The dawn of masteries mod is more of a mod pack for grim dawn, that brings together a whole bunch of class mods for a whopping total of __ playable classes, and a few more bonus mods and new mechanics. https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/dawn-of-masteries/94373
On top of these new classes, there are other mods like grimmest that allows you to increase mob spawns, quality of life changes like every shrine now being desecrated, much bigger inventory & stash space, and.
There are a ridiculous amount of new items, including many new legendary, epics, and sets for the many new classes. Getting access to these items would be pretty hard with normal drops, this mod makes every epic and legendary item now drop as a token that you can trade into a blacksmith for items belonging to a specific mod, so you can gather the items you need easier.
These blacksmiths can be summoned by consumables you purchase from the now revamped devils crossing faction merchant, personally I like to organize them in my inventory like this.
These epics and legendaries aren’t the only new items added with this mod, there are a lot of new components, potions, and special augments.
These can almost exclusively be found by opening the mysterious lockers that mobs will randomly drop.
Almost all of these new components will add skill points to the new classes, or something special to one of the new skills, alongside other stat boosts.
The new potions act like the vanilla elixers that give you a buff that can last up to 10 minutes, these new buffs giving general power boosts like 33% bonus xp, 15% total speed, 10% damage absorption, 15% speed and others.
If you’re already sold on this mod, it’ll be here – https://forums.crateentertainment.com/t/dawn-of-masteries/94373 – , all you have to do is download, unzip, and drop into your grim dawn mods folder, open a custom game, and you’re set! Just be careful about playing the dawn of masteries classes in a different mod, since it might brick your character which would suck.
My personal experience with this mod has been pretty fun, I’ve tested out a lot of classes to around level 12, and one to above level 70. I really like the idea of how chaotic this mod pack is, combining all of these classes that were never meant to put together and completely demolishing thousands of monsters with the grimmest difficulty settings, an experience you’ll never get from vanilla grim dawn. I would never recommend this as a complete replacement to vanilla, I’ll go into why in a moment, but it is super fun to test out all of this new stuff, and see all of the new items.
A bunch of small changes to the game makes the early leveling much quicker, mostly the dead body just outside of devils crossing now dropping a locker with a new relic that gives good stats and the slam ability at level 1 with a much higher base damage then anything at that level would have, as well as the many new potions I mentioned, a lot of the new components having extremely powerful effects like +1 to all skills in a class, and the first tab of the devil’s crossing being revamped to not only sell these modded blacksmiths, but also merits that let you skip to the next difficulty and unlock all portals right after beating krieg.
Don’t expect a completely balanced and unique experience with every class in this mod, when you’re putting all of these mods together, things can get really crazy, confusing, and buggy. For example, both the elementalist from zenith and the paragon from cataclysm have a nearly identical ice wall ability, the wizard’s teleport skill is buggy as heck and lets you teleport to places no vanilla skill would ever let you, diablo 2’s druid class has some bugged animations, and combining it with the cataclysm’s same named druid class makes your character a “Grovekeeper & druid” and not a double druid!
It’s a good way to experience all of these mods at once, some were definitely not meant to be combined and aren’t very balanced, but it’s all in good fun to push this mod to it’s limits.
I first picked up the paragon class from cataclysm, which I fell in love with, this ability called elemental volley at level 1 felt so great to use. I combined that with the wizard from diablo 3, which made my character a magilord. I tested out nearly every spell from both of these classes, the paragon has mostly lightning spells with cooldowns and the wizard has a whole bunch of different elemental spells, I ended up going with these flaming hot cheetos that were doing way more damage than anything else at that level. I used one of the new transmuter components to convert 50% lightning damage to fire, picked up a passive that casts lightning from the sky when I crit, got the big giant meteor shower ability in wizard, and the black hole ability with the fire damage transmuter to pull enemies into this huge storm of death.
I’m really happy with this class combination, it’s the build I leveled the most out of the other classes I tried, but I will say that I crash A LOT while playing this, especially in normal difficulty where I raised the grimmest levels up pretty high to farm A LOT of epic tokens.
I really liked the classes from cataclysm I’ve played, the paragon and voidcaller have very nice skill sets and animations.
I also really enjoyed the zenith classes, especially the necrotic, maybe I’m the only one nerdy enough to care about this but every skill on every zenith class has lore pieces that fit into the grim dawn world, and are pretty awesome if you want to give them a read, also every zenith class has special skills when mixed with another zenith class, like combining riftstalker with champion giving you this really powerful chance on being hit skill and total lightning to chaos conversion.
I won’t go over every class I played, some were a lot more fun than others, but for the most part I stuck with my magilord to endgame.
Like I said, I farmed a lot with the grimmest settings near maxed on normal, which was pretty laggy and crashed A LOT. I kind of abused this insane amount of heroes to grind reputation for malmouth resistance super quickly, and farm a ton of mysterious lockers and epic tokens. Grimmest gets really messy, thankfully it is optional. Once I got set up for elite the game slowed back down to a normal pace, which I personally enjoy much more. Mixing vanilla’s potion of clarity with the modded mentor’s potion, and slightly higher grimmest settings, I was able to level up through elite pretty quickly, to equip this end game set that perfect for my build, that I can easily craft for 4 legendary tokens each.
If you want to get into this mod but don’t know where to get started, there’s this amazing tool made my fellow grim dawn content creator grimpedia, this resist reduction calculator on google sheets that lets you input any of the 50+ classes from this mod alongside devotions and equipment to see the maxmimum resist reduction you could reach, which is super helpful for knowing which classes are efficient in what damage types.
I’ll put a link to his video going over it in the description, go check him out if this mod interests you, he’s made quite a bit of build guides for dawn of masteries that I’m sure can help many of you guys!
Overall, I think this mod is worth playing when you’re looking for something new in grim dawn, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a complete replacement for vanilla.
smattymatty 