Hi devs & community
After fully min-maxing my build and pushing it as far as I realistically can, I’ve reached a point where Crucible is starting to feel a bit trivial. The Echo Knight, for example, dies instantly. When you reach that level of optimization, the tension and excitement start to disappear.
I think 5 Crucible difficulties is a solid starting point, that sounds good. BUT, if the level cap goes up to 60, I’m not sure 5 tiers alone will be enough in the long run.
Even right now, with certain builds, the damage scaling can get pretty extreme. It already feels possible to “break” the game and delete any enemy in a single hit. If player power increases further, the challenge structure will need room to scale as well, or the endgame will become trivial too quickly.
That said, even if the plan is to stick with 5 difficulties, I think there’s a very good solution: add an option to disable Echo buffs in exchange for better loot.
Currently, in a Crucible run, we progress through 10 stages and earn Echo points that can be spent on temporary buffs for that run (like +10% elemental damage, +15% HP, etc.). These buffs are very strong and make runs significantly easier, especially for high-end optimized builds.
If we could choose to turn Echo buffs off before the run to earn improved rewards in the XI. room like significantly more Embers to experiment with other builds (which would be ideal, since there’s not much else to do once your character is fully min-maxed) it would add a meaningful risk–reward layer and give high-end players a way to push themselves further without necessarily adding more than 5 difficulty tiers.
Ideally, it would be great to have the option to turn Echo buffs off for better rewards as soon as possible, even now, when there’s only one difficulty level.
Thanks for reading!