In recent months, I haven’t really been paying any sort of attention with the general meta with the game, to where I had little idea of what was actually happening when it came to how some players were resorting to the sorts of degenerative game play that has been common in the game since vanilla. I really didn’t want to get into this long sort of posting thing but I had to say it.
After having played Season 2 far more than I originally expected, I ended up reading the Blizzard forums again. And that is when I began learning about the sorts of stuff that has been going on for some time now when it comes to the greater rift leaderboards. One of those was the entire pylon spawning thing with its algorithm (which is changing in 2.2 – the serious easiest solution though is to remove all pylons from greater rifts period).
It seems that “rift fishing” is a thing for the purposes of getting the right type of greater rift with the the right type of mobs in order to push the greater rift leaderboards. This therefore involves having to farm plenty of trial keys, performing plenty of trials to get a lot of the right rank keys, and then opening up those rifts.
If there are Act V type of mobs, that greater rift was discarded (and since there is no way to close the rift, means having to leave game and start a new one). So here we are again, back to the sorts of game flipping the devs wanted the player base to get away from.
If you search this blog for “degenerative”, I’ve brought this up many times before. During the 2.1 PTR when they still hadn’t adjusted the reward structure for greater rifts (and after they had introduced trial keys), I mentioned that low level greater rifts would be used for easy farming. Well they did end up adjusting that entire structure where that whole lower level aspect was avoided except for the initial time (when players run low level rifts to get all their legendary gems).
The point though is as I made before though; the degenerative game play in D3 is most often times a result of how designs are implemented by the D3 dev team. Back during Reaper of Souls closed beta, I outlined many of these points in my feedback that I e-mailed to them about the kind of issues that would result with distilling Adventure Mode, into this linear game play of Bounties and Rifts (and tying the majority of the rewards when it came to experience, gold, and drops to these areas while ignoring/nerfing other areas including some of the changes they made to rare mobs).
I say linear because you have to do bounties, to get rift keys to do those rifts. They followed this same ideal where you can only get blood shards by doing bounties, and if you wanted more, then you had to do rifts. This linear design continues with trial keys which drop only in rifts, and you need to do trials to get greater rift keys to do greater rifts (the only place to get legendary gems besides the Boon of the Hoarder and the ability to upgrade them). Like if I choose not to do bounties, there is no way to acquire blood shards or rift keys. That leaves the rest of adventure mode (plus the campaign) to basically rot.
So instead of feeling larger, the game actually feels smaller compared to vanilla (because bounties themselves are these objectives where once you do it, literally means players not continuing to full clear that zone while rifts themselves, pull map tilesets into this continuous run that due to their differing environments, don’t feel like you are descending a bottomless dungeon, nor feel like you are ascending, to the top of some tower). All rifts feel like is moving from one zone to another that is usually different (the whole thing feels disconnected).
Unsurprisingly, players got sick of the repetitive bounty objectives. The devs eventually relented by making it more palatable by increasing the legendary drop chance in a bounty cache to 100% at T6. Players in general are also tired of the game degenerating in rifts and more rifts. And as I posted about before, the power creep associated with greater rifts ended up trivializing the base core difficulty of the game, where players are asking for more Torment levels (and thus leaving greater rifts as the only place to continue playing the game).
Adding more Torment levels would be a short sighted bandaid fix to this poorly implemented greater rift design. It’s only going to be an endless cycle with the infinite scaling nature of greater rifts. As I opined before, such infinite scaling systems like this need really be a self-contained mode where your increased power is primarily applicable only in that mode. Your power would scale back to something more reasonable outside of it so as to not trivialize the games base core difficulty at the high end.
It’s actually humorous because this same team has issues with skills when combined with items and game mechanics, can lead to situations of perma-uptime or perma-immunity. Uhm, their power creep design has lead to exactly that for geared characters when playing on T6. The power and damage mitigation increases means those characters can one shot everything in T6 while having more than enough mitigation where it is nearly impossible to die.
The problem for the dev team is that this doesn’t apply to those players who do not push greater rifts, and therefore do not have high ranked gems (as a result of not playing greater rifts – which mind you, were meant to be optional). And given the game was sold to a broad demographic, there are a lot of players who do not follow this meta.
Other buggy issues including a multiplicative experience oversight that has allowed Paragon levels to be acquired at a much faster rate than originally expected in higher level greater rifts. This will result in an inflation of both primary stat and vitality as that experience rolls over to non-seasonal, and more non-seasonal accounts begin racking up points beyond P800 (it may seem trivial at first, but these both represent damage and health pool increases).
And that is going to hit the dev team square in the face when it comes time to trying to find that power balance in the near future. Again, not all of the player base plays the game that way, pushes leaderboards, or does continuous rifting (I avoid these as much as possible). That is also going to have an impact of how they will deal with all of this for the next expansion.
If this team is consistent, it will be a level 80 cap with the need to use even larger numbers (and these numbers will depend on the power creep in items AND the highest ranked legendary gems when the next expansion is in closed beta and closer to release) on level 80 items. I’d actually be surprised if they don’t do this, and be even more surprised if they decide to do an “item-squish” (compression of stats) like what was done in World of Warcraft last year.
Furthermore, there will be outliers with those players that end up having Paragon levels north of 1200. What I smell right now is a modification of Paragon (version 3.0?) for the next expansion to deal with those extreme outliers since as it stands, that aspect will lead to an un-ignorable imbalance at level 80 for those players (at least as seen from the eyes of this dev team; where it is more of a narrowed funnel vision and one which they tend to end up overthinking about).
Seriously, players have been providing reasonable feedback as to mob types in greater rifts and it is just mind boggling how they haven’t yet figured out how to randomly spawn those mob types into a map where their distribution is based on a points system. I’m again talking about addressing the fixing the root cause (something this dev team has NEVER been good at).
The most annoying/difficult type of mobs should have more points and thus also award the most XP and progress. Those points can be used to create a spawning algorithm which is both random, but also fair at the same time. As it stands, rift fishing (for ones that have easier mobs like zombies) is a result of spawns that while random, are also predictable.
What about trials? Again, the implementation of the design is poor. The implementation with the obelisk is also poor just for the sake of having physical keys just to provide some sort of tangible feeling of that actual item (which creates this unnecessary clutter where most players don’t care about having that feeling of placing a virtual thing in a slot).
That’s another hallmark of the designers; they seem to have this thing for tedium (where tasks in the game tended to be tedious; it shouldn’t need repeating but stuff like when ID all didn’t exist before the Book of Cain, having to click each time for every gem upgrade – this was alleviated a bit but they finally are relenting with 2.2 by making it the way it should’ve been, the clickfest involved with the loot pinata effect from a treasure goblin rift which is also being addressed in 2.2). It’s not like I don’t get what Wyatt Cheng is trying to achieve; the issue is as designers, they are overthinking that aspect and creating clutter, unnecessary tedious management, and generally annoying/obnoxious behaviors where the game feels more like work than anything else.
So going back to greater rift keys, these differing rank ones need to be removed period. As for the trials themselves, in solo, they should gauge your approximate start level that is appropriate for the numbers that are associated with that character. And that should be per character. So once that character does a trial, the highest one they achieved will be their floor. Once they begin doing greater rifts and achieve higher ones, trial keys they do have can be used instead at the obelisk, to select ANY greater rift from their floor, to the highest ones they qualify for.
Since the dynamics of multiplayer co-op is different, the concept of team trials has to come into play to yield the optimal starting point for this team combination. The same mechanics would apply though where once this team does ONE trial, as a group, they’ll have a floor and can select any rift from that floor, to the highest ones they qualify for. If the team changes (different player or a player switches to another character), then they must do at least one trial which checks to see that they can at least meet or exceed the current starting floor. If they succeed, then the team can continue to do any greater rift from that floor to the highest ones they qualify for using the trial keys they currently have.
This also separate group from solo progress. The thing is that if you play D3 completely solo, the solo part of the game is far less rewarding then co-op (the strength in numbers buff gives a huge bump to both experience and drops). Likewise when it comes to greater rifts, it makes leveling gems to unlock rank 25 at minimum, much easier.
It’s how they should’ve separated Greater Rift keys to begin with (those earned from groups should’ve been allowed to only be used in co-op play and not solo).
I haven’t fully fleshed out the above but the base objective with the idea is to reduce the need to do these trials over and over again (getting different results and/or having to game the trials to get certain ranks) as well as reduce the current inventory of multiple rank keys.
Again though, trials are not the sole issue; the root issue is greater rift mob composition and the fishing of greater rifts that is involved for the purpose of pushing the leaderboards. They need to fix that first to curb this kind of degenerative sort of game play.
