Are you really astounded? It’s Blizzard we’re talking about. They’re the Nomi of MMORPGs, they’d mess up microwaving leftovers.
Torghast would have been bis content if it had the horrific visions reward system and difficulty to match, instead of being tied to the worst version of crafting wow ever had and made so everyone could manage a “hard” weekly clear.
Of course it would get old and of course on a subjective opinion, there is room for debate. There are people who loved it, liked it, on the fence, hated, it etc…
My opinion is they ran it into the ground.
I didn’t like the powers they had for a lot of the classes/specs.
I didn’t quite care for the buff to the elite at the end of the level/floor.
The surprise attacks, or stuns etc were all annoying not fun.
The surroundings etc always been same-y visually just had me bored.
Ultimately [for me] it wasn’t remotely enjoyable.
In testing it looked much more of a fun 'lil thing to do then what they put out at launch.
??
Me? You’re blaming me?
There was a huge mismatch between what I though the devs were creating and what they devs actually were creating - I thought it would be more about discovery, poking around, finding special encounters and rooms with a wide variance of optional challenges to navigate through, a wide variance of length of runs depending on how the stars aligned. I simply wasn’t expecting a dungeon-like combat grind through a quota of monotone trash leading up to a boss fight that had all the rewards.
There was no path between what the devs were making and what I was expecting. It took me a little while to realize this, so my initial feedback might have been a bit random and garbled. But there was nothing about the evolution of Torghast over the course of the expansion that improved the experience for me.
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I loved Torghast. There were many many times throughout SL that I’d jump into TC just for the fun of gathering tons of powers and becoming stupidly OP
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Blizzard did not botch Torghast, they had it planned out the way it should have been, but as per usual the forums here and elsewhere had the usual mob of players show up and be like “Insert random excuse here because my favourite streamer told me it was bad”.
Or the “I can’t do unlimited Torghast levels because I get carpal tunnel after 2 minutes and because I cannot do it no one else deserves to do it either because that’s not fair and that’s dumb and you have to make changes to benefit only ME”.
They had the plan, but they are scared of those who yell the loudest instead of standing their ground and listening to everyone else who said “I like it”.
Just look at Ye Olde AFK Flying and how bad that was, renown 15 across all factions. Some players did not even have that and have been here in DF since the beginning, many were making up excuses, many just didn’t want to admit they are lazy, want to literally AFK above rares or events so they can play the game whilst not playing the game and let everyone else do all the work for them.
It’s simple, the moment a player can get rewarded for doing nothing some of the playing base will double down and try to force it to happen, or at the least not let it change, i.e. world events like the cooking one where you can stand at the pot and gain renown and rewards for nothing.
Or if a player has to actually put in effort, find a group without paying someone to carry you or run 50 levels of Torghast that takes an hour, they will come here and whine and try to get it changed.
Blizzard need to take feedback from both sides, they need to listen to those who enjoy the content and having to put in effort to get it done, just because we don’t yell loud enough does not mean our opinion does not matter, we simply walk out and won’t say a word.
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everyone: the devs really screwed this thing up
you: yeah those dang players
???
I’m curious what you see as the key differences between what was planned and how it evolved?
Boreghast was awful. I would like to see islands from BfA iterated upon as solo procedurally generated content in the future.
solo players insisted it provide progression. nobody who focused on m+ or raiding or pvp wanted to also have to do Torghast.
obviously not ALL solo players, but there were many.
Okay, here we go again.
Originally, Torghast WAS modeled after Horrific Visions:
- It DID award end-of-run loot
- It DID have a timer
See screenshot here from alpha. Note the “Torghast Boss Loot” placeholder end-of-run loot item in the lower right:
Not to be confused with the legendary component, which you also got:
The thing is, very early in alpha, a lot of really bad players started breaking out the torches and pitchforks and screaming about the timer.
They made a big stink and actually said (honest to god, people watching at the time will remember this), “If I want to take 10 minutes between every trash mob to wait for Bloodlust to come back, then I should be able to do that. Get rid of the timer.”
And there were SO many of them, and they were SO loud, that Blizzard took out the timer.
Which meant they were abandoning the Horrific Visions model.
Which meant the loot had to go.
The “suggested item levels” were laughably high. When Torghast v2 came out in patch 9.1 with the scoring system, I was unlocking and doing the Adamant Vaults with high scores on characters with just leveling gear. (solo)
This is a bizarre revision.
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Torghast was probably the most fun thing for me in the game ever, loved every second of it.
It reminded me of Dark Souls with the boss fights.
I loved it especially at first when it was hard, almost impossible.
you had to do three, four, myabe five attempts.
then i thought they made it too easy.
the legendary system was the best part of it, which was the reward for it. i loved all the different choices you had for cool gear and weapons. it just made the game feel like a real down to earth rpg, like old runescape or something where you were in this sort of hard, high level area on your way to get some legendary weapon or item
When I heard about Torghast, I thought it’d be akin to something like Risk of Rain 2, but what we got was a very safe bumper bowling version where the rewards weren’t there.
Some things were done very well, like the procedurally generated layouts (I think this is right, someone can correct me if I’m wrong). What Blizzard needed to do was give out rewards more regularly, such as catch up gear and unique transmogs. Then, remove the upper limit and probably have better pacing.
I don’t know, I’d have to take another look at Torghast to give better feedback, but I know there was a lot of potential there, and hopefully Blizzard learns all the lessons when doing Delves.
I’m not really concerned with what the structure was during testing cycles, just what we got on live. Blizzard may have had good reasons to change the structure based on feedback, but what they wound up with was a huge missed opportunity to give a true repeatable endgame mode for players who don’t want to raid or M+.
To make sure it’s clear, I am not and have not suggested the progression method should be loot. A much more robust version of The Box of Many Things that included ways to gain the stats you normally get from gear would have served the same purpose. The important thing is that players who enjoy Torghast need a path to progress to the end of Torghast on any spec via Torghast. If that is gear so be it; but gear wouldn’t be the only answer.
Sure, but what your ceiling was in low level gear was heavily dependent on what spec you were on. Some specs were so squishy they simply could not survive the initial instance of unavoidable damage in such gear in any kind of high layer. Not every spec could reach the top layers without some kind of high level gear.
I recently saw that ESO nabbed the ideas for Torghast and turned it into a new endgame system that’s been incredibly successful for the game.
More MMOs should do this to one another tbh.
My reasons for hating it wasn’t the rewards or lack thereof. It was the one-note bore of it all. From the universal gray, to the same basic mobs, traps, swinging blades, vases from Diablo… 
I didn’t hate Torghast.
If you watch early Alpha and Beta videos you will see, it was basically an unlimited levels event that they planned to have things drop from, not just renown or leggo stuff, but actual things like gear, mogs and what not, like a rogue like game.
How it turned out? Run 5 levels, get a score, get some mats for your leggos, a few achievements, and once you were done with the limited content you never went back unless you wanted fast renown farming.
if I understand the history of that rework correctly, the problem came when they started to tune the numbers.
Unlimited levels meant that as your gear improved you had to go through increasing numbers of trivial levels first before hitting a “challenge”. But going through those levels your character’s power became a function of the RNG of powerups, making it increasingly difficult to decide what tier of rewards a player had “earned”.
Breaking it up into a sliding block of levels was intended to ensure people could enter at an appropriate level of challenge while capping the levels meant limiting the value of a degenerate invincible build of powerups.
But yes, in the process of doing this fine tuning, it appears they tuned away a lot of the original promise and it sort of morphed into a mythic+ dungeon lite.
I never played with Torghast in beta but I had been anticipating the idea of not knowing in advance how deep the rabbit hole goes on each run, so hearing there being a set number of levels per run did set off some worry alarms at the time.