Maybe I had a different view of your proposal. It would actually be a good rework to the current version of the labyrinth, if we cut a lot of the currently available tiers. I am totally up to that, as I mentioned in my first post. In that case, to clarify what I meant by your suggestion being very similar to the current labs: if we limit the tiers to, let's say 5, then your upgraded versions will, so to say, replace the current t16-t10 and t11-t15, just by introducing different kinds of monsters, skills, mechanics.
So in the end, what we get is, so to say, no new levels, but actually more diverse content. I imagined your version of the lab to just be added on top of everything, but I think it should actually be the total rework of the whole uber area, by adding more interesting stuff and limiting redundancy to 0.
In that case, I have several suggestions to make too. The different difficulties of the boss can be reworked so that they depend on whether you're entering his area from the regular tiers or some upgraded/unique tiers or whatever. For example, the boss after the regular tiers can be made so that it does less damage, has lower health, requires less resistances, etc, while harder versions will still require you to get a lot of equipment. This way you'll also give more people the access to the easier versions of the boss.
CallMeCrazySam wrote:ILoseControl wrote:Mods that would require more gameplay decisions rather than gearing decisions could be cool."
I do agree with this and I want to comment on the current gameplay mechanics. In other games where gearing is not involved that much, take for instance Dark Souls, we can see that avoiding damage is essential to surviving. We clearly have examples for this here too. Atanna Khan requires you to dodge everything, otherwise you die. Kabraxis with the balefire and flamestrike. Uldyssian with his ghosts or whatever, and the massive deathstrike that gives you an indication of about 3 seconds, but if you don't move, it fucks you up. This, in my opinion, is how median should feel like - getting as much damage in, while also avoiding AVOIDABLE attacks.
Now let's take a look at the mini bosses in the labyrinth. Barbarian, assassin, necromancer, amazon and gharbad are trash. The barbarian will kill you if he damages you, but how do you actually kill him if you don't have 100k hp? Assassin shoots some missiles that are fast moving and you're just damaging her and back away if you actually start getting damage. Gharbad spawns shit on the floor that sometimes hits you, sometimes not, and otherwise throws missiles that are hard to dodge too. Necromancer is too easy to be a factor. Amazon involves some avoiding, but is RNG fest. Why does the abyss totem have laz in there? No idea, just for artificial difficulty. These bosses should definitely get a rework, as they are just boring and don't require you to pay attention.
Phoboss, navigator and the anomaly are the only examples for good work, in my opinion, and are exactly what I described earlier. They are very dangerous and require skills from you. What we need, however, is for them to have an indication on the map. What do we achieve by not having these markers on the map? Angry players, artificial difficulty and RNG fest. Not a good design, in my opinion. Those should be limited to 0.
Next point - I like the idea to break the linearity of the area. If we have higher drop chances even in the normal 5 stages, people will actually want to farm it - this is what we want. If you have acceptable rewards in these areas, this including unique riftstones and, for example, glyphs that drop from the mini bosses that enable you to access harder versions of the same areas, then people will be able to farm these and sell these for tg to skilled/more geared people, if they themselves can't yet run this content. In the current version of the labyrinths you are punished if you're not lucky and do not get the red riftstones. You fall out of the red bracket and you go back to the orange one. And let me tell you, if you have good killspeed on the red ones, the orange ones are cakewalk and require no attention whatsoever, literally just luck. I think we literally do not want that, so breaking this linearity is much welcome here.
New mechanics, monsters and skills is what actually needs to be thought of, and is also the hardest part, but I think it surely can be made to work good and be interesting, so it should definitely be considered by the devs.
