The system is far too easy for an endgame system.
Suggestions:
It seems like more of the same to me. A little denser with some events. But it’s still very easy. This doesn’t scale in the end game.
My suggestion is to repurpose the stygian stone to allow us to juice the affixes on a dungeon instance in return for multiplicative increase in mat drops etc
Something similar can be done for bosses
Please Blizzard - get braver with this system! I’d love for you to nail it but right now it’s a bit underwhelming.
Leading up to the PTR Campfire I was hopeful this system would do 2 things:
Help to bridge the gap between Torment levels by increasing the difficulty of sequential dungeons by 1-5 Pit Tiers*, ideally under the control of the player. So if struggling a bit choose something that gives +1, if finding it easy go for +5. With 3 Dungeons choosing +5 would take a T1 NMD from Pit 10 to Pit 20 which is most of the way to T2.
Give an alternative activity to the Pit on T4 for farming XP and having an engaging difficulty level of the player’s choice. Again, Escalations should be able to add up to at least +5 Pit tiers and ideally on T4 there should be the option to increase the number of escalations so you could build up to at least +20 or so Pit Tiers for the final dungeon, if you wish.
Unfortunately that’s not how it is, the affixes don’t seem nearly impactful enough and seem like they maybe add the equivalent of 1 pit tier of difficulty at most?
Most importantly there needs to be some viable source of XP other than mindless easy Pits. Please make this system into a viable alternative.
*Or equivalent - HPx2 or 3, Resistance/Armour penalties, etc. It doesn’t need to be exactly the scaling the Pit uses, it can be done through affixes but they need to be interesting and impactful if we only get 2 escalated dungeons. But the XP needs to scale well also.
I was worried seasons of the Nightmare Dungeon and Horde reborn were going to fall flat. Modifiers mean nothing if the game has no balance. People will literally just resort to picking whatever drops the most obducite, most aether, and not even bat an eye towards what the modifiers are actually supposed to do.
It’s sad to see them wasting resources on content that will still only play out as a 1 shot everything until possibly being 1 shot yourself game loop. (apparently this doesn’t even provide that…) That’s not expanding anything, not providing any new game play. It is just wasting development time.
2 years in and I still would prefer the option to replay the campaign with built up characters, unlocking new world tiers, chasing higher item power.
But yeah sure, seasons of meaningless modifiers, cool.
It took 9 seasons and they failed again. I thought we would have content to compete with the pit. These changes have little impact on the endgame.
Yes, that’s the role this system needs to fill.
Right now the only difficulty progressions within a Torment are the Pit (which gets repetitive) and Boss Ladder (which is a limited activity and not the most fun to do repeatedly).
With this new system NMDs absolutely need to offer some sort of impactful, customisable difficulty and corresponding XP increase to give an alternative to the Pit, throughout Torments but particularly on T4 as a viable XP source.
Preferably without relying on Timers like other game modes, which just turn them into a DPS check race. An occasional Timer Affix would be OK because if we don’t feel like racing we can just not run that Sigil.
emphasis on “customisable”, allow the player to choose how difficult they want to juice a NMD or Boss into being. It at least then moves the “it’s too hard” and “it’s too easy” saltyness to “allow me to make it even harder” instead
They won’t change in a short time. I would like more floors 5…6…etc or the choice to increase the DG level. But due to the feedback they will increase the life of the monsters as they always do since it is the easiest.
Agreed, here are my thoughts about new challenging NMD affixes…
That’s a good idea, something needs to make the NMD both challenging and rewarding.
Your ideas are not bad, but still a bit too conservative for me.
I would prefer affixes to exist for the whole dungeon run, instead of giving just a short one-time spawn. I think this is also the direction the devs have in mind for the dungeon affixes. Because there will be a point in progression where a single butcher for example will be killed in a second, so these kind of challenges need some additional buffs that arent dependend on character strength.
Imo, negative affixes should at least be annoying and never feel rewarding as that is already reserved for positive affixes. Floors can scale rewards and experience, no problem.
Allow me to update some of your suggestions:
Flesh Carver
What Lurks Below
Profane Mindcage
Updated list above!
The whole system is really disappointing to me and RNG-dependant, yet again. I was expecting something like sigil crafting where players have certain degree of control when customising sigil affixes, or at least introduce a system where we could turn them from one thing to another… every single rework we have had in the game is RNGed. Why Blizzard thinks that the Diablo player base is this dumb?
At the very least they should spawn 3 or more different options to choose from for the escalations not just RNG a whole new set of affixes and you’re stuck with whatever you get.
The mode would be much better if they add player agency with options that include significant difficulty & reward increase.
To be fair the rewards are pretty good in terms of obducite and items. The XP needs to be increased to be competitive with Hordes and Pit.
There´s nothing new in Escalating NMD but just a lazy copy/paste of existing NMD played 3 times in a row with a boss at the end. Very disappointed.
Agreed, seems like Seasonal mechanics are watered down ideas at this point.