Grim Dawn - Grim Misadventure #46

This weeks Grim Misadventure for Grim Dawn talks about food. The two new game mechanics are rations, and constitution. Here is a sample of the update.

Grim Misadventure #46: We Need Food

Hello and welcome back! In this latest dev update for Grim Dawn, we are going to delve into an upcoming new mechanic: Constitution and Rations.

Grim Dawn currently features a powerful healing system that activates upon leaving combat for a few seconds. It is commonly referred to as Out-Of-Combat Regen and abbreviated to "ooc regen". The system was implemented in order to reduce overal reliance on health potions and eliminate the need to drink potions after battles to refill health before engaging the next group of enemies.

However, some perceived the unlimited healing as an exploit that made the game too easy. Since health potions were expensive and ooc regen free, it also "forced" players to constantly leave combat and regen as a means of conserving health potions. This slowed down the pace of combat and was also skewed in favor of ranged characters who, already fighting from the fringe of combat, could more easily access ooc regen and did so more frequently.

Previously, our only means of balancing ooc regen was to reduce or eliminate it. In B17 we significantly slowed the rate of regen. This alleviated the feeling of it being overpowered but slowed down gameplay, increasing the time it took to run around avoiding enemies and regenerate during battles. It also resulted in times where people wouldn't be fully healed by the time they reached the next group fo enemies and would have to stop and wait.

We realized that we needed an additional mechanic that would allow ooc regen remain fast but not feel cheap and unlimited. The solution was a new long-term resource we called "constitution".