I’ve just spend several days putting this video together. It’s much longer than I’d like, but this is actually the condensed version. I had a lot to say, and I’m hoping this can get a discussion going on where dungeons are right now and where they should be in the future. I have plenty of timestamps so feel free to check out the sections that are most important to you.
Good points, I do agree on some points and want to bring my thoughts about accessability and keys into the discussion.
Keys weren’t as accessable until the first hotfix was definitely a big let down for a lot of people because they wanted to experience the new content.
But at the end of the day its not a major issue, because its simply not how the content was supposed to be played.
You do not immidiately gain access to dungeons,… the access to dungeons will come naturally when you progress through the story and MoF.
But the main problem with keys will lead into my big issue: 2 out of 3 dungeons need external ressources (Temporal Sanctum + Lightless Arbor).
For those 2 dungeons keys are basically meaningless.
There is no way you gain more keys than you can (at least half way decently) utilize for those 2 dungeons.
For an already established account/stash with items and gold, adding something into the game that is not immediately accessable does feel bad at first. (because of relatively low drop rates or buggy loot tables)
But from my experience on Solo character/fresh account you will never get enough gold or Unique + Exalted items before getting a key for Sanctum or Arbor.
Having a dungeon that requires external ressources to get good use out of it is not necessarily bad, it gives some other regular ressources (like Gold or Exalted Items you otherwise can’t utilize) a purpose.
But having 2 out 3 of the first dungeons having the need for external ressources was a big mistake.
Soulfire Bastions rewards really do feel so much more exciting and because the dungeon itself is self-contained in terms of ressources, dropping a key is a way better feeling.
But generally I would lean more towards making the dungeons rewards overall more lucrative while making the keys rarer. For Sanctum and Arbor lower key drops rates should not have any impact in their current state, because you are never starving on keys anyway.
For Soulfire Bastion the Soul Gambler probably needs to be buffed a little bit more, to stay exciting for the rarity.
But to make my point clear: I would rather have the dungeons be more rarely accessable, but if you do access them making the outcome feel better.
I want to be excited, just by simply dropping a key and I think Soulfire Bastion is very close to deliver that feeling already.
I don’t say, that just because something is more rare it is automatically more exciting or feels better if you get it. The rewards definitely need to match that rarity.
I also 100% agree on the door modifiers for Sanctum and Arbor. They feel very forgettable and replaceable and disconnected from the actual dungeon.
The Soulfire Bastion door modifiers on the other hand have so freakin’ many cool ones, not only the sealed affixes, but also the more LP chance or first item is guaranteed X item rarity and first X items are refunded etc. They really make the whole process of spending your soul ember way more tactical.
All this issues with keys and rarity would be not a thing if you would incorporate them into MoF.
I really hope, they change Arbor and Sanctum significantly in terms of rewards and dungeon modifers and future dungeons hopefully all are self-contained without any need for external ressources.
TL:DR:
They should just make a master key which can open everything in my opinion.
And i agree with Heavy his ideas and the OP.
For me its just a general staleness of the game as a whole.
I think its because dungeons are supposed to be used as a decent treat or unique rewards, but instead feels like the goal to farm.
The general rewards in dungeons feel way too high, I guess the idea is so that its always fun to do a dungeon even if you dont have a need for the special reward. But I dont think that should be the case, I think we should go to MoF for our general rewards and use dungeons as side content we do once in a while for some specific task, if they dont get farmed thats a good thing imo. Keeps them interesting for campaign skips, and does not burn us out on them.
I think that if MoF had a major rework better retooling how we get rewards from it, and letting us better target the rewards we want then we would be less likely to need or want to farm hours of a single dungeon.
I think the game is in desperate need of randomized event content like the video mentions, ala league encounters like PoE has. But LE needs time to grow into that. I feel like dungeons were just introduced in a weird spot in the design of game. We barely have an end game people want to play for months on end or even weeks on end… I dont think we need to be worrying about wide scaling right now…
I think the dungeons are interesting, but Im not so sure on them needing to be the content they are working on right now.
I havent even bothered with T4 bosses apart from Julra as I cannot be bothered to run the dungeon again if I get one shot and they also have nothing I want at this point
It seems to me EHG is trying to make some sort of statement about the difficulty of their game by making their T4 bosses mathematically ridiculous but are missing the point of where/why a game needs to be difficult
I dont know why they didnt learn from the years and years of PoE feedback Labyrinth ‘one life’ ‘one shotty boss’ at the end people usually avoid the content unless they have to engage,
I agree the keys are not a big concern for the dungeons now. However, I don’t think making the dungeon rewards more exciting will improve them. The rewards are already good, but the dungeons themselves aren’t very enjoyable to run. Maybe adding additional rewards that can be found throughout the dungeon would help.
I hadn’t bothered doing any T4 Temp Sanctums until recently and laughed at the numbers I saw. It’s the same problem I have when scaling up corruption in MoF, after a certain point (and immediately in Empowered on some builds) I stay away from any and all damage mods (aside from crit) because it just becomes unbearable. After all the years of PoE’s one shot nonsense, I want to avoid that situation as much as humanly possible.
I think the formulas might need another tuning session, or some classes need more available sources of Damage Reduction. Although that could lead to some further problems and a numbers arms race ala D3, which I can’t imagine anyone wants again.
Yeah the PoE Lab completion numbers speak for themselves. I get that EHG was going for something similar to what Grim Dawn did with the “rogue-like” dungeons. But, this feels like a situation akin to when Monolith quests and bosses were first added. It needs a little more elbow grease to get it in good shape.
The current PoE league/state of the game is the least one shotty ive ever played funny enough, after the defence rework recently for Determination/Grace characters have a lot of defensive mechanics
The character I played an Inquisitor had 86% all resistances, 24k armor, 9+k HP (6khp/3.7kES) and about 3k regen/second. almost nothing was killing that character apart from Maven Brain Bomb infact the only thing that killed them was a russian hacker who deleted everything I own
Yeah the defense rework was definitely needed and a breath of fresh air. But the dark ages after Ghost Reaver + Vaal Pact combo got nuked until the recent changes still haunts me. The problem I have is finding a build I can love again.
And sucks about your account. I’ve been lucky not been hacked… Yet. I don’t want to lose my trophy mirror in standard.
Great points on the new dungeon mechanics. Absolutely, terrible design for t4. Julra is much easier. The fact that you cannot avoid damage unless you have teleport/transplant/rebuke, is absolutely ridiculous. And that’s including having high ehp without the ward rings 
For about 15 leagues I just did High hp as main defence ie Low life with 8-10k ES or life builds with 7.5-8.5k HP and mostly worked ok if you had recovery to match maybe Fortify as well, nowadays with PoE its common to have less HP and more defence due to reworks of Armor/Evasion and others like Agnostic/Mind over Matter. One of the tankiest I ever played in PoE had 4k life and 10k Mana with 60%? damage going to Mana with 3k mana regen and Agnostic giving 3k life a second the character really only died to massive one shots
Thats also a major issue in LE as you cant lean into massive defence as easy as PoE. I feel I cant cut 40% of my damage for 30% eHP by switching my tree around
That’s an issue I had with the first iteration of the new monolith bosses as well. You got oneshot from almost every ability despite having max res on a tanky character.
There’s a fine line between increasing difficulty for having skillful gameplay and overpowering a boss to a level it makes itemisation completely meaningless.
The latter is happening. If I cannot tank the damage an enemy does by improving my defenses, where’s the point in doing so? If Julra oneshots me at 3k hp, it doesn’t matter if I have 3k hp or 900. The result is the same. I don’t like that. The only thing that matters here is damage output to be able to kill the boss. Defenses are completely irrelevant. What matters is your positioning and avoid getting hit.
The Bossfights was something Wolcen did really well imho. They always gave you the chance to recover from a single mistake. If you made 2 mistakes in a row, goodbye. But making one and avoiding another for a certain amount of time and you were able to go on. The Bosses were intense and the fights increased in difficulty during combat.
In LE you can die within the first 3 seconds of a fight by catching a oneshot.
The mono bosses have a relatively good balancing imho (at least for me). The Abomination might need a bit more damage on their a abilities, because they don’t really scare you anymore.
Very nice video, McFluffin!
I can’t think of a better solution than making dungeons accessible by finding their entrances in an echo map. Give us some mechanics to increase the chances to spawn one. Keys could be used to have a guaranteed entrance.
These mechanics are what make mapping in PoE exciting: Searching the map for encounters that are rewarding.
Nice video, Thank you for making this!
I found your discussion really interesting, despite the fact that I ended up disagreeing with several of the points you brought up.
The main point I found myself agreeing is the staleness of MoF and the concerns you expressed on the longevity of the individual dungeons.
It is indeed true that endgame systems are dry at the moment.
The main concern being that MoF, the one system everything is supposed to revolve around, gets stale rather quickly.
I also share the concern that if kept unchanged the dungeons have the potential of becoming very stale themselves.
In my experience, I am already tired of the exploration of the dungeons themselves, possibly with the exception of soulfire bastion (where clearing the map is rewarded).
Enemies are annoying, map layouts are especially annoying with their randomly placed doors.
Bosses are also not great, but that has been discussed to death.
From your video, it appears that you belive that the staleness of the dungeons is unfixable, or maybe that is inevitable.
To that I disagree, in that i belive that the deterioration of the content with time can be significantly slower.
I think that with some changes the experience could become a lot more interesting.
I should also note that in the future they could add other dungeons with the same reward, making for instance the eternity chache available at the end of multiple dungeons, and that could significantly reduce staleness.
Another point on which, I fundamentally disagree with your position that the dungeon system should have been placed as a bandaid to fix MoF.
I think that both versions of integrating dungeons in the MoF have significant problems.
dungeon as a side area:
Using a dungeon to their fullest requires significant preparation, especially for temporal sanctum.
You need time to select the unique, it takes time to prepare its exalted counterpart, and having to stop mapping to figure out the best way using the dungeon would not be great.
This is the same reason some people disliked harvest in PoE, it is very disruptive to play to be sucked out of mapping to do crafting, but it feels that if you don’t use the dungeon you are wating a precious resource.
Other dungeons have the same problem to a lesser extent, soulfire bastion is probably the one that would best work, mainly because of how self-contained it is.
Lightless arbor would also place you in this unpleasant situation of wanting and not wanting to use it at the same time.
Additionally, encountering the dungeons when you want them would be RNG, so it could be very frustrating for a player that is ready to create a legendary, but can only do monoliths and hope for the best.
Lasty, side areas can also very easily become really stale. Personally I never run any side area in PoE, unless you count the syndacate lab as a side area.
Vaal side areas are typically not worth your time, lab trials are just plain unpleasant, abyss is often times not worth it.
dungeon as special echoes:
Dungeons as special echoes would behave very similarly to how they behave currently, with the only change is that you cannot really decide when you can run them.
Sometimes you have to run them to get to the next echo, sometimes you want to run them but you cant find any.
In both cases, integrating the dungeons in the MoF removes agency from the player, of deciding when they want to do the dungeons.
Personally I run some dungeons when I am tired of grinding monoliths, and the integration would remove all possibilities for players like me to self-direct in this way.
Lastly, I believe that in your arguments you are disregarding all possible future growth directions of the game.
From my understanding, in the future the game will operate in a league cycle similar to PoE.
It is highly likely that league mechanics in the future will be integrated directly in the MoF system.
In this regard, I feel there is no need to use the dungeons as ammunition to spice up mapping.
As I argumented before, not all mechanics are fit to be directly integrated into mapping.
Dungeons represent an avenue of adding in the game mechanics that are not fit to be added as a mapping mechanic.
In this regard I think that dungeons as a whole are a postive addition to the game, which however requires further polish (like everything else to be honest).
I’m assuming you came to this conclusion because I referred to them as static content, and if they were always static content, then yes this would be inevitable. The fact is, they don’t always have to be as static as they are now, and your suggestion for adding dungeon chests is an example of that.
They could, but I would consider this a pretty big waste of dev resources unless the dungeon had some other big benefit to it.
We have very different experiences with this. Generally I know pretty quickly if I’m going to turn a drop into a legendary, or I wait for when I’m going to make a build that will use it, but I already know what I’m going to make. In that case, there’s already a stash in the dungeon entrance, and that could remain so that players can get the unique and exalted they need from stash.
That’s kind of the point. Right now we just horde our keys. I have like half a tab of Sanctum keys. It would be nice if I actually cared when I came across a dungeon entrance because I have to run it if I want the rewards. If I don’t care about the rewards, then I can just skip.
I consider this and your Sanctum point as examples to why the dungeons themselves are so underwhelming. If you don’t want the ultimate reward at the end, then there’s really no incentive, or motivation to do them at all. They would still work just fine in the MoF because we could just skip them when we don’t care about the final reward, but it would be even better if they were worthwhile for other reasons as well.
So, similar to if you don’t have a key but want to do the dungeon? That seems to be an issue for a lot of players this patch. But yes, one advantage now is you can horde the keys until you want to use them, which also promotes spamming the dungeons and burning out, or acquiring so many keys that you just don’t care about them any more. Having the desire to create a legendary but needing to find the dungeon makes finding the dungeon actually exciting for once. Some things could also be done to improve the players chances or target specific dungeons in the echoes to give the player some control (which would address your concern about agency).
Sure, you might not always want to run every piece of content in a PoE map, but take them all out and what do you have? The point is to give players lots of interesting choices and let them choose the ones they want to take part in. If there are enough things to do, then some of them will be interesting/exciting to the player and they’ll have a good reason to explore the map/echo to see if they can find those things.
Yes they would, and they wouldn’t add to the exploratory sense of an echo, which is why this is my least favorite choice but still better than keys. You’re never forced to run a dungeon even in an echo situation, but it could induce backtracking if the dungeon is the only path and the player doesn’t want to run it. In that case, I think it would be better if the dungeon was its own short branch off the side of your path. Either way, I think having them show up inside an echo is infinitely better.
I’m not disregarding possible future growth, I’m evaluating dungeons in their current state. If things changed in the future, then of course I would reevaluate. Right now, those things that you suggested don’t exist and we have no official information suggesting they will. We’ll have cycles but we don’t know what the content will be like for each cycle. I need to provide feedback based on where the game is right now and what the devs have told us, not based on assumptions of what I hope they’ll do in the future.
In both cases, integrating the dungeons in the MoF removes agency from the player, of deciding when they want to do the dungeons.
Personally I run some dungeons when I am tired of grinding monoliths, and the integration would remove all possibilities for players like me to self-direct in this way.
This is my only real issue with the video. If dungeons were integrated into monolith as described it would result in two pain points:
If they spawned randomly in echoes it would take away player agency. You would end up with situations where you stumble upon a dungeon in your echo but you don’t have the time or don’t feel like being completely derailed from what you were working on in terms of pushing stability/corruption/echo rewards. This method would also draw criticism due to people who are just blazing through echoes without exploring either (a.) finding more dungeons because they are so efficient with their time per echo or (b.) never finding dungeons because they’re always spawning away from the echo objective and so they feel like they’re missing out.
If they spawned as special nodes on a monolith they would be annoying to me because (a.) they would be lost whenever killing Orobyss (b.) they might show up on the monolith web blocking a direction I was going to try to push corruption and forcing me into more dead ends.
I get why you feel the way you do about keeping everything in the MoF or giving echoes more content but I personally think it’s wise to have side content that gives players a different avenue to specialize in (especially in a multiplayer trade economy in the future). I like making builds in games like PoE, LE, D2 that have specific purposes and if my character had to be built a bit more generalized to grind MoF just to get to the dungeon content that I do want to play with it that would be a negative.
Pretty much everything else in the video I agree with. I finally got around to Soulfire Bastion yesterday and thought to myself “Wait, if the doors can affect the dungeon reward then… why didn’t they do that for the others?”. 
I for one don’t agree with alot here, i think that the rewards are so rewarding that it feels good to run the dungeons albeit some small changes can fix alot of the issues.
I like that the dungeons are long and “tedious”, there is imo a big hole in arpgs today for longer content, everything is always supposed to be bitesised, but tbh its nice to just lose yourself in a dungeon once in a while (i was a big fan of delve,synthesis and grand heists in poe for this reason, its just you playing without minding your loot/hideout is lavatime).
The things i agree with is the difficulty of the bosses and this i think can be solved at the same time as “solving” the longevity of the dungeons.
Put the dungeon boss difficulty at lvl 4 to lvl 3 Instead, and instead of having 2 exits, put in 5-6 in each level.
The one adding 0% monster dam/life gives a drawback (julra can only drop legendary potential of a maximum of 1, julra only drops 1 exalted item, addings treasure chests/affixes costs cost 20% more, gambling items costs 20% more)
the next one is neutral 10% more dam/health for no benefit or drawback
and after that you keep on adding bonuses until you reach the last door, 100% more dam/life for a big bonus (find a chest with 400k gold, Julra drops minimum of 3 uniques,the soul gamblers first item have a sealed tier 5 affix) stuff like that.
This naturally gives you a position you want to aim for when you know how much difficulty you want to go for, which makes it easier to just run there.
I do want to note though that i like the dungeons alot, the boss difficulty is hard to gauge as a hc player though and i would rather have the highest difficulty be something you gradually go into.
PS: i really like the idea of adding chests that give a bonus depending on dungeon, gold in lightless arbor and so forth, having a few sprinkled out will give people a bigger reason to explore, and you can have less stopgaps in the dungeon.
Any time you are revamping old content you are wasting dev resources.
The content was already there, nobody is forcing you to change it and technically it is not adding to the set of features of the game.
The benefit or revamping content is improving the experience that players have with the game.
Introducing diversity to dungeon grinding is another big benefit that should be accounted for.
I should note that when I meant that they could add more, I was referring to a fairly remore future.
You are a better player than I am.
I might want to reset the web, then it’s either run it or toss it away.
I will probably end up skipping it as well.
But that is not the point.
It is not about what we as rational agents do when interacting with the game.
It is about the feelings that such interaction invokes (english is not my first language, so I might be misusing vocabulary here).
Ultimately, the point is that to me it will feel like a waste, which, in turn, means I will enjoy the game less.
Ligthless arbor is a resource sink, I feel that calling it a reward is doing it a disservice to its intended use.
In any case, you misinterpreted what I meant when I said that you want and not want to use them at the same time.
Since arbor is a sink, you need to accummulate currency before using it.
Making the assumption that arbor is a rare encounter.
If I were to enconter it while not having enough currency for using it at its fullest what am I to do?
Should I:
a. use it suboptimally, or
b. not use it and possibly not encounter it again for hours
Neither options are desirable, but i must pick one.
Keys are plentiful, this does not really happen right now.
As I said in my post, there will be other mechanics like that, I am confident in that.
The dungeon system is a good fit for mechanics that do not fit in this mold.
You are clearly a better player than me, so you don’t seem to experience this.
For players such as myself powerful and highly decision intensive systems such as the temporal cache and the gold sink of lightless arbor induce a decision fatigue that can significantly deteriorate the player experience when encountered during mapping.
I do not claim to be talking for anyone else other than me, but the change you propose would significantly reduce my enjoyment of the game.
Making the assumption that they will add mechanics to the echoes is not a very big assumption in my opinion.
You’re right about building tankiness against t4 julra, it is binary that you have enough to survive everything or you get killed. For monolith bosses I disagree with your point that “you get one shot from almost every ability despite having max res on a tanky character.” Outside of high end content or t4s, if you have a tanky character you aren’t getting 1shot unless you stand in a long-windup telegraph. Having max or near max res at endgame is the bare minimum.
The oneshot argument was solely meant for t4 Julra. In my comment I also say that I’m fine with current mono boss balance. Maybe some abilities are already to weak now and need a balance pass.
I draw a comparison to the first iteration of mono bosses. At that point it was the same like t4 Julra now. You saw the boss, he did his first ability and oneshot you. EHG nerfed them and we also got more player power since then. But t4 Julra feels exactly like that, back in the days.
Sorry if my post was a bit confusing.
I want to make a clarificatory point on my vid, since I’m seeing a lot of the same feedback about combining dungeons with the Mono. Ultimately, I still think that would be the best case scenario, and there are a number of things that would be improved if they were.
I do understand that not being able to make your legendary immediately could be a source of frustration, but it also makes it more exciting to come across a dungeon than just stash your keys away and hope for a legendary to drop some day so you can use one of them. I don’t understand the argument for player agency so much when so many of the other things we do in the game don’t involve direct player agency. Mechanics that provide a way to improve the likelihood of dungeons, or even a specific dungeon would provide a similar kind of agency that players already have, so agency could pretty easily be incorporated into the MoF. This could be something as simple as a blessing (the left timelines could sure use something more enticing…) or something more elaborate that really connects the two even more.
Ultimately, the reason I believe dungeons should have been incorporated into the MoF is because mapping in general is stale in LE, and has been since I started playing the game back in late alpha. The dungeon system was a chance to start bringing some exploration and dynamic content to the most important part of the game, which is the moment to moment gameplay found inside a map. Instead, the dungeons are another mapping system (aside from the boss portion) with stale mapping, which means instead of improving maps, the problem has effectively been multiplied. Yes, if they fixed these issues through some other means that would be good and may get to the point where having dungeons as a separate system is no longer really worth talking about, but I still think it will always be worse than having a stronger connection between the two. Either way, we have heard exactly nothing about EHG’s future plans towards making mapping a more exploratory, dynamic, and generally enjoyable experience, so I should not and will not make the assumption that there are some other plans for improving either system until we’ve heard directly from the devs. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe those plans exist. I do, and when they decide to tell us about those plans I will of course reevaluate where we stand on both the dungeons and on the MoF and provide feedback accordingly.