1)“Layered progression”
Instead of ending after a boss fight, players can choose to continue deeper into the dungeon, facing tougher enemies, harder modifiers and better rewards.
It will be like an “endless mode” where each completed layer ramps up the challenge.
2) “Room-by-Room” Difficulty Escalation (“Torghast-style” as in WoW)
Phase-based structure where each room or section increases in difficulty.
You clear one stage, move to the next and so on, like a “Dungeon Gauntlet”.
3) “Real-Time Escalation (Dynamic Threat Level)”
Difficulty increases the longer you stay inside the dungeon.
Enemies could become more aggressive, events could trigger unexpected changes and optional bosses or portals might appear based on time or performance.
What do you think?
And what do you think Blizzard’s choices could be?
Sounds cool, but, based on past experiences, I am very weary at how anemic the rewards will be, how much of a buggy mess it will be and how much the rest of the game will suffer because of the focus on this.
TBH I expect (and hope) that the dungeons will be more themed and we’ll have higher control over what we get and how
For example - a dungeon of Snakes with a “Poison” modifier make all snakes inside poison per hit and have some Poison resistance themselves, but drop loot explicitly revolving around Poison
Do the same with Fire, Bleeding, Overpower, Lucky-hit, e.t.c., like, give the dungeons some theme (along with a rare elite/monster that doesn’t appear anywhere else and specifically revolves around the theme chosen)
A bit too much I know, but setting up the bar high cause it’s about time tbh
Replace that with “more junk/scrap rewards” and you may be on to something.
Oh, my bad; how can we think of improvement when the class designers/dev team and D4 leader can’t do basic math, can’t fix broken things for 2 years yet claims “quality first”.
Having seen the dungeon from season s7 I imagine… that we will have options to choose from. I don’t imagine anything complex from this team. I think it will just be a bigger dungeon with 3 or 4 choices in 3 or 5 sections. I don’t think it will be anything surprising.
I thin it will be dumb if we walk into a room and get one-shot.
Like how Bosses are. You kill them fast or they kill you fast mechanics.
I want challenging difficulties to hurt my character instead. Instead of my Health never moving and we one shot Bosses or they one shot us, allow for repeat mistakes.
There’s no, my health went down and I need to actually use Healing Potion mechanics.
Hopefully they fix some of these damage over time resistances before they even think about launching endless dungeons that escalate in damage and HP (copy paste of the pit.)
I can still guzzle down 6 potions from a single spider bite and drink 5 of them to recover from a poison puddle under 3 other layers of ground clutter.
#3 seems cool. Also, it’s basically the “original” Hordes - aka Echoing Nightmare in D3, with “bosses and portals” being a shout-out to Visions of Enmity.
What’s really missing in dungeons is verticality. I can do without all the ladders & ramps - in fact, remove them from the game, idc. I’m talking levels going down, like in D1/D2. Make them more & more bizarre & claustrophobic. Whenever you phase into the next one, you don’t know the layout or what lurks there. And ofc make the mobs aggro closer to the level’s entrance.
These little details matter, and they impact how ‘fresh’ a dungeon feels. I never understood why they avoided ‘depth’… totally absent in D4 (& iirc D3)… dungeons feel static, even if there’s some faux ‘random gen’ going on.
Dungeons in this game are not randomly generated therefore there is no “deeper” to go.
Dungeons in this game have inconsistent separation design (i.e. caves can have 4 real rooms and buildings can have 50+) so there is no “next room” to go to necessarily.
Dungeons in this game, by design, are very small and quick to complete. While this might work with Nahantu this won’t work with the main continent with any consistency. Literally standing around becomes a strategic behavior. Bad design.
A realistic outcome is that dungeons become pits and you beat them and then “escalate” them repeatedly. You remember back when NMDs used to go to 100? It’s that, reworked in, and given a shiny coat of paint.
I’m afraid that prolly anything “new” they will add we will have still some “junk/scrap rewards”.