“Alright, perfect day to go farm some keys for rift fishing”…said no one, ever.
D3’s end game, for the most part is GR pushes and leaderboards. Rift fishing is a “byproduct” of that and usually entails burning a lot of keys to at least start off with a quality pushing map.
What if the 38 maps were either voted on by the community or a select group of content creators and twitch streamers. Suppose you rank them in 3 categories similar to what we see content creator’s do today with an “A” tier, “B” tier and a “F” tier group. RNG with weighted rolls would guarantee that on a 6 floor push you would randomly see 2 from each group. For the folks that are staunchly opposed to losing the variety of maps…this still keeps them all in the rotation.
I mean, we always know/see how festering and battlefields come into play, but there are some good progression maps on silver spire, archives, pandemonium and plague tunnels. You could 8 easily in the first A tier group and split the other 2 at 15 maps a piece.
This would definitely affect:
The amount of time farming keys
The amount of time restarting the game fishing GRs
less taxing on servers for game restarts
…and maybe (most importantly) give more merit to leaderboard results since it would level the playing field a little taking some of the rng element out map selection.
So many quality of life changes that could make the game less painful.
I’m a fan of the linear/confined “Cave/passage” type maps and wish GRs would all have those. I don’t think it would change very much to give players a choice, especially at this point.
We’re basically all twiddling our thumbs to see how WoW-like d4 is (Sorry Blizzo, y’all earned the pessimism yourselves. Love you anyways, just dislike almost exactly half of decisions made).
May as well toss in the final batch of quality of life changes for this game to save us from lingering repetitive strain injuries.
I suggested this for Challenge Rifts when they were announced - replace their algorithm for auto-picking with players’ voting. This way streamers can fish for fun GRs with fun builds and promote them on their channels so people can vote for them, or players can decide to vote for the rank 1 clear for example and it becoming the CR.
That’s a programmer job for a day - to add a voting mechanism to existing LBs. They didn’t do it.
Even if GR pushing is not your thing, GR pushing is the most centric piece of the end game. The number of people out there fishing. Restarting game, handshake with server and fetching hero lists is severely taxing on the servers. Just getting rid of keys does not mitigate this.
The proposal above was to promote less fishing and mitigate some of the strain on Blizz’ servers while hopefully providing a better experience for the end user.
@Kilometer I have proposed this before and was surprised when I saw the negative feedback of removing a few of the F tier maps that either have zero mob density. Off topic (for GRs), but shrouded moors on nephalem…how is this still like this after all this time? A “unanimous” either fill it with density or axe it from the line up was the consensus on the Danctuary podcast a few weeks back.
Yeah, that map is pure trash in Nephalem Rift. Big map without a decent monster density at all. If Diablo Legacy has no intention to fix it, then at least remove it from the Nephalem Rift forever. Shrouded Moors Rift version made Sewer Rift and Cave Rift looks like a decent rift map.
In addition to your proposal, I would add that keys are an outdated mechanism and should be removed. I would also like to see a way to close a rift without creating a new game.
I agree Argos maybe a couple more tiers, with more keys and obviously more legendary drops at the higher level.
Can’t be all negative and criticism so I will give props to Blizz for trying to give all the classes some options for speed-farm builds since there was a big disparity amongst the classes one short year ago.
Currently, my wizard’s gear is kinda completed, so Death Breath is never an issue as I have no need to upgrade rare anymore. If it is not because of GR keys, I totally have no reason to run Nephalem Rift.
Gold is never an issue too because I have a lot of puzzle rings.
I understand, but there are more people in the game besides yourself. It’s still a big part of the game to a lot of people. I’m just saying keys aren’t the only reason people run rifts.
You’re right. Some will use the opportunity to get DB, keys a hit a few XP pools to maintain a bonus bouncing back and forth to GRs just to get the 25% XP.
Again, there are always ways to improve the experience.
Me personally, I think fishing is terrible game design. I would rather they spent a little time to balance out the maps, so more are playable rather than guarantee spawn rates of the 2-4 push-worthy maps.
This is something that has been broken in the game for years. The only thing I don’t want to see is them adding more torments to try to balance it out. We finally have build options outside of GR’s. I do not want to see that disappear again.
Couldn’t agree more. Why is it so hard to give us mob density? Why would anyone want to jump into a map and have 3 skeletons every 2 screens? Something needs to be done.
On one side, the luck(RNG) is part of the game.
I’m not really bother the change of this because I’m casual player.
But I hope this remain Untouched because I had watch the China’s Seasonal D3 24hours Competition where this is Huge challenge and make it extremely excited.
Whichever team(2p) push the highest GR in 24hours under hardcore mode will win. It’s test all their skills, lvling tactic, and RNG of map, pylon, mob type etc.
Seriously, we know China’s game like “pay to win” “pay to unlock” etc, everything about spending, but these competitions are really keep the game and players feel fresh, where I can’t find any excitement here, not even bother about any gameplay streaming, it’s boring.
GR fishing is an unnecessary mechanic. We already have to put up with Wallers (Hiiiiii!), doors and what not. They should put maps that are mainly open space, having to open a door every 3-5 seconds is not immersive or exciting, all your dmg being mitigated by a mob affix (waller hiiiiiiii!) same thing, at least shielding is only affecting one enemy from the pack so you can still deal damage etc.
The game should be about testing your build / items / gems / skills choice vs tough content and not artificial bumps like map layout, waller, doors etc.
Also rework Stricken and other outdated legendary gems. RG fights should be about avoiding telegraphed attacks that could one shot you, engaging and fun, and not a sponge HP fight where you spend 5+ mins doing same rotation until you deplete the HP bar of the boss.
Pylons are fun and helpful but they should be more evenly placed (spawn points based on progression) on maps, it makes no sense to clear first floor completely with over 50% progression and not a single pylon to spawn (having more than 30% progression when you leave starting area).
Too much RNG is already within many builds, adding more RNG through GR maps, RG type, pylons spawn, doors, wallers is just not fun. You can easily tune down sets / builds DPS by reducing the general bonuses accordingly (6pc, or LoD gem) if you’re worried that too many peeps will get to 150 clears too fast or too low paragon, but the game needs to remain fun, exciting and engaging otherwise only 1% of playerbase will actually bother with the end game content for pushing / leaderboard ranks etc because it’s tedious, frustrating and not worth your time.
The easy fix would be maps like in PoE (most players choose linear layouts like Alleyways, Beach or Strand for clearspeed). But it’s to late for D3, maybe we will see some fixed tiles in D4.
