Torchlight 1-2 are decent fun for normal playthrough but plagued by bad design decisions and downright silly difficulty spikes on harder difficulties. Mods probably fix many of these issues but in vanilla the build diversity on harder difficulties is quite bad with only handful of viable builds with skill trees full of "trap skills".

[–] Nefara 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I might have lucked into some cheesey builds, I only maxed one character and have a few at 60. One mod I did get was a full respec mod, but the default reset of the last 3 levels was at least good enough for me to see if a skill was working for me or not. I agree that there seem to be too many "dud" skills, especially on embermage and engineer. My lvl 100 character I did without mods and I kind of liked how punishing it was. I get that that's a preference though.

[–] Vipsu 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Prismatic bolt embermage is really strong in vanilla and cannon engineer is probably easiest class to play in the whole game. Melee engineer and many other embermage builds can be quite tough and the game has plenty of weird difficulty spikes and enemies with "shotgun" skills that can melt through player health in an instant.

In Torchlight 2 you can reset the world and grind for levels and gear but that can feel like a chore.

[–] Nefara 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Lol yep prismatic bolt embermage is the character I got to max. I realized super early how great that skill was and fully invested in it. I also played sword and board engie and dual pistol Outlander. So maybe if I had invested more in other skills or wanted different builds for my embermage I'd have a more lukewarm view of the game. I had a lot of fun with the builds I did try though.

I never had to go grind for gear, I usually had enough gold to gamble and transmute a decent equipment set together for each character. I did grind for levels in the extra map zones though after finishing the New Game+.