I freaking have spent hundreds of hours in games like Slay the Spire, Hearthstone dungeon runs/duels, and tons of other roguelikes. Torghast should have been an easy slam dunk to keep players around when they have no desire to run yet another raid/heroic. Its the perfect solution to end of tier draught when people arent doing much.
What happened?
It had piss poor rewards, when it should have given another gearing path, a boatload of transmog, mounts, pets and even cool Shadowlands themed glyphs for our spells.
Spend 2 hours grinding through only to get a sprinkle of dust…
If Blizzard allowed us to farm Anima, I might consider spending more time in Torghast.
Did you RP walk through it?
People I know want to do it, but have no reason to. It wouldn’t take much to incentivize people with a few rewards.
Leveling in Torghast, Transmogs, Gold, Anima… etc etc
Just my opinion here,
It’s too long and boring.
Like Dreadmoon said, you grind two hours to accomplish anything. And it’s a grind. There is very little variation in mobs, and there are too many of them. The traps are all basically the same, avoid the damage on the floor.
There is no strategy or planning beyond not trying to pull too big of a group until you can cheese it by getting really lucky on powers, being the right class/spec or out gearing it.
What they should have done is make it class agnostic. You go in and your class doesn’t matter. You are a clean slate with no abilities. Then make the powers actual skills you collect and use against the mobs. Then tune the mobs to be weak or strong against different skills so it’s a strategy on what skill you use and when. Higher levels could make it harder by limiting how many skills you can use so you have another level of strategy deciding what skills to keep and what skills to leave behind.
It’s long and boring, but should you need to stop for a bio break, be quick before those mobs that spawn should you dare to stop, kill you before you return.
Waiting for floor 3 or 6 works if you can in fact wait, but it’s just another poor move by Blizz.
What happened was, like with so much content in wow, devs couldn’t decide what they wanted it to be. They tried to make it everything and it ended up being bad at everything.
They first introduced the concept of Torghast when Horrific Visions were brand new. Thus, the suggestion that it would give good gear. While I think Horrific Visions was the inspiration for Torghast, a lot of the playerbase actually hated Horrific visions. And quit over it. It was very common to hear people saying they were leaving because of 8.3 and would be back for Shadowlands.
Torghast was intended to get the playerbase to step up their game, just as Horrific visions was, which was the only new content in 8.3, aside from the raid. Both were designed to get casuals to get serious. And since a lot of players had decided during 8.3 that Horrific Visions was optional, they made Torghast mandatory to grind currency for getting legendaries.
I guess at some point they realized that a mandatory content bottleneck intended to force a hard content gate on the entire playerbase was actually going to be problematic. So they nerfed it. And since casuals were now going to be expected to complete it without turning full dirtbag hardcore, they removed the gear, because casuals don’t deserve gear.
There you go. Yet another meta solution intended to solve all sorts of unrelated problems that actually solves nothing.
I earnestly believe the concept was doomed from the start. Roguelikes by their design are built around recurring failure but you can’t have that and what is an essential currency in the same room in an MMO.
If I die after a run goes south in Hades, it’s ok because I still get some currency, a bit of character development from the cast, and I can feel myself improve at the game mechanically through learning more about what the enemies do. I still have a sense of progression even if I’m going to start all over again. If you were to fail in Torghast, you get nothing out of it. You just have to start all over again.
The lack of rewards didn’t help either, having everything in Twisting Corridors and making it last 3 times as long was a massive mistake. Most Roguelikes a successful run is usually 40 minutes to an hour. Completing a single tier of TC while gathering everything to try and insure survival can be a 2 hour+ affair. That’s…borederline insane considering you can’t just save and quit or suspend save it either.
Torghast, as much as I really want to like it, has a bunch of issues. I think the largest of which however, is the difficulty curve.
It’s essentially a flat line up 'til the last couple floors, where the difficulty and strength of enemies suddenly spikes, making the previous floors feel like an extensive, time-wasting slog. The fact that there’s very little in the way of enemy variety the entire way through only worsens this further.
It’s a little bit like one of those old NES games that sends you all the way back to the beginning when you run out of lives. You’re just doomed to spend a bunch of time clawing your way back to where you were.
In a Roguelike, which was meant to be what inspired these things, even if you die, there’s not a lot of time investment to reach your previous point, because runs are usually fairly short. And even in the longer-form games, you’re constantly presented with new enemies, items and surprises to keep you motivated.
Torghast has nothing in the way of new enemies, items and surprises. It’s just a process - and even after all that, you’re rewarded with what either feels like nothing, or fail on the one or two actually important floors, and get literally nothing.
Not enough rewards
Terrible power disparity between classes - just far, far too many worthless powers for some classes/specs.
So, it can be really not fun over perhaps an extended period of time for little to no reward.
Yay?
Even at the fastest speed you have to slow to a crawl to frisk every corpse for phantasm.
I don’t know who’s against auto loot/loot on kill but man they are in the WRONG.
I wish they’d shift from a design where every single mob can potentially have powers, too, and instead stick it behind tough minibosses and unique mobs. Things you can target, but still very much have to go out of your way for.
Risk VS Reward is what Roguelikes are all about. If I can potentially risk tanking my run in favor of some very powerful items, god does it feel good when I pull it off. Every good Roguelike has a mechanic or two like this.
But Torghast doesn’t. You just rake over all the trash mobs and hope one of them has one. That’s on top of feeling like you have to do so anyway, thanks to having to loot them for phantasm.
It’s just one of the many contributing factors to making Torghast feel like much more of a slog than it really has to be.
I actually disagree.
The framework for it working was there during it’s first iterations in testing, but they changed it and it’s garbage now.
Keeping it “endless” but having currency be awarded the further you go would have allowed them to keep the power gain play-style relevant - something that only existing in twisting corridors right now - give it an optional competitive edge, and provide reasons for people to go in continually as groups.
You’re eventually going to fail, but if you get a bit of currency on every floor - with it ramping up higher and higher the further you get? That’s motivating. Especially if they had some major big-ticket items to buy that could take a very long time if you’re not very good, but you could get them fast if you are very good at it. RIP Shadebeast mounts though, I guess. Would have been perfect as the endgame reward for such a system.
I don’t know why they keep trying to do that, when it’s perfectly crystal clear that the vast majority of people play this game to have fun - alone or with friends - not to “get better” or “step up” or “do a great push” or whatever.
The increasing design of what was once a fun and inclusive game to emphasise “improving yourself” and all that bollocks is actively killing the game.
Don’t get me wrong - there’s nothing bad at all about players wanting a challenge and the devs giving it to them - I mean, that’s what raids are for, right?
But the devs can’t stop at raids - not when a raid designer is directing the entire game. Now, EVERYTHING is about combat, and challenge, and “getting better” and “proving yourself” and other guff, and that sense of fun has vanished.
Haha! My response to that was simply to check out of the legendary system - especially since they were determined to gold-sink me for power this time.
Torghast fails at the first hurdle there by taking gold from you for every death, even though (supposedly) death is part of the “fun”.
Game is one big grind with $hit rewards. But you can pay someone to get the cool stuff seems to be the in thing nowadays in wow.
The most annoying thing to me is the mawrats getting me out of stealth constantly. Juuuust when I think I can sneak by a group of mobs, nope.
I think it is purely the rewards. I spent LOADS of time in horrific visions. Did that grind on like 17 characters and then just did 1 vision per week on each of them for the item reward.
Maybe a combination of an anima chunk for the first time you complete it for the week along with the soul ashe? something like 1000 anima? Combine that with an item or have torghast runs open slots in the great vault? Toss in random spawns for mounts/pets/toys?
Also if they let us level in torghast?
As it is now I only did the grind to get a legendary on like 10 characters, despite having about 20 at the level cap I just can’t do it anymore just for soul ash.
Roguelike games are in such a different genre that whoever pitched the idea at the drawing board should have literally been slapped from the rest of the team.
Its like if they decided next expansion was going to have a kart racer mode where we sit on our mounts to farm points for time played metrics. Just doesn’t make sense.
I know they got away with it when they did battle pets but you can’t just shoe horn any type of gameplay into an mmorpg.
That’s a hard pass for me, I definitely wouldn’t do it in that case.