I heard you say Nightmare Vaults won’t be retained past the end of season 3. I hope you reconsider, and keep them in the game permanently because they are so much better than nightmare dungeons.
Backtracking through barren, already-cleared hallways is such a tedious mechanic — this constantly happens in dungeons but almost never in the vaults. Doing a mini-quest in a ND is fine IMO, but stacking them (gather animus, then free prisoners, then kill all the mobs) is so anti-climatic and tedious — and, again, this doesn’t happen in vaults.
I hate running NDs but they’re required for glyph levelling. Hopefully you’ll find a way to keep vaults as an alternative. Thx
Update: Thx for the great replies, especially Bolander. I agree that a better solution is for Blizzard to instead apply the features that make the vaults great to improve the existing dungeons:
• Straight-forward monster killing
• Unambiguous path to follow
• NO backtracking whatsoever
• Minimal (or no) mid-run mini-quests
• High monster density
• Great gear rewards at end
the vaults are fun, but dont forget, we dont even know the s4 theme yet. just because the vaults might be gone, it doesnt mean there wont be something comparable
Well Vaults are not the focus of the theme, it’s the robot companion. Vaults can be a generic feature like NMDs, and an alternative activity to level up, hunt loot and gear up.
Vaults are awful. Traps got nerfed to not matter. They invalidate all dungeons. They need to go. Sure its more loot. That is not a good enuf reason to keep them.
I think the reason most player base like Vaults is not a good one to keep them.
Traps were one of the “big” mechanics for Season 3 and Vaults were designed around them. Unfortunately, traps idea failed completely for vaults.
People currently like vaults basically because after they were changed, the traps were trivialised and you can play as if they do not exist. This made vaults become very close to something people asked a lot NMD to be: straight forward monster killing, without backtracking and boring objectives, plus high monster density and good rewards.
When you look at it that way, you don’t actually like vaults or any of its exclusive mechanics. You like what it became: a good dungeon, and this is why we don’t need them.
NMD offers far more variety than vaults in terms of levels design (I thinks there are only 4 or 5 vaults maps). We don’t need vaults to stay in the game, since their design failed. What we truly need is the same as asked before, we need NMD to be more akin what vaults turned out to be.
And keep the vault city too. Love having everything in one place a few steps from the portal. If they made NMDs that dense with 5 chests at the end they would be much more popular. Too many gaps of nothing to kill that resets all your buffs you build up in NMDs, plus doors that aren’t destroyable, objectives to stop and click on, and all loot and dungeon obstacles thrown behind you so you have to turn back constantly. ARPG players want a continuous wall of things to kill from beginning to end and Blizzard always seems to fight against making that a reality.
What I don’t like about vaults is that they obsoleted all NM dungeons this season. What is even the point in touching NM dungeons when vaults do everything the same or better AND give you the seasonal stones.
So this season, instead of having 30+ dungeons to run we got reduced down to 4. Terrible for variety. Also the warding stacks and traps are 100% useless as you get WAY more pearls than you can possibly make use of. Just terrible design all around in that regard.
I hope that vaults DON’T come back as they are today. But ideas from them can be implemented into other dungeons, as seems to be Blizzard’s intention.
When you look at it that way, you don’t actually like vaults or any of its exclusive mechanics. You like what it became: a good dungeon, and this is why we don’t need them.
Great points. I completely agree — what I actually want is the features that make vaults better applied to the NMDs. I updated my post. Thx
