I made the following posts regarding “difficulty” in D3:
Normal versus Torment VI = no actual difference (note that this was made before they enabled Seasons on the 2.1 PTR).
And I made the following post regarding the design flaws of Greater Rifts over an year ago based on the initial 2.1 PTR (thus some of my postulations weren’t accurate since that first iteration did not have the Realm of Trials; Nephalem Rifts just dropped tier 1 Greater Rift keys and the rewards weren’t yet balanced to their final tuning).
I later made the following post regarding the moving definition of “higher” Greater Rifts.
With all of this in mind, I again will reiterate that adding more Torment difficulties solves absolutely nothing. It’s a bandaid thrown on top of a flawed design; one that will be never ending due to the design flaws inherent with Greater Rifts.
Kanai’s Cube will provide enough power creep to allow players to push Greater Rifts even further (that aspect in conjunction with the changes they are going to be making to Greater Rifts with the removal of perma-crowd control and re-scaling monster damage). I don’t even give it more than 3 months until there will be players saying how trivial T10 is.
That of course depends on how they intend to scale T7-T10. Right now, the assumption that many are using is based on the following (where they’ve indicated the approximated equivalent of the games base difficulties):
A tweet was made saying that T10 is approximately around GR40 in the initial 2.3 PTR patch that will go live. Thus there is no huge exponential scaling happening with T7-T10. Source below.
@Kirdock It’s currently equivalent to about Greater Rift 40 in terms of difficulty, but that could change based on feedback during the PTR.
— Diablo (@Diablo) June 26, 2015
I highly doubt the game designers will actually be introducing differing monster mechanics and adaptive AI’s into the game though as a complimentary form (along side increased health pools and outgoing damage) of increasing the difficulty level. They could of course allow monsters to gain another affix at T9-T10 which would create some differences but I doubt it since some kind of data string indicating this type of change would’ve shown up in the datamined PTR client.
Basically, the tuning of T10 is going to end up being one of the most hot topic and heated discussions that will happen during the PTR. And here’s the thing, given the scaling at lower levels, they really do not have that huge a leeway to dramatically increase the curve between T7-T10 where the playing experience will end up feeling jarring except for the most well geared players. And given their introduction of these 4 new difficulties, it would not make any sense for them to re-scale Normal-T6 (because that would throw off players who do not push Greater Rifts). And if that happens to end up being the case, then they could’ve just re-scaled the existing difficulties to begin with.
The most vocal minority (and the owns who generally play the game a lot) will of course be asking for T10 to be well north of GR45 (as least in the 50’s or 60’s) because they already have trivialized anything below GR50. And this right here exemplifies the bad design decisions with the entire Greater Rift system. I am actually hoping the devs cater to this crowd and balance the game in that direction so that these same folks will be yelling again for more difficulties a few months later.
There were these benchmark data strings which will need to wait for the PTR to actually go live to see what system (if any) will be used for that and how it ties into the games base difficulties (and whether that will have any sort of bearing on what Greater Rift tiers a player has unlocked in the above). It’s not yet known if players will have their current highest GR key unlock the above (I’m presuming that this is how it will work). The new trial-less system will probably make more sense in the context of Seasons where the Torment level of a regular rift will determine the initial highest Greater Rift level that is unlocked.
What also isn’t known is if this benchmark testing system (if it actually shows up in the PTR) will be mandatory to effectively unlocking that level (like when you are at the game setting screen, and you select a particular difficulty slider, that it initially puts your selected character into this benchmark testing). Likewise, this could just be left over strings from internal design iterations.
Given there are many who do push Greater Rifts and are already well into 50+, T10 for these folks will still be absolutely trivial if those increased difficulties are just bigger health pool and damage numbers. So based on what is currently known, adding these 4 new Torment difficulties solves nothing. The power creep from Greater Rifts will always trivialize the base difficulties.
On the flip side, there are still large portions of the player base who don’t even have characters that are T6 capable because they play the game fairly casually, not following any particular meta. For these folks, the upper end is now that much farther away.
So instead of working out a better fleshed out solution, all they are doing is opening up a Pandora’s box where players will keep asking for more higher end difficulties. I’ll just cut to the chase; taking this brain dead route, they should just get rid of the big multiple Torment difficulty selections and just have ONE with a pulldown menu like the above Greater Rift one where you can select up to T100 and be done with it (no, that wouldn’t be my actual solution but this is the exact stupidity involved when you have an infinitely scaling design like Greater Rift’s that leads to power creep).
