http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19941042/patch-240-ptr-patch-notes-11-11-2015#setdungeons
Test your mettle against one of twenty four custom designed set dungeons! Each dungeon features a pre-generated, static course designed entirely around a specific class set. Don all six pieces of your chosen set and visit Leoric’s Library to obtain a clue on where these hidden trials are located. Hunt down your dungeon of choice and master it to unlock exclusive cosmetic rewards for one, more, or for the truly dedicated, all of these challenges!
At face value, it seems like the D3 designers finally are working on other forms of end game challenges that players can engage in. But as typical of the lead designers since the games start, the implementation ends up lacking.
We have this following “jewel” posted by lead technical game designer Wyatt Cheng.
We totally agree but we don’t have a lot of awesome solutions at this time.
I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but it’s the truth. We have had the same feedback come up internally. We looked at scaling the dungeon based on gear but that ran into other problems too (such as min/maxing the types of gear that you wore to “fool” the autoscaler, which given the variety of legendary items in the game, the auto-scaler was very, very easy to fool).
During development we were juggling lots of conflicting design challenges and we found that in order to make Set Dungeons work as a feature at all we had to pick one of the following:
- not making the dungeons require much execution on the part of the player
- making the set dungeons more gear dependent to succeed
- implement auto-scaling and accept that there will be some weird gearing strategies that you could use to overcome the logic of the auto-scaler because auto-scaling 24 dungeons given the depth of our legendary pool and the rate at which power scales is pretty much impossible.
- Only design dungeon objectives that would never degrade when you overgeared them.
- Have some dungeons that were actually harder with good gear that you’d have to deliberate gear down for.
We opted for a mix of all, but mostly #4 and #5. We want the Set Dungeons to be accessible to a wide audience, but we don’t want them to be trivialized by gear. We do #4 quite often, but every so often we had a quest objective that was particularly flavorful for the set and we opted to accept #5 as a consequence. The Firebirds dungeon is an example of this.
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So why implement a half-baked design to begin with? And it is half-baked when you have one of the lead designers stating they know of the problems they came across in their set dungeon design, and don’t have a lot of awesome solutions at this time.
What’s even more hilarious is the part I bolded. You cannot make this kind of stuff up because that right there is an outright admission of how broken their game design is. I mean, who came up with the Greater Rift design and okayed “infinite” power creep? Who came up with Paragon 2.0’s “infinite Paragon’s” round robin design which ended at P800 and made it so that any points after that only going into main stat and vitality (along with XP scaling that wasn’t even thought through past P2000)?
Seriously, the fact that game director Josh Mosquiera can even ok some of these design decisions by the lead content and technical game designers is just whacked IMHO because they are only digging a deeper hole for themselves (it’s already obvious the amount of bandaid fixes they will need to implement for transition into the 2nd expansion; and one year from now, the games balance is going to be so messed up where the variance between player power is going to be such a huge chasm that they are going to have come up with something that amounts to a reset without making it look like a reset).
As for the current set dungeon implementation, it turns into ridiculous game play when you pretty much have to start removing pieces of non-set gear, removing your follower, and changing your skills around to complete the objectives. This hoop-jumping so lame that this doesn’t even deserved to be called an additional game challenge activity.
But this is what happens when your core foundation is broken to begin with and try to bandaid fix it along the way. You cannot build anything meaningful (like Set Dungeons) on top of it. This franchise is now relegated to stupid status so long as the senior/lead designers who have been with Team 3 since the 2009-2012 timeframe until the present, remain because they are proving they really do not know what they are doing in terms of not just core ARPG design concepts (which again, D3 hasn’t been for awhile now), but design that allows at least some semblance of balance that can at least be dialed in even if it is an arcade game.
