Core Keepers Feedback / Ideas

Hello Exiles,

with Keepers in most peoples rear view at this point I figured this was as good a time as any to look back at it and throw out an idea for how it could be handled going forward. Overall I do believe the League has much more potential than Breach 1.0 did, so I think it would be a shame to waste that. With that being said, here is a rundown of what I came up with:

Grafts:
I think Grafts are neat, that being said, I think their abilities are too much of a balancing nightmare and ultimately unnecessary. Thus I think it would be better to focus them purely on influencing Breach rewards (Graftblood gained, chance for specific Wombgifts etc.), basically the Breach version of the Heist Thief Trinkets. That means well rolled ones can still have good value, without contributing to player power creep.

Core Mechanic:
I believe it is fair to say that most peoples favorite version of Keepers Breach is the 1.0-esque Unstable Breaches. It's no nonsense, kill monsters in circle, quick to do. Thus I think this should be the baseline breach encounter you will always find without any modifications.
I would also remove the stabilization mechanic with mobs spawning in the middle and move that functionality to a scarab (obviously then with increased rewards / Boss chance etc.). That way if you just want to blast, you can do that with no backtracking.

On the other hand, I think there is value to the "defense" encounters. That is why I would add those in the form of a Keystone that transforms all the breach encounters into defensive encounters. In "exchange" for being slower this could add a big multiplier to league specific rewards like Graftblood gained etc.. I would also add an escalating chance for the boss to spawn with a wave (similar to how Simulacrum does it, though here he could only spawn once). The idea is that if you want to focus on farming Breach rewards, this should be a good place to go, especially if you don't have a super fast moving build that can just rush unstable Breaches (The keystone would also make modifiers to Breach opening and closing speed affect the spawn rate of waves, because I know we are all impatient).

That brings us to Hives. Personally, I found Hives cool the first couple of times, and then I simply started skipping them because they just felt tedious and not worth it. I assume many people felt the same. Thus my idea was the following: Hives no longer randomly spawn instead of other breach encounters. Instead they are added guaranteed through a fragment (similar to how the boss hives work right now). To be clear, they would still be part of the map, not a different area that isn't affected by your map mods like the boss ones are.
I would also change Hives to simply work in a way where you walk in, find yourself in a big room, then start the wave encounter. No clearing beforehand, no escape minigame. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate those things but frankly, I think they ended up being much more tedious than cool after a couple of times doing them so I think in the long term the mechanic would be better of without them.
I would also remove any and all Graftblood rewards from Hive encounters, you will see why in a second.

A quick finishing word on Ailith: In the interest of allowing people to properly juice without needing to worry about weird quirky mechanics I think I would just remove her from the equation. As in: just make her invulnerable. Her vulnerability significantly skews this mechanic to certain builds on top of how skewed it already is, so I think it would be better if that wasn't something to worry about.

Reward structure:
Let's start with the good: I think foulborn uniques are a great success (it also helps that a lot of us are psycho Gamblers, looking at you yellow Harvest juice price), so I don't believe the uniques part of the tree needs to be touched.

I talked about Grafts briefly above, so I don't have much to add here. One idea though: With abilities removed a grafts type basically becomes irrelevant, so maybe it would make sense to split the mod-pool a bit or make certain graft types have better chances of rolling certain reward modifiers. Alternatively, just remove the types entirely I guess.

Currency and Mysterious rewards are honestly whatever as far as I am concerned. Keep them, change them, I have no strong feelings on these personally.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room screaming "Address me!".
I would outright remove the non-unique equipment Wombgifts. These are clearly too powerful, the game has plenty of good options for crafting, I see no reason why these need to exist.

Which brings us back to Hives. When I talked about them I said they should only be accessible from a fragment. I think this fragment should come from a new Wombgift grown on the tree. Specifically, I think the Wombgift should only drop from Vruun (instead of the normal Boss Hive gland he can drop).
These Hive fragments could then roll with a range of waves to the encounter and add a number of reward modifiers to monsters inside them, which can be manipulated via the tree (including more / less chance to be a Boss Hive instead). The idea is that this should be the "juicy" endgame of the mechanic, something that it feels like it should have been to begin with, but just doesn't feel like right now.

This is also the reason I would remove Graftbloods from Hives, to create a better economic split. "Regular" Breach encounters should be the main source of Graftblood and the Wombgifts that allow growing Hives, while Hives should be a juiced up source of ground loot and the other Wombgifts. This way hopefully both can be economically viable alongside one another.

Obviously there is then also the matter of tree support and scarabs (I can see the "monsters gain increased difficulty and rewards for each previous wave"-scarab in my dreams), which I haven't put much thought into except what is mentioned here.

I think an implementation of Keepers along these lines could do a lot to deal with some of the frustrations and problems that the current league has brought out whilst keeping the same core ideas.

I like the 1.0-esque and scarab suggestions. As a baseline Breach feature it would make many players happy.

As for Ailith suggestion, I don't know if it is needed to have Ailith invulnerable. She kinda has to die every time storytelling wise, so it kinda would not make sense for her to have an invulnerability phase, no matter what others say. :D