What happened to the game activity that absolutely destroyed BfA’s islands and warfronts by being so much better? How did it go from something that people run tens of thousands of times during the alpha and the beta and love it, even though it had absolutely no rewards, to being something so hated by the community? To be fair that many promising features like this one have been killed off by Blizzard because of the super negative idea of said feature.
So, instead of iterating on that idea, making it better, the developers decide that it’s not worth the effort. Torghast is also a pretty simple idea in itself. And people started to play it, not expecting much. You pick the difficulty that you want and go in. The tower allowed you to make your character so brokenly powerful than you possibly can — this was fun. And the difficulty curve was heavily inspired by what this activity as a whole is based on — rogue-like games like:
- the Binding of Isaac,
- Hades, and others.
As the tower became popular among the more casual part of the community, the development team started to cut down a lot of the features. First, they cut down the time it takes to complete a run. At first, it was around 4-5 hours. Now that there are 6 floors, aka wings. Of course, the fun element became too dull. Just because it’s not as hardcore anymore. The developers listened to this feedback and added the Twisted Corridors increasing the number of floors to 18. But you still can’t make your character insanely powerful. But the worst thing they could do to this activity is making it mandatory. This changed the whole perspective.
The Wrong Message
The whole point of the Torghast was that you could do it at your own pace. Some people like to take their time, while others like to speedrun things. Some people liked the idea of making their run more difficult by keeping the character underpowered, while others enjoyed the crazy builds you could come up with. But the amount of power pick-ups you can have now has been severely cut down for some reason. It’s not like there can be an abundance of these powers like in real rogue-like games, but there certainly could be more.
The problem here is that you’re now more likely to run into the same powers that will make you go for a certain build you usually choose. Whereas the real rogue-like games are structured in such a way that doesn’t allow you to stick to the same build each run. Instead, you’re forced to improvise as you go and survive with what you have. This idea is essential for this kind of activity. And now add to this the fact that each character has to make at least 4 runs to the Tower of the Damned with 6 floors.
We already established that the shorter version isn’t very liked in the community because of how small it is. But making players run it is even worse. And now we’ve reached a conclusion. As an idea, Torghast is wonderful. It’s even better than everything Blizzard came up with in earlier expansions, but they really have to iterate on this idea rather than changing it drastically after each time the community cries about something. Speaking of, if you still have to make those runs, and you don’t want to, click the link in this text, and you’ll find someone who’ll help you out!