This mission (and to a slightly lesser extent) The Pit are considered to be excessively long by some of the community, to the point that people will quit or suicide at the beginning the same way they used to for Skittergate before the loot dice buffs. I think the reward for Blightreaper should be increased and certain parts trimmed.
1. Speed up the timed events on Blight Reaper
This mostly applies to the gates in the sewers, but also the search for the key and the finale itself. You don’t have to make the event any easier in terms of enemy spawns, just have the gates open faster so players can progress forward and fight a running battle instead of several static last stands. You can still put your backs into a corner until each wave is over, but a skilled party can make good time by advancing and fighting at the same time.
For the gate key search just tell the players where the key is, similar to Against the Grain. This level is long enough already and the last thing it needs is a scavenger hunt.
For the finale reduce the time between switch activations such that the next switch will appear while you are still fighting the previous horde. This way your ability to fight through the horde to the next switch will improve your overall run time if you are good enough to handle the faster spawns. For those who aren’t as confident you can still finish the current horde before activating the next switch.
Also you could speed up the final gate opening animation for the sanctum once the switches are done.
2. Change the finale to increase rewards/difficulty
For the finale of Blightreaper put a loot dice inside the sanctum that players can collect.
When the players take the sword and have their health converted, spawn a boss behind them. The boss takes a while to arrive and it’s intended that the players fight their way through the horde and escape. However if you’re feeling up to it you can clear out the final horde and then fight this boss with your whole party on temp health which nets you another loot dice. To make this more fair the sanctum would always have some healing in it to give the players a second wind.
Also for The Pit you could add two loot dice to Okri’s stash to give people a reason to open it during a normal run.
After playing Blightreaper a couple of times my time for each level was about 23-25 minutes with a good party. Particularly “short” levels like Bell or Fort averaged lower at 20-22 minutes. Though as always it’s very party dependant in terms of collective skill level. If you tend to hunker down for each wave instead of advancing as you fight it takes more than twice as long to cover the same ground.
I think if you trim the unskippable events in the sewer and finale a good party that doesn’t waste any time should be able to bring that closer to 20 minutes per completion. That would make the level more “competitive” with the others, especially if you add the loot dice to the sanctum and the optional final boss at the end.
In most of my experience, when people try to quickly advance through the sewer gates, they get wrecked pretty bad but sitting back for a couple gates makes it a cakewalk. I don’t like the sewer part either, forcing someone to hold a torch which is horrible for self defense makes most people just ignore them and then people get stuck in the dark, I’d much rather fight to get to the torch first and have it just be held by a belt around your waist which only drops on death and create the same aura of light around the holder. I agree there should be more incentive to play these dreadfully long maps as we had to pay to even be able to play them. The key search part is fairly simple though, take the path towards dead end, staying left on the forks, if you don’t see the icon pop up before you move close to the dead end, go towards the upper ground area, stay close to the edge of the up and down staircase to see if the key is in the tunnel and if not proceed to the last spawn on the raised platform. Also since you mentioned the pit, the event where you hold the store room is kind of ridiculous, when you’re supposed to escape, the number of waves of enemies is variable until you get down into the water and even rushing that part can prove difficult with hyper density hordes with a bunch of bulwarks and sometimes the horde is over before you reach the water so it doesn’t make much sense.
I like most of your suggestions, but adding loot dices to okri’s stash is a terrible idea. Not bad per se, but it definitely won’t make the runs faster, as it is one of the most time consuming challenges of the game.
Yeah that part’s a nightmare and needs rebalancing. I’ll make a thread about that another time.
It’s actually not that long, there are only 10 switches. If you do a “normal” party run where you get the first tome, the grim and the second tome you’ve already run past almost all the switches. The only two not located on the main “route” are located in the bottom left corner relative to the entrance in the barricade and marketplace. I think once people get used to it they will develop an optimized pattern to hit them all with 4 players working together and it will be just like getting the tomes and grims.
This combined with the Blightreaper tweaks would make the DLC maps something to look forward to in quick play because they match boss levels for potential loot bonuses.
I don’t think incentivizing okri’s stash is necessarily a bad idea, but people already separate and die on that area already, this would only accentuate that problem because most people don’t communicate in pubs. It’s funny though, there are other “button” puzzles for grims that people always do because extra loot yada yada, so if this happened, I’m curious if people would consider it worthwhile.
It would be rough on the pubs initially but just as with the grims people will eventually figure out the “standard” route people use to hit all buttons, drop by the stash and then continue through the level. Right now experienced parties ignore about 2/3 of the actual “pit” because all they have to do is head straight for the grim, then the second tome, then out. I think novice parties would ignore the stash, but experienced ones would be able to split the party up and get it done quickly.
For instance for the final three buttons you could send two people into the sewers to get the grim and button there, and the other two players would go to the marketplace and hit the final two before grabbing the dice from the stash and meeting back in the sewers. Or maybe they could change the map so that the entrance to the sewers on the market side isn’t one-way, then you could hit the sewer button, then the market, then the one in the corner and double back through the sewers to get the tome and exit.