One of the changes made to the Greater Rift system in this build is that instead of a level 1 Greater Rift key being potentially awarded after clearing the Rift Guardian, a level 0 Greater Rift trial key is potentially given instead.
Opening up this Greater Rift trial, you are required to clear as many monster waves as possible. It’s as the name implies; a trial to see what Greater Rift tier you will start at. There is currently a bug though where the trial rift’s starting difficulty is based on the difficulty of the game. Thus if your game setting is Torment VI, the first wave starts off with T6 monster scaling (and each successive wave increases from there). Thus some players are setting the game difficulty to Normal, and able to secure a Greater Rift key of tier 255. Thus Blizzard is going to have to clear the leaderboards yet again once they fix this issue.
For my test, I started the trial rift in a game at Torment I. I then stopped attacking to fail on purpose at wave 7. The game instructed me to speak to Orek; when I did, I was awarded a Greater Rift key of tier 7. No rewards (experience, gold, items) were given for this trial. Totally awful iterated design here. Why?
True, you can skip many lower tier Greater Rift’s and cut to the chase with this new system. But one of the advantages of the previous design is that playing through those lower tiered Greater Rifts, is all the rewards (experience, gold, and loot) at the end. I suspect this design was implemented to discourage using Greater Rifts for farming at lower tiers.
One of their objectives is scaling the rewards to be appropriate for the effort required to complete each tier. The problem is that scaling those rewards aren’t going to be easy because they would have to make rewards for Greater Rift tiers from around 28 and lower, extremely unrewarding to the point where it would feel like a pittance. Thus I can see why they came up with this trial system. The general expected psychology is that most players will want to clear as much waves as possible to start off in as high a Greater Rift tier as possible (and bypassing all the intermediary ones).
It’s not going to work though when there is no reward structure for the trial segment (which is why I stopped at a lower wave just to see what kind of loot I would get clearing a tier 7 Greater Rift). I got a decent amount of items (one legendary, many crafting materials, many gems, and two legendary gems), a tier 14 key, and 18 million experience. Thus it is clear they haven’t yet fine tuned the reward structure of Greater Rifts and I don’t see how they are going to be able to that without heavily nerfing these lower level ones. The following is a screenshot of the loot that dropped.
How exactly are you going to find a decent reward balance for each of these lower tiered Greater Rifts when the objective is to make the higher tiered ones rewarding enough to incentivize the non-competitive players to keep pushing onwards? Nerf the lower level ones too much, and you also remove any incentive to run Greater Rifts below a certain level. That may seem fine but not everyone has well geared characters (and a poorly tuned reward structure is only going to lead a poor gaming experience that is again, un-fun).
I’d be surprised if the above amount of loot actually ends up dropping on these lower tiers once the 2.1 patch goes live. I’ve also said it before that this team has never been generous when it comes to rewards. I already called it that the Treasure Realm would end up being nerfed (treasure goblin spawns in places like the Dark Cellar, Northern Highlands, and Halls of Agony 2 were also reduced). So this plus other past nerfings, is why I believe the above amount of loot, will only begin dropping at higher tier levels that are more or less equivalent to mid-level Torment in difficulty.
It’s a fundamental design issue with Greater Rifts because not finding that proper balance, will also lead to the sort of degenerative game play they don’t want players doing. Players (especially ones who do not care about the leaderboards) will try to find that sweet spot and just game the trial rift to start at a tier which is decent from a farming perspective/ability to power up their legendary gems.
The above is yet another example of a design team that doesn’t quite grok the whole reward for effort angle. It’s a core design that needs to be built into the underlying system, not tacked on as an afterthought or trying to rely completely on drop rates (which makes the above sort of balancing, tricky).
It’s something I touched on many in many previous posts where those metrics need to be defined at a lower level (to determine player effectiveness when it comes to not just kill speed, but efficient use of skills/resources – sort of like a StarCraft II style “actions per minute” metric but one that is more appropriate for Diablo III). This way, the rewards in terms of drop quantity and quality, can be calculated dynamically based on how well the player is actually playing/countering situations. It also goes a long way towards relying completely on RNG to determine the quality level of drops.
In lieu of that though, Greater Rifts already have a timer mechanic that can be used to determine both the amount of loot to drop, but also chance to upgrade the rank of a legendary gem. The tier level of a Greater Rift can be used in conjunction with this; thus the faster you clear a lower tiered rift, the greater your chances for a higher quantity/quality of loot to drop (clear it too slow, and less items will drop including a lower chance of a legendary/forgotten soul). This will already play into the psychology of how most players will play through Greater Rifts anyway. What it also helps to offset is purposefully slower play of lower tiered rifts (allowing the farming of successive low tier rifts).
