Patch 2.6 promises to kick Diablo 3 competition up a notch with the introduction of Challenge Rifts. The mode will give you a real player’s Greater Rift clear that you can take on in an attempt to beat their time. The layout of the Greater Rift, including the map, monsters, and pylons, will be exactly the same as the original player's experience. Additionally, you are given the exact character the original player used, and you'll use the same gear with all the same Legendary gems, Kanai’s Cube powers, and so on. The only thing you can change is the arrangement of the skills on your bar.
So, now that you know more about Challenge Rifts, we're going to discuss why should you be excited about this new feature.
1. New Build Discovery
If you’re the average player, you probably have a favorite class or two that you enjoy playing. Each season, you might contemplate changing it up a bit, but you always end up with your same Wizard or Monk at the end of the day. Challenge Rifts present a great opportunity to get you out of that rut, even if only temporarily. Since Challenge Rifts rotate through the different classes, you’ll have the chance to try out a build you may have no familiarity with, and you don’t have to commit any time to finding gear or coming up with ideas of how to put the skills together.
2. Short Term Commitment for Great Rewards
Challenge Rifts usually present a Greater Rift clear time of about 6 or 7 minutes by the original player. Since your goal is to beat their time, this means that you’ll spend maybe five minutes with that particular Challenge Rift if you're able to knock it out on your first try. For this small time investment, you’ll be rewarded with a Challenge Rift Cache. Inside of the cache are contents comparable to a full run of bounties on Torment VII. Currently on the Closed Beta, you receive 8 of each Legendary bounty material, 100-250 of each regular crafting material, 300 Blood Shards, and 4,000,000 gold. For people that don’t enjoy doing bounties, now you have another source of collecting similar rewards without traversing all of the Acts.
3. Balanced Competition Among Friends, Clanmates, and Regions
One of the major issues with current seasons is that those with the most consistent grind schedule, and therefore the most Paragon points, tend to be the ones occupying the top of the Leaderboards. With Challenge Rifts, there's no grinding involved. The time investment is initially very small, and if you’re a class expert for the current Challenge Rift, you may easily claim the #1 spot on the server-wide Leaderboard. After you meet the goal of beating the original player’s time, you can now work on improving your own time and see how your runs compare against others in the region, in your clan, or on your friends list. With thousands of players optimizing their runs, the top spots could come down to points of seconds, which should get any truly competitive player very excited to test their mettle without worrying about Paragon.
4. Community Involvement and Strategy Planning
Challenge Rifts provide an amazing opportunity for the community to build out additional resources that make the mode as robust as possible. For example, Desolacer put together the map shown above to indicate where the different Elite monsters are, as well as what the layout of what the Greater Rift looks like and where different pylons spawn. Information like this gives Challenge Rifts a more intense feel, as you now have a wealth of information at your fingertips and can better plan your way through attempts at creating the perfect run.
5. A Bright Future
What else can Challenge Rifts do? What if this mode becomes so popular that it feeds into other features like a Spectator Mode? What if we get Global Leaderboards with everyone compared from region to region? What if Challenge Rifts mirror seasonal play and a league develops where your placement in each Challenge Rift gives you a point total, and the person with the most points at the end wins the league? Challenge Rifts are still so young and their potential is quite vast, but early reports from most players reveal that they're surprisingly addicting to compete in. Perhaps the community and Blizzard can work hand-in-hand to take this excitement and evolve Challenge Rifts into one of the most entertaining ways to play Diablo III.
Do Challenge Rifts excite you? With more Closed Beta invites rolling out, have you had the chance to test them? What would you like to see the mode turn into? How would you improve it? Leave a comment below and let us know how you feel.
Leviathan (@LeviathanD3) is a content creator for Diablo Fans and a Hardcore Crusader for life. You can likely catch him streaming high Leaderboard/Conquest rank attempts unless he's out taking photographs or discovering new music.
I hate everything about this outside of having an alternate option to bounties. Otherwise, why would I care about speed-running something when everything is completely static. It'd be more fun get that map info and then let players pick their own skills / class / gear, etc. to see who and what is fastest, which spec has the quickest clear, etc.
On top of that, why would I bother spectating someone running stuff like this. I know there're people out there who watch Twitch streams of GR's, but I feel like that's more of a testament to wanting to know how a high-level GR feels, what kind of gear / builds work well, etc.
This is like offering me an "opportunity" for players to beat AI generated Mario Maker maps. It's inane that Blizzard thinks that Challenge Rifts have "vast" potential.
Blizzard, do you really know what we want? We want build diversity. We want uniques that drastically change the face of a class. We want a grittier experience, with the feel of D2 with D3 combat elements. We want new classes and skills. Not another form of Rifts. I can't presume to speak for the entire Diablo community, but I can't imagine that this is something people have honestly been clamoring for...
Why not complain about people with high refresh rate and/or low response time monitors? Or those with super fast/reliable internet and/or are closer to Blizz's servers? Or people with gaming mouses that can put all their skills on one device so the other hand is free to fan themselves to keep themselves cool under pressure?
If losing first place by .001ms by someone with an SSD irks you that much, then get an SSD. It's no one's fault but your own that you don't have one. Or you could just say "Hey, their time is close enough to mine. I understand their advantages and won't get super salty about it."
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1: Build Discovery? HAHAHAHAHAHA
lets see what we have this week. Some scrub sader sporting a zweihander and a razorstrop. Ooo and he rolled movement speed off boots for more armor. Yeah, these builds dont need discovered. They arent builds, they are half builds with random crap throgn in.
2: Great rewards. Once a week. So considering the average length of a seasonal player. 2 maybe 3 challenge rifts before they break will next season.
3: Balanced yes. But competition with broken builds is not fun it is annoying. The interest seems very low on beta.
4: Community involvement? This is assuming you get enough people to care about more than thier weekly bounty bag
5: You couldn't come up with something so went with what if scenarios?
Overall they could be a lot more, but as we have seen before any suggestion will be met with "You are having fun because we say so". Welcome to set dungeons 2.0. In order to get people to do them, they will need to add them to a journey reward, complete 5 in a season for champion or some crap.
Don't see an edit button. and on monday night, people have had a week to run this sader build on beta. A whopping 66 people were able to find enough craps to give to run it.
So this is the useless crap blizzard is working on? Dang...
SO much for actually new content lol
Looks pretty neat, I'd definitely give it a few runs.
Bright Future. LUL
Misleading title, should be "Why Leaviathan is excited about challenge rifts"
"Do Challenge Rifts excite you?" - No
"With more Closed Beta invites rolling out, have you had the chance to test them?" - No
"What would you like to see the mode turn into?" - into real content
"How would you improve it?" - remove it
I think the rewards cache is missing cosmetics. Farming cosmetics is a pretty annoying thing (and this is coming from someone who's found ALL the white transmogs, pets, pennants and only have the cosmic wings to go)... doing challenge rifts seems a lot more fun.
Yay, looking forward to it. Gonna be fun to compete with my friends.
The whole article is joke... omg...
@ ProDexorite
LMAO are you serious? I can't take you seriously...
One thing this seems to aim to deliver on is a reason to stick around a little bit longer in a season. Someone else mentioned it before, but most players would be around for like 3 challenge mode rifts before they take off to disappear until next season. Don't get me wrong, I am fine with binge-running on diablo for a few weeks every few months. It fits fairly well with my schedule and I'm usually interested each season. I could potentially see "hey there's a cool challenge rift this week, I'll check it out" as a reason to come back for an evening here and there, so maybe it'll extend my play time in an unobtrusive way.
I can also see "eh, idrc about challenge rifts, see ya next season" causing this to come up short. It wouldn't be a lot, but adding a guaranteed ancient item (with a chance for primal if unlocked) would be fun. A single item per week wouldn't add a lot to the pool for high end competition but would potentially assist more casual players out.
Something that concerns me a bit is how challenge are CM Rifts? I don't mind the idea of people making maps and video guides, but will average players be clearing CM Rifts without those resources? If the resources are for people looking to push the envelope more than people looking to just clear it for the weekly reward, I like it. I don't like the idea of "okay it's wednesday, time to watch my weekly guide on how to get free crafting mats."
Great article overall, with a ton of great points.
One point stands true above all else, even though it was never actually stated by the author.
This point is the community and how they view things. Even reading the comments before I posted this, people seem to consistently think about features in the game and how the affect the leaderboard. If you are a leaderboard junky, that is fine, but the issue is that most people who complain never push the leaderboard anyways, so why are you so concerned? Especially considering that if you would just take a step back, and experiment with random items, trying to take them to Torment 13 can actually be very fun!
I think Challenge Rifts can spark that fun instinct that is sorely missing in this community that has been polluted with a concern over the paragon pushing leaderboard.
I'd really love the idea of playing a rift without worrying of having the proper gear, paragon, etc.
just my (lack of) skills..and saving time instead of doing bounties.
Until paragon levels are removed, it'll be the only gamemode i play
"A Bright Future"
Sure it is. The "a paid DLC, one class after a year" type of bright.
Just put it in a casket and be done with it. The game is pretty much dead and I've yet to see ANYTHING to make me want to do the Seasonal grind again.
Blizzard should hire some game designers, because the janitors aren't making a good job, both in HotS and D3.
I want to know the number of people still playing D3.