After playing the game through pre-season and season 1 I think its safe to say doing nightmare dungeons just…isn’t fun.
I don’t think its that the dungeons or enemies are in anyway bad but more as a whole the entire set of nightmare’s dungeon mechanics are just unfun.
You are handing a set of objectives that almost always involves having to run back to either a boss gate or an area you have already been at which means running around wasting time.
Animus Monsters: Offshoot hallways where you potentially miss one or don’t pick up all of the little purple balls from an enemy because they for some reason don’t auto loot
Release prisoners: Easy to miss a hallway or prisoner which causes running back
Putting items in pillars: Almost always has two hall ways and a middle point so you are running to hall A back to the middle then hall B back to the middle
Slay all enemies: Typically these are the most palatable but even then they typically have a split hallway where you run up on half, reach the end gate and then run back down the other half and now have to walk back to the end gate.
In a perfect world I would just scrap all these mechanics and have dungeons you run into, fight monsters, if you find the end gate then yay go fight the boss and leave.
23 Likes
All objectives should be removed. Kill monsters then kill boss. That’s all it should be
35 Likes
Agreed. Objectives are terrible. They don’t add any fun, just annoyance.
I bring this up in at least 75% of my posts.
12 Likes
Yeah, I have 3 characters, and on all 3, I quickly lose interest in further progression after finishing the renown grind.
I find that in nightmare dungeons I just skip everything to the objectives, probably because the game puts too much emphasis on the end of the dungeon, i.e. the glyph exp and completion bonus.
I don’t know what will make it better, but perhaps shift most of the rewards to the mobs on the way, and make the boss and completion reward a “hefty bonus” to mark the end of the activity? Maybe?
1 Like
You make good points but I think Nightmare Dungeons being the only meaningful way to progress in the endgame is the main issue. I’ve already tapped out and cried Mercy to the season because of the endless NM Dungeon grind. If only there were 3-4 more activities on par with NM Dungeons that provided glyph leveling and similiar exp gain, I would probably still be playing the game. Right now im burnt out. Hopefully I snap out of this funk to finish the season journey and battle pass.
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Not only that, but when making and chosing what NMD you want to play, its always a choise of lesser evils. Very annoying vs annoying.
And thats endgame in D4. 
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I think there’s room for a variety of content. D3 had the problem of rifts being 90% of the game and it’s just the same thing and nothing else.
Objective based content is fine, you just get bored of that being the only thing to do and helltides and tree don’t really stack up as alternative options outside of having to do helltides occasionally for mats.
Just add some NM dungeons that are more like a D3 rift while still having others that aren’t and also adding other types of end-game content later. IE: take some inspiration from Lost Ark towers and what not or maybe even have some megadungeons like WoW occasionally adds etc
Other ways to improve NM dungeons with minimal effort/dev time would be:
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increase the glyph XP more substantially as you go higher in NM dungeon level to add another incentive to try higher dungeons
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improve the overall xp, which I think they’re doing on the 8th after I’ll already be done with S1
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increase the average item power for drops the higher in NM tier you go (maybe this is already the case but it’s not enough if so)
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incentivize actually running annoying affixes so we don’t just salvage them all constantly by making every affix also come with a magic find or buff value of some sort with the most annoying affixes having the highest values
If I want that, I’ll boot into D3 and do a Rift.
I like the dungeons the way they are, no rushing through, just play and have fun.
The Xp are also ok for me, I get about 15% Xp with 79 per dungeon, so I have a levelup about every 9 dungeons.
When I complete a helltide it’s about 20-25%.
2 Likes
Its a walking simulator,
Affix like Slay all enemies,
Backtracking,
I remember having played D2, you didnt have the mission to explore the dungeon, you do it anyway, because you want to kill monsters.
Remember Maugan Works pre NERF?
I was going there to search that 2 insane elite mobs exist there, After that, reset. Repeat
I didnt go there for the objective, i got there to kill monsters!
They want to prevent botting nightmare dungeons with these objectives but that is such a bad way to do it.
3 Likes
That’s the first thing that came to mind when I started d4. I thought, all these objectives are bot prevention. But sorry to say bots didn’t ruin d2 or the duped/hacked items, it actually was a fun era with the occy rings etc. unpopular opinion I know
Yeah so blizzard wants us to do extra chores just so they can have minimum viable bot protection.
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I don’t think D4 dungeon objectives have anything to do with botting.
A bot can probably do the dungeon faster than a person since they probably read the games memory and can easily navigate the dungeon right to the objectives without accidentally missing a turn or having to actually manually search for anything.
More human-like AI powered bots that just look at the screen like a person and figure it out from there will probably be coming soon as well.
Your title should be the issue with dungeons, because the issues you mentioned are the exact same with regular dungeons, they were designed by someone who clearly doesn’t play arpgs.
Plus each dungeon seems to have 2 separate objectives. Do one, go to the next room to do another. That really does make it drag out. Then the Season Malignant, you get to activate the heart and fight the same monster again, that was very lazy design.
Devs be like, hey, the feedback is repetition. Lets create a season where monsters have to be killed twice lol. I do not think this would be as tedious if each dungeon had one challenge, not 2 sets.
1 Like
How do you unlock sigil crafting? All I am getting is tier 1. Is it broken like everything else this season launch?
And the NMs modifiers… that thinks that follow you…
I agree, all dungeon mechanics are very unfun. Just remove all of them.
Better yet, you should just have to fill a bar with monster kills and when it’s full the boss spawns near your location. Also, no drops while fighting monsters, only after you kill the boss you get something like 9 items (with stats appropriate to your current level, not the mountain of trash you are showered with now).
I can’t remember exactly but I know when I first got sigils in WT3 this season it didn’t unlock crafting. I think maybe it didn’t unlock it until I finished the capstone to get into WT4.
Run tier 1 and 2 until you get a tier 3. Run a tier 3 dungeon to unlock crafting.
1 Like