It would be cool if dungeons had an additional, opt-in level of difficulty that introduced negative modifiers that could severely impact or even soft-brick certain builds.
My spitball idea is:
For each dungeon door, there is an option (vote enabled if multiple players are participating) to “double or nothing.”
On taking this option, a random negative modifier is added on top of the existing negative, and the positive value is increased by some set percentage (perhaps scaling relative to severity of the negative modifier).
These modifiers could be more interesting than the usual “increased HP/damage” that is added by default, again, spitballing:
- Players lose x% of current health and ward on block
- Players gain a stack of armor shred when they evade
- Players are Damned when they hit enemies with Void damage (no more than 1 stack per second)
If the player does not like the negative modifier, they can then opt remove it via a “cleanse” option (also vote-enabled for party play), but the cleanse also removes the entire positive the modifier, and the player(s) must proceed with the baseline generic enemy HP/damage malus and no bonus. Once “cleanse” is chosen, no further modifications can be made to the next level’s modifier.
This would introduce a level of risk to dungeons that would add the pleasure of a lucky roll or allow players self-imposed additional challenge by holding on to severe negative modifiers, while also allowing players to back out at a penalty if they prefer to just complete the dungeon rather than risk the entire run should a soft-brick modifier be rolled.