So the solution of shitty rewards in a single player game is to play online? Wow, kys with your epic advices.
Ectoplasm is used too much in recipes, on top of it being good for fresh characters (which will also require ectoplasm to level up). Meanwhile I have a stack of 500 polished emeralds doing nothing. They aren’t even good for throwaway socketing.
I wholeheartedly agree with every word. People are arguing over spending 1 blood/1 corpse dust/1 ectoplasm but gamble 8 hearts away on a celestial smith with chance of getting the piece of gear they want with odds like 1:30. Also, good point about not going there untill ultimate (although farming BoC on elite is a very good way for single player characters to farm close to end-game gear).
You are also awarded 1 key per dificulty as a quest reward. Keys also can be obtained through dismantling high level epics/legendaries.
Also, I wonder if those guys who cry here about unjustified expenditure/reward ration when it comes to crafting skeleton key (which is not true, you cover your crafting costs if you complete a dungeon and get few things on top of it) EVER TRIED CRAFTING BADGE OF FREAKING MASTERY.
It’s on a chance to get a legendary you’ll use… Which is far more than 1:30.
One key? So 3 per character is a big deal to you? And considering how many threads complain about having difficulty getting legendaries… WHY would you rely on the CHANCE to get them from dismantling?
Badge of Mastery is indeed insane, I agree… But that’s not really relevant here. One issue doesn’t excuse another.
Sorry about that, I went overboard with my previous rant. I didn’t mean it, but it seemed funny how you could be in need of those particular ingredients that much.
As is only SoT doesn’t give you neither Blood, nor Brain matter however BoC compensates for that and every run gives you more bloods than what you entered it with. So when you go to SoT you are doing it knowing you are going there for something else than the mats, meaning don’t go there if you are not hunting for something specific that drops only there.
Giving your hard earned bloods and hearths and brains 
to the legendary blacksmith is a scam. If you were to craft legendary level 75 you know almost exactly what you are getting. When you go to the blacksmith you have to craft so many times that it’s not worth it. For me at least.
There is no fast way to the legendaries you need and once you exhaust your ingredients it becomes apparent how slow their accumulation can be.
So you wanting to constantly craft more leggies and having enough for keys is just greedy. However once you start doing it you obtain what you need for future builds and at some point you don’t need that many items. Eventually even the rare ingredients pile up… if you stop crafting unnecessary legendaries since you have other means to obtain them.
What do you mean by “being good for fresh characters”? Don’t tell me you are slapping it on general basis on items on the first difficulty and then you don’t take it back. Of the characters I’ve made only the one using the ether ray needed Ectoplasm and I leveled that with a spell that was much less mana hungry and it didn’t require Ectoplasm at all.
Don’t tell me you are slapping other components that are not active skills on the first difficulty also. Such a wasteful attitude from all of you No wonder it’s never enough and it never will.
Usually I don’t bother with components with passive bonuses until the start of Ultimate. There is no point in doing that when you know soon you will replace that item and that happens a lot more frequently on normal difficulty.
Here is some advice that might be epic for you - Don’t use components for marginal upgrades in power on the easiest difficulty. 
You leveled AAR without AAR? It’s so much fun to level AS AAR though. Ectos all round and a stack of green pots, and you walk all over everything until mid Elite, at least. I used to keep a full set of gear around just FOR that, that’s how I liked to level all my Arcanists. Way more fun than OFF IMO.
I do use components when leveling, it makes it much easier. I just destroy the item afterwards and keep add-on, easy as that. Wasting ectoplasms on veteran dificulty and then not getting them back is a real waste.
And as LuckyMole mentioned you should have an abundance of components once you finished ultimate. Every character that you legitimately level to level 85 collects enough components to craft couple of sets of gear for himself and then some. Once you get past you first characters it becomes much easier.
I still cannot believe there is even discussion here, people are complaining about 1 blood/1 corpse dust/1 ectoplasm, like, really
With the continued development and progressively increasing awesomeness of GD, you’re going to see a lot more D3 babies migrating, and they’re going to have some growing up to do.
That adds up. If you specifically enjoy just farming those dungeons, and you spend maybe a couple hours playing the game… That’s a lot of keys you go through. One doesn’t sound like much… Unless you go through maybe twenty five or more in a play session, and you play once a day or so… It can add up pretty fast.
Except that doesn’t solve the problem, genius. The problem is “uninteresting drudgery is in the way of the interesting content.” Why would killing a boss I have no other interest in just to get the shit I need to play the part of the game I want be a solution?
This isn’t an MMO. Crate already has my money and skeleton keys don’t make them any more of it. If grinding shit for hours on end just to get to play the part you like for 15 minutes (tops) is your deal, there are plenty of shitty freemium MMOs out there for you. A client-side single-player RPG shouldn’t have arbitrary roadblocks.
The way I see it, there’s only a few ways to really fix the issues:
[ol]
[li]Drop the keys entirely. Let us play the whole game without MMO gatekeeping.[/li]
[li]Make Alkamos et al. drop a key 100% of the time. This lets the grognards keep their “punishment” boners while letting people actually play the game.[/li]
[li]Make the loot a lot better. Like “each of the chests has a guaranteed legendary” level better. Make crafting a key worth it.[/li]
[li]Make the key require something else. How about a pile of emeralds and scrap instead of blood and ectoplasm? Put some of that garbage to use.[/li]
[/ol] Any of these would be a marked improvement of the so-called “end game” of the game. The idiotic running around is solved simply by putting portals closer to the door.
Roguelike dungeons have been one of the best received features during the development of Grim Dawn, which is why we added 2 more such dungeons and are going to add at least one more with the expansion.
The Skeleton keys started out more costly to make, but had been tuned to a crafting cost that is now appropriate to the return from the dungeons themselves. This cost exists because it adds a material investment to attempting the dungeon in addition to the penalty of having to start it over if you fail.
The current approach to roguelike dungeons is something that we are pleased with, and have made small improvements to the formula as we released new dungeons (such as more monster infrequents and new traps/challenges).
I completely understand though that not every aspect of the game is going to suit everybody’s desires/interests and that not everybody will agree with our definition of fair or fun.
For that, we released the modding tools. Everybody is welcome to tweak the game to their desires. Changing the recipe for the Skeleton Key or even the door itself to remain unlocked are some of the easier things you could tackle within your very own mod.
will be beast type rouge dungeon :o?
It isn’t mmo, but the whole shtick of ARPG genre is putting in time and getting rewards. You put in hours, grind experience, items, quests, your character becomes stronger, your grind becomes easier and more rewarding. That’s the whole idea basically, that’s why people spent so much time games like Diablo or Grim Dawn, time that is, let’s be honest, doesn’t make you smarter or better as a person, doesn’t boost your reflexes or muscles, doesn’t make you learn new things or experience emotions that change you.
If you remove that grinding aspect there would be nothing left, I mean, games like shooters have much deeper and interesting gameplay mechanics, games like strategies require a lot more coordinated clicking and strategic/tactical thinking. Then there are legendary games that can be considered art as well as entertainment (Bioshock Infinite or Witcher 3, for example), that give you experience that is equal to the one you can get from a good book or a movie.
Look what happened to Diablo 3, noone plays the game anymore, everyone gets rushed to latest dificulty, gets few neccessary items and gets to grinding for end-game gear which is, let’s be honest, pretty easy to gather. After that, you are spawning rift portals in town endlessly just grind more overall meaningless paragon points to min-max their gear. There is no build diversity too, everyone cried about how that or this build was too OP, but they still can’t fix the darn balance, it’s always one build that shines and few more other ones that are ok, everything else is garbage. Simplified to the point I am probably not even interested in playing it ever again.
Eh that’s the whole “stick” behind any RPG, mmo or otherwise, adding in artificial gates like keys or dungeon timers is a MMO thing… not a RPG thing. MMO started doing this to slow down grinding and min/maxing so they could min/max their f2p wallet picking abilities.
Removing keys wouldn’t remove any kind of grinding for gear, it just lets you run a dungeon when you feel like it instead of needing some kind of notation in your agenda.
That said…IDC if this remains or not as the people at GD dont care if we mod the game to our liking and I will just CE out any crap I don’t want to do.
Please, nobody likes Port Valbury :rolleyes:
I sure do. It’s the only rogue dungeon where i’m actually awake because the other two are so damn easy.
“Eeeesh, so much crying about spending trivial components like Ectoplasm and Blood of Ch’thon. Like wow it is such a pain for you guys to get ectoplasm to the point you complain about it.”
Why the anger? No one is saying its hard. But then, neither is counting to 5000 by 1 at a time.
Answer this please, does farming trivial content over and over just get a chance to farm normal content sound fun to you in any way?
Perhaps you just got lucky on ecto’s. On my last character, I completed every area of every map once on each difficulty, ended up with a whopping total of 4 ectoplasm, several of which you need just to finish your devotions (forget which shring in Ultimate requires it).
Couple of runs of that cave in Arkovian Foothhills and you have 1 full ectoplasm. If you time it with relevant bounty there is a chance to get haunted steel for that quest. If you have nemesis @ undead you can quickly check Crumbling Watch for Moosie. Trivial run becomes less trivial. And surely you are going to get one full ectoplasm/corpse dust from full SoT clear.
Also, the reason those roguelike dungeon bosses legendaries are so valuable is that it takes several steps even to get a chance to drop them from the boss. Otherwise they wouldn’t feel so special.
Didn’t you have to craft something special in Horadric Cube in Diablo 2 to get to farming Ubers?
Those dungeons will stop feeling special. Maybe increase a chance of dropping Alkamos rings to 100% too? Make a riftgate right to Von Aldritch’s summerhouse and add Shar’Zull to your facebook friends to further facilitate their unique legendaries farming?
They sure don’t feel special when they drop greens and one blue you’ve seen 18 times before.
So if they had better loot, they would be special, hence deserving the key.
With generally crap gear, they are not special. So why the key?
You seem to be arguing both ways.