Greater Rift changes coming

http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/55494-greater-rift-issue

Community Manager Nevalistis posted the following:

There has been a ton of great feedback coming our way about Greater Rifts and your experiences with them. So let me take a moment to just say thank you! It’s been super helpful to us and confirmed a lot of suspicions our development team has had regarding their current reward structure. Plenty of changes are coming in the next PTR patch that reflect these concerns.

Urshi will no longer only spawn when a Greater Rift is failed; instead, she will spawn at the end of every Greater Rift level. You’ll be able to choose whether you wish to upgrade your gem or, assuming that you completed that Rift within the time limit, move on to the next level.
The Rift Guardian will spawn at the 15 minute mark regardless of whether your bar has reached full progress. This should eliminate “the slog” at higher Greater Rifts where you fail, but have the rest of the level to go before you get your rewards.
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!

These are some pretty significant changes to the Greater Rift reward scheme and they should vastly improve your experience when completing and conquering higher Greater Rift tiers. Be sure to let us know what you think once these changes are on our PTR!

—

This is much better than the current iteration. It won’t eliminate players still gaming the system though without changing the percentage of rewards given when the Greater Rift Guardian (GRG) spawns from a successful clear versus an auto spawn after 15 minutes (the latter should always provide a lower percentage determined based on how much of a Greater Rift had been cleared – this should also affect the bonus XP/gold provided when talking to Orek).

As noted before, it’s a “path of least resistance” issue that will show up for all but most competitive players (where players will find a sweet spot to farm the highest level Greater Rift they are capable of by afking for the GRG spawn). That means most players will still try to find that sweet spot where they can at least clear the GRG (if you can’t kill mobs in a specific tier, then it’s likely that taking out the GRG will also be impossible – thus players will shoot for that tier where they can at least accomplish this in order to get the rewards as well as Urshi to spawn).

Gem upgrades percentage of rank upgrades as well as success should be based on the effectiveness of clearing a Greater Rift. Say if you are clearing through an already difficult tier and manage to complete it in a decent time relative to what you’re character’s items are capable of (these breakpoints should not be difficult for the developers to code for); at certain points, your upgrade chance should be 100% – what also is impacted is the amount of ranks you could potentially gain depending on the clear time. AFKing issues are thus reduced since 15 minute afk’ing will never produce the best upgrade chances or the best rank progressions. It’s a simple progressive reward versus time spent as well as one based on success versus failure.