Players have been poking around the Sins of the Horadrim Public Test Realm for a few days now, taking a look at the new features the season brings. The main focus of the season is the Nightmare Dungeon rework. And a big part of that is the Escalating Dungeons. However, players currently aren’t too pleased with how this is turning out on the PTR.
Not a Lot of Escalating Going On
The idea behind Escalating Dungeons is to string three NMDs together and make them more of a connected challenge. And there’s a boss at the end! They’re meant to be an additional endgame activity. However, what players are seeing on the PTR is just a pretty standard three NMDs back-to-back, with not much more to it.
The escalation part seems to only involve adding more NMD affixes. That’s pretty much it. You finish one dungeon, a portal for the next one opens up, and the next one then has two affixes. Same thing with the third with three affixes.
Unfortunately, as an endgame activity, most players breeze through the dungeons very quickly. The affixes don’t really mean much, as the enemies die fast. Adding one or two more isn’t as relevant as making the enemies themselves more difficult. Having to face Astaroth at the end does add some variety, as he’s a brand new boss (or two, really), but the three dungeons preceding that aren’t anything special.
This may be an issue of over-gearing on the PTR, as players have access to very high-quality items. However, Nightmare Dungeons get pretty easy pretty fast once you get to your chosen Torment difficulty, mainly being Obducite farms.
Random Affixes
Another thing players noticed with the Escalating system is that it doesn’t actually “stack” affixes from dungeon to dungeon. What happens when you move from the first to the second and second to third dungeon is that the two/three affixes just get re-rolled. So you’re not really adding to your previous affixes, but rather getting random new ones each time you move to the next dungeon.
This isn’t really a big issue, but it does take away from the coherency of the set of dungeons, as you feel you’re just doing three random dungeons back-to-back, instead of a single escalating experience.
It’s always important to note that this is still only the PTR, and Blizzard are looking for exactly this type of feedback from the players. These types of things can get fixed after the issues are pointed out during testing, so let’s see how the Escalation system works out in the end!
