So the whole goal of bringing Greater Rifts to Diablo 3 was to offer a higher difficulty for those that are steamrolling through T6 and want a bigger challenge AND offer some sort competitive gameplay including leaderboards.
What we got was just more RNG on top of RNG on top of RNG and frustration.
If you watch popular streamers do greater rifts, all you see if them trying to get a) good mobs a good Rift c) good pylons d) a good guardian. How is this competitive if everything about is just random luck instead of rewarding perfect execution?
I propose a new mode for Diablo 3: Challenge Modes
Challenge modes are a fixed set of maps, that are 100% identical, nothing about them is randomly generated and every group that runs them gets the exact same mobs, pylons and guardians.
Let’s make up a Challenge Mode map so I can better explain how and why this is better than Greater Rifts for Leaderboards.
Hellfire Citadel (yeah I’m creative, I know)
You and your friends are storming a castle
All Mobs are themed the same way, in this case it’s Act-4 styled mobs (yuk, I know!)
Even the affixes of the groups are not random generated and can be made to fit the current theme of the floor, think something like a arcane laser labyrinth floor.
Each floor can (but does not have to) have some sort of mini event that gives you an advantage when you complete it in time. Like reaching the warden’s cell before he closes the gates let’s you skip the longer way you’d have to take if you fail to reach the goal. (Thought-curve: Having 2 Demon Hunters here could give you an advantage to beat the DPS requirement, but does it give you a better time overall if you have more “squishy” classes in a later floor?)
You get a pylon each time you reach a certain floor of the castle, it is always the same order and always the same place. Let’s say at the start (cellar, whatever) you get a speed pylon, then at the third floor a Power Pylon and so on.
At the pinnacle of the castle you have to face the final boss, let’s say it’s Diablo here.
After the defeating the boss your team gets rated and a place on the scoreboard, there are ratings for speed and execution (least deaths, number of used pylons?).
Loot is given at the end from a chest you unlock by beating the last boss (or drops from the boss itself; can be different in each map etc).
Loot amount (shards, legendaries etc) is generated based on how you do (speed, execution again).
What this gives us is a way to rank players in a way that does revolve around player skill and group play only.
There will always be a class that is better than another at dungeon-X, floor-Y but you can’t build your whole group around just that. So clever gameplay will be rewarded more than playing the flavour of the month/season class. Challenges inside of the dungeons can be build around that fact, like not being CC able in some cases so not every group with an zDPS CC Witch Doctor has an easy life throughout the whole thing but maybe on floor-X where it sure helps them out but gives them a disadvantage on the other floors because CC does not work there.
This could of course be expanded on with a lot of different ways on how to build those dungeons. For example some could be separated into wings and completing a wing already gives you loot and saves your progress there so you can continue here. You of course want to avoid a situation where people can just farm Hellfire Citadel - Part 2 (the kitchen!) all the time because it is the easiest and gives fast loot.
This could also be seen as finally having some sort of proper PvP in the form of PvPvE in Diablo 3. Would also make quite a good stream/Blizzcon show, watching teams compete in Challenge Modes. Learning how to beat certain stages/groups the best and so on.
Seasons are also the best possible way to introduce new Challenge Modes and iterate on the old ones, fixing bugs and exploits along the way to make them better and fun to re-play.
You could also introduce cosmetical rewards from beating certain dungeons, like a banner when you beat Hellfire Citadel, or a pet when you reach a certain progression stage on a different one.
As you can see, this has endless possibilities and I’d really love to hear what other people think about it.
best regards
Stanzilla
You're pretty much just describing story mode, without the story and with some bells and whistles. Content like this tends to get stale faster than good randomly generated content.
What I'd rather see is a daily (hourly?) challenge mode, in which all players get the same multi-tier rift. Perhaps each tier of the rift should be shorter than a normal greater rift; say 5-10 minutes instead of 15 minutes. Clear one tier and you can move on to the next, more difficult tier, and score players based on how many tiers they clear.
You may be missing the line in the patch notes to the effect that Kadala also has a significantly increased chance to generate legendaries, to go with the increased cost.
A higher cost and an equivalently higher legendary rate does make your results quite a bit more prone to luck, though; rolling a 6-sided die twelve times is much more likely to give you a total near the expected value than flipping a coin four times is.
This is also a bit of a nerf for fresh level 70 characters. Previously you could spend a few dozen shards at Kadala and be assured that you'd get at least a decent rare for a particular slot; now it's nowhere near as effective.
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What I'd rather see is a daily (hourly?) challenge mode, in which all players get the same multi-tier rift. Perhaps each tier of the rift should be shorter than a normal greater rift; say 5-10 minutes instead of 15 minutes. Clear one tier and you can move on to the next, more difficult tier, and score players based on how many tiers they clear.
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A higher cost and an equivalently higher legendary rate does make your results quite a bit more prone to luck, though; rolling a 6-sided die twelve times is much more likely to give you a total near the expected value than flipping a coin four times is.
This is also a bit of a nerf for fresh level 70 characters. Previously you could spend a few dozen shards at Kadala and be assured that you'd get at least a decent rare for a particular slot; now it's nowhere near as effective.