http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/55494-greater-rift-issue
Nevalistis added some clarification on the changes coming to legendary gems (one of the rewards) in terms of how they’ll be upgraded:
Good questions! The quick answer is no, the secondary ability no longer unlocks at level 50 – it now unlocks at 200. The reward scaling and rank power of Legendary gems has been completely revamped, and we’re still working on additional tuning. You’ll see our first iteration in the next PTR patch. It roughly works out to the same amount of power gained over time, but you’ll have fewer “no rank up” droughts. Hope that makes sense.
I’d also like to clarify something that I misunderstood when originally relaying this information. Legendary Gems no longer have a chance to rank up multiple times in one attempt. Instead, when you choose to use Urshi to upgrade your Legendary Gems, if you’ve completed a high enough Greater Rift, she will offer you additional attempts at upgrading your Legendary Gems with a higher success rate at higher Greater Rift tiers. You can gain up to a maximum of 4 upgrade attempts at a time.
This is a bit hard to illustrate, so here’s an example (though bear in mind the numbers are completely pulled out of thin air and not accurate; they’re just here for the sake of explanation):
Say you complete a level 15 Greater Rift and you decide you want to opt to upgrade your gem. You have a reasonable chance for your gem to upgrade, but you’ll only be able to attempt it once. Instead, you decide to try to push a little further to Rank 20, where you know you’ll get two attempts at a slightly better chance. You can then choose to spend these two attempts on two different gems, or use them both on one to try to get two ranks.
In short, while you could try to upgrade your gems with Level 1 Greater Rifts, the chance will be very low and you’ll only have one attempt. Higher level Rifts offer not only more attempts, but a higher success rate for upgrades. While there will likely be an “efficient” place for you to upgrade your gems based on your current gear, there’s still room to push yourself further for greater reward.
I also want to thank everyone who’s continued to provide valuable and constructive feedback in response to these updates. I’m passing it all on, and it’s greatly appreciated!
As she mentioned in her initial posting, she wrote: “The pacing for upgrading your Legendary Gems is being significantly revised. Legendary gem upgrades are now more likely to receive multiple ranks per upgrade attempt at higher Greater Rift tiers, to a maximum of 4 ranks at a time. This is in addition to the higher chance to upgrade gained at each additional Greater Rift tier. To compensate for this change, individual ranks are less powerful. The rate of power accrual will roughly be the same, you’ll just experience it more frequently!”
The change is just a slight of hand to accomplish the exact same thing. You see more “rewards” but those ranks are essentially nerfed. Furthermore, the secondary power unlock has been moved from rank 50 to 200. So yes, from a “reward” perspective, the player will see more rank ups giving the perception of being rewarded (those ranks just have much less power than before). But this also proves again how these D3 designers fail at understanding rewards.
The fact they even came up with the first iteration of Greater Rifts and its terrible reward structure shows how rudderless this team really is. Furthermore, the entire reward structure is something that from a quality assurance perspective, can be easily scripted and auto tested to give a range of results that could have then easily verified by the design team via an actual playthrough, of all the flaws that not only myself, but many others saw (and still see) with their design.
This team obviously doesn’t even bother testing something as simple as the above at higher levels. I mean, the overall impression they are giving is they don’t even play the game for long periods of time at higher levels at all (because these flaws, even show up in play at levels below this – like myself, my items are rarely ever best in slot/maxed out, but I come across all this poorly thought out design issues in my own test play).
It’s like their usual “fling some spreadsheet numbers out there and see if it sticks”. Their notion of “greater reward” is also old news already because based on this clarification, it’s not really going to scale well based on the actual time and effort (they’ve never gotten this right and their Greater Rift design is heading down this same path).
To which I again question, why bother even having this entire mode called Adventure Mode when their design is going to funnel EVERYONE through to Greater Rifts? The reward structure itself is going to be the usual tepid/drawn out designs they’ve relied on which has very little addictive value in them.
I haven’t even played on live since early June. And while I have jumped onto the PTR, not even the changes have had any real effect in giving that dopamine fix/addictive feel that has me wanting to see this patch go live as soon as possible. Unlike past PTR’s (I know that with 2.0, I easily put in over 100 hours), I probably put in only 24 total hours and got a good enough jist of how flawed the design is with both Greater Rift’s and Seasons (end game wise since it inherits all those flaws) to not bother (this along with the lack of addictive quality the game is seriously lacking).
