I think there’s a fundamental with the way they are creating these dungeons, even if they are one offs and have several different formats, they all have one single issue: their lengths are all “the same”. You basically have a single objective on the first floor, open a door and then do one more objective and then a final boss.
What we should have are VARYING lengths of dungeons. Either one really long floor with randomized length, some short, some long, and also randomized levels of the dungeon. Some dungeons can be just 2 floors, but sometimes they can have 3-5 floors, or more, and furthermore, each floor should increase in difficulty.
That was fundamental to the feeling of going “deeper” into a dungeon in D1 and D2, was the isolation and fear from going deeper into a dungeon, and becoming more scary and difficult. There is none of that here. One dungeon is always 2 floors or 2 parts with a door to unlock and then a final boss. Extremely shallow.
You can add so much depth to a dungeon by simply adding a randomized number of floors or length to a particular dungeon. I hope that these Sigils will address that, but in general that’s how they should be. You should always feel some sense of wonder as to what kind of dungeon you might find this time.
Bottom line though, dungeons should not simply scale based on their “tier” with these Sigils or whatever, they should not be just one difficulty throughout a single dungeon. What makes dungeons epic and interesting is the scaling of a single dungeon instance with floors. The deeper you go the stronger the monsters should be. And that should be somewhat luck based, meaning, if you find a dungeon which has 10 floors, this may only happen 1% of the time, but that dungeon will have an extraordinary amount of loot at the end, but also some insanely hard monsters and even multiple bosses IN A SINGLE DUNGEON INSTANCE.
The floors is what should scale the difficulty, but there could be an overall modifier that scales the entire dungeon. So you could have a t2 dungeon for sake of example, at level 50. But 90% of the dungeons you open at that tier and level have 2-3 floors, but 10% of the time, you get a dungeon with 5-10 floors, etc, and those RARE dungeons, have RARE loot and RARE bosses. This is key. Few understand this.
Dungeons should have a sense of rarity, the same as you have rarity in items that drop. You should be excited to find a rare dungeon, like you find a legendary. You should be even more excited to find a rare boss at the end, adding to layers of rarity and depth, like an onion that keeps unraveling in layers.
Some rare dungeons can have so many floors and become so difficulty in theory, that you will NOT be able to complete them at your level and you might have to level up and revisit them to finish them.
What I really miss is the mob density and loot quantity based on floors as well. In the beginning floors, monsters and loot should be low, and the more floors there are the greater the density in monsters and therefore loot. Imagine a rare dungeon with 10 floors and at the 10th floor there are so many mobs it’s just packed with them and all of them are more difficult.
Expert dungeon master here, btw. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.