Greater rifts and Hardcore

[Aqueous]

Never thought of this but yeah, the entire concept of the Greater Rift seems to be at odds with Hardcore mode. Not saying it's impossible to get around it but it doesn't seem to really work well together at all.

[loki504]

Never thought of this but yeah, the entire concept of the Greater Rift seems to be at odds with Hardcore mode. Not saying it's impossible to get around it but it doesn't seem to really work well together at all.

why not? greater rifts ask you to play to your max. if you play hardcore you should know your max. ofc we will see lower grift scores on hardcore then on sc. but its up to you to know your max.

[Spiralphoenix]

why not? greater rifts ask you to play to your max. if you play hardcore you should know your max. ofc we will see lower grift scores on hardcore then on sc. but its up to you to know your max.

Yes, but they also ask you to play until you surpass your max, which, in general, will probably mean death. I'm guessing that for most characters, by the time you are reaching the point where you can't meet timers anymore, the risk of death will be pretty high, unless you skew towards toughness way too much at expense of damage.

And knowing your max won't be quite as simple as it is now, without timers rushing you, and fairly well defined difficulty modes. For the average hardcore player not having touched the PTR and jumping into a greater rift, what do you think their perception will be jumping from say, rift level 9 to rift level 15, as to how much more difficulty there is? Sure there are rough equivalence marks between rift levels and torment levels, but it might not be that clear. It seems a pretty silly mechanic to me to wait at the end of a rift to prevent jumping ahead too far.

It almost seems like you should be allowed one death in a GRift on hardcore (perhaps 1 death per 24hrs, to restrict it even further), to get a feel for the level you're in once you're reaching your limit, but it would probably take too much away from the spirit of hardcore. In the end it will probably just be something hardcore players have to be extremely careful with.

Perhaps they could add some sort of meter that shows like, average monster DPS for the current rift level, taking into account your mitigation, to give you a sort of "at a glance" feel for your chances of survival. Hardcore players could choose a point they don't want to cross and just gtfo when they reach it. Then build up more toughness to lower the number /etc.

[Deleted]

Ehh...Greater Rifts kinda seem to be an antithesis to HC.

With normal rifts, either you can clear it or you can't. With a greater rift however, it just keeps getting tougher and tougher, so there's going to be a limit on how far you can go.

But that's just me, I don't understand why anyone plays HC. Losing 100's of hours of progress to a lag spike is not my definition of "challenge" or "fun".

Playing hardcore is about knowing how to play the game and how to truly gear up. SC is just no skill sandbox.

[Kelimbror]

SC is just no skill sandbox.

Um...you misspelled 'fun'. I also don't know how you think a sandbox applies to a very singular form of gameplay in an ARPG. It's pretty much the complete opposite of 'sandbox'. Also, there's nothing that says making sure you don't die is 'truly' gearing up. Essentially you tried very hard to sound very hard since you are so 'hardcore'. If you had simply expressed why you like hardcore without the tacky slander, it would've benefitted you more. I'll give you a mulligan if you like.

[Keyboardjenkins]

Um quick question relating rifts sorry didn't want to start a new thread but I'd imagine rifts will be available on consoles versions as well right Xbox one to be exact. Again kinda off your guys topic slightly but didn't want to tart a whole new thread

[Fus Ro Yay]

Um quick question relating rifts sorry didn't want to start a new thread but I'd imagine rifts will be available on consoles versions as well right Xbox one to be exact. Again kinda off your guys topic slightly but didn't want to tart a whole new thread

i see no reason to why they would exclude this content from their console users, it should probably be online soon enough

Greater rifts is going to be a weird thing to adapt to, i guess if you play a class with near-death mechanics (wiz/wd/monk) you could probably test to see how far is "too far"

[Sting]

I just tried a few greater rifts with a friend (on sc), and there is certainly some RNG involved. Going from 24 to 25 felt like a big difference in difficulty, but perhaps we just got unlucky with the spawns / level since our level 25 run was mostly winged assassins in the first floor (very open) and the second floor had mallet lords (2/2 waller, ofc) in that small bendy area in the portal realm.

Cleared level 24 with 4+ minutes to spare, got destroyed on level 25, we both died like 15 times but still got to ~95% before our time ran out.
I don't think I'll be doing this on my hardcore characters.

[Lathais]

why not? greater rifts ask you to play to your max. if you play hardcore you should know your max. ofc we will see lower grift scores on hardcore then on sc. but its up to you to know your max.

Greater Rifts ask you to play until you die. It is a foregone conclusion(unless you just quit) that you will die in a Greater Rift. HC is about NOT dieing. How are those NOT at odds with each other?

[Nerraw]

Greater Rifts ask you to play until you die. It is a foregone conclusion(unless you just quit) that you will die in a Greater Rift. HC is about NOT dieing. How are those NOT at odds with each other?

You do Greater Rifts until you can't do them in time anymore. There's no dying involved if you play smart. At some point you just can't burn them down fast enough anymore.

[Gande]

Greater Rifts ask you to play until you die. It is a foregone conclusion(unless you just quit) that you will die in a Greater Rift. HC is about NOT dieing. How are those NOT at odds with each other?

I keep going until my timer starts to run close to 15 minutes. My goal from that point on is to suck less around that level and try to push further. Most hardcore characters tend to have a bit more of the toughness : damage ratio as a precaution(key word most), and as such tend to finish when they can't push fast enough rather than when the monsters push back too much/too hard.

[Deleted]

I did hit 70 on my crusader monday evening. I managed to beat rift level 17 with 2 minutes to spare. It was close a couple of times but doable. Goal is to beat 22 this weekend.

[Ugum]

GRifts on Hardcore are a lot of fun. Nothing else in the game will test your sanity like doing GRifts.

I run a Crusader and I'm currently Paragon 73 or so. Last night I cleared a solo L16 GRift and I knew that going any higher was pushing my luck. Here's my current Seasonal HC Character. I could probably do a 17 or 18 if I wanted to get a little crazy but I'd rather play it a little on the safer side.

The thing with GRifts is that you will learn when it's getting too much for you. Always take it slow enough to be relatively safe. If you don't finish the GRift in time, no big deal, you use that to upgrade your gems. If you finish it and they only want to bump you up 1 more GRift level, it's safe to assume you are at your sweet spot.

There are MoBs that each class can easily mow through and others that give them a hard time. If you get into a GRift and it's full of your characters worst enemy, just rush to the exit killing normal stuff along the way. GRifts are a lot of fun and a great way to see just how balanced your gear is in HC at least.

Buddy lost his Wizard last night at level 69.5 to a bad affix of Waller, Frozen and Arcane (as well as something else, think it may have been Horde). I powered him back to 60+ in about 2 hours so no harm, no foul. Just a little time lost. HC is really the most fun way for me to play as it poses a risk of losing it all.

[Matimyri]

HC is the more fun way for me to play D3. I only have a couple buddies that play it with me though. The rest are too scared to lose so much investment into a character. You have to have a certain mindset to play HC and have fun with it. If you aren't willing to accept that you WILL lose a good character at some point... you might not want to do HC. I made a season HC wizard... got to 70. Got fairly lucky on drops and got up to grift 20 quickly. Then I had an unfortunate ISP moment. Some connectivity issues in the area. Got disconnected during a grift and came back to a ghost. Was I pissed? Not really. Slightly annoyed? Yes.

A majority of all HC deaths are avoidable. If you run into a bad affix combo, you didn't plan defensively enough to escape. If you can't kill a boss fast enough before it slowly kills you, you bit off more than you can chew. I had a warning that my ISP was having some issues, but I ignored them. About an hour before my connection dropped I got a huge lag spike while in town and disconnected. I choose to continue playing despite rarely ever having issues with lag unless there is some kind of outage going on, which is seldom. After my death I decided to check to see if there was an outage report for my area... and what do you know... there were significant issues going on in my area. If I had checked after the first disconnect I would have seen that it might not have been the best time to be doing HC grinding.

Basically, in HC... you have no one to blame, but yourself for dying. It is fairly common knowledge that most people don't like admitting their mistakes and accepting responsibility for them. In HC, you can't really shift the blame to someone else and have it fly. Yes, disconnects happen without warning. It sucks and plenty of HC players have lost characters due to that happening. However, that is not the norm of what kills players. A lot of the time it is overconfidence. I will admit it... a majority of the HC characters I have lost were almost all due to me thinking I was cock of the walk and deciding to play more aggressively. Maybe drop a defensive ability or passive for some more damage thinking I could handle it just fine. That tends to get a HC character killed with a quickness.

I am loving doing the season on HC. My barb is up to doing 14ish grifts at the moment and I am having a blast doing it. Grifts work just fine with HC. Just keep going until you start feeling the burn. When you start getting some affix combos that make you raise an eyebrow at your health dropping quickly... that is the sign you might wanna finish this one and upgrade gems instead of moving on.