Dungeon reward doors are supremely underwhelming.
I’m referring to the doors just before rest areas, and typically you’ll choose one of the doors to go through, based upon the rewards on the door.
These rewards need seriously reworked. Right now they’re essentially irrelevant to a dungeon run. I’ll use Soulfire Bastion as an example for the rest of this post
Floor 1
“The Soul Gamblers Inventory contains [N] additional [Equipment Type]”
So I’m going to get three reward doors, and one of them will give me more chances at a specific item type, which I may or may not be hunting that day, and even then it does nothing to ensure they’re going to be of any specific rarity, let alone a relevant stats and base type. There is clearly going to be an amount of RNG involved but even if I’m looking for several different items, so the item type numbers aren’t as harsh for me approaching SFB, there are just too many layers here for such a weak, randomly chosen modifier.
Floor 2
“Exalted items from the Soul Gambler have a Tier 1 Sealed Affix”
Tier 1? Really? So first it has to roll an exalted item on an item type I want, on a base type I’m interested in, and even then it has to roll an exalted affix that I would want, followed by rolling another affix that I would want - but one I wouldn’t want at T5 on the item.
Or we can try another one:
“The first 3 items purchased from the Soul Gambler have their soul ember cost refunded”
At least there isn’t 5 layers of RNG here, but it feels kinda pointless because if I’m doing the dungeon for the soul gambling at the end (which would be the primary point in running the dungeons past tier 1), I’ve likely gotten enough soul embers to buy more than half of the guy’s inventory in the first place which would be enough for every item type I’m actually interested in; so this modifier mostly just lets me gamble on extra junk I didn’t really want anyway.
Floor 3
“The lowest tier affix of each exalted item from the Soul Gambler has a 80% chance to roll perfectly within its tier.”
As before, after several layers of RNG, now I have another layer of RNG to potentially get a very minor benefit. You could give a guarantee, a 100% chance to roll perfectly, and I still would find the reward lackluster, so why bother to make it 80% at all?
Suggestion
Buff and rework dungeon doors significantly. Obviously RNG needs to be a factor to prevent dungeon runs from being absurdly rewarding but we aren’t even close to that point, and even if we were you could still make keys much rarer as random drops to help counterbalance. As it stands right now I have dozens of keys, and my friend has multiple stash tabs of them.
Instead of an 80% chance for perfect rolls on the lowest tier affix of only exalted items, make it so that each affix is rolled 3 times with the best kept, and it applies to both exalted and uniques. Remember that we still need to roll well one of those 3 times, that we still need to roll a relevant unique or exalted affix, and that it all needs to be on a usable base type, and happen on one of a limited number of attempts of a given item type. And with exalted items its still likely that one or more of the well rolled affixes will need to be crafted away because the chance of getting all affixes you need is absurdly low.
Instead of a sealed tier 1 affix for exalted items, make it a tier 4 suffix/prefix (declared on door), or make it a unique with 0-3 remaining legendary potential which has one affix on it as if it was a partial LP success. There are a ton of different things you could do that would feel way better to see, be fun to take, and yet still wouldn’t make dungeons into crazy over-tuned loot generators. Even if you had a mod that made exalted items appear at twice the rate the vast majority of runs would still turn up literally nothing of use.
I’ve provided a small list of possible modifiers below for Soulfire Bastion, but the problem exists for all of the dungeons on some level, and these are just meant to help the conversation of what could be done rather than be taken at face value exactly as they’re stated.
“The Soul Gambler’s Inventory has an extra page of [Weapons/Accesories/Armors/Idols]”
“The first non-unique item purchased from the Soul Gambler has +1 to the tiers of its two highest affixes (to a maximum of tier 7).”
“Exalted and Unique items purchased from The Soul Gambler drop a copy of themselves on the ground.”
“Non-unique items from the Soul Gambler have a 20% chance to have a skill related affix.”
“Non-unique items from the Soul Gambler have a 50% chance to have their lowest affix sealed.”
“The first 3 items purchased from the Soul Gambler have maximum values for their implicit modifiers.”
“[Melee/Bow/Thrown/Spell/Minion/Elemental/Affliction/Defensive] affixes are twice as common”