New Torghast Feedback

Community General Discussion
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9.1 brought a large number of changes to Torghast:

  • New Blessings and Torments: These are excellent. The old floor torments were either pointless or very punishing for certain classes. This is a great change.

  • Tower Knowledge and Torghast Talent Tree: This is a fun change, as it gets to the Roguelike heart of “every run is unique, but the more you do it, the more unlocks you can make to help you down the line.”

  • More cosmetics: Having stuff drop from the mobs (as well as stuff you can buy with Phantasma) is great. Everyone was complaining that you don’t get anything from the place and now you stand a very good chance of getting at least something.

  • New Legendary currency: This is a necessary evil. Obviously we couldn’t just bank all the Soul Ash in the world, there has to be some kind of engagement drive to keep people playing.

  • Removing Death Counter: I only ever hit the death counter once, but I can understand that classes without reliable self-healing probably had a really bad time doing solo content, so I can appreciate making Torghast more accessible for all classes.

  • Scoring System and Timers: Yeah, this sucks to high heaven. This sucks on ice. This sucks so hard that I kind of hate Torghast now.

Let me preface this by saying that I know the timer doesn’t affect your final Soul Ash/Cinders. You can AFK for a day and still eventually beat the last boss for your Cinders. That’s not the point. I loved old Torghast. While plenty of people were complaining that it has no rewards or point, I ran it just for the fun of running it. When Twisting Corridors came in, I went through that and had a blast. Everyone was like “spend 300 hours in TC just to save 3 minutes in the Maw? What a stupid idea!” but I loved every nail-biting minute of the thing. A slow, deliberate challenge with high stakes that relied on using CC, careful pulls, and a little bit of luck. Great! My favorite part of Shadowlands, hands-down.

But now, this. Locking your Torghast progression behind a scoreboard is bad enough, but making a timer count towards that scoreboard is the worst possible decision you could’ve made. WoW has too many timers as stands; the last thing we needed was yet another one. We were explicitly told that you could EITHER go quickly for the timer OR clear everything for the completion, but how the system actually works is this:
You need a score of 200 for a 5-star rating. You need at least 4-stars to unlock deeper Layers, and the more stars you get, the more Tower Knowledge, the higher rare drops, and (eventually) a perfect score unlocks two bonus floors with exclusive rewards. Okay, great. So there’s a concrete reason why you should shoot for 5-stars. So, what goes into that?

  • Completion: you get a maximum of 100/200 for killing, breaking, saving everything.
  • Timer: every wing has a par time and you can get 50/200 points for beating the par time.
  • Empowered: ??? I guess you kill stuff while empowered and get a bonus, but this category is utterly meaningless. There’s some % for the final bonus, but that’s entirely arbitrary, since you are hard-locked on how much you can earn and use. This is an idiotic source of points, but I guess it’s nice that you gave a mini-heroic to classes who don’t have it.
  • Misc. Bonuses: You do stuff and some of the things give you 5-20 bonus points. Some are standard, like save all souls. Some are totally random if they’ll be earnable or not, like Collect 30 powers. Some are challenges, like kill two elites at once. Some go against the entire spirit of the whole friggin thing, like never select an epic power. Not only do all of these conditions vary widely in their achievability, they’re all HIDDEN from the player. If you don’t go online to look them up, you have no idea how you’re being graded.

So, to recap: if you kill everything, you get 100/200 points (3-stars). Depending on what you do while you’re running it (and how lucky you get), you MIGHT get bonus points ranging from 5 to 145. Depending on how quickly you finish it, you’ll bet 0-50 points. And when you use empowerment, you might get some bonus points, who knows, this category is idiotic.
And just how severe IS the timer anyway? Well, I went through a Par 23 minutes wing in 26 minutes. I ended with 24/50 final points. So, apparently 3 minutes over loses you half your points. So, pretty friggin severe! If the Misc. Bonuses were more visible, or less reliant on random luck, or less reliant on avoiding the whole “get super powerful via these powers”, MAYBE you could reasonably get to 200 without worring about the timer. If the Empowerment bonus were something that actually had some sort of explanation behind its % and the resultant points, maybe it would make some kind of actual impact. But as stands, both of these hidden systems are mandatory to getting a 5-star if you’re ignoring the timer. And since you generally have no control over which bonus points categories are achievable or what your empowerment % will be, neither can reasonably be counted on for a reliable 100 points for an average run.

So! What’s the whole point of this post? Let’s get right down to it: Throw out the Timer. Just straight-up remove it completely. Reduce the Star minimum scores by 50 and let Torghast remain a fun bastion of powering up with randomized boosts. Timers are, and I cannot stress this enough, anathema for fun. Timers are already the plague of dungeons, with M+ being almost EXCLUSIVELY a timer race. Torghast is hard-locked in how much you can benefit from it per week already. Let us take our time and enjoy the run. Why should we have to rush through this one-a-week bonus content?

I can hear the canned responses already:
“But the talent tree will make your runs better, which will make them faster, so you’ll get a 5-star no problem!”
“As your gear goes up, Torghast gets easier, so you’ll beat par every time.”
“Just get gud”

I don’t care if gear/talents/skill makes Torghast take 2 minutes instead of 20. I don’t care if you CAN MAYBE KINDA HOPEFULLY get max with perfectly lucky Misc Bonuses and some cryptic, optimal configuration of Empowerment activation. I want to take my time and enjoy the friggin content. I don’t want a timer telling me “oh well you killed the last boss in 5 seconds from all the power-ups, but actually, you took too long considering your options so I guess you suck.”

TIMERS. ARE. POISON.

Throw away the timer. Torghast does not need a timer, full stop. Focus your energies on making new floor configurations. If this is a roguelike, I shouldn’t see the same 2-4 floor layouts every time. Make some new enemies. You added a bunch of new models for 9.1, why not slap some of them in Torghast? Add to the Roguelike nature of the thing with VARIETY, not yet another in a long line of lazy Timers.

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hey, here’s my 5-star run from last night:

note that even if i’d taken 10 hours to complete it (subtract 23 from my final score) i’d still have had a 5-star run.

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I have only run an M+ once, and I hated it, and I’ll never run another. That timer… yeah, that stressed me out to the point where it wasn’t fun. And I don’t do things in WoW that aren’t fun… kinda defeats the purpose.

In Torghast? I have no problems with the timer, or any of the additions. Yesterday I did 3 Torghast runs. The first one I wanted to hit just the bosses and get out, for the soul ash. I think I got… two stars, and I didn’t even look at the timing. But I got my soul ash. The other 2 I decided to try a bit, and got 4 stars on each run. At no point did the timer even concern me, and the 2-star rating on my first run didn’t seem to have any effect on my next two runs. You don’t even see the timer until the end, it’s not like it’s staring you in the face or something.

So, I really don’t see what the issue is. Just ignore it. shrug

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wait, what? you think they’re random?

yes, you can have some unlucky situations with some of them. on the run i posted, i had to choose between an epic power (lose that bonus) or a second stack of something i already had (lose that bonus). it can happen. but there are lots of possible bonuses, and you don’t need all of them to 5-star even if you also miss the timer by a mile.

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Let’s look at your bonus points for a moment:

  • Reinforced: you got five of the same Armament powers. This is WILDLY improbable on an average run, and you’d have to go out of your way to focus on just the one instead of spreading out to take a variety. Just what Torghast needed: LESS variety!
  • Rescuer: you had a prisoner to assist, which only randomly appear and absolutely do not appear as often as they used to.
  • Plunderer: you had TWO chest, which also are random and way less common
  • Hoarder: you beat the last boss with 500 unspent Phantasma. Oh, so the whole point of the thing - getting powers to be cool - let’s just throw that out. Or the new buyable cosmetics? Nah, better not, we want to get completion points!

And how did you know about most of those categories? You had to look them up, because the game never tells you about any of that. And I see you got a 24 on Empowerment. Any idea where those 24 points came from? How much was each elite worth? The rarespawns? The bosses? Do respawning skeletons count? How about urns? It’s a pretty big number for having zero player knowledge as to how it works.

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That’s great for you. I also despite timers in M+. But I despise timers in Torghast just as much. And yeah, I COULD just ignore the big “Hey you suck” message at the end of the thing, but why should I have one of those at all in the first place? Torghast didn’t NEED a timer, it NEEDED variety. The Blessings and Torments are the kind of systems it needed, not the laziest system around. I don’t care if I’m getting a 5-stars every time. The feeling that I’m being rushed through what used to be my favorite part of the game pollutes the entire experience.

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it’s not really that improbable.

that may be, i don’t know. i’ve seen at least one in every run i’ve done since 9.1 dropped.

okay, also possible, but i’ve seen at least one in every run i’ve done. are you sure you’re full-clearing floors?

Grab powers that give you more phantasma. Balance your needs (what do I need to kill the final boss) against your wants. Use the unstable phantasma lure if it’s still a struggle.

Yes, the game needs to do a better job of this. But it took me maybe 60 seconds to look them up. This isn’t some sweaty pursuit that took hours of theorizing and simming.

You get empowered bonus by doing stuff that would otherwise give points while under the empowered buff. I mostly broke urns and killed elites while the buff was active. You can hit the empowered buff right before the floor 2 boss dies, and it’ll pause while you’re on the vendor floor – you can 100% clear the vendor floor with the buff up and that helps quite a bit. I found this by accident. Again, yes, the game should make this more clear.

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  • Collector: get 30 powers. Outside your control, because you get a random number of drops and only so much phantasma to buy powers with.
  • Plunderer: Open treasure chests. Outside your control how many chests, if any, you get.
  • Reinforced: Get 5 of the same power. Outside your control, as options are randomized.
  • Rescuer: Save a prisoner. Outside your control how many, if any, prisoners there are to save.
  • Trapmaster: No trap damage taken. Outside your control if there are even any traps on the floors.

That’s 5 of 15 categories. Some of which lock you out of other categories (never get the same power twice). And two of the categories (kill within 40 and kill within 20 are exclusive), so you’re actually looking at 5 of 13 possible bonuses are completely up to the random spawn.

Which, as I pointed out, makes the bonus categories an unreliable replacement for the up to 50 points gated behind the miserable timer mechanic.

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I mean, if it’s not really rushing you through, isn’t that kinda a “you” thing? Especially if it doesn’t really matter?

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Just about every response so far as said “Oh, the timer doesn’t actually matter.”

Hey, I’ve got a great idea! If the timer doesn’t actually matter that much, how about:

WE GET RID OF THE TIMER.

It doesn’t matter, right? So there’s no reason for it to be there.

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I mean… it does to the people who like that sort of thing.

So… for those people, great, they get a timer. Woot.

For those that don’t like it, ignore it, it won’t hurt anything. Woot.

No real problem.

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or we could leave it in. what’s the obsession with deleting aspects of the game you personally dislike? i think LFR is a waste but you don’t see me arguing it should be deleted.

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I cant understand how casuals are mad about the new torghast. It is exactly what they wanted.
The timer isnt really relevant for the important rewards, they can do it at their own speed. They might not instantly get the same reward as the top players, but they will get it eventually. Going slow, at their own speed and still getting the full reward, just slower. Thats what they always wanted, at least so they claimed.

Its like they just hear the word “timer” without understanding it and their brain just goes haywire…

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like if you don’t like the timer because it makes you feel bad about yourself, fine – just say that. acting like it’s literally impossible to get 5 stars unless you’re a sweaty elitist gogogo esports superstar is ridiculous and weakens your argument.

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Yeah, clocks are hard to come across these days. It’d impossible to look down at your task bar and see how long it took you. Better add timers to everything! Time-To-Kill timers for pvp! Auction House timers for how long it took your stuff to sell! Vendor Trash timers for how long they were in your inventory before you sold them all!

Add timers to every part of WoW. Timers are the HEIGHT of gameplay fun! Aren’t we all having so much fun now?

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It shouldn’t have been added in the first place. I’m not advocating removing something that’s been in the game since the advent of the keyboard. It’s an idiotic addition to the game, and it’s endemic of the Timer-obsessed Devs who have no idea how to made content engaging without putting a count down on it.

They already ruined high level dungeons with timers, I don’t need another one on the one good part of this expansion.

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again, you can ignore the timer completely and still get a 5-star run (which you don’t need in the first place). it sounds like your objection is just that the game isn’t telling you how amazing you are. sorry!

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I disagree, I hate the changes and will not step foot in it again. If I wanted to run timed content I would run mythic+. I enjoyed it somewhat before the changes now It’s not worth stepping into.

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So, I’m kinda done dealing with your snarkiness. WoW isn’t just for you, it takes all types. Some people like timers in WoW, some don’t. For the people that like timers in WoW, awesome, Torghast has one now. For the people who don’t like timers in WoW, the Torghast timer can completely be ignored.

If you can’t see that past your selfishness and snark, I have nothing else to say to you.

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I already liked Torghast. It already WAS what I wanted. The timer was added for, I guess, hardcore players who complained that they weren’t getting a gold star for trying to rush through content as fast as humanly possible.

Casual players already GOT what they wanted out of torghast. You already COULD go as slowly as you wanted and get everything. The system was fine. It wasn’t “fixed” or “made better” like you seem to be claiming. All they did was add a scoring system and a timer, making it feel less like an enjoyable roguelike and more like a MoP Timer Rush Scenario.

And to be clear: this isn’t M+. Rushing through at top speed isn’t getting you much. The scoring system doesn’t change the fact there isn’t actually that much to GET from Torghast. The “super exclusive rewards” are like two cosmetic shoulders. Woopdie friggin doo. The point is that if you’re going to have a scoring system in place, and then say over and over again that you can just kill things at your own pace, so don’t worry about the timer, having that timer contribute to your final score still means that you’re getting dumped on every run you take.

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