for extra content, but Port Valbury not only has just the one path, it is purposefully as long and winding as humanly possible. No shortcuts allowed.
Speaking of Port Valbury and the Dangerous/Treacherous Domains, I'm very disappointed in how the difficulty in these areas is artificially inflated by the additions of terrain-based hazards. Having tougher monsters is one thing, having arena fights that limit your kiting is another, and finally there are terrain hazards like mines, spitters and shit. Balancing these three things is the key to a fun but challenging dungeon. Grim Dawn don't care about that, it just throws all three at the player at once and lets them figure it all out. The Ancient Grove is a prime example of this, there's so much cheese in that dungeon alone. In Ugdobogen there are these large mushrooms that mostly count as scenery, but occasionally they're actually acid mines that go off if you walk on them. In the Ancient Grove they're all acid mines. Special mention goes to the baddies that do some new green-colored AOE attack in an area with an almost identically colored ground, so you don't see what's hurting you. But the final battle is the worst culprit of them all. The Boss monster there has a trillion HP but moves like molasses. To compensate for that the fight takes (at least) two rounds and the second round cuts down the arena size to a veritable strip on the very edge (because flamethrowers in the walls)... and suddenly the boss now moves faster despite being bigger in size. I want a challenge, not a trolling dungeon.
Also, small admission of sillyness on my part: I completely forgot about the Devotions. I took one look at that system at the start of the game, thought to myself "this system looks so convoluted, yet I'll bet there's only like one or two viable builds in there" and didn't give it any further thought until I'm at the outskirts of Malmouth and had about 35 Devotion points to spend. Turns out I was right, there are three viable builds in the Devotion system, and they all fork off of one 'essential' starter build, so kudos to the devs for making such a complex system that does fuck-all - except, as it turns out, crank up your character's powers up to 11.
Still, having a blast gunning through everything in sight. Most of my gear is either Rare or Epic by now (except for my Medal and Leggings which are Legendary) but my Bread and Butter, the two guns I'm packing? They're still Magic. RNJesus just doesn't seem interested in giving me Sum Gud Guns, and the current ones I got from storekeepers rather than loot chests. As a result I'm not doing optimal DPS, but so far I melt everything into dust in about 5-6 seconds unless it's some super-special boss. Like that Rashalga fight, that one took me ten minutes. I'm still dreading The Sentinel fight.
