They are too easy. They pose no threat while granting a valuable reward. Meanwhile totems can be deadly and they only produce a wheelbarrow of items - nice reward, but player finds items everywhere all the time.
Here is a recent example. I was playing on Veteran and came across a shrine and a forsaken totem in the same location.
shrine spawned 5 monsters, no heroes, fight was quick and easy,
totem also spawned 5 monsters initially, but 2 of them were heroes and they were capable of killing me, so I had to move a little.
With that in mind, it seems absurd to me that totem is activated upon touch, while shrine presents a button to press as a form of warning.
Please make these devotion points harder to earn.
Imo they should stay easy and accessible on normal difficulty, but have totem-like difficulty AND loot reward in ultimate. Most of the shrines in ultimate are redundant when it comes to devotion points since you have 55 or close to 55 from normal (or normal+elite), thus many of them feel skippable, uninteresting or even useless in ultimate (with the exception of ultimate only challenge runs). Some of the ruined shrines are already frequently skipped as they are very costly while providing no reward and desecrated shrines, while having no investment besides time, feel like a waste of time. Also for ultimate challenge runs, having harder shrines would add to the challenge, so people enjoying that play style would probably endorse such a change, too.
About shrines in elite? No clue tbh, elite will feel absolutely redundant to me as a whole once FoA releases, so I don’t have a strong opinion on them there, but I think they could be either left as they are right now, or be slightly increased in difficulty/loot as a nice middle ground between normal and ult.
TL;DR on my opinion on the matter:
Leave shrines as they are on normal, increase their difficulty and loot(!) reward significantly on ultimate since you already have (close to) 55 devotion points at that point.
On Elite either leave them or increase their loot/difficulty slightly, so they are a “nice middle ground” (no strong opinion here).
Ive always thought that shrines should provide some long-range buff (the same way the Ugdenbog witches’ wards do) if you activate them, so theyre not entirely useless once activated.
Not really . If you play ultimate only, the early ones are a tricky already. And totems are often impossible until you’ve got at least some of your resists in order. So no I wouldn’t want them to be the same difficulty as totems, at least not early on.
Later when you start outpacing the monsters though, they are easy, but I’d argue it’s not just the shrines at that point.
Imho if you farm them on normal for easy points, it’s mostly your own fault that they’re useless on ultimate.
I also wondered about this, but I actually think it’s not that bad. You can skip them when you don’t need them, but you do need all of them on ultimate, so you will pay the extra price.
I agree that their loot reward is insignificant though. Often times I don’t even get anything above rare.
They’re fine as they are. Not every content in the game needs to catter to late-game builds. I wouldn’t even increase their difficulty in ultimate, because that could screw runs that start there.
I’m probably in a tiny minority (at least on this forum), but I really don’t like Totems.
I believe they were a bad addition to the game (both lore and gameplay-wise), but what’s worse was the “sales-pitch” for them: “Every body loves Shrines, so now you’re getting moooar of them!”.
:facepalm:
Yes, everybody loved Shrines… because they were part of your character progression. They fulfilled the role that Quests should have fulfilled but failed at: linking your character “power progression” with the progression on the map.
People didn’t love them because they were yet another loot pinata!
(I’m using the past tense btw because the fact you can get close to all your devotions points in normal nowadays had essentially erased that sense of progression. Except for people playing exclusively in Ultimate.)
Each Shrine should be a Quest-like event, requiring you to hunt down a mini-boss for instance, or find a special smith for a craft recipe unique to him.
As far as “rewards” are concerned, since Devotion points are not enough of a reward with 3x more Shrines available than max devotions points, the best I’ve come up with (with the restriction it shouldn’t require game engine work) would be random relic augments: +1 to a skill in normal, +2 to a skill in elite, +3 to a skill in ultimate.
Biggest drawback would be inventory space since they obviously wouldn’t be stackable, but anyone who’s playing more than one character already has those inventory space issues anyway.
I agree that totems often feel out of place. Shrines are placed in cool locations and fit the world around, even if no character ever mentions them. Meanwhile totems… what are they and why? Most of the time they release monsters that don’t even match the ones roaming around. I don’t want to get started on celestial totems from 1.1.8.0.
Totems sometimes dominate the area in terms of threat and reward as if trying to make up for something. But I didn’t feel like anything was missing prior to installing FG expansion (which brings totems). After all, I’ve been cutting through monsters to get to items all the time, right? A totem condenses that quest to a single point for some reason. Even if breaking these randomly scattered piñatas feels good, they could use a stronger foundation in the world.
comn… you know why - you just disagree with the rationale/“balancing”
regular loot obtaining is/was insanely slow, so much so crucible and by extension fg had literally been joked about being GD’s part of “p2w”
While you, and undoubted a few others too, and likely in either the OG sense of desireable or tolerable Diablo 2 grind, or just outright have a more unique play approach than the avg player, “most people don’t appreciate that grind”.
And like you?(iirc?), not everyone enjoys SR or Crucible, heck some don’t even enjoy the dungeons as main farming aspect. This massively changed the loot obtaining for both the casual level experience but also the availability and accessability of “endgame”.
I’d dare to bet there are more praise for Totems, even if including their unfitting area/world location theme, than there are detractors, (let alone ofc the segment that applies your more unique playthrough approach)
*and yes i’m aware it’s another notch/further point towards your argument of the orginal game/design has changed/wasn’t what we bought into. But imo pine barrens farming was the least fun aspect of the game
(and as a experienced player i have the privilege of being aware of their mechanics, so i can just ignore them during levelling if i wanted less loot/xp)
*this is not me disagreeing with the original devo shrine notion or making a type of argument towards that, it’s just pointing out the totem stuff (that you’re kinda also already aware of)
. If you play ultimate only, the early ones are a tricky already. And totems are often impossible until you’ve got at least some of your resists in order. So no I wouldn’t want them to be the same difficulty as totems, at least not early on.