This is one major thing I notice when other players talk about Greater Rifts; it is what they personally define as “higher G-Rifts”. That definition is purely arbitrary and one that is slowly moving upwards due to the power creep involved. It also doesn’t help that a range of Greater Rifts have become a thing for speed farming due to their increased rewards (Greater Rifts were never meant to be farmed but it makes sense because they had to figure out the reward balance to make them a bit more lucrative at certain tiers) over just farming T6 (seriously, yet another failure by Team 3 because it is their exact design with funneling players through bounties and rifts, while nerfing the rest of the game, that is causing these kind of unintended ways to play the game).
When these timed trial challenges first rolled out, high G-Rifts were considered in the 30’s. And the Season 1 achievements bore that out since one of the main conquests involved completing a Great Rift 30. In Season 2, that bar was moved to 35 and in Season 3, to 40.
Group play has consistently pushed that definition higher and higher with that spilling over into solo since as explained before, one is able to rank their gems higher playing in a group than going through the process completely solo.
Myself, I’ve done Greater Rifts only solo (where I also do not constantly push – I’ll usually move up a tier once I’m consistently clearing a previous personal best tier in under 11 minutes regardless of mob types); my highest to date has been tier 38 on my non-seasonal wizard (this was with some of the S2 only drops like an ancient Halo of Arlyse). Previously, I was using double Unity but moved away from that crutch.
The other reason I don’t constantly push is I generally dislike rifts period (and it’s just that much more annoying when you are on a timer with Greater Rifts). But it is something that I need to play occasionally in order to be able to at least progress my character when the other parts of the game starts getting stale (like I’ll usually be farming materials, keys for the Infernal Machines, running regular T6 rifts for shards that I use for my other characters that have terrible gear). Plus now that they’ve tried to incentivize Greater Rift progression by tying the Blood Shard cap to that, I find that this does compel me to occasionally make that push to the next tier. What it doesn’t compel me to do is to continuously get on the hamster wheel
Several item slots are also non-ancient plus I’m using ancient weapons that are merely adequate (previously, it was an Ancient Bonesaber of Zumakalis and currently, a Sever). I’m still using Firebird’s 6 with two pieces of Tal Rasha for the meteor. While I have all pieces of Delsere’s, only the helmet is ancient. I tested it out and #1, didn’t care for the playstyle. The key with that build is having to constantly fire off the appropriate primary and/or spender to allow spamming Slow Time since that is key to the damage multiplier. #2, I found I would take far more damage against elite packs in rifts even when using Slow Time Exhaustion (monsters caught in the bubble deal 25% less damage).
Using Illusionist allows taking advantage of that damage but the point is that I lost a large amount of damage mitigation from the FB6 and TR2 items. Trials bore this out; despite that mobs melted a lot faster with DMO, I couldn’t mitigate the incoming damage as well once I began hitting tier 30 waves. I also tried TR2 with DMO (but that required swapping out either an ancient belt or ancient source – both which again reduced damage and mitigation).
The point is that this set has the potential to allow my character to move into solo 40’s once I get more ancient pieces including the newer ancient version of the Triumvirate which would give a huge boost to arcane orb. The same goes for Tal Rasha (I have all pieces but only two are ancient). The lack of a better 1-handed ancient weapon (like a Serpent’s Sparker, Thunderfury, or Shard of Hate) is also a limiting factor on the damage side (moving to an ancient 2-hander is a wash once the ancient source is taken out of the equation).
In S2, I managed to get my hardcore demon hunter to tier 28 completely solo. Group play would have allowed ranking gems to at least 10 ranks higher. I just basically ran out of time to continue this solo progression to hit tier 30. But at that time, it had almost surpassed my non-seasonal progression on my best character (the above mentioned wizard which at the time, had only managed to do a Tier 29 using double Unity and a lot of non-ancient items including a regular Thunderfury – which had been my best weapon to date). I barely played my S2 wizard but had managed to get a few items that proved to be a huge power and damage mitigation boost.
Basically, better items is key to establishing that initial G-Rift floor. Beyond that, much of the incremental damage and mitigation increases (power creep) will come from ranking up legendary gems (excepting of course newer/reworked items). Thus what was once high, is now considered low. But this definition is relative to many factors including luck with drops as well as playstyles.
There are many players out there who do not bother pushing Greater Rifts. There are many out there who don’t even push regular rifts. If someone does not have a T6 capable character, a tier 25 G-Rift will be difficult. And this leads me to the point I am trying to make. Greater Rift tier difficulty can be easily replicated at any lower level because what determines the difficulty is ones gear.
Try and equip a level 70 character with items that are level 42-51 max (no reduced level 70 ones either) for example and try playing through a tier 1 Greater Rift without any legendary gems. No longer is the content even at that tier trivialized where stuff can one shot you, where any mistakes you make are magnified due to the lack of damage capabilities and damage mitigation. Next try it with some low level ranked gems and the tier feels a little bit easier. Next try it with level 60-66 items and lower tiers become noticeably easier. Once one has level 68-70 items in all slots, does the lower tiers of a Greater Rift become trivialized.
Again, others have a different definition of “player skill”. D3 is more of a point and click type of game. Sure, there is some timing involved as well as strategy when you are playing at the limits of a characters gearing, but all of this is not what I consider “high player skill”. The kind of high skilled play that I really put a lot of stock in is like what is required in StarCraft 2 for example which puts to test not just keyboard and mouse agility, but knowledge of all facets of the game, managing ones game play/multitasking in real time, and putting all of that together against either an evenly matched AI or real life opponent. Sure, there are “cheesing” techniques used (just as players in D3 cheese through the content making clever use of game mechanics) but those normally don’t take a player very far in league play.
It’s like when I switched to playing hardcore for a period of time pre-patch 2.0. The game is exactly the same except that death is permanent. Sure, that aspect makes the game play sometimes more interesting because death isn’t an option. Strategies change which can help make ones game play management better overall but I never did consider being able to avoid permanent death by not making mistakes as one that meant it took greater player skill to accomplish. I mean, it even got to the point where game play against certain affixes became second nature so long as you played knowing the actual limits of your character. At that point, you simply moved up to the next Monster Power, hope to find some small upgrade, and not make some stupid mistake (or worse, disconnect during an elite encounter).
Thus I do not buy the oft-used rationale that just because one hasn’t done a tier 50+ G-Rift, that their input regarding game play at those levels aren’t valid (because I’ve illustrated exactly how to achieve that aspect by undergearing the content) or that it takes really great skill (which is just laughable when talking about D3). It’s easy to say that when one hasn’t gotten to that point incrementally via completely soloing that progression (not taking advantage of group play to short circuit the ability to clear higher tier rifts and thus, level gems much faster). And again, one can easily inspect in-game the top solo leaderboard spots, and see that their records include multiplayer ones. As soon as I see that type of argument from one of those e-peen types (that skill actually matters), I pretty much dismiss their rationale that they know any better.
This is why the definition of “higher G-Rifts” is purely arbitrary because there is variance in item progression (drops subject to the games RNG) as well as gem rankings that have been accelerated due to the benefits provided in group play. Difficulty in this game has always been about bigger numbers. Difficulty in D3 has never been about dealing with smarter monster mechanics and AI. The only time abilities come into play are the addition of affixes that comes at set levels (in the current dynamic difficulty system since before, those changes happened in Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties). And some of those abilities are cheaply and lazily designed mechanics that don’t scale very well in an infinitely scaling design (or one that is lazily designed as it is with Greater Rifts).
This is also why I mentioned before that the solo leaderboards should have been just that, progress based on actual solo effort. Greater Rift keys that were earned from multi-player should’ve been only allowed to be used in group play. But that itself doesn’t solve the “short circuiting” ability since leveling gems in co-op can also be accomplished faster. The best way to have handled an actual solo leaderboard is that any particular characters progress, would be completely self-contained. Thus no Greater Rift group play AND gems leveled only by that character.
The D3 devs would never implement this though because it goes against the mandate of “making online matter”. The ulterior design motive is to get players playing together just so that they can sell the point that the statistics bear out the number of players that play public games and/or private multiplayer ones, show that D3 was a game meant to be played with others.
So yes, I know that I am not pushing Greater Rifts based on some other persons arbitrary definition of higher. What I am doing is pushing Greater Rifts based on the actual abilities of the items that my character has while I myself am getting a better overall feel for the actual limits of that gear since I am going through the process completely solo. Using the D3 devs oft mentioned reasoning for going with the current restrictive trading and soul binding mechanic (where they feel trading would rob players of the reward loop and a large number of hours of game play), I see it the same way with Greater Rift and legendary gem leveling progression where group play short circuits that loop and progression. My point is that the D3 devs once again show their lack of consistent design philosophies (if there is one thing they are consistent at, it is being inconsistent and contradictory).
Thus if I want to get a general idea of what GR55 feels like, I can under gear myself again and slog through GR35. Because that is all that this system is about. The key thing to note is there are actual limits to what ranked gems will be able to accomplish; items will always be the key factor and the current ones that exist will be reaching their limits without a boost in their numbers. As those limits are reached, the margin for error in game play becomes more noticeable. That and the RNG heavy aspect when it comes to the mob make up of Greater Rifts, means that actual player skill plays a far smaller role in successfully completing such rifts that are approaching the gear limits. It’s why I cannot even take the leaderboards in D3 seriously.
